Graffiti Mystery Theatre: Same Old Same Old

Let me offer you a minor graffiti mystery, a who-done-it. Consider the piece in Figure 1:

Figure 1

Notice first of all, the overall style, that the letters are 3D. This is quite common. Next, there are designs on the faces of the letters, designs that run up to the edges of the letter forms and even seem to stretch through and across them. This too is common. Notice how the third-dimension is added along the bottom edges of the letter faces, with lines running perpendicular to the plane of the letter face. It’s as though the name-form had been cut from a piece of metal, and the faces then painted. This is another common motif in graffiti practice. Finally, notice the arrows pointing here and there. Common, very common. And rather old, old school.

Now look at Figure 2. While the overall name-form is different, as are the colors, this piece exhibits all the stylistic features I’ve pointed out for Figure 1: 1) 3D form, 2) face designs, 3) perpendiculars on the depth dimension, and 4) arrows.

Figure 2

These two pieces share one other motif, and thereby hangs the mystery. Look at the bottom half of the leftmost letter in Figure 2. See the heart shape? That’s what interests me. You can see a similar shape to the right of center in Figure 1. That heart shape is not nearly so common as the other stylistic features I’ve pointed out.

So, the pieces in Figure 1 and Figure 2 share many characteristics. Why? Perhaps the same person did both pieces, or perhaps the writer of one piece was imitating the style of the other piece. Perhaps they’re imitating a common model. Except for the heart motif, however, all the shared characteristics are so common that I see no need to resort to any of those hypotheses to account for those characteristics. Lots of writers display those characteristics in their styles. As these two pieces are relatively new, and those features are relatively old – all of them existed by the early 1980s, if not before – the parsimonious assumption is that the writers of those pieces simply drew on the pool of motifs common to graffiti culture.

But there is that heart motif and, as I’ve said, that’s not so common. In fact, it seems rather rare. How do we explain that? One writer, two pieces? One writer imitating another? Both imitating a common model? Or independent invention? The heart shape is common enough, after all, that we cannot rule-out independent invention.

Let me tell you more about those two pieces. The first is from a video of graffiti in Japan; the video is on the DVD that accompanies RackGaki, by Ryo Sanada and Suridh Hassan, which was published in 2007. That particular section of the video is about graffiti in Osaka. In the book itself there are three pieces by Zen One, an Osaka writer (pp. 56-57). One of them exhibits the first four stylistic features, but not the fifth, the heart motif. However, if we look carefully at the letter-form in Figure 1, it’s not difficult to read it as ZEn, with the heart on the left downstroke of the N. There doesn’t appear to be a “one,” though perhaps the up arrow at the right serves that purpose. In any event, it’s not unusual for writers to use various versions of their name. So, I read the piece in Figure 1 as being by an Osaka writer, Zen One, and it was done sometime before book publication in 2007, though probably not much before.

Figure 2 is a photo I took in Jersey City in November of 2006. I read the name as Then, or Then One, who gets up fairly often in Jersey City. In fact, he’s showing in an exhibition of street art that’s currently in a gallery in JC’s City Hall.

I don’t think that Zen One, from Osaka, and Then One, from Jersey City, are the same person. It’s possible that one imitated the other. After all, the web is full of graffiti photos, and writers examine them as well as post them. And it’s also possible that they both imitated a common model.

Can we find such a common model? I don’t know, but I can offer a candidate. In 1984 Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant published Subway Graffiti, one of two books known as ‘the bible’ of graffiti (Mailer and Naar, The Faith of Graffiti, is the other ‘bible’). The cover image (which is repeated on p. 45) consists of seven rows of closely-cropped pieces. In the second row from the bottom, and the right edge, is a piece that reads “HeaRt.” (Here’s a link to the book at Amazon.com. If you click on the cover image, you’ll get one large enough so you can see the piece I’m talking about.)

This piece has all five of the characteristics shared by the Zen One and Then One pieces. The face designs are not quite as developed, nor are the perpendiculars. But the features are all there. The heart shape is on the left downstroke of the “H.” And, of course, in this context, the heart motif echoes or exemplifies the name itself, whereas it’s merely a design motif in the other two pieces.

Now, did Zen One and Then One actually get the motif from Heart, even from that particular photo of the Heart piece? Perhaps. That book is very well known, chances are the both Zen One and Then One know the book and have studied it. But so have many other writers. Perhaps Then and Zen got the motif from some one or two among those others. Given that Jersey City is just across the Hudson River from New York City, it’s even possible that Then got the motif directly from Heart, whose piece was painted on a New York City subway car. It is even possible, after all, that we’ve got three cases of independent invention, though that seems unlikely to me. There’s no way to tell, given only the evidence I’ve presented here.

One final comment, about Zen One’s piece. Perhaps the most striking thing about that piece is how very much it resembles Heart’s New York 198? piece in Subway Art. There’s nothing about his piece that seems specifically Japanese, and that despite the fact that written Japanese uses an entirely different alphabet from written English. And THAT’S the most interesting thing about the graffiti in RackGaki; the styles that existed in New York City in the early 1980s are going strong in the first decade of 21st century Japan. Yes, some Japanese writers use Japanese characters, and some use Japanese design motifs (e.g. dragons, samurai), and figurative characters of Japanese provenance (e.g. anime and manga styles). But those NYC styles still exert a very strong influence, as they do all over the world.

Culture is like that, fundamentally conservative. Innovation happens within narrow parameters and at the margins. Just look at these three pieces, most likely by three writers. Two were done two decades after the first, and one was done in Japan. But any one of them would be at home on a New York City subway car in 1984, an Osaka wall in 2007, or Jersey City in 2006.