Seven Red

Last Friday I showed you NINE’s piece on the rooftop near Montrose. It turns out that this guy has been going off, stamping versions of this burner on rooftops up and down the Brown Line, essentially, as we used to say, killing the line. On Tuesday I noticed a new NINE piece just north of the Chicago and Franklin stop, and Thursday morning on the way in I noticed yet another NINE piece at Diversey. The guy’s on a crime spree. You’ll often get this in writers: bursts of activity followed by relative lulls. I think all of these went up in the last two weeks, which is a pretty productive two weeks, all things considered. There must be some study on that feeling though, where you get over on one rooftop, and then you’re just out of your mind to do another one, Rusto fiend, just crazy for it. I remember this. It’s like you don’t do anything for two months, and then you catch a fill-in on some borrowed cans, and suddenly it’s “Let’s go rack some cans we gotta go out tonight tonight!” The high is unbelievable. Nothing like it since, really (not nothing better, just nothing like it). Anyway, in recognition of some nice work, I’m doing an all NINE Graffiti Fridays today to showcase this guy’s stuff. We’ll start with the detail flick from last week.

NINE, Brown Line off Montrose

NINE, just north of Chicago and Franklin, Brown Line

NINE WRS, Brown Line off Diversey

And just for context on the Chicago and Franklin and the Diversey piece:

paint, says the sign. Well, OK. So, how would this rank on the scale of risk/reputation? Pretty high, I’d say. If we go back to the original claims in the series, they are as follows: graffiti writers write primarily for other writers, with non-writers serving as a secondary and for the most part unimportant audience; graffiti is asignifying – the tag doesn’t “mean” anything, but rather pushes and pulls categories; graffiti is a reputation economy, where writers invest risk in return for reputation – the whole set of categories runs on this engine of risk-reputation, with aesthetics being one factor, but a factor heavily affected by the risk-economic considerations (i.e., complex pieces take longer, and thus increase risk); finally, people who don’t know about graffiti tend to either aestheticize it (“I hate the chicken scratch tagging, but some of those murals are really beautiful!”) or make it into a standard political statement, a signifier (graffiti means “rebellion” or appropriates from and thus participates in mainstream cultural forms). And yes, I understand that one could read me as saying that graffiti signifies its own risk, is a trace of that risk. This is true: it’s at once a trace of the risk and independent of it, just as it’s at once completely dependent on mainstream culture (which provides the prohibition, and therefore the risk) and independent of it, in that it’s not particularly interested in speaking to mainstream culture. This is a very odd relationship that has gone more or less unstudied as a conceptual matter.

According to the economic considerations I outlined, these would rate high for three reasons: 1) they would take far more time than a simpler work; I’d estimate that each of these would take somewhere around 45 minutes to an hour. The Chicago and Franklin piece is probably the least risky from the point of view of time (30 minutes maybe), but it’s no cakewalk.  So, essentially, for thirty minutes to an hour, NINE was in the open committing what is in Illinois an ongoing felony. Think about that. Hardly any other crimes work this way, from a temporal perspective. 2) The time is one thing, the location is another. As I discussed, graffiti is about real estate. You could do an eight-hour piece in a place nobody would see it, and somebody else would get more credit for five or six quick three minute jobs in busy locations. It’s all about the risk you’re incurring. If you check the context of these, the locations are in the red zone of exposure. Rooftops are particularly tricky, because if you’re spotted, you’re pretty much caught. There’s nowhere to go. The Montrose piece is on a well-lit, very exposed rooftop directly adjacent to the platform, so, you’re pretty much out there for the taking if somebody comes up on the platform and decides to call the cops. I’d give the guy props for doing even 10 minute fill-ins in those locations, so this is above and beyond.

Finally, 3) from the point of view of aesthetics, these are very well done. The classic New York style (pre-90′s) has flat letter-interiors, clear letter outlines, and smooth curves; the depth is handled in external 3-D (either isometric or in one-point perpective). (I linked that SEEN piece in particular because it uses precisely the same opening loop as each of the NINE pieces; that feature is clearly derived from SEEN’s classical style). The post-90′s styles are much more complex, with no outline, depth indicated by realistic interior shading, “broken” and disconnected letter-forms, and two and three point perspective with varying vanishing points. These NINE pieces are hybrids, mixing the old style flat letters, where the depth mostly came from the 3-D, with the shaded interior-letter techniques that emerged in the mid-90′s. You see this most of all in the Diversey piece, where he’s working with four blue shades to give the letters a rounded interior look independent of one-point perspective exterior 3-D (in purple). Now, some of the blending is a little bit rushed and sloppy (the second N in the Diversey piece in particular), but these are rooftop burners, felony-charge burners, real graffiti, exit-value graffiti, not art murals for smiling liberals. I’ll give the guy a pass on some rushed blending. You also see the more angular cuts and broken letterforms (as I’ll show below), married with the old-style smoother curves, especially in the symmetrical loops that precede the first N’s and close the lower-case E’s. In a table of risk, then, for these reasons, this is well up there.

Graffiti Literacies

The crowd is crucial
MC’s grounds are neutral
Now that you’re here let me introduce you
Get ready
I’m hard to read like graffiti
But steady
Science I drop is real heavy
Rakim, Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em

So I showed these to she, and she was suitably impressed (probably keying in on my excitement), but she gave me the usual “I can’t read that” line, even when I pointed out the letters. Nope, she said, I don’t see how you’re getting NINE out of that. In fact, all three pieces use the same basic outline, with some really interesting stylistic variations. But the letterforms are essentially identical. This cuts down the time it took NINE to complete these: he has a set piece that he does, and he doesn’t have to spend too much time messing around with the initial outline. Since I assumed some of you, dear readers, are in the same boat as she, I thought I’d take a minute to indicate the abstracted letterforms. So, in each of the following, I’ve reduced the image to about 75% transparency, and added a quick outline of the letterforms. You should see an uppercase N, a straight line for the I (it’s dotted in the Diversey piece), an uppercase N, and a lowercase E that overlaps with the second N. I didn’t do the Chicago and Franklin piece, but it works the same way.

Now I’ll take the images back up to 100%, but leave the rough outline:

Obviously, there’s a lot more going on in both of these than the abstracted letterforms, and I almost feel bad butchering these pieces with those, but that’s what they look like. I left out the opening loop that precedes the first N in all three pieces in order to not confuse the start point for the N’s letterform. Just as another example, if you look again at the originals without the silly “Can you see it” outlines I threw on, you’ll notice that NINE consistently breaks the E at bottom curve, using elements of a broken N to suggest the letter shape. This is good stuff. But the point here is simple: the pieces don’t lose track of the letters (the “e” is obviously the same in all three – can you see it now in the Chicago and Franklin piece?). They are legible, if you’re meant to read them. In my view, the Diversey piece is the best overall, but the Montrose piece uses really strong angles; it’s the most complex of the three. Just so I don’t come off as too much of a fanboy, I will say that NINE is just an atrocious tagger. Guy can piece, but those tags are bush league, just awful. We take it where we can get it, I guess.

But that’s all for today kiddies. Hope you enjoyed.

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