Is Graffiti An Urban Art Form?
Tool....of the trade!
You can travel almost anywhere in the world, and you will probably see graffiti. Although graffiti art is usually more common in big cities, the reality is that it can occur in almost any community, big or small.
The problem with graffiti art is the question of whether it ’s really art, or just plain vandalism. This isn’t always an easy question to answer, simply because there are so many different types of graffiti. Some is simply a monochrome collection of letters, known as a tag, with little artistic merit. Because it ’s quick to produce and small, it is one of the most widespread and prevalent forms of graffiti.
Although tagging is the most common type of graffiti, there are bigger, more accomplished examples that appear on larger spaces, such as walls. These are often multicolored and complex in design, and so start to push the boundary of whether they should really be defined as graffiti art.
If it wasn’t for the fact that most graffiti is placed on private property without the owner ’s permission, then it might be more recognized as a legitimate form of art. Most graffiti art, however, is only an annoyance to the property owner, who is more likely to paint over it or remove it than applaud its artistic merit.
Many solutions have been put into practice around the world, with varying degrees of success. Paints have been developed that basically cause graffiti paint to dissolve when applied, or else make it quick and easy to remove. Community groups and government departments coordinate graffiti removal teams.
In some places you can’t buy spray paint unless you’re over 18. Cans of spray paint are locked away in display cases. In a nearby area the local council employs someone to go around and repaint any fences defaced by graffiti. A friend of mine has had his fence repainted 7 times at least, and it took him a while to find out why it was happening! Certainly the amount of graffiti in my local area has dropped substantially in the last year or two, so it appears these methods are working to a great extent.
But is removing the graffiti doing a disservice to the artistic community? Maybe if some of the people behind the graffiti art were taken in hand and trained, they could use their artistic skills in more productive ways. It hardly makes sense to encourage these artists to deface public property, and so commit a crime. But perhaps there are other ways to cooperate with the graffiti artists rather than just opposing them. Graffiti artists can create sanctioned murals for private property owners and get paid for it.
Maybe we need to start at a very basic level, and find a way to encourage the creation of graffiti art on paper or canvas, rather than walls. After all, who would remember Monet or Picasso if they’d created their masterpieces on walls, only to have them painted over the next day? Finding a solution to such a complex situation is never going to be easy, but as more graffiti art is being recognized in galleries around the world, we do need to try.
Author: Steve Dolan loves art in various forms and mediums. Find out more about graffiti as an art form at Graffiti and Urban Art and if you have art that needs framing visit Picture Frames.
Article Source: Content for Reprint
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Writing On The Wall – A Look Into The World Of Graffiti Art
Highly decorative graffiti from Brazil
Graffiti has always been given a negative connotation as it is seen as a defacement of a piece of property with the used of paint and other items. It has also been inextricably linked with the hip hop culture and has become one of the main elements of the movement. Despite the negativity that some people feel towards graffiti, it has slowly become one of the foremost art forms in modern society.
Graffiti Art History
Despite seeming to be an all too modern art form, graffiti has always been around even in ancient times. Remains and relics from the ancient Roman city Pompeii reveal a world where people expressed their thoughts emotions by writing on walls and on other public and private items. Everything from poems to various drawings were found preserved in the ancient walls. This kind of society in ancient Rome is beautifully depicted in the introductory scenes of the HBO series Rome. The animators of the two season TV series depicted Roman streets and walls covered with graffiti that ranged from the obscene and sexually explicit to depictions that were political in nature.
Rome wasn’t the only place where ancient graffiti was found. The Egyptians were also known to write on the walls aside from their highly celebrated hieroglyphics. In Saudi Arabia, it is widely recognized that a form of ancient Arabic language called Safaitic was only found scratched into boulders and rocks in the Syrian and Jordanian deserts.
During war eras and choppy political periods in the United States, people have also seen various forms of graffiti from World War Two’s “Kilroy Was Here” to Dick Nixon “Before He Dicks You” during the 1970s. Another famous graffiti are the immortal words “Clapton is God” found in the London Underground. Read more
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Radical And Political Graffiti Use
Ancient graffito from Pompeii.
Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist and anti-consumerist messages around the London Underground system during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In Amsterdam graffiti was a major part of the punk scene. The city was covered with names as ‘De Zoot’, ‘Vendex’ and ‘Dr Rat’. To document the graffiti a punk magazine was started called Gallery Anus. So when hip hop came to Europe in the early 1980s there already was a vibrant graffiti culture.
The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as “on the street” or “underground”, contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicized art form in the subvertising, culture jamming or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms except when using non-permanent paint. Since the 1990s a growing number of artists are switching to non-permanent paints for a variety of reasons — but primarily because is it difficult for the police to apprehend and for the courts to sentence or even convict a person for a protest that is as fleeting and less intrusive than marching in the streets. In some communities, such impermanent works survive longer than works created with permanent paints because the community views the work in the same vein as that of the civil protestor who marches in the street — such protest are impermanent but effective nevertheless.
In some areas where a number of artist share the impermance ideal, there grows an informal competition. That is, the length of time that a work escapes destruction is related to the amount of respect the work garners in the community. A crude work that deserves little respect would invariably be removed immediately. The most talented artist might have works last for days. Read more
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Characteristics Of Common Graffiti
An example of stencil graffiti
Some of the most common styles of graffiti have their own names. A “tag” is the most basic writing of an artist’s name in either spray paint or marker. A graffiti writer’s tag is his or her personalized signature. “Tagging” is often the example given when opponents of graffiti refer to vandalism, as they use it to label all acts of graffiti writing (it is by far the most common form of graffiti). Tags can contain subtle and sometimes cryptic messages, and might incorporate the artist’s initials or other letters. As well as the graffiti name, some artists include the year that they completed that tag next to the name, so that Tox, an artist from London, becomes Tox03, Tox04, etc. John Tsombikos claimed subsequent to his arrest that his “Borf” tag campaign, which gained recognition for its prevalence in Washington, D.C., was in memory of a deceased friend.
Another form is the “throw-up,” also known as a “fill-in,” which is normally painted very quickly with two or three colors, sacrificing aesthetics for speed. Throw-ups can also be outlined on a surface with one color. A “piece” is a more elaborate representation of the artist’s name, incorporating more stylized “block” or “bubble” letters, using three or more colors. This of course is done at the expense of timeliness and increases the likelihood of the artist getting caught. A “blockbuster” is a large piece done simply to cover a large area solidly with two contrasting colours, sometimes with the whole purpose of blocking other “writers” from painting on the same wall. Read more
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Modern Graffiti
Modern graffiti on European train.
Graffiti is often seen as having become intertwined with hip hop culture as one of the four main elements of the culture (along with rapping, DJing, and break dancing). However, there are many other instances of notable graffiti this century. Graffiti has long appeared on railroad boxcars. The one with the longest history, dating back to the 1920s and continuing into the present day, is Bozo Texino. During World War II and for decades after, the phrase “Kilroy was here” with accompanying illustration was widespread throughout the world, due to its use by American troops and its filtering into American popular culture. In the sixties, its popularity was eclipsed by American graffiti proclaiming that “Yossarian lives!”, a reference to the protagonist of Joseph Heller’s novel, Catch-22. The student protests and general strike of May 1968 saw Paris bedecked in revolutionary, anarchist, and situationist slogans such as L’ennui est contre-révolutionnaire (”Boredom is counterrevolutionary”). A famous graffito of the 20th century was the inscription in the London subway reading “Clapton is God”. The phrase was spray-painted by an admirer on a wall in an Islington Underground station in the autumn of 1967. The graffiti was captured in a now-famous photograph, in which a dog is urinating on the wall. A popular graffito of the 1970s was the legend “Dick Nixon Before He Dicks You,” reflecting the hostility of the youth culture to that U.S. president. Graffiti also became associated with the anti-establishment punk rock movement beginning in the 1970s. Bands such as Black Flag and Crass (and their followers) widely stenciled their names and logos, while many punk night clubs, squats and hangouts are famous for their graffiti.
In America around the late 1960s, graffiti was used as a form of expression by political activists, and also by gangs such as the Savage Skulls, La Familia, and Savage Nomads to mark territory. Towards the end of the 1960s, the signatures-tags-of Philadelphia graffiti writers Top Cat, Cool Earl and Cornbread started to appear. Around 1970-71, the center of graffiti innovation moved to New York City where writers following in the wake of TAKI 183 and Tracy 168 would add their street number to their nickname, “bomb” a train with their work, and let the subway take it-and their fame, if it was impressive, or simply pervasive, enough-”all city”. Bubble lettering held sway initially among writers from the Bronx, though the elaborate writing Tracy 168 dubbed “wildstyle” would come to define the art. The early trendsetters were joined in the 70s by artists like Dondi, Futura 2000, Daze, Blade, Lee, Zephyr, Rammellzee, Crash, Kel, NOC 167 and Lady Pink.
'Kilroy was here' inscription on the World War II Memorial.
The relationship between graffiti and hip hop culture arises both from early graffiti artists practicing other aspects of hip hop, and its being practiced in areas where other elements of hip hop were evolving as art forms. By the mid-eighties, the form would move from the street to the art world. Jean-Michel Basquiat would abandon his SAMO tag for art galleries, and even street art’s connections to hip hop would loosen. Occasional hip hop paeans to graffiti could still be heard throughout the nineties, however, in tracks like the Artifacts’ “Wrong Side of Da Tracks” (Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Big Beat, 1994) and Company Flow’s “Lune TNS” (Funcrusher Plus, Rawkus, 1997). Read more
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Stainless Steel Extinguishers and Urban Art
A stainless steel extinguisher: a classy piece of decor. A vital tool for fighting large, dangerous fires. And, in some urban areas–an art supply. Not that the graffiti artist’s arsenal needs to be limited to co-opted extinguishers: the traditional spray can is still popular, and other industrial sprayers, stencils, and tools for putting up illegal art are well-known around the world–yet no less controversial.
Graffiti is one of the most controversial of the modern arts, although it’s hardly a modern art at all, considering its long history. The history of art and graffiti is arguably one and the same history, considering the roots of art in the cave paintings and the origins of cartooning in satirical scribbles applied to public monuments. Soldiers recorded their dead using graffiti, and the technique has always been a means of “speaking truth to power”: using the powers available to the lower classes to subvert the higher classes and their property.
To simplify the argument in favor of graffiti: it costs thousands to rent a billboard for a week to provide one voice to one company. The ideal of Athenian democracy is for one person to have one voice and one vote in the public sphere. Democracy isn’t preserved when inherited wealth allows some people to have vastly more political power and “voice” in American society than others. The graffiti artist, then, climbs the billboards and paints his own message over them. His message is heard, and the company spends more of its own money to remove it: either way, the situation moves closer to the Athenian ideal.
It’s this politically-motivated argument that led to the super-popularization of graffiti among the hip-hop and punk cultures of the 1970s. Following the precedent of the French during the fallout of 1968, when students covered the walls of Paris in radical slogans against the police, punk fans and hip hop lifestylers in the rich Manhattan and Brooklyn scenes of the 1970s covered walls, the sides of subway trains, literally everything in tags and slogans explaining who they were and what they were about. The graffiti style developed in Brooklyn became the visual signature of the late twentieth century, with artist Keith Haring in particular and his thick-lined cavorting human figures dancing into the public eye. Read more
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Graffiti And Street Art – On The Borderline Of Crime And Creativity
Since the early Neanderthals scratched out the Bison on the moist caves of Eastern France, Graffiti and Street Art have remained a very raw form of expressive Fine Art, which have shunned all class barriers and have emerged as a separate thread of work. Graffiti is derived from the Italian root meaning, “scratched out.” Technically, to narrow down its scope would be to define it as a surface art on the surfaces it is “not meant” to be displayed. For example, you would not define a ramshackle wall, or a car, or a window as a canvas to any artist worth his/her salt. For Graffiti Artists however, that would be a perfectly normal platform to present their body of work.
Spanish inscription at El Morro National Monument, 1605, with later graffiti.
Graffiti & Street Art so boldly lie on the border of vandalism and art that it is difficult to eulogize them without feeling a bit like singing Paeans to LSD or Morphine. However Graffiti and Street Art, even though pursued doggedly by law and order have steadily metamorphosed into an important mouthpiece of rebel expression. Simply put, Graffiti and Street Arts are art pieces by artists with no inclination or the wherewithal to resort to the conventional forms of display, who though are bubbling with a strong urge to express themselves.
The profiles of Graffiti and Street Art closely follow an underground, anti-law route because of the angst they carry. They are art forms, usually generated in ghettos and tough neighborhoods, where there are few rules and therefore explosive creativity. Graffiti Artists are people, seething inside to stamp their territory, on walls, buildings, bridges, and yeah toilets too.
Graffiti and Street Art took a long time to come out of the ghettos, and be recognized as art. Although they are omnipresent phenomena, Graffiti and Street Art came onto the forefront only towards the development of the Hippie Culture in 70’s. This was a time when people broke out of conditioning to see Graffiti & Street Art as art. The first opening of Graffiti was at Rome by Fab5 Freddy and soon other artists flooded the New York, London, and Paris art scenes. Read more
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Is Art Being Stolen To Order?
Now we know that art is becoming mainstream, as theft is becoming the order of the day, as thieves in hoodies target prints by Banksy the anonymous and faceless graffiti artist. Then a few days later; the conviction of the boyfriend of the Olympian Myriam Badard, for theft of paintings of the late Ghitta Caiserman-Roth. Nima Mazhari was convicted on the 5th of June of stealing the paintings worth $100,000.
Art theft can hardly ever have seemed more fashionable than in this last traumatic week. Nima Mazhari has been convicted of stealing work by Ghitta Caiserman-Roth worth $100,000. A gang of youths called “hoodies” has made off with Banksy prints from a theft in Brighton. And in Milwaukee a work by Delacroix stolen some two years ago from a gallery in Milwauke has been returned, by a man who says he found it in the trash!
As works become more popular and expensive thieves who previously would have thought a Mondrian was a new alco-pop are unfortunately starting to take an interest in some of the more popular works of art available today. The hype of the anonymous Banksy have clearly increased visibility of his works to such an extent that an exhibition of his work has been closed. Stuart Hobday, Director said “It’s a real shame that this exhibition is not going ahead, but the risk of the art being stolen was fairly high and we understand the concern raised by the owner of the works.”
Because Banksy’s works are graffiti they are often easier to steal than traditional works, because of their public nature. Last year a work was cut from a section of wall in Paddington and later auctioned on eBay for ?20,000. Murals were also ruined in Whitechapel last month when thieves tried to chisel the works from the wall. Read more
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Graffiti Terminology
A number of words and phrases have come to describe different styles and aspects of graffiti. Like all slang and colloquialisms, the phrases vary in different cities and countries. The following terminology comes primarily from the United States.
All City
The state of being known for one’s graffiti throughout a city (originally throughout the five boroughs of New York, often through the medium of subway cars).
Back To Back
Graffiti that covers a wall from end to end, as seen on some parts of the West-Berlin side of the Berlin Wall. Similarly, trains sometimes receive end to end painting when a carriage has been painted along its entire length. This is often abbreviated as e2e. End to ends used to be called window-downs but this is an older expression that is falling from popularity.
Backjump
A quickly executed throw up or panel piece. Backjumps are usually painted on a temporarily parked train or a running bus.
Black Book
A graffiti artist’s sketchbook. Often used to sketch out and plan potential graffiti, and to collect tags from other writers. It is a writer’s most valuable property, containing all or a majority of the person’s sketches and pieces. A writer’s sketchbook is carefully guarded from the police and other authorities, as it can be used as material evidence in a graffiti vandalism case and link a writer to previous illicit works. Read more
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