American Graffiti. Margo Thompson

      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 on New York subway 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 Village Voice in 1980.[28] The aspiring impresario Fred Brathwaite was impressed with LEE’s pieces and approached him about promoting the crew. His proposal led to LEE giving him permission to use the Fabulous Five name: thus FAB FIVE FREDDY was born, although he never tagged with the original crew.[29] Some crews expanded exponentially, like RTW (Rolling Thunder Writers), led by the charismatic Bil-Rock. ZEPHYR joined at the beginning in spring 1978, and QUIK was another member. By 1981, ZEPHYR says, RTW was the largest crew in the city and not all the members knew each other.[30]

      RAMMELLZEE was not a subway writer – the name he adopted was clearly too long to be a functional tag – although he was the leader of a crew of sorts. Observing writers and their pieces, he developed an intricate theory of writing called ‘Gothic Futurism’ or ‘Ikonoklast Panzerism.’[31] Through DONDI, RAMMELLZEE met DAZE, who remembers him carrying portfolios, not the usual black sketchbooks but long connecting boards, in which he detailed how letters could be armed and the connection he supposed between subway writers and Gothic monks.[32] While RAMMELLZEE believed it was imperative to recognise the significance of writing and its historical origins in the subway, some of his crew wrote on trains only after they painted canvases. Photographer Henry Chalfant said of one Gothic Futurist, A-ONE,

      [He] had never painted a train, but he was a good artist, and his work started to get some action in the art world. He painted canvases. He was part of art shows. But he knew what everybody thought of him, and what everybody thought of the whole scene – that if you weren’t down on trains, you were nobody, a toy. This concerned him greatly, and he suffered a couple of years of this kind of criticism. He really wanted to do a train, and he finally went out and painted four or five trains – whole cars, top-to-bottoms – in his inimitable style. They weren’t traditional pieces, they were wild and crazy. I went to photograph them, because he insisted that I be there to get the picture![33]

      In RAMMELLZEE’s clique especially, but also in other crews, they re-imagined writing as something much larger than the individual. It constituted a world of its own, with an aesthetic, an ethos, a history: it was hardly a surprise to writers, then, that others thought subway pieces were worth preserving on canvas and displaying in galleries and museums.

      Themes

      PHASE 2 was an old-school writer who had begun tagging in autumn 1971. He identified four themes in writing: ‘the centrality of naming; the concept of building language… or visual and verbal wordsmithing; the idea of constructing an identity in opposition to state

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