ASIA tag, 1981. Aerosol paint on New York subway car. Destroyed. Photo by ZEPHYR.
Evaluating Quality
Photographer Martha Cooper, who documented subway pieces and emerging hip-hop culture in the 1970s and 1980s, described the way writers evaluated their pieces:
Writers had developed what amounted to their own gallery culture on the trains. The trains were the gallery and the writers were their own critics. Their culture in many ways mimicked the art world, but they had their own art world. The kids were their own harshest critics. They could go on and on about why a piece didn’t work aesthetically and which colors were in the piece…[57]
DONDI, who made himself available to critique other writers’ designs, recommended taking snapshots to learn from and improve upon one’s efforts.[58] BLADE, too, relied on photographs to document his and other writers’ pieces. Because of the MTA’s campaign to clean graffiti off trains, writers could not count on their pieces lasting for long – sometimes cars were washed even before they left the yard. As much as possible, however, writers judged each others’ efforts after viewing them first-hand. They measured their praise, even when they discussed writers whom they admired, as in this dialogue between DONDI and ZEPHYR about LEE:
[DONDI] When I first saw LEE whole-cars I thought they were really great, until I caught one in the Two Yard. They were great, but I thought they were a lot better until I actually saw one up close.
[ZEPHYR] They’re painted real fast.
[DONDI] Yeah, there were drips and everything and I’m thinking, “Well, this is, this is okay, it’s good, but…”
[ZEPHYR] But when you saw them up close they weren’t as impressive as when you saw them…
[DONDI] Right, right.
[ZEPHYR] Which is the way he paints.
[DONDI] Of course, this led me to believe that he was doing these things out of a bomber mentality. And he wasn’t trying to become a muralist of the graffiti scene, which eventually happened because he covered so much space.[59]
FUTURA 2000, Break, 1980. Aerosol paint on New York subway car. Destroyed. Photo by Martha Cooper.
CRASH, Untitled, date unknown. Aerosol paint on subway car. New York.
BLADE, Whole car tag, 1980. Aerosol paint on subway car.
Neatness counted: no matter how capable a writer was stylistically, drips detracted from his reputation.
Qualitative evaluation was closely linked to documentation of the history of writing. BLADE maintained meticulous records of his tags, and kept track of the innovations that he and others developed. RAMMELLZEE, as already mentioned, proposed that writing had roots in medieval manuscripts and the monks who lettered them, and he inspired others to elaborate his theory. NOC 167 helped young writers define their styles, and created the whole-car piece that represented the motivating notion of ‘Style Wars’ – the competition among writers to create distinctive forms of lettering and broadcast their innovations city-wide on the sides of subway cars. All three understood subway writing as an historical phenomenon independent of fine art, with a past to be mined and a future to be shaped.
BLADE
BLADE belonged to the first generation of graffiti writers, a peer of ‘Old School’ writers like PHASE 2 whose tagging careers began in the early 1970s and were documented in the 1974 book, The Faith of Graffiti. From the Bronx, he began tagging trains in 1972, and he kept a list of his tags, organised by train car numbers. By 1980 he had completed five thousand pieces.[60] BLADE advanced stylistic developments in graffiti throughout the 1970s: he painted clouds to establish a neutral ground for his tag, he wrote in bubble letters, he used shadows to create a three-dimensional effect, and he was the first to use a character in a masterpiece: a snowman in November 1974, on a Christmas-themed car.[61] He continued to use characters of his own devising to animate his pieces, such as Joint Man, Dancing Ladies, and the Galaxy Gangster.[62] By 1976, he had mastered not only three-dimensional forms that seem to pop out from the plane of the subway car, but also an illusion of space that extended back into the picture plane.[63] This facility was evident in his 1980 swinging letters masterpiece, where his tag seemed to have become animated and filled the side of the train car, top to bottom and end to end. There was a blue sky background, with puffy white clouds. Each letter seemed to pivot freely, like a car on a Ferris wheel, suspended between a pair of metal legs: the B rocked back, the A swung forward, and the D looked ready to fly up and around its axle. The letters were shadowed in black so that they looked substantial and seemed to project into space, especially against the actual sky as the train crossed an overpass, as in this photograph. Four round faces with big cartoon eyes to the right of the E were smaller than the letters and were graduated in size so that they appeared to recede into the pictorial space.
BLADE told New York Times reporter Grace Glueck in 1983, ‘I wanted to do the most and be the best at it’.[64] This was an unusual ambition. Generally, graffiti writers aimed for quantity, and while a distinctive style was admirable, it was not a substitute for ubiquity on a particular subway line in gaining a reputation as ‘king’ of the line. Thus, it was not inevitable that a prolific tagger would become known for producing masterpieces, because the time needed to execute an elaborate, multi-coloured, whole-car design could have been spent on scores of simpler tags. BLADE was unique in his desire to produce large, striking designs in quantity. He spent about ten hours on an end-to-end piece with his name centred over the middle doors in 1980. The blocky, blue-green letters followed the conventions of linear perspective with the vanishing point in the centre of the A. The A was the farthest back in space, and it appeared to be folded so that the whole tag angled into the atmospheric bands of white, gold, and orange behind it. This central design was set off by a pair of broad red arcs that separated the deep space from black areas of indeterminate depth at either side. An atomic blast in red, white, and blue was to the left and to the right was a pop-eyed head. Richard Goldstein, the Village Voice art critic, took it to be a reference to the famous painting, The Scream: ‘A subway Munch raises the heady possibility that art can happen anywhere’.[65] Any resemblance was unintentional, though: the artist said he was not familiar with Munch’s painting when he produced his image. Rather, he claimed to be self-referential: the figure expressed awe of the writer’s ability to break the picture plane, and craned his neck, wide-eyed.[66]
SEEN, Tag, 1981. Aerosol paint on subway car. New York.
RAMMELLZEE
Queens-based RAMMELLZEE believed in the power of writing as a vehicle to reconfigure language and the circuits of power it supports, although he was not active in the yards. He described his theory of writing, ‘Ikonoklast Panzerism’, to art critic Nicolas A. Moufarrege in a 1982 interview in Arts magazine. ‘Panzerism’, he said, ‘is connected to
Miller, 131.
Cooper and Chalfant, 32.
Witten and White, 111.
Stewart, 444, 455.
Stewart, 447.
David Villorente and Todd James,
Stewart, 448–50.
Grace Glueck, “Gallery View: On Canvas, Yes, But Still Eyesores,”
Richard Goldstein, “The Fire Down Below,” 55.
Interview with BLADE, 25 July 2006.
