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Page 1 of 2 Considering the storied history of graffiti, it’s important to consider what the lack of artistic bathroom vandalism on a university campus means for our intellectual health.
Steeped in tradition as ancient as the Egyptians, graffiti has long served those who form - if not the marginalized of a society - then at least those who lie somewhat at the periphery of what we consider mainstream, institutionally-sanctioned culture. In current times, that category perhaps includes the majority of us, yet it seems only those who recognize and embrace their status as outsiders take part in any acts of artistic vandalism. The bathroom stall, however, forms the happy exception. The spaces in which the masses now find themselves somewhat sanctioned in expressing themselves (socially, if not legally), are the walls of the public bathroom stall. This is the realm of the truly democratic, a place where discourses normally confined to diaries and private conversations surface in the public sphere. In the bathroom stall, the highest and lowest forms of culture and literature intersect: declarations of digestive and sexual prowess, among other vulgarities, appear side by side with poetry, witticisms, famous quotes, and political statements. The result is an undeniably cathartic (in every sense of the word) cesspool of language. But at Jacobs, we are confronted with bathroom stalls that remain, for the most part, pristine, astoundingly blank. The bathrooms smell like any other place of elimination, but contain none of the linguistic markers of this fact. This comprises an anomaly I find especially disturbing in a university setting, a place in which I always envisioned propriety as subservient to expression. Could it be that the students here consider such small acts of vandalism morally objectionable? I admit I have a difficult time seriously believing that highly educated people retain a respect for laws that do largely nothing to uphold social order. Indeed, in former times, there were far fewer stigmas concerning writing on the walls. Pompeii, one of the best preserved spaces from Roman antiquity, contained hundreds of messages on the walls, their subject matter not at all different from what is of interest to the average bathroom-visitor today. According to Professor J.C. Fant at the University of Akron, written on the north wall of the Basilica in Pompeii is the following inscription: “I could caress Venus’s ribs with a stick, and whip her buttocks with a switch: she pierced my heart, and I would gladly break her head with a cudgel!” The Romans were not historically unique; the societies of the middle ages and early modern times also seem to have possessed incredibly tolerant attitudes towards what we now consider graffiti. Juliet Fleming even claims in her work Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England that “early modern English contains no term to denote graffiti writing – a fact suggesting not so much that the vice was unknown, but that the activity was not distinguished from other writing practices, and not yet considered a vice.” The past thus reveals that we can view the milder forms of graffiti – for example, scribbles on bathroom stalls – not as desecrations, but as evidence of vibrant community life. The mystery of blankness at Jacobs, then, remains unsolved. But instead of accusations, I offer a series of questions, for they are nearly always more illuminating. Could it be that we have nothing to say, that we are either silently content or unable to articulate what we wish to express? Or could it be that the students at Jacobs, while perhaps critical and articulate, feel as if they are not up to the task of expressing something worthy of a bathroom wall? Could it be that, crushed beneath the weight of readers and lab reports, Jacobians have no time for self expression? Are we too inhibited to thrust our private lives into the public sphere? Or, are we all waiting for someone, anyone, to make the first move? Personally, I think it’s the latter.
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