The Lit of Graffiti

Art works by Barry McGee, Stephen Powers (ESPO), Todd James; documentary photography by Cheryl Dunn, Street Market (Little More)
No text, just dirty-cool images juxtaposing graff and post-graff art with found materials from the urban envornment, especially signage and public notices etc. To me, the design style implied is important and excellent and real. A million cool ideas, and a million cool encounters: gives you a sense of tradition and innovation in continuity. I don't quite know how to describe the coherence of the imagery: for one thing, the photography itself coheres stylistically with the material depicted. Anyway, compare this book to "New American Street Art": it's a thousand times better and more interesting, and a thousand times more imaginative and authentic.

Joe Austin, Taking the Train: How Graffiti Became an Urban Crisis in New York City (Columbia University Press)
Austin's writing is kind of labored, and the book is awfully repetitive. And it depends to a stupefying degree on the coverage of graff in the New York Times, circa 1970-1990. Dude, at least go get the Daily News, which would show some response aimed at a different demographic. Nevertheless, the book is invaluable. The history of NYC writing itself is wide-ranging and excellent, and involves talking with many of the major figures. The strongest writing comes in discussions of the aesthetics of the form. And the discussion of the way graffiti was understood and treated by the authorities, who tried to frame the whole discussion in certain terms favorable to themselves, is extremely revealing. Even the Times material helps; for one thing you will never again believe that the Times is an independent voice, as again and again they slavishly accept the mayor's line of the moment, more or less printing as news the press releases. Insofar as there is a full-fledged history of the form, this is it.

Susan A. Phillips, Wallbangin': Graffiti and Gangs in LA (University of Chicago, 1990)
Sometimes you just have to hate anthropologists, as well as anyone who tries to approach human beings under the auspices of a social science. This book has much methodological aheming, gratuitous references, etc. (Can I tell you something, social scientists? Putting someon'es name in brackets after every sentence is committing the fallacy of appeal to authority in every sentence. It's slavish.) Not only that, but it is the work of a painfully, painfully earnest graduate student. It's a very bad sign when someone actually writes in their own book, "I am not in the business of capitalizing on other people's pain." OK, OK: but underneath the utter pc, underneath the anthro, there is a great deal of good information here, particularly about LA's chicano gangs, and the kind of cultural and linguistic decoding that we white folks might need in a case like this. The basic concern is "gang" as opposed to "hip hop" graffiti: language rather than art. Phillips goes at a real immersion across cultural boundaries, and comes out wiser, though not necessarily more fun.

Andrew "Zephyr" Witten and Michael White, Dondi White: Style Master General (HarperCollins, 2001)
One signal of the maturity of the form is surely the full-scale art book devoted to a single artist (Futura is another). This is really a loving tribute to Dondi, who died of AIDS in '98, but it also makes a completely convinving case for his centrality to the graffiti tradition, and to the overall development of late twentieth-century art. Dondi was a master of the train, and also one of the first graf artists to mutate into a gallery star. And surprisingly, the stand-alone canvases are perhaps the strongest stuff in this book: displaying a brilliant visual flair that always makes use of his roots, while also developing along lines of real conceptual and visual originatlity and intelligence.

William Upski Wimsatt, Bomb the Suburbs (Subway and Elevated/Soft Skull, 1994)
This book is a classic, the manifesto of wiggerism and urbanism, with a great inside treatment of graffiti as well. Originally self-published in 1994, it took off, and now is distributed by mid-size publisher Soft Skull in a new edition. The verb "bomb" in the title imperative is obviously ambiguous as between blowing shit up and painting shit over, and basically Wimsatt means both. The writing is incredibly urgent and pointed and fiercely articulate and funny. In this it stands with the very best statements of anarchist art and politics of the last few decades (TAZ by Hakim Bey springs to mind). The treatment of race in relation to art and culture is particularly well-thought-out and important, as well as beautifully formulated.

Text by Norman Mailer, photos by Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar, The Faith of Graffiti (Praeger, 1974)
Mailer is certainly the most eminent literary dude ever to set pen to paper in defense of graffiti, and it is also to his credit that he did it so remarkably early. His essay is rollicking, loose, and pointed: funny in its seriousness (massive literary, art-historical, and philosophical references) and also in its jokes: it seems to have been written very fast but also with a great deal of consideration. The photos are indispensible as documentation of early NYC graffiti, emphasizing the filthy, scumbled-up origins, the source of recent neo-classicism.

Bob Edelson, New American Street Art: Beyond Graffiti (Soho, 1998)
"Beyond graffiti" more or less means work in which the pictorial elements (as opposed to the tag) are dominant. I guess we could think of these as illegal murals (or for the most part illegal). The photos are well made, and a lot of the work is excellent or surprising. But this *is* merely a portfolio of photos, and I don't understand why there's no context for the images at all. Edelson says that the works aren't credited because he doesn't know who made them. OK. But on the other hand even I can see that many of them are signed. They should be attributed where possible. Though Edelson in his tiny intro makes much of the urban context of these works, they are not even located by city, much less by street etc. I don't understand this set of decisions, nor the decision not to write a more elaborate introduction describing real principles of selection or assessing the state or the purposes of street art in the nineties.

Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff, Subway Art, (Thames and Hudson, 1987)
Chalfant and Prigoff achieved extremely important documentation of graffiti in the 80s, with both books and videos (see also the classic Subway Art, from 1984). This book, which focuses largely on NYC and Philly (but also hits other sites, esp. UK) (NYC and Philly are in a competition to be assigned the origin of hip hop graf), has especially great quotes from important early writers. 3D of Bristol, UK: "You live in a city in which you don't really get any say at all. You could and join some kind of committee and try to get things passed, which might take years and it's all watered down. To actually go out and paint the streets to me is still something uncontrollable." Images are very strong, and though graf has improved technically (see Broken Windows), most of the basic styles and ideas were in place by the mid-eighties. Plus you get to see guys wearing Kangols and Adidas jogging suits or tennis shorts plying the urban landscape. Oddly, Henry Chalfant shares a name with one of my favorite painters of all time, the monstrously undervalued J.D. Chalfant, who was part of the Philly trompe l'oeil school at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century. These folks often incorporated graffiiti into their still lives.

Liz Farrelly, et al., Scrawl Too: More Dirt (Booth-Clibborn, 2001)
The introduction, small and superficial though it is, is all about daring illegality. But the book merely uses graffiti as a design trope, a contextless stylistic choice, a mere form that can help make you and your product hip. There are some striking images, but for each of those there are ten that are empty and boring. Supposedly a celebration of amazing vibrant styles, this volume is really a kind of epitaph.

Stephen Powers, The Art of Getting Over: Graffiti at the Millennium (St Martin's 1999)
This is an admirable shot at a comprehensive treatment of the subject, with history, politics, interviews with great writers. The images are varied and excellent: from perfect murals to sloppy tags and black books, historical to recent. The writer takes up a participant standpoint, kind of signaled by the insistent slang and rollicking style, as well as the author's-name-as-tag on the cover. New York-oriented. Will be on the syllabus for my graffiti course at MICA in the Spring.

James Murray and Karla Murphy, Broken Windows: Graffiti NYC (Gingko Press, 2002)
Truly astounding images of contemporary graffiti, mixed around quotations from writers. Probably this is the best source book for the latter material. It definitely gives you the vibe, and the articulation of everything from an ethics to an aesthetics of graffiti is rich and powerful. Print almost too small to read without a magnifying glass: but then, I am 45 years old. As rich an elaborate a set of images as any book can boast. This is the book I use when I'm trying to convince somebody, if you get me. No one can look at this and say these people can't paint or are mere vandals or whatever.

Paul 107, All City: The Book About Taking Space (ECW, 2003)
This comes from Canada, and is a straight-up how-to: how to tag, how to make equipment, how to run from the police, how to negotiate with them if caught etc. It's an Anarchist Cookbook for artcrimes. Careless, but fun, and I'm sure useful if you really are fifteen and trying to develop your wild style all alone in Iowa or Saskatoon. Some interesting art, though you would buy something else (in a larger format, for one thing) for pictures. Also good interviews.

Tristan Manco, Stencil Graffiti (Thames and Hudson, 2002)
The stencil stuff is astounding, and astoundingly varied, and astoundingly ubiquitous: this nifty book takes you on a quick and visually and conceptually rich tour of the world. The style is very much not that of the hip hop-type writers depicted in other books: many more trained artists and people who exhibit are on display. But there's no doubt about the subversive tendency, or the effectiveness of the stencil for disseminating imagery (consider Shepherd Fairy's "Andre the Giant Has a Posse.") Again, a book I will teach.

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