American Graffiti

Subway Writers       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

rainforest’, the ‘jungle’, to the grey, mechanised urban environment. To Schjeldahl, it is likewise a force of nature, ‘volcanic’ and ‘unstoppable’. Most of the writers were African American, Puerto Rican or South American, or of mixed racial and ethnic heritage. Their cultural difference was reinforced and made visible in the writers’ racial or ethnic identity that set them apart from the predominately white art world. If race was not specifically mentioned in accounts of graffiti art, it was sufficient to locate the writers as ‘ghetto kids’ from the Bronx or Brooklyn to secure their identity as non-white.

Primitivism One of the strategies modern art has used to renew itself is primitivism, the appropriation of forms and motifs from non-Western cultures that are constructed as less civilised and closer to nature than Western society. For example, in the early twentieth century Picasso and Matisse solved the problem of how to represent a modern female form by referencing tribal sculpture from Africa. Primitivism is an attitude that reveals much about white, European society, and next to nothing about the non-European cultures that it has dubbed ‘primitive’. Primitivism does not account for the power and complexity of African, Oceanic, Native American, or Caribbean cultures, but labels them exotic and finds in them certain predictable traits: these Others are represented in the West as simpler, more intuitive, less inhibited. Very often, these stereotypical qualities are judged desirable by the Westerner, such as Gauguin’s Tahitians painted to represent mysticism and sensuality. In the so-called primitive Other, the primitivist finds his preconceptions about himself as sophisticated and civilised and the Other as naïve and natural to be confirmed. Subway writers knew that art world players viewed them with fascination and suspicion but with little real awareness of writing culture or even what it meant to depend upon the subway for transportation. The relationship of dominant culture to subculture that framed graffiti art is paradigmatically primitivist. Oldenburg’s and Mailer’s choice of words in the quotations above demonstrate how primitivism paved the way for the acceptance of graffiti art in the early 1990s. Graffiti, they marveled, is a ‘bouquet from Latin America’, made by ‘tropical peoples’ who import the ‘giant trees and pretty plants of a tropical