By Ernest Brown
February, 2006

“In these crises … there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce¹.”

And, today, we might add: and too much imagination. Today’s world is overflowing with creativity, which is being stifled. There are artists everywhere, but not enough galleries for them. Some of these artists and would-be artists who have no outlet for their work, no voice, have found a way out of the dilemma and create their works anyway – publicly and for free. They are loosely banded together as graffitists or graffiti artists. That, at least, is the immediate explanation for the worldwide growth of graffiti in the past few decades, but it couldn’t have been just that.

Trash! You call that “art”? But such reactions accompanied the development of culture in the early years of the 20th century², when “modern art” exploded with the bombs of World War I. And today, the same reactions accompany us as we crash into the 21st century.

Dada (Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Hugo Ball, Marcel Janco, Andre Breton and others) sought to express their horror (in nihilism, in fact) at war:

We had lost confidence in our culture. Everything had to be demolished. We would begin again after the “tabula rasa”. At the Cabaret Voltaire we began by shocking common sense, public opinion, education, institutions, museums, good taste, in short, the whole prevailing order³.

Wood Relief by Marcel Janco, 1917

Meanwhile, the art critics looked the other way and condemned the Dadaists⁴, which was probably what the Dadaists wanted them to do.

Tatlin at Home by Raul Hausman, 1920

Today’s graffiti artists do not have the same background, either in terms of their social origins or with respect to what has happened in the world during their own lives, notwithstanding the continued role of war under capitalism. There have been qualitative social changes since the time of the Dada artists⁵, who were represented by a relatively small number of people in a few countries, often from privileged backgrounds. Dada was all protest and very little art, but its protest only really had its effect within the confined atmosphere of the gallery – artists had yet to find their own surroundings, i.e. either to reject the gallery system and/or to find themselves (as today) generally excluded from it (the so-called “scarcity” factor). Certainly, though, these modern muralists reflect an inherent rebellion against existing property relations, using “other people’s” walls to write and paint on. Nor only that, but in doing so they have put art back where it belongs – where people can see it! And they also have a lot to say – it is not simply that the walls are empty, but that their souls are full.

Piece by Emy, New Jersey, February, 2006

But what about the content of their art? What does that reflect? Is it a critique of the present state of society? Indeed, a lot of it may say nothing to many of us, despite the way it implicitly challenges property rights. However, just look at the vibrant, shouting forms. There’s something there, isn’t there? Abstract, but with meaning.

Dondi⁶

One of Dondi’s works

The Death Squad⁷

Economically-speaking it is the art of what has been labeled the “informal sector” (street traders and small producers who pay no income tax, avoid customs duties, etc.), which has grown and grown around us everywhere since World War II, absorbed and to some extent unabsorbed by the “formal sector”, i.e. the one that “respects” property rights and pays its taxes to the State, but which is now inextricably interwoven with the informal sector⁸. Thus the graffiti artists some time ago began to appear in the galleries as well⁹.

This is not to say that people in the economy’s informal sector are its makers, although some graffitists are, indeed, in the informal sector of the economy – selling graffiti-linked merchandise. Graffitists come from every social segment. But graffiti itself is only really partly within the economy – certainly, it creates a demand for “cans”, “caps”, protective goggles and so forth (i.e. it consumes), but its authentic works are not sold (ignoring the work that does go into galleries, which can only represent a tiny fraction of the total) – its audience pays not a cent to see it. On the other hand the market for graffiti (created by graffiti) takes forms other than the actual works – magazines, books, calendars, stickers, videos etc. which are bought and sold by its practitioners and aficionados.

The social origins of graffiti are not simple. I recently read a piece that dismissed it as the facile rebellion of middle-class (mainly male) adolescents. Way out! First of all, the graffiti artists include people who have been active since the 1960s-70s (as the reader will already appreciate). Do you call them adolescent, then, simply because they spray paint on to walls? It appears to be true that a majority are male, but they are certainly not exclusively so.

Females to gain attention during the early 1970s were writers like Brooklyn’s STONEY and COWBOY. GRAPE and CHARMINE were also early female writers. Probably the most prolific of the time period were Manhattan’s BARBARA 62 and EVA 62. These women hit streets, public parks and subway stations with as much vigor as their male counter parts. KIVU, POONIE 1 and SUKI were also active around this time… The new breed of female writers shows a level of commitment seldom seen in earlier generations. These women are involved in bombing, burners, roller letters and tagging on the streets on New York City. Recent female writers to make significant impact are MS. MAGGS who broke ground in the early ‘90s, Brooklyn’s DIVA, HOPE, and DONA of the Vandals In Control crew – they have produced many elaborate murals across the city. JAKEE from the borough of Queens was a prolific street bomber during the late 1990s. Other recent day female New York City writers include MUCK, FNS, CLAW, MISS 17, ICON, EROTICA 67 and NAISHA¹⁰.

Painting by Lady Pink

And the leading groups of graffitists right from the start came from the inner-city ghettoes, from the urban poor. But today they come from all ethnic backgrounds; most went to State schools, but some went to private schools – there are even a few, for example, from Britain’s poshest and most famous schools. They are, therefore, a cross-section of society, a “cross-section” of our superfluous imaginations¹¹.

Graffiti’s spin-offs give an idea of the size of the audience involved – books, monthly magazines, internet chat-sites, shops, films and connections with popular music such as hip-hop. Graffiti, whose modern origins can probably be traced back to inner-city (largely black) youth in New York in the 1960-70s¹², is everywhere today – from Moscow to Tokyo, London, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Mexico City, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro Johannesburg and Delhi. Its orbit is worldwide, its practitioners are well known (within its circles) throughout the planet, and it has more sophisticated global networks than most other organizations, except perhaps the transnational corporations and their accompanying unseen networks of power.

Graffiti therefore also shows the possibility of a demand that is not driven by money and the market, but by more invisible factors, in ways that cannot be simply attributed to “callous cash payment”, to style wars perhaps…

Graffiti from Moscow

Butobask, Tokyo

Graffiti artists move around the world with ease – they can do so on a shoestring budget as they don’t tend to pay hotel bills but stay at each other’s homes or at squats, or just out in the open. Two weeks in San Francisco or Paris, then back to base, wherever that might be. They may not speak the same languages, but they understand each other well enough. They are not necessarily unemployed and they don’t necessarily have boring 9 to 5 jobs.

Out they go “bombing trains” – in other words, painting designs on the carriages of metro trains or railway trains. Indeed, some interesting stories emerge from this about public security. They go well-equipped, cutting wires in the yards and dodging the surveillance, spending enough time there to “bomb” a train. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? I heard a story from London after the 2005 bombings of the London Underground – the night after they had happened, while the streets were swarming with police, a graffitist was able to get into the yard from where the trains came and “bomb” several of the trains that passed along the same routes the next day! Daring? Undoubtedly. Politically-inspired? Probably not. But it makes you wonder about certain things, doesn’t it?

A yard in the Bronx

Do graffiti artists do what they do merely as a rebellion against the lack of opportunity for expression? Probably this is an important ingredient, but this alone would not make it art – or even comment. It goes well beyond mere rebellion, frustration, hooliganism, smashing telephone boxes, scratching people’s cars, and so on. Its own genres have evolved – it is highly diverse. There are the graffitists who focus on producing and reproducing their initials, their trademarks, in varied ways, in monochrome or in sumptuous colors, distorted to such an extent in some cases that reading them is itself a specialist art, and has more to do with recognition than reading. There are the painters of surrealist-like landscapes and people, and there are the stencil-painters, just to give a few examples.

My Kingdom Come

Apparently, graffiti is legal in Brazil – and “Loomit” has been there, too, among other places.

Painting in Munich by “Loomit”, 2001

Stencil graffiti in Electric Lane, Brixton, London, UK

A few graffitists make obvious political comments on society (a phrase that reminds me of New York Mayor Koch, who in a February, 1982, anti-graffiti drive intended to tell New York youth to, “make your mark IN society, not ON society”, but managed to get the two prepositions mixed up and refused to correct himself, even though he knew he’d got it wrong¹³), on what is happening today – on war.

Madrid Stencil reminds us of two
unwelcome faces (“Neither him nor him”)

One of Britain’s best-known graffiti artists¹⁴ who makes a valiant, effective and very good-humored comment on the society he lives in is the stencil-artist known to the world as Banksy. Indeed, his title has become a household name, with various publications and sites on the Internet. He plays on meaning, often via official signs and wording (visual puns) – his latest book is called “Wall and Piece”, for example. His work is very economical and although it is highly varied, it carries his own personal view of the world – not just paintings but sculptures (or objets d’art which are mistakable as the real, until you see they are unreal, or rather that they have their own reality). Like the joker who managed to get a painting of Mao Zedong as prophet on to a wall of the Vatican for several months back in the 1980s,

The Papal Mao

Banksy managed to get a stone age man with shopping trolley painted on a piece of rock into the British Museum for several days

Neolithic man with shopping trolley

He’s painted in the zoo in Barcelona and on the Segregation Wall between Israel and Palestine – where an old man told him to go home because he was making the wall look beautiful. One of his best-known images is one which at first sight appears to depict an anarchist throwing a bomb, but which, on closer inspection, shows him throwing a bunch of flowers.

Banksy’s Flowerchuckerman

Another famous name in British graffiti painting is Kelzo¹⁵, who is now doing quite nicely for himself in the formal sector. Here’s where and why he started in his own words:

[Manchester inner-city housing estate] Hulme was the craziest place I have ever seen. I was born and raised there and will always remember everything about it. What people have to understand is at first I started painting Hulme and nearly got arrested every day. We just kept painting until we were allowed ‘cos we would have continued anyway. It had so much creativity and atmosphere. Forget NY’s ghettos, Hulme was fucked up. It was condemned by the council as early as 1985. For years university dropouts, travellers, junkies, thieves, muggers, used this place like it was a different planet. One time me, Karl 123 and Elk walked into this flat and the room was about 2ft deep in used needles. Most flats were the same…. You had to be cautious whilst out bombing as you could easily have been jabbed… it was a lawless society, the police would keep their distance. It was a graffiti, drug infested half a mile radius concrete jungle with very little sympathy. If you were from out of town and you strayed there it was most likely curtains for your wallet¹⁶...

Hoax, Kelzo and Stun, St Louis

One politically-oriented graffiti group used to call itself PPP (pink punk pixies), and now calls itself OSI (Operation Scrub It). This “crew” does more obviously political works, directly denouncing Bush’s war and so on.

Operation Scrub It’s “Hang Bush”

We have a growing muralist movement before us, which is recognized by the powers that be to a certain extent, although these powers want to fence it in and take it over, absorb it into their system, i.e. do exactly what the graffiti artists are fighting against. What may or may not be recognized by the authorities, though, is the spirit of giving that graffiti expresses – artists who, enjoying what they do¹⁷, give and give and don’t expect to receive anything, except time inside, if they get caught by the unsympathetic guardians of the law.

And ironically it was New York, the birthplace of modern graffiti, which in the 1990s decided to get really nasty about graffiti. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani¹⁸ decided to crack down on graffiti, and established the Anti-Graffiti Task Force, which includes the following lines:

No person shall write, paint or draw any inscription, figure or mark of any type on any public or private building or other structure or any other real or personal property owned, operated or maintained by a public benefit corporation, the city of New York or any agency or instrumentality thereof or by any person, firm, or corporation, or any personal property maintained on a city street or other city-owned property pursuant to a franchise, concession or revocable consent granted by the city, unless the express permission of the owner or operator of the property has been obtained¹⁹.

But Giuliani’s name has been associated notoriously with repressive authoritarianism, not just involving graffiti artists²⁰. Perhaps enforcement has weakened since he left office – anyway, the law is being broken regularly these days.

In a very concrete sense, the graffiti artists are up against the system, although they may not always acknowledge it. And the system is trying to bend and embrace them, draw them into its web, while repressing them constantly, a further reflection of the schizophrenic nature of contemporary capitalism, a sign of its growing waywardness, its lack of direction. It is also ironic that people who are engaged in and enveloped in change sometimes do not recognize what is happening – they see the world beyond themselves as unchanging and unchangeable. A friend of mine was talking to a couple of graffiti artists the other day, and asked them what they thought about some political issue or other, probably the situation in Iraq. Both replied in a customary “received wisdom” non-committal way – “Nothing changes, nothing can change.”

Perhaps a lot of graffiti artists are politically unconscious, though maybe they would not find it so hard to recognize that the world of graffiti has itself changed. To begin with, graffiti’s re-emergence in New York back in the 1960s and 1970s, its gradual growth and the movement of its themes, styles, modes represents change. And it continues to change – it cannot stand still, but changes not only as it moves from one people to another but simultaneously in the time that this movement in space takes.

Graffiti has changed (and changes every time someone engages in it) from the simple tagging – “I write, therefore I exist” – where the writer impresses his consciousness on the city, to the sophisticated forms, such as those illustrated above. That doesn’t mean it’s all good or that it’s all art, but there’s a lot out there to choose between. “Tags” appear as mere assertions – the writer goes “everywhere” to stamp his/her mark. It’s not a primitive marking out of territory, just a sort of visual cruise about, and a sign of defiance against social impotence.

What I should like very much to see is a graffiti that returns to some of its older roots, that starts to take a more informed stand on humanity’s dilemma. And I think we should review and review the history and role of contemporary graffiti – while its early beginnings coincide with the surging social movements of the 1960s, the marginalization and growth of inner-city youth, and the emergence of the mega-cities, it has taken its own direction compared with what earlier advocates and practitioners of street arts generally sought. The impetus is still there, of course, in its defiance, but the visionary nature of the adherents of such movements as the Situationiste Internationale which began in Paris in the 1950s, the Lettrists, Surrealists and (where we came in) Dada has not been solidly absorbed.

L’Internationale Lettriste were the first artists to understand the enormous potential of graffiti as a means of literary expression today. A number of the slogans they chalked or painted up – ‘Never work’, ‘Free the passions’, ‘Let us live’ – were to turn up again, more than twenty years later, on the walls of the Latin Quarter in May 1968. They also painted slogans down their trouser-legs and across their ties and shoes. The two latter items they tried to sell²¹.

I don’t wish to resurrect something that came to an end as some sort of “perfect model from the past”, but it is always fruitful to trace your origins, to discover that although a movement is new, it may say some of the same things that were said in the past, and how can we bridge the gap, how we can learn from our forebears, how can we overcome the forces that press us back into the past, how can we change the world? Looking at the statement above it appears that the Lettrists were content with slogans, perhaps also what was labeled “concrete poetry” in some places at the time. Later, an artist made a name for himself through the art magazines ripping shards from billboards. Then there were the so-called “happenings”, which appear to have gone nowhere. Today’s graffiti movement is on much firmer ground than any of that – not only a commitment to bring art to the streets but a need to do so, a challenge to defy, in a situation of growing world conflict and danger for humanity. Can it maintain its integrity as an art of rebellion and how might it be combined with a social vision – we are beginning to see this, and we shall surely see more.

NOTES

¹ Karl Marx, Friederich Engles: “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, 1848.

² Indeed, even before then as witnessed by the Impressionists, for example: ”’A bunch of lunatics and a woman’,” muttered one observer” back in 1874. “An outraged critic, Louis Leroy, coined the label ‘Impressionist’. He looked at Monet’s Impression Sunrise, the artist’s sensory response to a harbor at dawn, painted with sketchy brushstrokes. ‘Impression!’ the journalist snorted. ‘Wall paper in its embryonic state is more finished!’” (See: Art of the impressionist painter at: http://www.j-m-w-turner.co.uk/impressionist-index.htm

³ Marcel Janco. See the Wikipedia page on Dada: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada)

⁴ “The Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man.”(According to a reviewer in American Art News: See the Wikipedia page on Dada: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada)

⁵ Population growth, migration, increased literacy rates due to “universal” State-sponsored education, social welfare schemes, social mobility, etc.

⁶ Dondi, Donald J. White(1961-1998), was a famous East New York, Brooklyn writer who began work in 1975.

⁷ An important New York group from the 1970s. Like Dondi, much of their work focused on the subway system – wall paintings began during the 1980s.

⁸ Making the distinction more theoretical than empirical, as is evident from reading Edwin Sutherland’s early study of the issue in “White Collar Crime” published back in 1949.

⁹ One of the first was the Brooklyn graffiti painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, who became friends with Andy Warhol back in the 1980s, and planned to show his work at Robert Fraser’s Cork Street Gallery in London in the early 1980s.

¹⁰ See: Female Writers at:
http://www.at149st.com/women.html

¹¹ The reason for my use of parenthesis should be evident -how do you take a cross-section of imagination? The word “superfluous” might also be placed in parenthesis, but I have resisted the impulse to do so -let’s say it from the mouth of Capital.

¹² Obviously, graffiti is older than this, and I shall say something about this later, though nothing of its more ancient presence.

¹³ See the 1983 graffiti film “Style Wars” for this little slip-up by Mayor Koch.

¹⁴ I am including Banksy here as a graffiti artist, although probably most graffitists would not accept this. If we try to use a wider term, such as “street painter”, we exclude graffiti painters who focus on subways and so on. I accept that much about Banksy (including the embrace he is receiving from the status quo) is really not within the field of the “traditional” (ooops!) graffiti realm, but I think he is relevant to the rather general scope of this essay.

¹⁵ Having spoken to an insider since I wrote this article, I realize that my criterion for including artists would be questioned (attacked perhaps) in more knowledgable circles. I think Kelzo’s work is worth including here for its artistic merits, independent of his personal trajectory since his initial days – I am not judging graffiti on its daring, although I certainly value this aspect. Moreover, I think his comments are interesting.

¹⁶ From an interview with kelzo, ukhh.com, 2002:
http://www.ukhh.com/elements/graffiti/kelzo/kelzo.html

¹⁷ Indeed, some describe their enjoyment rather like taking a drug – a boost to the adrenalin flow (see the Kelzo interview mentioned above).

¹⁸ Remembered, of course, for the helpful actions he displayed on September 11th, 2001 – he was also on the scene to lend a hand in London in 2005 when the Underground bombings took place.

¹⁹ Section 10-117, a of New York’s Anti-Graffiti City and State Legislation.

²⁰ One example of the repressive nature of Giuliani’s crack-down on street crime that hit the headlines in February, 1999, was the killing of unarmed street seller Ahmed Diallo by police belonging to the “Street Crime Unit”.

²¹ From: drifting and psychogeography, http://www.headmap.org/index/headmapb/psycholo/situatio/drifting.html