Leaving a mark - or a signature?
THE PRESENT IS ALWAYS PRESENT
Our house is constructed with second-hand materials here and there, including this very large post, which supports the roof. Now and again I have noticed this small group of nails arranged, I think, as initials, and I noticed them again this morning. I'm not sure whether they are the right way up, (I think not) and I definitely do not know if they were there in the post when it was put in place, or whether the builder hammered them in? It's a mystery, but somebody wanted to make their mark. It's what we do isn't it? You see it everywhere in graffiti, and where there is wet cement, somebody often puts their initials. I think we have, in the concrete slabs of the houses we built. Some of it is artistic, some of it is interesting, some of it is just plain ugly. All that tagging along the railway lines for example - and here are some examples of graffiti that caught my eye over the years:
As you can see most of them have some sort of artistic intent, although there is also a fair bit of the ugly. They are signatures in the broadest sense. So why, and is there any point?
I guess the most basic reason is to say that you existed. That you had meaning. Because one's existence seems so meaningless sometimes does it not? It's an urge as old as time almost, as those prehistoric cave paintings attest. When we go we want to be remembered.
You could say the handprints are the primitive signatures of the artists. But are they? We have no way of knowing whether the handprints were made by the people who painted the pictures. But here is an interesting aside I discovered as I looked for appropriate pictures. They now think that most of the handprints - over 60% (or was it 80%?), they have found belong to women. Apparently women's and men's hands are different - in women the ring finger and index finger are roughly the same length. Men's index fingers are longer. So does this mean that the women painted the pictures? Or does it mean that they were painted by shamans, who apparently were often women? Or did the women just add their handprints to the men's paintings? Or was it adolescent boys (whose hands are more similar to women)? This theory goes on to say that adolescent boys painted the things that impressed them - naked women and big frightening animals that they had to kill for food. And indeed those big animals which prehistoric man doubtless hunted and ate are the dominant feature of the cave paintings. That and the handprints. There are many - all over the world - that are just handprints. Were they all made at the same time or over a period? In Alan Garner's wonderful novella The Stone Book, a young girl is taken into a cave and shown handprints on the wall, and footprints in the ground - made over millennia. It is presented as a sort of ritual - a rite of passage. I can't remember now whether she adds her own hand to those that are there. She obviously left her footprints. And there is definitely something spiritual about all of those hands.
"I was here." The handprints are completely anonymous - well nowadays I guess if you had the fingerprint it would not be and I have seen archaeologists earnestly discussing whether the maker of the handprint had a broken wrist, or other such deformity. I'm sure you can now tell a lot more about the maker than you used to be able to. But it doesn't tell you who that person was and what they were like does it? And modern graffiti is transitory as well. It gets covered up by officialdom or by other graffitiists. So your statement of existence is transitory too.
The other major kind of graffiti is the one that tells of love - like the "Je t'aime" image above. Here are two more examples of that. The padlocks are quite common in Europe, though I have yet to see them here. I have also seen the carving of the succulents more than once over there.
I suppose the ultimate version of this is a tattoo on your own body. I wonder how many of these expressions of love are joint or how many of them are just people expressing a passion of the moment or even an unrequited passion? We have probably all done it somewhere - scratched in the desktop at school, scribbled in the margins of our text books and exercise books, scrawled it on a wall somewhere, drawn it in the sand on a beach. Are we hoping that the loved one will see or telling ourselves how hopeless, or wonderful it all is? "Je t'aime." Who is 'je' and who is the object of the statement? So is it therefore only meaningful to the person who made it? Well no - because I noticed it enough to take a photograph, and probably lots of others have too. Maybe that was its purpose. Maybe it's just a general statement.
Then there are the prisoners with time on their hands and only something sharpish to scratch in the wall. Because they have time on their hands though, their efforts are often more elaborate and they may tell a story. The examples shown here were found on the wall of the castle prison in Tarascon in the south of France. The ship must have taken a very long time to make.
If you achieve some kind of fame you might get your hand or your foot cast and displayed - as in Hollywood - or on this wall of footprints + signature of well-known soccer players that we found in Switzerland. In this case we are moving away from complete anonymity as in the cave wall handprints, through graffiti that might incorporate a name or an initial, towards an actual signature. But it's not a signature that says "I created this", it's still really only saying "I was here and I was famous - at least for a while."
I have no idea when artists started signing their work. It's very important though is it not? If your Van Gogh that you found in your attic doesn't have a signature it's going to be a big job to prove that it's genuine. The authenticity of the artwork depends on it.
And yet, there is more than just the signature that points to a work of art being by a particular artist. Great artists have a style - a way of doing things, that experts maintain they can identify. That and some outside facts, like dating, materials, buying and selling records. But the signature style is often the deciding factor when authenticating disputed works of art.
Which brings me to food. There is a lot of talk by chefs and the foodie press about signature dishes and some of them build a reputation around them - like Heston Blumenthal's snail porridge. Or they have a particular style - Elizabeth David has a style as does Robert Carrier, Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Delia Smith ... But do we ordinary cooks have a style - a signature dish? I have been racking my brains to think of a dish that I could describe as a signature dish of my mother's. Help me out here sister. And what about me? What would my children say was my signature dish? Spaghetti and meatballs perhaps - which, of course, isn't mine - it's a Robert Carrier recipe, although it has doubtless evolved slightly over the years to become mine. Is the goulash that I make the same as the goulash I found in a recipe book and the goulash my son makes? Theoretically they are all the same but they are probably all slightly different. We have all added our own signature to them. Can I say I have invented something completely original that is mine and mine alone? I don't think so. I like to think that I invented my beetroot and smoked trout quiche, but I bet if I looked, somebody else has done it before. Food is truly transitory - even more than graffiti but the style in which you cook is rather more enduring, because it's part of your personality. And the famous cooks and chefs, try to set it in stone, as it were, through cookbooks and television programs. Food is different to art in that the original dish is never exactly the same, even when cooked by the same person, and even those written recipes get altered as others use them.
So only the truly talented, and perhaps the middle talented have a signature that is memorable and which tells you who they are. Or do they? Do we really know everything there is to know about Van Gogh? Almost perhaps because he did write a lot of letters as did his brother. Mostly though we are just guessing.
For the rest of us, we might as well just make a handprint on the wall and leave it at that. "We were here" - and that will have to do. A moment in time when the handprint was made which will always be there. Present always. Or maybe our real signature is our children, and their children, and their children....
