In the Museum

Parque 3 de Febrero, Palermo

"You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact."

~ Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye

Buenos Aires is a capital city, a city peopled with marble and bronze statues of horse-riding heroes of this or that war, of the independence or the War of Etc.---monuments and art rising out of parks and street roundabouts like a citywide open-air museum.  Some of these (like the giant fountain in front of the Congress building, the various monuments to the city's founding in Parque Lezama) are surrounded by wrought-iron fences.  Whether fenced or not, most of these monuments are scrawled over with half-assed junk tags of graffiti.

Graffiti is omnipresent.  In our first days in Villa Crespo, on the cusp of posh Palermo, we thought we were sunk in the heart of a ghetto, the buildings so thickly graffiti'd at eye level.  But as we explored, we realized that was just the state of the city: a little Fuck You on any decent place you can find.  The first "Spanish Apartment" we found, a shared house south of Villa Crespo, was marred with a black spraypaint scrawl on the side.  The photo on craigslist, however, had shown a clean facade.

I took the above photo on Census Day, the day I began this blog.  I've been planning to write about the graffiti ever since, but my outrage has dimmed.  That day I saw so many hidden statues and grand monuments scarred with pen and etching and spraypaint I thought, WTF?  What is with porteños that they destroy that this beautiful stuff?  Here I am in the sunshine by a beautiful lake, in a beautiful park, with a book and a bottle of wine, and I have to look at a statue so thoroughly tagged that it looks like someone pasted on pages of their high-school yearbook?  Why don't these people do something?  I felt like Caulfield, surrounded by priceless monuments that I wanted to enjoy---a peaceful afternoon in Palermo or Congresso or Lezama---only to have que te jodas written in right under my nose.

Plaza Congresso

Months later, my sentiment is Who Cares.  Every day I pass a dozen Spanish scrawls on the way to the chino.  In the park, political graffiti overlaps political graffiti, the name of last week's candidate showing through the whitewash.  Despite the fence, somebody still crawled into the fountain on the La Boca end of Lezama to write whatever junk.  There isn't a single step of the park's amphitheater without graffiti.  After a month or two, as my outrage subdued, I wondered if the graffiti were an extension of the red-faced, a la gente democracy practiced here (people who have so recently had their democracy stripped of them seem to treasure it more)---so much of the tags I see, especially bigger ones, have political overtones.  But just as many are acid-trip murals of green-titted robots eating the tails of impossibly fat, fedora-wearing goldfish.  A few are impressive.  The big cartoon Jesus on the way to Microcentro is pretty good.  As are the elaborate names in the little playground on Avenida San Juan.  Most are garbage.

San Telmo mural

But, like a continual ringing sound or a bad smell that won't leave, the graffiti is so prevalent it's hardly noticed now.  I don't have illusions about its purpose---it isn't the democratic voice of the people, made flesh.  The graffiti exists for the same reason the veterans' hand-painted banners are tolerated in the shadow of the President's office and the cartoneros camp under the trees of Plaza Congresso.  The fact is that Argentina isn't a rich country, and Buenos Aires is not a rich city.  When two dozen homeless men are sleeping in front of the national Congress because the only job they can find is scavenging recyclables, who cares about a little graffiti?  If the government had money, maybe they could institute public works, pay the jobless to clean up the city.  Until then, the tags are here to stay.