Leave Political Graffiti to the Artists: Why Bathroom “Art” Regressed the Occupy Movement

Eugene Lang College is known for its students’ involvement in radical political movements such as Occupy Wall Street.  The way that we present our involvement in such a heavily loaded campaign is crucial to gaining and maintaining student involvement, especially when that involvement has been dwindling recently.  The OWS movement has lost momentum severely in the past year; many people have now lost interest or serious investment in the idea of a bunch of unorganized crazies sitting around in a drum circle in Washington Square Park.  Images in the media such as these really jeopardize OWS and what the core of the movement stands for.

In a similar aspect, I think the way the movement becomes casually present at our school starts to tarnish its credibility as well.  It seems that it is nearly impossible to walk into a bathroom at Lang without being bombarded with politically charged bathroom graffiti.  When you see these messages every day, often haphazardly scrawled on a stall door, containing some kind of profanity or petty argument amongst those who identify with the movement, it becomes less and less serious.  The word “OCCUPY” crossed out and followed by “COCK-UPY”; we see these kinds of things in passing and almost immediately dismiss it as childish dribble reflecting nitpicking students who cannot agree to disagree about their personal political views. Political bathroom graffiti has almost become a novelty at Lang; you come to expect it every time you walk into the Lang building and ultimately laugh it off or, perhaps worse, dismiss the underlying message of that which is being parodied.

On the other hand, there are a slew of graffiti artists who take an educated, stylized approach to political graffiti.  The pieces they create and their placement often presents social symbolism which outdoes petty ballpoint pen arguments above the urinal any day. Street artists like Banksy are skillful and selective of the messages they put investment in, and because of this, they are often successful in achieving whatever message it is that they were trying to get across.

Don’t get me wrong; I am all for graffiti.  It is an art whose form I have admired from a young age. But there has always been a difference between ‘good’ graffiti and ‘bad’ graffiti; between smart, stylized street art and pointless scribbles. And the pointless scribbles have always acted to discredit graffiti purely as vandalism that has no place in our culture. I also understand I’m not at Parsons when I walk into the bathroom and, rather than ‘art,’ I see poorly executed attempts at fighting the power or sticking it to the man. To those who are guilty of this, realize what you’re undermining by spewing this stuff on the walls. There are many of us that want to be a part of the 99%, but are hesitant simply because we are always afraid of who we will be associated with if we act, and many do not want to be associated with juvenile approaches to protest. It’s sad to see something like OWS go to complete waste. Instead of being passively aggressive and confronting someone’s opinion on the bathroom wall, exercise confrontation outside of the bathroom and in the street, in the park, wherever you feel is appropriate to undermine corporate oppression. Squash the “drum-circling hippie burnout” stereotype and make your own history. If you don’t agree with the movement, let the janitors do their job; you can count on them to stamp out the bathroom occupation in a timely fashion.