Object Writing: Materiality and/on Streetscapes in Contemporary Germany

(or Corporeality?)

optional quote for flair 

“In good writing, words become one with things.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

beginning:

On the walls of Berlin’s Hackesche Höfe—a famous street art locale—four brightly colored dots stake out visual claim in the city’s notoriously contested alleyway, epitomizing the ephemeral ecosystem of walls and artistic and political statements that appear and disappear on them. At first glance, the dots resemble a thicker version of a vinyl record-sized disc and might seem rather basic in terms of artistic content. And yet, the familiar color scheme of blue, magenta, yellow, and black embody the universal CMYK color model in most computer printers. Positioned on the side of an alleyway wall, they not only intervene into the surrounding street art textures, which very much scrape the surface of the wall, plaster it, or emerge from it as opposed to the more conventional form of graffiti writing/spraying onto it; instead, the CMYK dots also trouble notions of writing as such. By invoking the universal grammar of computer printing, CMYK dots bridge streetscape with everyday computational life in the Twenty-first Century. This intersection between ephemeral street object to ubiquitous communication reality—printing—uncovers a dynamic set of questions that intervene into the discourses surrounding writing, reading, viewing, and contemporary experience as a whole. How do objects and urban surface textures reframe discourses surrounding writing? To what extent do streetscapes rewrite notions of writing places and spaces? How can we position street art with conventional graffiti writing? Can surface materialities and material interactions with surface inject an alternative framework of visuality, writing, and reading? Turning a refined eye to street art like the CMYK dots, which appear in Berlin and other places around the world, this chapter examines the writerly role of objects and the texturing of surfaces in contemporary German street art.