American Graffiti. Margo Thompson
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. New York.
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. New York.
Unknown, date unknown. Aerosol paint on building. New York.
PRE, Tags as CRISPO, date unknown. Aerosol paint on freight train cars. New York.
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,
See Liza Kirwin, “It’s All True: Imagining New York’s East Village Art Scene of the 1980s” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland at College Park, 1999).
Kirwin, 19.
David Gonzalez, “Walls of Art for Everyone, But Made by Not Just Anyone,”
Joe Austin,