Week 6 Journal

    Until now, I did not believe that place and scene had a significant impact on writing. After the reading, I now realize that it has a great deal influence on what is written and how it is written. 

Growing up, I was raised to think that graffiti was an act of vandalism and that graffiti artists were simply criminals. Because of that logic, I never gave any thought to what the spray-paint read. However, after reading this, I understand that graffiti has a purpose. It is not just angry words scribed across a train or a billboard in big colorful bubble letters. Like many forms of writing, each drawing is different. They each have their own personality and they each tell different stories. 

The place and scene of where graffiti is done is not random. It is not a location chosen based off where the artist believes he has the least chance of getting caught. The reading mentions that graffiti on a train goes “into circulations that might now otherwise be possible, moving a single piece of graffiti across the country. The message that an artist wants to get across is what determines the platform in which a drawing goes on. Trains may be used for mass communication, while a wall, such as the one at the university, is used for locals to convey messages for each other. The goal of the wall was to take small ideas and make a big impact.

Circulation of the ideas expressed by a particular work are largely affected by the scene and place chosen by the artist. Walking in city streets or even watching movies, I have noticed many graffiti works on billboards placed way up high. At the time, seeing these works, I only thought of how difficult it must have been to get up that high just to vandalize something. I wondered if the artist was worried whether or not he would get caught and also how no one had seen him vandalizing the billboard and stopped it. Now I understand that the artist choose that platform because it is easily noticed from the streets below and from distances further away. The artist realized the risk of getting caught or hurt and choose to draw on the billboard anyway so his message would be seen by more people. 

The train example discussed on page 145, tells readers the logic that a artist uses when choosing a platform. Witnessing a train passing by and reading the words written on the side of it, you fail to realize that what you're reading, has been read by thousands of people all over the country. The artist chose to tag the train realizing that their message would be conveyed over the entire country.