Rafael Schacter. Monumental Graffiti: Tracing Public Art and Resistance in the City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2024. 400 pp.
Review by Kyle Proehl
5 December 2024
In the introduction to his vivid and ambitious new book, Monumental Graffiti, anthropologist Rafael Schacter makes a familiar but necessary move. Schacter argues that bringing our conception of graffiti into conversation with our conception of the institutional monument helps us understand not just graffiti but monuments as well. The book’s opening gestures at the recent wave of attacks on statues across the US, the UK, and elsewhere, red paint splattered on this or that colonizer’s face, sometimes their entire figure wrenched off its plinth and dragged back down to earth. Yet this is not simply timely but rather the recent appearance of a fundamental aspect of graffiti that Schacter pursues widely, namely its relational or antagonistic character, the way in which—both conceptually and practically—graffiti wields a critical function, drawing contradictions and repressions to the surface.
Monumental Graffiti aims this critique at public art, raising a panoply of questions about the meaning of both halves of that term. The imaginative tracking of a multiplicity of urban aesthetic reworkings, from recognizable artists to anonymous graffiti crews, along with a restless zest for citation, lends the book a vertiginous quality. Its argument proceeds through nine chapters organized in three sections, “Form,” “Message,” and “Trace,” across which runs a tripartite “lateral argument” based on the pairings “Space and Appearance,” “Body and Visibility,” and “Temporality and Sociality” (pp. xii, xiv). The balance of intersection and diversion can seem both overdetermined and estranged, here burdened by a sudden convergence of theoretical demands, there carving this or that aspect off in abstraction. For example, the gendered domination seemingly inherent to any public becomes separable rather than constitutive: the exclusion of women from graffiti practice is discussed nearby but not within discussion of the sociality of crews. There is sometimes the sense that the parts do not speak to each other. Yet Schacter’s unflagging enthusiasm draws us back together before taking the next needed leap: “Rejecting the perlocutionary visuality of the corporate city, the impersonal imperatives of the state, the reductive monologue of the linguistic landscape, it pronounces the possibility of a speech going beyond the instrumental, a speech speaking for speech’s sake” (p. 131).
Schacter seeks to recover the etymological root of monument as reminder, advice, warning. Monumental Graffiti inverts the argument made in his previous book, Ornament and Order (2014), transforming the dependent ornament, fixed to surface, into an independent monument, wandering off on its own. Though Schacter does not explicitly say so, this development carries an affinity to the logic of baroque art. Bolivar Echeverría (echoing Theodor Adorno) understood the baroque as an ornamentalism expressing a profound theatricality, a decoration that ceases to decorate, a staging that ceases to set anything on stage, becoming absolute ornamental-theatricality, a semblance of autonomy that is also deeply ephemeral, such that it calls into question the legitimacy of reality, exposing it as decorative, staged, contingent—in other words, changeable. Likewise, graffiti’s monumentality lies in its ephemerality—in its reminder that we might yet wrench life loose from the ruin of our glittering cities.