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A little after eight this past Friday morning, I found myself rushing over to Firenze S.M.N. to catch the first of many trains, planes, and buses that would carry me all the way to the Belgian capital – Brussels. While Bruxelles is a city of neon light coupled with Art Nouveau, where the warming scent of golden frites or gaufres au chocolat (their famed waffles) seems to hang on every corner, I stumbled upon the same things and curiosities that always seem to really strike me in Florence.

This past week in Theme Sequence, especially through the mind-mapping activity, I began to discover I was returning to similar themes; however, not just themes related to my object of choice, but broader, representing those same ideas that pique my daily curiosity in the streets of Florence.

Firstly, the theme of “rules” and what qualifies a “right” or “wrong,” or if these can even be so concretely qualified or separated. That must sound pretty broad, but I almost think about it as related to social consensus and convention, like what a culture qualifies and we perpetuate as “truth.” I’m really interested in the questioning of this “truth” and the relationships between those who question and those who continue to perpetuate, how they view each other. As I suggested in my last post, it’s Florence’s sprawling graffiti that really pushes my thoughts in that direction.

Secondly, I’m really interested in exploring why people feel such a need to be documented, remembered, or acknowledged – whether it be through classical portraiture or a signature tag. In Brussels, it was really interesting to see a sort of elevated street art, so to speak, a kind of bridge between an amateur tag and the gallery setting. In one square, near the Musees des Beaux-Arts, there was a sort of constellation laid out on the cobblestone – a sea of little white lights secured into the stone. We’d walked through this square once earlier that day and hadn’t even noticed it. I’m pretty sure I walked right over it. Then, to come back, into the twilight, and see this ordinary square transformed was really ethereal. Nothing else had changed; the traffic continued to ebb and flow. It was almost like a rough pencil transfer of the sky unto the weathered pattern of the cobblestone. Yet, it still had this really anonymous feel. The artist had obviously taken time and thought to create the work, but, like another tag, it had been created and left to the public – in a public space, in a public area. This sort of public art is the same thing that fascinates me about window displays, the arrangement of reality for aesthetic enjoyment (like Homo Aestheticus). For the most part, street art, tags, window displays, and café display cases all go unnoticed, but they are so gorgeous to me. It’s a humble, anonymous art born from a desire to beautify, attract, or connect. I love finding little stickers or messages stuck in hidden places or modified street signs; it’s like a sign of life, of play. Even alone on an empty street, especially in the museum of modern Europe, with its Gothic arches or Neoclassical columns, someone was here. Someone’s been leaving pieces of themselves behind. Is it ego? Is it a cry, trying to reach out to anyone that will listen? Is it play, novelty? Does it matter?

Erin