Detroit Research Volume 1

69
On another wall, beneath a hand-lettered and illustrated sign on an appliance store wall are the
words “STOVES & FRIGIRATORS” with a “frigirator” illustrated in two-point perspective and a
clothes dryer (not a stove!) also illustrated. In response to this benign domesticity are the freehand,
spray-painted words “EAT ME.” Short, succinct, and brilliantly dark, this is a response that
is more devastating than the usual overblown, spray painted gang tag or egoistic marking that
we see in most graffi ti.
Bad Graffi ti — from Black Dog Publishing of London, a press that features “art, architecture,
design, history, photography, theory and things, and that celebrates the layered processes of
cultural production” — is a felicitous publication for both Black Dog and Scott Hocking. It suggests
the nuanced engagement that he has with his work and the broad range of his vision. If
the whole fraying fabric of the city is Hocking’s studio and his process is this chance-driven, drift
through the palimpsests of the derelict, then he is as much grammarian as artist, archaeologist
as photographer, scholar as monk, and perhaps a good deal of each. Bad Graffiti is way smarter
than the good graffi ti they call art.
-Glen Mannisto
Image courtesy of William Henry Jackson