The Writing’s On The Wall

To be completely honest, I'm not sure if this ever got printed (but I believe it's in the latest issue of Infinite Magazine)? Anyways, enjoy this missive on graffiti, property, cities, and love.

I love seeing walls and windows fucked with tags and designs, political and not-so-political messages, bold rebukes to private property and propriety.  Call me an anarchist (please don’t) or a chaotic mind but disruption in the old-fashioned, sophomoric, almost kiddish sense really does it for me: I just hate seeing certain things go the right way. This summer provided a lot of that energy; demonstrations in cities nationwide featured paint bombing and property destruction alongside pro-Black movement. I don’t care to address efficacy or disavowals, the fact of the matter remains that cities were painted red, green and Black. People were tired. And somehow or someway, that fatigue turned to frustration, frustration to fuck-you’s. The imagination of it all, however, was and is stunning; that anger directed into public works of art spoke to a love people held for the places they called home, even when those homes visited harm upon them. 

Murals, tags, sharpie notes, stickers, all of it represent the subtle imprint of the marginal making their mark and rejecting the order which precipitates their social situations and constructs their lives. 

Day in and day out lives are dictated; industrialized and mechanized schools prepare students for clockwork organization of their time in jobs which don’t pay them their time’s worth and complex city planning infrastructures ghettoize and disenfranchise while affording developers free reign to carve up cities and business owners the rights to unattainable property. If order means all this…

What good is that order?

Public art (re)gained its political and popular significance because people took it upon themselves to commission their own works in- and outside of their own neighborhoods; Black Lives Matter murals and street signs were commissioned by cities who beat their protesters and murdered Black people in those same streets, but the graffiti: that came from something real. People aren’t blind after all, and they know the only reason they can’t do what they want, be where they want, make what they want is because they don’t have the capital; so they circumvent. 

There’s a theory that surmises rap’s material origins (and more broadly, the usage of the sample) as a form reacting to defunded arts programs in public schools. Cities ran into money problems in the late ‘70s and ‘80s driven by the incentivization of the suburb and the flight which followed, and animated by disdain for those who remained. Austerity reigned king, and the arts were the first subjects exiled. So kids didn’t learn to play instruments; but they did learn how to listen to music from their parents old records, and later from 45s and 70s spun at block parties and bashments. If newly musically-conscious young people can’t make new music, but they have the world’s record collections at their disposal, then old begat new (begat newer) as the sample and the scratch foment the basis of the rap instrumental. If a production team wanted to make a record that sounded like Hey DJ by Worlds Famous Supreme Team cut with an insane bass line and thrumming drums, they could chop all that together like Puff, Stevie J, and The Ummah did when piecing together Honey (Bad Boy Remix) for Mariah, Styles, and Jada; if what’s desired is a dizzying, almost drunken snare line layered over every non-vocal second of Ain’t Got Time by Roy Ayers Ubiquity, J Dilla pulled all that into one record cutting Little Brother for Black Star.

I’d contend the same foundation of a response to underinvestment supports the history of urban street art; graffiti is by no means new (its etymological origins as a word found in mid-19th century Italy with aesthetic roots witnessed as early as caveman drawings (ooga booga)), but its popularization in cities and association with Blackness and hip hop’s five pillars stems from that same late ‘70s/early ‘80s city environ. Kids couldn’t get oil paints and clay, canvases and scaffolds, architecture drafting classes and fabrics seminars; but they did have spray paint and sharpies, building walls and city structures, lessons from old writers and eager eyes to the streets. Moreover, street signage and subway cars provided vibrant and moving backdrops, and connected the artists to the cities they worked in; tagging the 6 train on the New York City MTA, for example, meant everybody from City Hall in downtown Manhattan to Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx (15 miles away) saw that shit. And shape + material constraints as well as location considerations make graffiti an art of placements and colors as much as one of recognition and vandalism. That vitality of graffiti writing adorning our buildings is related to a function the grafs serve: reclamation of space.

There’s something to be said for seeing your name somewhere; I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a kick out of the few bylines I’ve collected, but representations of self in a city that hates you? A city that arrests your brothers, rends apart your families, shunts you into its darkest corners and then blames you for surviving there? Tagging your name on a building and knowing the city will hate that too, but will be forced to see you, is a whole different kind of paint-huffing high. 

These young bulls eventually made it to private showings and galleries, collections, and museums; Basquiat and Haring are household names, Rammellzee the stuff of folklore, Futura now collaborating on Dunks for Nike, and these luminaries represent just a few of the mulititudes + armies of graffiti writers. But the enshrining and institutional acknowledgement of the culture isn’t all that interesting; in fact, all it does is speak to the art world’s ability to capitalize on genius and enshrine political movements in glitz and glamour. What remains enthralling are the conditions these people spring up from, and the love they impart on their neighborhoods. 

Graffiti is still illegal and dangerous, to be clear; citations and jail time have befallen many a writer, as have health conditions precipitated by heavy exposure to paints. As with all products of the city, eventually the writing itself is cleaned away or torn down to make room for the ever-approaching bright future (or even tagged over by new writers eager to put their name out there). 

Just like anything else, graffiti will not love you back. But graffiti represents the democratization of public space into whatever we deface it to be; the love is in the doing, and sometimes a one-sided affair is the best we can hope for.