Signature

 

Nowadays the metropolis is signed off unofficially everywhere. The initials and cognomens and pseudonyms and badges of unknown citizens are shown and known on every available surface. They leave their mark with increasing scale and detail and colour and flourish. Letters are turned into artistic platforms, the personal embellishments to words that all too frequently they make unreadable on purpose and by design. They invent fonts yet to be patented, point sizes outside a computer’s dropdown list. The extensive extent of this efflorescence has the effect of a citizens’ cartoon running along railway sidings and over city laneways and across commercial billboards and around factory corners. It delineates its own terms of reference in active hand, its own strident message, at times beautiful, grandiloquent; at other times intrusive, or even grotesque. Someone must push back against the coldness of real estate brain, must escape the disempowered sense left by empty words of politics. Muralists transform concrete walls, work at Sistine proportions, or miniature, or at the human scale. This set of ideograms painted on a power station, for example, is nothing but scribble to the passing eye. Until we take time, rather than our usual leisurely rapid, we cannot apprise their character and potential meanings. The square of shapely lines reads O INSTER TRLAR PIUO I or about that. Google yields nothing. I like the O of the sun, or it could be the moon, rising over the streets below, trees and houses, and the graffitist about their silent work. That person is an I at ground level. It is their private language, a poem thrown against the wall with a few gestures, spatial need easily accommodated. Muralists make concrete, poetry. Further contemplation has the final line morph into PIVOT, which may be a clue. I should watch out for other PIVOTs in the area. Against the ideogram square runs a second line lower left in pale green that reads NOM. Maybe NOME. To the trained Western eye it’s the artist’s signature, literally their nomen, but again a signature no one can trace on a government database. It is theirs and theirs alone, together with every other anonymous sign-off. Their flourish joins the untraceable collective. NOM has a name, at least, dashed in spraycan as scent trace, land claim, a say at belonging, an adventure under cover. For it’s the anonymity of this work, brazenly silver, striking in public places, that is its signature. The only begetters of these anonymous names move unnoticed by any but the most acute closed circuit TV eyeball. Our job is to give them even a modicum of the time of day. Grey men from the council will roll their beige rollers over the poem, one grey old day, slightly overcast, whereupon NOM will strike again with a fresh picture of what is going down.