Seven Red

To all my real kids, throwin’ up the graffiti pieces… – Killah Priest on DJ Spooky’s Mex Grass remix of “Catechism”

This will be our first installment of Graffiti Fridays, in which I track down and discuss the graff that I’m finding here in Chicago. Don’t expect murals. I like tags and throwees, and I’ll leave the burners to the slumming art critics, who seem to enjoy that sort of thing. That’s one of the principles here: I’d rather spend considerable time discussing a marker tag on a newspaper stand than I would a full mural with some socially redeeming message. Social redemption ruined graffiti.

Now, I got into it on this very point with a particularly famous blogger a few years back, when I had the great honor of taking one of his graduate courses. I don’t like murals, and I don’t like the term “graffiti artists.” People who write graffiti are writers, not “artists,” and full on pieces are the least interesting aspect of graffiti. My argument was based on a very resentful, very nostalgic, and very dubious foundation of authenticity. I don’t like murals precisely because they are so easily assimilated to something like “art.” And so beginning in the 1980’s gallery shows for graffiti writers started popping up everywhere, and then the legal walls were dedicated, and everybody was happy because the kids had been given a safe outlet for their creativity. Well, fuck that. As much as polite society likes to think that graffiti is about “creativity” and “art,” graffiti is also about destruction, and there’s some beauty in that. I often say that there’s a very easy way to eliminate graffiti: make it legal. Demand for that destructive edge, that excessive and almost pointless act (the sovereign moment, in Bataille’s sense) would evaporate within three years. Murals, then—and this was my contention—weren’t (ahem) keepin’ it reeeeeaaal, authenticity-wise—and I know that’s a dumb argument, and this particularly famous blogger called me on it, and he was right. But…

You’ll get the liberal view that the “murals are very beautiful, but we really hate all those chicken scratch tags and why do they have to write on the store gates like that?”—a view that’s roughly equivalent to some liberal praising the “socially redeeming” lyrics of rap while noting that they don’t really think of the beats as music, lacking in instruments and melody as they are. Tricia Rose years ago destroyed that high-minded conceit in “Soul Sonic Forces,” an excellent chapter of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, but the blind spot on the graffiti analogue of rhythm still afflicts those commenting on the practice, for the most part. Even Joe Austin, in his otherwise masterful Taking the Trains: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City, sniffs at what he calls the street and highway era, which is to say, the era of tags and throwees that emerged after the top-to-bottom whole car became far too risky a venture for the immediate buffing policies and escalating sentences of the second Koch regime.

The tag and the throwee were always part of the game, quantity operations that involved low risk relative to a piece, but for that reason only acquired value through multiplication. If you wanted to catch fame primarily behind your tags, you better bomb a lot, son, and many did just that (JEW and REPS being two that come to mind). This is a structural necessity. Many people may remember a “beautiful mural,” but nobody will remember a lone tag. It only acquires sticking power with repetition (yes, graffiti is the twisted cousin of advertising), and repetition requires that you wreck the city. But there’s also a particular aesthetic to the tag and the throwee, and that’s what’s often missed by the mural fetishists who—truth be told—rarely understand the aesthetic of murals either. For my money, the great taggers (say, DURAN, BESTER, ENUF, CHINO) and throwee guys (COPE, SOE, CRO, SP) were doing something far more interesting than the art gallery converts: coupling a secret aesthetic with a thoroughly excessive practice. Writers know a “good” tag or throwee when they see one, but few others do. And, strangely, writers often don’t know the social upshot of their practices, though you had interesting political import emerge now and again, like when GHOST and some other RIS guys went around dogging legal murals (with the exception of RIP pieces, of course), an act I considered brilliant at the time.

Maybe I’m smuggling in authenticity through the backdoor, still trying to keep it real. Maybe I’m still engaging in what Andreas Huyssen called the romantics of marginality. Fine. At the very least, I’m not looking for the “good” in graffiti from the standpoint of the socially redeeming. We’re just talking styles and ups here. Styles and ups. Graffiti Friday, then, will be a chance to work out the aesthetics and excessive practices of writing in this town. I’ll be out looking for tags and throwees to catch a flick of and discuss. Knowledgeable observers will notice that all the writers I named here are NYC writers from a particular era. Let’s see how contemporary Chicago measures up.

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