Art of the remix: Interpreting classroom graffiti as contemporary art

A student who scrawled "math sucks" on a desk or the wall of a study area at the University Of Chicago probably wasn't thinking about artistic legacy. But in a post-Damien Hirst/James Franco-on-General Hospital world, anything can be defined as art, and a new book—as well as a contest associated with it—seeks to bring "math sucks" or "penis... hahaha" to the masses. Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur: Confessions Of The University Of Chicago, by U of C Emerging Technologies coordinator Quinn Dombrowski, is a collection of photographs taken from 2007 to October 2009 of more than 700 scrawled pieces of graffiti. To make the book more interactive for a 2009 audience, she's holding a remix contest.

To enter, all you need to do is take one of the trivial thoughts immortalized in pencil on the wall of a University of Chicago library and create "something nifty" with it, in any medium. The winning entrant will receive his or her favorite piece of graffiti on a T-shirt (runners-up only get coffee mugs). All of which sounds fun because, hey, free T-shirt. The contest ends Dec. 20, and since The A.V. Club is feeling arty, we cherry-picked a couple selections and offer our own interpretation to help get your creative juices flowing.

Go to Italy. Be a cobbler.

This screams "dynamic solo stage performance." We envision this one as a one-person show in which a middle-aged actor, like a James Gandolfini type, recounts the series of events that led him to leave behind his boring life as an undergrad farting through life at an unnamed university and pursuing a path of adventure, romance, crippling despair, and—ultimately—redemption as he repairs the shoes of the people of Palermo.

This is not Josh's desk anymore! Mwahahahaha

In order to stay true to the spirit of this piece, an artist needs to be keenly aware of the exclamation point at the end of the declarative sentence—if you've been working on a mournful, soul-searching ballad about how the desk that once belonged to Josh now belongs to someone else, tuck the melody away for future reference and move on. Instead, we recommend taking it in a more upbeat direction—the staccato rhythm of the "mwahahahaha" could form the basis of a pretty killer hip-hop track about how Josh's desk now belongs to the MC. It'd be like Jay-Z's "Run This Town," only sassier and more intensely personal.

Laura = MAD tired + hungry 

The combination of emotions experienced by Laura in this piece is familiar to most students, but it's the floating "MAD" hanging above "tired + hungry" that leads us to believe that this is graffiti whose meaning can best be conveyed via the medium of interpretive dance. Spatial relations are at the core of all movement-based performance, and the tension between the caps-locked anger and the lowercase physical sensations inherent in Laura's equation requires at least three dancers—an overpowering Mad, along with the tandem of Tired and Hungry, all seeking to co-exist within the performance space (Laura).

The U of C is great—Yeah!—No.

Few of the images in Dombrowski's collection call out for a giant contemporary art-style interpretation like this collaborative piece of graffiti created by an artist who attempted to catch his peers in an unguarded private moment and relate their true feelings about their center of learning via hash mark. The obvious disdain for the institution evident in both the "yeah!" and "no" responses—after all, both of them cavalierly deface the walls—suggests unleashing your inner Andres Serrano. We'd recommend taking a pair of milk jugs labeled after the options in the anonymous student's survey and asking current University Of Chicago students to cast their votes by peeing in the jug that best reflects their opinion of their school.

AR hearts ML

The young love apparent in ML's broad smile becomes slightly tragic when put next to the sharp, forced smile on the face of AR, and it's the sort of thing that can probably best be explored via a heartbreakingly simple, stick figure-populated graphic novel. The plot can be clearly discerned after even a casual glance at the image—ML, a young lesbian enjoying the first blush of true love while at the university, falls hard for AR, whose flirtation with the same sex is merely an undergraduate's first foray into determining her burgeoning sexual identity.