Graffiti

A new magazine appeared on the scene recently here in SmogTown: spacing, a magazine specifically about public space (www.spacing.ca) and all things related. A chum of mine, noting that the deadline for submissions for the October issue was approaching, and that the issue's theme was public art, figured we could get something in there. Her suggestion: compare and contrast public bathroom graffiti as it appears in men's rooms versus women's rooms. Brilliant, I thought, remembering the bathroom scrawls from university days, plentiful, political, interesting. We set out last Thursday night on our `can-crawl', digital camera in hand.

Eglinton Station, rumour had it, had some wonderful stuff. This was our first stop, and what turned into the first of many disappointments. While there were some phrases scratched into the paint, they were faint, uninteresting, and not nearly photogenic enough. We decided to head to the Ghetto, but didn't even see faint scratchings, just unblemished paint. Perhaps preparations for Pride Week had included a thorough repainting?

Still a little flabbergasted at our bad luck, we headed to one of our ringer locations, The Bus Station. If nowhere else, you'd think the bus station must have some excellent graffiti, no? No. The main restrooms were closed, and the backup restrooms were unexpectedly free from any vandalism. The spinny feeling we had were our assumptions about bathroom walls being pulled out from under us; or, the humidex advisory. We weren't even going to get to the fun of comparing and contrasting, since bathroom graffiti seemed to have gone the way of shoulder pads and legwarmers.

Our faith in humanity started to get shakey. Were folks no longer rebellious enough to sully bathroom walls? Did people just simply not care anymore? Was the activity so cliche that folks were bored of it? Had the Internet become our bathroom wall? Or, was our university an anomoly, a graffiti-filled exception that proved the uncluttered bathroom wall rule?

I chose to believe that industrial cleaning-fluid technology had advanced to such a degree that removing permanent marker had become as easy as cleaning zit-innards off mirrors.

We finally started to find some along Queen Street. Relief! Although the quality was a little short of what we had hoped, simply finding some wall-etchings restored our faith in humanity. A chance encounter with a bathroom patron revealed some good leads: the club district was filled with catty and interesting stuff, as well as Sneaky Dee's. While visiting the club district was out, we had planned on stopping at Sneaks, and were relieved that we had some third-party confirmation.

We got most of our best stuff at Sneaks, with a couple of beauts found along Bloor. The bathroom stall picture at the start of the post came from there, as well as this one:



The best of the bunch was discovered at the Green Room. The intensity and minimalism give it an emotion we didn't find in the others:


After four and half hours of walking and shooting, we were happy with our treasures, and thoroughly exhausted. We are still in the midst of preparing our submission. Fingers crossed we get in!