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The unexpected impertinence of urban creativity

The End of Graffiti

Lachlan MacDowall

O n the face of it, the end of graffiti seems an unlikely

event. In the forty years or more since an article in
the New York Times on Taki 183 and his Pen Pals triggered
a city-wide then global spread of tagging and ornamentalised
murals, modern graffiti has been highly successful at
reproducing itself, not only from country to country but across
the surfaces of cities, from trains and walls to bill-boards and
websites. In this, graffiti can be best understood as a set of
highly mobile and flexible aesthetic features and traditions,
rooted in particular social conditions but now circulate
globally and are available for a range of purposes.

In simple terms, the aesthetic features of graffiti build on

formal elements and design techniques appropriated from
sign-writing, advertising and cartoons, applying them to a
new alphabet, one in which letterforms are freed from the
normative constraints of standard spelling and typography. In
classical graffiti, writers are carefully schooled in techniques
to maximize visual impact: the shading and blending of
colors and the use of shadows, gleaming highlights and
neat final outlines. Also, key to graffiti is the adventurous
twisting of letters and the staging of interactions between
them (Castleman, 1982). Graffiti is based on a series of fine
distinctions about the kinds of letter distortions that can

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make a piece fresh, rather than (out of) wak (Chalfant and
Cooper, 1984).

This dance of graffiti letterforms is considered a highly

individuating one, a careful staging of ones distinctive style
and subjectivity. As Dr. Seuss puts it: my alphabet starts,
where your alphabet ends. For pioneer writer Kase 2, this
individuality has an aggressive dimension. His letterforms are
armed, equipped for battle, covered with sharp edges but also
camouflaged, to obscure both their immediate denotation and
their design tricks and techniques from potential imitators, or
biters (Chalfant and Cooper, 1984). Historians such as Ivor
Miller have noted the ways in which the graffiti letterforms
can also be read as an analogue for the other elements of hip
hop culture DJing, MCing and particularly, breakdancing
but also relate specifically to the modes of performance of
black or racialised bodies (Miller, 1996). Through the revision
or deviation from official forms of language, graffiti aims to
move beyond urban decoration to puncture the skin of city
as Achille Bonito Oliva describes it (Bonito Oliva, 2010). This
visual impact or puncturing is an inopinatum, an unexpected
impertinence, designed to trouble the standard grammar of
the street and the city.

And yet, despite its apparent success and visibility, the end
of graffiti is an important area of critical attention, firstly,
because individual instances of graffiti are almost always
short-lived: defaced, cleaned or superseded by more up-to-
date pieces. Generally, the end of graffiti has been inevitable
erasure: to be aged by the weather before being scoured by
chemical cleaners, slashed and trashed by further graffiti,
or burned by more dramatic or dynamic murals. Across its

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history, the end of most graffiti came quickly, with very few
given a second life through photographs, and later, publication
in printed zines, books and videos.

Secondly, the idea of endings in graffiti history is often

obscured by the focus on origins and originality, particularly in
the recent spate of books that typically focus on an individuals
entry into graffiti, or the beginnings of graffiti in a particular
city. The notion of originality itself requires a particular mode
of history, a sequential temporality of beginnings, roots,
precursors, lineages and pioneers and in this, endings are
often forgotten, notwithstanding the important tradition of
memorials upon the deaths of writers.

Thirdly, we can also consider the connections between endings

and the ends, or uses, of graffiti. One of the primary features
of graffiti is that it is now deployed for such an array of social
purposes, from vocational training and tourism, to health
promotion and urban regeneration. Now the usual, obvious
ends of graffiti to be slashed, buffed, burned are being
reframed by some more prominent ends: its preservation as
cultural heritage, its eternal, global replication in the digital
realm, its re-evaluation with the new category of street
art or its usefulness to state agendas of tourism and urban
redevelopment.

Finally, considering the end of graffiti as the near inevitable

erasure of individual tags and pieces or as an element of graffiti
historiography is also productive: it is only as we contemplate
the possible end of graffiti that a number of its aesthetic
features become visible and available for re-evaluation. In
contemporary graffiti it is possible to read three prominent

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endings, real and imagined: the death of industrial cities, the

end of freedom in control societies and the supplanting of the
category of graffiti itself by the emergence of street art. Each
of these ends is reflected in a range of aesthetic strategies,
impacting directly on the appearance of the letterforms
themselves.

Graffiti often depends for its visual impact on a counterpoint

with a monolithic concrete metropolis: think for instance
of the iconic logo of the Wild Style film painted by Zephyr,
Revolt and Sharp, which shows the colorful letters bursting
out of a grey wall. However, graffiti can also be read as index
of the end of the industrial era, both in a practical sense that
it typically adheres to elements of the city tied to the mode
of industrial production, such as train lines, signs factory
walls and abandoned factories, but also in an aesthetic sense,
with letterforms reflecting the materials of a decaying and
fractured city. If graffiti letters seem to be made of an infinitely
pliable imaginary substance that can be freely bent to the will
of the writer, often the letters also resemble the materials of
the citys industrial sites. Motifs of twisted pipes and cracked
stone appear as formal elements of graffiti, while in the more
elaborate wild-styles there are references to shards of broken
glass and bent electrical circuitry. More recently, as industrial
cities are renovated into apartments, it is possible to see this
reflected in detailed new styles made possible by custom
spray paints, showing clean fusions of post-industrial glass
and steel.

If the end of the industrial city is also the end of a whole

system of writing font types, genres and readerships these
pressures are also felt by graffiti letterforms. What gives

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graffiti letters a degree of resilience is their ambivalence to

urban decay, both depending on an urban context as their
canvas but able to take an anti-aesthetic pleasure in a city in
ruins, the end of an age. Carlo McCormick notes that the Bronx
which gave birth to graffiti echoed the bombed out cities of
postwar Europe, a fact not lost on a generation of Europeans
in New York:

They remembered Europe, what it looked like it took

Europe a long time in the post-war period to rebuild,
so they were slightly inured to the look of the collapsed
buildings and vacant lots and shit like that. There was
actually a resonance there, a kind of nostalgia (Ahearn
et al, 2011, p. 60).

In graffiti slang, the effects of the aerial bombing of the war

return as a description, or metaphor, for graffiti damage.

Just as graffiti can be viewed as an index of the end of industrial

culture, it also registers the development of control societies,
in which policing and spatial confinements mesh with more
subtle methods of technocratic surveillance. From the Bronx
redevelopment which provided the context to early New York
graffiti to the notorious security of rail yards in Tokyo or
Singapore, to the various forms of repressive laws and zero-
tolerance policing, graffiti writers often have to contend with
cities in which urban space is increasingly regulated and
militarized (Iveson, 2010). In his account of subway (tube)
painters in London, Tom Oswald argues that these forms
of policing mean an end of an era: it seemed clear that the
culture of tube graffiti is facing its last days. An aggressive
graffiti cleaning campaign is under way, graffiti artists are

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the subjects of large-scale police operations, and lengthy jail

sentences now handed down. For many writers the fun and
the romance is gone, replaced with hard slog and homework
in exchange for ever dwindling rewards and ever increasing
penalties (Oswald, 2012).

These visions of control societies, real or imagined, and the end

of freedom they represent provide the urban context against
which graffiti sees itself. In many cities, the appearance of
graffiti is shaped by the limited freedom translated into
temporal limits: short amounts of time available to paint, and
the limited lifespan of pieces. Aesthetically, the end of freedom
can be expressed negatively through critical content (images
of CCTV, riot police, military hardware) or more positively,
through context: demonstrating the exercise of freedom
by placing pieces in locations in which they are clearly not
authorized, such as trains, rooftops and freeways.

Could graffiti ever be eradicated altogether? In his book on

graffiti in Moscow in the last decade of the Cold War, Mike
Bushnell argues that the idea that a totalitarian state could
monitor and regulate individuals behavior to the extent that
graffiti markings could be prevented is more closely tied
to the Wests imagined view of the Soviet state, rather than
reality (Bushnell, 1990). In fact, Bushnell found many forms
of graffiti in Moscow, particularly tagging related to youth
subcultures and punk music.

After the end of its industrial canvas or the end of the liberty
required to do graffiti, comes a different kind of ending, in
which the category of graffiti is supplanted by the new regime
of street art. While the kinds of objects gathered together

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under term street art spray-painted stencils, large scale

murals, paper paste-ups, ephemeral sculptures - have a long
history, it only at the turn of the twentieth century that the
term emerged as global category, eventually producing its
own system of legible forms, leading practitioners, galleries,
publications and events. While definitions of street art vary,
they are often located in relation to a series of interconnected
narratives, such as the emergence of global social movement
protesting against neo-liberalism, the circulation of forms of
culture-jamming and DIY culture on the nascent Internet and
the increasing visibility of local traditions of graffiti distinct
from the New York style (Ganz, 2004).

The emergence of street art is also often tied to the supposed

end of graffiti, particularly its increasing codification,
conformity and aesthetic exhaustion.

Just as certain versions of street art are set, directly on

indirectly, against the contemporary art worlds gallery
system, so they also contain an implicit or explicit critique of
the graffiti. Despite graffitis political stances, both its formal
qualities and subcultural ties made it an inappropriate vehicle
for emerging global youth movements, which instead looked
back to the posters and slogans of the May 1968 protests, the
accessible stencilling techniques used in punk and anarchist
subcultures and the broader exploitation of the semiotic
vulnerability of cities found in culture-jamming.

In this context, graffiti pieces appeared elaborate and

specialised, however the aesthetic exhaustion needs to be
understood in broader historical terms. As Walter Benjamin
noted in his 1928 collection of essays, letters themselves reflect

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the inexorable drive of the capitalist mode of production:

Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to

lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out
onto the street by advertisements and subjected to the
brutal heteronomies of economic chaos. This is the hard
schooling of its new form (Benjamin, 1979).

The relationship between the aesthetic pressure on letterforms

and the transition between the categories of graffiti and street
art is aptly illustrated by an early piece by Banksy. Painted
in Bristol in 1998, before the full development of his now
signature prankster stencil style and his positioning as a flag-
bearer for street art, the piece takes the form of a traditional
graffiti piece, executed with spray-paint but exhibiting a high
degree of self-consciousness.

Graffiti letterforms forming the tag ASTEK lie on an operating

table, under surgery lights, surrounded by six surgeons.
Following their being dragged out into the street, a flat-
lining heart monitor and the expressions of the doctors
suggest the letterforms are dead, with an autopsy more likely
than resuscitation.

Of course, graffiti artists continue to refuse the end of graffiti

but the tensions evident in this end of graffiti the exhaustion
of letterform read through the advent of street art can be
seen in two aesthetic trends.

The first is the prevalence of an aesthetic of decadence,

in which formal innovation has stalled, leaving only the
possibility of generating identical pieces on a larger, longer

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or more detailed scale. This condition of an aesthetic cul-de-

sac, in which letterforms cannot be pushed into any structural
changes but can only be further ornamentalised, is particular
evident in many large-scale wildstyle pieces, where the scale
draws attention not to their visual dominance but to their
futility, where the levels of intricacy begins to undercut the
pieces visual impact, rather than to drive it. It can also be
seen in pieces which are covered in decorative detail, but in
which the shapes of the letters remain relatively conventional.
Decadence is a style for near (or past) graffitis end. However,
as a style, decadence is not about formal elements but about
historical context: it is only as the context to graffiti changes
and its end is threatened that it becomes evident.

Finally, the supposed end of graffiti also drives aesthetic

strategies based on nostalgia, in which graffiti again reasserts
the importance of the canonical pieces of New York graffiti and
celebrates the previous golden age, in which the letterforms,
set against the city, appeared to have a dynamism that did
provide an inopinatum or a puncturing of the citys skin.

There is a critical dimension available in this mode, as

contemporary writers revisit no just the mature masterpieces
of New York subway graffiti, but also the delightful messy and
nave prototypes of the very early subway years, well before
the letters and styles became codified, when the alphabet was
still growing up in public and an experimental spirit reigned
(MacDowall, 2006).

This strand accounts for the current popularity of a retro-style,

a kind of anti-aesthetic that eschews highly mannered designs
and blended tones for self-consciously ill-proportioned letters

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and garish color combinations. Here, the immature shapes of

the letterforms suggest regression, historical and psychic.

These aesthetic conditions of exhaustion, decadence and

nostalgia only become evident through a consideration of
the end of graffiti, whether this is understood in terms of
changing cityscapes, regimes of security or the emergence
of new conceptual categories. The end of graffiti happens in
the interplay between historical forces and the minor, local
examples of graffitis end. In one recent exchange, a nearby
mural by two respected pioneers was covered over with a blue
printed logo. As if to highlight the stakes, the triple incantation
in the circular sticker read: Things are ending. Things are
ending. Things are ending.

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The unexpected impertinence of urban creativity

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