Graffiti

Historical Evolution

Graffiti is certainly not a new phenomenon, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s, new forms of graffiti began appearing on the streets and public transportation systems of Philadelphia and New York City in the United States. Young people in these cities started writing their tag names with ink markers and aerosol paint. Gradually, as these graffiti writers sought to maximize the exposure of their tag identities, both the quantity and the quality of their productions increased. By the late 1970s, elaborate artistic productions (or “pieces”) by writers like Dondi, Futura 2000, and others covered whole subway cars in New York City.

These new graffiti styles gradually gained wider exposure through books like 1984's Subway Art by photographers Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, and through early films such as the Public Broadcasting Service documentary Style Wars and the film Wild Style. This media circulation of graffiti subsequently helped facilitate its global diffusion and proliferation. Thriving graffiti scenes exist in hundreds of cities around the world, with every populated continent boasting its own hot spots and styles. These scenes and styles are by now exhaustively documented in glossy books published by major commercial publishing houses and in graffiti-related magazines and websites.

Graffiti might be viewed as an example par excellence of Michel de Certeau's tactics—an appropriation of space that insinuates into and against the dominant normative values inscribed in the urban environment. Graffiti writers see urban surfaces not as sanctified private property but as a medium for circulating their identities, artistic ambitions, and messages for each other and the wider public.

An Urban “Problem”

Not surprisingly, then, the global diffusion and proliferation of these new forms of graffiti have typically been viewed as a problem by urban authorities. Graffiti is frequently described as a kind of antisocial behavior that undermines urban quality of life. Indeed, critiques of graffiti played a formative role in the development of current approaches to law and order, which place emphasis on the need to curb antisocial behavior in the name of quality of life, such as the “broken windows” [Page 327]crime control thesis advanced by Wilson and Kelling, which claimed that signs of physical decay would lead to neighborhood decline. As a variety of scholars have emphasized, such a reading of graffiti was not uncontested and has been privileged over other possible readings in the service of quite particular political and economic interests. And, just like graffiti itself, this particular reading of graffiti as antisocial has spread from its epicenter in New York City to other cities where graffiti scenes have emerged.

...