Eater

 

Seminar on Street Art 8: Eater. Graffiti eaters need to get food on the table, like everyone else, their hours are long, their locations change daily. Luckily, they have a constant source of work. The paint drippers far outstrip the paint strippers, numerically, outwitting all manner of detection. There will always be a livelihood for graffiti eaters while muralists persist and badgers insist. Some say it’s a toxic culture for graffiti eaters, the air laden with leaden fumes, their skin exposed to the constant tinge of poison. Their company motto, though, is a serious commitment, almost a commandment: you want it off, we’ll get it off - the graffiti eaters. They will not desist. They bear down on luckless wall scrawl. They turn flowery daytime expression back into a nighttime of uniform grey, starless and reliably blank. Secrets, coded but out in the open for all to share, return to the unknown, unspoken. Retail outlets breathe a sigh of gratitude, assured that only their name defines the streetscape and fills the skyline. Shopping centres feel clean again, free of the linguistic detritus that dirties their outward esteem. Banks can count on keeping up appearances, no more sloppy consonants spoiling the view, lowering the tone and the rigorous property values. Councils may boast of tidy minds in a tidy town, rid of the vulgar splurges overwhelming other less attentive neighbourhoods. Owners protect their assets from the desperate signs of the dispossessed, at least for the time being. Graffiti eaters promise that whatever the surface, brickwork with rising damp, concrete with accretions, timber with root rot, their devouring techniques should leave no trace of the event ever happening. Ever. Which raises the matter, what is the event? Is it not true to say that for every textual mural event there is an immemorial removal event? For each personal autograph event left overnight for daylight sightseers, there is an equal and opposite autograph erasure event performed in daylight, leaving the innocent surface once more stark staring bible black, again? Which, in turn, raises the question, what is ever? Graffiti eaters assure their clientele that their work deters the artists from ever returning to that favoured location again. An assurance that may be music to the owners’ ears and money in the till for graffiti eaters, but as likely to be the making of a clean canvas for the Rothkos of the outdoor vowel, the poets of never say never. O where will it all end, as one event leads to another event leads to another, down to the last syllable of recorded time, along warehouse frontages rife in new estates, down under bridges where the Merri river flows by, almost everywhere. Making a meal of it.