Words on walls

I recently (I say ‘recently’…) watched a documentary with Mr Mark Lawson having an old chinwag with Messrs Gilbert & George.  I love them.  I love them so much I named my cats after them.  If you don’t love G&G, you must prefer a world which didn’t contain them, and in that case, you are (to quote Quentin Crisp in his foreward to a book on the Marchesa Casati) a TREMENDOUS BORE.

G&G made some bold assertions.  Firstly, that in countries where there are no art galleries, bodies litter the streets.  Secondly they mentioned graffiti as a form of expression, but one which has recently been dying out.  This is a shame.  There is much room in the medium of graffiti for great imagination, and you have to wonder what sociological phenomena would result in people feeling less need to mark the walls of their cities with their own (often strangely chosen) messages.  The Romans were scratching curses onto walls.  What can possibly have changed?  What is this terrible drought of culture that G&G have picked up on?

I don’t mean Banksy, by the way.  I’m long bored by this attention seeker.  Banksy is the toast of middle-England.  In some grotesquely ironic coup, he has become a coffee table artist, an Ikea lifestyle choice.  Everyone KNOWS why he’s done it.  Take four of my favourite examples I’ve noted over the years.  There is a strange enigma which stays with you afterwards.  It’s the equivalent of a stranger striding over to you in a bar and whispering something disturbing and devastating; transferring something from his mind to yours.  I’m enamoured by the irrelevance and pointlessness of some of these captions…

“Worms boil through screaming flesh” – circa 1994, The Four Bars, Cardiff (now Dempsey’s)

“Insert baby for refund” – on a condom machine – possible the same place as above

“I want the whole fucking cake shop” – something Jacques Miami found during a frazzled walk around the outskirts of Naples.

“Bell-end” – succinctly and inscrutably scrawled across the bottom of a lamp-post on Buarth Road, Aberystwyth.  Why?  Just because it was their particular favourite phrase?  Or did someone believe they were being witty, but mistook a bell for a lamp-post?

PLEASE comment if you are the scatter-brained genius behind any of these….