Monumental Graffiti – Rafael Schacter

What graffiti says about contemporary society, and why it demands our urgent attention as a form of civic expression. What is graffiti – vandalism, ornament, art? What if, rather than any of those things, we thought of graffiti as a monument? How would that change our understanding of graffiti, and, in turn, our understanding of monument? In Monumental Graffiti, curator and anthropologist Rafael Schacter focuses on the material, communicative, and contextual aspects of these two forms of material culture to provide a timely perspective on public art, citizenship, and the city today. He applies monument as a lens to understand graffiti and graffiti as a lens to comprehend monument, challenging us to consider what the appropriate monument for our contemporary world could be.

Monumental Graffiti unpacks today’s iconoclastic moment, showing us why graffiti demands our urgent attention as a form of expression that challenges power structures by questioning whose voices are included in – and whose are excluded from – public space. Written from twenty years of embedded research on graffiti, the book includes works from graffiti writers such as 10FOOT, DELTA, EGS, TOX, HONET, REMIO, MOSA, PETRO, REVOK, WOMBAT, ESCIF, FATSO, BLU, alongside those of artists such as Adam Kraft, Francis Alÿs, Olivier Kosta-Théfaine, Jeremy Deller, Thomas Hirschhorn, Stephen Burke, Brad Downey, Jenny Holzer, Duncan Weston, Wermke/Leinkauf, Klara Liden, Katharina Grosse, Do Ho Suh, Gordon Matta-Clark, William Pope.L, Evan Roth, Cy Twombly, and many more.

386 pages, 19 cm x 24 cm, hardcover with dust jacket
Language: English
Release date: October 2024
ISBN: ‎ 978-0-262-04922-1
Publisher: The MIT Press