Constructing Identities with Graffiti

            Depending on who you talk to, graffiti can be a form of vandalism, yet at the same time a piece of art. This blog sees it as a creative form of self-expression and a tool of identity-construction that comes in various forms. Ranging from chalk on the sidewalk to wall murals spanning several stories, graffiti – from the Italian world graffiare, “to scratch” – sometimes evokes authorship in the “tag” of a particular fashion, while other times anonymity.

These notions are expressed in the multitude of graffiti frequently found on the engineering Cairn in a strip of Main Mall at UBC. The iconic monument has been symbolic of UBC’s engineering faculty since the mid-1960s, erected by the Engineering Undergraduate Society (EUS) in 1966 in appreciation of “the humble diversified and continuing contribution to campus life by the engineers”. The six-foot tall white pyramid with an enormous “E” on each side has been an object with a semi-permanent residence, but an enduring legacy of tradition. It has been moved many times around the campus, finally landing in the middle of Main Mall outside many engineering buildings. In the almost fifty years since its birth, the Cairn’s colours have been painted thousands of times by almost every faculty, AMS club, or student housing society. Though, after every defacing – occurring most of the time at night when no one is around – the engineers confidently repaint the Cairn in its white and red, adding layer by layer, year after year.

The defacing and subsequent repainting of the Cairn has been a ritualized experience of many of the students at UBC, with no real legal or social repercussions dealt to the infringers, even when their mark is left. Rodriguez and Clair (1999) sees similar acts of graffiti “frequently reflect[ing] tensions and conflicts among diverse groups”. As a place of diversity – in academic interests as well as ethnicity and race – it is no surprise that graffiti occurs specifically on the Cairn, as the Cairn historically has not been well-received by neither campus government or student society. Furthermore, they posit that “marginalized individuals perform acts that are intended to oppress other marginalized individuals” (1). In this case, each social group carries out these public defacements of the Cairn in inter-faculty competition. It is personified by these graffiti acts and yet the engineers, seemingly unphased, repaint the Cairn again and again.

The ways in which the engineers respond to the defacing of their Cairn is interesting. Even when distinctive residence or faculty marks are left – as seen in the “G” for Geology Cairn – the Engineers do not vandalize their structures; rather, they dutifully repaint the colours and return to business as usual. In this passive resistance to other social bodies, the engineers derive resilience, one they pride themselves on. By repainting the Cairn in their colours, they are reclaiming what is theirs, proving to the student society that engineers are resilient. By doing so, the Cairn functions to all the social units on campus as a temporary poster board for campus identification ad differentiation. Students know that whatever graffiti is painted is only returned back to its original state with virtually zero consequences. With no repercussions and almost no public backlash from the engineering community, it seems that they have embraced the fact that the Cairn is repeatedly painted over. In an almost desired way, the constant restoration encourages and facilitates the public defacement of the Cairn so that on the one hand, social clubs produce temporary representations of self-identification on the campus they belong to while on the other hand, develop the resilient quality the engineers have become to embrace.

            Talking to some engineers, I have received mixed remarks on the dynamics of the Cairn. Though one student thinks it’s funny that many people paint the Cairn in their own faculty colours or other pictures, the student sees that “to disrespect my monument on campus feels like they are disrespecting me and my peers”. Another student says if other faculties had monuments similar to the Cairn, students, maybe even engineers, would deface it as well in enjoyable acts of rivalry and competition. A graduate student in chemical engineering says, “it promotes a good-natured spirit of competition amongst faculties and programs… If you look at the big picture, it’s more about other groups challenging this clique by taking something away, and having the engineers respond by taking it back and reestablishing their engineering pride”.

Thus, in these graffiti acts we have a group of anonymous individuals often painting identifiable markings on the Cairn, with little to no recourse to halt more acts from happening. The dynamics between this anonymity and authorship are mixed together in the act of painting the Cairn, creating a systematically and almost mutually supported channeled output for the betterment of campus life. It seems to me that this is the ideal situation, no?

References

Begnal, Michael H. (1985) Graffiti as Intentional and Patterned Communication. Communication Quarterly 2:155.

The Engineers’ Cairn. (2010). The Engineers’ Cairn. http://heustory.apsc.ubc.ca/wiki/index.php/The_Engineers’_Cairn, accessed February 7^th, 2010.

Rodriguez, Amardo and Robin Patric Clair. (1999). Graffiti as communication: Exploring the discursive tensions of anonymous texts. Southern Communication Journal 65(1):1-15.