ABSTRACT
Sixty years ago, in Britain, my Father, like many others living in the country, competed in growing the biggest marrow. Naughty children would sometimes surreptitiously carve their initials, or a rude word, on the immature vegetable, and watch it all grow. We would also carve our names on our school desks, on the bark of trees, or on the soft sandstone surface of rocky outcrops. Waiting at the bus stop after school we would bore cupule-shaped holes in the sandstone wall with the large penny coins of the day. (In those days, ‘Penny please’ secured you a bus ride, and a ticket punched melodiously by a wonderful silver box worn on the conductor’s leather belt.) In public toilets we would wonder at the explicit messages and the crude anatomical drawings on the walls, some seemingly reminiscent of the ‘vulva’ symbols in rock shelters imputed, together with ancient cupule patterns, by archaeologists to fertility rites or other religious rituals. So were these really vulval representations, or are we nowadays seriously missing the point, if they represented in fact something quite different, and we are simply seeing what we might nowadays expect to see on walls in public places? And if they really were crude vulval images, does that merely make them graffiti, maybe juvenilia by immature and hormonally challenged Palaeolithic adolescents? Can graffiti be considered in the context of art, any more than a ‘Kilroy was here’ message, or modern defacing ‘tags’ scrawled on buildings and signage?
