Lots of the graffiti that I photographed all winter has been painted over in the past couple of weeks. At first I thought it was just a spring-cleaning type of thing, now I realize (a friend pointed this out to me) that it's part of an effort by Moscow Mayor Luzhkov to clean up the city in time for all of the foreign dignitaries who will be visiting to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII on May 9th. Luzhkov is acting in the best traditions of Potemkin, of course, but I actually don't mind seeing some of the writing that had become a familiar part of the landscape painted over. There are several reasons for this. One is that painting over graffiti just gives the writers a new, clean canvas to work with. For example, in the picture below, the "444" stencil was applied over a patch of paint that had been used to cover a "Zachem" tag (you can still see it peeking through):
Next door to the headquarters of the "Kultura"TV channel on Malaya Nikitskaya St., Apr 13.Another reason is that it keeps the city's landscape and visual space fresh and dynamic - they can never seem to match the proper background paint color when they go to "abate" graffiti here in Moscow, so you get all sorts of interesting pink patches on yellow buildings and the like. Finally, I can't complain when graffiti is painted over because the ephemerality of it is one of the major reasons why I photograph street art in the first place. All of the above notwithstanding, sometimes I see a wall and hope that it doesn't get painted over, at least not until many more people have had the chance to enjoy it. That's how I felt when I saw this:
On a utility building in the sprawling courtyard/wasteland between Spiridonovka Street and Granatnyi Pereulok, photographed around 7:15pm on April 12.
There was more interesting graf in this area (to be handled in a later post), but none that I liked as much as this one.
Comments? Props to the artist(s)?
Labels: zachem
