The bathroom walls host an overwhelming information network. The room is crowded with various graffitied messages. This bathroom is an anomaly in that it provokes serious consideration. At most places, the graffiti is reckless, rebellious, consuming, misinformed, and lacks any structure or planning. Here, it is a conflicting database of pertinent and manuscripted information. It necessitates readership in ways that other bathrooms don’t.
It is not necessarily that the Old Miami’s graffiti undergoes a preliminary planning process, for that would defeat its nature anyways. Rather, its uniqueness resides in its ability to manifest within unintentional formal constraints, and with the appearance of authority. One begins trusting the validity and structure of what would otherwise be considered anarchy. There are procedures which one presumes one is supposed to follow. Standing at the urinal, the phrases advise your movement and action: “Flush the toilet,” is scribbled in bright red marker. Interestingly, one assumes that this is the preferred movement, the way in which the following actions must be coordinated….The zipper is pulled up, and the hand moves quickly to the handle. Suddenly the hand stops, as the patron reads the message which follows. It denotes with the urgency of a series of exclamation marks, that the toilets should not be flushed.
The messages have become horribly conflicting, despite their formal nature.
Admittance/Denial/Refutation
Significance/Insignificance/
Scribbling/Coloring/Blocking Out/Deletion
These are the procedures and the opposing procedures that a patron must consider. And, it is in this consideration, that the bathroom of the Old Miami exists as an anomaly. It is in the willingness that patrons have of participating with the graffiti that it becomes something else. Here, control is coordinated by means of falsified anarchy. That in itself is the contradiction, and thus the conflict.
If I call 455-5678 will Mike answer? I wonder if he really, “enjoys sucking big dick?” I should flush the toilet, and shouldn’t at the same time. The only thing that is really clear is that I should just, “FUCK OFF.” For now, I’m searching for the response to that.
How is it that what was both rebellious and politically motivated between 66′ and 71′ has become a semi-structured information network voicing authority? Authoritative information takes the form of that which once could have been considered rebellious. The messages are now in direct conflict to this system of informal gesture. The contradiction lies in the way in which form has come to dominate the informal. These are the same messages which derive from Roman political contexts, from ancient and decaying walls…
Yet, the Old Miami graffiti refuses this association.
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