The Art of Defiance

Tyson Mitman

Description

The Art of Defiance is an ethnographic portrait of how graffiti writers see their city and, in turn, how their city sees them. It explores how becoming a graffiti writer helps disenfranchised urban citizens negotiate their cultural identities, build their social capital and gain a voice within an urban environment that would prefer they remain quiet, passive and anonymous.

 

In order to both demystify and complicate our understanding of the practice of graffiti writing, this book pushes past the narrative that links the origins of graffiti to criminal gangs and instead offers a detailed portrait of graffiti as a rich urban culture with its own rules and practices. To do so, it examines the cultural history of graffiti in Philadelphia from the early 1970s onward and explores what it is like to be a graffiti writer in the city today. Ultimately, Tyson Mitman aims to humanize graffiti writers and to show that what they do is not merely destructive or puerile, but, rather, adds something important to the urban experience that is a conscious and deliberate act on the part of its practitioners.

Chapters:

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Chapter 1: Introduction and History

1.1 It Shall Be Written 

1.2 Graffiti History from Graffiti Writers’ Perspective 

1.3 Graffiti History According to the City and Media (and Writers) 

1.4 Wrap Up

Chapter 2: Graffiti and the City 

2.1 North Philly Routin’ 

2.2 Kasso, Philadelphia Mural Arts, and The Joker 

2.3 The Arrest 

2.4 The Trials 

2.5 The Authoritative Constructions of Graffiti

Chapter 3: Graffiti, Rules, and Politics 

3.1 The Rule, Guidelines, and Politics of Graffiti 

3.2 Beef Inside the Graffiti Community 

3.3 Graffiti Beef with the Rest of the Community

Interlude: Kick It Wicked

Chapter 4: The Graffiti Self and the Reimagined City 

4.1 Making Space for Making Selves 

4.2 Create, Destroy, Create, Destroy… 

4.3 Neo-Liberalism? 

4.4 The Gendered Writer 

4.5 Resist, Remake, Repeat

Conclusion: And So It Was Written

References

Vita

Index

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Arts visuels
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• General officer
• South
• History of the Americas
• Central
• General
• ART

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 11 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783208999
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2018 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2018 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2018 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Production manager: Mareike Wehner
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-898-2
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-900-2
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-899-9
Printed and bound by Gomer, UK
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Chapter 1: Introduction and History
1.1 It Shall Be Written
1.2 Graffiti History from Graffiti Writers’ Perspective
1.3 Graffiti History According to the City and Media (and Writers)
1.4 Wrap Up
Chapter 2: Graffiti and the City
2.1 North Philly Routin’
2.2 Kasso, Philadelphia Mural Arts, and The Joker
2.3 The Arrest
2.4 The Trials
2.5 The Authoritative Constructions of Graffiti
Chapter 3: Graffiti, Rules, and Politics
3.1 The Rule, Guidelines, and Politics of Graffiti
3.2 Beef Inside the Graffiti Community
3.3 Graffiti Beef with the Rest of the Community
Interlude: Kick It Wicked
Chapter 4: The Graffiti Self and the Reimagined City
4.1 Making Space for Making Selves
4.2 Create, Destroy, Create, Destroy…
4.3 Neo-Liberalism?
4.4 The Gendered Writer
4.5 Resist, Remake, Repeat
Conclusion: And So It Was Written
References
Vita
Index
Acknowledgments
First, let me thank Baby. Without her guidance and friendship this book would have never happened. I would also like to sincerely thank Zero, Mad, Peter, Lady, Nema, Nise, Moon, Kasso, Lazz, Madam, Sega, and all of the other graffiti writers who helped me during this project. It would have been impossible without them. I owe them all my gratitude and sincerest thanks. Forgive the lack of crew letters, and please forgive me if I accidentally forgot anyone. I would also like to thank my family and friends, specifically my partner Paige and our son Fisher, who endured me during the course of me writing this. And finally, I want to thank all of the graffiti writers out in the streets doing their thing. Keep up the good work.
I also owe genuine thanks to Dr Brent Luvaas for all of his help and support. This would not be nearly as good as it is without his help. Further, I would like to thank my mentors Dr Wesley Shumar and Dr Douglas Porpora. I would also like to thank Dr Mary Ebeling and Dr Phillipe Bourgis for their efforts. Their encouragement and service were integral to this happening.
My final thanks goes to anyone taking the time to read this, both these acknowledgments and this book. Thank you, dear reader. I hope you find it thought-provoking and interesting. Enjoy!
Foreword
I got my first glimpses into the graffiti world when I was in seventh grade at Trexler Middle School in Allentown, Pennsylvania. A classmate had a copy of the graffiti magazine FatCap , and he was generous enough to let me look through it. I was fascinated by what I saw. Though I largely couldn’t make out the words in the tags (a writer’s stylized signature) and pieces (often considered the most artistic style of graffiti, they are complex, intricately designed and often brightly colored works of graffiti) I saw, I was amazed at the talent exhibited through the work. And I appreciated the audacity of those who put it up illegally in city spaces, right in plain view. When I found out that it was mostly teenagers and young adults, 1 likely with no formal artistic training, who did them, I was even more impressed. At the time, I liked the throw-ups (letter outlines of one color, filled in with a different color, and sometimes outlined again, or “shelled,” with the fill-in color or a third color), primarily because I could read most of them. They were the form of graffiti most accessible to my young self, and as such I felt they were most representative of what graffiti ought to be. I was too baffled by the pieces and many of the tags to be able to appreciate them. But it only took that one issue of FatCap for me to know that I liked graffiti. It was visually impressive, rebellious, creative, and cool in a self-possessed urban way.
Of course, seeing pictures of graffiti in a magazine (or online for that matter) and seeing it on a wall or a train are two very different experiences. The scale of the work, the attention to detail, how busy or public the spot is (and thus the risk accepted to paint it), or even environmental factors like the way the wall absorbs paint or how rough, uneven, or narrow the spaces that have to be interacted with to put up that piece or throw-up or tag are often diminished or lost in pictures. This is one of the primary reasons that, to really understand what a writer went through to produce a work, one has to experience that work firsthand and experience the spaces the writer had to move through and interact with to do so. One of the primary contentions of this book is that for graffiti to be understood as a practice, an art, and a culture, it has to be experienced directly in its raw, unmediated form. In other words, you can only understand graffiti by doing it. And that’s what I would ultimately go on to do.
When I was first introduced to graffiti, Allentown had no graffiti scene to speak of (years later, while conducting interviews for this book, graffiti writer Nise would tell me, while holding his index finger and thumb a millimeter or so apart, that Allentown has “a little tiny, tiny little one, super small”). There was some graffiti. But it was pretty much just bathroom graffiti, love declarations, political commentary, or scrawled curse words. Those graffiti styles that had captivated me in the pages of FatCap magazine did not adorn (or mar) the walls of my hometown.
It wasn’t until I moved to Philadelphia to begin university in 2001 that I encountered graffiti in its native habitat, the public spaces of a big city. There I was, immersed in graffiti as I had never been before. Graffiti was everywhere I looked. I would see it in every neighborhood, along the highways, in the subway tunnels, on the rooftops, and even blazoned on some trucks that carried it around the city. Even the places where there was no graffiti bared telltale signs of its previous presence. The large square patches of brown, or green, or red, or black paint were obvious signs to those who could interpret them that graffiti had been painted over or “buffed” out of existence.
My experience wasn’t unique. Living in spaces that are heavy with graffiti demands that it be acknowledged. It’s there, whether you want it to be or not. There’s no ignoring it. But the way individuals acknowledge it varies. Some may experience a type of frustration or even outrage at every instance of graffiti they see. Others might see it so often that it just becomes part of the noise of the urban landscape, and they go through a type of visual satiation. Still others might find the graffiti engaging, grow curious about the people who produce it, and work to decipher what they see. Graffiti grabbed my attention and made me pay attention to the city around me. I noted who was altering the spaces by writing their names on them (e.g., who was “up”). I also started noticing where graffiti was being placed, and where it was not, and began to see a system of regulations or guidelines present in where graffiti writers put their work (see Chapter 3). But at the time, these were just casual observations.
My focused and dedicated inquiry into the graffiti subculture did not begin until 2011 when I started working on this project. At about that same time I also began writing for The Infamous graffiti magazine. I wrote mostly about the legal and political implications of graffiti. I was still a novice in the scene, but I thought I was fairly well informed about graffiti history and culture. I would come to find out that I was wrong. Through the years long process of doing the research for this book and working with the dedicated and magnificent staff of The Infamous I learned that what I thought I knew about graffiti culture and its history was under-informed and occasionally entirely incorrect. The major reason for my misinformation was that at the time almost all of my knowledge about the subculture came through mediated sources. I learned about graffiti from documentaries like Style Wars (1983) and Kings Destroy (2000), magazines like FatCap, A Day in the Lyfe, Magic Moments , and On the Go , from Steve “Espo” Power’s fantastic book The Art of Getting Over (1999), and websites like Art Crimes , but at that time rarely directly from any graffiti writers. All of these sources gave me a window into the graffiti scene, taught me the terminology, and introduced me to some of graffiti’s more famous players, but the information they provided was always filtered through those sources’ ideas about what graffiti was and where it properly belonged. In other words, I was presented with a history of graffiti that was focused on New York City. While this is an essential part of the historical narrative of graffiti, I would find that it is a privileged narrative granted because of the size and importance of New York City’s pillar in the graffiti pantheon. The New York City-centric history overshadows other city’s influence on the development of graffiti. This book will discuss the often overshadowed but equally important account of graffiti’s emergence in Philadelphia.
As I will describe in the coming pages, Philadelphia is a monumentally important city in what is now a global graffiti mov