I was having a poke around Google, as you do, perusing the current world’s favourites for the search term "graffiti" and was rather miffed to see that for one, I’m nowhere to be seen, and secondly, and far more importantly, the top listing is still being hogged by GraffitiCreator.net.
Perhaps you’re a fan of the old school, the old old school, lost in an urban ghetto dream of block parties and tagging till there’s nothing left to tag but the back of your hand, but for me graffiti art never deserved closer scrutiny until it entered the fold of the intellectual, the avant-garde, even the futurist to some extent.
The truth is, no matter how much you might have a penchant for toons and typography, it isn’t art as we know it. The graffiti movement, teaming with crews battling to make their mark on the grimey underbelly of social infrastructure. The fact that it’s actually happening, that they’re doing it, that may be classed as art, something of an arts/social phenomenon. Though it must be clear to many that many of the individuals who make up this unmentionable movement, for the main part isn’t an artist. Graffiti is not a cerebral enquiry but an act borne out of pure frustration, a primal need to change one’s local environment, personalise it to reflect an emotional transience. The main source of their collective frustration being the dilution and dissolution of individuality and identity, a proposed conformity that has a precise and definite strangehold on the lives of so many people, young and old, in this world. The disenfranchised, the unheard and unheard of, will most likely never have their say in a public forum, and worst still many wouldn’t know what to say if they could. Anger can be as self-destructive as narcotics, depression, poverty, indifference, to name but a few of the alternatives to dealing with the cage that is our present mutual predicament.
Conformity is a sin, I’ll grant the angry taggers that much, a life isn’t worth living if it simply consists of diktats and perfunctory acts of obedience, passed top down from unseen echelons of power, yet in every act of socially collective rebellion there is always a sense of dutiful obedience to the "cause". Peer pressure and the desire for affirmation from one’s contemporaries, the need to be recognised by someone, anyone, within a selective mindset can result in as much a fascism of the mind, beneath the banner of another name, however intoxicating that banner may appear.
Stylistics are barely worth the effort if the message is one of vacuity, lines and colours do not form a masterpiece, not unless they really mean something, to someone, other than the person who created them. Graffiti, street art, tagging, stencilling, individually or as a crew can only make a lasting impression if the work breaches the traditions of self-aggrandisement, and even that can run thin when time is short and the law are pulling up for an inspection.
I had intended to steer this article towards a comparison between the traditional urban tagger and the newer breed of graffiti/graffiti visionary, and a similar divide between those who craft and those who create art. I’m well known for picking on craftspeople and I know I shouldn’t, it’s not fair to make such a generalisation, it could be due to the arts training I’ve received, the strict and almost compulsive teachings of a reasonably successful conceptual artist who found himself stuck in a teaching job with a grimace of desperation that would ensure that all who met him knew exactly what he thought of them. I spent my late teens and early twenties immersed in a world of conceptualism, in a rarefied atmosphere of intellectual conflict and self-justification, I was taught how the artist no longer existed, anyone and everyone could create, the difference being only those with the discipline of forethought and the appropriately selective emotional detachment could separate the subjectivity of the craft from the objectivity of the artistic simulacrum. The act of creation is dualistically fired by the primitive instincts of the anima, and the objective goals of the intellectual ego.
Positioning oneself in the world of the arts, finding a footing in the culture that abounds, pinpointing the moment of clarity, tempering the juxtaposition of the self with the context of the age and a plethora of cultural phenomenon. leaves little room for the love of elaboration or a demonstrable over indulgence in the whims of cultural taste and fashion. "The New" is an ugly and malformed creature, it has no airs and graces, and cannot exist merely for the sake of its own survival, it must find its context within a long history of semantic debate and perceptual enquiry, it must compete with the "old guard" of notional values be they right or wrong, The future is where hope resides, it is an avenue of possibility, a corridor of unopened doors of unclarified intellectual enquiry and discourse held at arms length by the majority view and their suppressors and delegators of what can only be described as an acceptable truth, or a quantifiable presence.
Listen to my former newness, it is now old and forgotten, dishevelled and discarded like last season’s fashion faux-pas, yet I, as a physical being lay intellectually and emotionally dormant for many years, as many will do throughout their existence. However contentious the statement, the truth is we all reside somewhere far below our true potential, no matter the context, and we always will as long as we tolerate the "drag factor" of the lowest common denominator, culture is sick, it needs reviving, it needs to be taught harsh lessons and teach harsher ones. Symbolically we are at a crux in our civilisation, no partisan movement or theology can solve the quagmire of our own undoing, this is a collective plateau and it requires a collective response. it’s more than merely questioning authority that I propose as a vital component for the healthy evolution of both species and individual, it is the precept of reality itself.
I felt like a relative idiot back in the late eighties, I hadn’t read too many books, I simply liked drawing, I liked art, I didn’t really have a clue why, I didn’t think I would have to explain why, and then I found myself in a small white room filled with smirking old men who had been, seen, and done it all. I showed them my illustrations, a few paintings, some sketchbooks, and they frowned until the creases in their skin turned crimson. I rummaged around to see what else I could offer them, a glimpse into exactly why they should let me on their degree course when the head tutor reached in a pulled out a series of prints I had made the summer before. They were rather abstract, rather pop, rather graffiti in essence.
He asked what they were about, I have never stopped thinking, talking, or explaining since then, if I have the chance to spout I will, as time has passed everything I have ever thought has reached a new level of interconnectivity that firstly cannot be fully explained in words, and secondly forces me to purge and expunge through the medium of the visual arts.
The prints consisted of faces of a friend of mine at the time, Simon, a Californian staying with his nan in Eltham, South London, literally on the run from the law back home, it’s a long story, and you know how much I love long stories, so here goes…
Simon was a middle class lad from a leafier district of San Antonio, or was it Santa Fe, I cannot recall, what is important to note however is that he had fallen in with a bad crowd, his friends were dropping like flies all around him, an overdose here, a stint in "juvie" there, one after another the crew was literally shrinking day by day. He and his closest homies managed to pilfer a few bucks from their parents and decided on an all-night blow out, with fake ID’s in hand they slipped in and out of various local dives, one would pay the entrance, whilst the others would beat the alarm systems with baseball bats. The motley crew, the tatters of a brigade would then quietly proceed through the back corridors towards the bar and eye the heaving throng for dealers.
Simon was heavily into speed at the time, amphetamines, the poor man’s coke, he managed to score a small wrap, but it had been heavily sugared, it was more Pro-Plus than anything, and before long, he and his buddies had a collectively searing migraine coming on. Then an old waster stepped out of the darkest corner of the urinals and offered Simon’s best friend some PCP (Angel Dust). Simon warned him off but there was no stopping him, he was gagging for a fix of something, anything, and as he said at the time, but not in so many words "variety is the spice of life". A few more of the unholy teamsters slipped in on the grapevine, having tweaked that drugs were in the offing, and between them they finished the bag, like pigs at a trough, in mere minutes. Simon went back to the bar, he looked to young to serve, he sat down and nursed the empties of other revellers, and proceeded to grind his teeth for an hour.
A fight ensued, a creature with wild hair and crazy eyes was punching and kicking his way through a group of gangly looking goths, slam-dancing everyone and everything in sight, when he raised a chair in the air and threw it at the crowd the bouncers threw him out, his last words before hitting the exit head first were "Hey Simon, we’re leaving".
Simon stole a few half empty beers and a soft pack of Marlboro and sneaked them under his flak jacket as he sauntered after his mate, at a safe distance and a respectable rate, so as not to be noticed by the red faced security who were still busy cursing his friend. They had no money left, they had no ride, the crew had disbanded yet again, and so they walked, His friend performed impossible feats of strength on the way home, lifting cars and punching chunks from wood and brick. Unfortunately he’d also managed to smash a few knuckles ,the pulverised bone made Simon retch, but he kept it together. He knew he had to get the guy to E.R, he saw a late night cafe and placed him at the back with someone else’s cold coffee and told him to wait. The staff shrugged when he asked for a phone, he remembered seeing a call box near an empty taxi rank a few blocks back, he jogged there and called the operator, who passed him on to the local hospital, who must’ve informed the police.
When Simon finally returned to the greasy spoon there were blue and red lights flashing everywhere, he saw a pair of paramedics and a police officer fighting wth his friend, desperately trying to strap him down to the stretcher, his hands were bloodier, in fact it looked as if he had some fingers missing. The police were asking if anyone knew the madman, now screaming in the back of the ambulance, Simon was about to speak up when his friend, in an unexpected moment of lucidity frowned and shook his head and he mouthed the words "No Simon, they know about the drugs". Simon nodded and slipped back into the cafe, he sat at the table where he’d left his friend, a paramedic ran in, Simon looked at the table’s bloody surface, having first assumed it was smothered in ketchup stains he could see three fingers. He recognised the ring on the middle one, they were his friends fingers.
He never saw his friend again, a month or so later he received a letter, it stated that his friend had hung himself after being gang-raped, some of those who’d attacked him were guards, the police had started questioning the crew. They were focusing purely on a suspected PCP drug dealing ring, everyone had been implicated, the dealer said they were all his friends, no money had been exchanged. Simon’s mother panicked and sent him to Britain, he was shell-shocked, his dear old grandmother was oblivious to his past, and was rather pleased he’d managed to find a friend over here. We spent some years clubbing at the local punk and Goth hangouts in S.E. London at the time, as well as a few very late night Irish pubs who had a penchant for lock-ins when it took their fancy. Slowly I learned about his life, I wanted to commemorate his existence, his trial of life, and did so in the only way I knew how. Through artistic means. His life seemed like a prison for one so young. We experimented with a photocopier, his face and hands squashed against the glass, I mixed it with a series of screen-printed abstracts, the final results got me a place on my arts degree course a year later.
Simon had changed by then, he wore a suit, he worked as a trainee estate agent, he was going back to the states now he had turned 18, he said the trail on him had turned cold, he had finally learned to conform. I missed him but it was for the best. As I sat twelve months later in a studio at Brighton University (it was a polytechnic then), I recounted the tale, I justified my work, I was accepted into the fold. I had too conformed, I was an art student, an artist, art would make a decent human being out of me, it would channel my anger, it would change my perception, and in turn hopefully those around me. As time moved on I lost the passion, the vitality, the sheer insolence and arrogance needed to constantly fight my corner, to justify my life, my work, my art. I let the system beat me, I did what I was told, I designed graphics and websites for people I had no time for, dentists, bankers, retailers, franchise opportunities, I hated them and myself.
It was a long time before I found myself again, a few deep depressions and a couple of suicide attempts taught me that this was all there was, I either make the stand now or give up. Do what you want to do, what you need to do, if you are not the first then make it your own, life is in all its manifest spheres of influence and action, a forum of relative conformity. We are connected, we are as one, but we are not same, be thankful for your individuality and thrust it into the mists of what will come. Don’t tag, don’t tag along, challenge yourself and soon you’ll lbe doing the same for others. We are not here to be popular, we shouldn’t live for approval, we each have a destiny manifest, find it, nail it, and do it soon.
