Graffiti as deictic practice : the poetics of engagement, appropriation and intervention in Sydney's inner suburbs

This paper outlines a conceptual framework that was developed to negotiate and interpret the differentiated traces of illicit graffiti practices. It is a key component in a larger body of research which attempts to frame and decipher tensions and dialogues in the visual landscape of the graffiti writer and urban artist, and gain insights into the relationship between place and practice. It is a model that is responsive to variation in communication, representation and practice, and aims to contribute to a multimodal way of analysing cultural practices. This paper draws on data and readings from my own visual, reflexive and empirical encounters with a range of interior, exterior and subterranean graffiti sites. Drawing from linguist Karl Bühler's (1990) 'organon' model of language, this framework underscores and nuances the symbolic value of communication with Bühler's situated 'I here now' concept of the deictic field. It further draws on Hanks (2005) studies in the field of social deixis and emphasis on the embeddedness of socio-cultural phenomena. Moreover, it extends on Chmielewska's (2007) application of Bühler's theory to realise a 'topo-sensitive' analysis of signature graffiti messages in-situ. Chmielewska's multimodal approach allows for a broader communication model, one that accommodates differences in linguistic, discursive, expressive, iconographic and figurative modes of graffiti practice. This model embraces the complex nature of graffiti practice in which, it is argued, there is an 'aesthetic' and a 'grammar'. It rests on the assumption that the materiality of practice is a situated experience; where meanings and identities are constructed and embedded in context. Framing graffiti as inscription and re-inscription implicates the interconnectedness of the material surface (as palimpsest) and visual culture. As such, it also connects the practice to a temporality, materiality and interiority that precedes and intertwines with the conceptual, ideological and corporeal space a graffitist is performing in and drawing on.