Graffiti was always a serious art form

BLU

I haven’t put up many posts on graffiti and yet as an art form it is probably the closest to pure drawing. I wonder if its my age or a certain unconscious bias that has kept me away from reflecting on an area of art making that surrounds me and where I can walk out and see good examples of it within seconds of emerging from the house. I did a few years ago put a book together about the streets texts of Chapeltown where I live, ‘Wits Breath Edion’, https://www.blurb.co.uk/books/2308745-wits-breath-edion and its still available on-line but I have not been alert to the latest developments of a movement that continues to be very powerful globally. However I need to remind myself of the issues involved because I have just been given an MA level graffiti artist to supervise, and so as I go through the process of preparation by reacquainting myself with some of the key background issues thought it would also be an opportunity to develop a blog post outlining what I think are the key issues surrounding graffiti art form practices.

You could define graffiti as an art form of the proletariat, being an old left wing socialist I have always thought of it as a way of making marks on a property canvas; by this I mean that walls or the surfaces on which graffiti is made, are usually owned by someone and yet the images made on them are usually produced by those who own little or nothing. This I do understand is an old trope or stereotype and as I pointed out just the other week, stereotypes are dangerous so perhaps I’d better broaden my definition.

A Marxist reading of graffiti would highlight how it works in terms of stages in the redistribution of property. In this case the use-value of a wall or other surface is becoming appropriated by the graffitist and the surface’s owner is losing control over one of the meanings of his or her property. However many current graffiti artists are using their style for commercial gain, the spray paints they use are expensive and the culture from within which they operate is much more complex than that attacked by certain urban revolutionaries. For instance a Banksy image stencilled on a wall can increase its value considerably and yet at the same time he is very critical of certain capitalist values and his work is often considered a left-wing critique of the establishment. 

 

In 2001 IBM employed graffiti advertising by spray-painting images on pavements.

Ogilvy and Mather: IBM Linux ad

The ad agency Ogilvy and Mather were using graffiti images to bring attention to IBM’s launch of a new Linux based e-server by linking in the idea of graffiti to the counter-cultural roots of Linux as open-source, community-driven software. This awareness of commercial possibilities was a product of capitalist appropriation and for some time before this there had been a gradual drift of street art into gallery spaces, the most notorious perhaps been the parallel careers of Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. 

Bansky comments on Basquiat

Basquiat's work was highly political, it questioned everyday racism and the fluid nature of identity and Haring supported rallies against apartheid and the campaign for nuclear disarmament as well as being an early AIDS awareness advocate. Both artists emerged from the New York graffiti scene, hence their left wing credentials and were taken on board by fine art galleries. It has been argued therefore that their early left wing stances were appropriated and neutered by being turned into commercial products. It is this argument that now lies central to the ambiguous nature of more recent writing about graffiti, is it truly a style of the streets or is it yet another platform for wannabe gallery artists? I don't have an opinion on this and think it's too complicated an issue to unpick as I don't know enough about the current situation, however anyone thinking of developing a graffiti practice does I think have to at least be aware of the issues. 

Advertising directed at your counter culture

When Sony decided to use graffiti type images on the streets of American cities, of urban kids playing with the PSP handheld device as if it were a street culture icon, there was an immediate backlash from the graffiti community. However the line had now been blurred and a number of graffiti artists, including Mike Giant, Pursue, Rime, and Noah have used their street credentials to support new careers in the design of skateboards, T shirts and other urban wear including shoe design. 

'Become a walking art installation with the Dr. Martens X Jean-Michel Basquiat collection. Iconic silhouettes are adorned with Basquiat illustrations to take your look to new levels' Text pasted from Doc Martin's website.

Doctor Martin's in the case above suggesting that by buying their boots decorated in imagery derived from Basquiat's paintings, the wearer can become a walking art installation. What this image also suggests is how much humans need imagery in order to brand themselves as belonging to certain 'urban tribes'. In this case the wearer can suggest an interest in creativity, urban style, black street culture as well as suggesting an edginess due to the fact that everyone knows that Basquiat was a drug addict and that he died young like so many teen icons. 

Haring seemed to understand the very ancient roots of graffiti, and as soon as you see his imagery painted directly onto his body, you get a sense of how 'tribal' some graffiti is. 

Keith Haring

A performer at the Ayres rock Tjungu Festival

Body decoration in many cultures including our own is usually part of a 'total art' or gesamtkunstwerk, which is an approach to using imagery, music, dance etc., all together, as a way of communicating what it is to be a human embedded into a particular culture at a particular time. Think of someone today going to the tattoo studio, hanging out on the street, wearing certain clothes, then moving on to a music scene to listen to a certain type of structured sound. It should all hang together for them and be part of the way they develop an identity. 

High Viz street culture festival Birmingham 

The idea of 'street culture' is now so embedded into contemporary consciousness that cities like Birmingham are now bringing together comic book, dance, skateboarding and graffiti as annual festivals celebrating the contribution of street life and culture to the city. 

Of course when this happens some will decry the artists as selling out, whilst others will bemoan the fact that the city is allowing graffiti and urban culture to become acceptable. All of these ideas are also mixed in with issues surrounding the fact that cities are multicultural and that they are melting pots of culture clashes, high art coming up against hip-hop, poetry against tagging, oil paint against the spray can. You are either excited by the potential of new hybrid art forms emerging from this chaotic mix or are worried that what you have always understood as culture is being eroded by something that you never even considered as art. What you cant do if you live in a city is ignore it. 

From a personal point of view I think that people will always want to celebrate their identity and that if you begin to elevate one way of doing this over another you begin the process of selecting out the culture of the elite or powerful. A healthy culture is not a fixed culture, it is one that is open to change and is confident enough to reflect that the only things that are constants in life are growth, death and energy transfer. 

Basquiat and Haring were followed into the gallery by many other graffiti artists, and as they transfer across and become more acceptable their work becomes appropriated by academia. In my own institution Sweet Toof has been a visiting lecturer and his work it has now being argued is a modern continuation of the 'vanitas' tradition, his teeth standing in for the full skull image that was used to remind us of the fact that death is always with us.

Sweet Toof

I opened this post with an image of Blu's work, one that if you click on it becomes an animation. I have been following Blu's practice for a few years now and his work attracts me for a number of reasons. First of all he reminds me that all drawing is in some ways a performance. He will be acting out the drama of these animations in such a way that they extend over several days, as he makes drawings, paints them out and remakes, over and over again as they make their way over buildings and along streets, each drawing being a clearly thought through follow on from the one before. Of course he needs a supportive team of people filming his drawings as they unfold, and the team becomes part of the street performance. He is also very inventive, and the invention begins with the environment within which he is working, as William Kentridge said about his own animation drawing, "there is always discovery in the making". In this case the drawing begins with outlining a single brick in a wall. Once the work is done we are left with a cleaned off surface, each drawing being wiped out as a new one replaces it. This means that the work is ephemeral, something that is enacted as street drama, but not left so that it becomes dated or inappropriate because the moment or issues it reflects upon has now gone. 

PHLEGM

More locally to Yorkshire PHLEGM, who is based in Sheffield, has been making images that I think work very well in an urban setting. He uses images drawn in black over a white silhouette. This is a very canny way of making his drawings stand out against a variety of different backgrounds.  

If you want to get an idea of how the New York graffiti scene changed over a period of time when some of its members became art stars, perhaps the film KENNY SCHARF: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, is the best introduction. It was made over 11 years and features interviews and rare archival footage with Kenny Scharf, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper, Yoko Ono, Kaws, Marilyn Minter, and Jeffrey Deitch. 

See also:

 

The tattoo as drawing

KAWS

Underground comics

The idea of the mash up, where street art meets music in a gesamtkunstwerk,

Thoughts from the Los Angeles graffiti scene

When writing is not writing, the way that even the removal of graffiti creates meaning