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In
October of last year Todd James and Josh Lazcano were taken into
custody in Manhattan's Soho district across the street from the
gallery that was about to show their recent 'graffiti-inspired'
work. They were held on charges of criminal damage that dated
back two or three years. It's a story that shows the glaring contradictions
inherent in an artistic genre that has one foot firmly rooted
in a tradition of subversive 'vandalism' and one freshly planted
in the more bourgeois world of upmarket galleries and coffee table
books.
So how
did we get to this point?
Well,
if you're going to get all academic about it you can trace the origins
of 'political graffiti' all the way back to the nineteenth century
and the Austrian 'Kyselak' (1795-1831) being the first person to
'tag' his name all over the country, through the Mexican mural movement
of the 1930s, right up to the political scrawlings of the Hungarian
revolution in 1956. But things start heating up quite nicely around
the tail end of the '60s with the student uprisings in Paris (and
the Situationist influence on those events) and the advent of turf-graffiti
in New York and Los Angeles. By 1975 there had been over 1,200 arrests
in New York for graffiti-related offences, and that same city had
spent seven million dollars on wiping out the product of what glossy
magazines were now calling a 'social phenomenon.'
For
the next 20 years or so graffiti kept a steady pace, enjoying the
same ups and downs as any social trend; evolving steadily within
its own boundaries; progressing, as any art form will do, to its
'next stage.' But over the past five years the universe known as
'hip-hop,' within which graffiti exists, has taken on stellar proportions,
eclipsing every other musical genre on both sides of the Atlantic,
transforming itself into what marketing personnel would call a 'major
lifestyle choice' and creating a slipstream of 'cool' within which
graffiti has been inevitably caught up.
The
corporate instinct, honed over generations and capable of recognising
trends before they really even exist, has wasted no time at all
in harnessing the revolutionary spirit behind 'street art' and has
shrewdly recognised that while graffiti is primarily an underground
culture, it also exists as a highly recognisable media text (more
important if you're an ad man), firmly ingrained in the consciousness
of the populous. It is these seemingly contradictory elements that
make graffiti a potentially marketable commodity.
But
surely graffiti has been around long enough to ride out this current
wave of corporate interest? Well maybe it doesn't want to. After
all, if a graffiti artist is commissioned to produce something for
a leading brand then it is his prerogative to do so. He can profit
from the work, make a living from his art, and pursue more independent
projects without worrying about paying the rent. This is a perfectly
acceptable hypothesis but one which throws up a few important questions
regarding style and exposure.
Graffiti
is rooted in a tradition of stylistic independence and as a result
artists who have developed within this environment tend instinctively
to produce work that is immediately identifiable as their own. On
one level this can be seen as a positive effect as it deters plagiarists
and allows the artist's name to become 'known' more easily. The
downside occurs when an artist takes his work out of its underground
context and begins to produce commercial work that can be viewed,
potentially, by millions. Then the elements that once made his work
unique can conspire to make it over-familiar and at this stage the
work is in danger of adopting the elements of homogeneity particular
to corporate branding and is therefore in danger of crossing the
line from tag to logo.
Another,
more ironic, factor which makes graffiti a potentially vulnerable
target is that graffiti has long been regarded as an example of
the 'anti-logo.' The act of creating a personalised tag and then
reproducing that tag en masse mirrors corporate marketing techniques
but also subverts them in the sense that while a logo incorporates
a range of signifiers linked to a specific product or line of products,
a tag represents nothing but itself.
Even
if that same tag is customised in some way its core elements will
remain unaffected and this gives it an endearing, indestructible
quality that logos simply don't (and can't) possess. When a large
company attempts to change the way it presents itself to the world
(remember when Pepsi changed the colour of their cans?) they are
hindered by the large amount of corporate 'baggage' their logo carries
with it, while a tag can change and evolve at will and still retain
its credibility. However, once a graffiti artist lends his style
to a certain brand or range of products, that style loses its independence
and simply becomes one more cog in the behemoth we now know as 'lifestyle
marketing.'
Graffiti,
like any other artistic genre, is only capable of existing within
a community while it exists outside the commercial mainstream. And
in one way it will always do so. However, as certain artists progress
from working on trains and walls to T-shirts and jeans this community
becomes stretched. Its borders become transient, shifting uncomfortably
between independent and commercial work.
Any
artist who chooses to produce work for commercial reasons must realise
their work is in danger of becoming incorporated into a culture
that is hungry for brands; especially those brands that are attached
to something as highly marketable as graffiti. They must recognise
that the qualities already inherent within their medium make it
uniquely vulnerable to adoption by marketing strategists desperate
for new and exciting ways of presenting old and lifeless products
to the buying public. They must admit to themselves that to ensure
the continued progression of their chosen medium they must strive
to explore the context in which it is to be produced and to learn
the nature of that context in order to subvert or even undermine
it. And, most important, they must learn not to rest on the laurels
of their chosen style, but to push themselves to produce innovative
and inspirational work in order to preserve the integrity and relevancy
of their art.
Copyright
© 2001 Robert Hinchcliffe. All Rights Reserved.
Robert Hinchcliffe lives and works in London and is a founding
member of www.funkierthanthou.com
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