Is It Graffiti or Is It Art?
Student Perspective/ Public Art

By Frank "Bennett" Sims '08

POMONA COLLEGE HAS BEEN, TO PUT IT IN THE LEAST ALARMING WAY, INVADED BY FACES. George W. Bush, Hermann Munster, Iggy Pop, et al.—the faces of pop culture
icons have been carefully stenciled and spray-painted in and around art buildings, on bathroom floors and onto Walker Wall. While being leered at by Munster on one’s way to class may be slightly uncomfortable, the phenomenon is, for the most part, innocuous. The only face that really gives pause is Iggy’s. On the outside of Walker Wall, the seminal punk rocker’s face hovers just below the caption, “You people make me sick.”

The particular image used for the stencil (the album cover, actually, of 1992’s Lust For Life) is of a boyishly grinning Iggy—not of the strung-out-and-aboutto-vomit Iggy who uttered these same words moments before showering his audience with bile at a Stooges concert in 1971. So the ironic juxtaposition of “boyish grin” with “You people make me sick” is worth a chuckle, true. But who are “you people”? “We people” don’t make Munster sick, so why Iggy?


That, presumably, depends on the question of authorship: Was a feverish, mono-positive Pomona student made physically ill by peers? Or a Claremont McKenna student revolted by Pomona culture? Or a local community member revolted by the 5-Cs in general? What’s
this all about, anyway?

Since he noticed it two years ago, Ronald Nemo, the College’s horticulturalist and assistant supervisor of grounds, has assumed that Iggy was the work of a Pomona student. While local community members do occasionally spray-paint gang insignias and other graffiti on Walker Wall in the summers, the work is typically of a cruder sort than the neatly stenciled Iggy.
And, besides, the students in charge of giving Walker Wall—where students are allowed to paint club announcements, public art and general wackiness—a new coat of whitewash at the end of each year have chosen, so far, to let Iggy be. This, combined with the facts that (a) Campus Life has never told Nemo to paint over it and (b) Nemo actually finds the face/slogan kind of cool, has spared Iggy from the groundskeepers’ “graffiti treatment,” in which SOP is to paint over ASAP.

But how do groundskeepers distinguish between “graffiti” and “public art”? According to Nemo, whenever they notice anything (1) that could deface property, (2) that employs vulgar language, or (3) that’s clearly nonstudent-originated (e.g., the insignias spray-painted onto Walker Wall in the summers), they treat it as “graffiti.” Number (1) is a pretty capacious category. For instance, Mufti burgers, those Riddler-esque stickers that allude to campus politics via puns and quadruple entendres, are considered “borderline” because of how potentially damaging their glue is to paint and plaster. They can stay up for a day, just to get the message across, but no longer. Likewise, a recent graduate’s Saussurean art project
in the spring of 2005, which involved placing dozens of small “Sign” stickers on everything from stop signs to bathroom signs, was “overwhelming” for the groundskeepers, who did their best to remove the potentially damaging stickers. Still, (2) and (3) are clear enough, and, feeding Iggy through Nemo’s criteria, one can at least determine that he isn’t “graffiti”—that is, he isn’t ruining property or offending anyone, and it’s likely enough that he’s a Pomona student’s artwork.

The Mufti burgers and “Sign” stickers seem to be walking a nominal balance beam, though. Are they “graffiti” or “public art”? And what’s the difference?

Frances Pohl, a Pomona College art historian whose job it is to think about just these sorts of questions, hadn’t taken serious note of the faces before they were brought to her attention. “They’re so subtle and inoffensive,” she said, from behind an authoritative and thoroughly intimidating pile of books and papers on her desk, “that I didn’t actually notice them as anything particularly meaningful
… Art students are always putting little things up.” These “little things”—i.e. the public art projects that are a strong presence on Pomona’s campus—comprise murals, spray-paintings, sculptures and even installation pieces in bathrooms. Apropos the bathroom installations, Pohl qualified, “But (this) was part of a class project, and (the students) let people know they were doing this, or they did it in such a way that no one was outraged or offended, and then they went and cleaned it up.”

These measures distinguish these particular art students from Mufti, whose damaging glue has frustrated Pomona staff since at least the 1960s, when a College dean offered to post the messages himself to prevent further harm, and from the “Sign” project, whose author failed to let people (viz. the groundskeepers) know about his plans ahead of time.

The distinction being made isn’t an aesthetic one, then, but one of responsibility. “Where’s the aesthetic difference between an Iggy Pop face and a ‘graffiti’ tag?” Pohl asks. “(The) thing about people doing actions in public spaces—it’s a question of, ‘What is the effect on the physical space itself and the people who move through it?’”

The fact that Iggy is on Walker Wall, a designated safe-space for Pomona student artwork, signals a kind of “letting people know”—one expects works like him around there. And he doesn’t seem to be outraging or offending anyone, except insofar as a student’s unease at making him sick might be called “outrage.”

What’s more, it will be Pomona students  who whitewash the wall and paint over him, if that ever happens, so they are, in a manner, assuming the responsibility of “cleaning him up.” Bearing this in mind, one can say that Iggy fulfills Pohl’s three criteria. “Graffiti” or not, Iggy, like the statues, frescoes and murals that grace Pomona’s campus, constitutes a reasonably responsible piece of “public art.” But is it a “good” one?

“The good thing about (public art),” Pohl suggests, “is that it makes us aware of the public spaces that we move through.” That’s a gold star for Iggy, then—he does, after all, make Pomona students daily aware of the fact that their public space sickens him.