When was graffiti art invented and who was its inventor? The answer has come with refreshing candor in the wake of two new books and a major survey exhibition, “Art in the Streets,” in Los Angeles. Graffiti began when humans had walls to write on. And since its modern revival in the 1960s, it’s been re-invented a few more times.
Beginning as an exploit of American urban youth culture, graffiti has become a vaunted global art form, according to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition and two related books, the Art in the Streets catalog and The History of American Graffiti. Unlike most new, short-lived art “styles,” the latest graffiti movement has expanded for forty years.
And no wonder. “Graffiti is the rock and roll of visual art,” says Caleb Neelon, a graffiti insider and co-author of History. The other author, Roger Gastman, says that the art form’s essence is not just any old writing on the wall: “It is illegal art on a wall.”
Many of us remember living in New York City on the cusp of the 1980s when not a single subway car was spared, inside or out. Most of it was dull black or silver insignia, overlaid ad nauseam. Who can deny, however, the splendors of the high-end “wild style” graffiti? Jeffrey Deitch, head of L.A. MOCA, is surely correct when he says, “Wild style graffiti may be the most influential art movement since pop art.”
Wild style is an articulate abstraction, using letters, arrows, curves, and biomorphic shapes (think surrealism), almost like Celtic lace work. In the old Cubist days this violation of normal space was called “shattering the closed form.” Wild style has excelled all others in its brilliant colors and air-brush modeling. Nevertheless, on the way there we can’t forget the organic tendrils of art nouveau or the glossy hot rod and custom car designs of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.
With graffiti, size matters. Chroniclers agree that its main impulse was to do something big that could be noticed. For these entrepreneurs, the idea of a painting in a gallery was unthinking. If “style” is a loathsome term in modern art, style is everything in making a name in graffiti art.
According to the “Art in the Streets” exhibition, which runs through the dog days of August, the modern roots of graffiti are found in Philadelphia and then New York City in the 1960s in a practice called “tagging,” or putting your initials on a wall. In the 1970s, Los Angeles had its own “cholo” graffiti (an angular style used by Latino gangs). That decade saw graffiti blossom in diverse forms in many cities. A turning point was New York City’s anti-graffiti campaign in 1989, but already in the early 1980s, graffiti artists had taken their work into upscale New York City galleries.
L.A. MOCA’s Deitch, who is the first commercial gallerist to head a major U.S. museum, used his Los Angeles gallery to help establish some of the graffiti stars, including the late Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and the currently active Shepard Fairey. Not all of these artists are cut from the same cloth, however, according to the authors of History. For example, Basquiat, Haring, and Fairey did not originated as graffiti artists. They were simply street artists who paralleled the graffiti culture.
Whatever the case, the art movement reached a kind of peroration in Fairey’s “Hope” poster for the 2008 Barrack Obama presidential campaign. The 2010 graffiti documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop” was also nominated for an Academy Award.
Today “illegal” graffiti continues, but it has mostly joined forces with commerce and expanded as a subculture entwined with city skateboarding and hip-hop music. Some of the best-known street artists now take commissions for public murals or show in galleries. Not a few commercial art design firms are now headed by former spray-can bandits.
True to its originating spirit, graffiti still aims to rile the public. When Deitch took over L.A. MOCA in 2010, he commissioned a graffiti mural for the side of one museum building, Geffen Contemporary, only to white-wash it later in the face of downtown neighborhood complaints.
For the “Art in the Streets” exhibition, Deitch brought in veteran NYC “subway” graffiti artist Lee Quinones to put up a new mural on Geffen Contemporary, scene of the exhibition. No doubt what’s inside is the most intriguing, an art form begun by teens in poor urban neighborhoods. Now it’s a celebrity art form, spreading like graffiti around the globe.
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