Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral: What is Graffiti?

William L. Benzon June 2013

Abstract: Graffiti exists in a liminal zone undefined and unwonted by any particular cultural institution. Born on the streets, it exists on walls where it is subject to the weather and to the needs of and desires of the graffiti writers who explore those walls. It is the graffiti site, rather than the individual piece, that is central expressive locus of graffiti culture. Because the site is ever changing, subject to a dynamic controlled by multiple parties (graffiti writers, passers-by, municipal authorities, and the weather) we can think of the site as home to a tutelary spirit, known in Japan as a kami. Graffiti: Some Parameters ................................................................................................... 1 Names: Tags, Throwies, Pieces .................................................................................... 1 But What IS it? ............................................................................................................. 1 The Rest of this Paper ................................................................................................... 2 Graffiti Hit the Reset Button on Culture ............................................................................. 3 The Site as the Expressive Locus of Graffiti Culture ......................................................... 4 Whats to be Explained, Anyhow? ............................................................................... 4 Starting from Basics ..................................................................................................... 4 Add in Skill ................................................................................................................... 4 Subculture Needed ........................................................................................................ 5 A Platonic Interlude ...................................................................................................... 5 The Rush, the Site, the Sacred ...................................................................................... 6 The Spirit of the Site: Linked Poetry and Muen ................................................................ 6 The Newport Wall ........................................................................................................ 7 From Muen to Kami .................................................................................................. 10 An Urban Design Center ................................................................................................... 12 Photographing Graffiti ...................................................................................................... 18 The Paradox of Graffiti and Photos .................................................................................. 21 222 Van Horne St., 3R Jersey City, NJ 07304 201.217.1010 bbenzon@mindspring.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

What is Graffiti?

Graffiti: Some Parameters

What is graffiti? Thats the question. Well, actually, its two questions. One is relatively easy to answer, though the answer is, inevitably, a fuzzy one. This answerable question is about whats it look like? who does it? and where do you find it? The other is difficult to answer, perhaps even, at this time, impossible. This is the question about graffitis nature, its place in the scheme of things. Its an impossible question because we may not have the terms in which to state an answer. But perhaps impossible as well because graffiti is still in a state of becoming and, as such, has not yet settled into being some one thing or several delimited things. Its the second question that interests me, but I cant get to it until Ive provided an answer to the first.1

Names: Tags, Throwies, Pieces

On the first question, by graffiti I mean an expressive tradition that seems to have started in North Philadelphia and New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s and which spread out from there. Its now all over the world, with visible stylistic links back to the 1970s graffiti in the Northeastern USofA. Graffitis about the name, the name a person takes when they decide to write graffiti: Taki183, Snake, Dondi, Blade, Seen, to name a few names. The word graffiti has been externally imposed, though its long been accepted within graffiti culture. Since the form is about the name, the people who do it think of it as writing, and of themselves as writers. They write graffiti. A writer may write under two or more different names, nor is it uncommon for a writer to get up (that is do graffiti on a wall) under the name of another writer in his crew. The tag is the most basic form of graffiti, but it can, in some hands, take on the grace of a master calligrapher. Tags can be done quickly. Throw-ups or throwies are more elaborate, generally taking the form of block of balloon letters with outline and fill in contrasting colors. They cover more space that tags and take more time to do. Tags can be done in, say, a minute or less; throwies take several minutes. [When youre avoiding the police, time to execute is important.] Pieces, aka masterpieces, are the most elaborate of the basic graffiti forms. A piece is likely five or six feet high, maybe eight or ten, and can be 15 to 20 feet wide. The design of a piece may be worked out beforehand in a black book. Pieces may be multi-colored and may feature various kinds of representational art. If executed in so-called wild style the name may be so distorted and elaborated as to be unreadable.

But What IS it?

When Norman Mailer wrote his 1974 essay, The Faith of Graffiti, he declared it to be art, perhaps the first to do so. But many New Yorkers most? thought it was vandalism. After all, it was illegally done. So, is it art or vandalism? They arent exclusive categories. Remember, however, that those original graffiti writers did not come up in the world of art schools, galleries, and museums. They operated outside of it. And getting away with vandalism was important to them. It still is. That is, the illegal nature of the work is not an incidental fact of its production. Even those among the very small number of writers who make a living working with design firms will still keep up their street cred by doing illegals.
1

This paper is based on a presentation I gave to the Semiotics Workshop: Culture in Context, which was hosted by the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago on January 5, 2013. Special thanks to Chris Bloechl, Britta Ingebretson, Michael Silverstein, and Joseph Weiss. Page 1

What is Graffiti?

A tag sprayed on a moveable board is just a tag. But it earns the writer no street cred. A tag on the back of a stop sign, or on the side of a water tower, that tag is illegal and earns points. It doesnt matter what it looks like as long as its identifiably the tag of a named writer: Ceaze, Tdee, KH1, Sol, Werds, to a name a few that have gotten up in my neck of the woods. Aesthetics counts, but just where and why and how much, thats tricky. Then we have a remark by Susan Farrell, who started perhaps the oldest graffiti site on the web, Art Crimes. She said, in an email a few years ago, that graffiti is a cross between art and extreme sport. One earns credit by getting up in places that are both highly visible and difficult to reach, on the upper parts of buildings and towers. Some writers have been known to use climbing gear to a gain access. And then we have the standard advice on how to photograph graffiti (which you can find here and there on the web). Photograph it straight on, with no fancy angles. You can include some context if you wish, but the emphasis is always on the graffiti itself. Sounds sensible enough, no? Well, not quite. A lot of graffiti is quite large and you may come onto it at odd angles. If you can get close to it, you probably will, at which point you can no longer see the whole thing. You may even all but put your nose on the wall examining a particular detail. In any event, you get close enough to see the grain in the concrete, or brick, or wood, whatever the surface may be. The way you look at it at different scales, thats important. Thats how you take it in. The standard advice ignores that. The standard advice, in effect, instructs you to pretend that graffiti is just like easel-painted art, except outdoors. And so thats how you photograph it. Through several years of photographing the same walls month after month, in different kinds of light, and at different seasons of the year, Ive come to think of the site as itself and important locus of graffiti activity, perhaps THE most important locus. Thus I see it as a kind of back door environmental art that changes constantly. The standard photographic advice simply makes that invisible, as do the usual accounts. All of this taken together suggest to me that it is at least unwise, of not an outright mistake, to think of graffiti is some species of art that just happens to be on walls. It doesnt just happen to be on those walls, and that fact of its so being makes it illegal has far-reaching consequences, some of which I bring up in the notes that follow this introduction. Finally, I note that photography has become integral to graffiti culture. Because much of the work is illegal, and almost all of it is outdoors, it is also ephemeral. It is either buffed by the authorities, gone over by other writers, or simply degrades in the weather. So, photographs are important in documenting graffiti. Writers will photograph their own work, but there are also many photographers with a specific interest in graffiti (like me). And these photographs find their way onto the web in various photo-sharing sites, some general and some specific to graffiti.

The Rest of this Paper

consists of lightly revised posts from my blog, New Savanna. As such it is informal in tone and lacking in scholarly apparatus. It is also exploratory in nature. Im trying to figure out whats going on, not reporting closely argued conclusions. I note that while writing these posts, which are recent, Ive been under the influence of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennet (Vibrant Matter) and so have been seeing how it feels to think of the graffiti site as an agent, or actant (Latours term), in graffiti culture. I did a series of blog posts on Latours Reassembling the Social where I used graffiti as a touchstone example. Ive gathered those posts into a single document which you can download here:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1943125

Ive got thousands of graffiti photos online at Flickr. Here they are organized according to site:

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What is Graffiti? http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/collections/72157601413328684/

Except for those in the Suburban NJ collection all of the sites are in Jersey City (with a few in Hoboken), which is across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan. You can find my graffiti posts at New Savanna at this link:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/graffiti

Heres a PDF that contains some of my older posts on graffiti:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/57704300/Urban-Marginalia-Graffiti-in-Jersey-City

Graffiti Hit the Reset Button on Culture

What happens when you think, not in terms graffiti, but in terms of the culture thats been organizing itself THROUGH the graffiti. Standard discussions hang everything off the graffiti. Hell, its what every discussion of art, even art-in-context, does. What matters, it seems to me, is the culture and social practice that organizes itself through the graffiti. You see, when you hang everything off the graffiti itself the first question that hits you is: Is it freakin art? That IS an important question. But when you put it first, then everything else depends on the answer. If it IS art, then its important in one way. If it ISNT, then its important in a different way, or not at all. But, really, does the question matter? Is it the right one? Its not a question I want to be answering; because MY answer is beside the point. Whats important about graffiti is that it DOES force the question: Is it art? That is, just what IS art, anyhow? And it forces it from a point OUTSIDE the art world, which has fully absorbed Duchamp and Warhol and everything around them, absorbed it and is grinding it out: the most expensive sausage in the world. And so graffiti forces the question deeper and farther than its gone in a long long time. Some of the people doing the forcing many of the writers themselves dont much care about the question itself; they arent asking it. Theyre just getting up, as they say. Its a question asked by outsiders, like Norman Mailer, WHO ASKED IT LARGE in The Faith of Graffiti (1974). He set the terms in which to ask the question, not simply art vs. vandalism, but graffiti in the context art history. And he talked with the writers themselves, and with the anti-graffiti mayor of New York, thereby encompassing the society in which graffiti lives. As for Jon Naars photographs of the graffiti, without which Mailers essay would have been flapping in the breeze, they ARE art; and theyre mere reproductions of the originals. So there we have it: graffiti, the question, the society, and art. How do they interact? Ive got several contributions to make: In the first place, Ive documented the changing life of graffiti on a limited set of walls. Everyone who knows graffiti knows it happens. But it hasnt been documented and it hasnt been much thought about. The life of graffiti has been but a shadow behind the high-gloss images in the books and, more recently, digital bits on the web. Whats important about graffiti isnt a few selected works that have somehow crossed a finish line into ART. Graffiti REARTICULATES the environment in which it lives. It is environmental / ecological / community . . . ART? Yes / No? Whatever, its environmental / ecological / community WHATEVER. And then theres the nature of the images themselves. As Susan Farrell pointed out to me in an email, graffitis the first form of abstract art to reach a mass audience. Thats important. But how and why has it happened? What does it enable? Where can the future go with THAT?

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What is Graffiti?

The Site as the Expressive Locus of Graffiti Culture

Whats to be Explained, Anyhow?
Really, the rise and spread of graffiti, largely outside the institutions of the art world. Not completely outside by any means. But the gallery world, the museum world, and the art school world have pretty much been at the periphery of the graffiti scene, and remain there to this day. Thats not mere happenstance. Thats deliberate. On both sides. But what are the nature of the deliberations, and whos making them? Heres what I think: You cant understand the rise of graffiti culture unless you understand the site. And you cant understand the site if you think of it as basically a substitute for a rectangle of stretched canvas. Its like canvas in that it has a surface on which paint is applied. Otherwise, it is different and must be conceptualized differently. What I dont know, is how to explain that. I can talk around it, but explain it, no. The purpose of this post is simply to think out-loud, to get some thoughts out there where I can step back a look at them and perhaps see something Im missing. Im going to talk around it, but in public.

Starting from Basics

Graffiti started as tagging, a way to get recognition from girls (Cornbread in Philly) and ones peers. You put your (graffiti) name in a public place, so its visible. Alas, its also vandalism. So, theres a tension, a conflict. Youve got to get up while avoiding getting caught. Thats the founding situation. From that grew . . . a world. Enter, competition with other writers. Youre all competing for recognition. How do you do it? Let us assume, for the moment, that all are equal in technical skill (can control) and aesthetic skill (design). Lets further assume that all were doing is single stroke tags. No throw-ups, no pieces. Given that, whats the basis for competition? Basically, visibility. You can be up in more places, and in more visible places. The two are not at all the same. Thirty tags in a place where no one goes are collectively less visible than one tag in a spot everyone passes every day. Hitting lots of spots just takes time. Hitting the best spots, that takes luck, skill, and aggression. And it doesnt hurt to have some athletic ability and so physical courage. Visible places can be high up and relatively difficult to get to. Those who can and are willing to reach those spots, they have an advantage over others lacking the physical skill, or lacking the courage. Keeping skill levels more or less the same, lets expand the repertoire from tags to throw-ups. Theyre larger and hence more visible than tags; further, they can go over and thus obliterate tags. But they take a bit more time to do; five minutes or perhaps ten, as opposed to a minute or less. How does this change things? It seems to me it favors the quick and the daring.

Add in Skill
Now, lets allow for different levels of skill, both technical and aesthetic. And lets allow piecing. What happens? Of course, now some tags will be better looking than others, by far. This is aesthetics, not coverage or visibility. It introduces a new factor into the game. The real difference, however, comes with pieces. Thats where skill most obviously differentiates Page 4

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one writer from another. But there is a cost to piecing. Pieces take time to do, several hours or more. How do you make pieces that are highly visible and yet remain protected while making them? Back in the subway days the solution was to paint the pieces on trains that were in lay-up for the night. By exercising reasonable caution and posting watch, it was possible to get several hours in which to paint. One was relatively safe. Then, the next day, when the train rolled, the piece became visible up and down the line. Painting these pieces became something of a quasi-military operation executed by a small crew. It had to be, as it was illegal. And so the whole process facilitated the growth of an alternative aesthetic culture. With the emergence of that alternative culture, visibility became a peculiar thing. Visibility within ones subculture was one thing; visibility to the public at large was another. As long as one painted on subway cars, the requirements of these two visibilities, the requirements of reaching these two audiences, remained the same. Once the cars were gone as a surface, things changed.

Subculture Needed
We now have a situation where at least some of the very best piecing is visible only within the subculture. Tagging remains visible to all, but piecing changes its valence. Which is to say, graffiti needs a subculture in order to thrive. Thats the point, no? Or rather, thats the question: Why did a subculture coalesce around this activity? Why didnt the activity just disappear? Where did this subculture come from? It seems to me all thinking about graffiti more or less assumes the existence of a subculture. Certainly, such a subculture existed by the mid-1980s, when Subway Art appeared. But did it exist in the early 1970s when Jon Naar and Norman Mailer did The Faith of Graffiti? Perhaps, perhaps not. The activity existed, yes, and was widespread, but had it become a differentiated subculture? Or is that what happened when it hooked up with hip hop? Getting back to piecing, at least some of it became more or less secret. Hidden from the mainstream world, but not from the graffiti subculture. And its access to this hidden world that makes / defines the subculture. [Is it, really? Do I believe that?] Now we have a distinction between legal pieces and illegals. Now we have the demand that writers maintain their street cred within the subculture by doing illegals. Thats what marks the distinctiveness of graffiti. At the same time this puts a premium on the spots available for doing the illegal pieces. The site becomes an extremely scarce resource. And so it gains power, agency.

A Platonic Interlude
By way of contrast, lets toss out a theory of art that most likely no one believes, but theres a lot of talk thats consistent with this straw-man theory. This theory is Platonic. Works of art are expressions of Platonic ideals. So, the physical work of art isnt the REAL work, its only an imitation. The real work is pure form, as such it has no size, no scale. Its just a design. Size and scale belong to the imperfect expressions and, as such, are ephemeral. On this model, graffiti is deeply mysterious. Why bother to break the law just to get access to the large surfaces needed for creating pieces? Why not simply render the design on a canvas? Yes, itll be smaller, but whats important about that? A design is a design, and form is a form, regardless of scale or location. If thats what art were about, then, as I say, graffiti would be a mystery. But thats not what arts about, not entirely, perhaps not even at all. The designs the forms mean nothing without the world around Page 5

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them. They create the world that creates them.

The Rush, the Site, the Sacred

At the same time, we have stories of the adrenalin high the writer feels when working illegally, and/or in a physically dangerous location. Consider a passage from an interview that Cedar Lewisohn conducted with Sweet Toof and Tek33 (Abstract Graffiti, Merrell 2011, p. 95):
Talk me through the experience of making an illegal work. [Sweet Toof] Its that first pop of opening a can of paint. Your heartbeat is racing, youre sort of looking round. The noise of the paint coming out of the nozzle, you feel that everyone can hear you. Youre scared and excited at the same time. Your senses are really aware. Your sight and hearing are sharp and you can smell the vapours of the paint. Then what usually happens is you go into a trance and are not quite aware of stuff. Sometimes it hits you harder. You can feel drunk without being drunk. You can lose track of time. The whole thing about getting bustedits not just when youre painting; they can raid your house or you can get grassed up. [Tek33] It depends on the spot, if theres a high risk or being caught or of falling off a ledge, it its slippery and you could fall off. You do simple spots as well, just to keep your name out there. Its like different kinds of adverts.

How deeply does THAT affect the work? Is it possible to get that rush in a studio? If not, then the illegal nature of the act itself has an aesthetic function. And that function is tied to the site, for its the nature of the site that makes the act an illegal one. Where this all leads is to a remark that PAC, one of the curators of the Underbelly Project, made about the site:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/arts/design/01underbelly.html?pagewanted=all

We do want to preserve the kind of sacred quality of the place, PAC said, but we also want people to know it exists. And we want it to become part of the folklore of the urban art scene.

That sacred quality, that implies a world. And thats what we have to understand about graffiti, how it makes a world.

The Spirit of the Site: Linked Poetry and Muen

Graffiti expresses the kami of the site where it is situated
I take it, then, that the site of graffiti is the focus of our, or at least my, investigation. But the site is to be understood, not as a mere physical place. It IS that, but the physical place is to be understood, perhaps, provisionally, as a resource accessed by the graffiti, and thus by the graffiti writer. The site is a confluence of physical, social, and aesthetic energy. In order further to understand this, a little comparative investigation is called for. And for that we turn towhere else?but to Japan and Buddhism. Not directly, but as interpreted through Eiko Ikegamis wonderful book, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge 2005). We start with linked verse, a form of collective, public poetry practiced in the 13th century (and later):
The atmosphere of a Cherry Blossom session was intensely moving for its participants. The typical number of seated poets in a za session was not fixed but usually stood at around 10. Unlike the more formal linked-verse meetings of later periods, however, members of the audience that surrounded a circle of poets in a Cherry Blossom session were free to contribute poems of the own

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What is Graffiti? to the circle. After one sequence of chain poems was made by seated members in the circle, the floor was open to the public. All the participants in the meeting would avidly search for the best follow-up verse, one after the other, Sometimes, dozens of poems were thrown in from the audience to provide the next stanza in a particularly difficult chain. When an unexpectedly interesting succeeding stanza was presented, the perceptive participants would be captivated by feelings of surprised exhilaration. (p. 87)

In other words, we be jammin. Now check this out, its from Roger Gastman & Caleb Neelon, The History of American Graffiti (Harper 2010); theyre quoting TDEE, a Jersey City writer talking about the Jersey City Wall of Fame, as its sometimes known (p. 276):
All of sudden, already seasoned writers like TECK, SERO, SNOW, and the QMB CREW started rocking our walls, to where soon you could go up there on any given Sunday during the summers of 1991 to 1993 and find at least ten people painting, and twenty more just hanging out. . . . The Newport Wall was the first time writers from different New Jersey cities got together on the regular and had a place to meet and paint as a collective.

Times have changed, but the Newport Walls still there, only three blocks from the Holland Tunnel and thus within earshot of thousands of cars a day, though its been neglected of late and part of the walls covered with dirt, dirt thrown there as part of preparations for erecting apartment buildings that have not yet happened.

The Newport Wall

My Flickr site for the Newport Wall:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/sets/72157594380716421/

Yoder, now covered with dirt: photo taken in 2006:

Jersey Joe (aka Rime), covered with dirt: photo taken 2006: Page 7

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Some writers from the UK (see UK in the green at the right edge), notice the freshly dozed dirt in front of the wall; photo from December 2006:

Heres a long shot, from the North Approach (ha!); notice the freshly piled dirt; photo from December 2006:

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What is Graffiti?

A little graffiti in the mist, photo taken 2007:

Taboo and 41Shots, DYM crew from Brooklyn, a couple years ago:

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That is to say, a graffiti sites a living thing. Like all living things, it changes.

From Muen to Kami

But I digress. Back to Ikegami, Japan, and Buddhism (87):
Closer observation of the operation of the Cherry Blossom sessions reveals the presence of multiple devices for creating spheres of muen, or no relation. The word muen (mu means absence in literal English translation; en means relationship), originally a Buddhist term, implied the absence of a relationship to worldly constraints.

Now, one more passage (p. 90):

In this sense, it was fitting that the Cherry Blossom linked-verse sessions were organized by such nenbutsu hijiri as Zenna because these monks not only renounced the world, but also frequented funerals and graveyards, the realm of the dead. They were persons who typified muen in that their bodies and very existence were sites of no-relation. Muen referred to sacred places but also to such spaces as markets, trading posts, bridges, riverbanks, and graveyards. Bridges represented physical connections and geographical boundaries. Graveyards were the realm of the dead, in which the living communicated with their ancestors during funerary rituals. Thus muen spaces offered a kind of asylum at places of boundary intersection as spheres for transformation.

These muen spaces, these no relation spaces, could also be thought of as interstitial. However you think of them, the Newport Wall is like that. Fifty or sixty years ago it was a train station. The ground in front of it carried four train tracks while the wall supported a station. Goods and people moved over those tracks to and from the banks of the Hudson River. When the railroads left Jersey City, the tracks were ripped out, the station dismantled, and the site, which once had been bustling with activity, became deserted, useless, between the cracks, muen. And then the graffiti moved in, like a spirit, as a manifestation of spirit. The Japanese word is kami, the central objects of worship for the Shinto faith according to the Wikipedia:
Some of the objects or phenomena designated as kami are qualities of growth, fertility, and production; natural phenomena like wind and thunder; natural objects like the sun, mountains, rivers, trees, and rocks; some animals; and ancestral spirits. Included within the designation of

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What is Graffiti? ancestral spirits are spirits of the ancestors of the Imperial House of Japan, but also ancestors of noble families as well as the spirits of the ancestors of all people. There are other spirits designated as kami as well. For example, the guardian spirits of the land, occupations, and skills; spirits of Japanese heroes, men of outstanding deeds or virtues, and those who have contributed to civilization, culture and human welfare; those who have died for the state or the community; and the pitiable dead.

Graffiti is a manifestation of the kami of a site. Think of it this way: In a modern and secular Western ontology, a place has many separable aspects. It is a physical site consisting of a certain substance, or collection of substances, having a certain location and a certain form. Plants may grow there, animals feed, or nest, of mate, whatever. Those are other aspects of the site. One might also talk of the light incident upon a site, and the sight lines to and through it very important for architects and urban planners. Then there are the laws governing use of the site and accessibility of the site. Those last laws are very important for graffiti, for they determine whether or not it is legal for a writer to step foot on the site. My point is, however, that in a modern Western ontology, these features or aspects are all separate. The site can be analyzed into, reduced to, those aspects. What do we call that thing that is all those put together, inseparable? Provisionally, we can call it a kami, the spirit of the site. The graffiti writer, then, is attracted to, called to a certain site by the kami. What the writer does is a manifestation of the kami. The flow of graffiti on the site, then, expresses the life of the sites kami.

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An Urban Design Center

My Flickr site for this building:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/sets/72157627183052119/

The Urban Design Studio, as Ive been calling it, is located near the mouth of the old Morris Canal at the point where it joins New York Bay. While it isnt quite so undifferentiated from its surroundings as an ancient burial mount, it aspires to that condition. Heres a shot of the North Wall:

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The foliage all but disappears into the blue and yellow patterning on the wall, or is it emergence? Taking a closer look, could that be a tutelary spirit we see?

Lets move around to the West Wall. Here we see a typical undifferentiated palimpsest of multiple interacting asynchronous causal agents, that is, different writers, different times, messin round:

Note the purplish color to the left, and the leafy-form green spotting to the left. Now focus on the arcing black streak at the center, bottom half, how it moves down the wall, across a cinder block, and onto the Page 13

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deck slab:

Now you can see it, the black streak connects the wall to the cinder block to the deck. And not only the black, the yellow as well. What weve got is a spontaneous multi-agent Pollock spread across a complex 3D surface. Abstract expressionism never had it so good! One more time, the money shot:

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Is all this intentional? Well, I figure that the physical motions that caused the paint to be here and there where it dried up now is, yes those motions were intentional. Were the exact landing zones intended? Exact? No. But more or less, generally intended, I would suppose so. Hmmm, I wonder. What would happen if I just tossed this paint at the wall? Wheeeee! And there you have it, a flying streak of black paint binds wall, cinderblock, and deck into a fractured unity. Intention. No one person intended all of this. Each bit, there by intention. Collectively, let us say that the kami, the spirit of the site intended it. Lets go inside and examine and take a further look. Heres a rear view, backlit, looking out through a hole in the West Wall:

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Theres our purple streak, just to the right of center:

I urge you to look closely at this tableau, the small lady bug painting behind the cinder block at the lower left, moving up the diagonal beam, weathered, with the small painting attached near the top of the photo, then look to the right, a purple streak moving down, over one painting, then a plywood board, then another painting.

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Back to the lady bug, if thats what it is:

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Accident? Intended? Who knows? Who cares? Why? All them questions. Graffiti aesthetics. The kami. Objects in motion.

Photographing Graffiti
Photographs have been with graffiti almost from the beginning. When the New York Times did its article on Taki 183 it ran a photograph of his tag. When Norman Mailer wrote his extended essay, The Faith of Graffiti, he was chasin Jon Naars superb photos. Without those photos the essay would have been pompous and overblown. With them, it reaches the mark. Now look closely at Naars photos, some of them are here:
http://www.jonnaar.com/portfolio/graffiti.htm

Theres not a single piece (aka masterpiece), as theyve come to be called, among them. Here and there you see something thats on the way to being a piece, but none are there yet. The thing about pieces is that they provide a natural frame to the image. So the photographer doesnt have to think about composition. Just hit the frame and youve got it. Naar didnt have that luxury. He wasnt looking at framed art. He was looking at tags on walls, tags and tags and more tags and somewhat more elaborate letters and some shapes here and there. But no frames. He had to do the framing himself. With his eye, in his mind. That takes skill. ***** Its easy to see why pieces arose. Writers wanted to distinguish themselves among their friends and other writers, and, incidentally, to attract the photographers to their work. So they did ever more elaborate work, and, in time, piecing emerged as a distinct form of graffiti, along with tags and throw-ups. By the time Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant published Subway Art (1984) pieces were ubiquitous. In fact, Chalfants studio became a haven for many writers, as Gastman and Neelon explain in The History of American Graffiti (p. 115):
By 1979, he had amassed a substantial collection of images, and when he met DAZE, KEL 1ST, MARE 149, SHY 147, and CRASH at the 149th Street bench that year, he invited them to see his images. For the artists, seeing Chalfants professional photography of their work and that of their peers for the first time was an astonishing experience. At a show at OK Harris gallery in 1980, Chalfant met Martha Cooper, a photojournalist who had found her way into the graffiti scene through the phenomenally talented East New York writer DONDI. The pair began assembling a book together, but also became friends and allies of graffiti writers at a time when graffiti, however spectacular, had few friends in the adult world. Chalfants studio in SoHo became a gathering point for writers: Chalfant would share his images and art books with the writers, and the writers would call Chalfant and Cooper to tell them where they had painted a new train in a certain yard so they would know where to go to get the picture.

Then theres the fact that graffiti on the subway cars didnt last. Either it was gone over by other writers, buffed by the city, or eroded by the weather. Whatever happened, the work was gone. So writers, some of them, took photos of their work. You paint during the night, then you hang out by the track the next day and snap a photo as the train goes by. The photo became the persisting, if not quite permanent, much Page 18

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less eternal, record of the work. This process went into overdrive when the world-wide-web emerged. Susan Farrell created Art Crimes (the one and only graffiti.org at http://www.graffiti.org/) back in the mid-90s and began collecting graffiti images from around the world. Other sites soon followed. Now the internets awash in photos of graffiti. Heres a bit from Cedar Lewisohns interview with Futura 2000 (Abstract Graffiti, 2011, pp. 67):
[Lewishon] The distribution of imagery is one of the biggest changes for graffiti. [Futura 2000] Now that we have this international medium, the internet, you can see images from every city, and its given the community a reference to draw from. Is it possible to distinguish between graffiti from different cities? Is there a difference between work from, say, London and Paris? You used to be able to do that. Everything was more isolated. In America, in particular, there was total style between what the Latinos and Californians were doing. They had their own calligraphy. But the graffiti thats been exported to Europe and ultimately the world is still based on the same kind of style.

Thus, graffiti goes up on a Brooklyn wall on day 1. A photographer drops by on day 2 and photographs it, say, in the early afternoon. It goes out on the web in the evening, where its transmitted around the world, instantly. On day 3 similar designs are going up in Sao Paulo, Sydney, and Osaka. There we have it: 1) paint to wall, 2) image to camera, 3) image to web, 4) similar to to other wall. A complete circuit. A new aesthetic ecosystem. No, a new KIND of aesthetic ecosystem, one dependent on reproduction as no other has been. ***** But, alas, the reproductions, the photos, are often weak, sad, lifeless. Not everyone can be a Jon Naar, nor a Martha Cooper, nor a Henry Chalfant. But we can do better. On two levels. One, technical. The composition can be better, so can the contrast and saturation. These are relatively simple matters. An hour or three of instruction in a short course at the local community college or recreation center, whatever, will fix this. But theres a deeper problem. The graffitis being photographed as though it were free-standing easel-painted art that just happens to be painted directly on a wall somewhere. And, all too often, the context is almost completely cropped away. The site is rendered irrelevant. Yes, you can do that with pieces, because theyre made with a natural framing; theyre painted within a bounded rectangular area. The border may not be perfectly straight, it may not be clearly marked, but its there. One can photograph and crop to it. When you look on the web for advice on photographing graffiti, thats what it says, straight-on, maybe a little context, but no odd angles, no fancy stuff. The advice is saying, in effect, imagine that you are in a museum and photograph the painting, and the painting only, not the wall. But you arent in a museum. Youre on a street somewhere in Brooklyn or South LA or Santiago or Melbourne. You come upon the piece at an angle, maybe you dont even see the whole thing at first. Then you move around it, toward it, back away, kneel down to get a good look at that section near the bottom, now that one up there. Viewing graffiti in the wild is a kinetic experience. You really should have a video camera, but thats a whole other ball of visual wax. *****

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So, its just you, your point and shoot or your DSLR. Do something. Take, three, four, ten shots. Different angles. Details, and details of details. Maybe different times of day, different kinds of light. How about different seasons of the year? What about winter, snow on the ground? How many graffiti photos have you seen with snow on the ground? One, five, eight, none. Most likely that, none. But, the graffiti doesnt disappear in the winter. It doesnt hibernate. Its still there, beaming away. So photograph it, three, ten, seventeen times over a year, three years, or more (if it lasts that long). Only then will you come to know it. Well. But you can never know it so well that you exhaust it. Theres always another view, another angle, different light, different weather. As the object-oriented ontologists say, it's always withholding itself, always keeping something hidden. There's no way to take a transcendental photograph that encompasses it ALL, at once, FOREVER. You arent photographing a tag, a throwie, a piece, a burner, a production, whatever, you arent photographing it so you can tell your children it was there and so was I. Youre dancing with it. Make the dance a good one.

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The Paradox of Graffiti and Photos

That is a so-called piece, from masterpiece. Its by Jersey Joe, aka Rime. When you buy a book of graffiti photos these days, chances are youll get page after page of pieces, often tightly cropped and placed edge to edge so you get six or eight pieces on a page, 12 or 16 on a two-page spread. When the case is made for graffiti-as-art, more often than not, its hung on pieces. And why not? Pieces are virtuoso productions. Intricate and elaborate designs, sometimes with realistically rendered figures in them, highly colored. Pieces are difficult to do, few do them well. They dont look at all like the UGH! tags that folks find so bothersome when theyre planted on mailboxes and lampposts on their streets, and rightly so (bothersome, I mean). Yep, if graffiti is art, then its pieces that seal the deal. Except, except that piecing hardly existed in 1972 when John Naar took the photos that put graffiti on the map, and that Norman Mailer declared to be art in The Faith of Graffiti (1974). What Naar photographed and what Mailer declared into art looked more like this:

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Not exactly like thattheres more writing on top of writing in that then there was in Naars photos, nor did Naars photos feature luxuriant weeds around the edges-but in texture and (apparent) lack of virtuosity, pretty much like it. Thats what was declared art in 1974. Were they smokin weed back then? Probably, still are. What of it? And then we have this:

I think of it as interstitial or wild graffiti. Its what you get when writers empty their cans at the margins of the real graffiti. Or maybe theyre testing their caps. Or just sprayin shit for the sake of sprayin shit. What you get is a jumble of lines, textures and areas reflecting the palimpsestic overlay of 4, 5, 9, 14, who Page 22

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knows? different writers over a period of weeks, months, maybe years. The thing is, these three photos depict different, albeit related, phenomena. They look very different. But each looks good in its own way. Are the photographs art? Assuming, of course, that youre willing to grant artistic status to photographs at all. If theyre art, what of the somewhat different phenomena they depict? The piece in the first photo is the only one that originates in the intention of a single mind, the graffiti writer. The rest, no one person intends those lines and colored areas. And yet the collective result is . . . not bad. Perhaps art. So, what is art? Where is art? Is graffiti art? Do we care?

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