All you need to know to understand this mural, which is on a hill near the high school, just past the cemetery, in that nether world that is definitely not Downtown yet not quite the Heights, is 1973-2001. Regardless of cause, death occurred too young and the loss for was so profound for the loved ones that a mural taking up an entire side of a building needed to be painted.
I can’t decipher the name, which seems part of the need to know sensibility. Will the name of somebody who is a stranger add any meaning –RIP, the years of the live, doesn’t that already humanize this mural?
Rarely is such purposeful illegibility so artistic. Echoes of psychedelic pop culture and sports team logo are mixed with that distinctive Keith Haring urban sensibility. The lettering, with its wiggly arrows is playful as the opening credits of the Electric Company on PBS. Is that an A or a V? I can’t make out the name and it is only single word – last or first name –only a guess.
Maybe it’s the media overload and the constant commercial and advertising messages we are bombarded with every moment. It’s clear what they want us to know: here’s something else to buy. Maybe to clarify immediately taints the integrity of the message. The same philosophy seems to motivate tattoos. To those not in the know, the image is isolated from any defining context. It just is. But to those in the know, there’s a symphony of significance leading up to the moment the skin was permanently changed for all to see. Maybe that’s all that you really need to know.
The tragedy of young death, the despair of grief – that’s
what you need to know – and we do...
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