{"id":10115,"date":"2023-09-29T15:52:14","date_gmt":"2023-09-29T13:52:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spazioc21.com\/liquid-crystal-moses-taps\/liquid-crystal-moses-taps-presentation\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T22:35:55","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T20:35:55","slug":"presentation","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.spazioc21.com\/en\/liquid-crystal-moses-taps\/presentation\/","title":{"rendered":"LIQUID CRYSTAL – Moses & Taps – presentation"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row full_width=”stretch_row” el_class=”riga”][vc_column width=”1\/4″ offset=”vc_hidden-sm vc_hidden-xs”][vc_widget_sidebar sidebar_id=”cs-36″][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”2\/4″][vc_empty_space height=”85px”][vc_column_text]\/ PRESENTATION<\/strong>[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

LIQUID CRYSTAL
\nMoses & Taps \u2122<\/h2>\n

[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Text by Vittorio Parisi[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]OFF THE GRID
\nThe story of graffiti is tied hand in glove with the image of a broken window.
\nIt has been so at least since 1982, when American sociologists James Wilson and George Kelling formulated and diffused the theory according to which the visible signs of disorder and negligence \u2013 a broken window or a piece of graffiti for ex.\u2013 inevitably lead to the encouragement of antisocial behaviour if not even real crimes, because signs of a lack of order and an absence of laws.
\nWidely disputed today \u2013 though still endorsed by certain urban decorum associations and wannabe-sheriff administrators \u2013 the broken window<\/em> theory inspired one of the most scathing and violent campaign against graffiti; endorsed in 1990 by then New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and known as zero tolerance, it put an end to the golden age of New York writings of the likes of Dondi White and Phase2, Lady Pink and Rammellzee.
\nIf graffiti today continues to be considered as a sort of ph\u00e1rmakon<\/em> \u2013 a poison or an antidote at the same time, depending on the point of view \u2013 when in conversation with the principle of urban decorum, we owe it too and above all to this image. But what if we were to loosen that glove and this narrative for once, and think of a new metaphor able to tell us something more, something new, about the journey of the phenomenon after<\/em> New York?
\nAmong the artists-vandals who are absolute protagonists of that after<\/em>, MOSES & TAPS\u2122 take a spot like very few others; in fact, they embody the point of no return after which the writing, retrospectively observing its own story, has started to vandalise itself. Those familiar with the journey of the Hamburg duo know that it isn!t a paradox, but an actual plan, almost a manifest that goes through impossible challenges and dadaist violations of writing very own rules.
\nThinking of the INTERNATIONAL TOPSPRAYER\u2122 project, that since 2008 saw MOSES & TAPS\u2122 paint a thousand trains in a thousand days swapping their respective tags, or again the SPLASH\u2122 project, begun in 2010, in which their respective tags completely dissolved through a perforation of the spray can that turned them into big abstract stains.
\nIt is natural to ask if it isn\u2019t artists like MOSES & TAPS\u2122 who might suggest a new image that can better represent what writing is today, as well as everything it has already been and \u2013 perhaps \u2013 will always be.
\nThis exhibition seems to provide us food for thought: what if the broken window were to make way for a broken screen? It does so right from its title, Liquid Crystal<\/em>, but even more so from the artworks on display: the SPLASH\u2122 series of irregular coloured splashes, here \ufb01nd themselves superimposed or juxtaposed to lattice and regular pattern borrowed from digital typographies, composing paintings aiming to emulate the mechanism of a broken or malfunctioning LCD.
\nIn a liquid crystal display, these move between two transparent layers of electrodes that, disciplined by a grid, determine the image that will appear on the screen. When this breaks, the liquid crystals \ufb02ood the grid and end up generating unexpected and cryptic shapes. Kind of what happens with the graffiti: they too, in their own way, \ufb02ood that dense lattice of written and unwritten rules of urban common living, symbolically and aesthetically invading spaces, and generating signs \u2013 the tags \u2013 at times so cryptic, they appear illegible.
\nBut this is MOSES & TAPS\u2122 authentic mise en abyme<\/em> and, once again, it aims at breaking a second layer of written and unwritten rules: those of writing itself, according to which it is not possible to disregard the lettering and its supremacy. Once that constraint is broken, all that remains to the writer is to experiment the invasion of pure form.
\nIf the story of graffiti has for a long time been the story of broken windows, now we know that it isn\u2019t any less a story of broken screens. It is saturated with displays, literally: from those who crowd train stations since the Seventies, the smartphones that today enable us to photograph graffiti and to daily scroll through hundreds of images, liquid crystal screens are a kind of McGuffin, and object that, though it appears to be accessory, accompanies and transforms the plot of this movie that has been rolling for \ufb01fty years.
\nAfter all, speaking of \ufb01lm isn\u2019t inappropriate: for the seventh art too, the screen today has more and more the con\ufb01guration of a display rather than that of the \u00e9cran-fen\u00e9tre<\/em> Andr\u00e9 Bazin borrowed from Leon Battista Alberti\u2019s picture as \u2018an open window onto the world\u2019. If the latter allowed the director to open, like a painter, a breach in reality, creating another meant to at least ideally last forever, the display is a space in which the images, \ufb01xed or in movement, result ephemeral – think of the use of glitch and pop-up in the so-called screenlife movies<\/em>.
\nThe ever more ephemeral nature of images is an inalienable part of our daily lives. They tell less and function more and more as simple information, whose duration is limited in time: this principle applies for the images that scroll frantically on our smartphones screens, the images that display train times, or the images the writer imprint on the surface of that train or wall. If writing is to take its rightful place in the history of painting, it is precisely because it has overturned the albertian<\/em> principle more than any other pictorial practice germinated in the post-modernist chaos. In this chaos, buildings \u2013 from Time Square to Asian megalopolis \u2013 no longer have windows but screens and neon signs, and painting can no longer give itself as window but display, meaning a space for \ufb02uctuation and endless manipulation.
\nOn trains as much as on canvas, MOSES & TAPS\u2122 keep embodying more than anyone else this stage at which writing is being manipulated and lets itself be so, derides itself and vandalises itself. In other words, it becomes vertiginously aware of itself and of its story only to then break its own beliefs, escape its own laces, and, because of this, build its only possible way out of it in order to remain true to itself and together a wholly vandalistic and wholly pictorial practice. [\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space height=”64px”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n