Aug 31 2007
Graffiti Fridays: What’s In a Name?
It is perhaps at this juncture that the question “What does it mean?” begins to be heard, and that problems of exegesis prevail over problems of use and efficacy. The emperor, the god – what did he mean? In place of segments of the chain that are always detachable, a detached partial object on which the whole chain depends; in place of a polyvocal graphism flush with the real, a biunivocalization forming a transcendent dimension that gives rise to linearity; in place of nonsignifying signs that compose networks of a territorial chain, a despotic signifier from which all the signs uniformly flow in a deterritorialized flow of writing. Men have even been seen drinking this flow. – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
Ok, kiddies. It’s time for another edition. I’ll keep the extended discussion short this time, since one of my many readers has already accused me of angling to write a book. It would be a terrible book, given what we already have. Or it would be a textbook, which might actually be a funny idea as a novelty item, or as a book inside a book, like a character in a novel is writing a graffiti textbook and encountering all kinds of resistance from various parties. Would have to be a fringe character, comic relief sort of diversion. In any case, I’ll tone down the high falutin (sp?) angle, which is likely just gibberish anyway.
Today I just want to show off some pics I took in Lincoln Park (arguably not the “worst” neighborhood in the city). I’ve started scoping out spots off the Brown Line, and there’s actually some good stuff. If you remember our friend JULS from the first edition, I have some news. He and another cat hit some rooftops on the Brown last Friday. At some point, I’m going to have to do the graffiti train tour, getting off at some stops and maybe getting a bit closer to the stuff on the ground. There’s some good stuff on the Metra tracks, too. In any case, JULS also bombs with NAME, a funny tag to start out – it has a kind of GNU’s Not Unix recursivity. At least his tag isn’t TAG (more than a few imbeciles have thought of that one), but NAME is close enough. So tonight I want to talk a bit about tags, not as styles or ups, but as signatures. If this were our textbook, we’d call this chapter “How to Choose your Tag.”
First a few flicks taken on a Saturday stroll in Lincoln Park:
First off we have ONION, on a dumpster beneath the Fullerton El. This guy knows how to write, for sure, sporting an old school plain style with a nice variation on the I. Next, as promised, is VEGAN:
Last week I called VEGAN the marker tag king of the north side. This kid has ups. Now, I don’t think this is one of his best tags, and might be a bit older, but he still has a sense of how to connect and move letters. In this case, he went with a cursive style – not great, but it actually works with the letters really nicely (VEGAS did something similar). And finally, the best straight tag I’ve seen so far, NEGROE:
This is definitely reminiscent of a New York outer boros style circa 1991 or so. I’m not crazy about the “R,” which is way overdone given its location in the tag, and NEGROE gets a bit too swirly with the closing “E,” but the initial lower case “N” is an interesting move given the capitalization throughout, and I like that the “O” loops back into itself, forming a consistent line with the stems and serifs for the E, G, and R. That’s a smart variation on the “O,” I think.
But, of course, we’re not really talking about form this week so much as tag selection. I mean ONION, VEGAN, and NEGROE? Of course, you’re thinking that my standard bearer for good tagging was EARSNOT, so what’s so weird about these. Nothing, really. I actually like them as tags. They’re real words, rather than some strangely spelled pseudo-word, and they’re completely original. NEGROE, in fact, reminds me of one of the great Bronx writers from back when, JEW:
As you can see (I hope), this guy could tag. Notice the flair on the J and the perfection of consistent angles through the E and W. That’s just about perfect, as a tag. Here’s another:
JEW used to write with a bunch of Bronx guys that went by the name BT (Bronx Team, Bronx Taggers), like BESTER (about whom more in addendum) and LOUIE167 (HR Crew). At a certain point, JEW started doing these really great tags with ultra fat caps – caps that people normally use just for filling in. You can see the effect taking shape at the top of his first tag above, as the line widens towards the top of the letters. These tags were just great – stylish and original in technique. Now, of course you’d expect that anyone writing JEW would be Jewish, but it turns out that JEW was Latino Puerto Rican and African American – not Jewish at all. Needless to say, this quickly became a talking point about JEW’s work in the perpetual race war that was late-1980′s New York City. “JEW,” people would say, “That motherfucker’s funny, being black and all.” Point being, whether VEGAN’s a vegan, whether NEGROE is African American, or whether ONION is, well, an onion or onion-farmer, or lover of onions, is utterly immaterial. What does your tag mean? is always the stupidest question one can ask. There are, of course, always the people who get their tags from their initials, or from some childhood nickname, or from some quality they have (how many giant TINY’s do we have to meet before the joke gets old?), but the best tags lose all designation and begin to circulate merely as themselves: EARSNOT, VEEFER, GIZ, SOE. Perhaps the repetitive character of graffiti produces that repetition effect, where you repeat a word until it starts to sound strange, and loses its meaning. If I was to venture yet another tedious theoretical stab at the thing, I might say that graffiti is a strange re-emergence of something like a primitive social machine: inscription on the body of capital, undermining the signature from within its logics. But I promised to be brief, a promise I have already broken.
But this, I think, is the lesson in choosing a tag. Any writer who tries to explain his or her tag through some narrative probably has it all wrong, or is not really a writer. Any writer who starts to explain to you what his tag means is missing something important about writing. This is why TURK 182! is the dumbest graffiti movie of all time; the tag is the meaning that drives the whole narrative – one only need decipher it to track down the writer. It’s precisely what you get when liberals misconstrue graffiti as meaningful protest. (Incidentally, someone asked me the other day whether I liked V for Vendetta, perhaps the dumbest movie made in the last ten years. I liked it better the first time I saw it, I said, when it was called TURK 182.) So, when looking for a tag, lose the damn meaning. Let the letters – the word – become something else: EARSNOT. Nietzsche, at the end of his life, suffering from syphilitic dementia, said “I am a beast, a negro.” This is often mistaken for Nietzsche’s racism, when it can be read as quite the opposite. Ever aphoristic, Nietzsche can be read (as many do read him) as saying “I am becoming something else, something other than what I am…” Maybe writing does the same: I am an ONION, a GIZ, a JEW, a NEGROE…
Addendum: Last week I listed three ways a writer could become famous that were not related to pure repetition: the multiple, the original, and the Just Plain Fucking Crazy. JEW reminded me of BESTER here, and that let me recall another way: the fortuitous event. Now, this is really a bit of a stretch, since BESTER was basically all city by bombing. In other words, he was quite well known through sheer repetition, but BESTER is also famous for having one of the most televised tags in history, all by accident. In March 1990, a Cuban refugee set fire to the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx, killing 87 people. This was one of the great tragedies of the last 25 years in New York, and it got massive news coverage. Nobody living in New York at the time could have missed it; it was everywhere, for weeks, and even months.
Of course, writers were just as shocked as everyone else, though they tend to be a cynical bunch. But the Happy Land fire also had them talking with some envy about BESTER, who fortuitously had a tag…smack on the front of the Happy Land Social Club building. So, essentially, BESTER was getting television time every day for months, as the news anchors stood in front of the Happy Land Social Club filing their reports. New Yorkers saw the tragedy as the backdrop. Writers saw a fat chrome BESTER tag jack in the middle of it all. For months, all you heard was “Fuckin’ BESTER probably burned that shit down himself!” Fame, kid. Yes. A strange breed. Here’s the difference between what a regular person sees and what a writer sees:
Normal Person
Writer’s View
Normal Person
Writer…Like I said, strange breed
1) There’s no doubt that graffiti enters into all kinds of systems of meaning. That’s fairly obvious. It attaches to all sorts of politics, and is constantly determined by and determining contexts. It then proceeds to operate in any number of ways. People have written on these aspects of graffiti almost ad nauseam (as in the Joe Austin book I cited in Graffiti Fridays #1). I was trying to do get to another level of operations that slip beneath these molar aggregates. I didn’t realize it would be *this* offensive to the meaning and context crowd.
2)The risk economy I was describing was heuristic rather than a categorical. Why you consider it “capitalist ideology,” I cannot fathom (indeed, you never explain even here in this long post why you would think it is “capitalist ideology,” choosing instead to merely assert that). In fact, it doesn’t operate by exchange at all. So I’m just going to have to throw up my hands on that one. The “risk economy” was just a way of describing this little machine. I could use terms other than “risk” and “economy” if you’d prefer?
3) Graffiti may be – in part – about territory and ownership. Analyses to that effect are so frequent and tired that I’m not really interested in them. What else is it?
For sure, searching for the narrative behind the tag is silly, but that’s not the only way a “tag” — or any sign — has meaning. Is the choice of a tag purely arbitrary and random? This makes me interested in what you think the word “meaning” means because you’ve devoted both this and the last post to arguments against graffiti as a meaningful art (and because I doubt you sincerely think that Deleuze and Guattari are “likely gibberish anyway.”)
In your last post, you concur with standard capitalist ideology when you argue that graffiti is nothing more than participation in a “risk economy.” And then you rag on “liberals” (whatever that means) for trying to redeem graffiti with some transcedent social or political meaning — “political resistance,” perhaps, or “self-expression”. . . or even worse, “existential-cry-for-help.” So maybe a “liberal” likes cheesy liberal meanings, but you’re just as guilty of building an edifice of (linear) meaning around the graffitii with this risk-economy stuff.
Neither of these explanations is entirely satisfying, and I think your D&G quote shows us exactly why neither of these explanations is completely satisfying (i.e., why you don’t need to buy into capitalism just to prove you’re not a sentimental liberal with false consciousness), because the act of signification is part of a non-linear signifying chain. The issue here is that it’s neither just self-expression nor just risk — and I can show you the the layers of value (or meaning) and praxis here as well as possibly an inherent ideological contradiction by giving you two quotes by the same graffiti artist LADY PINK (who is a woman, hence her tag, though it’d probably be interesting if a man adopted a tag like that just like your example of an African-American who adopts the tag “Jew.”)
First, she agrees with you when she says that Graffiti is “an outlaw art. When we train other graffiti writers, we’re not training fine artists to exhibit in a museum. We’re training criminals. We’re training kids how to take life in their own hands and go out there and hopelessly paint on some wall or some train that will do nothing for you except get you fame with other vandals and criminals.”
In other words (oh, wait, am I allowed to use “other words” because then I might “mean” something?!?!), as you say, it’s all about establishing cred in a risk economy –a risk economy that is meaningless as soon as it becomes legit… graffiti means that you’ve got brass balls just like Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross (even if you happen to be a woman such as LADY PINK.)
Ironically, if this is ALL that graffiti is, then LADY PINK agrees with the city officials who have publically condemned graffiti not only as an act of petty vandalism but as an act inherently linked to felony crimes such as drug dealing and murder — i.e., metonymically (which is one of the many ways that signs can means something), graffiti is the visible sign for the entire criminal underworld. What graffiti means for the city government is two things: (1) the dollar sign next to a six or seven digit number, which is what it will cost them to re-paint all of the surfaces, and (2) a barometer of crime — i.e., graffiti means that they haven’t solved the crime problem yet. And this also means (in their minds) that the punishment they unleash on graffiti writers can exceed the crime. (And so, considering this context, maybe it makes sense why some sappy liberals might want to redeem graffiti so taht 14 year old kids don’t receive unreasonable punishments for it.)
Anyway, so then LADY PINK says “I think graffiti writing is a way of defining what our generation is like… we’re not a bunch of pussy artists… We defend our territory, whatever space we steal to paint on…”
So though she still agrees with your posts (especially her assertion that graffiti is not restricted to an alienated end-product, i.e., the stuff that “pussy artists” do), it’s now no longer ONLY about risk — it’s also about territory and ownership. Although certainly risk and personal style is key, there’s also other contexts and other ways that graffiti can mean something, and one has to ask, “of all the ways to signify territory, why this one?” And moreover, if it is about terrority, then the tags are not really as arbitrary and anonymous as they appear to be in your deterritorialized, formalist description. In your analysis, there’s nothing at stake except for the possibility of getting caught, but is that all that’s at stake here? Certainly, the analysis I’m offering here is not all that cool — but it seems to me that there’s more to D&G than seeming cool.
Love it.
bester was definitely more well known after that coverage, lucky dog,, we as graffiti writers are always seeing the boxed tags in the midst of anything and everything—its our gift, hehe, anyhow, there are a few good writers down here in austin, some which i’ll get flicks of before i leave and send them to you for you graffiti friday projects, ofcourse, i’ll flick the bad ones as well and there are quite a number of them, good grief, speaking of GRIEF and you were in one of your last blogs, he was extremely talented and to this day when I try to do G’s of F’s in straight letter style, I sort of mimic his work, bastardize as its become over the years..the onion tag is fresh, the vegan tag looks shaky but there could be many reasons for that and the negroe tag i’m 50/50 about,, i’ll get back to the letters and why i like them later.. tomorrow is another edition.. looking forward to it,, and finally, the Mets games will be broadcasted down here, Mets v Astros,, lets go mets, but ‘m also always secretly rooting for ty wiggington, he is no david wright, but he was and still is a good all around ball player!
cheers!
ps…even the siz knows bester burned that joint down!!!