We have been writing on walls since we could write and make walls and on everything else that we could get our hands on. It first came in the form of glyphs in fields and on hillsides, then hieroglyphs on monuments and tombs, then inscriptions on palaces and temples. From the beginning, we are told most writing on walls was neither formally designed nor officially sanctioned, and instead transgressive-- graffiti. Archeologists and historians recently uncovered, deciphered and excitedly reported on well-preserved, mostly mundane, sometimes raunchy graffiti at long-buried Pompeiian ruins--the ancients were just like us! Times change but it appears we less so.
Historians might know when official signs devolved from the spiritual and state-sanctioned to the merely informative. In public buildings, we are now required by law to have a sign on every door and room in the building, not to mention exit signs. Today we make large and complex buildings and complexes of buildings all of which, if poorly designed, require “way finding”, meaning signs that tell us where to go because it is not obvious where to go. In most parking garages, we rely entirely on signs to know where to go. Then there are our streets.
Somewhere along the way, settlements developed into cities complex enough that we needed to know with some sort of written indication which street we were on and where to find the market or meeting place. Before widespread mobility by means other than our own two feet, these signs were affixed to placards on posts and corners of buildings and mostly discrete. We only needed to see them from a few feet away.
Sometime in the 18th or 19th centuries when cities evolved into metropolises and our mobility expanded via the horse-drawn carriage and the locomotive signs grew in number and size. In a metropolitan marketplace, a business may not personally know its customers and want or need a larger pool of customers, hence the birth of advertising. Mobility and advertising gave us bigger, more colorful and ubiquitous signs all vying for attention. We got the tall wall and the billboard. By a hundred years ago the number, variety, technology and creativity of signs had surged.
All of this accelerated in the 20th C. with the arrival of consumer society and mass mobility. Corporate manufacturing, publishing and packaging planted the seeds for a new discipline we know as graphic design. Consumer products of all kinds, even our clothing and our bodies, are wrapped and stamped in images and labels. Airplanes and cars changed the scale of our mobility, our daily reliance on it and in turn the scale of graphics and signs. And it expanded their role to include directions and safety. Everyday we experience large scale graphics and signs on the streets we drive on and walk across. We take it for granted that most surfaces in our built environment are veneered in graphics and signs sometimes so many that all we see are them.
Inevitably high art took notice. In the 1960s, Pop Artists (and others) aspired to elevate our appreciation for the commonplace by placing it in new contexts--- physical (the white box gallery), aesthetic (a real artist can transform anything into art) and intellectual (theorizing is what makes it so). Corporate signs and labels were an easy target, pithy, pungent words and mottos another. In the 1970s, the Supergraphics phenomenon turned any building, room or wall into an opportunity for large-scale mostly 2- D, boldly colored graphics and signs. How can we understand this phenomenon other than as a natural extension of an environment inundated with paint and ink? Huge printed signs on buildings and huge words, symbols, stripes and arrows painted on streets had to have normalized our relationship with supersized graphics and signs.
Once flamboyantly transgressive (and illegal) graffiti or “street art” has today been elevated to high art (rightly so) and permitted even encouraged in cities like Los Angeles to flourish on any wall that will have it. We celebrate huge lit-up signs, tall walls and billboards in places like Times Square, Las Vegas and the Sunset Strip. (Oddly after a hundred years of been-there-seen-that these places are still somehow seen as “the future”.) We might wonder whether having normalized large scale graphics and signs we have become addicted to them: signs for signs’ sake. We might also wonder whether in our cities in our time in all the excitement of the last 100 year,s we have missed out on the wonder and the magic of cities of the prior 4,900 years without them.