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Embodied Walls and Extended Skins: Exploring Mental Health Through Tataus and Graffiti

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Street Art of Resistance

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture ((PASCC))

Abstract

Tattoo comes from “tatau,” a Samoan/Tahitian word for mark. Graffiti recorded on walls are also an inscription in a skin, a narrative in the flesh of the city (an extension of our-selves), and someone has extended a cut from their own flesh to this urban skin, a sort of dermatological testimony. Our organic skin creates an illusory belief that, that is where we end and the rest of the environment begins. Hence, removing graffiti from walls may be positioned as a palimpsest of dermabrasion, political censorship, and bodily restriction. In this chapter, New Materialisms, Contemporary Animism, and the New Science of the Mind/Situated Aesthetics help me to conceive mental health and well-being differently while investigating tataus and graffiti in the city of Liverpool.

We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body, or, conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box. Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?

(Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 138)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    From the Greek, aisthētikos, referring to perception by means of the senses.

  2. 2.

    “Tagging is arguably the most prevalent type of Graffiti and cities all over the world have passed laws with strict fines often accompanied by community service-hours that offender’s spend cleaning up graffiti.” Eickmier, (2017, para. 5).

  3. 3.

    Topology refers to stretchable spatial relations rather than linear geometrical measurements.

  4. 4.

    The concept “haecceity” was coined by the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus to mean a “nonpersonal individuation of a body” (Bonta & Protevi, 2004, p. 94); in other words, a things “thisness”.

  5. 5.

    “‘Topography’ is defined in Cassell’s Concise English Dictionary as: ‘the detailed description of particular places; representation of local features on maps, etc.; the artificial features of a place or district; the mapping of the surface or the anatomy of particular regions of the body’” (Murdoch, 2006, p. 12).

  6. 6.

    The WiC inquiry group used collaborative action research to explore how our perceptions of a variety of environments might alter or influence our moods, stress levels, mental health, and well-being. Other than myself, the group consisted of six co-participants/co-researchers, each with a specific diagnosed mental health condition, mostly recruited from a therapeutic community garden. The inquiry consisted of a series of trips to a variety of environments (almost one every month), democratically chosen by the WiC group, followed a couple of weeks later by focus group meetings, giving me enough time to layer and edit the empirical materials (video interviews, photos, journals, notes) so that we could analyze them together.

  7. 7.

    Pseudonyms were chosen by the co-participants/co-researchers of this study.

  8. 8.

    According to the Office for National Statistics (2013, 2015) England has one of the highest rates of rape in the world and cases of reported rape are on the rise. However, according to the Ministry of Justice, Office for National Statistics and Home Office, ‘Only around 15% of those who experience sexual violence choose to report to the police’ (Rapecrisis, 2016, para. 1). Although I could find no recent report to compare UK cities, in 2006, Liverpool had a statistical “city crime average” for reported cases of rape (Gibbs & Haldenby, 2006, p. 34).

  9. 9.

    “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 3).

  10. 10.

    “Barad (2003) coined the term ‘intra-action’ to replace ‘inter-action’ in order to highlight that agencies do not precede encounters, but rather that agency emerges from the relationships between components” (Poole, 2015, p. 862).

  11. 11.

    “Some stones have been discovered to walk, slide, or sail! A number of stones at Racetrack Playa, Death Valley, California, have been documented (Reid et al., 1995) as sailing across the desert floor, leaving trails like snails behind them, criss-crossing in varying directions depending on their destination. Rather like plants creeping around when played back on video at high speed, rocks also begin to become more overtly animated and slither around. The illusion of time deceives us all” (Mcphie & Clarke, 2015, pp. 242–243).

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  1. University of Cumbria, Carlisle, UK

    Jamie Mcphie

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  1. Jamie Mcphie
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  1. Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Sarah H. Awad

  2. Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Brady Wagoner

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Mcphie, J. (2017). Embodied Walls and Extended Skins: Exploring Mental Health Through Tataus and Graffiti. In: Awad, S., Wagoner, B. (eds) Street Art of Resistance. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63330-5_10

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