When got up on Monday morning I had no inkling that this week would become Graffiti Week at New Savanna. I figured that I’d do a review of The Faith of Graffiti, post it, and that would be that. I’d move on to other topics for main posts. However, that’s not what happened. Graffiti Week is what happened, so let’s get back to it.
I want to think out loud about the process of reading graffiti, or seeing the letters. FWIW, these remarks are in counterpoint to a discussion elsewhere in the blogosphere where the topic reading literary texts, which is a nasty nasty topic, very messy.
Let’s start with a simple example. Look at the vertical beam on the left side of the following photo. There’s a name there: Themo. The “m” may be just a bit fancy, but there’s no trouble reading those strokes as an “m.” I will observe, in passing, that there are any number of ways to write one’s tag. The best writers develop a distinctive style, known as a hand-style.
Now look at this photo:
I didn’t read it as Themo when I first saw it. All I knew is that it said something, and that I liked it a lot. This, of course, is not a tag, it’s not done with a few quick strokes from the spray can (or with a marker of some sort). This is a bit more elaborate, over six feet high and perhaps 10 feet wide. And yet it is very free and fluid, as though it had been dashed off quickly.
Now, once someone told me to read it as “Themo,” I didn’t have any problem seeing it that way. The “T” is obvious, as is the “h.” Notice that the vertical stroke of the “T” is joined with the tall vertical of the “h” at the bottom. In the printing trade such a combination is known as a ligature. Moving to the right, the upper part of a lowercase “e” is partially obscured by the ‘knee’ of the “h.” It’s small, but it’s there. The “e” overlaps the leftmost vertical stroke of a capital “M.” Last, we have the “o,” which is partially overlapped by the “M.” Just to the right of Themo there’s something that looks like a large, but partially erased, numeral 5. That probably belongs to the Themo, but I’m not sure. The coloring appears right.
Now, what about this piece:
It’s Themo, of course, but how could you know? I know because Problems told me so in a comment at my Flickr site. Problems is a New York City writer, based in Brooklyn, who is quite prolific and is certainly an expert about the local scene.
Given that it is Themo, how do you read the characters that way? I’ve got a few hints. Look at the bottom; there are two points where the figure touches the ground. Read those as the bottom ends of a capital “M.” You should then be able to read up those strokes to find the rest of the “M,” though it’s elaborately tricked out with various flourishes, which is characteristic of so-called “Wild Style” graffiti – a term of art that goes back to 1970s.
Now, lets look for the “T.” It has to be to the left. Look at the topmost arrow on the left and read that at the left end of the top stroke of a capital “T.” With that pinned down, the rest of a somewhat distorted and embellished capital “T” follows. The vertical ‘body’ stroke is relatively short, and wide. What about the “h”? I’m going to take a wild guess. Recall how the “T” and the “h” were combined into a ligature in the second example? Something similar is happening here. Look at that middle arrow on the left. Think of that as the “knee” stroke of a lowercase “h.” To do so, you have to think of that stroke as extending to the left of the vertical, rather than to the right – a modification well within bounds for wild style graffiti. The vertical stroke of the “h” is then to the right and is, in effect, a slender downward and curving extension of the vertical from the “T.” This is ligature almost has the aspect of a man with the bottom of the “h” being the legs and cross-bar of the “T” being the arms. The neck slash head is a small extension above the crossbar.
And that’s as far as I’ve gotten, “T” “h” and “M” out of “TheMo.” Not bad.
But I rather suspect that the local experts don’t have to decode the piece in order to identify the writer as Themo. The piece has a definite style, one that’s different from other styles in the area. Other writers simply recognize the style, though I’ve no doubt that they could read-out the individual letters if called upon to do so.
In the first example we have a name written with a certain style. In the second case, the style has become more elaborated, but the letter forms are relatively intelligible. In the last case, stylistic elaboration has taken over. The name is simply a framework or armature on which to ‘hang’ the style.
Further Reading: This post, Graffiti, Signaling, Evolution, and Art speaks to the process whereby (competitive) tagging leads to the emerge of stylistically complex pieces. In this post (at The Valve) I examine the visual logic of some pieces by Gas (see, in particular, the very illuminating comment by fear31). In this post I examine Ceaze’s visual style and contrast it with Themo’s.
ADDENDUM: The piece in the following photo will help you see the connection between the second and third "Themo" above:
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| Goth, by Themo |
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