Stencil Tagger

You know, I’ve happenstanced upon a few subversive activities in my 9 Victoria years: squeaky license plates being stolen from a looted car; a needled woman fishing for veins in the neck of a man on the steps of a church; a fist in the shocked face of a cop from a masked woman that freed a silly arrest; and I’ve even opened the door of the Y’s steam room to witness some fellow getting his noogies nibbled. But never, not-even-once, have I stumbled upon somebody scribbling a tag. A tag: you know, all those billions of omnipresent signatures that are everywhere. Not even once...

Tag over Time

My explorations of tags were greatly influenced by the birth of my son. Just like many other new Papas I grew a new limb called a camera. There I was trying to catch every minuscule shift of facial expression on my fresh little babe on every stroller ride. Eventually, somewhere on the hundredth ride, I started taking pictures of other interesting things like telephone polls, wet road rainbows of spilt gas, and tags.

And if you haven’t noticed- tags are absolutely everywhere!

Boom Fame!

Yet I have never formally met a tagger. Regardless, the hundreds of photos I’ve taken have helped me form some beliefs of the tag world. For example, I think there must be an unwritten and unspoken attempt to constantly create and increase one’s status as a tagger. Here’s a few ways how:

Quality of tag- originality and variety are important (I’ve witnessed tags evolve)

Quantity- the more tags the better, to a point of almost ridiculousness

Quirky- the odd places score high

Height and Visibility: tag while hanging off a roof to achieve fame

Travelling tags: moving vans, semi-trucks

Sper Eats

Now I’m sure most hip cats know the difference between graffiti art and tags. Graffiti is using the urban landscape as a canvas. Tagging is using it as a scribbler. Some people do both. Years prior to my ‘tag-eyes’ opening I had truly awoken to graffiti soon after my personal political revolution. I clearly recall the moment in 1999 as Shelbourne Street and much of downtown was adorned with a blazing yellow and black sign telling the eyes to “Disobey.”

UFO or BBQ?

It came with a strange black image that looked like a UFO or BBQ or something. Stencil cut, spray painted on newspaper and glued up with flour and water. Beautiful! Since then this UFO image began showing up all over the place- on telephone poles, walls, scraped in concrete. It had molted and transformed in each instance to include strange chicken feet, antennas and sometimes painted in red and black. But that is another story...

Back to tagging: Perhaps tagging is actually a bizarre expression of a biological need. Like the wolf that squirts his boundaries.

Who are you?

Like the Andy Warhol hole of fame we long to fill. Like my grade 6 scribblers, scarred millimetre by millimetre with incessant “Keith Moen was here”, “Keith Moen was here” - on and on. As humans a small or larger part of us just wants to be seen and heard. We clamour for moments of permanence in an impermanent world. We long to stand out and away as a unique signature upon the planet- don’t we?

Click to see all

I wondered- who are they, these people behind the scrawls? Who is the mystical melancholia; Jet the irritating; the stencils of Gerp and muse; Opie the destructive; BOOM the anarchist, HHHAHA (are you laughing at us or with us?); the quirky nose of pinoke; the bleeding art of mules; postone the square; the political strike; the ever-present enter; or the beautiful yet disturbing new scrawl on the wall: konqr? And those are just some of the tags I can read.

Vic High 1951 Graffiti

It doesn’t take a criminology degree to realize that all “crime” contains a political component. Scrawling on the wall is as old as humans. Political tagging is well documented throughout history as a critical people’s medium of addressing wrongs. It crosses most cultures around the globe. I get tingly when I come across a poignant political message. But tags are signatures. So are they political or selfish? Perhaps tagging is ego-masturbation! Or are tags meant to mess up and mirror the dysfunctional structure of a messed up world?

Loosers?

Just look at what gets tagged: concrete, abandoned buildings, fences and more concrete- all symbols of separation from one another, disconnect from nature, and decay. If tags aim to stick a wrench in the destructive machine, I’m in. But does “ME, ME, ME” achieve that?

That answer, I may never know. For I am sure that tagging is unique to each tagger. And, of course, every viewer will have a different opinion of the scrawls. I learnt about tags by seeing them instead of looking at them. I concluded that most tags suck, but some are brilliant.

Community Reclaim

In fact I believe that some tags are art. But isn’t that the nature of all art: what we see is a reflection of our selves?

Regardless of why a person plants a tag, I've witnessed a secondary phenomena grow.

Tag, the author is it

Often repeatedly tagged areas, usually brick or concrete walls, become reclaimed by the community with a mural of art. This is done because when art is on a wall it will remain honoured and untagged for years. Perhaps that’s it! The hidden beauty of tags is that they are seeds of art!