Waiting for Mr. Shuttleworth

By Roger Rosenblatt

Ordinarily one does not advertise in this space, but occasionally commerce and virtue coincide. Behold the Graffiti Gobbler--"the first effective, no mix, inexpensive formula that quickly and easily removes graffiti without harming the original appearance of the surface." (Did you feel your heart leap?) Already proved successful in Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Detroit and Windsor, Ont. (Canadian graffiti?), the "spray-on, wipe-off' Gobbler is right now being tested on the New York City subways, the end of the line. If it works there, its Australian inventor, Norman Shuttleworth, will be the Emperor of Gotham. No fame will equal his. His name will appear on every wall in the city. And then, quickly and easily, it will be gone.

What inspires such inventiveness? Something loftier than dollars. Vengeance? Civic duty? It is not surprising to learn that Australia has a subway, being down under, but can that lovely country have possibly reached the stage of mural riot that rapes New Yorkers every rush hour? No. There must be some holy altruism in Mr. Shuttleworth. Unlike other inventors, he is not giving the world what it never had before, he is restoring it to its origins. (One wonders, in fact, if there really is a Mr. Shuttleworth. His name is suspicious; it has a subway in it.)

Of course, if the Gobbler works, we will lose a bit in the bargain. The instructive messages in public toilets, the phone numbers, the lively anatomical drawings--no loss in any of that. But some things will be missed. The desperate erudition on the walls of college hangouts, for example: ARS LONGA; VITA HERRING. The continuing message exchanges will also disappear:

TO DO IS TO BE--NIETZSCHE

TO BE IS TO DO--KANT

DO BE DO BE DO--SINATRA

Some genuine poetry will be erased as well, such as these lines from a Harvard men's room:

SHE OFFERED HER HONOR, HE HONORED HER OFFER, AND ALL NIGHT LONG, IT WAS HONOR AND OFFER.

If graffiti had stayed at that innocent level, there would be no need for Mr. Shuttleworth. No Gobbler would have been welcome in the days when Kilroy was here. But Kilroy is not here any more and his, in any case, was a benevolent omnipresence. Not so with his successors: TURP, BOOB, HURK, DZ3, SONY, JUNIOR Y, SODA 1, whose names--if they are names--twist and bubble on the flat surfaces of our lives like virulent bacteria. No place in the country is safe, but New York City is actually under siege, its walls tottering under the cumulative weight of the lettering. So dire are the city's straits that Richard Ravitch, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has been holding truce talks with the graffitists, who are asking him to concede them ten subway cars for their "artwork" in exchange for leaving the others clean. One artist by the name of CRASH, speaking in his native graffiti, thinks that the plan would "pass with flying colors."

The premise of such heady deliberations is that graffiti is art--a premise supported over the past decade by several people with brains. In 1973 Twyla Tharp introduced the ballet Deuce Coupe, which used the doubly delightful background of music by the Beach Boys and six graffitists shooting spray cans at panels.

Claes Oldenburg once offered this exuberant judgment: "You're standing there in the station, everything is gray and gloomy, and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big bouquet from Latin America."

Have you not often said just those words yourself? Have you not been standing in the gray gloom of the subway station, when suddenly there slid in one of those darling graffiti trains, and could you restrain from muttering Ole?

Norman Mailer has written the most elaborate defense of graffiti. Snuggled among references to Giotto and Van Gogh, his thesis is arresting: "Slum populations chilled on one side by the bleakness of modern design, and brain-cooked on the other by comic strips and TV ads with zooming letters," assert their presences, their worth, by writing on subway cars. It is the old "I am" flung at the deadhead world, but no longer as an assertion. Instead, it screams bloody murder. According to this doctrine, art is a form of threat. And so it is. Art -- real art -- does indeed threaten a deadening complacency. But it does not threaten it with mugging. Art threatens to make life happy, to bring existence to its senses. And graffiti of the current subway type makes no one happy. What it does is make you scared.

It does so for three main reasons -- all gray, gloomily middleclass, but honest just the same. For one thing, we do not ever see who writes HURK and SONY. The "artist" is a sneak thief, and just as he attacks his "canvas" suddenly, his work attacks you. For another, these names (scary in their very loudness) are yelling at you in public places, where you wish to preserve your own name. For a third, there is the terror of the illegible. Most of the graffiti on subways nowadays is indecipherable, which either means that the attack artist is an illiterate -- frightening in itself-- or that he is using some unknown cuneiform language or the jagged symbols of the mad. And then there is a fourth reason. We have a right to our dullness. We have a right to clean slates, to blank places. Writing on a wall is a way of breaking down the wall. We have a right to some walls.

This said, one would still not have the Gobbler reach all the places in the world where words have been surreptitiously inscribed. The impulse to scratch lines on walls goes rather deep into our natures -- "the handwriting on the wall" being a common term for prophetic truth. There are prisons where a name on a wall is a window; and trees with lovers' names carved on wood that usually outlast the love; and wishing wells and secret caves, where someone has wanted to say something so private that only the darkness could bear it. These things are no defacements.

Even Lord Byron wrote his name on the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion in Greece -- technically defacing a house of worship, but enhancing it too. Run your finger along his signature now and you are touched by him who wrote: "The hand that kindles cannot quench the flame." One would not gobble that.

But as for the subways and toilet walls and all the other places yearning to be free, Gobbler, do your stuff. Who knows but that one day we all may be up against a wall that bears nothing but the news: MR. SHUTTLEWORTH -- By Roger Rosenblatt

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