Graffiti Saving







Writing texts on the wall has a tremendous tradition in the folklore of big cities. It is one of the simplest ways to demonstrate freedom; the creators communicate with every citizen of the city, in principle. They make intrinsically illegible town legible. Just think of the confessions, names preserved on the walls and other signs having lost their significance. The majority of them are occasional inscriptions defended by nothing, neither physically nor morally; to the contrary, people seek to remove them.

One of the important aspects of the inscriptions is that they are born in spite of a serious prohibition, even the most ordinary graffiti is an illegal damage in principle; haste, shortness and incompleteness are consequences of this. Its physical frame is determined by the features of human body: every graffiti is also the movement-notation of its realization.

Through my present work I would like to record one (or more) inscriptions of this kind, that is, to lengthen its natural lifetime by placing it into the medium of art. One of the inscriptions of this kind in Budapest is to be found at the end of Városház Street, it is nearly ten years old, as far as I remember.

The word SZTRIPTIZ on the Városház Street wall of MATÁV headquarters


By now we can only guess what the creator's original intention was, it is impossible to know why the word SZTRIPTIZ were important for him/her, therefore the effect of the text has become expressly poetic.

So I would like to preserve this inscription by casting it into bronze; I would cast the original typography into bronze of about 2 cm high and by putting it into the wall I would cover the original painted characters.

I would hope to call attention to the graffiti by this particular act, by raising a monument to the memory of an old fleeting thought, of an unknown person who applied unconsciously the instruments of art in order to break out his own restrictions.

At the same time this procedure demonstrates the good-act character of art: it transfigures a deformed wall into a work of art.

I would not be sorry if it would initiate a movement with the objective to preserve some graffiti in the bigger towns.

As an alternative suggestion or even as a second part of this work I would suggest a preservation of a similar kind of the inscription JOY DIVISION at Kodály körönd.

János Sugár