Anyone remember that Graffiti artist in SF who used to do the horses? I forget her name. They'd paint over and the next day there'd be a new horse rearing up, with the words "Still alive and kicking!" The Tuesday night dance thing called "TOGETHER" used some of her work for their flyers. A friend of mine who worked at KQED interviewed her for a documentary they did, but she didn't want to appear on camera. Anyway, much of what's out there just defaces property, but some of it is pure art, and I am always sorry to see it go.
Here in Boston, there is construction near Forest Hills that requires tearing down some old warehouses for new condos and apartments. I think my favorite Boston graffiti is already gone. I have a not-so-great photo of it somewhere, taken from across the T and Commuter rail tracks. I never got around to going up close. It's called "ALONE" and was there when I moved here in 2005. I used to see a tent pitched below it, and I imagined that was the artist, as any time any new graffiti threatened his image of a lonely figure and a mountain under the night sky, the paint got touched up again. I'm almost afraid to look next time I'm on the T. ~PB
Sunday, Nov 30, 2014 02:00 PM EST
Max Rivlin-Nadler, Full Stop
This article originally appeared in
Full Stop.
Last week, HBO debuted
Banksy Does New York,
a documentary on Banksy’s 2013 residency in NYC, where he debuted a new
work every day in various areas of the city, each imbued with his
trademark wit and moralistic commentary. Each of his pieces ignited some
sort of confrontation, be it another artist painting over his work to
make a point, or individuals with an entrepreneurial spirit charging
admission to see a section of a wall. In Queens last fall, I got to look
at one piece just hours after it was created and moments before it was
defaced. The graffiti was of a workman erasing a quote from Gladiator —
“What we do in life echoes in eternity.” Both the piece within the piece
and the work itself would now only be echoes, as a local graffiti
artist angrily tagged over it while a hissing crowd pleaded him to stop.
The next day, it was painted over.
It
was a traumatic year in the world of New York City graffiti — the
graffiti’d factory known as 5 Pointz was painted over and is currently
being demolished, while William Bratton returned as the commissioner of
the NYPD, re-instituting “broken windows” policing, which focuses on
low-level violations or misdemeanors, like panhandling, performances on
subways, and graffiti. Arrests have already risen by four percent and
will continue to climb. That the NYPD was never able to apprehend Banksy
during his time in New York City, and the persistence of graffiti
across most of the city, demonstrates what an impossible task it is to
stop graffiti or tagging. Direct confrontation, however, has returned to
the discussion of street art, with the ever-reactionary New York
Post declaring that graffiti has
again “reared its ugly head.” Not that it ever went anywhere — graffiti
has been a constant part of the landscape for the past thirty years,
while the city still draws record amounts of tourists and oligarchs. So
why does graffiti still remain something so threatening to the powers
that be? And why are we being reminded that it doesn’t belong?
One
early morning this year I was taking the 7 train in Queens, a
mostly-elevated line that runs from Flushing to underneath Manhattan.
The 7 is a unique vantage into the state of NYC graffiti, where
street-level murals meld with larger tags in harder-to-reach places
further up on buildings. In fact, it’s almost a museum in itself, with
established artists like Klops sharing space with kids who are just
learning the art. If you’re lucky on this early train ride, you get to
meet some of the artists. At 74th street in Jackson Heights, a group of
teenagers got on the train and huddled at the window. For them, it was
the first time they were seeing their art the way most people do.
“Oh shit, we got high up!”
They
were pointing at a tag that was almost impossibly placed on the side of
a building. In the first light of day, they were finally seeing the
danger that they had faced during the night before, all in their attempt
to have their names echo with the riders of this train. Almost a year
later, that tag they put on the side of the building remains, and will
possibly stay there until the building is re-painted or torn down.
It’s
the tearing down that causes a larger threat to graffiti than even
policing. While famous, established groups like T.A.T.S. Cru have set up
shop in community centers and been given studio space and walls on
which to work, the urban environment itself is presenting less canvas
than ever. As the necessary push for density emanates ever outward from
the city center, gleaming condominiums have crossed over from Manhattan
and into Brooklyn and Queens (one of the few places to still see
graffiti in downtown Manhattan, Chinatown, has so far remained resistant
to massive upscaling . . . but stay tuned), and quite symbolically, 5
Pointz is being torn down to make way for condos. While graffiti
presents itself as an art with a rather low cost-of-entry, works of
graffiti are now being absorbed by these massive developments, who
advertise their galleries as one day hosting a show
featuring the very same graffiti they replaced.
The canvas has moved inside the building — to the benefit of
developers, a select group of artists, and the architects of the city,
who badly want more apartments built on former industrial sites as soon
as possible.
So the canvas moves ever outward — not that it ever
knew a boundary in the first place. When the MTA finally cracked down on
graffiti artists who turned their trains into murals in the 1970s and
80s, graffiti remained on overpasses and buildings, and still appeared
in subway tunnels and, every now and then, on a train. But as parts of
New York City might finally become the first graffiti-exclusion zones,
either by design or by their sheer inaccessibility, one wonders where
the push will end. Because we’re not really talking about graffiti at
all, but how one can leave their mark on what was home. And, however
cheesy, how long that mark can echo.
Max Rivlin-Nadler is a freelance writer who has covered
culture and politics for The New York Times, The Nation, The New
Republic, and Gawker.
More Max Rivlin-Nadler.
