American Graffiti. Margo Thompson
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passages, and narrative elements. In the centre, ‘Style War’ was written in two distinct styles. ‘Style’ was composed of wild-style letters that waved and danced, elaborated with arrows directing energy and the viewer’s attention outwards. ‘War’ was in italicised block capitals. The letters were rendered primarily in black, white, and grey – some orange in ‘War’ tied it to the flames painted around it – and decorated with starbursts and dots of various sizes which added excitement to the restrained palette. These were known to writers as ‘pop and sizzle’, and were one of NOC’s trademarks that he had adapted from the comic book artist Jack Kirby.[72] Above the title was an abstract arrangement of white, blue, pink, and orange shapes, with dripping paint rendered in black. (Dripping paint was a sign of amateurism or lack of control of one’s medium and writers made every effort to eliminate it. Still, masters like NOC drew drips with paint in a self-reflexive gesture, much like Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein did with his comic book-style expressionist brushstrokes.) One side of the conflict was depicted to the left. A subway train shot out of the space from left to right, while a set of tracks with the perilous third rail came in parallel to the train at the top, from right to left. The space NOC articulated here was complex with two vanishing points far above and below the train. A guard tower anchored both spatial schemes while it existed in its own perspectival space to the left, where a horizon line was visible low on the end of the train car. ‘NOC 167’ against the train and ‘The Death Squad’ (the name of his crew) against the tower were situated in their own plane and made the symbolism of the scenario clear. On the right end of the car, two cartoon figures confronted each other: the one in a top hat seems to be shooting flames at the other one, a variation on the robot-assassin Necron99 from Ralph Bakshi’s animated film Wizards, who stood with one hand in a palm-up gesture.[73]
NOC’s subject was the dramatic life of the graffiti writer, who competes for dominance on a subway line and eludes the Metropolitan Transit officers who would persecute him for vandalism, and it was an exceptional treatment. The theme was rarely taken up on the subway cars themselves, where the risk involved in ‘bombing’ a train with a tag of any great ambition was implicit and familiar to the other writers who were the primary intended audience. When writers like NOC 167, DAZE, LADY PINK, and LEE worked on canvas for an audience of gallery-goers who might ride the subways infrequently if at all, they began to make their former lives as subway taggers their subject. This was in part to educate their new public, and to express their sense of themselves as authentically grounded in subway writing. This iconographical shift in the artwork, from tag to pictorial narrative, established a critical distinction between graffiti on the subway and graffiti in galleries. As graffiti artists, the writers adopted a self-reflexive point of view and consciously addressed an audience outside their peer group.
QUIK and SEEN
Some writers turned their hands to canvas and found their careers gained more traction in Europe than in the United States. This was true for BLADE, and also for QUIK and SEEN. QUIK was an extraordinarily prolific writer who began tagging trains as a young teenager in 1972. A few years later, he saw canvases by the Nation of Graffiti Artists – an organisation that splintered from United Graffiti Artists in 1974–near his high school, and he made his first graffiti painting on canvas soon afterwards. He felt that writing was an outlet for artistically-inclined African Americans who otherwise had few opportunities to express themselves: ‘Our society did not encourage us to be creative. We were social misfits. Thus this sector of the population decided to create its own art world and guidelines toward creativity: not necessarily in galleries, universities, cafes and shops, but on the hard steel flesh of the New York subway’.[74] His tags sometimes had a political edge: after a subway fare increase, he turned the Q into a face that grew fangs, calling the MTA blood-suckers. He was less interested than other writers in pleasing his audience, whether it was fellow writers or the public at large: ‘My style was aesthetically displeasing; people felt uneasy with it. My letters don’t look like letters, they look like monsters or eggs with holes’.[75] QUIK’s paintings from the 1980s, and those he paints today, also challenged the viewer. The taunting face of his tags was on canvas transformed into a full-length figure of a crucified black man, symbolising the tragedy of racism in the United States.
NOC 167, Gold Chain, 1981. Aerosol paint on canvas, 106 × 120 cm. Galerie Yaki Kornblit, Amsterdam.
LEE, Stop the Bomb, 1979. Aerosol paint on New York subway car. Destroyed.
SEEN, of the United Artists crew, was famous amongst his peers for his masterful renditions of mass-media cartoon characters like Fred Flintstone and the Smurfs. In the 1980 whole-car piece ‘Hand of Doom,’ a masked, muscular executioner holding a double-headed axe loomed ominously at the left of the green, lower-case lettering. A hand grasping a bloody blade emerged from the centre of the phrase. SEEN also mastered wild-style writing, as seen in a top-to-bottom whole car that he executed with MITCH in 1980. Both the colours and the composition were complex. Yellow blended smoothly into pink, which faded into blue, and the transition was uniform across letters that intertwined so ornately as to be illegible to non-writers. It looked at first as though SEEN had been lucky enough to find a clean subway car for his brilliant, busy design, because it was set against an almost uniform metallic grey background. But the windows were silvery too and the grey field had cracks running through it: SEEN and MITCH painted the entire car as a crumbling stone wall with their pieces bursting through triumphantly.
SEEN’s paintings often incorporated his tag, or the tags of others in his crew such as P-JAY or his brother MAD. He produced his first canvas in 1979, and in 1981 or 1982 he says Henry Chalfant encouraged him to go to Europe to continue working on canvas.[76] There he found a receptive audience, as did QUIK; their careers outside the United States will be discussed in Chapter Four.
DONDI, FUTURA 2000, ZEPHYR, and LEE
Four writers began to establish themselves as graffiti artists while still active in the train yards by painting whole-car masterpieces that appealed to a public beyond their writing peers or decisively transcended the inherent design limitations of the tag. DONDI, FUTURA 2000, ZEPHYR, and LEE crossed paths at the graffiti collectives Soul Artists and Graffiti 1980, and in the production of a film about graffiti, Wild Style, directed by filmmaker and rap aficionado Charlie Ahearn. FUTURA 2000, who like DONDI was regarded as a master writer, helped to organise writers for commercial commissions, through Soul Artists, and working on canvas, in the Graffiti 1980 studio that will be discussed later in this chapter. ZEPHYR was active in Soul Artists and was the instigator for Graffiti 1980, and with DONDI took Ahearn to paint a train as part of his pre-production research for Wild Style. While DONDI, FUTURA, and ZEPHYR made the connections in 1980 that would eventually take graffiti into commercial galleries, LEE had already shown his paintings in Europe in 1979, with FAB FIVE FREDDY. His murals on handball courts in Lower Manhattan led an Italian art collector to contact him with the offer of an exhibition at a gallery in Rome. He and FREDDY would both appear in Wild Style and also in another film about art on the margins of the Manhattan market, New York Beat (released in 2000 as Downtown 81), starring Jean-Michel Basquiat.
DONDI
DONDI, a Brooklyn-based writer, began tagging trains in 1974. He formed a working relationship with DURO soon after he began writing, and later was influenced by SLAVE from the Fabulous Five and NOC 167.[77] His crew, the Crazy Inside Artists (CIA) rivaled the Fabulous Five’s dominance on the IRT lines 2 and 5 by the end of the decade.[78] Other writers looked up to him for his graphic fluency that he refined by making up new tags, new arrangements of letters.[79] DOZE described DONDI’s mastery: ‘His style was very logical and smart. He taught me how the letter flows and how it should go in certain directions, that the arrows should
Villorente and James, 69.
Villorente and James, 69.
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen,
Hoekstra, 266.
Witten and White, 11, 18–19.
Stewart, 408; Witten and White, 18–19.
Guy Trebay, “Getting Up: Dondi and the Late, Great Art of Graffiti,”