Art Crimes
by Sara Rudin
Graffiti isn't corporate, so it gets no respect.
Hasn't made a billion dollars for some corporation yet. -KRS-One
Travelling the streets of downtown Richmond, one is unlikely to be struck
by visions of mass amounts of graffiti. Yet Richmond is receiving plenty
of attention in the news for its crackdown on graffiti writing-recently
the it gave jail terms to two convicted graffiti writers. Other writers
have been more lucky. The Ink Headz, a three-man crew of graffiti writers
from Miami who were travelling up the East Coast painting (or "bombing")
walls, are one such example. These three guys-Ease, D.K., and Shie-spent
most of an afternoon and evening painting one wall in Richmond, in addition
to the time spent planning the piece. Painting such a mural undoubtedly
requires great skill and talent, but, on the other hand, it is also quite
illegal. The result, crime as art, is a puzzling contradiction that does
not fit into an easy distinction between right and wrong.
Over twenty years ago in the subway system of New York City, a revolution
of sorts began. The unusual letters and characters that a handful of artists
painted on the subway trains gave rise to a unique concept of style inherently
mixed with urban youth culture and the music of hip-hop. The pieces spray-painted
on the trains and later on the walls of handball courts represented a revolution
of what we know as "graffiti": writing on walls, trees, benches,
and just about any other public surface. Today the term graffiti covers
a number of such writings including the simple "tag," or name,
written with marker or spray paint, to the colorful and complex murals that
may contain more elaborate paintings of letters as well as cartoon-type
characters.
To some, graffiti has become an art form complete with its own aesthetics,
particularly graffiti murals. But for the majority of people, graffiti is
treated as a public nuisance that desecrates our city landscapes and destroys
our communities. And of course, the fact that it is illegal doesn't make
graffiti any more popular in the public eye. Recently, cities across the
country, including Richmond, have attempted to crack down on graffiti as
part of a campaign to revitalize our cities. New York currently serves as
the model for such efforts with its "Quality of Life" campaign
which aims to prevent such detriments to city landscapes as graffiti, loud
car stereo music, pan handling, homeless living in public spaces, etc. In
Richmond, these programs manifest themselves in a city curfew for youths
under the age of eighteen, fines and jail sentences for graffiti writing,
laws against car stereo systems that can be heard over 50 feet away, and
the closing down of Bryan Park due to noise problems.
What all of these conflicts have in common is the debate over public
space and the rules governing that space. In dealing with the problem of
graffiti writing in particular, it is essential that we understand the nature
of graffiti before making assumptions that graffiti and graffiti writers
are a threat to the public's quality of life. One of the first issues to
address is whether or not graffiti can be considered an art form. Personally,
I find the scrawled tags you see on the buildings and dumpsters around campus
to be pretty inoffensive, though uninteresting artistically. However, the
layer
upon layer of black markered tags that cover entire sides of buildings in
Richmond are quite unappealing to look at. Yet they are relatively easy
to remove and to prevent by painting over with new paints impervious to
subsequent graffiti, and are relatively inconspicuous because they usually
appear in alley ways, under bypasses, and other incidental areas. Very rarely,
if at all, does an individual's home or property get hit by a writer. From
the perspective of artistic merit, most of the writers who do these "throw-ups"
and tags are inexperienced and not respected within the graffiti community
because of their lack of skill. Another point to consider with this type
of graffiti is that it has been around since the ancient Egyptians and Greeks,
who carved graffiti phrases into walls.
Until recently, tagging (writing one's name on walls) was the predominant
form of graffiti writing in cities. The phenomenon of full-blown graffiti
murals did not begin until the 1970's when writers began painting entire
subway trains in New York City. Graffiti became more predominant because
it was larger and more colorful, and because it gave birth to a specific
graffiti culture. More kids began writing in the hopes of becoming a master,
or "king," and thus gaining respect and fame in their neighborhoods.
As the number of writers increased, they focused less on painting trains
and more on new mediums for their work. Thus, graffiti spread to handball
courts and city walls. Because of this, graffiti has acquired a much more
prevalent, and at the same time problematic, position in city environments.
Even so, the influence of the graffiti mural has spread to the mainstream
modern art world and in turn has been influenced by art. For example, Varnedoe
and Gopnik in their study of modern art compare graffiti art with the works
of Marcel Duchamp and Jean Dubuffet.1 Other researchers have associated
graffiti muralists with the naive movement because the muralists "lacked
any sort of training yet produced new forms of art that incorporated diverse
elements of mass culture."2 In addition, when graffiti was rapidly
gaining a foothold in artistic and cultural circles in the 1980s, an art
dealer from Amsterdam, Yaki Kornblit, organized a number of successful museum
exhibitions of top graffiti artists from New York, including a show at the
Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Many of these writers later moved
towards more mainstream artistic ventures, retaining only the use of the
spraycan in their art. Whether or not we view a piece as beautiful, though,
is still a personal, subjective choice. That does not in any way diminish
the talent, creativity, or overall artistic quality of a graffiti mural.
Graffiti <I>is </I>an art form.
The phenomenon of writers who are paid to do work raises another issue:
the difference between legal and illegal works. While some writers regard
legal works as a form of "selling out," paid works and free walls
erected by cities to channel graffiti away from public property are a vital
part of graffiti. The distinction between a legal and illegal piece also
points to the essential problem of this culture-the question of vandalism.
It's fine to say that a piece has artistic merit and should be appreciated,
but the fact that the piece is illegal and therefore a punishable crime
provides an immovable obstacle towards appreciating graffiti as art. Ernest
L. Abel and Barbara E. Buckley raise several questions regarding to this:
"Do we stop searching for the inner meaning of a painting or a poem
when it appears on a wall merely because we do not happen to acknowledge
the wall as a suitable receptacle for art or literature? Do we stop trying
to understand what motivated the artist or the writer merely because he
chose to express his thought through some unconventional medium?"4
But while these are important and relevant points, most people will still
view graffiti as illegal and therefore unworthy of any further consideration.
There is also the problem of crime associated with graffiti. Besides
being seen as vandals, graffiti writers, who often travel in three or four
man groups, or "crews," are also associated with the violence
attributed to gangs simply because they look like a gang and do their work
at night. One anti-graffiti activist, who started a web page devoted to
the anti-graf movement in his neighborhood, writes, "Graffiti makes
people fearful of their own neighborhoods." Many of these claims, though,
are unfounded and over-generalized. Graffiti crews on the whole, excluding
gangs who mark their territory with graffiti, are non-violent. Writers themselves
repeatedly say that they do not belong to a gang, nor do they engage in
any violent activity or otherwise pose a threat to neighborhoods.6 Graffiti
writers are also not subversive members of society as many anti-graffiti
proponents would have us believe. Taking the Ink Headz for example, D.K.
started his own business in Georgia selling skate supplies and similar articles.
Ease and Shie work with him and produce <I>12 Ounce Prophet </I>magazine,
which they sell in stores along the East Coast. And all three are only in
their early twenties, thus refuting the stereotype of graffiti writers as
violent and irresponsible kids.
All of this brings us back to the issue of quality of life. If graffiti
writers are not a violent threat in the community, if the work they do is
not merely destructive scribblings, if the only crime they commit is writing
on a wall (in many cases making the usual drab city-scape a bit more bearable
to look at), what or whose quality of life are they offending? Stephen Duncombe
recently published an article addressing this question in regards to graffiti
and other inner-city problems. He says, "It is the roots of these things
[graffiti, panhandling, homelessness]-poverty, alienation-that have to be
exposed as the real attack on public space and quality of life. We have
to take the offensive by pointing out who the real space thieves are."7
And who are those thieves? The next time you drive down Richmond Road or
any highway or Interstate, go to a public park, or take public transportation,
look at the signs around you. What makes up a good portion of our so-called
public space and city landscape is not our buildings or the evidence of
a culture in decline, but rather commercial billboards and advertisements-the
unquestioned graffiti of the postmodern age. It's not unusual, then, that
graffiti is accepted when it is paid for or sponsored by some business,
such as restaurants or stores who hire graffiti artists to paint their shops.
And, in a culture that so values personal integrity, it is no surprise that
many artists would rather risk working illegally and getting caught than
selling themselves to a corporation.
Duncombe goes on to say, "Kids who put a marker to subway walls
don't see this as a desecration of public space, but of space they don't
own. In a society where intrusive advertisements and corporate logos are
the [language] of identity... is it any wonder that young people advertise
themselves through tags on walls?" Perhaps if there were such a thing
as "public space," a space not owned or sponsored by commercial
or government interests, our communities might have a different atmosphere
about them. Still, regardless of the personal merits graffiti may or may
not have, it simply does not make sense to try to eliminate it. If anything,
prohibiting graffiti and eliminating the free walls that writers can paint
legally will only detract more from public spaces. Writers will not be able
to put the time into creating the works of art we now see because of the
threat of arrest, and so the quick and clandestine art of tagging will flourish
instead. Just as pushing the homeless off the streets does not solve homelessness,
neither does erasing graffiti end the practice of graffiti.
1K. Varnedoe and A. Gopnik. High and Low:Modern Art and Popular Culture.
New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 1991.
2Richard Lachmann. "Graffiti as Career and Ideology." American
Journal of Sociology, Vol. 94, Iss. 2,
September 1988, pp. 229-250.
3Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff. Spraycan Art. London: Thames and Hudson,
1987, p.7.
4Ernest L. Abel and Barbara E. Buckley. The Handwriting on the Wall:Toward
a Sociology and
Psychology of Graffiti. Connecticut: Greenwood, 1977.
5 Graf in Pleasant Hills, an Anti-Graf Page. http://www.ccnet.com/%7Edougs/pgraf.html
6 Art Crimes. http://www.scotborders.co.uk.graf/
7Stephen Duncombe. "Quality of Whose Life?" The Baffler. Chicago,
IL; No. 7, 1995, p. 50.
8ibid.; p.53.