The Paradox of Graffiti and Photos

That ^ is a so-called piece, from masterpiece. It’s by Jersey Joe, aka Rime. When you by a book of graffiti photos these days, chances are you’ll get page after page of pieces, often tightly cropped and placed edge to edge so you get six or eight pieces on a page, 12 or 16 on a two-page spread. When the case is made for graffiti-as-art, more often than not, it’s hung on pieces.

And why not? Pieces are virtuoso productions. Intricate and elaborate designs, sometimes with realistically rendered figures in them, highly colored. Pieces are difficult to do, few do them well. They don’t look at all like the UGH! tags the folks find so bothersome when they’re planted on mailboxes and lampposts on their streets, and rightly so (bothersome, I mean).

Yep, if graffiti is art, then it’s pieces that seal the deal. Except, except that piecing hardly existed in 1972 when John Naar took the photos that put graffiti on the map, and that Norman Mailer declared to be art in The Faith of Graffiti (1974). What Naar photographed and what Mailer declared into art looked more like this:

Not exactly like that—there’s more writing on top of writing in that^ then there was in Naar’s photos, nor did Naar’s photos feature luxuriant weeds around the edges but in texture and (apparent) lack of virtuosity, pretty much like it. That’s what was declared art in 1974. Were the smokin’ weed? Probably, still are. What of it?

And then we have this:

I think of it as interstitial or ‘wild’ graffiti. It’s what you get when writers empty their cans at the margins of the ‘real’ graffit. Or maybe their testing their caps. Or just sprayin’ shit for the sake of sprayin’ shit. What you get is a jumble or lines, textures and areas reflected the palimpsestic overlay of 4, 5, 9, 14, who knows? different writers over a period of weeks, months, maybe years.

The thing is, these three photos depict different, albeit related, phenomena. The look very different. But each looks good in its own way. Are the photographs art? Assuming, of course, that you’re willing to grant artistic status to photographs at all. If they art, what of the somewhat different phenomena they depict? The piece in the first photo is the only one that originates in the intention of a single mind, the artist. The rest, no one person intends those lines and colored areas. And yet the collective result is . . . not bad. Perhaps art.

So, what is art? Where is art? Is graffiti art? Do we care?