American Graffiti E-Book

Margo Thompson

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 325

Beschreibung

American Graffiti

Leseprobe

Author: Margo Thompson

Layout:

Baseline Co. Ltd,

61A-63A Vo Van Tan Street

4th Floor, District 3, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

© Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

© Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA

© A-One

© Cey Adams

© Blade

© Henry Chalfant

© ChrisDazeEllis

© CRASH

© DASH

© DEZ

© DONDI, Estate of Dondi White

© Eric Drooker

© Evil 136

© The Famous Artists

© All images created by Lin “QUIK” Felton; used with express permission only

© Futura 2000

© ‘Gothic futurism,’ rocks the galaxy!!!

© Jenny Holzer

© Lady Pink

© Lask

© Mitch 77

© NOC 167

© Phase 2

© Lee Quinones

© Kenny Scharf

© SEEN

© Taki 183

© TATS CRU

© Toxic

© West One

© Andrew “Zephyr” Witten

All right reserved.

No parts of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to etablish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-78310-704-9

Margo Thompson

Contents

Introduction

Authenticity

Primitivism

The Avant-Garde

Acknowledgments

Subway Writers

Writing Culture: Social Networks and the Transmission of Skills

Themes

Lettering and Style

Evaluating Quality

BLADE

RAMMELLZEE

NOC 167

QUIK and SEEN

DONDI, FUTURA 2000, ZEPHYR, and LEE

DONDI

FUTURA 2000

ZEPHYR

Graffiti 1980

LEE

LEE and FAB FIVE FREDDY at Galleria la Medusa

FAB FIVE FREDDY

Fashion Moda

CRASH

DAZE

LADY PINK

Graffiti Art: Success for America

Graffiti Art and the East Village  Art Scene, 1980-1981

The Times Square Show

Events: Fashion Moda at the New Museum

‘The Fire Down Below’

New York/New Wave

The Lower Manhattan Drawing Show

Beyond Words: Graffiti-Based, -Rooted, and -Inspired Work

Graphiti Productions and Graffiti: Aboveground

The Fun Gallery Opens

‘The Radiant Child’

Graffiti in Galleries

Solo Shows at the Fun Gallery and 51X

Graffiti Art at Fashion Moda

Graffiti Art and the East Village Phenomenon

Graffiti Art in Art in America and Art News

Basquiat’s Solo Show at Fun Gallery

The Pledge of Allegiance

Hubert and Dolores Neumann

Post-Graffiti

Graffiti After Post-Graffiti

Graffiti Art, 1984-1988

Graffiti Artists’ Evaluation of Their Work at Mid-Decade

Basquiat, Haring and Scharf after Post-Graffiti

The East Village: A Status Report

The Contemporary Art Hype

The End of the East Village

American Graffiti in Europe

Graffiti in European Galleries and Museums

Bibliography

Index

EVIL 136, Tag, date unknown.

Aerosol paint on brick wall.NewYork.

MITCH 77, Whole car tag, 1981.

Aerosol paint on subway car.NewYork.

Introduction

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf are graffiti artists according to art historians and critics, and so are the painters, later featured in galleries, who began their careers ‘writing’ on or ‘tagging’ New York City subway cars.[1]

The graffiti art movement began with shows at Fashion Moda, the Fun Gallery, the Mudd Club, and other exhibition spaces that opened in the early 1980s, and expanded into the established galleries of SoHo, 57th Street, and the Basel art fair. It ended just a few years later when critics, dealers, and collectors turned their attention to new trends. In the decades since graffiti art’s heyday, Basquiat has had retrospective exhibitions, a foundation was established devoted to Haring’s legacy, and Scharf continues to test the boundaries between high art and popular culture. However, subway writers on the whole have not received sustained attention from art historians and critics of art of the 1980s. Considering them as a distinct group of graffiti artists who gave the movement its name and lent it ‘street cred’, we can learn something about the way the New York art market of the 1980s assimilated a subcultural, vernacular art form produced for the most part by racial and ethnic minorities and the terms on which it was accepted.

Haring developed a reputation for drawing cartoonish figures in subway stations. Scharf actually painted on a subway car or two with spray paint, after meeting some writers. Both men acknowledged, though, that they came to graffiti art ‘crossing over in the other direction’, as Haring said, from writers who began their careers by tagging trains and public walls and later translated their designs to permanent surfaces.[2] They both studied at the School for Visual Arts in New York, and they shared a studio. Haring had arrived in the city from the hinterlands of Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and Scharf came from Los Angeles. They were intrigued enough–Scharf said he was ‘hypnotized’–by the spontaneous art they encountered on the sides of subway cars to try their hands at similar public displays.[3] Basquiat, by contrast, came to the New York art world from the same direction as subway writers: moving from public spaces to commercial ones. He had earned a certain reputation writing gnomic phrases under the name of SAMO in 1979. SAMO was ubiquitous in some neighbourhoods in lower Manhattan, especially near art galleries.

There are a number of reasons why subway writers have not received the serious attention their more famous peers have enjoyed. For one, the ‘pieces’ on which their careers were founded, the whole-car compositions that captured the public’s attention–both positive and negative–have all been destroyed. Another reason these artists are often overlooked is graffiti’s strong association with hip-hop culture, which ties it to the mass market, not high art. As interest in graffiti art waned, a number of former writers developed careers as graphic artists while Basquiat, Haring and Scharf managed to transcend their paintings’ allusions to the mass media and achieve recognition as fine artists. These distinct career trajectories were set early, as a consequence of the language critics used to analyse graffiti art: Basquiat, Haring and Scharf were awarded an art historical lineage, while subway writers rarely were. This is not to say that subway writers did not receive positive notices in reputable art magazines—they did. But their paintings remained strange and exotic even to their fans: as one writer, DAZE put it, ‘Graffiti was this language that they wanted to get to know on a superficial level, but they didn’t want to be able to speak it fluently’.[4] This book seeks to correct that perspective, by taking seriously the writers’ ambitions and achievements.

STAR III and various artists, Tags, date unknown.

Aerosol paint on subway car.NewYork.

One history of graffiti art would trace it back to the cave paintings of Lascaux, by way of Roman latrinalia, Kilroy, and similar acts of anonymous mark-making. The aesthetic this genealogy suggests, of letters and pictures urgently scratched onto public walls, connects with some mid-twentieth century painters whose brushwork resembles calligraphy, like Cy Twombly, or whose figures seem crude and untutored, like Jean Dubuffet. The palimpsest that graffiti builds up over time brings to mind Robert Rauschenberg, whose accretions of images from mass culture are rich and layered. Yet graffiti art derived from subway writing was in fact innocent of these influences, at least until the artists discovered them and, in Basquiat’s case, consciously appropriated them. Art historian Jack Stewart, in the first scholarly study of subway writing, argues persuasively that the tags and pieces that first appeared in New York City between 1970 and 1978 were a unique efflorescence, having no connection to any known high-art source.[5] The writers agree: even those who harboured ambitions to be fine artists from an early age honed their skills within the highly organised writing subculture. They furthermore rejected calling what they did graffiti, a term imposed by the official state culture that wanted to eradicate it. ‘Graffiti’ designated what they did as criminal vandalism. They preferred to call their activity ‘writing,’ and I have used that terminology wherever possible to distinguish between what was written on the trains and what was painted on canvases. Writers insisted that their paintings should not be called graffiti, because they were made legally and for a different audience than their tags and pieces. As at least one writer recognised, calling their paintings graffiti suggested a limit to their iconographic and stylistic advancement: how much could the paintings change and still fit that designation? Nevertheless, art dealers, critics, and the artists themselves accepted the label ‘graffiti art’, albeit with various degrees of enthusiasm, and I use the phrase for its historical context. The following chapters establish the parameters of the movement by giving their pieces (to the extent that documentary photographs permit) and paintings the formal analysis that has been absent from existing accounts of graffiti art.

Writers developed their styles in a hierarchical system of apprenticeship, where aspiring taggers made contact with more established ones, who critiqued their designs worked out in hardbound black sketchbooks, gave them tags to copy, and perhaps invited them to participate in executing a masterpiece–a large-scale composition covering most or all of a subway car. A young writer might join a crew whose writers he admired, and prove himself by advancing the group’s signature style. By devoting hours to his craft, he would master aerosol techniques, become familiar with the palettes of various spray-paint manufacturers, learn the subway lines, lay-ups, and yards, and develop a distinctive tagging style of his own. He might eventually be recognised by his peers as ‘king’ of a particular subway line, if his tags were ubiquitous enough and his style was impressive. Basquiat, Haring and Scharf did not participate in this well-established and self-perpetuating writers’ academy. With the exception of some tags on the inside of subway cars, Basquiat’s public writing was limited to the black block capital letters with which he wrote nihilistic aphorisms as SAMO. Haring drew pictures in chalk on the black paper covering expired advertisements in subway stations, using a lexicon of ideograms of his own devising. Scharf did spray paint some graffiti in imitation of the writing he admired, but cannot be said to have been a part of that culture. The frame of reference, source material, and aesthetic of these three artists differed significantly from each other, and from subway writers.

Given the stylistic disparity and the different contexts in which the artists first developed, what was the basis on which the category ‘graffiti art’ was consolidated? There was a critical discourse that established graffiti art as a significant trend in the early 1980s. Art critics worried over issues of authenticity, primitivism, and the avant-garde in their reviews of graffiti artists. These were the terms by which Basquiat, Haring, and Scharf, and DONDI, FUTURA 2000, DAZE and the other writers were evaluated.

GREG, Untitled, 1977.

Aerosol paint on subway car.NewYork.

Various artists, Cartoon Characters.

KEY, Burglar, 1981.

Aerosol paint on subway car.NewYork.

MITCH 77, Pluto,

date unknown.NewYork.

Authenticity

Since the early 1970s, when writers first decorated the outsides of subway cars with increasingly large and elaborate pieces, graffiti found favour among some urban intellectuals as a legitimate form of visual culture that gave voice to a racial underclass. In 1973, Pop artist Claes Oldenburg expressed his delight with the trend:

You’re standing there in the station, everything is gray and gloomy, and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big bouquet from Latin America.[6]

Pulitzer-prize winner Norman Mailer wrote a book celebrating subway writing called The Faith of Graffiti in 1974. The title came from a remark writer CAY 161 made to Mailer, that ‘the name is the faith of graffiti’: the tag is fundamental, unique to its owner, not to be borrowed or copied. Mailer described the way graffiti had spread over the urban environment:

[I]t looked as if graffiti would take over the world, when a movement which began as the expression of tropical peoples living in a monotonous iron-gray and dull brown brick environment, surrounded by asphalt, concrete, and clangor, had erupted biologically as though to save the sensuous flesh of their inheritance from a macadamization of the psyche, save the blank city wall of their unfed brain by painting the wall over with the giant trees and pretty plants of a tropical rain-forest, and like such a jungle, every plant large and small spoke to one another, lived in the profusion and harmony of a forest.[7]

Some writers formed collectives: United Graffiti Artists was organised with the help of Hugo Martinez, a sociology student at City College, in 1972. They exhibited tags on canvases at the Razor Gallery in 1973. Peter Schjeldahl, reviewing the Razor show for TheNew York Times, judged the paintings as lacking in structure, but strong in the use of colour, and he singled out a few artists for their especially striking tags in the collaboration to which all the UGA members contributed. Most significantly, he observed that the works on canvas extended the ‘show-off ebullience’ of the tags seen city-wide on trains and walls. The efforts of the ‘ghetto kids’, with their ‘volcanic energies’, were ‘unstoppable’. Those ‘youths, having found an exciting outlet for their rage for identity, are not likely to drop graffiti’, Schjeldahl predicted.[8] The taggers’ motivation to expression their identity gave writing its legitimacy. Because tags were uninfluenced by formal training or high cultural references but were clear, forceful declarations of ego, they had an authentic quality. To Schjeldahl, the tag was all about asserting the subjective presence of the writer, but the style with which it was executed was more difficult to evaluate because it had no reference outside writing culture. It was inevitable that the distinction between writer and tag would collapse immediately. Tags and writers spoke for themselves in a visual idiom of their own, a form of subcultural communication impervious to whomever else might be looking on.

On canvas, however, the tag seemed less a matter of faith than a trademark reproduced on demand, and this threatened the authenticity attributed to illegal graffiti. In the studio, writers no longer worked only for themselves and their peers, but for a broader public. Furthermore, the paintings were evidence that they now wanted to please this audience, whereas their tags in the subways aggressively claimed the space in a way that many perceived as menacing.

Primitivism

One of the strategies modern art has used to renew itself is primitivism, the appropriation of forms and motifs from non-Western cultures that are constructed as less civilised and closer to nature than Western society. For example, in the early twentieth century Picasso and Matisse solved the problem of how to represent a modern female form by referencing tribal sculpture from Africa. Primitivism is an attitude that reveals much about white, European society, and next to nothing about the non-European cultures that it has dubbed ‘primitive’. Primitivism does not account for the power and complexity of African, Oceanic, Native American, or Caribbean cultures, but labels them exotic and finds in them certain predictable traits: these Others are represented in the West as simpler, more intuitive, less inhibited. Very often, these stereotypical qualities are judged desirable by the Westerner, such as Gauguin’s Tahitians painted to represent mysticism and sensuality. In the so-called primitive Other, the primitivist finds his preconceptions about himself as sophisticated and civilised and the Other as naïve and natural to be confirmed. Subway writers knew that art world players viewed them with fascination and suspicion but with little real awareness of writing culture or even what it meant to depend upon the subway for transportation. The relationship of dominant culture to subculture that framed graffiti art is paradigmatically primitivist.

Oldenburg’s and Mailer’s choice of words in the quotations above demonstrate how primitivism paved the way for the acceptance of graffiti art in the early 1990s. Graffiti, they marveled, is a ‘bouquet from Latin America’, made by ‘tropical peoples’ who import the ‘giant trees and pretty plants of a tropical rainforest’, the ‘jungle’, to the grey, mechanised urban environment. To Schjeldahl, it is likewise a force of nature, ‘volcanic’ and ‘unstoppable’. Most of the writers were African American, Puerto Rican or South American, or of mixed racial and ethnic heritage. Their cultural difference was reinforced and made visible in the writers’ racial or ethnic identity that set them apart from the predominately white art world. If race was not specifically mentioned in accounts of graffiti art, it was sufficient to locate the writers as ‘ghetto kids’ from the Bronx or Brooklyn to secure their identity as non-white.

TAKI 183, Early tag, date unknown.

Marker pen on wood.NewYork.

Various artists, Tags, date unknown.

Various materials on truck.NewYork.

Unknown, The Painters: Parts 2-3,

date unknown.Paint, ink stamp

and paste-up on building.NewYork.

In the primitivist scheme, the writers offered fresh perspectives as outsiders to American society. They held a mirror up to the hegemonic culture. Thus it mattered when the artists referenced the mass media or high culture in their compositions, because as a point of contact it helped make the subculture legible to its new audience. Graffiti artists drew exclusively upon American kitsch: cartoons and underground comix, heavy metal music, science fiction illustrations, and psychedelia. But because they did not often borrow from elite Western culture in their paintings, subway writers found it difficult to discourage the belief that they were in fact primitives. Consequently, their moves to develop more sophisticated themes and advance stylistically received little credit: a primitive was locked in a fixed position with regard to dominant culture, authentic but immobile. A primitivist–a Picasso, Gauguin, Basquiat, or Haring–chose to work with “low” culture’s material, and therefore had room to maneuver.

The Avant-Garde

In the late 1970s, the state of the avant-garde in the visual arts was interrogated in discussions about the end of modernism and its implications. A return to painting was widely remarked, with new images and Neo-expressionism complicating the notion of art’s autonomy that was the heritage of formalism: these artists blurred the categories of abstraction and representation and plundered historical styles and imagery to uncertain effects. Another, more radical avant-garde lived on in artist collectives like Collaborative Projects (Colab) and ABC No Rio that were politically engaged and mounted mixed-media installations to ally themselves with the surrounding communities and to critique social and economic inequities. A third trend that emerged simultaneously was the East Village art and club scene, which with its store-front galleries and local celebrities mimicked the established art markets of SoHo and 57th Street. This was where graffiti art was established. According to art historian Liza Kirwin, East Village artists nurtured fond hopes of being discovered and selling out, and to that end packaged and advertised their new bohemia.[9] Doing so, they departed from the romantic, utopian, or revolutionary ideal of the avant-garde artist as a breed apart from the bourgeois mainstream. Clement Greenberg, in his 1939 article, ‘The Avant-garde and Kitsch’, defined the avant-garde as engaged in art for its own sake and remarked that it was inevitably connected to its bourgeois audience by ‘an umbilical cord of gold’. That vital link, not the alienation or autonomy of the avant-garde, was the salient characteristic of the art produced in the East Village of the 1980s, including graffiti art.

Unknown, The Painters: Part 1,

date unknown.Paint, ink stamp

and paste-up on building.NewYork.

If anyone was responsible for paving the way for artists to embrace the marketplace as chief arbiter of their works’ quality, it was Andy Warhol. He deserved the blame not just for his breakthrough Pop silk-screened canvases that represented American kitsch to consumers of high art, but also for his films, which featured a clique of performers who acted out their everyday personas before the camera, following the loosest of screenplays. Warhol’s films and his first studio, the silver Factory, set a precedent for the self-conscious outrageousness of East Village habitués like John Sex and Ann Magnuson, who performed at Club 57 on St. Mark’s Place. Some of Warhol’s associates crossed over to become contributing members of East Village society, such as poet René Ricard, who wrote articles lauding graffiti artists. Basquiat, Haring, and Scharf all frequented East Village clubs, and all sought Warhol’s support and friendship. In the 1980s, Warhol seemed to be operating on three levels of career promotion at once: series like ‘Famous Jews’, ‘Endangered Species’, and the ‘Oxidation Paintings’ were made for exhibition with no particular audience in mind; portraits commissioned by the rich and famous generated a steady income–Warhol never waived his fee; public appearances at Studio 54 and Elaine’s, in advertisements and on television (The Love Boat) brought him to the masses. His crossover appeal to consumers of both high and low culture signaled to graffiti artists that they could show canvases in galleries for the art world elite, and maintain their reputation in the street by painting subway cars at the same time. FAB FIVE FREDDY registered his familiarity with Warhol with his 1980 Pop Art train, where Campbell’s Soup cans lined up in a whole-car masterpiece. Warhol modeled the role of famous artist, and as the most visible living artist in New York City when FREDDY was coming of age, it was inevitable that the younger painter and his subway writer friends would recognise fame as the stamp of aesthetic validation.

Unknown, date unknown.

Paint on wooden gate.NewYork.

Unknown, date unknown.

Aerosol paint on building.NewYork.

PRE, Tags as CRISPO, date unknown.

Aerosol paint on freight train cars.NewYork.

When Warhol emerged as part of the Pop art movement in 1962, there was no established critical vocabulary with which to interpret his paintings for the public. Formalist concerns with flatness and medium dominated talk about painting, thanks to Greenberg’s persistent influence, but these were hardly applicable to silk-screened representations of soup cans, celebrities, and car crashes. Nevertheless, Warhol had galleries to represent him in New York and Los Angeles, and eager buyers. Twenty years later, the secondary market established that his paintings were good investments (although Warhol complained in his Diaries that his contemporaries Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns beat his prices at auction). For the generation of artists that came after Warhol, there was no single dominant critical voice or curatorial position that applied to contemporary art across the board. In the case of Neo-expressionism, the brash figurative painting style that graffiti art overlapped, several prominent critics took vehement stances for and against its value as an avant-garde, radical gesture. But what captured the public’s imagination more than these intellectual disagreements, were the expert marketing ploys that the artists and their galleries mobilised to establish the significance of the return to large-scale, gestural painting. Critics might howl in protest, but Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, and Georg Baselitz, among others, became art stars: their market popularity, stoked by their dealers, proved their quality. In the absence of a unified or compelling art criticism, the significance of an artist’s oeuvre was measured in dollars.

The twin strategies of Warhol-style self-promotion and market validation propelled the East Village art world, which had its own talent, dealers, and press and sneered at the SoHo and 57th Street gallery districts even as it emulated them. Nightclub owners invited artists to curate exhibitions that, not incidentally, drew customers. Visual artists, musicians, and performers collaborated on multi-media spectacles at clubs, too. Artists rented small storefronts to show works they and their friends had made. Liza Kirwin characterised the East Village as ‘a community whose greatest ambition was to sell out’, in contrast to past bohemian communities, which articulated resistance to the middle-class norm.[10] She documented the reaction among specialised art magazines and the popular press, which was to mock the neighbourhood and its resident artists as juvenile poseurs. With art, the market, and the bourgeois buyer so intertwined in the East Village, it was obvious to critics that the art that was most promoted was least performing its critical, avant-garde function–at least they could agree on this negative assessment.

‘We are generous and shameless self-promoters’, writer LADY PINK told The New York Times in 2007.[11] This statement was true of graffiti artists from the beginnings of their careers. These young artists were eager to show their work, to sell it, to support themselves doing something creative that they loved. They were happy for the opportunity to continue to paint long after a career on the subways would typically end. (When the writer was no longer subject to the juvenile justice system, the consequences of being caught tagging in the subway were steep enough to persuade most to stop. Generally, writing careers were measured in months, not years.) Furthermore, an art career was a paying job when unemployment among young men of colour was rampant, 86% according to a US Bureau of Labor Statistics survey in 1977.[12] The subtext of writing–to declare one’s presence in a noisy, overpowering urban environment–became the text of graffiti on canvas. Some artists like ZEPHYR, BLADE, and SEEN repeated their tags insistently, while others like LEE, LADY PINK, DAZE, FUTURA 2000, and RAMMELLZEE explored abstraction and social realism. Self-promotion had been the motivation for writing in the subway and city-wide recognition the reward. The world of galleries, collectors, and critics did not seem to operate much differently: as DONDI remarked, it was just a ‘new yard’ where the writers needed to prove themselves all over again.[13] As masters of the subway, there was little doubt among them that they were capable of doing so, once they learned the ropes.

The rules of the new yard of the galleries were a set of unspoken assumptions about what constituted appropriate artistic attitudes and behaviour. As I have outlined above, notions of authenticity, primitivism, and the avant-garde helped define the way graffiti art was received by the public. As bohemians creating for the love of art, artists were supposed to be more involved in producing their work than in promoting it. To be seen as careerist or ambitious undermined the subway writer’s authenticity, his status as a naïve primitive who was favoured by having his paintings displayed. Furthermore, to qualify as avant-garde, art had to inhabit a critical position with regard to the market and its audience. In this light, subway writers were much too interested in explaining themselves to their audience, in promoting an understanding of writing and the conditions that produced it. Their paintings could be didactic, offering a glimpse into an unfamiliar world for the white, middle-class audience. Perhaps it was inevitable that graffiti art would fall out of favour with critics, dealers, and collectors because it fell short of the preconceptions with which they initially received it. But for several years in the early 1980s, the graffiti art movement did successfully negotiate the unwritten rules of the art market and the expectations of art critics and collectors. For a moment, it seemed that any talented individual could prove his worth as an artist, that class, colour, and academic credentials were irrelevant to artistic success.

Acknowledgments

While graffiti trains no longer course along the tracks in New York City, most resources on graffiti art are there. I would like to thank Melanie Bower at the Museum of the City of New York, the staff at Fales Library and Special Collections of the New York University Libraries, and the New York Public Library for their assistance. Writers were exceedingly generous with their time: I am grateful to BLADE, CRASH, DAZE, LADY PINK, and ZEPHYR, and MICK LA ROCK of Amsterdam, for their patience in answering my questions and for flagging my most egregious misunderstandings. Carlo McCormick and Barry Blinderman shared their experiences with graffiti art and artists. Joe Austin offered moral support and references. Tom Check and Nancy Witherell provided room and board on my research trips to New York. Belinda Neumann, Dolores Ormandy Neumann, and Hubert Neumann shared their enthusiasm for graffiti art. In the Netherlands, Henk Pijnenberg, Vincent Vlasblom, and Steven Kolsteren and the staff at the Groninger Museum gave me access to their archives and collections. The University of Vermont’s Dean’s Fund partially funded my travels there in 2007. I thank Ernesto Capello, DAZE, Steven Kolsteren, Nancy Owen, Henk Pijnenberg, John Waldron, the indispensable Emily Bernard and ZEPHYR for reading and commenting on this manuscript. Any errors and all interpretations are my own. To Court Thompson, my appreciation and love.

LASK, Wine, 1985. Aerosol paint on wall.

Staten Island,NewYork.

Various artists. Aerosol paint on subway cars. New York.

Subway Writers

Not all subway writers wanted to become gallery artists. This aspiration, though, is the common thread that links the writers I will introduce in this chapter who became graffiti artists in New York City in the early 1980s. They had mastered their medium and earned reputations within a highly-elaborated writing subculture that had begun at least a decade before. To inscribe nicknames or street names on neighbourhood walls began as a way to mark a gang’s turf but it became widespread beginning in June 1971, when a messenger who called himself TAKI 183 began putting his name wherever he went in the city, and his ubiquity led to an article in The New York Times.[14] School was out of session for the summer, unemployment among teenagers was high, and TAKI’s imitators took up permanent markers and later aerosol paint to write their own names everywhere. The public walls and subway cars filled with tags, as the nicknames were known, so writers worked to make theirs distinctive with eye-catching style.

By 1973, tags were pervasive and striking enough that cultural commentators took notice. Norman Mailer celebrated the writers he interviewed in his 1974 book The Faith of Graffiti and imitated them in the text by giving himself the tag ‘A-I’ for ‘Aesthetic Investigator.’ Art critic Richard Goldstein wrote in New YorkMagazine, ‘the most significant thing about graffiti was not their destructiveness but their cohesion, bringing together a whole generation of lower-class kids in an experience which is affirmative and delinquent at the same time’.[15] The cohesion, affirmation, and delinquency Goldstein noted made the writers glamourous and appealing to the New York art world because those qualities promised a new avant-garde that was not motivated by economic gain. But among the writers who comprised the graffiti art movement of 1980-1983, the desire to become professionals who supported themselves by selling their art undermined this romantic notion of them as outsiders. It was a fiction imposed on them by their admirers alongside certain stereotypes: that all graffiti artists were young, black or Latino, minimally educated, and motivated by an unquenchable creative urge that compelled them to exercise their talents by illegal means.

Besides professional ambition, there are four aspects of writing culture that were the foundation for graffiti art as a movement: the social network of writers, their favoured themes, stylistic evolution, and criteria for the evaluation of quality. Writers went to train yards in pairs or groups to work on whole-car pieces together or their own smaller pieces individually. Such openness to collaboration and awareness of each others’ styles and strengths facilitated the organisation of group shows in galleries later. Writers had a ready-made theme for their paintings, the tag, which was inherently self-expressive. They pursued this personal content further on canvas, in representations of the writing life or experiences of the urban ghetto. Writers relentlessly experimented with new styles for their tags and pieces. The process continued in their paintings, where they felt free to choose realism or abstraction depending on the content they wanted to convey. Unconstrained by the history of modern painting, they were uninhibited: they did not worry that figuration might look reactionary, or that abstraction could be merely decorative. Writers had their own stringent criteria by which they evaluated each others’ pieces. Having been vetted by their peers, the graffiti artists I will introduce in this chapter had confidence in their paintings’ quality.

SMILEY and KED, Untitled, 1980.

Aerosol paint on subway car.NewYork.

DAZE, TRAP and DEZ, Untitled, 1983.

Aerosol paint on subway car.

Writing Culture: Social Networks and the Transmission of Skills

Writing was a social activity: even when he worked alone, a writer tagged for an audience of other writers. Before taking up a marker or aerosol can, he studied trains exhaustively. Most can name the writers who first inspired them, and where they saw their tags, like FUTURA 2000, who grew up near the IRT 1 line and was especially impressed by PHASE 2 and STAY HIGH 149. STAY HIGH had appropriated the animated character from the television show The Saint for his tag, giving him a joint to smoke, and also used the phrase ‘Voice of the Ghetto’, which resonated with the younger writer.[16] Writers who began tagging in the 1970s in particular recall feeling as though writing was everywhere around them, as indeed it was. Trains had been covered in tags, and BLADE remembered that when the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) embarked on a comprehensive cleaning campaign in 1973, the fresh surfaces attracted an explosion of colourful ‘pieces’—short for masterpieces, the ambitious designs that filled the entire side of a subway car. Writers began to measure their reputation in terms of quality of pieces as well as quantity of tags.[17]

With some effort, it was possible for a novice writer to make the acquaintance of established writers he admired, although the tags made this a hit-or-miss enterprise. LEE, famous for his 1980 handball court masterpieces, was a figure of mystery to those outside his immediate circle, according to ZEPHYR: other writers assumed his tag was his last name and there were rumours that he lived in Chinatown, so they presumed he was Asian. In fact, he was a Puerto Rican named George Quinones from the Smith housing projects in lower Manhattan. CRASH met LEE in the Smith projects by chance while visiting a relative who lived there. Even when it was known where a famous tagger lived, there was no guarantee he could be found. ZEPHYR described a fruitless attempt he and FUTURA made one day to locate BLADE: they took the subway to his neighbourhood in the Bronx where they found his tags blanketing the walls, and there the trail came to an end. They simply, but perhaps irrationally, expected to find BLADE at work on his tags, ZEPHYR said. Having no way to pursue him further, they took photographs and left. There were spots where writers were known to gather, the various ‘writers’ benches’, but it could not be predicted who would be there at any given time. One of the best known benches was at the Grand Concourse station in the Bronx, where several of the lines ran that connected the Bronx with Brooklyn via Manhattan. DAZE met CRASH there and they forged a productive working friendship, only one of countless similar fortuitous encounters.[18]

The public High School of Art and Design, on the east side of midtown Manhattan, was a hotbed of writing activity, DAZE recollected. As a student there in 1976, he met more established writers in the cafeteria, where he saw their black books—the hardbound sketch-pads writers used to design their own tags and collect others—and tried to copy them, eventually following them into the subways.[19] LADY PINK attended a few years later, where she ostensibly studied architecture but in reality she said she learned ‘piecing and colors’ from SEEN and DOZE, older writers she met there.[20] There had been female writers before, but none were prominent when LADY PINK began to write seriously. She therefore had a certain celebrity but she also had to combat rumours that she exchanged sexual favours for men who supposedly did her tags for her. She said she worked with male writers from everywhere in the city ‘just so they could see me carrying my own bags and painting my own stuff’.[21]

Despite the competition that existed amongst writers who vied to be ‘king’ of a particular subway line by tagging with the most frequency and distinctive style, there was also collaboration. DAZE offered the analogy of how the music and lore of the blues was transmitted almost casually as more and less experienced musicians hung out and jammed together. In writing, beginners known as ‘toys’ sought out older writers from whom they could learn style. They aspired to accompany them to the yards and lay-ups where out-of-service trains parked, where writers executed the large masterpieces that might take an entire night and some twenty cans of paint to complete.[22] These arrangements could resemble artists’ workshops, with the established writer planning the design. He supervised the younger writer who filled in areas of colour, and then attended to the final outline and finishing touches. NOC 167 and DONDI were respected writers who were also generous in sharing stylistic tips and other advice. NOC 167 would offer variations on another writer’s tag, while DONDI was known for his sharp eye for design.[23] Once a writer had his own reputation, he continued to learn from other writers by working with them in a friendly competition. BLADE and COMET forged a partnership that was famous among their peers. Other pairs, of which there were many, included DONDI and DURO, and CRASH and KEL.[24] DAZE liked to write with groups of friends, and said the writers with whom he worked were too many to name.[25] These collaborations produced trains with multiple pieces to fill an entire car or pair of cars, and the individual contributions were coordinated to produce a unified style.

LEE, Graffiti 1990, 1981.

Aerosol paint on wall.

LEE, Untitled, 1981.

Aerosol paint on wall.

NOC 167, Style War, 1981.

Aerosol paint onNewYorksubway car. Destroyed.

Working partnerships multiplied when writers collaborated in groups known as ‘crews’. A writer could belong to several crews at once, and they crossed neighbourhood lines.[26] After three years of writing, DONDI had earned a place in the TOP (The Odd Partners) crew from Brooklyn in 1977. When it dissolved, he formed his own crew, CIA (Crazy Inside Artists), with DURO, KEL, and MARE, among others, and they dominated the 2 and 5 lines that ran from Brooklyn to the Bronx.[27] DAZE, from the Bronx, was friends with KEL and MARE, and joined the CIA crew to write in the 2 yard in Brooklyn. LADY PINK formed a crew of female writers called LOTA, Ladies of the Arts. LEE was one of the original Fabulous Five, a Brooklyn crew famous for multi-car designs: Henry Chalfant documented their Christmas train in a photograph published on the front page of the