This public service announcement once screamed out from the Moreland Road walkway to drivers heading north on Melbourne’s Tullamarine Freeway. Someone sprayed it on the concrete, brutalist-style pedestrian bridge, a link between West Brunswick and West Brunswick, a partition that confounds historians to this day. For sometime it remained before it was painted over, for someone to paint over that.
The message wasn’t an exemplar of guerrilla marketing, or a subconscious earworm intended to get people to test themselves for herpes1. Tegan may have them, perhaps, but the message was someone’s truth and one expressed to an audience. And what bigger audience than the population driving along the Tullamarine Freeway.
In place of Tegan was something forgettable, the mark of the bubble writing graffitist2. Bubble writing is distinguished by the big, inflated-balloon-like linguistic attempts at text3. The ‘bubbler had miscalculated the sum of its parts for it to be effective. Those parts being visibility, time required to bubble, divided by the odds of getting busted. Most it’s the bank of Mum and Dad: those who pay the fine and/or fund the spray can. The bubbler was male, as most are. Those past 20 who still bubble were most likely voted to fail finger painting by the Association of Kindergarten Teachers.
Academics coddle bubblers and their craft as a need for fame and recognition: the human condition in the modern age. But with a forgettable message, what’s the medium of recognition?
If bubblers are prepared to do (what is considered) the crime, do the time. And I don’t mean custodial time. I mean try. Lonny Wood, the godfather and originator, whose ‘softies’ first appeared in NYC in 1972, invented and evolved this style. That Wood is imitated to this day is remarkable. That no variation exists reflects the calamity of the modern bubble writer: a tourist with intent, but no map. Worse still, they eat their own. Bubblers cover up other, often better work. Academics call this ‘competitiveness’. What’s produced is a vacuum: the bubbler sucks up and censors. This influencer-fascists jockey with other nihilists in a hunt for high-visibility wall space and short-acting endorphins. The aim is synthetic but a cure-all for the human condition today: DMs, likes, or followers. Puff me up with adulation. Message is an alien concept, like aesthetics or skill.
Take the ‘Pam’ bird which appeared around Melbourne a few years ago. The smirk on motorists’ faces left when details of the court case uncovered the guy painting them is a creep. Fellow dullard, ‘Pork’ who, for a graffitist, is one hell of an abseiler, bubbled his tag on a chimney near the Westgate Bridge. Pork, halfway up, must have fantasised, this is a supreme act of civil disobedience, a real finger to the man. Unlikely. Chances are he’d be watching his follower count on ‘the_porksta’ (I guess an earlier adopter took ‘thePorksta’). Nost, whose tag resembles a flaccid rectangle, didn’t win any fans when he painted over a 1986 mural in Northcote that celebrated women. Nothing but censorship by paint can—even if Pork or Nost can’t tell which side of a spray can the paint comes out of.
The bubblers are here for the lols, likes, and followers. Whenever I see the Moreland Road overpass, I sigh. Bring back Tegan. At least she had a message.
- (if Tegan can get it!) ↩︎
- UK artist Banksy tried for years to master the bubble. The one-stroke technique, equivalent to Japan’s sumi-e ink painting on rice paper, proved too much and he reverted to stencils. ↩︎
- Often called “throw-ups” or “softies” (irony has fled at the sight of this generation)
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read
Howard, J. 1999. How to read graffiti.
graffiti.org. 2007. Graffiti glossary