Preserving Decay

Published in Alessandro Mininno, “Conservare il degrado”, in Margherita Lazzati, La mia storia con Samuel Beckett a Portobello, Milano: Ready-Made, 2010.

The first time I saw Margherita Lazzati’s series of photographs of Alex Martinez’s piece in London, I thought: she’s mad. Not even writers are this obsessive about documenting their own work, despite the ephemeral nature of their productions.

Train graffiti rarely last more than three days: they are meant to wear out, fade, be erased or covered by another layer of spray. Photographic documentation is often the only evidence that a piece ever existed. Those who paint on subways know they are painting only for the final photograph: it happens frequently that painted trains never even leave the depot, condemned to immediate erasure in the name of decorum.

Growing photographic attention

The documentation of graffiti grows more important every day, and those who paint know it: the quality of magazines dedicated to the phenomenon keeps rising and the photographs taken by writers have reached extraordinary levels. From Gusmano Cesaretti’s shots of cholo writing in Los Angeles in 1975, to Alex Fakso’s reportages on Italian trains and subways in the 2000s, to JR’s photographs exhibited at the World Press Photo show — much has changed: technique and quality have grown enormously. It is a sign of writers’ increasing attention to photography.

Yet photography is the concluding act of a piece: it immortalizes its completion and in some sense marks the beginning of its decay. It is taken at the moment of finishing or, at the latest, the following morning when the train pulls into the station.

Margherita Lazzati’s obsession

This is the opposite of Margherita Lazzati’s approach: her maniacal obsession with Alex Martinez’s piece — which led her to photograph it continuously for four years — reminds me of the obsession some writers have with their own name, driving them to write it everywhere and in any circumstances. An obsession closely connected to the insistent repetitiveness of advertising communication, which was becoming pervasive and relentless precisely in the years when writing was born.

I’m thinking of writers like Dumbo (who wrote his tag everywhere in Milan, in capital letters), not of Alex Martinez: if one places writers on an ideal continuum from pure vandalism to pure art, Dumbo sits toward the vandalism end (and toward self-referentiality, repetitiveness, non-art), while Martinez seeks recognition from the gallery world.

Just as Dumbo’s tags are an insistent obsession across the streets of Milan, Margherita Lazzati’s photographs have obsessively sampled the same painting throughout its entire life as a work, right through to its final erasure.

Destruction as part of the original statute

Certain works, argues Professor Antonio Rava (lecturer in restoration at the Accademia Albertina), are destined to destroy themselves and must be left to their fate. Their destruction is part of their original statute.

If we think of a graffito as a work of art (a hypothesis that will make many wrinkle their noses), the only form of preservation is precisely what Margherita Lazzati attempted: continuous documentation of the artistic object’s decay through to its complete destruction. In this sense, the photographic sequence is decidedly better than the work itself (a copy of a Beckett portrait that, frankly, appears to have gained five kilos compared to the original).

Documenting the passage of time gives us the measure of the inevitability of events: it is a metaphor for life, like Sam Taylor-Wood’s video (Still Life, 2001) in which a Caravaggesque basket of fruit molds, inexorably, in an accelerated three-and-a-half-minute time-lapse. A sentence that graffiti cannot escape and from which nothing shields them. The Municipality of Milan swept away, with a grey sponge, twenty years of Milanese writing history, erasing all the city’s historic hall-of-fame sites. And creating a phenomenon of adverse selection: in trying to reduce scribbles (which citizens dislike) the city erased the beautiful graffiti (which citizens liked). Where the hall-of-fame sites used to be, there are now only tags and throw-ups. Thank you, mayor.

Documentation vs. restoration

While the sporadic and ill-conceived initiatives aimed at restoring and safeguarding graffiti (such as the restoration of Bros’s wall in Via Olona, Milan) have thankfully been short-lived, serious documentary projects on a single wall have been very few.

Graffiti Archaeology is one such diachronic analysis — a wonderful time-lapse collage documenting various American hall-of-fame sites from the 1990s to the present.

Another example, this time in the street art field, is Self Destructing Sticker by the Dutch artist Erosie, in which the progressive fading of a sticker makes good on the sticker’s own claim: “this sticker will self destruct.”

Margherita Lazzati’s series cannot stop time. It marks time’s passage and narrates a ruthless and often ignored reality: when a piece is finished, it no longer belongs to the writer. It is at the mercy of photographers, other writers, the weather and those who erase graffiti. Writers hand over their works to the uncontrolled action of atmospheric agents and of society, with determined resignation and full awareness.

Fortunately, there will always be another generation of writers, ready to lay down another coat of paint.

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