A friend, author Ginger Strand, recently took this picture of a handprint I spray-painted on a wall in Manhattan. When I put it up a few years ago, the wall was blank, and she wanted me to know that graffiti has bloomed around it, along with this sweet little cluster of stars somebody put there (how I love you, whomever you are). On Thanksgiving, when in school we used to trace our hands onto construction paper and turn them into turkeys, I thought this would be a fitting post. The post originally went up in the winter of 2016.
Rounding a corner in Manhattan, I saw a handprint spray-painted on a wall. It was my hand. I had put it there last summer, my first and only piece of graffiti. It was nothing special, no artistic flair other than my five fingers. I had gloved my hand in plastic wrap and waved spray paint over it, creating a simple stencil out of part of my body, one of the oldest forms of enduring human expression.
The wall of the building had originally been a sprawling gallery of graffiti until, against the wishes of those living inside, the city whitewashed the whole thing. I was staying with one of the residents when the white-washing occurred. She invited me to go to the wall and plant a new seed. She was hoping graffiti artists would soon return and start the process again. A print was needed to kick off the next wave.
The oldest known rock art of a handprint was recently dated at 39,900 years ago in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The technique was more or less the same as mine. Wet pigment had been blown across and hand pressed against the rock to leave a negative impression.
Is there anything more indelible and primally human than the image of a handprint? The oldest print in the cave on Sulawesi is part of 12 prints painted at different times around images of animals. What was on their minds is hard to say, but it is a sentiment that is seen around the world. Other Paleolithic stencils of hands have been found throughout caves in Southern France, the oldest in Chauvet Cave dating to 31,000 years ago. El Castillo Cave in Spain has handprint stencils in red ochre dating to 37,300 years ago. From Indonesia to Europe, give or take 10,000 years, people were leaving the same expression.
I’ve seen this sort of imagery on rock faces and in sheltered alcoves across the American Southwest where dates range to the last few thousand years. Seeking shade in the summer in the desert of Southeast Utah, I crawled into a low rock overhang. On the ceiling were at least 40 handprint stencils made in the same fashion. These were adults and children, some fingers long and slender like those of piano players, some meaty like fieldworkers and masons. I lay on my back looking up at the arrays of personalities, each a different individual. I wondered if this was a tally of those who lived here, a telling of some agreement, a prehistoric constitution signed by the people of this canyon system, or if it was a celebratory gathering.
A study of caves in France found that the majority of the Paleolithic prints are arguable female. Women tend to have ring and index fingers of about the same length, whereas men’s ring fingers tend to be longer than their index fingers. This pattern revealed that 3/4 of the painted prints in the region came from women. The social differences between genders tens of thousands of years ago may have had nothing to do with divisions we see now. There is no way of knowing their intentions or why exactly prints came to be on these hidden walls, but the ultimate impetus may have been the same as mine. Beyond gender and culture, we keep doing the same thing, pressing our hands to some surface and leaving a mark as if to say, we were here.
The drive to leave this five-fingered print is not something I can consciously explain. We’ve been doing exactly this across vast geographies since the beginning of our own time. These are perhaps the marks of the first journalists, the first story-tellers that wanted more than words to pierce through time. I hadn’t placed it on the wall out of some homage to the past, but because I looked at the tools at my disposal and it seemed like the quickest and easiest way for an amateur to leave a mark without getting caught.
I’m not a fan of modern graffiti in the backcountry or natural settings, but in the city I feel as if I am in a labyrinthine cave. Under the green torch of a streetlight, I gave my story, a simple narrative, the cleanest, oldest story I could ever tell.
Top image Ginger Strand. Second image from the Nature article, Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia, October 2014.