The other day I dropped by
Moe's in Berkeley to peruse their lovely book collection. I usually start out in art book section and then move my way up to the language department, ending with the sweet dessert of philosophy topped with some social theory cherries. That's the shit right there.
This time though I halted in the art books for a little longer than usual. I found a
Prestel Publishing book in their street art series called "
Paris Street Art" put together by
Romuald Stivine and
Vito Del Forte. Dragging my fingers through the brightly colored pages, I recognized many of the pieces gracing the Parisian street walls. I also recognized the neighborhood; the curving walls at the bottom of Parc de Belleville or the swooping landscape of Pere Lachaise, even the alley ways off Rue des Cascades or by Cafe aux Folies.
I would see many of these paintings in the magnificent
Menilmontant neighborhood, right over the hill from
Belleville, the two districts where graffiti artists lay down the law of beauty in the streets of Paris. Well, I would more than see them, you could say that I was a regular collaborator. Especially during the Winter months of 2005 and 2006
where civil unrest uprupted in the streets all over France in response to the oppressive use of police authority in the ghettoized suburbs and then later, the government's attempt to liberalize worker's laws.
Those were the glory months of graffiti during my stay in Paris; classes canceled for months, the feeling of uprising in the air, creative energy spewing rainbows from spray cans onto peeling gray walls. It was an empassioned and naively brilliant time reminiscent of the the acclaimed phrase of May '68
tattood to the walls of the old vanguard; "Sous les pavés, la plage."
Anyway, while flipping through the pages I had a thought, "Wouldn't it be crazy if one of my paintings just happened to be in this little flip book?" And sure enough, on a page parallel to the geometrically balanced works of
l'Atlas, one of my schizophrenic little monsters gaping a toothsome mouth at the moon in torment.
What a strange experience. An experience where so two idiosyncratic and divided worlds cross spheres. I surreptisiously slid through the the streets at night and put up these strange scribbled marks on the stone walls and corroborated heavens of Paris. Days later, and it must have been only a few days because that painting was buffed quick, a street photographer by legal name Vito stumbled upon this horrific mural, and it touched him. He took a picture, expanding my transient moment into a pixelated image with thickness.
After assembling many other photos in the streets of that Winter and Spring of protest and violence, Vito finally published a book that was distributed worldwide. He searched out as many source names as he could, but in the world of graffiti the signatures (where they are actually authored) do not so easily trace back to an identifiable, legal origin. So there I was, holding this book in my hands, my mind traveling distances to recount the swiveling paths that finally closed their abysmal, cipher loops into that moment.
I wonder now, do I find out who Vito the photographer is and tell him of my experiences? Do I pursue this path of hardening the loops of anonymity into a reciprocal moment of direct acknowledgment? Or do I enjoy the pure incognito relations we developed, basking in the beauty of two contingent lives dialoguing from a resonant distance, and letting go? Or is this blog post, shot out in the depths of the internet waves, already taking the next step towards such mutual recognition?
My scribbled Demon which Vito published is mysteriously missing from this following collection of photos.
Vito, si tu lisait ce message, envoyeriez-moi un email!
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