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Page 1: Urban Marginalia: Graffiti in Jersey City

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I always tell people that if you want to know what’s going on with a city, look at the writing on thewall: you can tell what skill level and what social problems are happening, what’s going on with theyouth.

– Toons, Los Angeles graffiti artist

Graffiti. Not graffiti in general, which has been painted and written since humankind first put markings on cliffsand in caves, but graffiti of a certain type that originated on the East Coast of the United States, particularly NewYork City and Philadelphia, during the late 1970s. This type of graffiti became associated hip hop culture, whichalso includes the music itself, with its DJs and MCs, the videos that go with that music, the various styles ofbreak dancing, and certain fashion styles. As hip hop spread around the world, so did associated graffiti styles,though they've never become completely absorbed into hip-hop culture.

As far as I know, there is no standard term that designates this particular graffiti tradition and distinguishes itfrom the general run of graffiti. But people in this tradition often talk of “graffs.” That’s the term I will use, thegraff tradition.

Here is an example in the graff tradition:

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Figure 1: Mural, Jersey Avenue, Jersey City

Note: If you want to see a larger image, you can click on the image and thus be taken to my Flickrsite, where I store these images online. Click on the “ALL SIZES” button (the one with the littlemagnifying glass) above the picture and then choose a larger image.

That is as typical of the style as one could hope for in a single example, and that is why I chose it. The style isbased on letters, specifically, the letters of the writer’s nickname. In the graff tradition, a “writer” is someonewho paints graffiti. Reading the mural from left-to-right, we have DR. SEX (notice the downward sweep of thetwo R’s), Jersey Joe (the green creature), and HOUR. That elephant-like creature in the middle of this mural iscalled a character; such characters are often used as embellishments, though in some cases the embellishmentsmay expand and take over.

This mural is about 50 yards from my apartment building, clearly visible from my front windows and from thestreet. Or it was visible; now it is painted over it in a medium light gray paint. Someone complained to the Cityand the City responded.

While I am interested in graffs in general, I am writing specifically about examples within walking distance ofmy apartment. Much of what I say, however, is informed by general reports and discussions about graffs, most ofwhich are journalistic, even informal, rather than scholarly. I have no reason to think that my local sites areunique in any but a geographical sense. I’ve seen similar images in books and websites devoted to graffs.

The Lay of the Land

I live in the Hamilton Park neighborhood of Jersey City, New Jersey, located on the West bank of the HudsonRiver across from lower Manhattan. This is a complex urban environment containing housing, small businesses,major roads, abandoned buildings and lots, and small concentrated patches of woodland and grassland. Think ofit as an urban savanna in a temperate climate.

While exploring one site I sometimes feel like I’ve fallen into one of those jungle adventure movies at the pointwhere the Intrepid Explorers first see signs of The Ancient Temple That Has Been Lost for Ages:

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Figure 2: Lost Temple?

The letters to the left of center spell out “AIDS,” a graff crew that is quite active in the area. I have no ideawhether or not there is any affiliation with an old Chicago crew writing under the same letters: Artists InventingDef Styles. It should go without saying that these artists know quite well that “AIDS” is also the name for achronic disease. Another locally active crew calls itself ADHD.

Less than a mile from that graff we come to the remains of an old chocolate factory – at least that’s what I’vebeen told about the building:

Figure 3: The old chocolate factory

Notice the remains of spent fireworks at the lower right. I don’t know when those fireworks were discharged,though July 4th is a plausible guess, but I took the photograph on October 31, 2006.

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Roughly midway between those two locations there used to be several small abandoned buildings – they weredemolished sometime during the winter. I took this photograph inside a compound bounded by three of them:

Figure 4: Compound surrounded by abandoned buildings

Standing on an embankment not far from the mural in the first photograph, and roughly two blocks south of thatnow-demolished compound, I took this shot:

Figure 5: Freight terminal, PATH building, Empire State Building

In the left middle distance you see a red brick building that used to be a freight terminal for the Erie-LackawannaRailroad. The water tower at its western end is visible from the compound in the previous photograph. It’s on topa building that used to be a freight terminal for the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad. In the background to the far right,the Empire State Building. The building in the middle belongs to the Port Authority Trans-Hudson, the NewYork-New Jersey agency that runs the port, the airports, the tunnels and bridges, and ground zero.

This then, is where I live. My apartment is roughly three-quarters of a mile from the Hudson River and three-tenths of a mile – as the crow flies – from the in-bound toll booths for the Holland Tunnel. The southern end ofthe Jersey Palisades is about a mile inland at this point. The highways serving the Holland Tunnel comes downoff the Heights, as the Palisades are known locally, about a third of a mile West of me and two blocks (in-bound)and four blocks (out-bound) North.

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From the last half of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century Jersey City, along withHoboken immediately to the North, had major port facilities. Those facilities were served by railroad lines andyards. Many of those lines and yards where just north of my neighborhood. Most of them, but not all, are gonenow. Most of the graffiti in the area, but not all of it, is located in or near the abandoned or remaining railroadfacilities. That AIDS graff is 25 yards from a still active railroad line; it is painted on the base of a stanchionsupporting a highway that feeds into the Holland Tunnel. The chocolate factory is 100 yards from a commuterrail line. When I took the picture spanning the old freight terminal and the Empire State Building I was standingon land that had four railroad tracks on it until the late 1960s or so.

This land is marginal to the sites where we live and conduct office and retail business. That is where you find themost interesting graffs.

Life at the Margin

I became interested in graffiti in October of 2006. While walking to one of the sites in Jersey City’s annual tourof artist studios and galleries, I noticed things and stuff that prompted me to take pictures. Not remarkable orbeautiful things, just ordinary things on the streets. So I got out my Canon point-and-shoot and began walkingthe streets taking pictures.

Figure 6: Abandoned doll

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Figure 7: Stop Sign

One day I was beneath a long ramp that carried US Routes 1 and 9 down from the Jersey Heights and into theHolland Tunnel. At this point the roadway is supported by rows of squat cylindrical columns of reinforcedconcrete. When I looked down the rows toward the Tunnel I saw shopping carts, stacked mattresses, andfurniture, all in order. It was an odd and unexpected sight. What was going on? I approached to investigate and,more likely than not, to take pictures.

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Figure 8: Urban homestead

The only reason I did not immediately conclude that someone was living here is that that did not make sense.Here? Underneath one of the most traveled roadways on the East Coast, funneling tens of thousands of peopleinto New York City every day of the year? In full view of an office-building parking lot? This is not an enclosedarea; there is something of a “roof” overhead, the highway, but that’s it. No, it did not make sense that peoplelived here. But if no one lived here, the alternative made even less sense, that someone went to a great deal oftrouble to arrange trash in such an orderly fashion. By the time I had taken my third or fourth photograph I hadconcluded that I must be in someone’s home. I felt embarrassed, taking photographs of someone’s home withouttheir knowledge or permission.

Over the next few days I thought about that place and the people who lived there. Yes, I thought the obviousthoughts about such poverty in the world’s wealthiest nation. But those were not new thoughts; I’d been havingsuch thoughts all my adult life.

The thoughts I now had were a bit more subtle: First, I was impressed at how orderly the place was. The residentsmay have been homeless, but they kept this place relatively neat and orderly. Beyond that I wondered about theinformal social arrangements that make it possible for people to thus “squat” on public land in a denselypopulated area. The police certainly knew of this urban homestead and no doubt could have arrested the settlerson any number of minor charges. As long as they weren’t causing any obvious trouble, either to others orthemselves, however, bringing formal charges makes no sense. Once they’re in “the system” they use publicresources without producing any obvious benefit to anyone. There’s a Salvation Army facility a few blocks away,and a homeless shelter a few more blocks away. No doubt these homesteaders knew of these facilities, and othersas well, and, reciprocally, that they were known in the public and private social services community of JerseyCity.

What particularly struck me is that things seemed to keep in such good order in that spot – and others like it – dayafter day, week after week, month after month. These homesteaders lived outside the law, and yet seemed to keepa law among themselves, enough to keep this makeshift facility intact. I know almost nothing about the peoplewho live there – though, as it happened, a few months later I paid one of them $10 to help me with my car aftersomeone had sideswiped it during the night – but I’m pretty sure that they aren’t the only homeless people in thearea. Those who live there obviously had reached some accommodation with those who don’t.

Thus ordered life goes on, outside the law, but in the same territory otherwise inhabited by those of us who can

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afford to own or rent standard accommodations. Two very different communities inhabit the same space, walkthe same streets, only marginally known to one another.

In some measure, graffiti is like that. It goes on outside the law and proceeds according to informal arrangementsamong the artists – their informal social contract. To be sure almost all of it is illegal, done on public or privateproperty without permission, and contention between artists and authorities is part of the life. But to theconsiderable extent that the artists keep from getting caught, the laws they obey are the laws that constitute theirinformal world. Their graffs are both the visible signs of that world and its raison d'être. Those graffs are centralto one community, but marginal intrusions to another.

It is thus not surprising, that, as an improvised shelter prompted my interest in urban signs, in graffs, so mypursuit of graffs led me to other improvised shelters. This is a sleeping hut behind the chocolate factory:

Figure 9: Sleeping Hut

And this is the bicycle of the man who slept there:

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Figure 10: Bicycle

On the face of it, he’s a Mets fan:

Figure 11: Go Mets

I had a brief chat with him. He wanted to know whether I was taking photographs for myself or for somepublication. He’s the one who told me that this building used to be a chocolate facgtory. To the left of his hut wesee a graff by Meres, who has a graff-related gig in Queens:

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Figure 12: Meres

This couch is near that AIDs pseudo-temple in Figure 2:

Figure 13: Couch

I’ve seen a man sleeping on it several times.

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Figure 13: Napping

This chair is only 20 yards away:

Figure 14: Easy chair

The graff behind the chair is by Tenz, of Brooklyn’s DYM crew.

There is an obvious reason why graff artists share space with the homeless: they can. For the most part, no onewith power and influence cares about what happens on or near these buildings and structures. No one conductsbusiness there, no tax-payers live there. The graffiti artists thus have time to paint complex pieces without fear ofbeing busted by the police and they have reasonable expectations that a piece will live for at least awhile beforeit’s “buffed” by the City or gone over by other artists.

This affinity for marginal land is hardly unique to graffiti writers. I suspect, in fact, that it is quite common, butI’ll offer only one other example, one I find particularly interesting, that of pre-modern Japan. In her recentBonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture, Eiko Ikegami points out thatmuch aesthetic activity in pre-modern Japan at interstitial places such as graveyards, riverbanks, bridges, trading

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posts, and market places. These places were mu’en, meaning roughly “no relation.” They didn’t have a fixedspace in the social order; that’s what made them suitable for dance, music, theatre, acrobatics, and poetry circles.

The people who participated in those activities did not come from the same social spheres and so they needed tomeet in spaces which were not assigned to specific social spheres. Samurai, merchants, farmers, and others metin these marginal places as equals. Over the centuries, these informal institutions forged a civil society “thatgenerated an image of aesthetic Japan as if it had been a natural description of the geographical identity calledJapan” (p. 375). In the late nineteenth century, this identity coalesced around the figure of the emperor when thenation in general, and the shogunate in particular, was forced to adapt to Western imperialism.

Is the graffs tradition one facet of a similar process happening in the contemporary world, but on an internationalscale? Graffs are now international in scope, as are African-American musical styles and Asian martial artsstyles. The world of graffiti is everywhere marginal, having no fixed place in the local institutional order. Yes,graffiti style certainly has been appropriated and legitimized in various ways, and some graffiti works havemoved to canvas and into museums; yet there is a large and activity community of writers that resists assimilationinto existing institutions. They work on marginal land. This group is international and they trade photographs andideas through the internet, a practice you can verify by doing an internet search on the term “graffiti.”

Bull Durham on the Wall

Now I want to consider a specific site, one where there’s some writing on the wall, but only some of that writingis in dialogue with the graff tradition, much less directly in that tradition. This site is near the old Erie-Lackawanna freight terminal:

Figure 15: Lackawanna freight terminal

The terminal is two blocks long, stretching along Sixteenth Street from Jersey Avenue on the West (left) to GroveStreet on the East (right). The platform in front used to support a railroad siding which split-off a feeder track tothe East. The siding is now gone and the platform itself is isolated, with its eastern end just stopping in midair atMarin Boulevard (one street East of Grove).

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Figure 16: Bridge from nowhere

A small segment of that large building faces a small public playground – officially, the 16th Street Park – at thecorner of Sixteenth Street and Erie Boulevard.:

Figure 17: Playground

In the middle and upper portions of the far wall we see the faint traces of old Bull Durham ads that had beenpainted on the wall, presumably to attract the attention of the men who worked in the warehouse and freightterminal 24/7. These ads, of course, were not a guerilla activity. They were sanctioned and paid-for. At ground-level we see other, more recent markings. Strictly speaking, these markings are illegal, and they are not entirelywithin. Let’s take a closer look.

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Figure 18: Bull Durham wall

The wall has three areas, which follow the architecture of the building. The small center panel is more heavilyworked than the flanking panels. On the left we see some Puerto-Rican flags, some names, some numbers, andother stuff. At the right we see painted goal posts with “touch” (obscured) “down” written below the crossbar.Let’s zoom in on the right-hand panel.

Figure 19: Right panel, Bull Durham wall

I estimate that the crossbar is roughly three and a half to four feet off the ground. The uprights aredisproportionately wide, indicating that they were painted with a roller on a long handle – a common painting

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tool, and common in the graffiti game as well. There is crude lettering on the cross bar that says “15st Football” –either an observation or a wry joke. At the lower left there is a crude character – eyes, cap, and fingers – grabbinga name. To the left we see a Puerto Rican flag and other stuff. It is difficult to infer the order in which thesevarious markings were made, but it seems likely that they were made by different individuals, at different times,and certainly without any overall coherent plan. The wall is a commons and various people feel free to maketheir markings upon it.

The left-hand panel is, overall, the same: various people making various marks at various times, with nocoordination.

Figure 20: Left panel, Bull Durham wall

We see three more Puerto Rican flags, each associated with a name and a number. The obvious guess is that thenames are those of the painters – the three “hands” show slightly different styles – and that the numbers are theirages. The flags are their ethnic identification. There is a large Hispanic population in Jersey City, and certainly inthis particular neighborhood. There are other markings here, about which one can speculate, but I only wish tocall attention to another wry commentary, “SHiT STADiUM.”

That photograph was taken on 27 November 2006. The following detail was photographed on 7 July 2007 andshows some new writing: “Shay Shay White Boy.”

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Figure 21: Shay shay white boy

I do not know what that means. Note carefully the quality of the letters. These letters, all of them, are sloppy andit's not the deliberate sloppiness of writers who've mastered hand styles and basic letters. Granted, this painting ison raw brick; still, the edges of the lines are fuzzy and their quality and thickness uneven. This is true for everymark across this wall and indicates that the people who did the work were not very skilled with aerosol paint.Either they were just learning to be writers or they were not writers at all, just people who wanted to make theirmarks on the community wall.

Here’s the central panel:

Figure 22: Bull Durham

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First, note that, like the rest of the wall, this is a palimpsest; various markings have accrued over time, with themore recent ones not quite obliterating the old ones. Second, note the relative crudeness of the lines, yet they arenot so crude as the lines we saw in the left-panel close-up (look at the edges). Third, note the central figure,which I take to be “WAR” rendered in elaborate lettering. This shows the influence of the graffs tradition.

Some more terminology: As I noted at the beginning, graffs are based on the writer’s nickname. The simplestexpression of that name is a tag, generally painted with a single line, either from a marker or an aerosol spray.Throw-ups or throwies are a little more elaborate, often done with bubble letters and two or more colors, onefor the outline and a contrasting color for the fill. Sometimes a third color will be used to create a background.The most elaborate graffs are called pieces, from “masterpiece.”

The graff in the central panel is a crude piece. I do not know whether these letters were written by a writer goingby the name of “war,” or whether those letters designate some war, whether a merely local war between, e.g.rival gangs or gangs and the police, or, e.g. the war in Iraq. Whatever the reference, I’m most interested in thecoloring: red, white, and blue. Is that just any red, white, and blue? I think not, for the red and the white areclearly in stripes. Are they the stripes of the American flag or the Puerto Rican flag? With four Puerto Rican flagson the wall, three to the left, one to the right, context argues that it is a Puerto Rican flag. Could the war be overstatehood for Puerto Rico? Who knows.

However, and this is a guess, I suspect that most of the graffiti on that wall was painted by people who live in theneighborhood. For one thing, I can’t imagine someone coming in from outside to scrawl “SHiT STADiUM” or “15st Football” on the wall. Those seem like local comments on a local (15th St.) situation. The names and thePuerto Rican flags feel local as well; these blocks do have a substantial Hispanic population. The fact is, this site,though a visible one, is not the kind of site graff writers favor.

It’s too visible and exposed for someone who wants to do a high-quality piece; they’re likely to be spotted by thepolice long before they can finish their work. And someone seeking to “get up” with tags and throwies is unlikelyto “bomb” what is, after all, a community recreation facility. Graff writers may be vandals, but they have theirethical principles. As Paul 107 says in All City: The Book About Taking Space, don’t hurt the “little people.” Thisspace belongs to the little people. No serious writer will touch it.

There are serious writers at work in the area, however. A block and a half north of here, just west of Fourteenthand Jersey, I found this graff:

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Figure 23: Say No2War

This graff, which is somewhere between a throwie and a simple piece in complexity, is in clear sight of trafficleaving the Holland Tunnel, or was until the building was demolished a couple of months ago. The war is notspecified, but I would suspect that the war in Iraq is the target. Why? That is, given that this sign contains nomore information than that on the Bull Durham wall, why am I more assured of its reference? Because the site ismore visible, making it more appropriate for a general political statement. The Bull Durham wall is purely local;unless you live in the neighborhood or have business there – e.g. with one of the companies now housed in theold freight terminal – you’ll never see that wall. But “NO2WAR” faced traffic leaving New York City throughthe Holland Tunnel, tens of thousands of people daily, some bound for a home within a mile or ten of that spot,some just getting started on a cross-country trip. Such a very visible place is where you would protest the mostvisible war we’ve currently got.

Do I absolutely know this? Of course not. I’m making a judgment. What is objectively true, regardless of whoput that graff there, and why, is that the quality of workmanship is much higher than that on the Bull Durhamwall. Whoever painted that graff, they are experienced in the craft. The writer may have lived in theneighborhood. As we have already seen, however, outsiders do come into the area to write, so it is notunreasonable to suppose that an outsider wrote that particular piece. In addition to Meres (Queens) and Tenz(Brooklyn), Host, and Taboo (DYM, Brooklyn) have several pieces within easy walking distance of the BullDurham wall. Writers known as Ceaze and Gaser have a number of pieces in the area, including some adjacent toNO2WAR. They’re associated with California crews, one of which, The Seventh Letter, has a website. For thatmatter, so does DYM.

Let’s consider two more graffs near the Bull Durham wall. Both are memorials. This one is in the graff tradition:

Figure 24: RIP Angie

The entire composition is built around the name, “Angie.” I assume this is the name of the deceased, not the graffwriter. Notice the embellishments on the letters, the gradations of blue and the white lettering. Notice the pinkbackground, with its bubbles, the heart, the arrow pointing up, the message “we’ll miss you.” Note the assuredpaint-handling, the crispness of the lines; this is much more skilled than the markings on the Bull Durham wall.Was this done by a local? I do not know.

But if we head back toward the Bull Durham wall we’ll find a memorial to A. There’s a bodega at the corner ofFifteenth and Erie. On the 15th Street wall of that bodega we see this memorial:

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Figure 25: Memorial to A

Though painted with more skill than the work on the Bull Durham wall, it does not seem to be within the graffstradition. The lack of an overall compositional order organized around letter forms is the most obvious indicatorof that. The composition is very diffuse. The painting, however, shows greater skill than that on the Bull Durhamwall. The roses and leaves are well-formed, and the cherries nicely shaded. Note how sharp the edges of the “A”are. However painted this was skilled with a can. I’d guess the person is a writer who choose to work outside thetradition for this graff. I have no idea whether or not this A is the Angie in the other memorial.

The graff tradition, then, exists within the larger practice of putting marks on walls, a practice which, itscontemporary urban form, does the medium popularized in graffs, aerosol paint. In that they are members of localcommunities, graff writers may mark the same walls as locals having no particular interest in graffs as a specificmeans of personal expression; but the writers will also venture outside their local community to write.

What’s in a Name

As we have seen, the graffs tradition is based on the name, a nick name that the graff writer chooses as his or herpersona in the graff world. As I indicated in the previous section, tags are the simplest expression of the name.On the left in this photo we see the tag of a writer named Switch along with a crew tag, LNR:

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Figure 26: Switch LNR

Throwies are a bit more developed. This railroad bridge is covered with tags and throwies (most of them inballoon-style letters):

Figure 27: Tags and throwies on a railroad bridge

The most highly developed expression of the name is the piece. Pieces are written in two broadly defined stylefamilies. As far as I know the oldest family has no standard name, but the phrase “old school” is sometimes usedwhen talking about them, so that’s the term I’ll use here. The letters in old school pieces are easily read byanyone; they may be highly ornamented, with drop shadows, coin-like edging, and patterned faces, but the formsare legible. When the so-called Wild Style emerged in the late seventies, the letters became elaborated in such away that it was very difficult to read the name unless you already knew what it was. At this point the name seems

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to function primarily as an abstract framework upon which the writer crafts a design, much as blues musicianswork endless variations on the same basic chord progression.

In the rest of this section I want to examine a few pieces. My purpose is not to give anything like a representativecatalogue of styles. I simply want to make a few broad but useful distinctions.

Let’s begin with a very simple, readable, and subtle old school piece by Ceaze:

Figure 28: Old School Ceaze

The letters are simple bold block letters with 3D extensions. The faces of the letters are lightly painted; in fact, itappears that the letter faces are not fully painted at all, but rather have patterns painted in them, as though Ceazewere eliciting the patterns from the concrete rather than painting them on it. Beyond this, it is not at all clearwhether or not the forms in the letter faces represent an earlier layer of painting, Ceaze’s work on this piece, or abit of both. To the extent that they a carry-overs from earlier painting, Ceaze has incorporated them into his ownwork.

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Figure 29: Detail, Ceaze

Those patterns do not follow the logic of the letter forms, but rather “cut across” them in visual counterpoint(look at the first “E” and the “a”). The letter forms are outlined in hot pink and a light blue that contrast nicelywith the neutral tones of the letters themselves. Finally, notice the “shines” and the references to his girlfriendJen (at the top) and his crew, MSK, at the lower right (in the first photo). This piece has been weathered awhile,dulling the colors a bit. I don’t know how it would have looked when freshly painted.

A few months after I took that photo Ceaze painted over it with another piece, in a more elaborated style. But notas elaborate as we see here:

Figure 30: Wild Style Ceaze, chocolate factory

This was painted in 2005 (look at the lower right) and seems to me an example of the kind of baroque over-

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elaboration to which the style is prone. If you know the name, you should have relatively little trouble making itout, otherwise you may be mystified. But that is, at best, a secondary or tertiary issue. What I find bothersome isthat the image lacks an overall visual form or focus. It is just a fussy mass of detail: grey, green, red, blue, andyellow. I’m sure there’s a logic to it all (e.g. core letter forms in grey, curvilinear elaborations in heavily-shadedred, horizontals in green against red and purplish-blue clouds), that it took care and skill to work it out, but I donot find the result very compelling.

Now consider a very different piece, which is painted on an archway that spans the Erie Cut, a channel whichhad been cut through the Palisades to accommodate four railroad tracks. Three of the tracks have been ripped outand the Cut’s been abandoned since, I’d guess, the late 60s or early 70s.

Figure 31: X form

This piece is strongly symmetrical about the vertical axis. Close examination, however, reveals that the symmetryis not exact. Presumably the difference answer to the requirements of the letter forms constituting the name,which is obscure to me. An expert is likely to recognize the writer simply from the style, without any need todecipher the name.

And that, the readability of the name, is an interesting question. At the very least it forces a distinction betweeninsiders and outsiders. But this piece is in a location where no one would go unless they had a specific reason todo so, e.g. to paint, view, or photograph graffiti. It’s not difficult to enter the Erie Cut, but you have to knowwhere to go and be willing to trespass. In this case it would seem that the distinction between insiders andoutsiders is not just between writers and non-writers, but between a specific group of writers and everyone else.

In any case, though the intelligibility of wild style names is an issue, it’s not one I wish to belabor. As far as Iknow, no one has much to say on that issue beyond noting that that’s how the tradition works.

What is interesting to me about this graff is that an overall form has been imposed on the name in a way that’squite different from what we’ve seen in the two Ceaze’s. In the Ceaze pieces the name-form is the result of thejuxtaposed letterforms, as is the case in standard printing. In this graff a strong form has been forcefully imposedupon the letter forms of the name. Thus the X-form in this image has a meaning, a significance, that it would nothave if this were an ordinary abstract design.

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Few names, or words or phrases, are symmetrical about a vertical axis, so few that discovering them is a parlorsport. Further, the X-form also imposes a weaker symmetry about the horizontal axis. The X-form both forces usto distinguish between the letter forms and the name form, and to realize that a name form has been imposed onthe letter forms. X-form pieces are quite common.

Let us consider a fourth piece:

Figure 32: Remix

Here we see boldly stated letters in black and white set against a brightly colored background of clouds accentedwith bubbles. While some letterforms seem clear and obvious – R M, perhaps an X – I have trouble reading thename. With the help of some internet friends (see the comment section), however, I have come to realize that thename is “Remix.” Given that knowledge, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to note in detail how the letterforms are constructed and how they interact with one another.

Even without parsing the details we can see that the letter forms are in vigorous interaction with one another,pushing and probing, pulling and twisting, invading one another’s space, whereas the letterforms in the Ceazepieces keep each to its own space. Difficult though it is to parse the Remix forms into letters, the formsthemselves are clear and compelling. The black faces are set-off by white 3D extension with the whole letter-block outlined in red. Notice the use of yellow and a purplish-grey to see off the greens and blue of the clouds.The overall effect is one of deceptive simplicity.

At this point we have three distinctly different graphic strategies for dealing with the writer’s name. In bothCeaze pieces, the old school and the wild style, the name-form results directly from the combination of thecomponent letter forms. The forms are of uniform height, are aligned against a horizontal base line, and eachletter is “well behaved” within its own orbit. The letters in the Remix piece are not horizontally aligned nor dothey keep in their own spaces. While the name-form appears to result from the positioning of the letter forms,that form is irregular, unlike the name-form of either the Ceazes or the X-form; I think of this as a crazy organic,and it too is a common strategy. Finally, the X-form piece has letter forms in vigorous interaction and a stronggestalt imposed on the combination of those forms.

This is not a complete inventory of the strategies used in deriving pieces from names, nor is it intended to besuch. I don’t know of such an inventory. My point is simply to demonstrate that distinctly different graphic

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strategies have been developed and that they must be understood in relation to an underlying name, even if thatname is unintelligible. What is important is that the name exists. One must read the forms as being in a dialoguewith a name.

Note also that these graffs are abstract in the sense that they to not represent people, places or things. This art isnot fundamentally representational. It would even be a mistake to think that the forms represent the name. Theydon’t, they embody it, with the tension between the forms on the wall and the name’s identity being a way toarticulate the those visible forms. In this way graff artists have been able to move artistic abstraction from thewalls of elite museums and galleries into the spaces and places of popular culture, streets, album covers, T-shirts,sneakers, and skateboards, all adorned graffiti style.

* * * * *

Back to basics. Now let’s take a walk in the woods, not a large wooded area, just the trees around the stanchionssupporting a major highway as a comes down off the Jersey Palisades and into the Holland Tunnel. As weapproach the base of one of these stanchions we see white forms cantilevered across the base from the right:

Figure 33: Organic piece through the trees

Once we’re through the trees and standing directly in front of the stanchion we can see the forms quite clearly:

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Figure 34: Organic piece in the clear

Whatever name is hidden in those forms is an utter mystery to me. But the forms themselves are quite attractive.They’re dense and heavy on the right and then become sparer and springier as we move to the left. These formsseem to echo those of the surrounding leaves, branches, and trees. Whether this effect is deliberate – consciouslyso or not – I do not know, but I find it striking, and pleasing.

Notice that there is some large-curved blue scribbling on the surface of this piece. That is probably a lateraddition, perhaps a critical commentary as well. I don’t know what to make of the white and yellow paintballmarks, whether they’re commentary or just collateral damage.

And then there is that odd big-toothed creature at the upper left. It seems to emerge from the forms as though itwere the spirit moving them and emerging from them. This creature, like Jersey Joe’s green elephantoid, is acharacter. Characters, of course, are representational. As graffs have developed, the styles used in renderingcharacters have proliferated. The first characters – back in the 1970s – were often well-known cartoon charactersand were, of course, rendered in cartoon style. Writers began inventing their own characters and explored realisticand surrealistic styles for rendering them. Often groups of writers would collaborate on a single extended work,called a production. Some productions consist of juxtaposed pieces, while others incorporate characters into thecomposition.

Here is a production painted on a bridge stanchion in a site that a staging area for a construction project:

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Figure 35: Atomic production

The right-hand piece is X-form while the left-hand piece is a crazy organic. The character in the middle isrendered in a realistic style, set surrealistically in a mushroom cloud. It is entitled “Innocent Screams.”

Figure 36: Innocent screams

But Is It Art?

To the extent that I am using my photographs and prose to document graffiti, the question “is it art?” is of littleinterest. In that context, the opinions that matter are those of the writers, their friends and families, and theirwider and dispersed communities. Serious, skilled, and hard-working people take graffs seriously, and that’ssufficient for me in my capacity as urban ethnographer, a recorder of existing artifacts and practices, a maker ofdocuments.

But that’s not all that I’m doing. I am also interpreting this phenomenon, graffs. In thus talking of “interpretation” I do not mean anything so trivial as the notion that any photograph is, in some sense, aninterpretation and any prose around and about such photographs must necessarily be interpretive as well. No, Iam interpreting in the deeper sense that I am attempting to comprehend, to find some larger order and pattern ingraffs.

Just what that pattern is, that is not clear to me. That is why I sift through the photographs and sort them intopiles, and why I write about them. As I explain below, many of my photographs are intended to be interpretative,

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rather than simply documenting the marks on the walls, or the railroad ties, the dirt, or the rocks, whatever thesurface happens to be.

In this context, my sense of the aesthetic value of graffs is a legitimate issue. But the issue cannot properly bejoined by asking: Is it art? The notion of “art” carries too much baggage, is too deeply enmeshed in issues ofclass, authority, elitism, and the universal. Those issues must be addressed, but not here and now, not at thebeginning. We must get our bearings first.

Graffs are expressive culture. They serve various purposes for the people who make them. Most basically, theystake a claim on public space; they say “I am, my friends and family too.” They are also an expression ofbravado, of machismo. Tags and throwies are can be made quickly and often and so are appropriate vehicles forthe blunt assertion of existence and the staking of territorial claims. Complex pieces take more time to craft, andso must be executed in protected spaces. They are appropriate to the expression of skill, and of the thinking andlearning that is behind the skill. These are the graffs that bring notions of capital “A” Art into play.

Graffs have been in gallery shows and museums for roughly a quarter of a century. In that institutional sense,graffs are Art, some of them at least. From my point of view, my deeply biased and interested perspective,however, that is hardly a recommendation. Lots of things have been endorsed by that institutional culture, someof them fine, some of them not. That the world of institutionalized art has room for graffiti is not surprising. Butthat is not, in itself, a recommendation.

Yes, I want to engage the Guardians of Art. But I don’t trust their terms. It’s not that I think they are particularlydevious or dishonest but simply that they start with the conventions of easel painting and work outward fromthere. Graffs demand different terms of engagement. I’m exploring those terms.

The most basic aesthetic issue is that of materials, are they adequate to the full range of the human imagination? Iam sure, for example, that there are some remarkable kazoo virtuosi in this world. But the kazoo is such a limitedinstrument that I see little future for it in the concert hall, nor does it have much of a role on the village greeneither. Similarly, I have seen photographs of intricate structures made by gluing burnt wooden matches together.But that material will not support, for example, Michelangelo’s Pieta or one of Brancusi’s birds.

Judging from the work I’ve seen in my neighborhood and photographs I’ve seen of graffs around the world, thematerial issue has been satisfied for over three decades. Writers skilled in the ways of aerosol can put anything ona surface they can imagine. But it’s not just aerosol and exterior walls and surfaces – though this is a matter ofcontention within the graff world. Exactly how the images are made is secondary. What’s at issue is just what theimages are.

Or rather, the pictorial space in which the images are deployed. That is, subject matter is not the issue. If it’sbeen drawn, painted, tiled, or woven by anyone anywhere, chances are a graff writer has seen it and put it on awall somewhere else. Not necessarily in Jersey City in my neighborhood, but somewhere – across the river inManhattan, or across the ocean in Barcelona, Sao Paulo, Cape Town, Melbourne, or Tokyo. You can read thehistory of the world’s visual arts in graffs.

But have graff writers made any discoveries about pictorial space? That’s the question. And I don’t have ananswer for it. But I can tell you why I believe it’s the question to ask and why I believe that graff writers mayalready have discovered something new, or are likely to do so in the future.

Consider the tradition of Western representational art from the Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century. Allof those paintings and drawings and prints are inscribed within the projection of 3D Euclidian geometry onto thepictorial plane. The discovery and deployment of that projection is fundamental to Western art. It opened up awhole new world.

And when that world started to seem old and stuffy, artists moved beyond it, not by painting new subject matter –

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though there was some of that – but by proposing new conceptions of pictorial space. The cubists weren’t happywith the Euclidian projection and, in effect, tried to treat the picture plane as though it were a 3D space, or was itthat they tried to project a 4D space onto the plane? Whatever. Kandinsky used the 2D image plane to depict atwo and a half-dimensional pictorial space (the notion is from the visual perception work of the late David Marr)filled with lines and surfaces in motion, but no solid objects. Jackson Pollack painted motion in fractal spacewhile Mark Rothko gave us colored luminosity in spaces of undefined dimensionality.

Geometrical terms and metaphors, however, are not the only way to think about pictorial space. We must alsoneed to think about how the mind inhabits the space, about how the body, brain, and mind construct that space.We see through the eyes and the visual areas of the brain, but I’m quite sure that we understand through themotor system and balance system as well. Wildstyle graffs are rich in visual motion. We don’t simply see themwith our eyes, we feel them with out hands and move about them with our bodies. We do this with all images,but do graffs ask us to move through space in new ways? That’s the question, and I’m sure that, at some level,the answer will be stated in neural times, not only for graffs, but for all the visual arts.

The physical scale of graffs is important, and almost impossible to convey in photographs. Graffs often extendsix, eight, twelve feet off the ground. A piece may easily be ten feet wide or more, a production can span 10, 15,or 20 yards. They are painted with large motions of the arms and trunk, as Jackson Pollack painted hisabstractions. You observe graffs by walking to and from them, back and forth from one side to another. Whenyour primary contact with a graff is through a photo, all this body motion must be compressed into mere eyemovements.

Yet that limitation might not be fatal to a viewer with imagination. Some years ago I interviewed an artist namedIrving Geis; he’d spent the last decades of his career creating images of complex biological molecules. He toldme that, in order to visualize the structure, he would imagine himself walking around inside the molecule. IfIrving Geis can project his entire body into a molecule, then I suspect that we can project our bodies into imagesof graffs and thereby walk around in them.

Then there is the discipline of the name. Whatever the chosen name, the writer is stuck with it. It’s one thing toget tags and throwies in as many places as possible. This is a game about speed and coverage. Not only does itnot matter that the tags and throwies are much alike; the lack of variety is what makes the game possible at all.

Making pieces is a different game, one about skill, style, and originality. Here the writer is challenged to inventnew ways of writing the same name, new forms to impose on the name as a gestalt, and on the individual lettersas components in the gestalt. Writers have worked with the forms in 2D and 3D, and with the surfaces as well.And they have worked figurative materials into their pieces as well, from cartoon figures through hyper-realisticfigures, landscapes, and cityscapes.

What seems important to me is that, while graffs are created on 2D surfaces, the fundamental conception of thepictorial world is not itself spatial. For names are not spatial, though letter forms are. When the graff writercreates drop shadows he does not thereby convert the pictorial world into a 3D space. Rather he places a 3Dspace in the world as one object. That object may dominate the world, but it is not the only object in that world.It is precisely because the graff pictorial world is not spatially conceived that it has been able to work soeffectively with letter forms and name forms in two and three dimensions. The dimensionality is inserted into theworld as a pictorial device, but everything is anchored in the name, which is not itself spatial.

The name is ultimately an abstract object, a place-holder and pointer in a social network. It’s expressions mustinevitably take on the spatial characteristics of the medium of expression. To use a well-worn terminology, thename’s signified is not inherently spatial, but its signifier is. When the name is expressed in speech, the signifieris extended in time; when expressed in writing, the signifier is extended in 2D space. We must not confuse thespatial extension of the physical graff with the non-dimensional name that it represents.

In the case of representational art within the realistic traditions of the West, there is a specific relationship

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between the 2D forms of the physical image and the 3D space that is projected onto and represented on thesurface. Graffs, as we have seen, are quite different. It is the name that is represented and, by implication, thatsocial network of graff writers that is implied in every graff. That network is the foundation of the expressiveform, not the various graphic conventions employed in a given piece.

Graffs are 2D forms because they are created by inscribing names on planar surfaces. As appropriate, they mayemploy standard conventions for projecting 3D objects onto a plane; but that projection should be considered alocal property of the object or objects that use it, not a property of entire pictorial space. That pictorial space, thespace conjured up by the 2D marks, has no specified dimensionality. In particular, it is neither in rebellionagainst the projective conventions of Western realism, nor an affirmation of any of the various rejections of andreplacements for those conventions – impressionist, cubist, surreal, abstract, and so forth. It is not that graffwriters are completely unaware or unconcerned about those traditions, but rather that their own tradition aroseoutside that cultural stream – in tagging – and remains anchored outside it. Writers may well employ elementsand techniques from such traditions, but that should not be taken as an affirmation of those traditions. But is notrequired by his tradition to have an opinion on such matters or to use such techniques. Only the name is required.

Even as graff writers have evaded and sidestepped the aesthetic controversies that bedevil and stymie themuseum-and-gallery world, they have employed the technological tools of industrial and post-industrialcivilizations – photography and the internet – to create an international and transcultural network of writers andaficionados conversant with these emerging graphic conventions. These writers treat the surfaces and digitalnetworks of post-industrial civilization as a new savanna on which they make their marks, attempting to tame itto an order they can inhabit.

Graffland: how Many Degrees of Separation?

Now I want to turn from the graffs to the people who make them. What I am interested in is the relationships thatexist between them, specifically, the relationships they establish by writing on the same surfaces with oneanother. Consider this photograph, which shows a part of the north face of a cliff outside the west end of BergenTunnel:

Figure 37: Cliff, West end of the Bergen Tunnel

It’s like the Bull Durham wall in that it has scattered graffs that are not ordered in any particular way. Like the

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Bull Durham wall, it would appear to be a community bulletin board.

Beyond the fact that one wall is man-made brick, the other natural rock, there are differences, however, and theyare important. The people marking the Bull Durham wall live in the neighborhood and they don’t appear to bewriters, at least not accomplished ones. I don’t know where the people tagging this cliff live, but it’s not locatedin a residential area. And all of them are writers; I recognize some of the tags from other sites. No one sees thissite except for people associated with the railroad, graff writers (and photographers), and various miscellaneouspeople – the day I took that photograph I met a man who’d ridden his bicycle through the Erie Cut, which is 50yards south of the tunnel and which is the route I took to this point as well.

Now consider this wall, which is on the underside of a large arch supporting Palisades Avenue as it goes acrossthe Erie Cut a bit less than a mile to the East:

Figure 38: Piecework, Palisades arch

At the base of the wall we see a jumble of pieces, tags, and throwies. This is not a coordinated production.Rather, like the cliff outside the tunnel, it reflects the uncoordinated activity of many writers over some period oftime. A writer comes through, puts a mark on the wall – a tag, a throwie, a piece, all of them – and moves on.Because this surface is smoother than the cliff, and more secluded, it is better suited to elaborate throwies andpieces.

Graff sites are like this. While isolated graffs do exist, for the most part, one graff attracts another. Graffs occurin clumps of varying sizes. If the surface is small, it will only attract tags. If it is larger graffs, throwies andpieces as the surface and local traffic conditions permit. As an order of magnitude guess, that cliff wall (Figure37) has 10s of tags on it while the arch wall (Figure 38) has 10s of throwies and pieces, with many more tagsscattered around. But that arch wall is one of a dozen or so such walls in the Erie cut, each with graffs on them.The Erie Cut must have on the order of 100s of tags, throwies and pieces in it, with new ones being added andcrowding out older ones. And the Erie Cut is only one of roughly a half dozen areas that I’ve beenphotographing, though it may be the richest one. If you count all the tags, throwies, and pieces in this area, itmust come to 1000s.

Now let’s play the six degrees of separation game with graff writers. Let us say that two writers are connected byone link if they’ve marked the same surface. If we were to do this as a real research exercise, we might want

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make distinctions between tags, throwies, and pieces, and weight the link between writers according to how manysurfaces they share. But let’s not worry about such details, as we’re not actually going to map out the connectionsbetween writers; we’re just going to think about it.

The point of this exercise, of course, is to ask how may links, on average, connect any pair of graff writers in theentire world. I suspect that the number is very small; if not three or four, certainly under ten. Note that, as I havedefined it, I’m not concerned about whether or not there is a personal connection between a pair of writers,whether they’ve ever had a conversation. I just want to know whether or not they are likely to have see oneanother’s tags, throwies, or pieces. If they have, then there’s a link between them. Note also that it is possible forwriter A to have seen writer B’s work without B having seen A’s. While we might want to restrict this exerciseto reciprocal links, that isn’t how cultural influence works. Cultural influence can be and often is unidirectional.

As you may recall, earlier in this essay I showed a piece by Meres that was behind a homeless man’s sleepinghut. Meres manages the 5 Pointz Foundation, a large warehouse in Queens whose walls been given over to graffitiartists, who come from all over the world to leave their marks there. There are tens of thousands of graffs at 5Pointz, though only a fraction of them are pieces, and Meres himself has pieces on the walls at 5 Pointz. Doeseach writer who’s up at 5 Pointz get a link to Meres? If so, then writers who aren’t up at 5 Pointz will be onlytwo links from Meres if they’re up with any writer who is up at 5 Pointz.

Keep in mind, of course, that Meres writes at other places, such as the ruins of the abandoned chocolate factoryon the northern edge of Jersey City. Any writer who’s up at that factory is up with Meres and so is no more thantwo links from any writer up at 5 Pointz. Or would be if it weren’t for the fact that the Meres piece at thechocolate factory is destroyed and that it is only a matter of time before the remaining pieces, tags, and throwiesare gone as well. Flux is thus an issue. Which is only to say that, if and when researchers attempt to establish theinterrelations in the graff community, there will be interesting conceptual and methodological problems toconsider.

What, for example, do we do about freight cars – “freights” or “fr8s” in the vernacular? Many writers paintfreights, tags, throwies, and pieces, and a few specialize in them. At various times on my visit to the BrunswickTracks site freight trains have come though and many of the cars have had graffs on them, for example:

Figure 39: Tanker car with graffs

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Figure 40: Box car with graffs

Freight cars move around, often from one railroad line to another, and can thus pick up graffs from writers indifferent cities. We need to accommodate these graffs if we are to have a full picture of the connectivity thatgraff writers establish with one another through their graffs.

And then there is the internet. Graff writers are constantly in touch with one another through the internet.Photographs are posted and commented on, information is shared. Nor is it unheard of to see a URL painted on agraff. There are two at the top of this piece by Ceaze (which has recently been painted over), one to the left, theother to the right:

Figure 41: Graff with URLs

The graff world thus spans two of the modern world’s core technologies, the industrial age railroad and theinternet of the information age, and uses both to convey its images from one place to another.

This world-wide-web of graff writers is, in effect, a social organization dedicated to maintaining the world-wide-graff-web. It does so by keeping it in constant flux. A writer paints a graff, it erodes through weather and thework of other writers, and in time is replaced by a new graff or graffs. The appearance of the world-wide-graff-web changes constantly so that is overall integrity remains uncompromised and the network becomes larger andmore varied.

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The upshot of this is that ideas and styles travel rapidly through the network. The basic expressive forms of thegraff tradition – the use of the name in the form of tags, throwies and pieces – exist wherever graffs are painted.Many of the same graphic techniques – letter styles and embellishments, 3D edges, drop shadows, “shines,” andso forth – are present everywhere, see, for example, Nicholas Ganz, Graffiti World: Street Art from FiveContinents. Yet, because the graff tradition has no foundational commitment to any artistic culture outside itscommitment to its own tradition of letter styles and motifs, it can assimilate elements from other traditions, breakthem down, recombine them, and thus generate new styles and motifs.

In the end, this social organism may be the graff tradition’s greatest innovation. In this context the question ofwhether of not graffs are Art seems somewhere between irrelevant and quaint. It is a new social mechanism forthe elaboration of expressive culture. Is this not more valuable that still more capital “A” Art?

Slum populations chilled on one side by the bleakness of modern design, and brain-cooked on theother by comic strips and TV ads with zooming letters, even brain-cooked by politicians whose ego isa virtue - I am here to help my nation - brained by the big beautiful numbers on the yard markers onfootball fields, by the whip of the capital letters in the names of products, and gut-picked by thesound of rock and roll screaming up into the voodoo of the firmament with the shriek of theperformer’s insides coiling like neon letters in the blue satanic light, yes, all the excrescence of thehighways and the fluorescent wonderlands of every Las Vegas sign frying through the Iowa and NewJersey night, all the stomach-tightening nitty-gritty of trying to learn how to spell was in the writing,every assault on the psyche as the trains came slamming in.

– Norman Mailer, “The Faith of Graffiti”

The Photographs

However inadequate photographs may be as documents for presenting graffs, they’re the documents I’ve got. Allphotographs are tricky beasts and thus these photos of graffs present the standard challenges of medium andintention.

The most basic problem I’ve had with these photographs is “fixing” the colors when rendering them with thecomputer – I use Photoshop. The obvious choice, of course, is to get the colors to look like they were when youwere actually there. But that appearance is only a memory. The lighting conditions on the screen and in the roomwhere you work or view the images are quite different from those on-site. I have attempted to keep these imagesmore or less within range of what you could actually see at the site.

These images also present a specific temptation. When newly painted the colors of graffs tend to be bright andtheir surfaces smooth and shiny. But they age quickly; the surface becomes dull and the colors faded. It is quiteeasy to brighten the images of aged graffs in Photoshop, perhaps even to something like they appeared whennew. But how can you tell? No doubt I have succumbed to that temptation here and there, but not tooegregiously.

There is another issue, that of intention. These photographs document the work of other artists. Ideally I shouldtake a “neutral” or “transparent” stance in composing and framing my shots so that one sees only what the artistintended, with minimal interpretive interference from the photographer, i.e. me. I have taken and prepared manyphotographs in this vein.

But not all of them, not by any means. These are not easel paintings, created as self-contained aesthetic objects.These pieces exist out in the world where what happens to them is beyond the control of the artists or of museumcurators. Some of them may be conceived in the spirit of easel paintings, first developed in sketches and then

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executed on whatever surface is available. But some of them – I have no idea of the percentage – will have beenimprovised on the spot, where the artist is susceptible to the immediate context. However they were conceived,whatever the artist’s intentions, graffs exist outdoors in contexts where their appearance changes according totime of day, season of the year, and current weather conditions. Their surfaces will degrade, as I’ve alreadymentioned, and others will come along and write over the topmost layer of imagery.

These things are important, and I have attempted to document them. I have taken many photographs where I aminterested in documenting the context in which these graffs exist. The more image area I devote to surroundingcontext, the more choice I must exercise in choosing that context and framing the graffs within it. As I do this Iam inevitably imposing circumstances on the graffs that are arbitrary with respect to whatever intention the writermay have had. In choosing those circumstances I am interpreting those graffs; I am taking what the worldpresents to me and using my craftsmanship to create order and meaning.

For example, when I photographed that rock-form AIDS graff (Figure 2) through the trees, I was interpreting thegraff. To be sure, I did not create the trees, or the lighting, much less manipulate the graff itself. But I choose thatparticular shot, at that time of day, because I wanted to create a certain kind of image. I wanted to create theimage of a mysterious structure hidden away in a lost world. Why did I want to create that image?

Because it casts the viewer in the role of an archaeologist investigating a strange but possibly quite wonderfulcivilization. That’s a useful perspective to take with you into the graff world. It reminds you that you are astranger here, but it also prompts you to attend carefully to what you see, for it may be your best evidence aboutthe lives of the people who made the images.

In this case, that last is not true. The writers are alive, most of them, though not necessarily available. Still, Ibelieve that we should attend to their work as though it were all we will ever know about them. For I believe thattheir art will, in time, become ancestral to new schools and styles that we cannot now imagine.

* * * * *

I keep my online photographs at Flickr, where my screen name is STC4blues. Flickr allows you to organizeimages into sets, and sets into collections. I’ve organized these images in three collections. The sets in the Sitescollection are organized according to location, with one set for each different site. Each set in the Changescollection shows a single surface photographed at different times, with different graffs on it at thos times. The

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last collection, Categories, organizes set according to some analytic category. The graffs in these sets will notnecessarily be at the same site, though in some cases they are.The Sites

This satellite image from Google Earth shows the area I have been investigating:

That’s the Hudson River in the middle, with the route of the Holland Tunnel drawn on the river. The pushpin tothe right indicates Washington Square Park, which is in Greenwich Village. My graffiti sites are within theshaded area to the left. Note that these are not the only graffiti sites in Jersey City; there are others, but theyaren't within easy walking distance of where I live and so I haven't investigated them.

Here is a closer look at that area:

Notice the diagonal green area in the middle-right of the image; that’s the edge of the Jersey Palisades. The landto the west (left) of that is roughly 80 to 100 feet above the lad to the east. I will say a bit about each area when Iintroduce the photos. All I want to do now is to associate names with areas on the map. The names are mind, butsome of them are grounded in local usage. Starting from the west:

BA – EC: Bergen Arches – Erie CutBR: Brunswick Tracks

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CT: The Cut, but not the Erie Cut, though physically close to it.YD: The YardSK8: Skate ParkS: Chocolate Factory, SouthN: Chocolate Factory, NorthJC: Jersey-ColesHC: Holland Corridor

Pushpins:

Blue: Dickinson High School (up on the Heights overlooking downtown)Green: Apartment building where I liveRed: Toll booths for Holland Tunnel

I currently have 14 sets organized by site. I’ve listed them below, along with some comments about each and aphotograph or two.

Graff Territory: This set of consists of images that span the entire area I’ve been investigating. I’ve linked everyimage in this set to an online map. To the left of each image you’ll find a block of material called “Additionalinformation.” The first line in that block will contain a link that leads to a map. You can view the map as a linedrawing, as a satellite image, or a hybrid of both.

Bergen Arches – Erie Cut: This is a big trench blasted through the Jersey Palisades early in the 20th century. Itwas built to hold four railroad lines. Three of them have since been ripped out, the fourth is broken and not used.The cut has been abandoned and allowed to grow over. Most of the graffiti is on the arches supporting the roadsthat cross over the cut. Some of the graffiti in this area is quite recent and changing. I’ve seen evidence thathomeless people sleep under at least one of these arches.

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Brunswick Tracks: This is where I started photographing graffiti. One railroad line runs through this area, and itis still active. If you are on-site for more than an hour or so during the week you will see at least one freighttrain. They seem to be less frequent on weekends.

Most of the graffiti at this site is painted at the base of large columns and stanchions supporting Interstate 78 as itfeeds into the Holland Tunnel. When I first walked the site I felt like I was in some ancient temple, with sacredart on its massive columns. The site is quite active, with changes weekly, some minor, but some major. Homelessmen live here.

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All the photos in Colonnade at the Brunswick Tracks were taken at that site. I framed them to emphasize theappearance of those rows of support columns.

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The Cut: This is the northern end of the Brunswick Tracks area. The railroad line goes into the Bergen Tunnel atthe western end of this site. The Bergen Tunnel is immediately to the Northeast of the Erie Cut. There is a cliff atthe northwest sector of this site that supports roadways going down into the Holland Tunnel. Here’s a view downinto the cut from a ledge beneath those roadways:

This is a shot looking out of the Bergen Tunnel:

The Shrine of the Triceratops is my name for a single piece in the Cut. This green triceratops is on thestanchion of an abandoned single track railroad bridge that goes over the track coming from the tunnel. It is about

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seven feet high and 18 feet wide and is one of the most striking graffs at these sites (I’ve discussed it here). Thename inside the triceratops is “Joe,” leading a number of knowledgeable people to assert that it was done byJersey Joe – it is, after all, in New Jersey. Stylistically, however, it appears to be by someone else, either that, oran alter ego of Jersey Joe.

The Yard: This site is beneath and between the ramps handling in-bound and out-bound traffic for the HollandTunnel, which is about a quarter of a mile away. It is currently serving as a staging area for construction workbeing done on those ramps and roads. Graffiti in this area is on the stanchions supporting the ramps, but also onthe construction equipment, such as cherry pickers and trailers, and on the ironwork supporting the highways.

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Skate Park: This site is the remains of a demolished building that is beneath Hoboken Avenue as it goes up theside of the Palisades. This may currently be the most active site in the area. It has been appropriated by youthsinterested in skateboarding and stunt bicycling. They’ve built ramps and other obstacles at the site, most recentlyusing concrete. At the same time, graffiti writers paint on the walls, with new pieces going up fairly frequently inthe past two months.

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That close-up of one of the pieces (the green was obviously added after the original was finished) shows a stickerwith a URL. If you go to that URL you find this YouTube video, which shows people doing bike stunts at thissite during the early summer:

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Chocolate Factory, North: These graffs on what remains of a chocolate factory – at least, that’s what the localstell me. The building was partially demolished, leaving most of the ground floor and the rear wall in place. As Iwrite this, the final demolition of this building has been in progress for almost two months. The concrete andmasonry is being ground into gravel on-site.

The next photo documents the act of taking a photograph, with the lens in the middle and the photographer’shead to the left. The piece is by Ewok.

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Chocolate Factory, South: These ruins are about 80 yards south of the chocolate factory. I do not know whetheror not they are also part of the factory complex; but it is convenient to designate them with the same label as it isin approximately the same location.

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Jersey-Coles: Most of these graffs are on a block-long wall on a site that is 10 to 12 feet above street level. Theblock is elevated so that it could support railroad tracks above street level. The railroad tracks are gone, but asignal tower remains, along with an old railroad bridge.

Because they are elevated these, graffs cannot be seen from the street. As far as I can tell, most of the peoplewho live in this neighborhood (Hamilton Park) do not even know they exist. These graffs will be destroyed whenan apartment complex is built on the site; preliminary site preparation has begun.

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Holland Tunnel Corridor: This site spans the largest area of any of the sites, but it has very few pieces andmurals and the density of tags and throw-ups is low. This is where I found the Bull Durham wall. Most of theinteresting graffs are on abandoned buildings; a block of them has been demolished since I photographed it.

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I have taken the photographs of the Bull Durham wall and organized them into a separate set.

Fr8s: These graffs are painted on the sides of freight cars. I took the pictures either in The Cut or the BrunswickTracks but these graffs go wherever the cars go.

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Changes

Each of these sets shows photos of individual sites taken at different times with different graffs on the sites. Notthat I have not attempted to organize all such changes in my collection into these sets. With one exception,there’s no particular reason I choose to highlight these changes.

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That exception is the set, Somer and the Showdown at Graffiti Gulch. This set documents a graff war betweenone Somer and writers unknown. The war took place over several months on adjacent stanchions at theBrunswick Tracks. Somer also has throwies and tags scattered about.

Analytic Categories

There are lots of ways to think about graffs. These are just some obvious grouping that emerged in the course ofworking with these photos. I am not attempting to be systematic or complete about this.

Simple Graffs: Tags and throw-ups from here and there.

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X Pattern: All of these pieces are symmetrical about the vertical axis, as is an “X,” and most of them aresymmetrical about the horizontal axis as well. Since few names have letter forms that are naturally like this, theform is forcefully imposed on the name.

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Crazy Organic: The general idea is that these graffs are the “opposite” of X pattern. They aren’t symmetricalaround either the horizontal or the vertical axis. The letters may be of very different sizes, they may be twistedand distorted in extreme ways, and have various arrows, extensions and visual “bits” added to them.

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Characters: Back in the 70s writers started adding characters to their pieces, often taken from cartoon strips. Forexample, the (now-deceased) writer known as Dondi took his name from the cartoon character that appeared inmany of his piece. All the graffs in this set have some kind of character in them.

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Individual writers: Ceaze and Gaser frequently write together and have similar styles. Their letters arehorizontally aligned and of approximately equal height. The degree of elaboration varies greatly, from simpleblock letters to highly elaborated “wild style” letters that are almost unreadable.

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Both Japan Joe and Jersey Joe are both named “Joe” and write in New Jersey, though they write elsewhere too.They may even be the same person, though their styles are quite different. Jersey Joe is well-known, with anational if not international reputation and his own website. As far as I can tell, a writer named Faro (seecomment by devbeep) is the only one who’s heard of Japan Joe, and I only have his word through hearsay in acomment on a photo at Flickr.

Memorials: Graffs in memory of someone who has died.

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Indiana SLuGS and the Journey to Nowhere in Particular: These photos document a site visit I took with awriter named PLASMA SLuGS. I’ve written about this trip in Journey to 3Tops: Indiana SLuGS and the Landthat Time Forgot.

Subsequent to this trip PLASMA SLuGS has been back in Jersey City, getting up in the Brunswick Tracks andBergen Arches areas. I have organized photos of some these graffs into a separate set.

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Learning More About Graffs

In the summer of 2006 New York Magazine published an oral history of New York City graffs along with somephotos: “Graffiti in Its Own Words.” It’s online, so start here.

More generally, the web is loaded with graff material, lots of it provided by writers themselves. Start with ArtCrimes and work your way from there. The site has photographs from around the world along with articles,interviews, bibliographies, and links. The Wikipedia articles are useful as well, the main one and the one onterminology. Graffiti Archeology is devoted to tracking individual sites as the graffs change over time.

When you begin to crave hard copy, start with Jon Naar, The Birth of Graffiti (2007) and with Martha Cooperand Henry Chalfant, Subway Art (1984). Naar was the one of the first professional photographers to documentgraffiti, perhaps the first. He took these photos in 1973 and published 39 of them in The Faith of Graffiti (1974),with a preface by Norman Mailer. Birth republishes those plus dozens more. These photographs are particularlyimportant because they document the emergence of piecing from tagging and throwies. Subway Art is about the “golden age” of graffs in the subways of New York City: great photographs, of the graffs and the writers, goodquotes, a glossary, all the basics. While you’re at it, get the documentary that Chalfant and Tony Silver directedin 1983, Style Wars. It shows writers in action, in the yards, at home, looking though photos of their work. Thencheck out Wild Style (1982), a film directed by Charlie Arhearn and starring graff legends Lee Quinones andLady Pink, among others. I’ve read that this film is what took hip hop to Japan.

The Art of Getting Over: Graffiti at the Millennium (1999) by Stephen Powers, documents the early Philadelphiascene and traces graff to freight monikers. All City: The Book About Taking Space (2003), by Paul 107, hasextensive interviews with old school writers, and practical how-to advice on paints, caps, and can technique. Likemany books on graffiti this one contains a disclaimer on the back of the title page explaining that graff writing isillegal and that this book does not encourage anyone to put marks on any walls.

Nicholas Ganz’s Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents (2006) is about taking it off the street and intothe galleries, or, at least, treating the streets as galleries. Ganz is particularly interested in cross-breeding betweengraffs and other art styles, including photo-realism, surrealism, abstraction, and the use of paints other thanaerosols. He calls it “the post-graffiti” movement.

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Steve Grody’s Graffiti L. A.: Street Styles and Art (2007) has lots of pictures, plus a DVD with more pictures andwith some interviews. The bulk of the text consists of quotes from writers. The material on technique andaesthetics is outstanding; the material on graff society and ethics is also quite good. If I had to choose two booksto start, it would be this one and Subway Art.

RackGaki (2007), by Ryo Sanada and Suridh Hassan, is devoted to Japanese graffs. To a first approximation theylook pretty much like graffs everywhere else, including the use of Roman letters; the basic graff style is thatstrong. But one also finds, as you would expect, characters and imagery from Japanese traditions and kanjiwriting. The accompanying DVD shows writers at work and includes interviews with them (subtitled in English).

* * * * *

I’ve blogged a number of pieces about graffiti and related matters. In chronological order:

Samurai Champloo: Anachronism, Revision, Hybridity, Eclecticism and All That: This is a review of a recentanime series in which one episode is devoted to writing Japanese, graffs, and Andy Warhol. This made meforcibly aware of the international reach of graffs.

Shrine of the Triceratops: My first essay devoted to graffs. I argue that the green triceratops graff embodies thespirit of its location.

Grooves, Grafs, and Toons: Transnational Cultural Forms: This post and the next explore the idea that graffiti hasbecome a transnational form of graphic expression, comparable to African American idioms in music.

3Tops II: Graffiti Update

Journey to 3Tops: Indiana SLuGS and the Land that Time Forgot: A writer from Brooklyn contacted me aboutmy photographs and I volunteered to give him a tour of the neighborhood. He showed up with his wife, a back-pack of spray-paint, and a Canon single-lens-reflex camera. This post tells the story.

I’ve blogged a number of pieces about the analysis and aesthetics of graffs. The “What’s in a Name” section ofthis essay is a revised version of the first of these three pieces. The second and third contain material that is notin this essay. The second is speaks to the issue of the nature of the graff tradition’s pictorial space while the thirdsuggests a way to think about the overall stylistic system that has emerged. The four is derived from the “Is ItArt?” section of this essay.

Graffiti Aesthetics: Five Easy Pieces

Graffiti Aesthetics 2: Learning to See

Graffiti Aesthetics 3: Stylistic Identity

Graffiti Aesthetics 4: The Space of Writing

* * * * *

There is a great deal of graff material in web videos. I have made no attempt to explore these videos in detail.Here are a few that I’ve found on YouTube:

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Graffiti aesthetics a la Cycle: a TV interview with a writer.

Strange Attractions: Internet Replaces the Freight Train: a cop talks about how writers meet one another.

Host18, Taboo (DYM) Bombing 11 Spring St.: These writers are based in Brooklyn and have written in JerseyCity. Note: "Bombing" is a term of art that has nothing to do with explosives. It's basically a full-out graff raid onsome location or neighborhood.

Madvillain "Monkey Suite" x Faro x Knox x MF DOOM x Madlib: Faro – the one who does the mummies – hasa number of graffs in Jersey City.

MERES interview at 5 Pointz Queens New York from Open Air: As the manager of the 5 Pointz “graffatorium”(my word), Meres is at the center of the graff world.

* * * * *

Acknowledgements: First I would like to thank Susan Farrell, of Art Crimes, for her advice, commentary, andencouragement since I began this research late last October. Bruce Jackson and Ellen Esrock have listened to metalk about this stuff and have responded in useful ways. I'd like to give a special shout out to Plasma Slugs andLayla for joining me in afternoon of adventure and exploration. Finally, Problems, Love is Kind, devdeep, andothers posting to Flickr have made useful comments.

* * * * *


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