Unleash your inner graffitist.

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My very old and dear friend and colleague, “Uncle” Bill Benzon (co-author of Visualization) has turned his considerable genius to tracking down graffiti artists around New Jersey and New York. His splendid photos of graffiti are wrapped in his very keen sense of the furtive, beyond the edge marginalism of the images and artists themselves.

Benzon’s Photo of Triceratops Graffit in NJ

These images evoke stories of young kids in urban guerrilla gear, sneaking onto the grounds of subway trainyards. They climb 12-foot-high chain link fences topped with razorwire. They dodge security cops, with cans of spraypaint in their backpacks. They work quickly, stealthily, but produce some amazing art. Many signature pieces are on the subway cars or on pillars under trestles that can’t be seen from the street.

So these artists put themselves in considerable jeopardy…and for what? Who is going to see their work? Thousands of commuters whizzing by an underpass, catching it, maybe, for a quarter of a second? Or thousands of commuters on subway platforms, watching it roar by, if they happen to glance up from their newspapers or blackberrys?

As I’ve said before, find an itch that needs scratching and you’ve got the basis for a good product. These graffitists are in the grip of a pretty compelling itch.

One of the desires SpongeFish wants to satisfy is something I call this graffiti impulse. I know something and feel something and must share it with the world. I have no hope of getting paid, but there’s a deeper reward: thousands or even millions of eyes on it, if only for part of a second.

Stowe Boyd has written about this phenomenon on his blog:

“Graffitti is a creative act. What is considered defacement is in fact an innate socializing impulse — to leave our mark on what we behold, and thereby denote our liaison with the greater world.” – Stowe on “Social Architecture: The Foundation of the Blogosphere”

The Web in general and sites for sharing what you know like SpongeFish in particular put the spraypaint cans in the hands of everyone and stands them in front of the public wall with an implicit challenge – and the permission: Go ahead and spray away! There are many companies in this space. The one that puts the better can of spraypaint in the hands of the most people will win. But it’s a noble enterprise: to unleash the inner graffitist in everybody.

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• NY police say couple spent summer in Europe tagging trains with graffiti
• Writers
• Graffiti in New York

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Tags: Bill Benzon, graffiti, SpongeFish