graffiti artist’s roots in writing, it also fueled suspicion that the graffiti art movement was motivated primarily by self-promotion, just as writing on the trains was. For some graffiti artists, featuring the tag signaled allegiance to their subway writing past. Others embraced the opportunity to develop a new style and iconography for the new medium and scale of gallery work.
A sense of self-consciousness loosely connects the tags, dedications, and references to writing life that writers treated in diverse ways. The writer is aware of his audience and engages in a kind of public performance of his identity when he executes a piece. The tag obviously demonstrates this sort of ‘show-off ebullience’, as Peter Schjeldahl termed it.[43] So do shout-outs to the writer’s family or girlfriend. LEE, SEEN, and others dedicated pieces to their mothers, either employing MOM as a tag or adding an inscription, ‘to Mom’. BLADE and DUSTER both wrote their girlfriends’ names in styles that matched their own tags in whole-car pieces, a unifying design to make a matched pair of the couple emblazoned on permanently-linked pairs of cars known to writers as married couples. In an especially striking birthday dedication from 1981, BLADE outlined BLADE ‘n’ DOLORES in bright white, yellow and red against a black ground. The black letters glowed like neon, with a green aura and fluorescent decorations surrounding them adding to the night-sky effect. Such dedications extended to loved ones the fame writers claimed when their pieces ran through the city-wide transit system.[44]
SEEN, Hand of Doom, 1980. Aerosol paint on subway car.
Writers annotated their pieces with inscriptions that commented on the writing process. Some mocked the Transit Authority police for their inability to prevent graffiti: they teased the ‘boys in blue’ to ‘catch me if you can’. Others echoed the boasts of dance-party MCs who proclaimed mastery of the beats, the rhymes, the ladies: ‘Me and my boys turn on the toys when we seek the trains they go insane that’s what it is the name of the game is graffiti fame’.[45] This inscription declared the writer and his crew’s preeminence, and it acknowledged the prestige economy that Austin shows organised the writing subculture, where fame and respect were conferred according to accepted rules.[46] It was intended for the eyes of other writers, but elsewhere writers indicated that they knew another public was reading them, too. Austin suggests that making letters legible, using mainstream media cartoon figures like Super Mario or Papa Smurf, and creating the illusion of three-dimensions all were strategies to reach out to that audience.[47] NOC 167’s ‘Style Wars’ piece of 1981 described the competition among writers and told the uninitiated subway rider that there was a point to the elaborately painted trains. These efforts seem designed to undermine the stereotypes of writers as anti-social hoodlums and vandals that circulated through the news media and justified official efforts to scrub graffiti from the MTA. LEE stated his intentions:
A short while after I started painting on the trains, I realized I was doing it for myself and for the masses of people who rode the trains. I did it for New York. I was communicating to the city and trying to reach the normal, so-called well-adjusted people, the people that weren’t expecting something like this to come into their lives. I was trying to reach them in an intimate way.[48]
The writers wanted to extend the prestige economy to encompass the non-writing public, to gain fame within the dominant culture. Their ambition to be appreciated on their own terms is reflected in the themes of resistance and outreach that they explored.
Lettering and Style
Writing was progressive: beginning in 1971, it evolved from simple tags, to big, colourful bubble and block letters, to the nearly illegible wild-style calculated to impress other writers. Writers graduated from perfecting the combination of letters that constituted their tags, to designing entire alphabets.[49] Individual writers recapitulated this evolution in their careers: the writing community expected them to understand the styles that surrounded them before contributing their own.[50] The possibilities for invention were endless, in PHASE 2’s estimation: ‘You can’t put a limit on communication or how one can communicate, you’ve always got to look further, that’s how style expanded in the first place’.[51] VULCAN expressed a similar sentiment: ‘Getting complicated, doing the impossible… I try to come up with new things that I’ve never seen before’.[52] There is a logic to writing that tends more towards elaboration than refinement, but nevertheless advances by way of a critical process in which the writers vocally participated.
DONDI was highly regarded for his inventiveness in designing tags, from legible block to intertwined wild-style letters. In a train he painted with KEL in 1979, they responded to an impressive piece called 2 MUCH + BOND by the TMT crew. DONDI wrote under the tag 2 MANY: the numeral 2 connected to the M, the N tilted into the Y that looked like an X (as DOC observed later). The legs of the letters bent in unexpected directions, folding in or shooting out. KEL mixed upper- and lower-case letters, and the lower bar of his L zigzagged into an arrow. In both pieces, the letters were decorated with spots of colour that contributed to the effect of fragmentation and made it difficult to discern the letter shapes. A scroll to the right at the end of the car declared, ‘We did it again’.[53] The elaborate, nearly illegible pieces were clearly meant as a challenge to other writers: DONDI and KEL’s CIA were the new writers to beat. Elsewhere, DONDI appealed to the general public with his three ‘Children of the Grave’ trains, where his tag was crisply rendered in big block letters and the title evoked the desperation of young men’s lives in the city. DONDI deliberately chose among the styles he had mastered when he designed his pieces, which proves his fluency as a writer and suggests his awareness of two distinct audiences.
Writers like DONDI were able to tune their styles to address different viewers. To use wild-style militated against outsiders understanding the content of the piece, because it was neither fully legible nor merely decorative or abstract. It competed with the desire to achieve fame in mainstream culture that is evident in some of the themes that I have described above. Instead, wild-style represented ambivalence towards mainstream society and put off subway riders. According to LEE,
The subway riders felt very intimidated and provoked by the whole evolution of wild-style in the mid-70s. Because it wasn’t readable any more. It felt foreign, they were alienated, and yet they were riding with it, to work every day. They felt that they were riding in something that they couldn’t understand anymore, and that scared them.[54]
It also expressed the way writers felt disadvantaged, said DOZE: ‘Graff [writing] is my ghetto defense. It’s my weapon against my sense of helplessness. It’s a code that is for us, for other graffiti artists to understand’.[55] LEE said,
There was a need among writers to come out with devastating paintings. Without money in your pockets, or any future in sight, there was a determination to create devastating work. One of the ways to vent that was through wild-style painting. You wanted to become a secretive figure that felt powerful by being anonymous, and being unreadable, and you felt dangerous like that.[56]
Through writing, young men and women built a subculture in which their class and racial identities had no effect on their efforts to gain fame and respect. Even as they inserted themselves visually into the public sphere, they controlled access to their world by adjusting their style.
Peter Schjeldahl, “Graffiti Goes Legit – but the ‘Show-off’ Ebullience Remains,”
Cooper and Chalfant, 90–3.
Cooper and Chalfant, 28.
Austin, 47–55.
Austin, 183–5.
Miller, 189. Emphasis in original.
Austin, 111–13.
Cooper and Chalfant, 22.
Austin, 114.
Austin, 173.
Witten and White, 64–5.
Miller, 87.
Miller, 84.
Miller, 86.
