Ask a serious graffiti artist why he/she started writing, pasting, stenciling or stickering, and you’re likely to hear about the sheer daredevil thrill of painting on a mammoth scale in a hard-to-reach, highly visible spot while trying to evade the police, or about the simple but significant fact that, for the beginning urban artist, buildings, billboards and train cars are a cheap canvas for their budding creative efforts. But just as often you will hear that graffiti is a way to beautify common and often ignored urban space. Far from an act of vandalism or “ quality-of-life crime” that politicians like Rudolph Giuliani use to score points, much graffiti writing is motivated by a desire to improve the visual quality of life – to make an already ugly and depersonalized urban landscape more vibrant and human.
When graffiti started to blow up in the early ’70s in cities like Philly and New York, much of it was in reaction to the ubiquity of corporate advertising. People saw brand names and slogans in 10-foot-high letters all over their cities, coating everything from billboards to buses to buildings. And although part of the motivation to write graffiti was the selfish desire to see one’s own name writ large, there was a dedicated core of writers motivated by resistance to corporate encroachment into everyday life. Writing graffiti was a way of pushing back and seizing some control over the urban landscape.
Over the years, graffiti’s growing sophistication has moved it into the mainstream, even into museums and, god-forbid, advertising. But graffiti’s critical edge and growing visual sophistication is evident in the work of artists like Banksy and others in groups like Visual Resistance, the Graffiti Research Lab, and the Wooster Collective. Three recent projects build on the anti-corporate strategies of graffiti art, specifically in response to the spread of LED advertising screens and projection technology:
- The Anti-Advertising Agency’s Light Criticism, a collaborative project. (Here are photos, via Flickr.)
- Jason Eppink’s The Pixelator
- Graffiti Research Lab has been documenting all manner of new high tech graffiti tools such as this hand-held L.A.S.E.R. Tag.
These are good examples of how, as graffiti becomes more mainstream and conceptual, its content has caught up with the subversive, political nature inherent in its form, taking on new opportunities to reclaim public space for non-commercial expression and even critique. Read hip-hop scholar Jeff Chang’s eloquent review of three books on graffiti.