A recent stop for a license renewal got us a bit ticked off when we noticed graffiti splattered on the back side of the old carriage factory.
It was one of those events we thought best tucked away for a rainy day, or a cold snap as is the case this week.
It’s a shared distaste most folks have in common, making it a topic as safe to write about as the perils of littering. No one possibly could disagree.
Hundreds of thousands have been spent preserving that piece of industrial architecture. Once industry moved on after carriage wheels were out of vogue, the building had many uses, but it is this last 20 years that peaks our interest most.
First the Epoch family and now the Lloyd family have invested greatly to keep a building nice and offer tenants an opportunity to house their own small business. It’s a vivid evolution of sorts.
Admittedly, we were a bit cross at seeing the rear wall with goofy graffiti marring its stone work. It flies in the face of a lot of things we hold dear, including respecting other people’s property.
Surely if the jokers who did this work did the same on a family member’s wall, there would be big trouble, but therein lies the conflict between public space, a perceived public building and private ownership.
Our disgust has mellowed since that late November afternoon.
Oddly, it was a piece of the Berlin Wall we saw while in Washington that got us thinking a little differently. Actual sections of the wall were set up on display, as they stood before the wall came down in and around 1990. Farmers would easily recognize them as pre-cast slabs, similar to those used as partitions in many barns here.
The free side of the wall where citizens could come and go much as we do here was littered with graffiti as an artistic expression against the tyranny people faced on the East German side.
While the art did little for us, the point was driven home about freedom when the opposite side of the wall was viewed. There, on a canvas of concrete that would have stretched for miles in Germany, was nothing. It was just a dull grey façade, overshadowed by a watchtower which would have overseen several hundred metres of the wall. Any attempt at expression, whether artistic or intellectual, would have been rejected with force.
The distance between the two sides of pre-cast concrete section was no more than eight inches on the top part of the wall. It struck us how ironic it was that such a slight distance stopped the oppressed from seeking freedom and conversely, a measurement as small as an average shoe size, kept the free from being oppressed.
Perhaps the message for our graffiti artists here is that along with freedom comes responsibility.
