My last posting on street art made me realize that archaeologists have not embraced modern graffiti as an object of scientific documentation. Graffiti is a vernacular art form (like tattoos and sticker art) that doesn't comfortably fit in museums (unless re-presented by Jean-Michele Basquiat or Banksy). The strength of vernacular arts derives less from creative individuality and more from the overabundance, variation and statistical distribution of its specimen. Graffiti is ephemeral, derivative and formulaic. Archaeologists and anthropologists are hence uniquely trained to document and study it. After all, archaeologists have been studying ancient graffiti for centuries. Measured drawings, location in space, codified systems of analysis and other such tools are essential in creating a complete record of an artifact that will ultimately be destroyed.
As far as I can tell, those tools have not been pervasively applied to street art. Many thanks to Nick Stap for pointing me to the direction of Graffiti Archaeology. Conceived by Cassidy Curtis, a computer programmer from San Francisco, Graffiti Archaeology is an exemplary project of recording graffiti's temporal dimension (creation, preservation, defacement). The Archaeological Institute of America understood the project's significance back in 2007, see Samir S. Patel "Writing on the Wall," Archaeology 60:4 (Jul./Aug. 2007). Using Flash-based animation, Curtis illustrates the changes of graffiti walls over time. Graffiti Archaeology has also built a democratic platform, where thousands of individual contribute their images to the public domain (through Flickr). Today for instance, Flickr's Graffiti Archaeology group includes 7,484 members (+1 when I signed up) and 70,338 images. The images are beautiful but lack any documentational discipline (size, scale, color value, location, angle). The only disappointing aspect of the project is that the interactive website features only 13 sites. Technical documentation is so labor intensive as to cease being democratic (Hannah Arendt comes to mind).
I know a couple of archaeologists who photograph street art and graffiti. Bill Caraher and Dimitris Plantzos, for instance, have included images on their blogs. I personally just singed up on Flickr's Graffiti Archaeology group and submit samples, like the image above, which I took in Philadelphia on May 13, 2002. I remain pessimistic, however, about the value of this endeavor. Flicks is inundated with street art images. They are simple photos, accumulating day by day, without any clear direction. I browse through Flickr's Philly Street Art group and find 381 members and 5,277 images. I cannot see how adding my image to this pool will help anyone's understanding of street art.
Speaking of ephemeral arts, I must confess that yesterday, I committed my first political act at Franklin and Marshall. I succumbed to two students and signed a petition. Arts House is a residence dedicated to art majors, who take pride in decorating theis spaces with original murals. Returning from summer vacation, the students discovered that F&M had painted all the walls without ever consulting them. From what I can tell, the college has been tightening the reigns on its properties because the city of Lancaster is inspecting more scrupoulously. Two fraternity houses, for example, were closed down because of city code violations. The residents of Arts House are petitioning more self control in the management, display and preservation of their art space. Not knowing all the details, I agreed in principle and signed the petition, encouraging the college to relinquish some control to creative interventions. The petition, however, has not addressed the more interesting question of governance. How will Arts House codify the destruction and recreation of its own murals?
Thanks to Jenn Ball for introducing me to Evan Roth's Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris 2009 after reading my medieval fonts of Middletown. Between April 24 and 29, Roth photographed 2,400 tags throughout Paris and produced a catalog of letter forms. This is truly interesting in its documentary value. Roth has done lots of other work on graffiti and is contributor to the Graffiti Research Lab. The taxonomy of fonts was sponsored by the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in conjunction with its current exhibition Born in the Street.
Last week, the New York Times also presented a guide to Paris' best graffiti, see Lisa Pham, "Street Art that Has Staid in the Street," (NYT, Sept. 2, 2009). As graffiti matures and, in some contexts like Athens, becomes truly uncontrollable, some venues have brought this art form indoors. Istanbul's hipster neighborhood Beyoglou, for example, hosted an open-ended indoor exhibition, see Yiegal Schleifer, "Bringing Istanbul's Street Art Indoors" (NYT, Jun. 18, 2009). At the end of the article, we find a note in parentheses that would make hipster Byzantinists (like Jenn Ball) smile:
"As an added bonus, the rooftop of the building has a stunning view of the Bosphorus and the Byzantine and Ottoman monuments of Istanbul’s old city. Just ignore the empty beer bottles left over from the exhibit’s opening party as you take in the scenery."
This summer's hottest street-art news came from Bristol, where Banksy took over his hometown museum and filled it with 100 of his creations. The exhibition was conceived in complete secrecy and took the public by surprise. The show closed a couple of days ago and the BBC reported additional controversy about what to do with the installation. Although criticized as cheap one-liners, Banksy's installation was pretty wild (and some piece were atypically three-dimensional). See coverage in BBC's "Bristol versus Banksy." Staying true to his strategy of street appropriation, Banksy infiltrated the museum's permanent collection and "defaced" their meaning. See Simon de Bruxelles' review (Times, June 12, 2009).
Different institutions deal with graffiti differently. About a month ago, a controversy erupted at the University of North Dakota (thanks again to Bill for highlighting this issue) over the erasure of an art work commissioned by New York graffiti artist Rich Patterson (aka. Rich2) and UND alumnus. Ryan Sander reported the incident in Axis of Access. If you scroll through the blog's comments, you will even find the artist's own response. At the end of the day, the University will proceed with the erasure but has commissioned the artist to replace it with a new piece (reported Aug. 28, 2009).
On April 2, the Philadelphia Alumni Writer's House at Franklin and Marshall College held a panel on the publication of Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Life, edited by F&M professor Marci Nelligan. Intersection collects six essays on the political contestation of public space, inspired by Jane Jacobs' classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Nelligan and Nicole Mauro have assembled a collection of vibrant essays that reanimate Jane Jacobs' urban criticism. The panel included performance artist William Pope L., sociologist and historian Claire Potter (the celebrated blogger Tenured Radical), and sociologist Jerome Hodos. The room was packed with faculty and students.
The event was magical for someone like me, raised on Jane Jacobs. Most incredible was to see a liberal arts college conducting a workshop at such a level of critical engagement. Having passed through many small colleges (Swarthmore, Vassar, Conn College, Wesleyan), I've become sensitized to the role that they can play in American intellectual life. As Claire Potter pointed out (from her experiences at Wesleyan), elite liberal arts colleges have changed dramatically. Competition for admission has become so fierce, that the student body is now dominated by successful test-takers. Colleges with radical traditions have a new problem. Their students have been admitted because they have done everything right (and hence taken no risks); they are the cream of the crop of no-child-left-behind policies. Liberal arts colleges have become conventional places of higher education. Paradoxically, the administrations heavily market the liberal arts brand as a places of experimentation, diversity, individualism and overall funkiness. Potter's essay "Chalking the Borders" discusses this very confrontation between critical student practices and the administration, when Wesleyan banned chalking on its campus in 2003-2003. In this case, Jane Jacobs' sidewalk (private? public?) was contested through ephemeral graffiti written overnight by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer voices.
My copy of Intersection just arrived and its contents look great. I will post comments about each individual essay, as I read them one by one. I encourage EVERY reader of this blog to order the book. It's published by Chain Links, an independent venue, and it's worth every penny of the $16.
And here are a few additional notes on Jane Jacobs. Debates over the fate of the American city, walkable environments, creative classes, etc., have brought fresh attention to Jane Jacobs, see earlier posting, When a Place Gets Boring, Even the Rich People Leave (July 23, 2008). Jacobs is newly relevant in issues of civility in the virtual community of the internet. By reading this blog, you are participating in democratic space. Wikipedia is another key example of this space. This month, the first book on Wikipedia was published, where we read the following, "Ms. Jacobs argued that sidewalks provided three important things: safety, contact and the assimilation of children.” She may as well have been talking about wikis: “A wiki has all its activities happening in the open for inspection, as on Jacobs’ sidewalk. Trust is built by observing the actions of others in the community and discovering people with like or complementary interests.” These words could have come straight out of Intersection. They are from Andrew Lih's, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia (2009), just reviewed in Noam Cohen, "Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City," New York Times (March 29, 2009).
Finally, back to urbanism. Peter Laurence, my colleague at Clemson University, is perhaps the single greatest force in Jane Jacobs studies today. Once published, Laurence's dissertation will be the authoritative intellectual biography; for the time being, see "Jane Jacobs (1915-2006): Before Death and Life," JSAH 66 (2007) pp. 5-15. Last November, Laurence organized a conference, Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design after the Age of Oil. The event marked the 50th anniversary of another conference held at the University of Pennsylvania, The Conference on Urban Design Criticism, where Jane Jacobs, Louis Kahn, Kevin Lynch, Ian McHarg, Lewis Mumford, and I.M. Pei first introduced their new urban visions. Both 1958 and 2008 conferences were sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, see Laurence, "The Death and Life of Urban Design: Jane Jacobs, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New Research in Urbanism, 1955-65," Journal of Urban Design 11 (2006), pp. 147-172.
Colleagues like Laurence made Clemson a place of intellectual debate (making my decision to leave even harder). For instance, I had the great pleasure to participate in Critical Practice for the Next Generation, a workshop on contemporary theory and practice organized by Laurence. It is there that I first learned the new term "post-critical," describing the architectural sell-out we are experiencing today (e.g. Rem Koolhaas, The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping). Intersection generates exactly the same intensity that I had last experienced in the Critical Practice seminars. And it reassures us that post-criticism has thankfully not won the day.
Some readers of this blog study Byzantine inscriptions and the sociology of defacement, graffiti, spolia. Just in class last week, I was explaining why the font used in the Vienna Genesis (6th-c. illuminated manuscript) resembles the font of stone-carved inscriptions. We discussed issues of literacy (especially in relation to Islam) and the conceptual framework of street art. In the last month, two images of public inscribing have struck my attention.
The first, a photograph by Joshua Lotts/Reuters, appeared in the New York Times (10/6/08, p. B4) after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It shows a Wall Street employee defacing the image of Lehman Brothers' CEO Richard Fuld, who was held responsible for the company's ill fate. The messages are predominantly negative: "Drop Dead Golden Parachute," "GREED," etc. This canvas was set up outside in Wall Street (not Main Street), giving the public a chance to textually perform.
The second photograph, by Mitch Dumke/Reuters, also from the New York Times (11/6/08, p. P4) shows another act of public inscription, this time positive, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Three passers-by write congratulatory notes to their newly elected President. On the iconographic connections between Barack Obama and the Lincoln Memorial, see my earlier posting.
"Graffiti Artists Leave Their Mark on Athens"on ABC Australia discussed the rise of graffiti on the archaeological sites of Athens. I thank Tim Gregory who sent this link to Bill Caraher who sent it to me. Indeed, walking through the streets of Athens in 2007, I first noticed the explosion of Greek street art. The Plaka especially is saturated. In an earlier posting, I explored Anastasios Orlandos' act of resistance by transcribing graffiti from the Parthenon during the German Occupation, see Writing off the Wall: Transcription as Resistance. I think that graffiti has not been seriously discussed in relation to Greek archaeology. How could Greeks archaeologists categorically condemn graffiti but, at the same time, celebrate Lord Byron's scratchings on the Temple of Zeus at Sounion? As an archaeologist of post-classical Greece, I find myself closer to the side of the vandals "defacing" the ancient temples than the purists. One of my favorite archaeological illustrations is a drawing showing a tapestry of graffiti at Ramnous; see Ο δήμος της Ραμνούς, vol. 1 , Τοπογραφικά (Athens, 1999), p. 270. Vasileios Petrakos is one of few Greek archaeologists to publish such defacement in a site monograph. My love of graffiti should not be dismissed at face value on account of my period interests (Byzantine over Classical). We tend to associate spolia, reuse and appropriation with the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. Classical Athenians, however, did a fair share of it, too. For details, you must ask my wife, Celina Gray, who labors over reuse in Athenian cemeteries. For my favorite article on Late Antique spolia, I send you to Joseph Alchermes, "Spolia in Roman Cities of the Late Empire: Legislative Rationales and Architectural Reuse," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 48 (1994), pp. 167-178.
In this posting, I wish to discuss neither the archaeology of graffititi nor the graffiti of archaeological sites. Rather, I want to highlight the burgeoning scene of Greek street art in a positive manner. Its cultural relevance should be taken seriously. It is Greece's greatest public art and one of the few instances of constructive civil disobedience. I will start with a simple question, which is more than rhetorical. Is modern graffiti inferior to classical art? Of course, classical art is more important, but can we be so sure? One way to test the relative relevance of disparate art forms is to gauge contemporary interests. Although my methodology is by no means scientific, I decided to test cultural value in my local Border's bookstore by conducting a simple statistical study. So, on my way back from work last Tuesday, I stopped at Border's at New London's Crystal Mall. The store contains a modest art selection, covering 18 shelves, or the equivalent of 54 linear feet of shelf space. Scanning carefully all the shelves, I was surprised to find absolutely NO books on ancient art. By the way, my job at Connecticut College is teaching ancient and medieval art (incidentally as Joe Alchermes' sabbatical replacement); my informal survey obviously devastated my sense of academic value. I was disheartened to see that antiquity was found sparingly only in a few general books. I concluded that, similarly, my ancient survey will be the only exposure that my students will ever have to this material. At Border's, a little more than 2 linear feet were devoted to street art, that is 4% of the total shelf space. Thus, we can conclude that for a general American audience, street art is infinitely more important than ancient art. Modern Greek graffiti, moreover, is highly respected within those publications. An excerpt from Nicholas Ganz's, Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents (New York, 2004), pp. 128, 162-163, best summarizes the Greek scene:
"Greece and its local activists were thrust into the limelight through the Chromopolis project. Concentrated in Athens and Thessaloniki, the movement is enjoying a boom, particularly in pieces. Over the fast few years, pioneers such as Bizare or Woozy have continued to make their mark, and new artists are emerging, often working with stencils or characters." Have the archaeologists quoted in ABC missed the movement altogether? Most likely. Reading the official condemnation of graffiti might give us the impression that street art is strictly an underground subculture. This is another misrepresentation. Preparing for the 2004 Athens Olympics, the Ministry of Culture went hip-hop by sponsoring Chromopolis, a project organized by graffiti magazine Carpe Diem. In the summer of 2002, Greece invited 16 internationally acclaimed graffiti artists, including OsGemeos, Besok, Codeak, Bizare, Mark1, and Loomit. The artists created large scale compositions at 10 sites (image above). The works were proudly included in Greece's official Cultural Olympiad and elevated graffiti with venues such as the archaeology of Minoan and Mycenaean food at Birmingham, or a Post-Byzantine art exhibit in New York.
Although by no means would I promote vandalizing archaeological sites, the recent growth in archaeological graffiti seems to fit a larger pattern, the explosion and international prestige of Greek street art. In the American context, it would be difficult to ignore the prestige of street artists like Shepard Fairey, who designed one of the most desirable images for Barak Obama's presidential campaign; see my posting "Punk Archaeology: Glue." The recent press on Fairey is more concerned about his mainstream status; see Melena Rizik, "Closer to Mainstream; Still a Bit Rebelious," (NYT, Oct. 1, 2008). The elusive Bansky also seems to have made a surprise installation in SoHo, and the press went wild, see David Itzkoff "A Could-Be Bansky Appears on a SoHo Wall" (NYT, Oct. 1, 2008). I fall in the group of people who worship those idolatrous artists. And judging from the 4% coverage at Border's, I'm not alone.
The fans of Greek street art are harder to find. But I'm clearly not the only archaeologist of Greece to see cultural vitality in modern Greece beyond the national love of the Parthenon. Guy Sanders, Jan Sanders and Petros Sandamouris administer a wonderful Facebook Group, "Alternative Athens: Beyond Your Comfort Zone." It's defined as follows: "Εκτός των συνόρων: how can you find a real Athens beyond your hotel or institution or group? A member of one Athens based institution has likened their closed community to a huge sow to which its piglets return and suckle year after year. How do we find out about the life beyond our Comfort Zone? This group is intended to be a place where venues outside the bubble are shared and evaluated." Some of the Group members (Jess Hackman, Eva Akashi, Sara Lima, Isabela Sanders) have been photographing Athenian street art and adding it to the communal images. What we need now is a systematic survey, the archaeology of Athenian street art, the mapping of Greece's newest masterpieces. The Wooster Collective is such an organized venture documenting street art globally. I'm waiting for the Essential City Guide to Athens!!!! I had started photographing street art in Philadelphia, but that was a few years ago. One of my objectives had been to record locations through time and show the temporal nature (both deterioration and addition) of this art form. The survey of Greek graffiti must take inspiration from the Geocaching craze, a hobby that unites GPS, Google Earth and treasure hunting. Deb and Colin Stewart introduced me to this and I look forward to joining. A search under Athens, Greece, produced 91 caches in Athens alone. What are we waiting for?
People catalogue all kinds of things. My dear friend jules, for instance, catalogues built-in ashtrays. Although she doesn't see it archaeologically, she is creating the only existing database of this extinct socio-type. In fact, if you have more instances, send them to me, and I'll send them to BUILT-IN-ASHTRAYS. Needless to say, this is the pet project of a reformed smoker and quite the social thinker.
Curious about street art bibliography? The least that I can do is share what I found at Border's in a measly New London mall. You can map that, too; click here. In the spirit of free art, I bought nothing but browsed to my heart's content. In browsing order: Tristan Manco, Street Sketchbook: Inside the Journals of International Street and Graffiti Artists (San Francisco, 2007); Josh J. MacPhee, Stencil Pirates: A Global Study of the Street Stencil (Brooklyn, 2004); Roger Gastman, Caleb Neelon, and Anthony Smyrski, Street World: Urban Art and Culture from Five Continents (New York, 2007); Nicholas Ganz, Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents (New York, 2004); Eleanor Mathieson (ed.) and Xavier A. Tapies, Street Art and the War on Terror: How the World's Best Graffit Artists Said No to the Iraq War (London, 2007); Stephen Powers, The Art of Getting Over: Graffit at the Millenium (New York, 1999), Steve Grody, Graffiti L.A.: Street Styles and Art (New York, 2007); Ryo Sanada, Suridh Hassan, Rackgaki: Japanese Graffiti (London, 2007); Jon Naar, The Birth of Graffiti (Munich, 2007); Bansky, Wall and Piece (London, 2007).
Street art has been a vibrant form of the urban underground for the last decade. Back in the 1990s, I began photographing such ephemeral installations throughout Philadelphia, returning even to trace the effects of deterioration or intentional erasure. This documentation, obviously, satisfied my archaeological sensibilities but, more importantly, got me to seriously think about medieval epigraphy and graffiti, a genre that is rarely considered as protest. Interestingly enough, we rarely imagine medieval men and women subverting public space through writing or scratching; we rarely think of them outside the modes of religious expression. Michael Camille's sign typology--protection, power, publicity, memory, location, public fantasy--does not include political subversion ("Signs on Medieval Street Corners," in Die Strasse, ed. J. Gerhard, Vienna, 2001, pp. 91-118). I have a suspicion that some Byzantine inscriptions served a subversive role, an idea based on prison graffiti from Corinth, as well as a series of proto-cartographic scratches.
Philadelphia street art (clearly defined as post-graffiti) boomed when I was a graduate student in AAMW (Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World) . Photographing this vernacular art while studying vernacular architecture gave me an excuse for meaningful procrastination. The discovery of street art, moreover, introduced me to the Space 1026 collaborative, which is responsible for producing some of the best Philadelphia street art. One day, I even stepped up the stairs of 1026 Arch Street, met Ben Woodward, explained my project and bought one of his prints, the barking dog with the word LOST. The print was inexpensive enough ($10) that I also bought a copy for my god-son, whom I've been intentionally trying to subvert through skate boards, CDs, etc. So a LOST print now hangs in a teenager's room in Überlingen, Germany, mind you, not glued in the streets but properly framed and hung).
On April 18, I returned to my alma mater and gave a lecture on Byzantium, Modernity and the American School at AAMW's Archaeology Lunch series. It was a wonderful event in its own right and quite emotional; my last involvement with AAMW was 5 years ago, scrambling to complete my thesis. In my last trip, spring had just began in Philadelphia, offering great opportunities for walking the streets. Although the visit was short and the wanderings even shorter, one image kept creeping up, the sticker you see above. It's a small red monochrome print juxtaposing a simple figurative image of a small mouse and the word GLUE. The print is wheat-pasted on a street pole near 44th and Pine Streets. In fine Pop Art form, text and image are congruous and incongruous. The subject matter itself is so appropriately regional to Philadelphia's domestic life, punctuated by the ever-present mouse problem creeping through every row-house. I cannot even begin to list the Philadelphia mouse stories. Sadly enough, mice was the subject of the last conversation I had with my father before he passed away (unexpectedly from a heart-attack), and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Another memorable incident is returning from a trip to Greece and finding a mouse strung around the strings under my mother's sewing machine (she was a seamstress). The poor baby-mouse had spun itself into its own death. We were gone long enough that the bodily deterioration was complete and what confronted us was a beautifully textiled flat object.
I find GLUE to be such a thought-provoking piece beyond the vernacular associations to West Philadelphia life. I will spare you of my own multiple readings. Flat as it may be, GLUE reverberates with so many references, including images from Robert Mapplethorpe's famous "Perfect Moment" show (1988) at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (which, back then, was housed in Meyerson Hall). Most obviously, GLUE is about prey and preyed, animals and humans, wild and domestic, but also about art process and meaning (the piece itself is literally "glued" on a post). Having just heard a fantastic Studio 360 episode, I cannot fail to see connections with Abu Ghraib as well. Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure (2008) just out in theaters and Stephen S. Eisenman's The Abu Ghraib Effect (London, 2007) are high on my list--Eisenman teaches Art History at Northwestern and he is the editor of Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History (3rd ed., 2007); I received a review copy of this textbook and could not put it down . I have no idea who produced GLUE, but I thank them for articulating so many subterranean strata with economical eloquence.
Whether coming out of punk rock, skate-boarding, or both, the aesthetics of street art have reached national exposure in the last few months. One of its most celebrated practitioners, Shepard Fairey, has donated a portrait to the Barak Obama campaign. Fairey's CHANGE is sadly SOLD OUT, but you can read more about it in Rob Walker's, "The Art of Politics" (NYT Magazine, April 13, 2008, p. 27). Fairey was born in South Carolina (which adds another bizarre geographic thread) and became famous through his OBEY THE GIANT signs. Even if you have never heard of Fairey's name, you have probably seen his work; this is one of the beauties of a genre that is (partially) anonymous but (thoroughly) pervasive. A few years ago, street art was an underground phenomenon integrally connected to other subversive urban grass routes movements. At this point, street art has entered both mainstream political arena and popular culture; Fairey, for instance, has designed the cover of a greatest hits CD for Led Zeppelin. Another artist, Banksy, is equally unavoidable. Last summer, I was so happy to find a copy of his Wall and Piece (Phaidon, 2007) at Barnes and Noble (Rittenhouse Square) to give to my godson when I visited him in Greece . When I walked into my godson's room in Athens, I saw the very same Bansky book in his library; the book had already been translated into Greek (now, that is globalization). I ended up lugging the (ungiven) gift all the way back to the U.S. and returning it to the Barnes and Noble. Whoever has bought that copy, has unwillingly purchased a much traveled book. Incidentally, my godson has now fully embraced hip-hop (as well as computer hacking) and goes by the nickname Pak. Regardless of its mainstream status, the much-traveled street art of Philadelphia seems potently alive and exciting. GLUE not only made my day happier but provided some wonderful connective tissue across multiple years of punk, art and urban archaeology.
PS. Connected to subversive street art, see the documentation of an ephemeral historiography in Boston, Chrstina J. Hodge "History on the Line, Davis Square, " Archaeoblog, April 10, 2008.
My last posting on street art made me realize that archaeologists have not embraced modern graffiti as an object of scientific documentation. Graffiti is a vernacular art form (like tattoos and sticker art) that doesn't comfortably fit in museums (unless re-presented by Jean-Michele Basquiat or Banksy). The strength of vernacular arts derives less from creative individuality and more from the overabundance, variation and statistical distribution of its specimen. Graffiti is ephemeral, derivative and formulaic. Archaeologists and anthropologists are hence uniquely trained to document and study it. After all, archaeologists have been studying ancient graffiti for centuries. Measured drawings, location in space, codified systems of analysis and other such tools are essential in creating a complete record of an artifact that will ultimately be destroyed.
