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It has come to our attention that there will be a ‘graffiti clean up’ effort this Saturday. As concerned residents of university district and members of the Ohio State community, we feel it is appropriate for us to voice our concern about this. Though we are sure that the cleaners are well intentioned, we are concerned, most fundamentally, about their assumption that graffiti is something that must be ‘cleaned.’ The assumption implicitly characterizes graffiti as ‘dirty,’ and we feel this characterization carries dangerous implications with it.

The assumption of graffiti’s dirtiness is related to discourses on policing, urban disorder and so-called ‘blight’ that conflate graffiti with a number of unrelated social ills and rather arbitrarily value some forms of expression above others. We think it important that our community consider the possibility that graffiti is not dirty, but is an expression of people seeking to address other people. The fact that the expression is not immediately legible to those who might seek to ‘clean it up,’ does not irremediably make it an illegitimate form of expression. The perspective of the self-appointed ‘cleaners’ should not be privileged absolutely. The fact of graffiti’s illegibility to some only suggests that the audience in question may not yet have recognized the producer of the form as a person, preferring, perhaps subconsciously, to dehumanize the producer as a mere figure of a social problem.
By characterizing graffiti as a form of expression, we invite you to consider how this de-legitimized form is related to others like billboard advertising or commercial signage. Why are these forms considered legitimate? Is the purported legitimacy of them due to anything but a historical peculiarity—our naturalized, ‘common sense,’ investment in the maintenance of private property rights? We ask: are not the streets that you intend to clean up public space? And, of course, we would answer in the affirmative; the streets are public space. Why do we assume the illegitimacy of some forms of public expression? Is this a reflection of widely held stereotypes about the producers of these forms? We maintain that the graffiti-producing public has as much a right to public space as the commodity-producing public. Related to this assertion, we maintain that the graffiti-producing public is not internally homogeneous and cannot be dismissed as, to re-iterate, a collective figure of a social problem.

It has been said that ‘blank walls equal blank minds.’ Some of the people expressing themselves through a form that you may wish to ‘clean up’ are dead and gone. Some are still active. All, we can safely assume, have recognized the power of visibility in public. And, all, we can further assume, feel an intimate connection with that space of public visibility in which they have ‘gotten up.’ Why should these individuals concede the space of their daily lives—their space as much as anyone else’s—to those who assert the legitimacy of their claim to space only on the basis of their ability to purchase a right to it? Why should we bolster their ability to speak over the rest of us through efforts to ‘clean up’ for them?

This brings us to our final point: the spray can is a modern day tool of democracy, just as the printing press was in the dawn of our nationhood. We ask that you consider the implications of graffiti’s erasure. If you consider graffiti to be an imperfect form of expression, we would encourage you to see it as a call for more sophisticated forms of public dialogue, we would encourage you not to dismiss the form on the basis of what may be your own inability to see the person behind what has rather cynically been called ‘blight.’
Thank you for considering our thoughts.

Nicholas Crane
Masters student, Department of Geography, Ohio State University

Nikki Skrinak
Senior, Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Ohio State University