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Punk graffiti: stencils and tags since 1977

Shepard Fairey, author of the Obey Giant campaign and one of the big stars of postgraffiti, has said it many times: his education didn’t revolve around graffiti, but around skate and punk. When, in 1989, he produced the sticker that was to be the germ of all his subsequent work, Fairey had had little contact with graffiti.

One of the original stickers by Fairey. Image taken from here.

A giant poster in London, 2007. Image taken from here.

His original work derived from his involvement in punk and skate cultures. Both cultures revolve (skate doesn’t so much anymore) around DIY philosophy. The home-brewed media of the early Fairey –stickers and stencils– are part of these cultures. The stencil, an ancient technique connected to the army and to industry as much as to propaganda and folk art, came to punk as a legacy of the parisian movements of 1968, which had used it profusely.

Urban art researcher Tristan Manco wrote that “stencils have a long association with rebellion and punk. The punk movement used stencils because they fitted the general DIY philosophy.” Stencil is, indeed, the outdoor communication technique that is closest to DIY. It lets a person disseminate his idea with the minimum resources. Manco thinks the adoption of the stencil worked also as a “reference to utilitarian and military style, which punk appropriated to subvert symbols of authority.”

Punks use the stencil mostly as a tool to disseminate political messages. However, the arrival of the stencil to the punk culture was also linked to the dissemination of the identities of music bands. The british band Crass, formed in 1977, was the first to use stencils in punk culture. Its members, closely involved in social struggles, are also considered the introductors of anarchist philosophy in punk.

Among the graffiti at the dressing room of the CBGB in New York in 1977 is a Crass logo, reproduced with a stencil. Image by Steph Chernikowski.

Front and back covers of Stations of the Crass, 1979.

Template of political stencils distributed by Crass.

The members of Crass said: “Since early ‘77 we had been involved in maintaining a graffiti war throughout Central London. Our stencilled messages, anything from ‘Fight War Not Wars’ to ‘Stuff Your Sexist Shit’, were the first of their kind to appear in the UK and inspired a whole movement.”

The link between the band and their stencil production became so strong that the title of their second album was “Stations of the Crass”, in a reference to their actions in the London subway, the group’s favourite place for intervention. The cover image shows several of their distictive stencils, that they kept on using well into the eighties.

Crass used stenciling to disseminate political slogans, but also to disseminate the band’s logo, which became one of the icons of punk. Also, the Tom Robinson Band, a british band formed in 1976 and as militant as Crass, used stencils to propagate its logo, a raised fist drawn from socialist iconography.

Apart from their musical activity, Crass, as well as TRB, functioned as activist collectives. Propagating their identity was, then, equivalent to propagating the identity of a political party or labor union, something natural in the tradition of political graffiti. Therefore, the transition by which the dissemination of political slogans became the dissemination of the identity of music bands happened in a very natural way, and within particularly militant bands.

The habit of mixing political messages with bands’ names on the walls soon became a part of punk culture. From this custom stemmed the habit of writing one’s nickname, something that, in punk, functions as another exercise in public demonstration of rebelliousness and affirmation of individuality.

This practice has never been an essential component of punk, and nowadays the vehemence of graffiti in the New York tradition –the one usually linked with hip hop– has obliterated it almost completely. However, several references lead us to assume it had a presence in many places, particularly at the start of the eighties. The influential graffiti writer and artist Barry McGee tells how he came across about that time with the idea of graffiti through the San Francisco punk scene: “It was a lot of punk rock shows and stuff like that. There was always graffiti in these places and I was just like, “Who is this guy? I keep on seeing this guy.” There was this one guy, Cuba, he wrote “Cuba” and it was at all the same hardcore shows in the bathroom, on the door, and on the street.”

Some tags from the Amsterdam scene from between 1977 and 1983.

The excelent documentary Kroonjuwelen rescues footage of Dr. Rat, the most important writer of the scene.

In two places in the world at least, Amsterdam and specially Madrid, the habit expanded until it gave way to actual scenes, already independent from punk culture, formed by writers focused on the competition for “getting up” more than the rest. Both scenes developed before the New York graffiti tradition took root in the youth of Europe. They were indigenous traditions that produced specific customs and codes, different from those of New York graffiti, although sharing with it the main premise: multiplying the presence of the name.

Both cultures dissapeared with the generalization of New York graffiti. In Amsterdam, this transition took place before the local culture had time to be fully defined. Madrid culture was isolated longer, because of the cultural inertia of the post-Franco era. Thanks to that, the originator and leader of the current, the legendary Muelle, had time for his particular graphic language to mature, a language that the whole scene adopted, giving way to one of the rare graffiti cultures independent from the New York tradition that have reached some degree of complexity.

Here are some images of tags in Madrid in the eighties, from Einsamkeit’s archives. It’s the scene of the “indigenous” or “flecheros”, a scarcely documented phenomenon (only Madrid old school and Flecheros gather some information about it) that we studied here not long ago.

Larry 88 VS

Bix

Tito 7 DK

Posted 22 October 2008 § Artivism § Eighties § Graffiti § Historical § Postgraffiti § Punk § Seventies ‡ Comments (6) °

What’s graffiti, what’s postgraffiti. Julio 204 and Daniel Buren in the spring of 1968

Some days ago I got in the mail the book Golden Boy as Anthony Cool, published in New York in 1972. It’s a brief look into the first steps of New York graffiti, in the moment when the phenomenon was starting to take form.

Graffiti in the New York tradition, now spread the world over, started as a systematized version of children graffiti, that ancient custom by which children and teens write their names, likings and aversions on some walls free from parental control.

During the second half of the sixties, this tradition developed with unprecedented intensity among the children and teens of Philadelphia and New York, helped by the recent introduction of spray paint, and parallel with gang graffiti, a close but different phenomenon. In the spring of 1968, Julio 204 carried out the first prominent case of the propagation of a name across a whole neighbourhood. Inspired by his example, others began to reach further. When names started to be written beyond the bounds of the writer’s neighbourhood, graffiti, as we know it today, had appeared.

It is the “all city” concept, to reach all city, the core idea of the movement that would end up covering the landscape of New York with names. The subway soon became the favourite target: on the sides of the cars, along the elevated tracks across the neighbourhoods, the names paraded in front of millions of eyes, from one end of the city to the other. From 1971 on, the phenomenon exploded.

There were soon thousands of writers competing for visibility, to appear more often than their competitors, to “get up” more. The need to make the name stand out in a saturated space resulted, first, in a progressive stylization of the signatures, soon illegible to the layman, and second, in an evolution that transformed them into huge multicolor letterings the size of a subway car.

In a few years a complex culture developed and, by 1973, almost every stylistic and methodological convention that defines graffiti as it is still practiced in New York and the rest of the world –to where it was exported quite literally– was already established. The game of graffiti has perfectly defined rules, that progress pretty slowly. The goal is to gain the respect of the rest of the practitioners, and to get there one has to appear more often, on more hazardous and visible spots, and showing the best style.

The concept of style is specially important. More than to any callygraphic or painting skills, style refers to the freshness and originality with which the narrow graphic vocabulary of graffiti is reinterpreted. Methodology is also determined by rules, from the acquiring of the tools to the choosing of the spots. Although it might appear otherwise, graffiti is a conservative culture, focused on the repetition of its traditions, where creativity is appreciated only up to a certain point.

This results in a game in which the pedestrian is not taken into account at all. Graffiti is a closed code, aimed exclusively at its specialized audience. Only graffiti writers –as the practitioners call themselves– can appreciate the merits and nuances in the work of another writer, from his style to his methodology, starting from the ability to simply read the name.

This is the idea that draws the line between graffiti and postgraffiti.

One of the hundreds of mosaics by Invader in Paris

Postgraffiti is a different game, one in which the pedestrian is invited to participate. Some examples of postgraffiti we’ve talked about are Invader and Eltono, two artists that also play the game of “getting up all city”, only in a way we all can understand. What they repeat is not an illegible name but a recognizable image, that any pedestrian can identify with.

The impulse of getting up does not originate in this case from an inside competition between artists. It’s part, instead, of the artist/viewer game that constitutes the aesthetic experience of postgraffiti: the artist reproduces his image, the viewer is surprised in every encounter, and appreciates the way the artist adapts his work to each spot. This game creates a link between both parts, some rare kind of intimate relationship that takes place in public space.

In most cases of postgraffiti, the repeated theme is not limited to a fixed logo. Instead it functions as a mutable icon, as those of Invader or Eltono: an image consistent enough to be easily recognized, but with a range of variation wide enough to retain people’s attention and to confer the artist sufficient space to optimize the process of integration with the context.

In the cases of Swoon or Banksy there are no mutable icons, there are just distinctive graphic styles. If the style is distinctive enough and authorship is identifiable, the game is still the same: the relationship between artist and viewer that is the core of postgraffiti.

One of the hand-painted hummingbirds of Birds of Manhattan, the fist series by Dan Witz. New York, 1979

Almost the whole production of urban art in the eighties was postgraffiti, from Dan Witz to Blek le Rat. As is almost all of contemporary urban art, from Shepard Fairey to Roadsworth, including the countless clones of the aesthetic of the cute that for years constituted the bulk of the scene — see these two famous examples.

In the eighties, as well as today, these forms of figurative graffiti emerged from the confluence of western art tradition with different forms of popular culture: punk, skate, subvertising and, most of all, graffiti. They can be considered descendant of the unstoppable cultural current of graffiti, forms of graffiti suitable for the general public. Therefore, the term postgraffiti would be appropriate.

However, the lineage of postgraffiti is as old as that of graffiti. In the summer of 1968, while in New York Julio 204 was starting off modern graffiti, a wholly mature experiment of postgraffiti emerged in Paris.

Daniel Buren, Affichage sauvage. Paris, april, 1968

Daniel Buren (1938) was in 1966 a painter who, after having progressively minimized his vocabulary for some years, had finally limited to use in his canvases only the traditional bicolor fabric of french awnings. Since then, his greatly successful career has consisted in the repetition of the vertical stripe motif.

The start of his popularity came out of his street activities, for which he abandoned the traditional fabric to use printed paper instead, retaining the original width –8′7 cm– and verticality. In march 1968 he started taking his personal icon to public spaces: first on the backs of human billboards, and immediately in the first auffichages sauvages, illegal installations on street-level advertising frames.

In 1969 he called attention to himself when, after having his participation turned down in the collective exhibition When attitudes become form in Bern, Switzerland, he carried out a series of installations around the museum. Since that moment and for several years he used his stripes, that he calles his outil visuel (visual tool) as an icon in a postgraffiti campaign that took him from New York to Tokyo.

Hommes-sandwichs, Paris, march–april, 1968

Exposition personnelle sur les limites de la liberté de l’artiste vis-à-vis de la société, Bern, march, 1969

Cinquante travaux environ New York, New York, october, 1970

Affichage sauvage, part of the project Summershow for Seth Siegelaub gallery, Paris, july–october, 1969

Cent quarante stations du métro parisien, Paris, march–april, 1970

Affichage sauvage in occassion of the Biennal of the X International Exibition, Tokyo, may, 1970

Cinq travaux/peintures, Kyoto, may, 1970

Part 2, with the collaboration of John Weber gallery, New York, april, 1973

Like many artists of the present decade, his illegal work in some cities took place as a consequence, or even as part, of his participation in some artistic event in that place. This way, legal and illegal activities benefit of a mutual feedback: the legal part pays for the trip, while the illegal part serves as promotion. A system that could be called plain and simple guerrilla advertising: the building of the lucrative brand image of an artist at the expense of the taxpayer’s cleaning bill.

All in Buren’s postgraffiti appears incredibly contemporary: his international vocation, his use of printed copies, or his fluent way of matching the legal and illegal sides of his work. It even seems to be winking at graffiti, before graffiti was born: it’s surprising that a piece like Cent quarante stations du métro parisien – which consisted in the installation of his posters on advertising frames in a hundred and forty Paris subway stations, a work that reproduces the essential stage and mechanism of graffiti, was carried out in 1970, even before the moment when, in New York, graffiti jumped from the streets into the subway.

Yet, Buren is not the first historical case of postgraffiti. Another frenchman, Gérard Zlotykamien (1949), began experimenting with his human silhouettes in 1963, and wouldn’t stop using them until forty years later. Neither was Julio 204 the first to write his name all over, there were similar cases as far back as 1959 in Philadelphia. Graffiti and postgraffiti, in fact, are not father and son. They are actually brothers, both born during the turbulent sixties as a response to the corporate monologue of the society of the spectacle.

Posted 06 October 2008 § Artists' profiles § Children graffiti § Graffiti § Historical § Postgraffiti § Seventies § Sixties ‡ Comments (18) °

Madrid eighties writing scene, Scandinavia, and Garrulo

At the start of the nineties I was lucky enough to meet some of the most influential artists of european graffiti, which was then starting to reach its maturity. Among other visits, the ones that left a more lasting influence in me were the ones I made to Scandiavia, allways one of the main stylistic focal points in the continent. Finland, in particular, is known for having created a way of understanding graffiti far from any convention and essentially fun.

In those pre-internet times, the only vehicles for getting to know graffiti from other countries were the xeroxed fanzines that circulated through mail. Like every capital city, Helsinki had its writers-produced fanzine, Gasmask, of which five issues came out between 1990 and 1992.

The original team has been producing a reedition of the five issues in a volume entitled Gasmask 6, the lost issue, that has just come out. Among the lots of new contents included is the text I’ve been commissioned to write, and that I’m posting here now. In it, I talk about the indigenous madrilenian graffiti of the eighties, that generation of el Muelle, and about finnish graffiti, all of it from the point of view of my personal experience and of the graffiti I produced around 2003 under the name Garrulo or Garr.

It includes some words from the graffiti slang. Buff refers to the act of removing graffiti. The images from indigenous madrilenian graffiti come from the archives of Remebe and Einsamkeit.

***

Madrid eighties writing scene, Scandinavia, and Garrulo

I hadn’t been active as a writer for years when i started sketching the ideas that eventually took form in these pieces. Those were sweet times for me, no work and lots of time to spend doing nothing. I lived in an old brick building in a pedestrian street in Madrid old city.

Garrulo was all about trying to climb beyond years of self-education as a perfectionist simple-letter writer by invoking the punk graffiti vibe from my teen years. It was also my humble proposal after the seminal work of folk hero and dear friend Inupie. It was about finding a Madrilenian alternative to the style that some years before Inupie had headed from Barcelona and which came to be one of the main trademarks of european writing. Led by the desire to find my own way of stripping graffiti to barebone purity i turned to my roots, to the paleograffiti scene i grew up in.

Before the advent of New York writing culture there was this guy in Madrid who started writing on his own, with his own invented style, formal language and methodological values. A punk, new wave kid from the working-class southern neighbourhood of Campamento, Muelle was to become a citywide phenomenom for years, and a synonym of graffiti for everyone, old and young. And most importantly, after him came a whole generation of writers with no other reference of graffiti than the work of each other and of the scene leader.

The indigenous graffiti scene of Madrid was romantic by today’s standards. Painting on trains was unheard-of and a socially conscious ethos existed, emanating from Muelle himself, that made most writers stay away from monuments and the like, and to focus on construction site walls, subway posters, and other surfaces that need no buff. Pieces were nonexistent and getting up with an unchanging logo-tag was the norm. A filled-in and outlined version of your tag was the thing to do when you wanted to go big, not unlike today’s grapixo from São Paulo. Visual references were taken from punk, metal and commercial graphics.

A relleno (fill-in) or grosor (width) by Muelle from around 1989.

Glub is still active today.

Josesa Punk, one of the style leaders.

Jojass Punk, one of Josesa’s followers.

This scene took over for the best part of the eighties and was the background for the most subculturally active years the city remembers, when Madrid was the heart of an explosion with which a country was spasmodically shaking off forty years of political enclosure. The scene only started to fade by the end of the decade, when New York writing gradually took its place in what was more a natural transition than an abrupt take over. Like myself, most of the main actors in the new scene had in fact been involved in the old one for years, and adopted the new set of rules as a way to have even more fun, after being exposed to Style Wars and the like.

In the start of the nineties i found myself leading the first scene of writers focused on piecing on subways. We were aware of the emerging european train scenes through the first xeroxed magazines, then coming to Spain, which had made the sight of pieces running in traffic a possibility in our minds. Although it was still to take some time, the scene would eventually become strong enough to live its golden era when panels would be in circulation for weeks.

The first european train writers to come to Madrid were Hick, Midas, Mer and Dudge, through an initial contact made with Wagon from Stockholm. That was 1990 or 91, and after that i went to Helsinki and Stockholm a couple of times, in what i guess was the first visit paid by a mediterranean train writer. The scandinavian attitude was an early influence in my way of enjoying graffiti. I was witness to how its free-range spirit became the nurturing soil for the roots of the style that Inupie was to lead by the end of the decade, and which would make a continent’s eyes turn to Barcelona and Paris.

After closely watching Inupie come up with his way of mining graffiti-pureness, i strived to find my own scheme for playing with the boiled-down essence of graffiti. It was in the memory of my first years as a writer where i found the feeling i needed. One of the core visual trends in the indigenous graffiti scene of the eighties was punk-rock angular rigidity, something i adopted as a frame on which to build the style. Thin, unmodulated strokes in the letters come from the filled-in and outlined tags Muelle made popular. Some elements in tags are directly adopted from the indigenous vocabulary. Brazilian and scandinavian heritage make part of the mix as well.

It’s been already some years since i made these pieces, and since i have been writing at all. I now find myself teaching all this to fine arts students in an university class about what i call independent public art. I speak about graffiti, postgraffiti, site-specific intervention, artivism, and the like, and students make their own urban intervention projects. Send your graffiti-clueless nephew for an Erasmus year in Madrid!

Posted 16 June 2008 § Eighties § Graffiti § Punk ‡ Comments (6) °