I've had a certain fascination for graffiti for a long time. "Street art" is trendy now. Its bastard step-child, tagging, is less so. And sometimes the difference between the two is difficult to recognise.
There are a lot of graffiti photos in my Flickr photostream, and every now and then some more will catch my eye. Yesterday in the CBD, something really intrigued me, and I got to wondering.
Now, this sort of graffiti (in the photo on the left) is fairly typical. Click on the photo for a larger view, and you'll see the graffiti better. And it's easy to see how, even tho it's really high up, the "artist" was able to paint it. They still have to scramble through barriers and closed, boarded up buildings, and sometimes, it seems, hang out on some edges to paint. There are some daring street artists around.
And there are certainly enough boarded up, high rise buildings around town.
But I've noticed a few pieces of graffiti around town that stagger me. Fascinate me. And vex me. Because I can't for the life of me figure out how the hell it got there.
The piece I saw yesterday is in the old Sol Square. Is it still called Sol Square? I guess it is. I have an album of pre-earthquake photos of Sol Square, one of which is a photo of the Mini Cooper that has stayed pinned to the wall through all 12,000 plus earthquakes we've had. And it was that Mini Cooper, and the piece of graffiti above it, that caught my eye.
I stood in the street for ages, looking at the Mini, and the graffiti. Wondering. I thought perhaps there was a way to it from the other side that I couldn't see, so I walked around the block.
I'm stumped.
It seems obvious that the graffiti was painted by someone standing on the Mini, but the question still remains, how did they get onto the Mini in the first place. Drop from the window? That's a ten foot drop. More? Maybe they had a ladder? Possibly, but the thought of a marauding band of taggers, wandering the streets of Christchurch at night with a ladder just didn't compute. I also wondered if the graffiti had been there since before the earthquakes. I didn't think so, but I thought I should check the PE photo.
Maybe they helicoptered in? What do you think?
