[Blancage] - The Second Death of Graffiti: The Municipal Mural and a Painting by Bruegel the Elder

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, detail from The Triumph of Death, c. 1562, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

[French]

In an urban context, there is a straightforward way to make a wild work disappear: you roll over it, whitewash it, return the wall to zero. In the psychoanalysis of the Threshold, this operation is called blanking. The trace is erased, the city recovers its compliant skin. It is merely a reset, a return to possibility.

And then there is the other death, softer, more flattering, the one that comes in the form of recognition: congratulations, approved budgets, immaculate surfaces where the graffiti writer is invited to paint ‘for real,’ ‘bigger,’ ‘better,’ ‘for everyone.’

This second death does not destroy the line: it cuts off the breath. What lived freely becomes image. What breathed becomes function — often even a participatory act of cohesion. In the logic of walls, recognition sometimes kills more surely than censorship.

Blanking itself is not perfidious. The city erases as it maintains its benches and barriers: because it must maintain its surfaces, manage its flows, preserve a minimal contract of coexistence. The wall returns to Zero, that pure potentiality where any gesture can return. The spray disappears, but the libido — the very energy of desire — remains. The arm keeps the memory of its pressure; the breath will find elsewhere a surface on which to inscribe itself. This kind of death is superficial. It affects neither desire nor the Threshold, nor the fire that triggered the apparition.

The fracture occurs when the graffiti writer is chosen, elected. When they are given a pristine wall, colours calibrated under an approved budget, a monumental format, a showcase. At that precise moment, the spray can changes state. It is no longer an organ, but a tool. The pressure no longer passes through the body. The jet no longer seeks its place in the roughness of the wall; it is laid down, reasonable, linear, disciplined, without urgency. The gesture loses its living nerve, its nocturnal jolt, that short-circuit where desire crossed the Threshold before thought could grasp what it had allowed to appear. The act, once risky, becomes functional. Breathing falls into line. The breath goes out. The urgency of expressing one’s essence — libido — yields to the mere necessity of existing. And since existence precedes essence, we are witnessing not a conquest, but a regression.

The municipal mural, admirable as it may be, no longer belongs to the regime of graffiti. It is protected, photographed, restored. It leaves the realm of the palimpsest and enters that of duration. It no longer responds to other walls, other hands, weather, conflict. It settles, motionless, beautiful, out of reach, like a monument one looks at but no one touches. Desire is absent. The image barely breathes. It is no longer a nocturnal apparition: it is a diurnal façade caught in the winds of heritage. Beautiful, yes. Alive, no.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder had already painted this reversal in The Triumph of Death. He shows less the brutal disappearance of bodies than their reuse. Some dying figures are drowned, hanged, broken on the wheel, crushed, dissolved into the Tartarus. But others, more terrible, have been recovered before being passed once more under the blade of the scythe. On the jetty stands an assembly of skeletons dressed in white togas, blowing into their heralds’ trumpets like a clergy pronouncing an ordeal. They are former living beings, bleached, stripped, turned into heralds of the return to official order. They no longer have breath, yet they still sound. They have no flesh, yet they announce in the name of a power that has absorbed them. They represent what they no longer are. They speak for a force that surpasses them and assigns them a utilitarian role. The herald carries a message; he is never its author. They do not live — they function.

This reversal illuminates that of the consecrated graffiti writer. He does not disappear like a drowned man carried off by the urban current; he aligns himself like these heralds. He holds the official wall as the skeleton holds its trumpet. He paints in the light what he once painted in the tremor of night. His gesture remains, his line persists, but the source has migrated. The spray can, once burning in the hand, stops beating. The pressure that gave birth to the line withdraws. The breath that animated the matter becomes a borrowed breath, synchronized with the respiration of the commissioner. The graffiti writer no longer transgresses: he announces. He no longer desires: he represents. His act has become clear, clean, readable. The Threshold — that fragile place where a subject emerges — has closed.

Thus, erasure by blanking touches only the inscription. Recruitment, on the other hand, removes the respiration. It is not a scandal. Not a reproach. It is a cold, regular, methodical structure. One does not kill an act by covering it; one kills it by consecrating it, by sanctifying it. The sublime death of municipal murals is more final than the crude death of the roller.

When the breath starts to show too clearly on the glass, it is because it no longer warms anything: it has already crossed over to the side of the dead.