[Reader-list] Graffiti and the Protests in Iran

[Paul D. Miller]

interesting blog post

http://markbattypublisher.com/news/graffiti-and-the-protests-in-iran/

images are kinda cool.
Paul

Lady JusticeJustice, so well personified by the blindfolded lady bearing scales and a sword, has always been the negotiation of balance shot through with violence. Most times, though, violence labeled as ‘just’ is not dealt out blindly; the blindfold that Lady Justice wears is more a pleasant fiction than a comforting reality and her scale is not perfectly balanced—the heavy debt of some acts is repaid with the equivalent of pennies, while minor offenses receive punishments that far exceed them. And what is considered a proper punishment, in terms of scale and sword, varies from culture to culture, each of which puts forth a particular rubric to articulate what it deems as just. It is this that Iranian street artist A1one captures with stencils and stickers of a Lady Justice who, with unobstructed vision, carries scales and, in place of a sword, a rocket propelled grenade, achieving a strangely fitting depiction of the contemporary relation of might and right. 

 

ProtestThe electoral mess that is sweeping across Iran, though, rips debates about justice and its implementation from academic discussion and throws them, roughly, into ragged streets, where they are contested as much with placards, batons, and stones as with pleasant words exchanged over coffee and books. Images of riot police clubbing women, videos of waves of protesters swelling through the streets, and pronouncements from officials all underscore the concrete nature of how justice’s rules are established. And with the clamp-down of the Iranian authorities on communications and the internet—satellite signals were cut back, SMS text messaging stopped, internet throughput reduced, and sites like Facebook shutdown—the hoary and effective means of disseminating messages by scrawling them on walls re-achieves prominence. 

 

GraffitoArtists like A1one, some of whose work MBP has featured in Urban Iran, have papered and inked the streets, giving expression to the frustration and dissent of a pulsing mass citizens who feel themselves to have been duped or worse. And their artwork is something a bit more direct than the canned television segments seeking to put a tempest into a teapot. By looking to their imagery, you get a rawer, more visceral glimpse of what is at stake in the conflict, since it takes a closer familiarity to follow graffiti’s sarcasm to its point than to catch which side of a dispute the producers of a television segment are editorializing for. Graffiti’s intricate strangeness invites investigation, and this is a good thing: the political programs of Ahmedinejad  and Mousavi, their actual policy goals and how they relate to Iran’s governmental apparatus, become relevant, and ‘getting’ the situation requires a fuller interpretation than is possible through the consumption of television’s exploitive, flat tropes.

 

YellAs Iran skips barefoot along the knife-edge between chaotic riots and authoritarian crackdown, and justice’s problematic knot of violence and retribution starts to come undone, one of the clearer glimpses an outsider may get is by looking at the writing on the wall.

–JCD