Revolution in a Can

Graffiti is as American as apple pie, but much easier to export.

BY BLAKE GOPNIK | NOVEMBER 2011

The worst moment in the history of graffiti came during what was also its heyday, in the early 1980s in New York. That was when mainstream culture adopted graffiti as something called "art." A counterculture medium that had, at least for a bare moment, been about communication and empowerment became saddled with the oldest high-culture clichés. Graffiti came to be about "personal style," "aesthetic innovation," and "artistic self-expression"; about looking good and catching the eye; about stylistic influence and the creation of a self-conscious visual tradition. That left it perfectly positioned to be co-opted by consumerist culture. You could say that the grand murals of graffiti art, known to their makers as "pieces" -- short for "masterpieces," another hoary cliché -- were a kind of stand-in for missing advertising billboards, made by artists from neighborhoods that had been left out of Calvin Klein's underwear ad buy. It was only by chance that those murals had no commodity to sell -- until they realized they could sell themselves, as that high-end good called art.

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Then, by way of contrast, think about graffiti as it appears to us around the world today, in places where painting on a wall is about speaking truth to power. The Arab Spring was marked by spray-painted taunts to dictators, and Haiti's chaos led to impassioned scrawls. A crackdown against anti-regime graffiti in the town of Daraa was even the inspiration this year for Syria's tank-defying protest movement. In many of these cases, the artfulness of the graffiti takes a distant second place to what someone is actually trying to say. "Free doom -- Get out Hamad," reads one spray-painted text from Bahrain. During the rebellion in Libya, "Freedom=Aljazeera" written on a wall makes the value of a free press perfectly clear; on another wall, the simple tracing of an AK-47 is enough to invoke an entire ethos of rebellion. In Guatemala City, stenciled portraits of the "disappeared" of Guatemala's long civil war, with the Spanish words for "Where are they?" written below, stand as eloquent witness to one of the country's most crucial concerns. (The portrait style is loosely derived from the British street artist Banksy.)

In all these cases, graffiti is being used as a true means of communication rather than as purely aesthetic exchange. These 21st-century scrawls leapfrog back to a prehistory of graffiti, when wall writing was mostly about voicing forbidden thoughts in public. And they take us back to the first years of graffiti in New York, when some members of the underclass declared their incontrovertible presence by "tagging" every square inch of the city as they transgressed the normal boundaries set by class and race. As German scholar Diedrich Diederichsen has written, "graffiti was a form of cultural and artistic production that was illegible from the dominant cultural perspective." When some of those same taggers realized that they could also make "pieces" that would count as something called "art," they began quickly buying into the values of the mainstream they'd once confronted.

PATRICK BAZ/GETTY IMAGES, SAEED KHAN/GETTY IMAGES, JONATHAN SARUK/GETTY IMAGES
CHRIS HONDROS/GETTY IMAGES, ALLISON SHELLEY/GETTY IMAGES, JOHAN ORDONEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

 

Blake Gopnik writes about art for Newsweek and its website, TheDailyBeast.com.

KURNEWAL

9:45 AM ET

October 12, 2011

Graffiti and political speech

Mr. Gopnik, thinking he is being provocative, is really the ten millionth cafeteria worker slinging the same old hash when he implies that political speech is more important than, or should be the real meaning of, art. Recently in Italy, I was stunned on the train into Florence to see several miles of great graffiti paintings in a row, one triumph after another of color and form. It may be tendentious to call graffiti art, but it is true and it is probably some of the best real art around today, when one looks at the calculated sterility of the art in the galleries and little new museums, all slinging the same old stale post-modernist conceptual hash which is really trash non-art, replacing the art with the idea. Graffiti is proof that art survives even when a hyper-attenuated society turns its back on it. Political speech is fine and necessary, but is no more art than Pericles' speeches were a substitute for the sculptures on the Parthenon.

 

NJ HOME THEATER

12:03 PM ET

October 12, 2011

Art or Trash

When graffiti has a purpose and a message then it is art, but when it's meant to deface property or is a product of an idle hand than it needs to be done away with. One of my hobbies is graphic design, and I can't fault or dismiss graffiti as an actual form of art. The line work and gradients are great and inspiring. I just hate to see it ruined by delinquents.

 

NINA MARTYRIS

2:54 PM ET

October 15, 2011

Berlin Wall

One of the sharpest examples of how graffiti is an expression of a free society is the Berlin Wall, slabs of which are preserved as an exhibit at the Newseum in Washington D.C. While the Western side of the wall is bombed with graffiti, the Eastern side is virgin, grey concrete. There's not so much as a dash of colour or a single scrawl. It's quite chilling to see the contrast presented by the two sides.

 

BNE WATER FOUNDATION

11:03 PM ET

October 24, 2011

Artist 4 Water

I agree with some of what Blake is saying but not everything. He says that this political graffiti, “takes us back to the first years of graffiti in New York, when some members of the underclass declared their incontrovertible presence by “tagging” every square inch of the city as they transgressed the normal boundaries set by class and race.” I’m not sure how much time Blake spends on the streets but it seems that he is unaware that these members of the underclass that he speaks of, are still out there illegally hitting the streets all over the world. Graffiti has sadly been co-opted by consumerist culture but there will always be true street bombers out there risking their freedom to rebel against the system. I happen to be a fan of crudely executed political graffiti but a crispy fill-in, drippy tag or illegal piece also get the “FUCK THE POLICE/SYSTEM” message across just fine. Blake’s closing, “In a strange reversal, the closer graffiti comes to being an empty visual commodity in the West, the better it serves the needs of the rest of the world’s peoples, who eagerly adopt it to speak about their most pressing concerns. It is as though Coca-Cola, as it spread across the globe, turned out to be a great nutritional drink.” does not make much sense. Political graffiti is nothing new and has always existed, it was used extensively during the Indonesian Revolution many years before NY graffiti even existed, and in many other countries throughout history. I agree that traditional, western style graffiti, a phenomenon which has spread across the globe, is not being utilized to it’s fullest potential in the sense of communication, but comparing it to Coca-Cola makes no sense at all. Blake, you make some good points but at the end of the day you are attempting to critique a culture and visual language that you are not fluent in. I do see where you are coming from though and agree, an illegally executed political slogan is 1000 times more authentic than any corporate sponsored “graffiti artist”.

 

YARINSIZ

5:00 AM ET

November 7, 2011

It may be tendentious to call

It may be tendentious to call graffiti art, but it is true and it is probably some of the best real art around today, when one looks at the calculated sterility of the art in the galleries and little seslichat new museums, all slinging the same old stale post-modernist conceptual hash which is really trash non-art, replacing the art with the idea. Graffiti is proof that art survives even when a hyper-attenuated society turns its back on it.