American Graffiti. Margo Thompson
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traditions.’[34] He and RAMMELLZEE most pointedly observed that writing could intervene in the systems of power that language supported. The militaristic cast of RAMMELLZEE’s ‘Ikonoklast Panzerism’, with its reference to German tanks (Panzer) and call to arm letters, suggests that he understood that language is the site for a struggle between oppressive ideologies and resistance to them. Who controls language controls social and political hierarchies, and for RAMMELLZEE and PHASE 2, wild-style lettering promised to entirely reinvent written language. Historian Joe Austin, in his book on the efforts of New York City authorities to eradicate subway writing, observed that by writing on public walls and subway cars, writers claimed public space and thereby gained access to the public sphere, the realm of political discourse from which they were otherwise disenfranchised as working-class, minority youths. For writers, carving out a space of resistance was a positive move that staked their claim on the urban environment, but for other citizens it was a symptom if not the cause of the crime, poverty, and alienation that plagued the city in the 1970s.
RAMMELLZEE worked out his Ikonoklast Panzerist strategies of subversion on canvas and paper, not on trains. Other writers executed whole-car masterpieces that expressed the pressures of urban life. ‘Heroin Kills’ by ZEPHYR and DONDI was an anti-drug message. LEE’s ‘Stop Real Crime’ protested the attention and funds devoted to eradicating subway vandalism that drained resources from campaigns to curb violent crime. QUIK expressed the urgency that fueled writers: ‘The graffiti movement represents the frustration of an inner city population attempting to satisfy the public at large. New York graffiti was revolutionary and rebellious! How easy and socially acceptable it would have been if we thousands of graffiti artists simply stayed at home and painted!’[35] Even as city officials pointed to graffiti as the cause of urban blight, writers offered first-hand reports of life in the urban trenches.
LEE, DONDI, QUIK, and ZEPHYR addressed the typical subway writer with their clear, colourful pieces. As LEE said,
We literally cut into a fixed society, a fixed way of living. People take the train, go to work, go to the movies, go to bed – day in and day out. Then whole-car murals came in front of you, and they’re not normal. They make you start to think, ‘well, who is normal?’ Is it the ones that are painting the trains who are really expressing themselves and able to be free to do something like that in such a molded system?[36]
Writing challenged those who chanced across it to think differently about their lives in the city, to consider the possibility that the subway could be beautiful and colourful, for example, rather than grimy and harsh. Graffiti was a sign of lawlessness to some, of course, but to others it seemed that writers at least were doing something to beautify the city. Writing appealed to the cultural cognoscenti as well as casual viewers because it was an alternative to the corporate commercialism of advertising and the dour restraint of much minimalist and conceptual art of the late 1970s. This audience expected that if writing were translated to canvas, it would likewise express the social consciousness of the underprivileged in an uncalculated and authentic way.
BLADE, Untitled, 1975. Aerosol paint on New York subway car. Destroyed.
LEE, “There was once a time…” (detail), 1980. Aerosol paint on New York subway car. Destroyed.
SEEN, Untitled, 1981. Aerosol paint on New York subway car. Destroyed.
By far the most common writing motif was the tag. It was where a writer started, tattooing train interiors with permanent markers, declaring his presence; as FUTURA 2000 claimed: ‘Graffiti is an inner outcry of the soul telling you, you have to communicate… Tags (initials) on the insides of trains are saying, “Here I am, and look I’m over here,”… It’s an answer back to our overcrowded environment, lacking heat, hot water, and money.’[37] Some writers graduated to the exteriors of cars, where they expanded their tag into a full-fledged masterpiece to fill the panel below the windows (a ‘window-down’ piece), to cover the windows (‘top-to-bottom’), or to extend from one end to the other (a ‘whole car’ piece). PHASE 2 compared tags to signatures: ‘Most people’s signature looks nothing like the way they write other words. So I think one’s identity is expressed through their signature.’[38] Writers chose their tags for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they were appropriated: ZEPHYR tried several names before adopting his from a brand of skateboard, while FUTURA 2000’s came from the name of a typeface.[39] DAZE chose his name ‘because of the forms [of the letters] and, at that time, no one else had a name that sounded like that. No one had a name with a “z” or an “e” in it, because those letters are difficult to come up with a style for’, but he also recalled experimenting with ‘W names’ for a period.[40] DONDI sometimes wrote as ASIA, PRE, and BUS, to try out different letter combinations. NOC 167 wrote under as many as ten tags, according to DAZE, but with a style recognisable to other writers that carried through them all.[41] By contrast, BLADE was proud to have devised a new look for each of his more than five thousand pieces, never repeating himself.[42] It was important to reveal one’s identity even when using several tags, to be credited for ‘getting up’ in quantity, but the best writer’s identity was expressed in his style which might constantly evolve.
When writers became graffiti artists, turning their aerosol cans on canvases, their tags often dominated their compositions. LEE and FAB FIVE FREDDY’s first exhibition in Milan in 1979 consisted entirely of tags on canvas. The name as central to the painting inverted the more usual practice of painters signing their works inconspicuously in a corner or even on the back of the canvas. While the prominence of the tag in these and other examples signaled the 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
Miller, 13.
Miller, 87.
Mizrahi, 10.
Miller, 85.
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Interview with DAZE by David Hirsh for American Graffiti Museum. DAZE clipping file, Museum of the City of New York. Austin, 56.
Austin, 56.
Stewart, 444, 455.
Peter Schjeldahl, “Graffiti Goes Legit – but the ‘Show-off’ Ebullience Remains,”
Cooper and Chalfant, 90–3.