Wall Language by Aliza Olmert and Gayil Hareven, Yedioth Aharonoth Books, 376 pages, NIS 148
At the end of my street is a stenciled inscription that was sprayed onto the wall in small, square letters, whose color has faded with time to rust:
"4104 Palestinians
1
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170 Israelis
116 Lebanese
6 others."
I don't recall exactly when, but at some point someone decided to lock this inscription inside a blue Star of David, adding the words "Am Yisrael Hai" (the people of Israel live). Nor do I recall when an anonymous hand added the Hebrew letters "vav" and "tav," which transformed the phrase into "Am Yisrael Hayot" (the people of Israel are animals). Like many inscriptions that are added to one another in the streets and alongside highways, every new addition represents a temporary victory in a prolonged battle.
On the facade of one of the neighboring buildings, an impassioned love song is carefully painted in block letters not far from a series of tags - personalized graffiti signatures consisting of a stylized combination of several letters. The corner garbage dumpster was also sprayed recently with a single word, "cappuccino" - as if the writer wanted to give expression to a sudden whim that overtook him as he was crossing the street.
There is something about this collection of graffiti that is highly characteristic of Tel Aviv streets; a combination of political activism anonymously voiced, intimate feelings, enigmatic expressions and echoes of global visual culture. They come together to create a unique textual reality - a random collection of signs that momentarily gives the impression that if we only knew how to put them together, they would reveal a hidden message that would have the power to shatter the reality in which they were created.
A similar combination of contradictory messages and different linguistic registers, of the personal and the political, characterizes the graffiti that appear in "Wall Language" - a collection of photographs taken by Aliza Olmert over a period of 30 years. Recently published in a hefty volume, these images are accompanied by a series of texts by novelist and essayist Gayil Hareven. In the three decades during which Olmert - a multidisciplinary artist, and also the prime minister's wife - followed the development of local graffiti, its explosion in Western metropolises was examined in hundreds of articles and books, which approached this phenomenon from various perspectives. It was analyzed as an art form and a social phenomenon, a communications model and tool for cultural representation, a criminal act and a linguistic event.
Olmert's book, by contrast, does not presume to offer a history or a theory of Israeli graffiti. It is a collection of documentary images, which locate wall inscriptions within a wider visual sphere composed of stickers, propaganda signs and posters.
Shortly after its publication, "Wall Language" itself was commented upon in a series of Tel Aviv graffiti, which protested the way in which the prime minister's wife had supposedly appropriated the images of an anti-establishment culture. (The exact words were: "Aliza Olmert, suck my ---, you and your so-called street art.") Indeed, the word "graffiti" is usually associated with subversive activities taking place on the margins of society. It has the aura of an illegal action carried out under the cover of darkness, and is seen as a means of overtaking part of the public sphere in a manner that challenges social, political and aesthetic conventions.
One of the interesting aspects of contemporary Israeli graffiti, however, is precisely the fact that it cannot be related to a specific subculture. It represents a broad spectrum of social and political sectors, whose messages range from anti-capitalist protest to an ecological agenda, from opposition to the occupation to racist incitement. Graffiti writers and painters include Tel Aviv youths and extremist right-wing activists, ultra-Orthodox Jews from Jerusalem and families who were evacuated from Gush Katif.
The photographs in the book are catalogued according to an associative logic, which underscores this heterogeneity by employing categories such as temporariness ("ma'ahaz zmani" - temporary outpost; "shfiut zmanit" - temporary sanity), different types of observations ("Russim ze sababa" - Russians are great; "ofno'anim mehurim legeves" - motorbike riders are addicted to casts), or sentences that begin with the word "ein" (no) or "yesh" (there are, I have) - ("ein optsia" - no option; "yesh li haver she'afilu hazar betshuva" - I have a friend who even became religious).
The 19 short texts written by Hareven - each of which is one or two pages long - relate to specific inscriptions or combinations of inscriptions that appear in various photographs. They include imaginary descriptions of the graffiti writers or monologues that supposedly reveal their motives, and thoughts about the contents, style and linguistic details of various wall writings. Yet in contrast to the inscriptions to which they respond, the texts have something forced and artificial about them, so that most of them resemble exercises in associative writing.
Olmert's photographs also draw attention to the way in which the inscriptions relate to typical characteristics of local architecture. In contrast to graffiti in large Western cities, which developed on the brick walls and doors of housing projects and on the sleek metallic exteriors of subway cars, Israeli graffiti is scrawled across scarred cement walls and peeling plaster, on cheap stone surfaces and old water towers, hitchhiking stations for soldiers and deserted buildings.
One of the striking features of this heterogeneous collection is the overwhelming emphasis of Israeli graffiti on textuality, rather than on the visual dimension of the inscriptions. The graffiti that sprang up in New York ghettos developed, to a large extent, through the creation of autonomous graphic signs that insist on remaining undecipherable outside of the subculture in which they evolved, and their protest is based in part on a refusal to communicate through conventional means. The language of local graffiti, which takes to extremes the painfully laconic quality of contemporary Hebrew, is characterized to a larger extent by the production of clearly legible messages. It seems that rather than representing fringe groups that have been excluded from the public discourse, they often bespeak a strong sense of belonging and of involvement.
Time-bound medium
Graffiti is a time-bound medium: it is created in a hurry and viewed hastily, and it survives for only a short time before being effaced or covered by other inscriptions. Graffiti writing itself often draws the viewer's attention to its status as a trace left behind by a transient human presence, which documents itself in advance in the past tense ("Ma'ayan and Motti were here and had wild sex"). Photographs of graffiti are part of an artistic tradition that attempts to catalogue and document the endlessly changing aspects of the modern metropolis, and to create a kind of archaeology of the present.
As Olmert herself points out in an epilogue to her book, part of the interest aroused by graffiti is associated with the process of spotting it - the result of an urban experience of wandering throughout the city and of chance encounters. The attempt to capture this experience in an elegant coffee-table book is doomed to fail. Those who are truly interested in graffiti will obviously continue to search for it in the streets rather than in bookstores.
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