Graffiti are words written on walls. One common content is the author’s name. Writing one’s name on a wall has always been a human impulse, specially as a way to leave a trace on a remote or symbolically charged place.
Children have always written their names on public walls. At the end of the sixties, children and teenagers in some US cities took the practice to extremes, helped by the introduction of spray paint and influenced by urban alienation and widespread commercial messages.
Hence developed in New York City the phenomenom of graffiti, a game based on competition. Each graffiti “writer” propagates his name to make it appear more often than the rest. Soon, it was necessary to make the names stand out by making them more stylized and bigger. The small and simple signatures became complex calligraphies and big, multicolored letterings. Subway cars, widely increasing the visibility of the name by taking it across the city, became the ideal surface to write on.
By the eighties, media linked graffiti with other New York cultures, giving birth to hip-hop, which was exported internationally through films and documentaries. Graffiti was adopted word-for-word by teens the world over: its narrow rules regarding tools, formal language, methodology and values, which took form in the seventies, still govern the acts of writers all around the world.
Writers work to attain the respect of their peers. One writer’s merits depend on how many times his name appears, how hazardous are the places it appears on, and his style. Style refers not only to manual skills, but more to the knowledge of the established formal traditions and resources, and about the freshness in the reinterpretation of them.
Graffiti, therefore, uses a closed code, and is meant exclusively for an specialized audience. Postgraffiti, on the contrary, aims to communicate with a general audience.
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Tag, throw-up and piece, the three formats of graffiti.
Images (cc) funkandjazz, Rob Larsen y Unity.