By Willy F.

How could this dirty wall, sullied with pen markings, be a valuable piece of art and a link to one of the most original art movements of the 20th century? This dingy wall, which was "tagged" (written on) by a teenage boy named Demetrius, is a symbol of, and a precursor to, the graffiti art explosion of the 1970s and 1980s. Since the time when people first shaped tools with which to draw and were able to mix berries and earth and water to make color paints, they have fulfilled the urge to write on walls. It is a seemingly inexplicable phenomenon. Cave paintings, most frequently depicting hunting scenes, have been dated back 35,000 years . In the Middle Ages, crusaders chiseled their symbol into stone walls. In the late 19th century, when archaeologists uncovered the temple of Dendur, which now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they scratched and chiseled their names onto the templeâs inner walls. Why? Why do people feel the urge to put their names on walls? First of all, there seems to be an instinctual territorial drive behind writing on walls. Your tag means that you were there, that place is your "turf." It also seems that there is a considerable amount of egotism involved öyour name is up on the wall, and people will see it. You will transcend generations. There is also a more erudite explanation, which is recording events and names for posterity.

Lee Quino–es, a distinguished and prolific writer (graffiti artist) said,

Modern graffiti writing evolved from "tagging" to "getting up," (tagging on a train) to a stylistic war of colors and forms in which writers would experiment with different colors and different types of lettering in order to best each other. But why did the seemingly isolated tagging of Taki183 in 1971 all over the city evolve into this phenomenal new art form that grabbed hold of New York City, overwhelming the subways and setting trends in the art world? This new wave of graffiti art emerged from the urban decay of New York City, the racism, segregation and ghettoization inherent in the building of housing projects in certain neighborhoods, the shortage of employment for inner city blacks, the "burning" of the South Bronx and the lack of city services during the urban crisis of the 1960s and the 1970s. While the Bronx was burning, this blazing new art form grew out of the ghetto, providing a release for the frustrations of the urban poor and attracting considerable media attention. It also attracted harsh critics, such as Mayors Lindsay, Koch, and Giuliani along with a chorus from the cityâs elites. Graffiti was denounced as artistically bankrupt and mere vandalism. Craig Castleman said:

After some years of abundant writing, graffiti did become accepted by some as a facet of New York culture and was later adopted by mainstream popular culture. This adoption and appropriation of graffiti made a ghetto art form less menacing. If stylish Soho galleries carried works of graffiti, and well-known writers designed store facades, how threatening could these ghetto graffiti writers be? In short: graffiti burgeoned out of the anger and frustration of the ghetto and emerged as a new art form in the face of the hostility of inner-city life in the burning South Bronx, defiantly making its mark on popular culture. In turn, first high and then popular culture adopted it, thus softening graffitiâs intrinsic threat and removing the origins of its power. The rise and fall of graffiti, through styles that change with the mercurial circumstances of New York City, show how the working class, by creating its own escape from the horrors of daily life, responds to being oppressed and suppressed.

Graffiti, derived from the Italian word graffito, meaning a scratch, is defined as words, letters, or symbols written or scratched on to a wall or a surface. In its most famous and recent incarnation, graffiti as we know it started in Philadelphia with two writers who called themselves CORNBREAD and COOL EARL. In the late-1960s, these two writers were bombing (writing their names prolifically) all over Philadelphia, in subway cars, above ground, and anywhere where their names could be seen. Soon after, in New York, around 1970, Taki183 started appearing all over the place. He was a 17-year-old kid whose name was Demetrius, and who lived on 183rd Street in Washington Heights. He was a messenger so in his travels across the five boroughs, he wrote his tag in the subways and on streets, on walls and on public monuments. He was not the first to "tag up" in New York. There were other early writers, such as Julio204, Barbara62, Eva62, Frank207 and Chew127.

Because of a unique combination of economic and social conditions that existed in 1960s and 70s New York, what could have been a few rare isolated occurrences of vandalism turned into a cultural art movement. These circumstances helped to create the modern ghettos of Harlem and the South Bronx, out of which modern graffiti exploded, and from which graffiti drew its power and sense of threat. Starting in the 1950s, there were government plans that helped to form ghettos. The Highway Act of 1956, set a 13-year plan for a 41,000-mile interstate highway system for 13 billion dollars. It dictated that miles upon miles of highway would be laid across the country, and through New York, dividing poor communities and providing for the flight of the white urban middle class to the suburbs. The Bronx was divided by three separate highways, which essentially roped off a neighborhood, destroying the communityâs fabric and much of its housing. The highway highlighted in all black, to the right, is the Cross-Bronx Expressway, officially known as Interstate-95; it was the first highway that was laid down across the Bronx. This new highway separated the southern area of the Bronx from the rest of the Bronx, thus grouping together Mott Haven, Melrose and Fordham Road to create what is now known as the South Bronx. Robert A. Caro, the biographer of Robert Moses, who presided over the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway, said,

This description of one mile alongside the Cross-Bronx Expressway shows how the building of this first highway began to turn the newly formed South Bronx into a ghetto.

The next two highways to be built were the Bruckner Expressway (I-278), to the east, and the Major Deegan Expressway (I-87), to the west; these two highways finished the cordoning off of the South Bronx neighborhood. This physical isolation marked the completion of the first step in turning the South Bronx into a ghetto. The next step in the decline of the South Bronx was a marked decrease in the number of jobs. As of 1969, the workforce in New York City was at a strength of 3.8 million, roughly the same as it had been in the 1950s. However, it subsequently went into a severe 8-year decline which, in 1977, left the workforce at a depleted 3.2 million. These startling numbers reflect the employment crisis that resulted from de-industrialization. During the late 1960s, the plethora of factories and warehouses that had been the material base for the economy and industry of New York City started to leave the city, pursuing cheaper land in the suburbs or cheaper labor in the South and abroad. Industry was shifting from manual labor and production, which were moving out to New Jersey, to the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE industries), which were moving into office buildings. This change strongly benefited landlords. There was roughly a 1000 percent difference between the rent that landlords received for factory and warehouse space and the rent received for class A office space. So, during the early 1970s, there was a boom in the construction of office buildings. And, like the real estate boom and bust in Harlem in the 1920s, because of overproduction, there was a bust in office building real estate. In 1977, when unemployment peaked, jobs for middle and upper-middle class Manhattan residents were still available. It was the working class man who suffered because the overwhelming majority of blue-collar jobs left New York with the factories. The South Bronx in particular was left with masses of jobless blue-collar residents. The consequences of this were horrible, because the financial situation of the city was so bad, that the jobless would remain unemployed, shoving the neighborhood further into poverty. As William Julius Wilson, a professor of Social Policy at Harvard University wrote:

These jobless people had nothing to do: they were unemployed and highways essentially shut in their neighborhood from all sides. Wilson also wrote that high unemployment rates, such as the ones in the South Bronx in the 1970s,

Graffiti, and all of hip-hop culture, was an attempt by the youth of the ghetto to be heard, because the voice of the ghetto was being shut out and suppressed; these new art forms became a voice for the ghetto. Shy 147, a writer from the early 1980s, said,

When the New York Times ran an article about Taki183 in 1971, he became the first graffiti celebrity. Other people realized that they too could be seen and attain fame if they wrote their names on walls, and that is why in the early stages of graffiti, there was a profusion of tags. Craig Castleman noted,

It was at this point that what came to be known as "style " became important. Writers now didnât just achieve fame, respect and renown on account of how prolific they were. It was now that artistic merit and value became important in the graffiti world. At this point around 1973, it was the frequency of getting up and the uniqueness and originality of your style that decided whether you, a young writer, could be the king of a subway line. A bounty of new styles was emerging. Each aspiring king, writer and toy (a beginner) was developing his or her own style. For example, SUPERKOOL223, a writer from the South Bronx ghetto, created the first piece (masterpiece) by replacing the thin caps on spray-can paint with the fat caps from household aerosol products. This same writer soon created a piece stretching from the top of a train car to the bottom. Shortly after these new size styles were implemented, new styles of writing emerged. TOPCAT126, a writer from Philadelphia, came out with something he called Broadway style, which consisted of large block letters. These large block letters are similar to the 3-dimensional look that Pistol I created. Another style pioneer was Phase II, who introduced the bubble letter as a viable graffiti style. Each writer tried to develop his or her own unique style. Some writers could not, however, so they would bite (steal) from other writers. These new forms of graffiti became more and more complex, culminating in a new style of graffiti, wildstyle. Wildstyle was a frenetic form of writing in which letters were interlocked with arrows coming out of them. One of the ideas behind wildstyle was that it was only legible to other writers, and thus cemented the unity of the members of the graffiti subculture. At this point, in the mid-1970s, graffiti had gone through one or two incarnations, (because graffiti was a youth movement, writers would stop writing and new ones would emerge) and style was reaching its peak. It was now time for a new generation of writers to take over and take advantage of the stylistic innovations of their predecessors. During this period, while New York City was struggling through near bankruptcy and financial crisis, while the South Bronx was burning, and while the city was severely underfunded, graffiti-removal and graffiti-prevention were at all time lows. Thus the urban crisis of the 1970s not only produced the conditions that inspired graffiti writers, but also removed the cityâs capacity to prevent graffiti. Writers like Lee, Slug, Mono, Doc, and Slave, who made up the Fabulous Five writing crew painted beautiful whole cars, and even managed to paint an entire 10-car train for Christmas.

Writers began emerging all over the city, and they had more support than ever. Writing groups such as the Ex-Vandals (1970-72) were emerging to support each other. They numbered seventy and traveled in a pack so as not to be harmed by violent gangs that were forming in Brooklyn and the South Bronx. Secondly came more structured organizations with financial motives. In 1972, Hugo Martinez founded the United Graffiti Artists, an organization in its origins, dedicated to helping young Puerto Rican writers, but whose membership was exclusive to kings. In early 1973, the Twyla Tharp dance company commissioned UGA to design and paint the backdrop for a dance set. The writers received $600 dollars for doing their art, and thus made their first legitimate money from graffiti. Another business venture of UGA was choosing the works of select writers and displaying their work, for sale, in the Razor Gallery. In 1974, Jack Pelsinger, who had been interested in UGA, founded his own organization, Nation of Graffiti Artists. Pelsingerâs philosophy ran somewhat counter to that of Hugo Martinez. Pelsinger believed in having a larger base for his group, and therefore was not as exclusive in accepting members. He said his organization "would not take kids out of their communities and into SoHo but would go to a community and grow with it and participate in its life." Members of NOGA painted canvases and sold them for as much as $300 each. These two organizations helped to solidify graffiti as a commercial enterprise; some of the public started to accept graffiti as art and not vandalism. However, the mainstreaming of graffiti would have to wait. Despite the public relations progress which UGA and NOGA afforded graffiti, there was a media blackout from 1975-1980 about graffiti. Craig Castleman said, "After 1975 there was little press coverage of graffiti, a reflection of the city governmentâs reluctance to publicize the cityâs continuing failure to control the graffiti phenomenon." The city was struggling with its budget and could not sustain graffiti clean up programs. Writers were bombing on all the subway lines, and the MTA was already shoveling in money that the city didnât have to clean up and prevent graffiti. So, when in 1980 there was a "style revival," and the media and mainstream popular culture once again turned their attention to graffiti, it came as no surprise to artists who were waiting to be recognized. Artists such as SEEN and DONDI started experimenting with new styles; they would battle each other to be king and thus spurred a whole new outpouring of style. However, this style revival would not last long. In September of 1981 Mayor Koch announced a $1.5 million plan to end graffiti. He later appended the plan to include a $22.4 million increase in the MTAâs budget. Many writers started to explore different options with their work. In 1979 Lee and Fred of the Fabulous Five had an art show in Rome. That same year Lee and three other writers received $1,500 to paint the inside of a chic Greenwich Village clothing store. It was also at this time in the early 1980s that a young white middle class suburban Keith Haring began to gain renown. He started in the subways, like many other writers. He wrote in white chalk on black panels. Haring remembers one time when he was arrested, "There, all the cops are wondering what this nerdy white boy could possibly have done. So the cop who arrested me says, ÎI caught him drawing in the subway on those black panels.â The cop at the desk says, ÎSo youâre the guy who does those drawingsöhey, Joe, hey Mike· this is the kid who does the subway drawings!â So cops are coming out and they want to meet me. They take off my handcuffs so they can shake my hand, Îcause, see itâs almost a year that Iâve done the subway drawings and Iâm a celebrity." This white graffiti artist received special treatment from the police officers. Perhaps it is because he was only writing on the black sideboards and not on the actual subway cars, perhaps not. It was at this point in the early 1980s that graffiti became adopted by mainstream popular culture. When asked what type of person writes graffiti, Officer Conrad Lesnewski said, "Some of the kids apprehendedötheir fathers were professors at Columbia, NYU, some were CPAs, some were doctors, architects. They live in a thousand-dollar house, apartments, some are living in a $1.98-a-month ghetto. Thereâs no generalizations." Graffiti was becoming popular in all types of social circles. Jean- Michel Basquiat, a Haitian artist who incorporated graffiti style into his traditional works, was in a period of success. Keith Haringâs "Pop Shop," a store, in which he sold clothing with his designs on them, was making money. Fab Five Fred explained that "Keith got into this whole graffiti thing, but he wasnât really that much a part of it. See, it was the media that placed the label "Graffiti Artist" on Keith and on Jean-Michel. But it wasnât really so. They didnât make any incredible contribution to the genre." The established art world, however, was embracing this ghetto art movement, and because at the same time graffiti was becoming less common on the subways, it seemed that graffiti no longer held its sharp edge. If it was displayed in prominent SoHo galleries, and if there were graffiti art shows in Europe, why was it different from any other art movement? The answer is simply because of its originsö it is an art rooted in oppression and painö but during the mid-1980s, its auspicious foundations were forgotten. Just as rap music was rising to popularity over other music, and being listened to and performed by middle and upper class white kids such as the "Beastie Boys," graffiti had risen to mainstream popularity and was being appreciated and written by upper and middle class art connoisseurs, such as Claes Oldenberg and Keith Haring. Oldenberg, a highly regarded pop-artist said of graffiti: "Youâre standing there in the station, everything is gray and gloomy and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big bouquet from Latin America. At first it seems anarchicalömakes you wonder if the subways are working properly. Then you get used to it. The city is like a newspaper anyway, so itâs natural to see writing all over the place." By the time that Haring achieved his commercial success in the public, the crack-cocaine epidemic was taking its toll on young inner-city kids waiting to become the next generation of writers. Haring painted his famous "Crack is Wack" mural on 128th Street by the FDR drive, but still, there was more violence in the ghetto, and the "culture of poverty" was becoming harder to rebel against in a positive way. The public was much happier to see graffiti as a clean white art than a dangerous ghetto art. So, when on May 12, 1989, the MTA proclaimed that all of their train cars were clean , graffiti became a tame SoHo art form, as opposed to a rebellious act of vandalism. Much earlier in 1980, but in response to the same trend of taking graffiti off the subways, Lee Quino–es, from the Fab Five Crew wrote in elegy on a number 5, "There was once a time when the Lexington was a beautiful line when children of the ghetto expressed with art, not with crime. But then as evolution past, the transits buffing did its blast and now the trains look like Rusted trash, Now we wonder if Graffiti will ever last?" Lee was right to ask that question. Graffiti, like a fish out of water, could not survive long out of the subways. After Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1988, and Keith Haring in 1990, graffiti as a SoHo movement went downhill, and with its defining feature of ghetto-based rebellion gone, graffiti was merely another kind of doodling, and no longer held the artistic and cultural merit which was once associated with it. The clean subway movement, which has been made possible by stainless steel subway cars that are easy to wash, and impenetrable fences around train yards, has kept any new writers from bombing in the subways. Furthermore, although ghettos still exist in Harlem, Brooklyn and of course the South Bronx, conditions are not as blatantly and offensively bad as they were during New York Cityâs financial crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Graffitiâs harsh edge has been dulled; that which defined graffitiö its rebellion, its vandalism, and its ghetto originsöwere all taken away in the late 1980s, and now there is virtually no way to regain the artistic thrill of an illegal art. Some writers have tried to bomb in New York since the subways were cleared of graffiti, such as REVS and COST, who wrote their names all over the city in the early 1990s. However, they did not attain respect in the art world, because their style had reverted to that of the early 1970s, with simple block letters. The most recent writer to emerge in New York is DeLa Vega. He writes clever catchphrases in chic neighborhoods, and always remembers to write his name at the end. One attempt to retrieve the greatness of graffiti is Scratchitti, almost an art form in which instead of painting, writing, or drawing a tag a name is scrawled into a subway car with a sharp object. Another attempt to once again achieve the glory of graffiti is over the Internet. Many artists have done graffiti work and photographed it and put it on the web, either for posterity and the sake of documenting a movement, like http://www.@149st.com, or some people do graffiti on their computer and post it on the web, trying to gain recognition for their artistry. Nina Siegal, a reporter for the New York Times wrote, "Many graffiti writers frown on a role for the Web in their world, arguing that the true culture is on the streets and in the trainyards, not on computers· Mr. Feliciano of Tats Cru said, ÎYouâve got phonies who will take pictures of trains and then Photoshop an image on the train and then act like they painted the train. The guys who actually do go out there on the streets and do take all the risks get offended that thereâs a guy sitting at home in front of his computer acting like heâs a graffiti artists, when all heâs done is paint a pretty picture.â" Here, Mr. Feliciano makes the distinction between graffiti and art. Because graffiti involves danger, simply drawing a picture in wildstyle does not qualify as doing graffiti. So, what is this elusive art form? What defines graffiti? Simply put, graffiti is a part of hip-hop culture, which involves writing on walls. Graffiti is rebellion. Graffiti is illegal and dangerous. Graffiti exploded out of a government created ghetto and grew exponentially due to the mounting oppression against the lower class. Graffiti became the voice the ghetto. It was nonviolent social protestö a backlash against the governmental machine that created the South Bronx and drove New York City to near bankruptcy. Amidst the Vietnam War and a city plagued by poverty and rising gang violence, graffiti was a peaceful means of communicating fervent dissatisfaction with "the establishment." Graffiti was an art movement that encompassed people who never thought that they would be famous and respected; it gave the youth of the inner city a chance to breathe. And when the upper class and popular culture recognized graffiti as an art movement and not a form of social protestö when graffiti left the subway for SoHo galleries in order to enhance its artistic value and decrease the intrinsic threat of ghetto culture, its message started to fade. However, despite the fact that graffiti lost some of its cultural power that it drew from the ghetto, and gained some respect in the art world, it was seen, it was recognized, and the ghetto was heard. Bibliography: Ahearn, Charlie. Wildstyle. Rhino Home Video, 1997 Burns, Ric. New York: An Illustrated History, Knopf, 1999 Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Knopf, 1984 Castleman, Craig. Getting up. MIT Press, 1982. Cooper, Martha and Henry Chalfant. Subway Art. An Owl Book, 1984 Crow, Kelly. "Preserving the Work of the Artful Tagger. New York Times, Feb 18, 2001 Drennan, Matthew P., "The Decline and Rise of the New York Economy," Dual City: Restructuring New York, Mollenkopf and Castells1991 Fitch, Robert. Assassination of New York, 1993 Graffiti. Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1983 Gruen, John. Keith Haring, The Authorized Biography. Fireside, 1991 Jackson, Kenneth T., The Encyclopedia of New York City, Yale Press, 1995 Kurlansky, Mervyn, Jon Naar and Norman Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti. Praeger Publishers, 1974_ Morris, Jeffrey and Richard B. Encyclopedia of American History, Harper Collins, 1996 Siegal, Nina. "Dancers, Painters and Sculptors Head to Hunts Point," New York Times, Dec 27, 2000 Siegal, Nina. "Extending the Life and Lore of Graffiti," New York Times. January 25, 2001 Tomasky, Michael. "Port in a Storm," New York Times Magazine July 28, 1996 Wilson, William Julius. "Work," New York Times Magazine, August 18, 1995 www.at149st.com www.at149st.com