Warning, this is heavily based on ugly pictures.
Warning, the pictures were taken from my camera phone.
Warning, my phone was just stolen in the jeepney.
Warning, this is a skool paper, not a blog entry.
Warning, prepare to yawn and be bored.
Warning, I wrote this for a grade.
Warning, so what else is there to warn about?
Warning, yes that's a seven-letter word that begins with W.
Warning, has the same number of letters as Wordgasm.
Arr, no. Wordgasm has eight.
Warning, cucumbers really are just pickles.
Warning, you are about to begin.
Warning, do you really have to read this?

Graffiti is in the eye of the beholder. It is a crime, which is part of its beauty. Some people think it's art and anarchy combined. Some people think it's a violation against public and private property. The crime concerns the basic questions: who, what, where, when, how. The who is composed of white wall violators, whose goal is personal advertisement, expression of ego and style, or to spread an idea. The what are the visual art themselves painted on the walls, ranging from the sociological and political, to the poetic and the reckless. The where is inside the University of the Philippines, Diliman, on canvasses made of bricks or cement that used to be bleak and empty. The when is the clean up during the Centennial Celebration last year, after almost all graffiti were painted over with a watered-down coating of dull, yawny white paint, and only a few survivors remain today. The how concerns different techniques and styles, from spray paint and brush paint, to stickers, markers, and stencils, with influences from the Victorian period to Hip Hop culture. But what we always fail to ask is the why. This essay concerns us with questions that boggles the mind: why people defile blank walls, why in the University of the Philippines, why this or that medium, why graffiti exists, and why we even care.

Why graffiti and why not vandalisms or murals? Of the three, graffiti (graffito is singular; graffiti, plural or mass noun) catches the most attention because it is creative and illegal, involving concealment, sneaking in the dark and avoiding the authorities. Thus, it is risky, daring, and dangerous, all the more intriguing when we think it doesn't last long. It is ephemeral in a way that contradicts our basic idea of preservation in the art world. On the contrary, mindless vandalism is artless and offensive, mostly using curse words and sketches of the male and female genitalia. A mural, however, is a permanent painting on the wall, ceiling, or other surfaces that requires permission. Due to its immensity, cost, and work--some even taking years to finish--it's usually commissioned by a sponsor. All three originate from prehistoric writings on the wall inside caves or tombs, where they survived perilous weather conditions and catastrophes, thus preserved.

The basic idea behind graffiti is to commemorate the person for being there. It is an act of primordial expression, basic and fundamental, to recreate one's self, sometimes provoking mystery and intrigue.

The graffito above is called "throwies" or "tags", a visual personification of Hip Hop using bubble letters or twisted lines that overlap each other. It is spray painted by someone named Chi. It says outright: I am different, I am cool, and I've painted this to prove it. We see them scribbled on bathroom walls, scratched on armrests, in jeepney stops, bulletin boards, or spray painted on buildings. People write them for fame, glory, or recognition. They want to get noticed, because right now they aren't getting the attention they deserve. They want to prove they exist, because right now, it appears that they don't. The logic is that they think they're cool and unique, but other people don't notice it, so they recreate their self on the walls to force people to think that they are. On the other hand, some people write them just because they can.

Another form of graffiti uses an image representation of the artist's alter ego, in this case, a gorilla face.

The artist shows us how he was able to paint this sketch multiple times and not get caught. It subverts authority figures right away. How many times does this happen in our society? How many times do people commit crimes and get away with it? Authorities would argue people who paint these don't understand basic property laws. It is sheer vandalism, defacement, gang-related, and it brings the city down to the tribal level. But who's bringing the city down, the violators or the watchmen? An online research tells me the artist who did this was also the one who painted the worms and maggots in the campus. In an interview he says, "Painting these images on the streets and people interpreting them gives me the thrill of doing it more often. The more I spread these gorillas and maggots the closer it gets to my idea of criticizing our system. Decay and rot!"

A more sophisticated version of this is the smiley artist.

Painting the geometric circles indicated above requires some sort of contraption, most likely stencil plates with perforated circles. Stencils use cardboards or other forms of sturdy paper that can be cut through, or custom designed on metal sheets, and then spray-painted over for a sharper image. This graffiti requires more time and effort, and still the artist wasn't caught. How long does it take for authorities to catch criminals? Are they doing their job?

Stencil graffiti covers a vast number of walls in the least time possible. Other versions of this technique use only one color, usually black, and spray-painted over a white wall, thus providing more contrast.

It's a stencil graffito of a schoolgirl reading something in her hands. The girl could be a foreigner; schoolgirls in this country don't normally wear long-sleeved uniforms. And the thing she's holding could be anything. It could be paper money, a wallet, a map, a romantic poem, an erotic novel, anything. But given she's a schoolgirl, most likely she's reading and not just looking at something in her hands. Right away it startles and provokes intrigue: what does it mean? Is it saying something about the system of education in UP? What about the future generations of scholars? Why is it even there? Are we even supposed to create meaning out of it?

Meanwhile, other stencil graffiti are less mysterious.

The graffito above is an advertisement of a missing or rather missed unknown person. The choice of word is intentional, implying acceptance that the person is not just missing, but already gone and will never return. Its anonymity can represent anybody. It represents you, me, your boss, your housekeeper, the stress balls door-to-door salesman, the manicurist next door. It represents the two missing UP students, abducted, tortured, and raped inside the Military Camp in San Miguel, Bulacan. It represents these students' family and friends, mourning and tortured and sodomized just the same. It represents us, their schoolmates, who are similarly affected. It represents the cynical youth stripped off of aesthetics and freedom of speech. It represents every Filipino, every activist, every anti-government organization demanding reformation, social change, and one plastic bag of NFA rice, please. But who is this missed person, really? Whose face was it patterned from?

Another stencil art shows an anonymous person blindfolded with an inscription of emancipation.

It is signed by TMTK, a group of underground anarchists inspired by the Filipino poet Eman Lacaba. In his Salvaged Poems, Lacaba says,

You want to know, companions of my youth,
How much has changed the wild but shy poet
Forever writing last poem after last poem
You hear he's dark as earth, barefoot
A turban around his head, a bolo at his side,
His ballpen blown up to a long-barreled gun:
Deeper still the struggling change inside,

There still is that same constipated fight for revolution waiting to explode, but all he manages to do is fart in the form of poetry. Sure, most anti-government sentiments take the form of essays printed in newspaper columns or aired in late night TV commentaries. But what about those who don't have access to information? Those who cannot afford to buy newspapers, let alone television sets? These stencil graffiti are painted right on the streets to reach a wider audience, to stir interest, to promote an idea, to ignite conversations, discussions, to rise and fight against our system of government.

The graffiti of missing people replicated everywhere have gained so much attention that even the carabaos, birds, and Santa Claus' reindeers have noticed them and did the same thing--to rise and fight against their Carabao System, Bird System, and Reindeer System of Government.

Unlike the stencil art of missing people, these of missing animals border on a whole new dimension of enlightenment. Their meaning is so indecipherable, so vague and perplexing, that there's no other logic to it than the animals did it. Perhaps it's one way to divert attention from the missing human beings, that an animal's life just costs as much as a man's. Or that The System itself spray-painted these to imply all these missing animals, and that includes the missing humans, are part of a cosmic blah art that doesn't mean anything. Or maybe it's a reaction against those graffiti of missing persons, mocking them and blurring the distinction between what's serious and what's ridiculous, that none of their efforts are going to change anything. Is it even saying anything at all? Whose pets are these away?

No doubt there's a dialogue in the graffiti community who are occupying the same space, acting and reacting against one another without even seeing or knowing each other. For a moment we think that's the end of it, but another figure springs up: a missing winged tarsier.

It verges on the fantastic it's mocking all the graffiti of missing persons and animals. It's questioning the power of all these political graffiti to influence public opinion: Are they effective? Have these artists changed anything at all? What happened to the opinion pages in newspapers? Are they losing their ability to influence people as well? Or is this dialogue among artists a visual representation of the dialogues we see in print, an exchange of opinions and not resolving anything?

Finally, someone sprays the end to it all.

This graffito merely says "ART" but says it differently given a specific angle. It's direct and self-referential, and yet abortive and suicidal. It's paradoxical in other words. It may not be even part of the dialogue, and yet it's painted there attracting some sense of purpose. What is this all about? Should we not care or should we?

Besides the stencils, there are other kinds of graffiti that have survived the clean up during the Centennial Celebration, one of which is the sticker graffiti. The stickers are no bigger than the size of a bondpaper, and they use a special kind of glue that would take you forever to peel and scratch off using your fingernails. Even if the stickers are removed, they leave this ugly smudge of white paper that would collect grime and turn black, looking even uglier than they used to be. Nobody wants a filthy wall, so chances are, you'll rather leave the stickers as they are.

A monster terrorizes UP Diliman. It is funny and amusing, but to some it elicits shock and anger. What have we done to the president? This is blatant vilification of the highest authority figure in the country! And yet we laugh at the caricature so hard it sinks in: the president controls everything, including the system of education in UP, including us. We are under the power of this monster. Who do you think is laughing now? Us or the president?

Other kinds of sticker graffiti promote an organization (UP Anino, top center) or an individual (Sicboy and Hepe). Unlike traditional graffiti which takes time to finish, sticker graffiti is the most efficient and effective way to advertise a person's art, a group, or an idea. There are no pressure or labels such as "success" or "failure" to limit them. The art was already preconceived and put on paper. The last thing left to do is paste them on walls where the guards are out of sight.

The sticker graffiti of individuals portray a different kind of frustration. Though the work they've done looks creative, smart, and crafty, wanting their art pasted there forever just shows how desperate they are. The artists who paste the same art they've made do show their artistic genius, but it's the cowardly, hesitating form of artistic genius they portray. It lacks the risk, danger, and suspense traditional graffiti artists go through. It could've worked to their advantage if they used this sticker form to advertise different variations of their art, all the while retaining the same style with or without the signature.

While the stencil and sticker artists are playing safe, other artists are out there to make a public performance. They are more creative, spontaneous, and reckless, too broke to go to art school, but not too broke to make art.

Street art like these have literally left the graffiti scene in UP. The cleaners must've left them out either because they're placed in abandoned areas or are farther away from the center of the campus (as in the case of the graffito fronting Bonifacio Hall). No fresh graffiti this spontaneously painted have ever appeared since the clean up. Have the spontaneous artists abandoned the campus? Obviously, the creative drive has dried up that even the yellow whale graffito was painted over with the same image due to the stagnation of imagination.

But still, three graffiti have remained to do more than disturb our stream of consciousness as we pass them by. They demand a second glance and linger in our memory longer than those previously mentioned.

This graffito features someone who looks like Darth Vader, and displaced the gun with a spray can instead. It uses a technique called "stenciling", which involves multiple layers of sprayed over stencils. It says, "Coloration is better than violation," grammatically rendered as "Graffiti is better than violence." It's the sort of graffiti that ignites a train of thought in our head. Is a battle of spray cans and skill better than a battle of knives and strength? Of course, the statement is a fallacy. It's like saying scratching out your enemy's eye is better than cleaving his head into two with a pickaxe. Both are an offense, one is just graver than the other. Substituting graffiti for violence doesn't solve the problem of violence; it's just justifying its point of existence. But then it strikes another question: why is it justifying its existence? Why should graffiti, all graffiti in general, exist?

The second was painted on a solitary wall standing across the College of Social Work and Community Development. Was the wall built for this graffiti or was the graffiti painted to beautify the ugly and otherwise purposeless wall?

This was painted by UP Alpha Phi Omega, the same fraternity who runs around naked at Oblation Runs every December. The first boy is sleeping; the second, saying "Isang Mundo ... Isang Pangako"; the third kid behind the wall says "Wait..."; and the fourth, "Ang hirap ng buhay, parang life." The style is generic; something a high school student can doodle at the back of his notebook. But given the blending of colors and ideas presented, not to mention the money, time, and effort invested to paint it, it's surprising to bump onto it amidst the mediocrity of the setting--it's something we don't see everyday.

And yet there's a plethora of prettier graphics we see everyday. They are glossy and stylized, complete with titillating fashion models promoting signature brands. They are sprawled on billboards, on huge skycrapers, on buses and trains, every single one of them screaming for our attention. But why do we find graffiti more interesting than advertisements?

Advertisements have all the tools to grab our attention and yet we don't look at them, much less pay attention to them. But when we see something like this, we are in shock. We protest: this should be inside an art gallery or a museum! What the hell is this doing out here? Most importantly, why?

The graffito on the tiled bench portrays a Victorian painting of an alfresco cafe with three gentlemen at a table, one of them eye-flirting with a woman at the other table. In a moment, our interpretation and criticism skills hang paralyzed, tossed out our brains. We don't know what to think, what to say, or how to react. We just stoop there gawking, not even wanting to sit on it. It's too beautiful to deserve our butts. It's too beautiful to turn our back to. But its stands there free for everybody to see and sit on. After we've absorbed all the details, the question boomerangs back to us even louder: why?

When we think about our advertisement-saturated streets, there is art everywhere. Some are even more clever and artistic than this one. But mostly they give us eyesores, trespassing into our heads. Graffiti and advertisements both promote something. But what's the difference?

If you have the money, you can put your graffiti on every billboard, on every street, every wall, every newspaper, every magazine, every web page, every imaginable space there is on the planet for all eternity. Money brings with it the absolute right to convey your name, your message, your idea, your art, in all forms of media and all kinds of space without violating the law. It all boils down to sheer capitalism: all this visual pollution is controlled by people playing lordship at the top of the food chain. They shape our dreams and desires at the subconscious level. But when it comes to personal space, those we call our brains, advertisements too invade our private property.

There's no question why graffiti grips our attention than advertisements do, no question why it even exists. Graffiti is art that doesn't lure us into giving the artist our money. Graffiti is art that doesn't require money to be plastered on a wall. Graffiti is free for artists to make and free for people to see. It's the homogenizing non-profit-driven commodity that shakes political and economic power. Graffiti slaps our faces and awakens us from being puppeteered by people we call authority and corporations. Graffiti is real and it exists to make a difference. In this world of fast cars, fifteen-minute fame, and branded lifestyles, we don't stop to smell the flowers any more. We stop to look at graffiti.

Word did you say?

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