WALLS MELANCHOLY WITHIN THE HEART OF A CONFINED SOCIETY

The signs of human conversation can be traced along walls throughout the historical formation of urban civilization and its hierarchal social systems. At the point in history when written script went beyond the transcription of religious prayers and hymns it took on a natural/political form which surpassed its preceding supernatural function. This matter, especially in the tumultuous contemporary history of the Middle East and Iran, has acquired a much more serious form. So much so, that it is possible to identify the historical path of the expressed thoughts of different social classes by tracing their writings on walls.

Although wall inscriptions in Iran have a long history— going back to engravings and epigraphs—this text addresses the composition of slogans and the reflection of present-day political and social issues upon the city walls. City, in its contemporary notion, is an encompassing network with written laws, which serves as a concentration point for populations and a hub for production and accumulation of capital. Governmental laws aimed at controlling and overseeing the populace hold strategic significance for the ruling authorities. In democratic political systems, citizens have the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with one another and to possess some level of power through participation in institutions. However, in non-democratic systems where locals lack the space for free expression, the surfaces of the city become the site of discourse or conflict between supporters and opponents of the established power system. In other words, when the individual lacks freedom of expression in the face of authority they turn to other means, such as graffiti, to assert their presence and simultaneously protect themselves from the inevitable consequences of expressing their beliefs. Thus, thousands or even millions of anonymous people take an activist approach and resort to slogan-writing as a means of speaking out.

If we consider urban inscriptions as a part of the visual, self-initiated, and political language of the people, then we can more clearly pinpoint the cultural position of what is happening on the streets of Iran in comparison to other movements. In the student movement of May 1968 in France, the revolutions in Cuba and Mexico, or the Palestinian and Syrian opposition movements, as well as the Arab Spring, the walls were mainly used for limited and essential images or slogans. The Iranian wall inscriptions, on the other hand, especially in the past forty-five years and after the events of 1978, deal with playful language and display linguistic innovation. Additionally, popular movements in contemporary history, such as the 1954 coup or the Islamic Revolution of 1979, were severely suppressed by the central government, and censorship of the press and other means of communication were intensified. Consequently, walls have become a means of communication and a tool for information dissemination.

With this historical context, in social movements after the 1978 revolution—such as the Green Wave in 2009, as well as the recent social movements in 2017, 2019, 2022, and 2023—the linguistic structure of wall writings in cities, villages, and even roads has acquired a newer cultural and aesthetic identity and has become more noticeable to citizens. One could say that in the past two decades the etymology of words in these writings has entered a new phase. Especially with the cultural background of the Iranian people and their rich, poetic language, wall slogans have always been an insoluble problem for governments, and they have never been able to completely erase the footprints of opposing/supporting or sarcastic citizens. It is worth mentioning that the slogans which still remain from four decades ago serve as another motivation for protestors to leave their marks (fig. 1). It is as if by tagging the wall this person has the opportunity to keep the life of the movement current over time. This desire for immortality can even be found among sentimental arborglyphs or writings related to illegal solicitation of body organs (fig. 2).

After every period of social change, what is most significantly transformed but becomes apparent only in the future is the alteration in language and culture. We usually do not sense changes in linguistic values unless they have a tangible form. These forms, arising from every upheaval, construct a new order that is based on disorder and chaos, and which fits into the larger system of visual culture. The words written on walls are a reproduction of that era’s cultural values. They are fervent and impassioned, conveying the language of a given present moment and the spirit of the writer. Sometimes they are explicit and formal, and refer to the main slogans of the movement (fig. 3); sometimes they are cryptic and literary (fig. 4); and often they carry a satirical and biting meaning (fig. 5), which the writer inscribes on all surfaces of the city, such as kiosks and street signs, government vehicles like ambulances and police cars, or even on the doors of houses, using tools like spray paint, markers, charcoal, and even blood.

Given the constant surveillance by the government, whether through its official and undercover forces or through cameras, writing slogans has always carried risks. That is particularly true during the recent movement, where the government has intensified its methods of pursuit in order to hold citizens accountable to the fullest extent. This becomes clearer when comparing today's wall writings with those of the 1979 revolution. In those years, government officials employed tactics similar to those used today in pursuit of protesters. However, due to limited technological capabilities and manpower, they were less able to quell the situation. By comparing the monumental slogans of up to fifteen meters in length, written in beautiful calligraphy, with the tiny two-centimeter stickers now commonly found on doors or cars, or slogans that only feature a part of the message written on walls (fig. 6), the stark contrast between the two eras becomes apparent. The shortness of the new writing illustrates the writer’s ability to control the amount of time it takes him to produce the work (fig. 7). In contrast, anxiety and fear is obvious in videos taken with personal phones. Often these video images, which are recorded quickly, with shaky framing, become central to the recent movement's news reports, adding an aesthetic dimension, and expressing the anxiety of the protesters.

The content of wall writings reflects a dissenting attitude towards the current situation, and, depending on the location, they may either feature iconic slogans or consist of numerous slogans that are only used for a brief period. One noteworthy observation is that the government makes efforts to counter this form of protest, incorporating the resources at its disposal. Their strict approach to this phenomenon can be summarized in two general ways. If possible, they either arrest the writer, and by punishing them create terror, or they hire city contractors to cover the slogans with paint. The covering of slogans in fig. 8 is itself a forty-year-old slogan and highlights the deep-seated tensions between the government and its people. Within the structure of the Islamic/Revolutionary government of Iran, relevant institutions, such as municipalities and Basij, bombard the walls of cities and villages with their propaganda slogans and images (fig. 9). They even sometimes use wall writings to warn citizens (fig. 10). Therefore, it is not uncommon for citizens to manipulate the writings as well. From this perspective, walls become the grounds of ongoing conflict between the establishment and protesters, and the collision often produces a final and innovative piece that embodies an absurd form. The layers stacked on top of one another, representing different concepts, may seem incomprehensible or vandalistic outside their own temporal context. In this process, a slogan is written and subsequently altered by a censorship officer. For instance, they might ridicule the message by adding cartoonish images, creating a humorous effect (fig. 11). They may also modify the slogan into a meaningless phrase (fig. 12) or they may change it back to a government slogan (fig. 13). This represents a type of participation in the creation of new meanings. During times of social unrest, the walls of the streets are almost entirely covered with colors and shapes. Yet, pedestrians are aware that underneath the thick, low-quality paint used by censorship forces, their own people's slogans can be found. Thus, while the walls may seem only a cacophony of visuals, the hidden messages convey a deeper meaning and offer a means for people to express themselves (fig. 14).

In this struggle there is an attempt to live beyond the world that the government has defined, a sentiment that elevates the sloganeers to a higher status than lawbreaker. That is, the manual labor of presenting these slogans without claiming ownership with a signature, situates the author in the position of an activist. One could argue that liberation begins with such defiant behaviors. Taking control over the walls is an act of opposition and collision with the government. It removes the citizen from a passive state while reflecting the perspectives of various social classes. This act, although devoid of common artistic values, is centered on the epistemic relation between the individual and the object.

Today, streets and walls are no longer the only avenues for expression. Social media platforms enable the dissemination of messages on a larger scale. The government continually disrupts internet access with harsh censorship or imposes blackouts during protests, but hashtags mark the walls, demonstrating the internal physical connection between these writings/walls and cell phone screens (fig. 15). Both are positioned to establish a network among the minds of citizens and to encourage hope in the face of government censorship and intimidation.

I’ve been thinking a whole lot about painting, about how (or if) it still matters in today’s radically changing society. Of course, it probably still does—after all, heavily invested personalities and institutions would never have it otherwise. But hey, you never know how things could so easily fall out of favor these days.

I remember in the mid ‘80s when times felt really slow, when the world felt like it was going to stay the way it had always been since the late ‘60s, when TV was the “new” technology that had been shaping and changing mainstream culture for decades. I’m not sure if it’s because I grew up in a third world country in Manila, Philippines, but for sure art wasn’t that mainstream at all, and painting was a fringe thing, almost irresponsible actually, for one to be doing in a struggling, developing world of post-martial law.

We lived in Quezon City, in the lower middle-class suburb called Cubao (pronounced koo-baow, which I think also means a local species of banana BTW), in a house made out of 19th- and early 20th-century lumber leftovers from the carcasses of ancestral homes in downtown Manila. It was also a small gallery, a studio, and an art framing business as well, in the basement, with a section of it that housed a whole bunch of workers. It was whatever it was for us to sustain ourselves—a bustling residential complex alongside several rows of apartments in a zoning nightmare of a neighborhood. Strangely enough we also lived in the same community as other painters, like Alfredo Liongoren and Romulo Olazo, “former hippies of the ‘70s” who both had the same setup of a gallery/studio/frame shop kind of home.

And then there was some work here and there throughout the day, my siblings and I helping out in whatever we could in my father’s studio. Art was something we just did as a part of our daily lives that wasn’t separate from everything else that we had to do—an odd sort of subculture, nestled awkwardly within the already-odd-enough broader culture of postcolonial Philippines. Painting was the only thing I knew at the time, in an art world that was hardly a market or industry, one that was slow and steady, and sparingly supported by proponents of “high culture.”

Dave Hickey once said that being an artist isn’t something we choose, but more like one that a community/society “elects.” He might have been right, but for me, at the time, it felt like it was a fate harshly imposed upon us whether we liked it or not. Like it was all “elect” and zero “choice.” Modern society teaches us that we are free to choose who we want to be, which is why, for many years, I have tried to fight off and steer clear of this “cultural baggage” we’ve inherited that we’ve sometimes called “identity.” Yet here I am, thrust into the world some thirty-odd years later, different yet the same.

The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

But in my spirit will I dwell, And dream my dream, and hold it true; For tho' my lips may breathe adieu, I cannot think the thing farewell.

On Darwin and Computation

It looks like Las Vegas is roaring again in 2023. It almost feels like forever riding this boom-and-bust cycle since moving here in 2009 when everything was on a seemingly hopeless downslope, then up, and down again. Now the highways are expanding, the Raiders have finally moved into their new stadium, Formula 1 is coming as well with a brandnew Las Vegas Grand Prix four-mile track right on the Strip, and public art in the entire southern region is thriving. Isn’t that what cities are supposed to do anyway? Capitalism shimmying its way to progress?

Something feels different though, as if the attitude of the city in its entirety is radically changing. Las Vegas will always be the casino capital, but pockets of other industries augmenting this enterprise (the film and fashion industry, and other cultural and entertainment venues such as the Smith Center and Meow Wolf in Area 15) have all matured a lot faster in the last decade. Is it because the Internet has given us a better way to steer and take stock of our evolving culture?

Modern technology has definitely played a big role in shaping contemporary “high culture” as that great equalizer of “virtue”—a fusion experiment converging everyone’s opinions into a giant headon collision inside that virtual tokamak we call social media. Things have gone way far beyond anything we could have ever imagined when the first bootleg of Windows came out in the 1990s. All this cultural exchange now happens in real-time blitzkrieg speeds wherein every single bit counts. We’ve barely been given ample time at all to contemplate our situatedness in the world, and in a second it’s gone—all that remains in the aftermath is an average split, a clean yes or no, blue or red, friend or foe in a black-and-white kind of stalemate monoculture. How does painting exist at all with the nuances of grays all washed out in this fast-paced 007 kind of world? Is this new pace for the new generation of artists a good thing or a bad thing: who knows? Maybe we’ll adapt, maybe we’ll settle, we’ll see.

Speaking of social media, in one of those heated debates on Facebook, I remember Dave Hickey saying that Las Vegas was the perfect city for artists to live and work. But he added that the art that we do here, at some point, must come to terms with the Strip and its ominous presence and imposing beauty, as well as its rich history that lies beneath the rubble from decades of architectural and cultural implosions. Yet somewhere in the middle of all that, he also insisted that we have managed to marginalize and neglect beauty and have instead celebrated the institutionalization of mediocrity—that art has merely become a useful sociopolitical propaganda tool to advance ideologies and critical movements. Tempting, isn’t it? But isn’t the Strip itself the epitome of aesthetic mediocrity as well? It’s interesting how worldviews can get so convoluted so easily: to consider, from an artist’s perspective, what Hickey says what artists “must” do from a critic’s point of view. See what that did there? Perhaps it’s really not that important what critics say, but what it does, how it pokes what’s inside of us, to help us look deeply into the essence of what we’re really doing here.

If we see the art world as a hyperobject— agents, objects, dealers, artifacts and everything else you can throw in there—an aggregate of stuff so large that it’s impossible to rationalize the entropy that ensues as we each go about our own business, then it doesn’t make sense at all to question who needs what and what needs whom. If culture is some kind of perpetually selfcorrecting “working memory” that processes the complexity of interrelationships in the world, then maybe everyone’s got a role, or no role at all, maybe everyone gets to pitch in and stir this melting pot of a culture, and whatever works, just works, the rest burns out to help fuel the flames of proclivity.

I forget that painting is a kind of technology as well, though sometimes it may appear more rudimentary/primitive than it really is—hacking and slashing, squishing and scraping, manipulating the paint until you’ve almost accidentally come across what you’re looking for. What might seem like randomness and chance could very well be an elaborate system of spontaneous creativity, wherein “emergence” plays an essential role in reaching beyond “purpose” and “intention.”

Painter Manuel Ocampo says the problem with some artists is that “they cannot escape language … they hold on to it tightly the more they try to let go of it.” How else is one to express that which is unknown (to language) in the same way that poetry and philosophy does, groping its way into the darkest of depths, reaching for what is ultimately forever withdrawn from the limits of human cognition? One thing’s for sure, that the ingenuity and beauty in the artifacts we’ve created throughout human history must be undeniable proof that a much more complex system of “mapping-out” relationships between irreducible ideas exists behind the simplicity of mark-making.

A couple of years back, I was fortunate enough to have been invited by painter Phil King to teach/ mentor in one of the most innovative painting schools in London: Turps Art School, spearheaded by YBA artist Marcus Harvey. One of the things I’ve stressed in their Correspondence Course is that perhaps we ought to think less and do more, and allow our unconscious to just do its thing. In the program, there’s a kind of clarity that’s achieved in discourse from casual conversation about painting, in keeping the “process” open enough that it preserves the irreducible nature of aesthetics from which wisdom emerges, as opposed to traditional instruction. In spite of all our intentions real progress in painting happens on its own; you can only steer so much of it until you realize there’s no choice but to allow the “imagery” to unfold on its own terms.

In the Journal of Researches, Charles Darwin states: “It is not possible for the mind to comprehend, except by a slow process, any effect which is produced by a cause repeated so often that the multiplier itself conveys an idea not more definite than the savage [sic] implies when he points to the hairs of his head.” Thinking about painting in this way reminds me of the algorithmic beauty of cellular automata, and the unprecedented level of complexity that somehow emerges from the very simplest of means. In fact, in one of these systems called Rule 30, physicist Stephen Wolfram believes that the distinct forms that emerge from simple repeating rules on a grid are the keys to understanding how the very same complex structures and behaviors emerge in nature.

Is painting just a thing that we do? A remnant of evolutionary biology, like the bark of a dog, or the chirping of birds? It’s always tempting to rationalize intention into all of these things, like assuming “love” as merely a tool to procreate and propagate, to ensure the evolutionary continuity of a species. Beyond instruction, beyond the intentions of artists, beyond the annals of art history, beyond the honoraries of prestigious institutions and galleries, beyond the rambling whataboutisms of critics, the Saltzes or Smiths of the world, what is it that we’re really trying to convey here in painting, if we’re even conveying anything at all?

For all we know, maybe that’s how we ought to “come to terms” with the Strip and its eternally evolving form—from a railway stopover, to a casino highway, into an F1 racetrack. It’s all the same as art and painting; we accept the changing pace of our evolving contemporary culture that happens right before our very eyes. We adapt, we settle, we procreate and propagate the evolution of our species, whatever it takes to get us to play out whatever or whenever its finality is.

Gig Depio

Las Vegas-based Filipino painter Gig Depio presents the conjunctions of contemporary and historical forces in the form of intense, often large-scale, figurative compositions. He focuses on American culture and its history, on the convergence of American, Philippine, and Spanish histories at the turn of the 20th century, and the inevitable interweaving of many different cultures from then on. A recipient of the 2016 Nevada Arts Council Fellowship Grant in Painting, he has been an exponent for art in Nevada since 2009, and has recently extended his advocacy internationally, including exhibitions with the National Commission for Culture and Arts (NCCA), Manila, Philippines in 2018, and in the 58th Venice Biennale, Giudecca Art District (GAD), Venice, Italy in 2019.