Graffiti and Transgression

They didn’t think of it as art back in the day. That came later. it was writing. And it was illegal; it was vandalism. And the vandalism mattered, not as an act of defacing property, but as an act of asserting one’s existence in a public space.

And then Norman Mailer wrote of the faith of graffiti. He embraced the vandalism. And he called it art. Is the vandalism essential to the art? One might say that the design is the design, regardless of what surface it’s on, regardless of whether or not it was done with permission. That argument makes sense.

And so there’s lots of graffiti on “permission” walls these days. All over the world. There’s graffiti on canvases, some hanging in museums and private collections. None of it illegal. Some of it even commissioned and paid-for. Is it real graffiti anymore? If not, is it art?

These questions keep spinning round and round.

You see, if the image is a name, however disguised and elaborated, then it matters whether or not that name is legally permitted to exist on that surface. For the name carries the spirit of a person, and is an assertion against the legitimacy of that surface, that wall. Without the link to the person, it’s just a design. With no spirit.

Or so one might argue.

And then there’s this. Almost two decades before he wrote about graffiti, Mailer wrote “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” which was about the attractions that a certain kind of black life had for certain kinds of mostly alienated white people. Which is to say, it’s about what those white people needed those black people to be, for their own purposes. Black reality was no where to be found.

The essay was embarrassing to read.

When I started reading The Faith of Graffiti, as opposed to looking at the pictures, I feared it would be more of the same. But it wasn’t, not at all. Mailer no longer needed a fix of hipness. He maintained his distance, perhaps the vital presence of Jon Naar’s photos kept him honest.

But the temptation is there, to value the transgressive nature of graffiti, not for what it means to the writer, but for what it means to the viewer. The viewer gets vicarious kicks through the danger the writer has put on the wall. Now the transgressing graffiti writer becomes a gladiator in the mind’s eye of the hipster art appreciator. The danger is real for the gladiator, but only a pasing thrill for the spectator. You could see it depicted in Wild Style, when Lee went to the rich folk's party and the lady invited him into her bedroom, for a commission. Transgression indeed.

There’s no way out of it. It’s inherent in the situation. It’s difficult to be honest in a dishonest world.

What wonders what will happen when a graffiti museum is created. Will  writers have to break into it in the middle of the night and spray the walls to keep it real? No one knows.