American Graffiti. Margo Thompson

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but long connecting boards, in which he detailed how letters could be armed and the connection he supposed between subway writers and Gothic monks.[32] While RAMMELLZEE believed it was imperative to recognise the significance of writing and its historical origins in the subway, some of his crew wrote on trains only after they painted canvases. Photographer Henry Chalfant said of one Gothic Futurist, A-ONE,

      [He] had never painted a train, but he was a good artist, and his work started to get some action in the art world. He painted canvases. He was part of art shows. But he knew what everybody thought of him, and what everybody thought of the whole scene – that if you weren’t down on trains, you were nobody, a toy. This concerned him greatly, and he suffered a couple of years of this kind of criticism. He really wanted to do a train, and he finally went out and painted four or five trains – whole cars, top-to-bottoms – in his inimitable style. They weren’t traditional pieces, they were wild and crazy. I went to photograph them, because he insisted that I be there to get the picture![33]

      In RAMMELLZEE’s clique especially, but also in other crews, they re-imagined writing as something much larger than the individual. It constituted a world of its own, with an aesthetic, an ethos, a history: it was hardly a surprise to writers, then, that others thought subway pieces were worth preserving on canvas and displaying in galleries and museums.

      Themes

      PHASE 2 was an old-school writer who had begun tagging in autumn 1971. He identified four themes in writing: ‘the centrality of naming; the concept of building language… or visual and verbal wordsmithing; the idea of constructing an identity in opposition to state and consumer culture; and the idea that resistance through cultural production is reinforced with a consciousness of ancestral spiritual traditions.’[34] He and RAMMELLZEE most pointedly observed that writing could intervene in the systems of power that language supported. The militaristic cast of RAMMELLZEE’s ‘Ikonoklast Panzerism’, with its reference to German tanks (Panzer) and call to arm letters, suggests that he understood that language is the site for a struggle between oppressive ideologies and resistance to them. Who controls language controls social and political hierarchies, and for RAMMELLZEE and PHASE 2, wild-style lettering promised to entirely reinvent written language. Historian Joe Austin, in his book on the efforts of New York City authorities to eradicate subway writing, observed that by writing on public walls and subway cars, writers claimed public space and thereby gained access to the public sphere, the realm of political discourse from which they were otherwise disenfranchised as working-class, minority youths. For writers, carving out a space of resistance was a positive move that staked their claim on the urban environment, but for other citizens it was a symptom if not the cause of the crime, poverty, and alienation that plagued the city in the 1970s.

      RAMMELLZEE worked out his Ikonoklast Panzerist strategies of subversion on canvas and paper, not on trains. Other writers executed whole-car masterpieces that expressed the pressures of urban life. ‘Heroin Kills’ by ZEPHYR and DONDI was an anti-drug message. LEE’s ‘Stop Real Crime’ protested the attention and funds devoted to eradicating subway vandalism that drained resources from campaigns to curb violent crime. QUIK expressed the urgency that fueled writers: ‘The graffiti movement represents the frustration of an inner city population attempting to satisfy the public at large. New York graffiti was revolutionary and rebellious! How easy and socially acceptable it would have been if we thousands of graffiti artists simply stayed at home and painted!’[35] Even as city officials pointed to graffiti as the cause of urban blight, writers offered first-hand reports of life in the urban trenches.

      LEE, DONDI, QUIK, and ZEPHYR addressed the typical subway writer with their clear, colourful pieces. As LEE said,

      We literally cut into a fixed society, a fixed way of living. People take the train, go to work, go to the movies, go to bed – day in and day out. Then whole-car murals came in front of you, and they’re not normal. They make you start to think, ‘well, who is normal?’ Is it the ones that are painting the trains who are really expressing themselves and able to be free to do something like that in such a molded system?[36]

      Writing challenged those who chanced across it to think differently about their lives in the city, to consider the possibility that the subway could be beautiful and colourful, for example, rather than grimy and harsh. Graffiti was a sign of lawlessness to some, of course, but to others it seemed that writers at least were doing something to beautify the city. Writing appealed to the cultural cognoscenti as well as casual viewers because it was an alternative to the corporate commercialism of advertising and the dour restraint of much minimalist and conceptual art of the late 1970s. This audience expected that if writing were translated to canvas, it would likewise express the social consciousness of the underprivileged in an uncalculated and authentic way.

      BLADE, Untitled, 1975. Aerosol paint on New York subway car. Destroyed.

      LEE, “There was once a time…” (detail), 1980. Aerosol paint on New York subway car. Destroyed.

      SEEN, Untitled, 1981. Aerosol paint on New York subway car. Destroyed.

      By far the most common writing motif was the tag. It was where a writer started, tattooing train interiors with permanent markers, declaring his presence; as FUTURA 2000 claimed: ‘Graffiti is an inner outcry of the soul telling you, you have to communicate… Tags (initials) on the insides of trains are saying, “Here I am, and look I’m over here,”… It’s an answer back to our overcrowded environment, lacking heat, hot water, and money.’[37] Some writers graduated to the exteriors of cars, where they expanded their tag into a full-fledged masterpiece to fill the panel below the windows (a ‘window-down’ piece), to cover the windows (‘top-to-bottom’), or to extend from one end to the other (a ‘whole car’ piece). PHASE 2 compared tags to signatures: ‘Most people’s signature looks nothing like the way they write other words. So I think one’s identity is expressed through their signature.’[38] Writers chose their tags for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they were appropriated: ZEPHYR tried several names before adopting his from a brand of skateboard, while FUTURA 2000’s came from the name of a typeface.[39] DAZE chose his name ‘because of the forms [of the letters] and, at that time, no one else had a name that sounded like that. No one had a name with a “z” or an “e” in it, because those letters are difficult to come up with a style for’, but he also recalled experimenting with ‘W names’ for a period.[40] DONDI sometimes wrote as ASIA, PRE, and BUS, to try out different letter combinations. NOC 167 wrote under as many as ten tags, according to DAZE, but with a style recognisable to other writers that carried through them all.[41] By contrast, BLADE was proud to have devised a new look for each of his more than five thousand pieces, never repeating himself.[42] It was important to reveal one’s identity even when using several tags, to be credited for ‘getting up’ in quantity, but the best writer’s identity was expressed in his style which might constantly evolve.

      When writers became graffiti artists, turning their aerosol cans on canvases, their tags often dominated their compositions. LEE and FAB FIVE FREDDY’s first exhibition in Milan in 1979 consisted entirely of tags on canvas. The name as central to the painting inverted the more usual practice of painters signing their works inconspicuously in a corner or even on the back

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