At last week’s editorial meeting, we were discussing Jonah
Spangenthal-Lee’s graffiti feature (see HERE), and the arts staff
couldn’t stop interjecting comments about a short film that came out
five years ago. Pretty memorable for a 15-minute experimental
documentary.
In 2001, Portland filmmaker Matt McCormick made The Subconscious
Art of Graffiti Removal, a point-blank genius short that screened
at Sundance the following year (available on the compilation pictured).
Narrated in an enthusiastic deadpan by (the not yet particularly
famous) Miranda July, and ornamented by a weird, blooping soundtrack,
the film approaches its tired subject from the back end, the moment
when graffiti disappears.
At first, July delivers a sort of lecture, sending up critic Clement
Greenberg as she contends that the paintings that result when people
try to cover up graffiti are themselves art. Moreover, these geometric
or freeform “buffs” are the culmination of an artistic lineage
descending from Malevich and Rothko. (The “unconscious” element owes
something to Surrealism too.) The thing that makes this lecture so
funny (besides July’s delivery) is that it’s actually almost
plausible—you could imagine a still egotistical but increasingly
senile Greenberg spinning just such an argument.
But the funniest moments come later, when McCormick hitches a ride
with some of the City of Portland’s graffiti police. He captures two
workers deliberating between shades of gray paint, labeled, gloriously,
“halation” and “dove.” An interview with a city official is remixed to
find the poor sap declaiming his love of subversive art.
The movie is great not only because it pokes fun at the critical
canon and city bureaucrats, but because it’s earnest about finding
beauty in unexpected places. And by attributing intentionality to
blotches and squares that clearly lack it, it makes us less certain of
the supposed motives behind graffiti itself. 
