Autograph

 

Seminar on Street Art 9: Autograph. All the very best! [Signed] Indecipherable Hieroglyphic. Such are the squiggles inside childhood autograph books. Autographs were the proof you were in the presence of greatness. They were your brush with immortality. They were the sign that such greatness existed. Only time and maturity changed the meaning of the ballpoint loops and dashes of Indecipherable Hieroglyphic. What a guy! That highflying footballer eventually retired to run the pub in his home town. That TV celebrity survives in their funny stock phrase, all in the moment, all in the timing. She was a trick! That opinionated politician visiting your school was voted out: autographs come to commemorate landslides. Autographs of your schoolfriends take on other, more personal meanings. The earnest copperplate denotes a focussed mind. The autograph with final fantastic flourishes wishes to entertain. The business-like lettering of honest endeavour vies with the jagged stuttering of could do better. Where are they now? Now you have only their names. Autographs clearer than their schoolyard faces in your memory. Time to turn the page. These signs of connection, fleeting as may be, are the beginning of a lifetime’s notice. Forms, you sign them with Date, Name, and then quizzically, Signature. As if your autograph were expected to be a different design, by nature and norm, to your Name filled out in full. That the two would be identically written is unlikely, in a society like yours. Your name must be clear and rigid as Times New Roman; your signature may be all over the place. You’ve always signed it that way. Only connect. This expectation of uniqueness motivates behaviour, from approval of deals to last wills and testaments, and signed first editions. And translates with ease to street autographs, seven-feet high embellishments emphatically self-assertive, and utterly unique in their own terms. They gleam in the sun, even after the paint’s dried. X, but then some. Your average street artist has, first and last, their name, an autograph practised over and over, in-your-face or inscrutable, being for the benefit of Mr Site, a landmark that must be theirs, if only for one day. Autographing the city, they lay claim to its identity, set out their pathways through the maze, strike a deal. Not that this autograph matches their real-life Name. It is a signature ‘innominato’, unnamed ones who inscribe their glorious autograph upon the walls for reasons known best to themselves. Reasons, innumerable as the ways of fortune that they must respond to. ‘Innominata’, perchance?  Almost certainly. All the very best! [Signed] Indecipherable Hieroglyphic.