The Delinquents
The Delinquents Part 2 (Destroy All Signs) from rage bank on Vimeo.
One minute excerpt from The Delinquents part 2 'Destroy All Signs' Duration 3.40 mins 2011Part 2 Destroy All Signs
Influenced by the essay “KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs” in Symbolic Exchange and Death by Jean Baudrillard, the video ‘Destroy All Signs’ cut ups and reconfigures footage of structural and dividing elements and urban signage such as South Bronx tenenment buildings, the South Bronx Express Way, Manhattan skyscrapers, and Subway maps just as graffiti reconfigured the entire New York transit system to symbolically traverse class division on trains that carried ghetto identities throughout the city defeating the prevailing delineated order in “a violent onslaught’’ reminiscent of the riots and looting of the 1960’s and 70’s. Screens continually implode and collapse during the performance/ filming process accelerating through various media depictions, starting with sampled documentation from the 1970’s and 80’s (Stations of the Elevated by Manfred Kirchheimer, Style Wars by Tony Silver) through to the mainstream film Beat Street and into Getting Up, the computer game by fashion designer Mark Ekko. As the last quote suggests New york Graffiti's strength lay in its absence of readable content, alien to the system it had briefly overrun - It was an aggressive virus spread by New Yorks abandoned urban youth, a defiant challenge to the existing order of signs.