American Graffiti. Margo Thompson
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, New York.
Subway Writers
Various artists. Aerosol paint on subway cars. New York.
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 York Magazine, ‘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. New York.
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
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen,
“‘TAKI 183’ Spawns Pen Pals,”
Richard Goldstein, “This Thing Has Gotten Completely Out of Hand,”
Froukje Hoekstra, ed.,