Graffiti Writing, Haring, Basquiat

Published in Alessandro Mininno, “Graffiti Writing, Haring, Basquiat”, in Bernardelli, Bertolino, Bonami, Corgnati, Del Drago e Poli, Contemporanea. Arte dal 1950 a oggi, vol. 4 (The Eighties), pp. 86–93. Milano: Mondadori Electa, 2008.

This is not an artistic movement, and they are not even called graffiti: no writer, between the early 1970s and the late 1980s, would have described their practice with that term (introduced by the media with a pejorative intent), and only a very few ever manifested a genuine artistic intention.

“Writers” — that was the term used for themselves by all those young people (there were hundreds of them): Black, Puerto Rican, or simply New Yorkers who accepted the challenge of choosing a fantasy name (a signature, a tag) and writing it with better style than the others, so frequently as to permanently change the face of the city.

For several years the phenomenon remained confined to that small circle of initiates (they had nicknames like Julio 204 or Taki 183) who had decided to be present “all over,” in all five boroughs of the city, marking their passage with a personal and original (calli)graphic style.

Just as billboards, to capture a moment’s attention in a jungle of signs, must grow ever larger and even begin to move, the writers’ signatures grew in number and size, finding in the New York subway cars their most suitable support. The subway carried the pieces (as writers called their larger works) from one neighbourhood to another, transforming the transit system into a rudimentary communication tool: their favourite lines were the 5 and the 2, which made a journey of about four hours from the Bronx to Brooklyn and made their names famous across the entire city.

The world of writers was always entirely self-referential: the style of the letters evolved quickly toward illegibility — the wildstyle — letters adorned with arrows and bars in such baroque fashion as to be comprehensible only to other writers.

This was an entire subculture revolving around the cult of the name, around vandalism and the occupation of public space as a means of attracting attention, around calligraphic style as a mode of expression to differentiate oneself from other writers, and around fierce competition based on entirely non-artistic parameters: quantity, the size of pieces, the obsessive repetition of one’s signature and, lastly, the possession of a personal style.

”It’s for us”

“If other people can’t read it I don’t care, I don’t care about them, it’s for us.” These are the words of the very young writer Skeme in 1983, filmed by Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver in the documentary Style Wars. “What you have on your hands,” Skeme’s mother says despondently in the same documentary, “is just a miserable subculture.”

There are many subcultures born in those years, and almost all of them, sooner or later, come under attack from the market, which seeks to absorb and neutralize them: similarly, the writers’ pieces — which within a few years cover almost all subway cars (and begin to appear on some city walls), executed in spray with many colours — are aesthetically appealing enough to lead some observers to consider them, almost, as a form of art.

The art market in those very years is witnessing a return to painterly expression and is hungry for novelty as never before: add to this that graffiti fully embody the counterculture, produced almost always by the disadvantaged classes with scarce means and explosive energy. They are hard to ignore.

On September 15, 1973, a group of about a hundred writers (including Phase 2, Mico, Coco 144, Pistol, Flint 707, Bama, Snake, and Stich), guided by sociologist Hugo Martinez, held their first collective exhibition at the Razor Gallery, promoted by the New York Foundation of Arts. All works by the UGA (United Graffiti Artists) sold for between three hundred and three thousand dollars, and the show was favourably reviewed by critics and the press until 1975, when the phenomenon was temporarily abandoned.

From writer to “graffiti artist”

This moment naturally marked a radical change in perspective for many writers who began to feel like something more than mere vandals: the label that came into use from that point on was “graffiti artist,” a category that made many purists recoil.

Naturally, if those forms and colours, transposed to canvas, had a market, part of the credit belonged to the whole scene — to those who had brought the movement to light by painting on trains: people like Super Kool, who had executed the first genuine piece on a subway car only a year earlier, in 1972.

Many writers soon left the UGA: some could not, on paper or canvas, express the creativity that came naturally to them in railway depots, while others felt that displaying their letters and names in a closed, sterile environment denaturing their work.

Stefan Eins, director of one of the first galleries (Fashion Moda, in the Bronx) to deal seriously with the commercialisation of graffiti, declared in 1979: “In the Bronx you see plants and electric wires growing side by side, animals and car shells, men and technologies. That’s why living in the Bronx is exciting, because you find virgin forces living next to communities that are uneducated in the traditional sense, in a third-world environment that has reasserted itself as nature ten minutes from the heart of Manhattan.”

At precisely that moment a second generation of writers was emerging — Rammellzee, Koor (A-One), Toxic, John “Crash” Matos, Chris “Daze” Ellis — already accustomed to three-dimensional letters, coloured backgrounds, and figurative or comic-book ornaments, which would prove far better suited for the art world.

In September 1980 Fashion Moda inaugurated “Graffiti Art Success for America,” a group show involving Crash, Disco 107, Fab Five Freddy, Futura, John Fekner, Kel 139th, Lady Pink, Lee, Mitch 77, Nac 143, Noc 167, Stan 153, Tom McCutheon, Zephyr, and many others.

John Ahearn, known for his casts of Black and Puerto Rican people arranged along walls in vivid colour, founded in the early 1980s the CoLab (Collaborative Project Inc.), which would gather many talented artists, claimed by more than one American and European gallery.

As early as 1979, Rome’s Galleria Medusa, run by Carlo Bruni, had hosted an exhibition by “Lee” Quinones (member of The Fabulous Five, who had created the historic whole train “Merry Christmas to New York”), granting graffiti an international recognition as an art form whose echo spread throughout Europe. Carlo Bruni, presenting Lee’s show, wrote: “Anyone who is interested in painting and has stood in the New York Subway watching painted cars rush past could not fail to think of paintings like States of Mind, Boccioni’s Farewells.”

Europe discovers writing

In 1981 many spaces, independent and institutional alike, opened to the language of writing: the Mudd Club, which saw the Keith Haring–Kenny Scharf duo organising the Drawing Show; Fashion Moda gallery; Tony Shafrazi’s gallery (known, among other things, for having spray-painted “LIES KILL ALL” on Picasso’s Guernica in 1974); Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery in Soho, which organised the first Rammellzee show, Ikonoklast Panzerism.

After Documenta 7 in 1982, curated by Rudi Fuchs, during which Fashion Moda gallery was presented, many European galleries began to take interest in writers.

During the VI Performance Week in Bologna, Francesca Alinovi (together with Barilli, Daolio, and Mango) organised “Telepazzia,” Italy’s first graffiti event — 1982, and Alinovi, who would tragically die the following year in mysterious circumstances, demonstrated precociously sharp curatorial attention to the world of graffiti.

On the transition from subway tunnels to art galleries, Craig Castleman, among the first academics to study the phenomenon, sadly describes the party organised by Lee Quinones’s dealer for his entry into the art world. “Lee’s canvases were hung on every wall, they looked a bit out of place among marble columns, crystal chandeliers, and Greek statues. […] The dealer announced that Lee would execute a masterpiece just for them. […] Lee was clearly embarrassed, he was frozen to the spot. […] The dealer said, quietly, that Lee would have to paint or his career would be over. […] I left, quickly, feeling dirty. Lee stayed. I never heard about him again.”

Context, in short, is fundamental to graffiti writing. Exhibiting the works in a gallery, painting in an enclosed space on commission, diminishes the work (if work it can be called) and cancels its premises. Illegality, risk, action, the disorientation produced by seeing a painted rather than clean train — these are integral and fundamental parts of the graffiti message.

“That feeling of painting on trains,” says Phase 2, one of the movement’s pioneers, “you can’t recreate it. It’s a whole other story. I don’t mean it’s just the adrenaline rush, but someone drawing with chalk on black advertising boards is not taking the same risks as someone who breaks into depots.”

Keith Haring: art, not writing

It is not hard to understand that the one “drawing with chalk” Phase 2 refers to is Keith Haring, who began drawing in public spaces in 1980, exploiting the black billboards left blank awaiting advertisements: his characters — the radiant baby, the barking dog — were almost omnipresent in subway stations, though rarely on the trains themselves. Born in Pennsylvania, after attending art school he arrived in New York in 1978, when the city had already run two anti-graffiti campaigns and the second generation of writers was already active.

Galleries eager to get their hands on the phenomenon probably needed someone like Haring: white, illegal but not too much so, and easily legible (palatable, as writer Dondi correctly described him).

He would become famous as a graffiti artist, though despite some points of contact with the writers’ scene, the differences between his art and the “pieces” are enormous, beginning with intent: artistic in Haring’s case, self-referential and narcissistic in the case of graffiti.

The cult of the name, risk and fame are goals alien to the New York artist, who never signed his works (he rarely even titled them) and embraced a mild illegality (vacant billboards, dustbins, pavements) in order to reach a broad, general public already alienated from the more chic galleries.

One might say that Haring took inspiration from graffiti writing, but only as regards the medium (the street, subway stations) and not the style or method. His stylistic influences come rather from comics (many of his works are surrounded by the panel border that in comics separates one scene from another) and from tribal motifs, replicated so often they become almost ideograms, composed with typographic sensibility (in white, red, and black) to illustrate ideas and concepts.

His encounter with the art world takes place in the downtown Manhattan clubs — Soho, Tribeca, and the East Village — none too salubrious but concentrating all the underground creative ferment of those years, where it was possible to stay out until five in the morning in the company of Lou Reed or Afrika Bambaataa. While Uptown Andy Warhol still frequented Studio 54, south of Houston Street encounters happened at the Mudd Club or Club 57 — a gathering place for predominantly gay art students producing extreme performance art fuelled by a fair quantity of lysergic postage stamps.

“The high point of the evening came when, suddenly, Andy Warhol and Tony Shafrazi (the art dealer) walked into the basement. We were all stunned. At that time Andy was drifting around the Mudd Club and must have realized that something extraordinary was happening downtown,” recalls Kim Hastreiter.

Haring develops a flowing calligraphy that starts from the alphabetic letter (not necessarily the European alphabet) and arrives at a fluid, rapid gestuality, in which the broad, clean line of his ideograms crowds around what is his constant symbol, the radiant boy, from whom rays of light emanate. “If technology changes the world, people continue to have the same problems; human beings are always beset by the same fundamental and primary needs, those that define their human nature.”

He begins by painting on stone and wood — easily portable materials — so that people can easily take his work; similarly, the white chalk characters on the black advertising billboards were meant to communicate with a broad public and cheer it up, while simultaneously offering an early critique of advertising’s commercialisation of public space.

His rise is rapid and takes him to exhibitions very quickly: after Fashion Moda (1973) he shows at CoLab events and at Times Square in 1982 (where an electronic billboard displayed his creations for thirty seconds every twenty minutes). He works for Vivienne Westwood’s “Autumn 83” collection and holds several solo shows in Italy in 1983, in Bologna, Naples, and Milan.

Defying the rules of good painting, Haring never mixed colours or used gradients: he preferred flat, highly saturated hues, primary colours, and a certain parsimony in palette, using two, at most three colours.

The mid-1980s saw the spread of AIDS, and between 1985 and 1987 Haring decided to engage personally against the disease through his work: he produced numerous safe-sex campaigns and posters, painted ailing friends, until in 1988 he himself tested positive for HIV. “Living with a terminal disease gives you a completely new perspective,” declared the artist, demystifying death by depicting it in many canvases — ridiculing and subverting it.

Basquiat: from the SAMO tag to the Whitney

The same decade that brought Keith Haring to fame also witnessed the birth, rapid blaze, and extinguishing of Jean-Michel Basquiat, often associated with the graffiti scene.

Basquiat came to attention in 1978, writing “SAMO” (the SAMe Old shit) on the walls of Brooklyn, Tribeca, and Soho — but unlike writers, spreading his name was not his primary intent: his tag, often accompanied by the © mark, frequently signed brief poems, pointed critical phrases, or truisms.

“SAMO as a neo art form. SAMO as an end to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy. SAMO as an escape clause. SAMO save idiots. SAMO as an end to bogus pseudo intellectual. My mouth, therefore an error. Plush safe… he think. SAMO as an end to playing art. SAMO as an alternative 2 playing art with the ‘radical chic’ sect on Daddy’s $funds.”

Graffiti, in short, served Basquiat as a door of entry to the art world — a rather effective one: by 1980 he had already participated in the collective “Times Square Show,” organised by the CoLab and the independent Fashion Moda gallery.

His works — typographic compositions mixed with crude anatomical representations in a childlike style — quickly began selling for between $5,000 and $10,000. He was hugely productive, reaching the rate of a canvas a day: Annina Nosei, who hosted Basquiat in her basement and was simultaneously his dealer, managed to sell them all without difficulty, whether complete or not.

He soon came into contact with Andy Warhol, who in 1982 portrayed him with a halftone print on canvas in which the colour was driven to oxidation by urine (a method often used by the artist to introduce an element of chance into his work). The two would soon become friends and would collaborate on a famous series of Collaborations.

Official consecration, long sought by Basquiat, arrived in 1983 when he was invited to exhibit at the Whitney Museum Biennial alongside Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, David Salle, and Cindy Sherman: at 22, Basquiat was the youngest artist in the show.

On February 22, 1987, following a gallbladder operation, Andy Warhol died. On August 18, 1988, Basquiat died of an overdose from a mixture of drugs. In 1990 Keith Haring also died, of AIDS — a definitive close to the 1980s.