Famous Monsters Part 5: Godzilla of Terror

Buford Youthward
stockcap@hotmail.com

Godzilla never asked to be created. The creation of monsters involves grand gestures of the will, not the posturing of science or politics. Imposing wills causes more calamity, more rebellion and zeal than any science or art can fathom. Mad wills take the world hostage.

Massacres of spirit shift with the wind and spread stench as invisible as radar. Moral imperialism disguised as national security, resentment magnified into brutality and barbarism. Take caution not to confuse the notion of representative government with democracy, tactics with results, heaven with hell. Power is an attractive scent. Cults emit power by way of their insularity. Take the wrong turn and belonging begins to blend with meaning.

Waging war against terror is like waging war against walking in order to prevent pedestrians from arriving to point B from point A. Choose your tactics wisely as your means, your strategy, always precedes your perception and destination. Tactics mature and provide identity, often in aggrandizing ways. Then someone shows up and calls it a style.

Granted, sometimes proper grammar gets in the way of a good idea, but the fashion of rhetoric confined to institutionalized press releases and media manipulated sound bytes provides all the cues and clues I need to filter a fraud. Keep in mind, the duty of bureaucracy is double speak.

Organic viewpoints dictate that style is conceived as a living entity, operating outside human agency and ambition, maturing and branching through its internal means. The process of growth is ineffable, internal and static, the variegated manifestation over the course of time of a central, unchanging essence. To search for essence is to explore the binding seamless continuum of things related to a certain context. The Byline's contention has always been that graffiti is the ultimate context.

The autonomy of graffiti is dependent on the promethean efforts of its practitioners to deny its co-option. After all, graffiti is heroic, affirmative and deeply rooted in notions of progress. Take graffiti to task as the process, the tactic that it is. Clowns that traffic in the gestures and techniques of graffiti without the direct experience will always shade the context, but redemption works in weird ways.

The argument that graffiti is art is quite comical. The sphere of commercialism that is necessary for sustenance dictates the creation of commodities and products. Graffiti is not and will never be product, therefore it will never be a form of art. Graffiti is a process. Processes by their very nature are unbridled and transient. The assumption of risk is too great for mere artists to handle. Mad scientists seem more secure with the required skill set.

So beware the demon-willed chaos that clutters airwaves. Yield to sense when it makes sense. And take stock of the greater Godzilla within.

Read more in Byline

Art Crimes Front Page