American Graffiti. Margo Thompson
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. New York.
Various artists, Cartoon Characters.
KEY, Burglar, 1981.
Aerosol paint on subway car. New York.
MITCH 77, Pluto, date unknown. New York.
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 The New 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. New York.
Various artists, Tags, date unknown. Various materials on truck. New York.
Unknown, The Painters: Parts 2–3, date unknown. Paint, ink stamp and paste-up on building. New York.
In the primitivist scheme, the writers offered fresh perspectives as outsiders to American society. They held a mirror up to the hegemonic
Quoted in Richard Goldstein, “This Thing Has Gotten Completely Out of Hand,”
Norman Mailer,
Peter Schjeldahl, “Graffiti Goes Legit – But the ‘Show-off’ Ebullience Remains,”