End to End Burners
Muncie Appreciation Photo Digest || Late Winter 2023 Graffiti Edition
We’re freshly returned to the denuded low-rolling prairie of the East Central Indiana Rust Belt, and are marking the occasion with another semi-quarterly Muncie Appreciation Photo Digest. Re-entry can be difficult here, especially if I’m coming back from a beautiful wilderness-ish place such as the Red River Gorge Geological Area of east-central Kentucky where we spent a long weekend this March.
As I’ve written previously, one of the challenges of Indiana living is a lack of access to land away from built-up areas, but I’ve made up for that by focusing on the White River Greenway and the riparian corridor that cuts through downtown Muncie. My process is often to focus on small elements of an ecosystem – a storm drain culvert eddy, a heron hunting fish, a floating leaf – and expand that mundane microcosm into something maximal and transcendent by replicating, saturating, and/or slowing the footage down. For example, this video I made for “Eco,” from PJS’ extraordinary 2022 album Environments, shot entirely on location here in Muncie:
If there is a hierarchy to the binary thinking that my Zen practice rejects, perhaps the most basic distinction is between self and other, followed closely by the line separating humans from nature. As argued by Timothy Morton and many others, this is a misunderstanding if not an outright refusal to acknowledge our place as humans as part of nature. Morton’s Ecology Without Nature is one place to explore these ideas further, but it’s enough for me to return to familiar language from Lewis Richmond describing Buddhism’s traditional Three Marks of Existence:
Everything is connected. Nothing lasts. You are not alone.
This is one of my favorite ways of explaining the basics of Zen: If you accept those three things to be true, then compassion will arise. Or as Richmond puts it, “The fact that we all suffer means we are all in the same boat, and that’s what allows us to feel compassion.” And if we truly accept that we’re part of nature, as opposed to its observers, caretakers, or owners, our species might be better equipped to fight those intent on destroying the universe’s only known mammal-compatible ecosystem for financial gain.
On a significantly less significant level, that idea also means not editing human impact from documentation of the White River that has been my subject since moving to Muncie in 2019. This approach to human artifacts and impact fits with previous Muncie Appreciation Photo Digests: it is a non-hierarchical approach to aesthetics that suggests that we can benefit by increasing awareness of what is here now, regardless of whether or not it’s what we want to see. This applies to the “scraps of old growth” that persist in the denuded agricultural wasteland that surrounds Muncie; to the herons, turtles, and drifting garbage of the local riparian corridor; as well as the sometimes mediocre graffiti and street art that marks the bridges that cross that corridor on the White River Greenway.
[cw: crude sexual graffiti]
There is an unexpectedly consistent blend of psychedelia, scatological sexuality, and grim existentialism to the work of the anonymous taggers working the White River Greenway. The crude subject matter and style can initially distract from these through-lines: the mushrooms of “LOVEONEANOTHER” bear a striking resemblance to the fungi that sit off-center in “I 🤍 women,” and the choice to shift focus from the typical obsession with male sex organs reappears just a few short miles down the Greenway (see “Nothing to Attain: Muncie Appreciation Photo Digest for August 2022”). The whitewashed wall in the above photo is topped with rolls of razor wire, presumably to discourage after-hours use of the murky diving pond that sits in between this section of the Greenway and the river itself.
The crude style employed by the taggers is well-suited to their usual subject matter, but its complexity is more easily ascertained in works such as “el GATO,” where the same stylized text and disorienting, brutalist/cubist perspective is used to portray the cat’s paw as the feline reaches toward the viewer to swat at its gasping prey.
At the other end of the spectrum, with “dong bong” the unknown artist(s) do away with text entirely. Instead they’ve created a narrative with the simple line drawing of a scrotal water pipe, in diptych with a surprisingly detailed – yet still crude – visage. The weary melancholy expressed in this simple facial rendering suggests that the artist is already addressing the joyless reaction of non-plussed critics to their celebration of genitals as a hybridized silicate/organic vector for plant-mind communion.
The section of Greenway that extends south of the Craddock Wetlands Preserve is less heavily traveled, and it cuts through a section of Muncie where multiple unoccupied industrial buildings offer shelter for our city’s unhoused population. Where other walls are tagged with horny gossip and toilet humor, the language here turns toward the existential musings of outcast members of our community, giving opportunity for possibly unintended yet highly poetic intersections such as The hood allah’s paraphrasing of Ecclesiastes 1:18 and the uncredited tl;dr expression of impermanence.
This area is also where stencils and more refined expressions of graffiti start to crop up among the casual tags and territorial pissings. The cursive “greenway” text on this overgrown concrete block is one of my favorite pieces along the route, pictured at the top of this post, and shown here in flood following a late winter storm.
The first stencil we encountered this winter appears to be a portrayal of Flavor Flav, with his signature clock pendant transformed into an Avengers logo? Here at Cosmic Chambo Studio we’re more familiar with the Public Enemy Expanded Universe, so not sure what to make of this crossover event.
We are also fans of the Pee Wee Expanded Universe, and were thus delighted to find this vernacular shrine to Jambi – immediately recognizable to acolytes such as we – radiating benevolence from crumbling freight train infrastructure just south of the Kitselman Bridge.
The most exciting street art encounters of the our Winter 2023 Greenway walks are all hidden beneath the pedestrian, motor vehicle, and train bridges near the Kitselman Trailhead. Unlike the aggressive placements favored by taggers, these botanical paintings are only visible to people clambering around in the more camouflaged areas where the artist(s) might’ve been able to spend more time, and possibly during daylight hours. They’re presented here without much further comment, other than I would like to say how much I love it when illustrations are denoted as “juicy” with little droplets squirting off their surfaces.
As a fitting coda, the final botanical painting that we found was the most difficult to observe, hidden away in the understructure of a bridge in such a way that leaves it submerged under floodwaters following a storm. Like “el GATO,” it is a quiet departure from the rest of the artist(s)’ catalogue, and plays with similarly disorienting perspective, as a paw with three detailed claws emerges from beneath the inner layers of a wild onion.
It is a pleasure and a privilege to share these images with you, and to celebrate the mundane, everyday experiences of human expression as part of the interconnected mesh of life – mammal, fish, reptile, avian, fungal, botanical, etc – that makes this unremarkable riparian corridor a quiet refuge in these Armagideon Times. (Speaking of which, our annual “Equanimity in Armagideon” series of reggae-forward broadcasts returns to ID Music this week). We would also like to express sincere gratitude to the street artists for their contributions to this landscape, with the notable exception of whoever left the slurs and partial rendering of a Confederate Flag underneath the Walnut Street bridge.
blessing up and blessing down,
DC
Previous Muncie Appreciation Photo Digests:
Scraps of Old Growth: November 2022
Nothing to Attain: August 2022
Pleasant Mellowness: August 2021
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Everything is connected. Nothing lasts. You are not alone.
This thought will occupy my mind for some time.
The most inspiring collage of words and images and sounds that I’ve encountered in a while. Thank u Baba. Looking forward to the forthcoming shared Armageddeon Time Rxpanded Universe effervescences. ॐ ♥︎