Underground

 

Seminar on Street Art 5: Underground. It is unclear why they risked their lives, dark in fact, descending into the wide drains below Melbourne. The Cave Clan left little trace underground, graffiti being contrary to their secret code of exploration. Anonymity was essential once they crossed the entrance to hell, somewhere near an effluent creek. They were torchlight crews, down there to discover the last frontier. Their cavernous concrete caverns were a hard day’s night, measureless to man where sunless they ran, tiptoed, stumbled, forged new memories. Speleologists of the sewers, their aim was discovering new reaches of the depths, only staying away for obvious reasons on rainy days. Now the explorers rise above the surface, whether rain or clear, scaling above the grids of lit windows, ducking down calligrammed bluestone lanes, finding forlorn fences beneath a sterling moon, their purpose to leave traces over every wall. Their purpose being to discover the next unknown nook that by hook crook they will hook with good looks. Just take a Captain Cook! And well that was one particular rabbit-hole. Another entertains Alice as she enters upon her adventures underground. There small becomes large, elephant becomes mouse again, and mirror-writing turns the alphabet inside out. Obtuse interactions, empirical impossibilities. the nightmare of the subconscious meet Alice whether she is opening doors, falling through space, or sitting down to tea. She’s frank. She’s grace. She’s prudence. But ask her to compose a response and we find she has risen to the occasion with seven-foot high mirror signatures that she’s good-naturedly choreographed across the entire neighbourhood. It might be a kingly Lear limerick in her head, a mock heroic palindrome, but across the waste deep urban landscape her names are pure concrete poetry. Which is not a poetry spoken into open mike at the seedy slam, or recited to a hush of introspective literati. Concrete poetry was everyone’s personal advertising in the heyday of the Velvet Underground. Cut-and-paste edged up the blocks of letters page upon blank page, their tumbledown graphix, their typewriter sprays in the days before personal computers. Newsprint turned a Cubist yellow, juxtaposition looked almost random, the capital letters awry the pride of their compositors. Now the Nicos and Alices draw their signature poetry from the earth below, where all paint is ultimately sourced in its myriad shades: vermilion earth, obsidian earth, sunburst earth, viridian earth, even skyblue earth, rising in wondrous oceanic earth waves over the reinforced blocks that uphold apartments, warehouses, flyover stations and hangars alike. Flourishes optional and noticeably frequent.