Grafittical Archaeology

From 1972 on, I paid intermittent visits to Berlin, one of the most fascinating cities where I can easily find my way around, with its sprawling circumference and intense weight of history.
When I wandered past an old fragment of the official Wall a few years ago, I saw for the first time how some parts were covered in dozens of layers of spray-painted graffiti, eroded irregularly by wind and weather. I captured as much as I could on film and went back the next day with an even better camera to satisfy my craving for images. I realized only later, without knowing exactly why, that I had discovered a place in the world where something truly exceptional was happening. It felt like a revelation, a sudden and simultaneous glimpse into the past and future at once. This must be how an archeologist feels when stumbling across an unexpectedly significant discovery!
Even so, it was years later before I took the time to pursue my excavations and bring the story to a satisfactory conclusion. In 2016, I returned to Berlin specifically to revisit this site, this time armed with a 36mp camera and a solid tripod. However, my worst fears had become a reality: there were only a few spots left that offered a clear glimpse of all the underlying layers, since this section of wall had received legal status for use as a graffiti repository and had been completely covered over in dozens of layers of new paint by enthusiastic new graffiti artists.
But I had taken the precaution of bringing along a putty knife, so I wielded my tools like a true archeologist, peeling and poking in search of the hidden beauty of undiscovered, as yet unexposed layers of paint in all their varied structures and colors. The paint chips that fell to the ground, I collected and took home with me as reliquaries from the site.

Any afternoon or evening when the weather is fine, dozens of graffiti artists bustle around each other, immortalizing their ego in paint. Not even a millimeter of this 150-yard section of the old interior of the Berlin Wall has remained exposed. The ground and the greenery surrounding it are similarly swathed in paint, with nozzles and cans littering the area. Groups of lounging artists, shirtless and sometimes wearing disposable white latex gloves, hang around listening to crackling rap music on old portable radios. Bottles of beer are everywhere. No white earbuds, no notebooks: this is back to the basics. Ball bearings slide through shaken spray cans with a satisfied click. The penetrating scent of floating clouds of propellant hang heavy in the air, making you light-headed. Artists work and watch each other. Sometimes they snap a photo when the tag is ready, sharing it immediately.

Spray paint is tough stuff to work with; sometimes it dries very quickly, while other applications seem to take forever to set. Sun, wind and rain create the worst possible conditions for keeping paint intact, but that’s perfect for an Urban Work of Art! Thick crusts created by many layers of paint could sometimes be pulled right off the wall with some difficulty. The removal revealed older layers that were more firmly attached to the concrete and had their own unique character.

It is an intriguing thought to realize that hundreds of artists have created their works of art on the same spot, only to leave them again. The exceptional status of this 150-yard stretch of wall provides a powerful story, leading to massive spray density unlikely to be achieved at many other locations around the globe. The mediocre quality of the tags and paint is not an issue here; the point is the quantity that deposits such a substantial, multi-layered sediment!

In the city that stands so strongly for freedom, precisely because its history holds the most horrible attacks on fundamental liberties, this is a place where freedom can truly be celebrated every day by anyone who can paint their own freedom flag. Flying freely, flag layered over flag, the colorful images wave in the figurative wind. In their brief lives, sun and rain meld them together into a new, massively layered work of art through which glimpses occasionally rise to the surface. At those moments, you look straight through all the layers down to the pale gray, pre-1989 concrete and see how what once marked a horrific separation between people can become a canvas that brings everyone together again.

Looking at a random example of all those layers, it becomes possible to perceive structures that resemble the topographic maps of Google Earth. The first photos of the earth seen from space also revealed structures that are literally universal, from the largest scale known to man all the way down to microscopic level; those structural correlations hold true here. Seemingly unguided, this entropy of many flaking layers generates a harmonic desire that elicits pure beauty from the decay in its fresh, new frame. Vice vanitas, the ego reversed? Such synchronicity with the newly devised metaphor of this wall!
One morning, someone had painted 20 yards of the wall completely white from top to bottom, according to their own account to create a lovely tabula rasa for a group of well-known, privileged artists who had apparently announced their arrival in advance. And poof! There went my careful excavation. When I came back later, though, I saw that the rain that was falling had largely rinsed off the poor-quality, water-based wall paint in gorgeous gray-white stripes like tear tracks, creating craggy topography like desolate, snow-covered landscapes.

The size of a spot of most of the photos is no larger than a standard sheet of printer paper. On some photos, it is possible to discern recognizable images from the abstract lines and shapes: a fish, a face, and so on. Pareidolia or pattern, our brains are simply wired to detect significant images in order to ensure our biological survival. It is coincidental that they were autogenerated from different layers of paint, however. This near-metaphysical event strikes to the core; it would seem that there is almost no escape from the visual world as we know it. Pure abstraction would be an illusion, if they were true. Still, the nearly perfect abstract quality of some spots captured on film is unmistakable. A solitary human hand applying paint might betray its presence, but the flowing convergence of the disparate factors of human agency, weather and time cause the organic emergence of a perfectly abstract painting that the photographer elevates to what is literally a new image, in which an observer can in turn detect new images. In my opinion, it is the blended combination of all these literal and figurative layers that makes the confrontation with these Urban Works of Art so intense and huge.

Look at the photos