To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  DYING IS A PART OF STREET ART. Vhils, Portugal’s most renowned graffiti artist as well as an artist of international repute, splits his time between the quiet neighborhoods of Lisbon and the hectic streets of Hong Kong. “Each city has its walls; each wall has its own layers, its own life. The process of renewal and decay is faster over there than here, but that’s precisely what inspires me.” We are in his studio, a huge abandoned warehouse that he refurbished in the town of Barreiro, on the banks of the Tagus overlooking Lisbon. Soon he will go to a different body of water, Kowloon Bay in Hong Kong. “There’s more in common than one might expect,” he asserts.

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  TALENT DRAWS ITS INSPIRATION FROM THE STREETS. Alexandre Farto, Vhils, age twenty-nine, continues to be dazzled by the streets where he became an artist: the chaos of the big city, with all its human depredation and its endless cycle of production and destruction. He is not a critic of consumerism or an apostle of recycling, but rather an observer of the ceaseless, hectic, fleeting life of cities. His huge portraits, pockmarked by the imperfections of the walls on which he paints them, express perplexity more than suffering or grief. They are calm faces. I am here to stay, they seem to say. You, most likely, are not.

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  TELL ME IF IT WAS A DREAM. “Public spaces make the work more human. It doesn’t bother me that it’s ephemeral. I live implicitly with that fact from the moment the work is born.” This summer, in just a few days, the pickax destroyed two of his most emblematic works in Lisbon. One of the derelict walls on which they were painted was needed for a private hospital. A dock for cruise ships is being built where the other one stood. Vhils is unfazed. “I’m not worried about copyright or about the destruction of my work. Destruction is part of creation. People sometimes rip out pieces of the walls where I do my work. But it’s just to take them home, no one has tried to sell one so far.”

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  WHERE IT ALL BEGAN. Vhils grew up on the other side of the Tagus, in Lisbon’s anarchic suburbs of Seixal, Barreiro, and Almada, where as a teenager he would make his graffiti paintings as quickly as possible before the cops arrived. A world that all big cities have in common, including Hong Kong. No matter how far apart or how ethnically different two cities may be, in the end there is always soul and cement. That is why he set up his second studio in a Chinese city that at times resembles London and at times Beijing. He spends about half the year there, and this past spring the HOCA Foundation hosted the largest ever retrospective of his work. It was shown not only on the walls of the museum but also on subway cars and streetcars, which were used as ephemeral moving platforms for his work.

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  THEY GLOW IN THE DARK. After experimenting with cement, acids, screen printing, and even polyethylene, Vhils came to embrace neon in Asia. “It came from a similar influence. The city, the big signs on the bay. It’s an urban advertising technique at risk of extinction. And it doesn’t mean I’m giving up on any other materials. My work is a bit anarchic; I choose as I go, I don’t have to quit one material to take up another.” In Hong Kong, the biggest show in town is the lighting of the neon signs at dusk over Kowloon Bay. It looks like Blade Runner, with Batman directing traffic down below, beneath those immense lights that shine as if only for themselves, conveying a sense of sheer mass. “In Hong Kong I felt compelled to use neon. It wasn’t easy, since there are barely any craftsmen left to teach you how it’s done.”

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  ALWAYS WITH YOU, WHEREVER YOU GO. Vhils takes in everything he sees on the street but he is also influenced by the films of Wong Kar-wai, the paintings of Cabrita Reis, or the latest hip-hop. He always perceives analogies between the deconstruction of sound and image, and has even deconstructed a train car into slices. Nearly fifty people have worked on the large exhibit in Hong Kong, which will travel to Shanghai, Rome, Cincinnati, and Rio de Janeiro. Meanwhile, through art galleries in London, Berlin, and Beijing, his work is sold all over the world. Alexandre Farto, Vhils, has become, according to various international publications, one of the most influential artists alive today. But he has a skeptical view of it all. “I never wanted to be anyone,” he says. “Just going across the Tagus was a big deal for me.”

  THE PULSE OF THE FUTURE IS STRONGER THAN EVER. Every surface must be entirely covered. Every bit of open space, every inch, like the walls of the Alhambra covered in Arabic lettering and glazed tiles, or like a body covered in tattoos. Messages can be inscribed absolutely everywhere: on a milk carton, on the postman’s sack, on the back of a seat in a taxi, an ATM screen, a streetlight, the back of a traffic sign, the side of a bridge across the highway that goes to the airport. At the arrivals terminal, people wait in front of large automatic doors that are entirely covered by an advertisement for a line of cruises. The whole side of the bus passing next to you is painted front-to-back in the bright green color of a Heineken bottle. Its windows swim in a frothy, golden sea of beer. The word Heineken is printed many times on both sides. Time is occupied as thoroughly as space. The voices on the radio ads are loud and very fast. The radio hosts speak hurriedly as well, as if they caught it from the advertisements and were now eager to rush to the next commercial break. The same announcer who a moment ago was informing listeners of something that actually happened proceeds without changing her tone of voice to what seems like a news item but is in fact an advertisement.

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  EVERY MINUTE COUNTS TO MAKE SURE YOU WIN. The same ads in the same voices that seem unnatural or dubbed are broadcast simultaneously on every station. The same voices of presenters, celebrities, politicians being ceaselessly interviewed. The same voices everywhere, in a kitchen, in the wireless earbuds of an elated and exhausted man at the gym, in a psychiatrist’s waiting room, all through the day, in a taxi driving you from the airport into the city at dawn after a long night of travel, in the high cabin of a trailer truck, in a car with a nervous woman and her children in the middle of a traffic jam, in the nurses’ room in a cancer ward, in the ears of a cleaning woman or of an employee pretending to work at a computer, in a sacristy, inside a convent, in each of the taxicabs that are driving at this very moment through Madrid, often blasting the radio so loudly that its passengers are unable to have a conversation. Enthusiastic voices, hysterical voices, tempting, familiar, urgent, complicit, confidential, impatient voices urging you to act as soon as possible, to come to a sale, just two more days, to take advantage of this offer now, become a millionaire, have it all, voices that become even more pressing when they relay their catchphrase in a bastardized English, “people in progress,” “power to you,” “gourmet your experience.”

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  EXPERIENCE YOUR FAVORITE MOVIES FROM THE INSIDE. To occupy space. To flood it. To exhaust it. I, too, have an instinct to fill every page of every notebook. A blank sheet of paper is as tempting to me as a freshly painted wall to a teenager with a spray can or as a patch of open skin to a tattoo artist. Once I start a notebook it must be filled to the last page. To leave it halfway and start another is a failure, a weakness of will, or worse, a loss in the urge to create. In exile, in growing poverty, Walter Benjamin would write in a smaller and smaller hand to make the most of every piece of paper. He wrote on used envelopes, on the back of handbills or movie programs, on random scraps of paper that he kept in his pockets for the moment when he felt the urge to jot something down, even if he was increasingly bereft of everything, of time, of money, watching in Paris as the great catastrophe approached like a slow-moving tsunami until it suddenly sped up, slow motion giving way to the frantic sequence of a silent film while he kept writing at his desk in the Bibliothèque Nationale, on the back of a lending card with his beloved fountain pen, the one with the extra-fine nib.

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  YOUR ULTIMATE A350 EXPERIENCE. Baudelaire says that he suffers from “l’horreur des affiches.” Before 1860 most advertising bills were relatively small and consisted primarily of words. In 1861 the art of lithography is perfected, making it possible to pri
nt posters more than six feet tall and displaying images in several colors. Baudelaire watches in anger as posters and bills spread through the city covering every wall, from the chimney tops to the very ground, as one witness relates. An encroaching blight of slogans and gaudy pictures of figures in motion: women dancing with their legs in the air, acrobats, huge bottles of liquor, galloping horses, locomotives, steamships, the huge face of a laughing clown. Around 1880 the first ordinances are imposed to limit the surging flood. Entire buildings are made off-limits. Special columns are set up on the street where advertisements can be posted. As a child, Marcel Proust would stand in front of one of these columns gazing ecstatically at a playbill for a performance by Sarah Bernhardt.

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  JOIN THE NEW DIMENSION. The city is tattooed in words: its bridges, its highway embankments, every bit of space has been inscribed. The city is submerged in a flood of simultaneous words as in a vast cloud of pollution. All the words that people whisper, yell, say to each other, mutter to themselves, speak into their cell phones to be scattered through the air in ceaseless bursts of electromagnetic radiation. Over rooftops and terraces, a constantly expanding array of relay towers that no one can see will send its signals to orbiting satellites and then all over the Earth. The hive of human voices down below merges with a skein of voices wrapping itself around the planet. Radio stations send their advertisements and their prattling, swindling, phony voices into every taxi in the city, filling it with toxic words. Words and voices pop up frantically on cell phone screens. In bars and restaurants, inaudible words flow in streams of subtitles beneath a talking head on a giant TV. The city is a body tattooed even to its inmost folds, the root of each hair, the ear canal. The skull is shaved so the tattoo can spread further. Even the highest floors of a recently abandoned building are covered in graffiti. Screens are installed on every street so there can be more moving images and words, and not a single place be left where the eye can turn without finding an advertisement. One day, electronic panels will identify you on the street and instantly project an advertisement that is custom-made for you.

  THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD IS BACK. Fat, destitute, ungainly, wearing rouge to conceal his eczema, Oscar Wilde shuffles down the boulevards of Paris and the narrow streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, home to the cheap hotels where he finds lodging. When he asks for a room he uses the same name that now appears on his visiting card, Sebastian Melmoth. When he removes a glove to shake someone’s hand or to offer his card, his own hands are big and coarse, bright red, like those of a manual worker or a stevedore. He is the Shadow, the Invisible Man, an apocryphal descendant of John Melmoth, a character in a gothic novel who lives as a wandering outcast for centuries, turning up now and then in surprising and even impossible places, the mountains near Valencia on a stormy night, a dungeon of the Inquisition, the cell of a man condemned to death, the bedroom of an agonizing man. The huge, wavering shadow of Oscar Wilde is cast on a wall by gaslight as he goes back to his hotel, drunk on absinthe and muttering to himself. When he meets an old acquaintance, he is, like Melmoth, mistaken for an apparition or a revenant. Some cross to the opposite sidewalk when they spot him in the distance, or simply avert their eyes and pass by as if he were invisible. Melmoth-Wilde is a ruined Golem, bloated with alcohol, a mop of dirty hair above his loose and jowly face. His steps are crooked and he walks in an insalubrious fog, reeking of alcohol and perhaps of jail. He is back in Paris after an absence of a few years but he might as well have returned from the past century or from another world. When he was here last he was a celebrity. His plays were staged in the best theaters and he was flattered and praised wherever he went. Now he is an outcast, more dead than alive. He keeps the hours of a vampire, sleeping all day and going out as it grows dark. One night someone saw him sitting at a table in the rain when the waiters had already rolled up the awning and turned off the lights in the café. An old friend, a woman, turned a corner and ran into him, the slow bulk of his body filling up the narrow sidewalk. She greeted him with pity, with sadness. He reached out a hand and asked her for some change.

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  LEARN TO READ YOUR BODY. In space, though not in time, Walter Benjamin and Oscar Wilde cross paths. They walk down the same streets and frequent some of the same cafés. Wilde may have stayed at one of the same seedy hotels for dubious characters where Benjamin now lodges. Benjamin, too, is a foreigner, a survivor from a vanished world to which he can never return. He has no money and his nationality is uncertain. He goes from one government office to another, obtaining and presenting documents that Wilde would not have known, passports, visas, temporary residence permits, photographic identity cards, documents that are hard to obtain and that can be revoked at any moment. Documents he must carry on his person at all times, to produce immediately should a policeman ask—he, who loses everything, whose hands are clumsy, who walks a great deal but looks, when he is tired, like a plodding turtle, according to the description of a woman he was in love with. He always carries with him a black leather satchel filled with all sorts of things: books, papers, antique toys.

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  YOU ONLY HAVE TO CLOSE YOUR EYES. In time, but not in space, Walter Benjamin crosses paths with Fernando Pessoa, restless wanderer of a city that Benjamin hoped to reach but never did, Lisbon, his intended port of transit in the attempt to flee to the United States. Some of his friends and acquaintances had passed through Lisbon and may have sent him letters while there. The world was coming to an end but the post office continued to work just fine. Pessoa walks through his city at exactly the same time as Benjamin through Paris. Both are nearsighted, wear round glasses, dress with a meticulous if rather run-down formality, and have an interest in graphology. Both carry at all times a big black satchel. Wilde had tried to hide under a false name. Benjamin published articles under a pseudonym when his name was proscribed in the German press. Pessoa conceals or multiplies himself through his various fictional identities. His doubles or his shadows walk the streets of the Baixa, the banks of the Tagus, the hills of the Chiado and the Bairro Alto. In photographs, Pessoa and Benjamin greatly resemble each other, as if they were doubles or what Pessoa himself called heteronyms. Pessoa reads Melville and Walt Whitman and is carried away in drunken flights of poetic creation. As a teenager, he went on the only great trip of his life, from Cape Town to Lisbon. Baudelaire, too, had a single, great, defining trip that took him down the Atlantic and part of the Indian Ocean to the island of Mauritius. He always lied and said he had reached India, where he claimed to have hunted tigers from the back of an elephant.

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  RIGHT WHERE IT SEEMS THERE’S NOTHING TO BE FOUND. Forgotten and discredited after the failure of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville works in an obscure post at the New York Custom House, the kind of position Poe unsuccessfully tried to obtain to escape poverty. Each morning at exactly the same time, with disciplined sadness, Melville follows the same path through lower Manhattan and up along the Hudson to get to work. Fernando Pessoa and Bernardo Soares, his heteronym or double, also gaze at a river on their daily walks to work, the Tagus. Melville dreams up Bartleby the scrivener, Pessoa the accounting clerk Bernardo Soares. Both sit at their desks writing with meticulous devotion, leaning over thick ledgers and office manuals. Bartleby lights a candle when it grows dark, Bernardo Soares turns on a light bulb. Bartleby’s office overlooks an inner courtyard while Soares’s looks out on the attics and the upper stories of the buildings on the Rua dos Douradores.

  CHANGE YOUR EYE COLOR. Slim, nearsighted, formal, and disheveled, James Joyce walks through the streets of Trieste and is forever late to his next English lesson. He walks as briskly through Trieste as Pessoa walks through Lisbon in those photographs where he is hurrying past the window of the Bertrand bookstore. Perhaps the reason for Pessoa’s haste is not that he has to be somewhere, but simply that he’d prefer to elude the wandering photographer who earns a living by snapping portraits of people on the street and trying to sell them their picture.
There is a kind of family resemblance between Joyce and Pessoa in their photographs: the glasses, the mustache, a dignified bowtie that is always askew, a satchel or briefcase crammed with papers and books. Engrossed, barely able to see where they’re going, and sometimes quite drunk, they walk through seaside cities that are also mysteriously similar. Some of Lisbon’s official buildings have a kind of crumbling Austro-Hungarian grandeur. What the Praça do Comércio most resembles is the Piazza Unità in Trieste; both are monumental spaces open to the sea. Joyce and Pessoa are both polyglots in love with a language that is not their own. Joyce and Benjamin cross paths in Paris as the German invasion and the great European collapse approach, stateless fugitives living precariously from day to day. Both are so nearsighted that they would probably fail to recognize each other if they ever met. Joyce, in Trieste and in Paris, is always really walking through Dublin in his mind, just as Benjamin perhaps is walking through Berlin. Neither one will ever return to his native city. At the very same time, Virginia Woolf is walking through London or down an English country path near her house, imagining as she wavers between reason and madness that the Germans are about to invade. She wears simple English shoes and her hair is dripping with rain. She pokes the tip of her cane into the muddy path before her. There is a river nearby. Its sound is like an invitation.