Seven Red

Mad brothers know his name
So he thinks he got a little fame
From the stick-up game
- Gangstarr, Just to Get a Rep

Early in our series, I set out a table of risk according to which graffiti is evaluated. At the top of the table are illegal pieces, which assume the most risk because they take the longest. (They could be as risky as less time-consuming works depending on location; in graffiti as in real estate, it’s location location location: not just time, but the valence of place.) At the bottom of the table is the sticker, which assumes the least risk, at least according to the time criterion, since it takes just seconds to apply, and you can generally do so without being noticed, even in the the middle of the day. For the next couple of weeks, I want to work through that table; we’ll start today with the least risky, the sticker, and progress upwards.

Stickers are extremely versatile, since you can do just about anything on them, and it’s easy to place them. Many new writers will start with the sticker as they’re getting their bearings in the game. But old hands will still do stickers; they’re just another piece in the repertoire. Because the risk is so low, you generally can’t get fame on stickers alone (we’ll see a partial exception below), but if the goal is ups, stickers can be another means to that end.

Writers usually look for semi-permanent stickers. They should be hard to peel off. People used to use those “Hello, my name is…” stickers, or the post office stickers for Priority Mail, although these can be a little hacky, since the form still shows through. Both have the value of being easily boostible or, in the second case, free, although I’m sure there must be some statute against using the post office stickers for non-official purposes. They both also stick like crazy, though apparently not to fabric! More complex sticker operations involve wheatpaste postering. The main advantage of all stickers is that you have plenty of time to create them. You can do pretty intricate things with stickers, but I always preferred the ones that kept it simple: a tag or a simple throwee. Despite the “permanent” stickiness, they’re going to fade in the rain and probably peel off fairly soon, so wasting a lot of time with stickers doesn’t seem very useful. So, on to some examples of stickers. The first two are tag stickers, the flicks taken on Fullerton here in Chicago:

OMENS (using a Priority Mail sticker), Fullerton near Lincoln

HYDE (using a “HELLO, My Name is…” Sticker), Fullerton near Sheffield

The next two are from New York, and use larger, unmarked stickers:

ROOK XXI HR TDK (Main Street, Flushing)

VOR (not DBI)

Both the ROOK and VOR stickers show how the form can go beyond just tags. That said, I wish I could find a flick of TWIST’s stickers (Brooklyn people, send me one!), since they’re the best tag stickers in the business. A bit of full disclosure here. I know both ROOK and VOR, so the selection isn’t completely arbitrary. ROOK I know from, well, let’s just say from way back. VOR I used to see from time to time when I hung out with some DBI guys, like DEAD, NOYZE, and RUNE. The VOR sticker is a good example of mixing forms, since VOR is up. A lot. The guy bombs and he’s good; he’s a writer’s writer. This is no surprise, since he came up with DEAD, who I always considered one of the best writers I’d ever met (Correction here per KRIstian’s comment below: this sticker is not VOR DBI, but another VOR from Brooklyn.).

In any case, it’s impossible to talk stickers without mentioning the true artists of the form, COST and REVS. In the early 1990′s, COST and REVS went on an illegal wheat paste postering campaign that just covered New York City. It was one of the most brilliant graffiti operations I’d ever seen. Here’s a quick example:

COST REVS

The stickers were so prevalent that they even got the attention of the New York Times, which ran a story in the Style section on January 3, 1993 called The Straight-Faced Revs and Cost. There may be nothing funnier than two writers spinning stories for Times reporters, but here are a few highlights:

“We want people to say, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ” said Cost, who is unemployed and was wearing jeans, high-top sneakers, a red baseball cap over his close-cut black hair and headphones around his neck.

So, what is going on? “There is no direct answer,” Cost said, smirking. “Once you’ve figured us out, game over. If you could give us the meaning of life, I’d give you the meaning of us.” [...]

“Real art is not hanging in the Louvre,” Revs said morosely. “It’s in the gutter.” [...]

Revs said he adopted his name about a year ago, after almost jumping off the Manhattan Bridge late one night. “Revs is short for Revs Suicide,” he said, adding that it stands for many things but declining to elaborate. “I just walked down from the bridge, and ever since that day, I’ve known what to do.”

“It stands for many things, but declining to elaborate.” I remember laughing my ass off when I first read that; it’s just like a reporter to ask “What does REVS stand for?” His answer may be the essence of the tag itself. In addition to the wheat paste campaign, REVS and COST also went wild with oversized rollers; a roller is when you get up not with spraypaint, but with an actual bucket of paint and, well, a roller. These things started popping up everywhere:

COST and REVS, roller

The New York Times loves REVS, and for good reason. Apart from my general distaste for legal graffiti and the term art, I consider REVS to be remarkably inventive and innovative, a graffiti philosopher. Wheat paste graffiti and rollers existed before COST and REVS, but they made the forms do something different, and their statements about what they did were always interesting. More recently, REVS transformed the idea of graffiti again by producing and installing graffiti sculptures, making the tag three dimensional and placing it in space, like these:

REVS Installations

Once again, the Times was smitten, running a story titled A Graffiti Legend is Back on the Street, this time in their Art section (there’s a great multimedia slide show of REVS’ work at the link which you really should check out). REVS is again interesting on the question of art, noting “I don’t want to become nobody; I just want to do what I do.” So I’ve beat up a little on legal graffiti, and these installations are mostly legal. So what? They’re great. Talk about a line of flight. Plus, we get this little teaser at the end of the article:

He kicked one the pieces, made from two-inch-thick steel, part of a column left over from a construction project where he once worked near the Port Authority bus terminal.

“A car can back up into it,” he said. “Somebody can get their head cracked open on it. A dog can go on it. Somebody can paint it if they want. It rusts. It’s more interesting that way, you know?”

But is it any less interesting because it’s legal?

He smiled. “I might still have a few little knickknacks scattered around in places where they’re not supposed to be, who knows?” he said. “I’m not commenting on that.”

Love it. OK, now I should stop jocking REVS and wrap up. I’m starting with the sticker because it is lowest in risk, but it also shows us the versatility and inventive possibilities of the form. Last time, when discussing KRINK, I pointed to the inventive space of graffiti. Even when we start with the sticker, we can see how it branches out and produces strange and interesting things. To follow REVS trajectory is really to see graffiti from a new angle. Consider the following from Richard Lanham’s chapter in The Economics of Attention titled “What’s Next for Text:”

You would hardly recognize the letters if the regular form were not given below them. A text printed in them would be hard to read. No increase in perceptual efficiency here. Why then such an endeavor? It comes from a desire to put letters back into the three-dimensional space where we all live and breath and have our being. We want to think of a letter as a physical object, a piece of stuff, which we can pick up with our hands and rotate on an axis, as we do with objects in the ordinary world. We want to put letters back into the world of stuff. But we still want them to be letters (95).

Lanham draws his examples for this desire largely from the world of modernist and contemporary art, from the futurist Francesco Cangiullo, from Claus Oldenburg, from Jenny Holzer, from the very cool work of Bart Overly and Ji Lee, from the surrealists, from computer graphics, where dynamic letters move – they move! Trains move too, I hear. Graffiti has always been largely about the same game, and we don’t have to wait until REVS started iron-working to get there. The letters “stand for” a lot of things, but that’s the information side. Graffiti has always been much more interested in the stuff of letters. The graffiti sculpture is only a radical expression of the 3-D shapes in 2-D graffiti, which have themselves grown more elaborate, as I’ve discussed before. Backwards letters, inside out letters, upside down letters, all manner of 3-D. Here’s Lanham again on contemporary art:

Whatever other aesthetic or political purposes such designs had in mind, they shared a central didacticism: pay attention to letters as three-dimensional figures, as material objects (94).

Now tell me something I didn’t know when I was 16 years old in a truck yard. But Lanham’s observations do help me work out what’s so distasteful about graffiti-themed energy drinks and Delft china. They turn graffiti back into mostly a signifier. Who was it that said all that’s solid melts into air…

Enough pontificating for now. Next week, marker tags.

*Note: Yes, I know “stick up kids” refers to street muggers and not graffiti writers. No need to leave a comment on that note (like I’m really in a position to turn down comments!).

Addendum: Hip Hop quiz. Knowledgeable readers will recognize that the title of this post cites Nice & Smooth’s painfully poppy “Funky For You,” as in, I’m gonna make it real. More knowledgeable readers will recognize that the line is sampled throughout Gangstarr’s “Just to Get a Rep,” skillfully used here as the epigraph. So, here’s the quiz. Name the 1990′s song and artist that samples Guru’s line “Mad brothers know his name.” Don’t go off Googling now. Answer in next week’s edition.

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