All things must pass, usually within a month. In graffiti, the dimensions of space and time are beyond control. Most writers return with cameras to document their work, since the TA’s buffing machines can reduce the most ambitious effort to a swampy blur. Often working from sketches prepared in advance, a writer and his “crew” may spend a weekend in tunnel light, drinking, smoking, listening to the radio. The idea is to impose yourself on an entire car, to move from “a throw-up” to the carefully delineated blend of tints and lines graffiti writers call “a fade.” This riotous effect can be achieved on the car while the paint is wet, or in midair, when a writer sprays two cans at once to see the fade as it forms in the mist.įrom the time a surface is sighted - usually a train laid up on the center track - it can take 12 hours to complete a piece. This communicative function, says Ali, puts graffiti in “the griot tradition” of African storytelling - whether or not you grew up close to your dad.īut tagging is only the most elementary form of graffiti, and the insides of cars are a practice zone in which aspiring writers fashion the techniques they will need to do “a piece” - i.e., masterpiece. A writer can tell who has been there, which parts of the city are represented, how long since the site has been buffed, and whether there are any startling innovations - “isms” - he wishes to incorporate. #R IN GRAFFITI WINDOWS#Some kids do write to deface - to “bomb” a car, as they say but the wholesale obstruction of windows and maps is a sure way to perpetuate your status as a novice, what serious writers call “a toy.”Įntering a graffiti zone - and these now include schoolyards, stairwells, and selected intersections - is like reading a newspaper. Once you learn to interpret the medium, it becomes clear that no single intention is involved. The debate over graffiti has been conducted by people who are unwilling to decipher the message it conveys. The real vandalism is what you’d see if you scraped the windows clean.” Says the indefatigable Ali, who, like many graffiti writers, has a ready capacity to articulate the ideas behind his work: “Graffiti takes away the placenta, and reminds people of how violent the subway is. The casual rider might conclude that perp and victim share an inability to control the danger in their lives. The Times has rounded up the usual assortment of social workers and shrinks to bolster its contention that graffiti is “an effort to deal with deep feelings of fear by seeking out an experience that involves facing that fear.” Psychologists who treat these incipient felons “believe their patients, virtually all of whom have less-than-perfect relationships with their fathers, are intent on defacing his car, the car of authority.” “It’s the feeling that an antisocial element has been in the system and had its way,” says an MTA spokesman, defending his department’s annual $6.5 million anti-graffiti budget - money, after all, that might otherwise be used for repairs. The great debate over graffiti, and what ought to be done about it rests on the assumption that its intention is to defile. It is, says Claes Oldenburg, “a big bouquet from Latin America.” It is, says Richard Ravitch of the MTA, “a symbol that we have lost control.” Their signatures - called “tags” - have transformed the subway into what the Times calls “some godawful forest.” And now that the perpetrators have moved above ground, trucks and elevators, monuments and vacant walls look as if they have suddenly sprouted vines. Now thousands call themselves “writers.” They come from every social stratum and range in age from nine to 25. In 1973, there may have been a few hundred ghetto kids writing in a few definable styles. Graffiti survived Lindsay’s defoliation plan, and it has thrived on every subsequent attempt to curb its spread. But the application of vast resources is no match for disciplined determination, as we should have learned in Vietnam. He vowed to wipe it off the face of the IRT, and allocated $10 million to its obliteration. In Praise of Graffiti: The Fire Down Below
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