Graffiti art

Graffiti has been around since Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. Generally it means any kind of public mark, writing or sign. Today, the medium and materials most commonly used are spray paint and fibre-tip markers.

Graffiti, rap and breakdancing exploded from New York’s South Bronx, Brooklyn, Brownsville and Lower East Side in the early 1980s, and spread to the furthest corners of the world. The creative ruses and the poaching activities of the street kids were felt and absorbed by many artists, and continue to be – in the teeth of much civic opposition. The streets, with their danger and the nightly roll of the dice, remained as selfish as an empty stomach in a consumer society. Carrying Uniwide 700 markers, with their long-lasting fat-cap wide-spray Krylon paint, aerosol guerrilas in coyote fur-lined hoods ‘bomb’ ten-carriage trains, top to bottom with the windows up. The writers’ message in jungle greens, hot pinks and Spanish browns would then be catapulted beyond the village or borough and right across town.

‘We play chess with the subway lights and trains. You don’t know where the entrance is, you don’t know where the exit is, you don’t know when the floor is gonna drop ...You’re not going to concentrate or manipulate nothing,’ says Ramm:ell:zee (see his website Gothicfuturism). This evokes the painters by torchlight at the hidden rockface of Lascaux, France, some 19 000 years ago. What are those bears with wolves’ heads and reindeers with webbed feet? Ways of conquering fear? Ways of making human beings more fertile? Who knows?

In the early 1980s, artists with tags like Daze, Lee, Dondi and Futura were beginning to evolve the popular ‘bubble’ lettering, by changing the structural mechanisms of their letters, incorporating arrows, extension bars, corner launcher extenders, whip launchers, star launchers.

Some graffiti artists like Ramm:ell:zee delved into calligraphic history and re-interpreted the alphabet, seeing language as ‘military function formations, conceived from territories and lands’. He understood the talismanic power of letters rooted in the pictogram, the hieroglyph, the head of an ox that became an A, a house, a shelter-sign: see Ramm:ell:zee on Gothicfuturism.

To keep the graffiti writers off, the NYC Transit Authority spent millions on special buffers and paint solvents and plastic finish in corporate grey – more money than the government assigned to the National Endowment of the Arts. The kids call the faded cars ‘ghosts’ or ‘flashbacks’ or ‘legends’ and then get with the ephemerality by inventing a ‘throw up’ style.

But by the mid 1980s, the form had moved from the street to the art world. A sub-culture far removed from the level-as-a-desktop cool of much contemporary art at the time, with its lifeless postmodern spaces, graffiti looked like the cultural enemy of all the ‘non-spaces’ of shopping malls and airport lounges, of the airless corporate lobbies like necropolitan sets where the smart money makes deals, or the colourless brick motel rooms up and down our coasts. It also represented a way for graffiti writers to parlay street cred into an art career.

Formerly spraycan bandit SAMO (for ‘same old shit’), Jean-Michel Basquiat was the first Afro-American artist to make it as an international art star. Working aboveground, he initiated new-wave graffiti with oblique messages, combining Caribbean voodoo with inner-city exoticism on large canvases. Images of skulls and mask-like heads with snarling, biting, chewing teeth. Names like Papa Doc and Idi Amin evoked ‘bad nigger’ vibes. Cryptic phrases included ‘invent enemies’ and ‘prfct’.

Another well-known graffiti artist from the era was Keith Haring. A white boy from Pennsylvania, with his famous radioactive baby icon, he made crisp cover-the-earth images that seemed to combine Pac Man and caveman. Haring brought pop art and graffiti to the commercial mainstream.

While many ‘writers’ find their niche in commercial design, very few since Haring and Basquiat make it into the white art world and know what it takes to achieve a one-person show. Born in Bristol, England, Banksy is probably the most famous street artist today, whose stencil works appear on walls around the world. He has said ‘People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.’

After 25 years of active repression, graffiti has not only endured but evolved into an international movement with thousands of devotees. Does including graffiti in the cultural canon shatter the presumption of criminality that has kept it apart from the mainstream? And does it broach the rarely asked question of whether our standard for judging art is founded on truth and beauty or on class and caste?