There is a boundary dispute along the walls of San Francisco. A contest between two acts of preservation. The first is an act of self-preservation, or Arendtian self-actualization: the graffiti signature, or “tag,” is a declaration of the presence of the artist. The second act is one of masking, washing, obscuring the first - “buffing,” as it is known. This is building preservation. Neither act is frequently witnessed, but their resultant compositions - action and reaction - are a constant presence throughout much of the city. Our attempt to maintain a graffiti-free cityscape is highly deliberate and comes at great public expense: San Francisco spends in excess of twenty million dollars annually on graffiti clean-up. (2) Reliefs of layered paint, mismatched color, strange collages of shapes that abstract the writing beneath: each marks an event in an ongoing exchange between the individual (the artist) and the collective (the city).
1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 72.
2. Ibid, 18
