On 'The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal'

Through a clever arrangement of the film's major documentary aspects, Matt McCormick's 2001 short film The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal allows imagistic juxtaposition, breaks in authorial perspective and deliberate distortion of recorded interviews to illuminate the unintended consequences of the ruling class's "war on graffiti" in the industrialized districts of Portland, Oregon.

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The film's major documentary aspects or documentary details are, as Gilberto Perez states in his book The Material Ghost, the "necessary material connection with reality" that distinguishes a photograph from something like a painting or a novel. In the film, they include locked-down shots of the Portland urban landscape, super-imposed samples of modern artwork, a lengthy moving-camera shot involving a lone bicyclist and the recording of an interview with a government official. McCormick chooses to juxtapose the modern art samples with the gritty urban landscape, include the seemingly omniscient narrator in the lengthy moving-camera shot as a physical person and completely rearrange the spoken words of a government official in a blatant re-edit of his interview.

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Several meanings can be mined from the various arrangements of the film's documentary elements. The juxtaposition of the urban landscape with the samples of modern artwork suggests that the government employees responsible for graffiti removal are unwittingly producing comparably interesting abstract art.

The bicyclist, associated with the very scholarly female narrator, shown riding through the already established environment of freshly overlaid paint brings forward the idea that the scope of the graffiti removal operation is creating a massive state-sanctioned art gallery - available to those lucky enough to appreciate abstract visual art.

Finally, the re-editing of the government official's interview implies the constant shaping and reshaping of language and types of expression at play throughout the film’s conflict between the ruling class and suppressed graffiti artists. In McCormick’s world, no one has a monopoly on language.

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McCormick derives meaning through creative visual comparisons, alteration of narrative perspective and brazen distortions of recorded reality. The structure of these documentary details emphasize a more mutual interaction between an artist and his immediate environment, presenting the viewer with the possibility of rejecting, altering or reinterpreting the icons of the ruling class. The filmmaker is, as Vertov before him, “working with the materials of life, making them into a new order” and creating a “construction made out of pieces of reality.”