American Graffiti. Margo Thompson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ said he substituted K for the C in ‘iconoclast’ because it was a more ‘evolved’ letter: ‘…the letter “c” in its formation is an incomplete cipher: 60 degrees are missing. A “k” is a formation based on the foki [sic] of it; a certain kind of science based on the knowledge of formation mechanics…’ Awareness of the structure of letters allows the writer to ‘arm’ them, as he believed the medieval monks had done with the points in their letters: ‘When they got to the points in the Gothic texts, we extended and made arrows’. Writers, he claimed, knew Gothic script from newspaper banners, such as the Long Island Press and The New York Times. The transformation of Gothic letter to wild-style was not necessarily deliberate, but to RAMMELLZEE it was undeniable: ‘All you got to do is look at that [the newspaper banner] and what we did on the trains: same thing. You’ve got the connection right there but we did ours in the dark and made that connection; therefore that connection is subconscious’. His own tag had evolved to be a ‘military function and formation, because when I draw it, it is not R, A, M, M, E, L, L, Z, E, E; it is R, A, M, M, Sigma, L, L, Z, Sigma, Sigma. We have turned Epsilon into Sigma’.[67] He espoused that letters are in themselves meaningful and properly understanding the concepts they signify allows one to unlock the secrets of the universe. This belief is reminiscent of part of the doctrine of the Five Percent Nation, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam that called upon African Americans to empower themselves and become self-sufficient, although he denied the influence. He collaborated with A-ONE, KOOR and TOXIC to develop his philosophy, and later was dismissive of writers such as DONDI, FUTURA, and LEE, who focused on imagery at the expense of letters when they began to paint on canvas.[68]

      NOC 167

      According to RAMMELLZEE, NOC 167 coined the phrase ‘style wars’, which conveys both the one-upmanship that existed among writers and the conflict over graffiti on the subways and other public spaces between writers and city authorities.[69] From the Bronx, NOC 167 began tagging in 1972 but quit in 1981, he said because his mother took a job in the federal government and if he were arrested for vandalism it would be an embarrassment to her.[70] Like DONDI, he adopted different tags to experiment with forms and combinations of letters, exhibiting creativity that inspired other writers. He also offered hands-on guidance: the Bronx writer CRASH said that aspiring writers could tell NOC their tags, and he would write them in two or three different styles to practice in exchange for a can of spray-paint.[71]

      ‘Style War’ was the title and theme of NOC’s whole car masterpiece from 1981. It was a complex composition, incorporating stylised lettering, abstract passages, and narrative elements. In the centre, ‘Style War’ was written in two distinct styles. ‘Style’ was composed of wild-style letters that waved and danced, elaborated with arrows directing energy and the viewer’s attention outwards. ‘War’ was in italicised block capitals. The letters were rendered primarily in black, white, and grey – some orange in ‘War’ tied it to the flames painted around it – and decorated with starbursts and dots of various sizes which added excitement to the restrained palette. These were known to writers as ‘pop and sizzle’, and were one of NOC’s trademarks that he had adapted from the comic book artist Jack Kirby.[72] Above the title was an abstract arrangement of white, blue, pink, and orange shapes, with dripping paint rendered in black. (Dripping paint was a sign of amateurism or lack of control of one’s medium and writers made every effort to eliminate it. Still, masters like NOC drew drips with paint in a self-reflexive gesture, much like Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein did with his comic book-style expressionist brushstrokes.) One side of the conflict was depicted to the left. A subway train shot out of the space from left to right, while a set of tracks with the perilous third rail came in parallel to the train at the top, from right to left. The space NOC articulated here was complex with two vanishing points far above and below the train. A guard tower anchored both spatial schemes while it existed in its own perspectival space to the left, where a horizon line was visible low on the end of the train car. ‘NOC 167’ against the train and ‘The Death Squad’ (the name of his crew) against the tower were situated in their own plane and made the symbolism of the scenario clear. On the right end of the car, two cartoon figures confronted each other: the one in a top hat seems to be shooting flames at the other one, a variation on the robot-assassin Necron99 from Ralph Bakshi’s animated film Wizards, who stood with one hand in a palm-up gesture.[73]

      NOC’s subject was the dramatic life of the graffiti writer, who competes for dominance on a subway line and eludes the Metropolitan Transit officers who would persecute him for vandalism, and it was an exceptional treatment. The theme was rarely taken up on the subway cars themselves, where the risk involved in ‘bombing’ a train with a tag of any great ambition was implicit and familiar to the other writers who were the primary intended audience. When writers like NOC 167, DAZE, LADY PINK, and LEE worked on canvas for an audience of gallery-goers who might ride the subways infrequently if at all, they began to make their former lives as subway taggers their subject. This was in part to educate their new public, and to express their sense of themselves as authentically grounded in subway writing. This iconographical shift in the artwork, from tag to pictorial narrative, established a critical distinction between graffiti on the subway and graffiti in galleries. As graffiti artists, the writers adopted a self-reflexive point of view and consciously addressed an audience outside their peer group.

      QUIK and SEEN

      Some writers turned their hands to canvas and found their careers gained more traction in Europe than in the United States. This was true for BLADE, and also for QUIK and SEEN. QUIK was an extraordinarily prolific writer who began tagging trains as a young teenager in 1972. A few years later, he saw canvases by the Nation of Graffiti Artists – an organisation that splintered from United Graffiti Artists in 1974–near his high school, and he made his first graffiti painting on canvas soon afterwards. He felt that writing was an outlet for artistically-inclined African Americans who otherwise had few opportunities to express themselves: ‘Our society did not encourage us to be creative. We were social misfits. Thus this sector of the population decided to create its own art world and guidelines toward creativity: not necessarily in galleries, universities, cafes and shops, but on the hard steel flesh of the New York subway’.[74] His tags sometimes had a political edge: after a subway fare increase, he turned the Q into a face that grew fangs, calling the MTA blood-suckers. He was less interested than other writers in pleasing his audience, whether it was fellow writers or the public at large: ‘My style was aesthetically displeasing; people felt uneasy with it. My letters don’t look like letters, they look like monsters or eggs with holes’.[75] QUIK’s paintings from the 1980s, and those he paints today, also challenged the viewer. The taunting face of his tags was on canvas transformed into a full-length figure of a crucified black man, symbolising the tragedy of racism in the United States.

      NOC 167, Gold Chain, 1981. Aerosol paint on canvas, 106 × 120 cm. Galerie Yaki Kornblit, Amsterdam.

      LEE, Stop the Bomb, 1979. Aerosol paint on New York subway car. Destroyed.

      SEEN, of the United Artists crew, was famous amongst his peers for his masterful renditions of mass-media cartoon characters like Fred Flintstone and the Smurfs. In the 1980 whole-car piece ‘Hand of Doom,’ a masked, muscular executioner holding a double-headed axe loomed ominously at the left of the green, lower-case lettering. A hand grasping a bloody blade emerged from the centre of the phrase. SEEN also mastered wild-style writing, as seen in a top-to-bottom whole car that he executed with MITCH in 1980. Both the colours and the composition were complex. Yellow blended smoothly СКАЧАТЬ