The Art of Defiance: Graffiti, Politics and the Reimagined City in Philadelphia

By Tyson Mitman

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: May 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783208999

Tyson Mitman

Tyson Mitman is a lecturer in sociology and criminology at York St John University.

Book preview

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 movement. I will make the case that Philadelphia should really bear the title of modern graffiti’s birthplace. I will show that graffiti as we understand it today appeared on the walls and in the media first in Philadelphia. But that alone does not comprise Philadelphia’s importance to graffiti culture. I will also contend that Philadelphia produced the world’s first graffiti crews, which grew out of social clubs and functioned as alternatives to gangs. Further, I will show that Philadelphia is a handstyles city, or one that is dedicated to tagging (as opposed to putting up throw-ups or pieces) in a way other cities are not. And that the graffiti handstyles produced in Philadelphia are distinct cultural possessions (most prominently the wicked) belonging to the city’s graffiti subculture and its writers that produce a visual terroir that is found nowhere else. I will also argue that these styles, specifically the Gangster Hand, had an impact on how graffiti developed in New York City and on the foundational graffiti ideal of style as a competitive practice that is present in graffiti cultures the world over.

While Philadelphia’s importance in the history of graffiti is a significant point that this text makes, it was not the reason I began examining graffiti in Philadelphia. I had no idea how important this city was to graffiti history when I started. I began examining graffiti for two major reasons; the fact that I did so in Philadelphia was a consequence of serendipity. I studied graffiti because I was (1) curious about why its practitioners did it, and (2) confused as to why it is so criminalized and vilified.

I posed the first question because I wanted to understand what was to be gained from an activity that risks your freedom, can be expensive in terms of supplies (if they are not stolen or racked) and fines, can literally risk your safety and life, and to some degree is done anonymously. What do those who are dedicated to graffiti get from it that keeps them so willing to accept these risks? As this project progressed I realized that the answers to these questions were complex. Writers wrote graffiti for a multitude of reasons: fame, fun, friendship, psychological catharsis, rebellion, political voice, and freedom of expression are just some of them. Additionally, the reasons that motivate some writers might not be major considerations for others. Some might be primarily motivated by fame and expression, while others might write for fun and friendship, or any other combination of reasons, with fame being only a minor concern if it is one at all. Further, as a writer evolves their motivations can shift and change. If (and this is an if) there is one universal thread that runs through the motivations for writers it is one of freedom. But when dealing with constructs some explanation is in order, and freedom for graffiti writers means two things: freedom to build a subjective identity as they see fit, and freedom from the psychological hegemonic control that living in a modern, capitalist, authoritatively controlled space imposes.

My second question provided equally complicated and nuanced answers. Why is graffiti so criminalized and vilified? A major reason is because it is a violation of the normative visual order of a space. This reason is often reductively and dismissively stated as, graffiti is bad because it is ugly, or dirty, or makes a place feel unsafe. But what is tacitly being acknowledged is that the graffiti has violated the expected visual presentation of a space. That violation of expectation is (at least in part) what causes the often-negative reaction to graffiti’s presence. But why? Years of city-funded anti-graffiti campaigning are certainly a factor, as are the association in the media of graffiti with urban criminality, as are other reasons covered within these pages. But what makes many feel uncomfortable around graffiti and fear its presence is not the form, but rather what it represents, which is a violation of the authoritative order of the city. Graffiti’s presence makes people feel as though the authoritative control that they grant the city over them has been violated, and that spaces where graffiti exists are spaces where a kind of social contract has been defied. It can make people feel as though those spaces are uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

But that violation of the hegemonic order does something else as well, it helps to expose the unequal way resources are allocated throughout the city. Where graffiti is allowed to exist and where it is not allowed to can be a clear indicator of what spaces a city is investing its resources in and, as such, which spaces it values. When considered alongside who uses these spaces a great deal about what type of citizens and interests a city considers important can be revealed.

Graffiti represents the unauthorized visual challenge to traditional forms of power. It can offer visual, psychological, or other comfort (in its originally defined sense) to those who find themselves, or view themselves, as social outsiders. It can also unsettle authority figures and those who support or enjoy the advantages of the authoritative structure. Graffiti can serve as a political tactic in the de Certeauian sense, and it can give someone an identity in an oppressive and anonymous milieu. It can offer a small rebellion against an authoritative structure, and it can be a cry against urban anomie. It can be creative and destructive, and both at the same time. It can be an effort to achieve urban street fame and it can be cathartic art therapy. And it can simply be fun.

As this book will explain, graffiti culture is complex. To properly participate in it, a writer must know the local history of graffiti, practice the craft, work hard to be able to reproduce the valued local styles, and also strive to create original work. They must also be willing to accept risks to their safety and freedom, violate laws, and explore urban environments as few others ever do. They must navigate a complicated social world where status is based on presence (i.e., being up), and talent, but also on a system of intricate and sophisticated rules for behavior and beefs that allow for (and sometimes encourage) forms of violence. A writer must do all this while also producing their life in the city. This is very often no easy task. As this will show, being a graffiti writer takes dedication, it takes hard work and requires sacrifices and frequently offers very little in the way of reward.

It is the effort of this book to help the reader better understand what it means to be a graffiti writer, specifically one in Philadelphia, and to help make clear why someone would want to begin writing graffiti and what motivates them to continue. Further, it is the intention of this work that through an increased understanding of graffiti culture some of the stigma that is so often associated with it will be removed. But beyond even that, it is the lofty hope that this book will cause the reader to re-envision the public and social spaces that they interact with and rethink who should have the right to decide how the visual landscape of the urban environment appears and who should get to make those decision.

Note

1 While teenagers and young adults still represent a sizable portion of the graffiti producing population I found that many practitioners were continuing to write well into their adulthood. While some writers aged out, others kept going into their late twenties and early thirties. In Philadelphia especially, because of its very long graffiti history, it is not uncommon to find writers writing until their forties and beyond. There are even writers who have been consistently writing since the very early days and are likely now in their sixties or older (Rue SAM1 for example).

Chapter 1

Introduction and History

1.1 It Shall Be Written

There is no place to begin but the beginning. However, when it comes to graffiti, the beginning is a matter of some debate. There is a claim to be made that there was no beginning at all; that wall writing has always been part of human culture and modern graffiti is just another iteration of it. Cave paintings, hieroglyphics, Greek and Roman graffiti, and modern graffiti can all be grouped together. Graffiti writers though eschew this idea, saying it is far too encompassing. Not all wall writing is the same, and modern graffiti is different from other forms in the important sense that it is the intentional and repetitive writing of a name or moniker to represent a specific individual or group to grant them recognition and renown. But this is not the only division among graffiti writers and those who study graffiti as to when exactly it began. One camp claims modern graffiti has its roots as far back as the 1890s with freight monikers, names adopted by hobos who rode the rails and railroad workers who worked them (Daniel, 2005). They wrote their assumed monikers, typically in grease pencil, on the sides of freight cars or carved them into the stations and on the benches, walls, and trees along the tracks.

Still others claim that while this is certainly a referent to what we know as modern graffiti, it is aesthetically and axiologically too dissimilar to be