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POST-GRAFFITI
by Gean Morenu
A year after ãFreestyle,ä the show that gave us the term
ãpost-black,ä and in light of the traveling post-Latin American
exhibition ãUltrabaroque,ä Iâm not sure whether speaking of
post-graffiti is productive. If nothing else, these exhibitions
remind us that the overused prefix leaves concepts stranded in
semantic vagueness. But regardless, I intend something much less
ambitious than mapping a massive cultural shift, or a
dissolution of calcified identities, or anything of the sort.
Rather, I simply aim to highlight the very concrete fact that
graffiti artists have moved, in great part, beyond the realm of
street art, to squat in the worlds of design and illustration.
As graffiti finds respect in these territories, nostalgia for
its shotgun wedding with the cocained-up eighties art world
seems to be boiling. Dondi White was one of the children of this
marriage and perhaps the first (Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith
Haring aside) to receive a mainstream biography, an honor in
this instance made doubly dubious because Dondi White: Style
Master General (Regan Books, 2001) renders him graffitiâs
one-dimensional monk; its saintly boy wonder sans the homosexual
subtext that may have complicated things in the manâs man world
of the train yard. This book provides an albumâs worth of
snapshots of Dondiâs work, making it indispensable for those
tracking the evolution of graffiti styles. However, it
disappointingly tosses out context, alluding to 1970s New York
merely to throw into relief Dondiâs magnanimous innocence: he
chose graffiti over gangs and, apparently, neither took drugs
nor had sex. He raised pigeons and played handball, instead.
From Brooklynâs train yards to Manhattan, the ride was short:
Dondi began showing at the legendary Fun Gallery in 1982, after
two years of solid group shows. Again, in this new setting,
Dondi behaved in exemplary fashion. Modest, shy, probably
glowing with saintly light, he managed to evade envious
colleagues, promiscuous looky loos, and drugged out, reckless
dealers. De-contextualized, his sudden dropout from this world
in 1985 is meaningless. What could Mother Teresa, loved by all
and infallible, possibly be running from, or renouncing, or
feeling exhausted with or defeated by? G-rated to the point of
exasperation, this book also cannot deal compellingly with
Dondiâs AIDS (of which he died in 1998) nor handle the massive
disparity between his work on the trains and his mediocre
paintings. Because it cannot take the hype around these
paintings for hype, it also cannot dissect that hype, nor can it
dissect what that hype did to Dondiâs life.
Corman McCormick, famous East Village alumnus, provides an
elegiac foreword that, while better than the rest of the book,
pretends that graffitiâs apotheosis occurred right before it was
exiled from the galleries in the mid-eighties. But itâs way too
obvious these days that, rather than becoming again the
inconsequential literature of neighborhoods, graffiti went on to
do with the web what it couldnât do with the gallery/museum
system: it created a) global networks, and b) global demand for
its off-shoot products. Surf a handful of graf sites and youâll
realize that the juxtaposition of work from, say, the West Bank,
Geneva, Johannesburg, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, and Gary, Indiana, is
commonplace. In these web sites, a row of digital images
summarize the negative imprint of the global corporate
model÷something like an underground rhizomatic network. But
graffitiâs situation is more complex than that of merely
assuming a peripheral position or antagonistic attitude. The
inverted model it has become is plugged into the currents of
capital.
These web-based networks have, in fact, found concrete extension
in the world of animation, publishing, clothing design, record
covers, fashion, ad campaigns, toy production, graphic
illustration, etc. Graffiti negotiates daily with the ãcultureä
that corporations support and create. It has fused its
gloriously ornamental down-and-out vernacular with the very
culture and the attendant social arrangements that foster the
possibility of maintaining folks down-and-out. In the process,
it has become something more ambiguous than simply an embodiment
of an oppositional stance or the semi-reckless behavior of
dispossessed or unruly kids.
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| Futura
2000 in action in 1982 (photo by Ivan Dellatana courtesy
of Tony Shafrazi Gallery NYC, Booth-Clibborn Editions/Futura
2000). |
If Dondi White didnât partake
in the graffiti global machine, his contemporary and graf world
veteran, Futura 2000, has led the way. Heâs a one-man industry
who specializes in, well, everything. His bio includes gallery
and museum shows, clothes and toy design, a library of record
covers, collaborations with young fashion rags and so on. But
Futura (Booth-Clibborn, 2000), a monograph dedicated to him,
isnât interesting for the biographical tidbits that ostensibly
hold together the barrage of disparate graphic styles. Rather,
itâs the explosion of these graphic vocabularies, and the
impressive range of presentational techniques, that are
interesting. Deploying lessons learned from rapid video editing
and ambitious graphics, this book is characterized by its
rat-tat-tat, video game speed, surprise on every page layout. It
continually de-familiarizes, de-stabilizes, even explodes, what
has hardened as mainstream book and magazine design. It does
this by relying on all sorts of visual metaphors that confuse
the page with a computer monitor, a TV screen, a photo album, a
teenagerâs journal, a record cover. It also does this by
introducing elements that inherently deconstruct the book
format, like vinyl stickers that once used literally leave a
ghost of their presence behind and alter the page they were on.
Or, it juxtaposes a bit of autobiographical narrative with the
standard instructions and warnings that accompany toys, in the
process collapsing the importance of one kind of text over
another by making them all subservient to intense graphic
presentation.
Scrawl: Dirty Graphics & Strange Characters (Booth-Clibborn,
1999), Scrawl Too: More Dirt (Booth-Clibborn Editions,
2001) and Schizophrenic: Lowdown Graphic Engineering Part II
(Die Gestalten Verlag, 2001) are among a slew of recent books
showcasing the work of graffiti artists who, like Futura, are
leaving their mark on mainstream industries. All these books
deliberately confuse systems of representation. Any number of
ways of depicting the world÷photography, animation, web design,
text and others÷co-habit in these books, on equal footing. And
this collapsing of the differences between systems, and the
resulting stylized or choreographed chaos, makes these books
interesting. They almost make accessible and seductive the
complexities of self-reflexive÷that is, historically aware and
conceptually dense÷graphics. But, in the end, they can
approximate these graphics only very superficially. These books
are more the graphic equivalent of MTV machinegun editing than
Bruce Mauâs kin.
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| Like
several recent books, Scrawl Too: More Dirt showcases
graffitiâs crossover to mainstream industries (cover
design by Dave Recchia and Mike Dorrian courtesy Booth-Clibborn
Editions). |
After the high of these indisputably exciting books wears off,
one is left to wonder, no doubt waxing more romantic than one
ought to these days, what graffitiâs communion with capital and
corporate culture means for its future. Clearly, some of the
things that this union has produced have revitalized and tweaked
numerous cultural artifacts, including record covers, fashion
spreads and web sites. But once corporate culture has milked
graffiti for all the profit it can produce, will it leave
graffiti, like punk, a bloodless carcass on which certain hopes
worth rescuing are projected? Or will graffiti again have
something to do with train yards, adolescent fraternity,
stealing spray cans, expressing disaffection and defying
authority?
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