Writing the Name: Between Inclusion and Repression

Published in Alessandro Mininno, “Scrivere il nome tra inclusione e repressione”, in La creazione necessaria. Arte tra espressione e reclusione, ed. Giulia Ingarao, Istituto Poligrafico Europeo, Palermo 2010.

Whenever art historians discuss graffiti, they begin with prehistoric cave paintings of bison hunts, with Lascaux and the rock engravings of Val Camonica. It’s a frustrating habit: the graffiti I know have nothing to do with these. The lexical ambiguity forces me, every time, to start from a terminological question that, somewhat culpably, produces a distorted picture of reality.

The word graffiti, dictionaries tell us, derives somehow from the Greek for “to scratch, to engrave, to draw” — graphein. It is a perfectly appropriate term, therefore, for cave engravings and the drawings of prisoners, which are the subject of the volume this essay introduces.

Until the 1970s, graffiti referred exclusively to wall paintings — more or less incised or scratched — rarely attributed to any artistic intent. Instead, they were connected to divinatory, propitiatory, or simply communicative purposes.

There came a moment when the word “graffiti” began to denote also the marker- or spray-painted writings on walls, and then the drawings that in the 1970s began to appear on the New York subway. The New York Times detected a new subculture in 1971, when it devoted an article and an interview to Taki 183, a young man of Greek origin who had begun writing his name everywhere with markers, prompting other young people to do the same. Taki simply could not explain why he did it: he just had to.

The New York Times called Taki’s signatures “graffiti,” probably disparagingly, associating them with the disorder of cave markings.

Writers, for their part, never use the word “graffiti”: they call themselves simply “writers,” and describe their activity as “writing” or simply “writing their name.”

The terminological difference matters for one reason only: it highlights a completely different approach. Not artistic, or at least not intentionally so. Not propitiatory, unlike the cave bisons. No longer sporadic, like the vernacular writings that have always existed on city walls from Pompeii to Paris.

This is an approach entirely focused on the cult of the name — repetitive, serial, and a-functional (not directed at communicating any specific message). Taki says: “I just have to do it.”

We are confronted with a radical change in the approach to writing on walls: so different from all previous manifestations that it arguably deserves analysis on entirely different premises.

Naturally, that more careful analysis never came: borrowing the generic term “graffiti” from art history meant generalizing, avoiding the precise framing of a poorly understood phenomenon that was already spreading alarmingly — by 1971 the New York Transit Authority was spending $300,000 a year to remove tags, writings, and obscenities from subway stations.

This is why I carefully avoid, wherever possible, using the word graffiti to refer to writing: it is inaccurate and generates confusion. A confusion that, naturally, serves those who want to lump everything together and find it useful to consider tags, love declarations, political and football slogans, and Paleolithic shopping lists for bison-hunting under the same heading.

What writers do

This is my area of study and practice: writing.

How does one distinguish a tag or a “piece” (a drawing made by a writer) from other kinds of wall markings? It is quite simple. Writers write their name — or rather, their pseudonym: since the activity is illegal, it would be imprudent to use one’s legal name.

The practice is fairly straightforward: choose a pseudonym, arm yourself with markers or spray paint, and write it as often as possible, better than other writers, with more style, on a larger scale and preferably in more dangerous locations (trains, subways, highways, overpasses, and generally any writable vertical surface).

As a result, writers’ markings are serial and stylized, and above all they are signatures. From the smallest single-color marker tag to the vast pieces visible on trains, the common thread is one: the obsessive, insistent repetition of a name.

By 2010 it is possible to recognize the marks of writers in every major city in the world: it all began in Philadelphia and New York, but by the early 1980s the phenomenon had spread to London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Milan. The vectors of diffusion were many, from books like Subway Art to documentaries like Style Wars and music videos like Malcolm McLaren’s “Buffalo Gals.”

Writing has become an uncontrollable planetary plague — at least for the institutions trying to eradicate it, often with laughable results.

Inclusion through illegibility

The difficulty of framing the phenomenon (and the terminological muddle is a symptom of it) plays a fundamental role both in repression policies and in its supposed acceptance by the existing art world. In many cases writers have no artistic intent: their goal is simply competition with other writers, for quantity or quality of signatures placed.

The aesthetic dimension of graffiti is considered by many writers to be little more than a by-product relative to the action and the competition. Yet this very aesthetic dimension very quickly generated commercial and artistic consequences, causing writers’ early entry into the art system: the first occasion was probably September 15, 1973, when a group of approximately 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 favorably reviewed by critics and specialized press until 1975, after which the phenomenon was temporarily dropped (see also Graffiti Writing, Haring, Basquiat for a more detailed account of this phase).

Writers, ex-writers, graffitists (like Haring and Basquiat, who actually shared little with the movement), and artists emerging from writing thus formed an extremely heterogeneous and difficult-to-grasp whole — certainly bivalent. On one side, the more extreme fringes of the movement, convinced that illegality and competition over the name were essential parts of their practice, often indifferent or even hostile to the criteria and policies of the art market, certainly self-referential: “it’s for us, I don’t care about them,” says Skeme in the documentary Style Wars. On the other, those who began to see themselves as “graffiti artists” rather than “graffiti writers,” creating a conception of the phenomenon heavily distorted by commercial influences.

“It’s for us”: in two words, the synthesis of a movement turned entirely inward — cryptic, self-referential, in which everything is directed solely and exclusively at other writers. The calligraphy is incomprehensible, the letters are forbidding, identities are concealed behind pseudonyms, the reasons for painting are not clearly stated. Or, according to some, they don’t exist at all: writers don’t know why they write, they just do it.

At the same time, this need for closure to the outside world constitutes the paradigm of an inclusion: if you are a writer, you are inside, you are one of us, you understand and are able to judge who the king is — the one who paints the best and the most.

Repression

Civil society has responded to this movement — whose manifestations are predominantly illegal — with reactions of the opposite sign: repression and the elimination of traces. Spontaneous traces, that perhaps describe the era we live in, just as the graffiti of Palazzo Steri describe the universe of Inquisition prisoners.

Certainly the uncontrolled proliferation of a jungle of signs in public space creates a climate of uncertainty, of loss of control. Even more so when we — accustomed to functional signs, to advertising, to informational graphics — find ourselves confronted with seemingly meaningless signatures. And, certainly, devoid of any commercial intent.

Judging from the state of many Italian cities, the strategy of repression and erasure has yielded modest results: the largest Italian cities are devastated, beyond recovery, by a dense weave of tags, throw-ups, and pieces.

Nevertheless, the costs of graffiti removal are substantial: Trenitalia declares spending roughly €3 million per year to clean trains, a figure similar to that of Ferrovie Nord Milano and ATM (€2 million each). The City of Genoa spends little — only €90,000 a year — and claims an amicable relationship with writers. This looks modest compared to Milan’s €25 million (2009), split between cleaning and anti-graffiti awareness campaigns. A significant sum, ending largely in the coffers of AMSA, the company that manages both cleaning operations and anti-graffiti advertising.

According to the Association of Building Contractors, Italy’s major municipalities spend approximately €25 million a year to clean building facades and restore vandalized public areas.

This is a question of priorities and agenda-setting. Given the results, the €25 million that Italian municipalities spend every year burying the traces of writing seem — at minimum — poorly spent. The City of Milan, with a single stroke, decided to erase all the historic semi-legal Hall of Fame sites that had stood undisturbed for twenty years, generally liked by ordinary people. In one move, it erased an important piece of Italian writing history and caused incalculable historical damage (on this point see also Preserving Decay).

I am not saying graffiti should be preserved: they are ephemeral and meant to disappear. For those who study them, however, the erasure of graffiti is like driving a bulldozer through an archaeological museum: expensive and destructive.

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