A wall is, above all, a linguistic sign, a sort of unspoken word. Mute. Voiceless. A petrified gesture that repeats the same thing over and over: stop, no entry, no exit. In this sense, a wall may well be the primordial form of prohibition and negation, a mute «no» which is louder than any «no» produced by other means. But what happens if on our wall as sign there suddenly appear other signs, which then ramity and proliferate until they cover all of the sur-face, stretching from one side to another, top to bot-tom? What happens then? Nothing. The wall re-mains; that «no» hasn’t been demolished; the negation has not, in its turn, been negated. Yet something has changed: the intrinsic value of the sign has altered, depreciated, degraded. For though the simple fact of having been used as innocuous backdrop for other signs has not abolished the wall’s nude power of interdiction, it has, however, ridiculed that power.
Dirtied, scratched-over, violated? Or decorated, adorned and cosmetified? In the graffiti-gesture these opposed functions and intentions mix, inter-twine, superimpose one another, mingle and unite.
So the paintings on the Berlin Wall were also a cosmetic operation similar to that regularly carried out by prisoners on their cell walls. Only it wasn’t the prisoners who prettied-up the Berlin Wall: it was done by other men, those who were outside and free.
In their motives and styles we glimpse a not-so-very strange combination of ingenuity and astuteness. Surrealism and Dadaism, expressionism and pop-art, comic books and transavant-garde, even caricature and graphic art.
Even fleeting traces and imprints are expressive, and the graffiti, viewed as a whole, seem the product of very mixed feelings, in which there throbs a secret, perhaps unconscious will to oblivion.
This yearning for oblivion, collectively and perhaps unwittingly expressed, has finally been achieved. In fact, the Wall fell, and with it the graffiti that had so intricately and completely covered it.
What remains? Memory. Some fragments gathered up by anonymous souvenir-hunters. And these color photographs: images which, for obvious reasons, should raise our spirits.
For we hold and believe that everything so long denied and repressed on the other side of the Wall