The Writing on the Wall

Part of graffiti’s appeal is that it is often seen as the dirtier Dionysian brother of the hip, savvy art world Apollo. Even though, as Brassaï’s quote implies, the impetus to write on walls is as old as civilization, graffiti as an organized subculture in the contemporary sense only dates back to the seventies when young boys – and a few girls – began developing their renegade art on the walls and subways of New York and Philadelphia. In the eighties, a pocketful of artists, such as Futura 2000, Zephyr, Ken Scharf, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lee and Lady Pink, who either began working on the street or whose work was inspired by the street graffiti, gained popularity within the art world.

These artists worked primarily on canvas because, as Zephyr explains, ‘once having decided "I do trains, but I am going to do other things", the parameters are that it has to be movable, be displayable and be archival. Canvas is the medium of gallery artists’, while some artists successfully shifted from the street to the gallery by painting on canvas, the ethos of graffiti proved difficult to translate to an inherently static, marketable medium. As Futura notes, ‘when an artist is used to working on the scale of a subway car, it is a very difficult transition to a three-by-three foot canvas’.

The gallery work is interesting to viewers because it carries its street cred. On the streets, graffiti has always caused controversy as it flaunts and blurs the lines between expression and vandalism. Its subversive status stays strong because it breaks social codes and creates a rupture between what is accepted as ‘public’ versus ‘private’ space. Even the sloppiest made mark forces an individual’s identity onto others’ property. Graffiti needs to transgress in order to function, and by the nature of its transgression it highlights social and political delineations.

Art in public space, art for the public and public art appear to be synonymous terms for work physically outside a gallery or museum. But these terms signify different ways in which art can contribute and relate to a discourse of spatial and social relationships. Whilst such art created through institutions, corporations or governments might visually enhance the environment, as an emissary of powerful tastes and ideas it functions as a reminder of exclusion rather than a symbol of dialogue.

On the other hand, it can have a specific relationship to the community in which it is located – whether made within an ethnic tradition or as a reminder of a unique history – its meaning dependent on a pre-existing link between the work and its surroundings. Sitting uncomfortably between these two socially endorsed models, however, is a form of public art more usually known as graffiti. While not all graffiti is art, that which aspires to art’s status serves a theoretical purpose, one that transcends even while it transgresses social norms.

The issue then becomes whether graffiti itself is considered offensive by authority figures, or whether they are offended by the reminder that irreverent and often alienated groups exist who seek to claim rights over communal space. The most interesting issues surrounding graffiti arise when it technically can qualify as ‘art’ and yet its illegal presence in the urban environment still frightens and offends people.

These concerns have inspired a number of contemporary gallery artists to create work for established art spaces exploring the nature of graffiti and its conceptual roots. One of the most interesting examples of a well-known and well-shown artist exploring the sociological significance is a project by Ellen Harvey. After graduating from Harvard University and earning a law degree from Yale Harvey, who was born in the UK but now lives in Brooklyn, NYC, practiced law briefly and then enrolled in the Whitney Museum’s celebrated Independent Study Program. Between 1999 and 2001, Harvey painted tiny, gorgeous, Hudson River School-style landscapes directly onto graffiti-covered walls and other seedy surfaces throughout New York City, in what she called the ‘New York Beautification Project’. By ‘bombing’ public spaces with her dainty tag, she did more than dispense little imaginative portals throughout New York. She threw into question whether it was the graffiti act, the graffiti aesthetic or the graffiti writers themselves that the city, and particularly Mayor Giuliani, found offensive.

Harvey’s project also added insight into another aspect of graffiti that gives it its power; graffiti’s ability to restore a sense of human touch to the urban landscape. As she explained "Creating work on the street is interesting, because people tend to know your work without knowing anything else about you. Paradoxically, while graffiti tags are often all about declaring "I was here," they’re also about remaining anonymous except to a select group of fellow practitioners." As with performance art, it is the act itself that predominates, advertising the artists’ existence at the moment of creation and extolling their unique personalities. As contemporary street and gallery artist McGee/TWIST declares, ‘Graffiti is performance. Every act is performative. Each mark is evidence of that act’.

The nature of these marks is radically changing now that an increasing number of artists are using methods intended to be replicated and appropriated by their fan base. Despite repetition and mass exposure, most graffiti images are unique, individual acts of personal expression, instead of replicas of a cloistered original. In the postmodern digital age the notion of the artist’s hand or the artist’s unique touch has lost some of its significance. Graffiti stands in contradistinction to this trend, since the appeal of most graffiti is that the artist’s touch is an inherently understood. But artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey have introduced to the streets mediums such as stencils and stickers, as a method of disseminating their aesthetic.

Fairey expands the definition of street art by powerfully deconstructing and mocking the omnipresence and nonsensical potency of advertising. Since 1989, Fairey has used the arbitrarily chosen but arresting face of the late professional wrestler Andre the Giant, juxtaposed with what seem to be equally random slogans and the command ‘OBEY’. Fairey replicates the stark graphics of Russian Constructivism, mixing this with the style of Dada-esque slogans born in the streets and cafés of Europe more than eighty years ago. Fairey invites an interactive approach by widely distributing his stickers and stencils. Aside from his many gallery exhibitions, the success of Fairey’s campaign is astounding and his images are globally pervasive. The Obey/ Giant stickers can be seen on lamp posts and walls all over Cowley and the world beyond. In Manhattan or Brooklyn one can often see his images at least once on every block. Like Keith Haring, Fairey has incorporated his imagery into merchandising through his own design company, adding another medium through which he can represent Obey/Giant and the concept it signifies. Basically, Fairey’s Obey/Giant campaign attempts to stimulate curiosity, encouraging passerbys to question the purpose of the poster itself and its relationship. Fairey’s posters, stickers and stencils have no intrinsic meaning and carry ambiguous slogans but, because we are unused to seeing advertisements in which the product or motive is masked, encounters with them tend to be both thought-provoking and frustrating in equal measure.