Alfresco History

For five years, a lanky sociologist from Fort Worth named William McLean prowled the boulevards, side streets, courtyards, back alleys and pissoirs of Paris, camera at the ready. Whenever he spotted an erotic representation of the human body or its genitalia, scratched by some anonymous artist in the soft limestone and plaster of which so much of Paris is built, he captured it on film. Sorbonne-trained McLean's collection, suitably surrounded by a scholarly text on the subject of erotic folk-art forms and published under the imposing title of L'Iconographie Populaire de L'Erotisme (The Erotic Iconography of the People), is the first serious study of the sexual graffiti that for uncounted generations have embroidered France's capital.

McLean's book is an important addition to the literature of graffiti (from the Italian graffiare, to scratch), if only because this highly perishable form of folk expression has seldom been taken seriously. It is at least as venerable as the human ambition to defy convention and authority--and both convention and authority, down the ages, have diligently worked overtime trying to scrub the walls clean. They can never, of course, successfully purge the record of these irreverent footnotes, which proliferate in both written and pictorial forms. When archaeologists unearthed Pompeii beginning in the 18th century, they found scores of graffiti that, after some two millenniums, have not lost their topicality: "Here I enjoyed the favors of many girls"; "Here Arphocras pleasured himself with Drauca for a denarius"--about a penny.

Such innocuous testimonials to man's urge to leave his mark adorn every accessible edifice, public park and mountainside in the world. In the same spirit in which schoolboys surreptitiously carve their initials on a desk, passers-by like to leave a record of their presence wherever they may go, either writing or carving their names and messages onto the nearest surface. Graffiti are simply man's attempt to proclaim his immortality against irreversible odds: he will die, but his name, crudely hewn in some rock of ages, will nevertheless endure.

Embellished Hearts. Beyond this basic ambition lie other more sophisticated motives. Sociologist McLean has studied one: the inexhaustible human preoccupation with sex, which, when repressed by the contemporary culture, invites the alfresco renditions of sexual equipment that subway travelers, for example, scrutinize or self-consciously ignore while waiting for the next train.

The illustrations in McLean's book enforce the point. They indicate an obsession with certain fundamental themes: the phallus, sometimes decorated with wings (an accessory, incidentally, commonly found in ancient Etruscan art); assorted schematic representations of the vulva; and the Valentine heart--a symbol that McLean believes is more erotic than sentimental. Typically, the heart symbol, if it survives long enough on the wall, gets further embellishment; someone adds an arrow, and then later another resourceful artist converts the heart into a rude approximation of the female posterior.

As a sociologist, McLean, 40, is cautious about interpreting the significance of the erotic graffiti he has photographed in Paris. But in his conditional judgment they seem to reflect the stratified ethics of society. In an outlying working-class suburb of Paris, the erotic graffiti tend to be explicit and unabashed. In more affluent and inhibited neighborhoods, he found that erotic graffiti occur in less abundance and tend to be more restrained.

Too Few Recorders. McLean has left to other scholars a study of that other, nonpictorial graffitic form that comments, often pithily, on human affairs. That is a pity, because in its communicative role the editorial graffito is universal and has much to say to its times. After the Parisian student uprisings of 1968, for instance, the city's walls bloomed with anti-Establishment slogans

like RUN FAST, THE OLD WORLD IS BEHIND YOU. Of these transitory social comments there are all too few recorders. In the U.S., one of the more dedicated collectors is Allen Walker Read, 63, a professor of English at Columbia University who has been recording graffiti on an international scale for more than 40 years. Some Manhattan samples from Read's collection, which has never been published in full: GOD is NOT DEAD! HE is ALIVE AND AUTOGRAPHING BIBLES TODAY AT BRENTANO'S (110th Street subway station). And, in somewhat the same vein: GOD IS DEAD BUT DON'T WORRY, MARY IS PREGNANT AGAIN (96th Street); GOD is OMNIVEROUS [sic] -CHITLINS, BAGELS, PIZZA, EVEN ENCHILADAS (96th Street).

COITO, ERGO SUM (Greenwich Village).

NORTH DAKOTA IS A HOAX (116th Street).

NIETZSCHE IS PIETZSCHE (116th Street).

Read is saddened by authoritarian resistance to the graffito. "It catches a human being at a time when he's just casually and not deeply engaged," says Read. "This is very important. People are on guard so much of the time." In this sense Read regards the graffito as the purest form of human expression. It announces to posterity the existence of an insignificant human whose passage might otherwise go unnoticed, from the legend incised in 1804 on a Tennessee tree trunk--DANL BOON KILT A BAR--to the classic and bittersweet self-advertisement that can be found all over the world:

ROSE [or whoever] WAS HERE AND NOW IS GONE BUT LEFT HER NAME TO CARRY ON.

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