The def, the wak and the piecers: spraycan art spreads a subculture

Press, 28 December 1989, Page 10

The def, the wak and the piecers: spraycan art spreads a subculture

By

RON SCOTT

It began in the early seventies, when gangs of intrepid teenagers in New York invaded the subway train yards after dark and decorated the coaches with the aid of aerosol cans.

The trains were transformed into moving exhibitions of graphic design. The citizens of New York had never seen anything like it — weird letters two or three feet high spelling single words, usually the artist’s name; characters from cartoons, fantasy movies and mythology; and a most refreshing use of colour.

These were the early days (and nights) of subway art. As the seventies progressed, it became apparent that the underground artists were part of a whole new culture. Their music was hip hop, beatbox (imitating instruments with the mouth) and DJs scratching records in the studio. Their favourite recreation was rapping (talking) and the language was different enough to be called unique.

According to this jargon, a group of writers was a crew, hitting or bombing a train with a piece. The stylish creations were def (good) while the inferior work was dismissed as wak (bad). Removing graffiti from the trains was known as buffing. There was plenty of buffing going on. The train operators were less than happy with this sudden explosion of colour, which they decided looked ugly. Barbed wire fences sprang up around the marshalling yards and the artists were threatened with fines and even prison terms if they were caught.

But there was no stopping them now. They had discovered a new art form, spontaneous, im-

mediate, directly accessible to the public eye. If their work was not welcome in the subway, they would take it above ground, to the nearest available wall.

From 1978 onwards, the same lurid lettering and comic book characters which had covered the sides of trains appeared on the walls of tenement buildings and handball courts in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. A few more years and the spraycan style had spread throughout America, across the Atlantic to the capital cities of Europe, and as far afield as Australia and New Zealand.

The heroes of “Spraycan Art” by Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff (Thames and Hudson), sequel to the same authors’ “Subway Art,” have names like Blade, Crash, Baby Rock and Phase 2. They are mostly unemployed, like to operate by night and tend to live on their nerves, especially if they live in cities where the authorities disapprove of their activities.

In Bristol, England, for example, an artist called 3D has been arrested three times for daring to decorate walls. He is still unrepentant. “Maybe in the eyes of this town I’m not so important, ’cause I don’t have all that high a status, in class and job, but I live here, so I should have as much say as anyone else, and that’s why I go out and paint, ’cause I want to say something, and I don’t want to be told when I can do it.” Artists like 3D have tried, without success, to win recognion for their work in the eyes of the -public. Those who have achieved recognition have started off with a better than average talent and

they have also been fortunate enough to work in environments where their style is appreciated. Lee Quinones of Brooklyn graduated from painting trains to painting handball courts in 1978, creating classic pieces like “Graffiti 1990,” where an armoured knight is -seen riding a rocket nosecone, surfboard style, heading for outer space. His colourful fantasies caught the attention Of Claudio Bruni, an Italian art dealer, who invited him to exhibit in the Galleria Medusa, Rome. Lee became an ambassa-

dor for spraycan art, introducing many Italians to the genre and encouraging them to have a go themselves. One of the more surprising aspects of the aerosol culture is the rivalry that exists between the masters and the second-raters. The latter are the creeps who don’t have the talent to create def pieces of their own and who delight in spoiling the good work done by the kings.

In 1982 Bil Blast painted an enormous mural called “Sky’s The Limit” on a Manhattan ball court. The Statue of

Liberty, Wall Street skyscrapes and the Brooklyn Bridge were all mixed up in a psychedelic homage to the Big Apple. Then the spoilers moved in, wiping out the bottom half of Bil’s picture with inferior lettering and untidy tags (signatures). Incensed by this violation, Bil blacked out the green letters and wrote the message: “Why can’t some people respect art?” In the same way that New York developed a reputation as the spraycan capital of the USA, so Paris became the focal point of the movement on

the Continent. Artists who were driven underground by the police and municipal officials in other European capitals began drifting into Paris in 1985. The gendarmerie were not all that tolerant either, but the painters discovered that as long as they confined their activities to the outlying districts, they were free to work without being harassed. Not surprisingly, the best spraycan art in Paris was the work of foreigners,, notably Bando, Pride and Mode 2, members of the London crew

Chrome Angelz. They were responsible for the dazzling murals that transformed London’s Convent Garden in 1984, done with the permission of the local borough council. Few other piecers, and that includes the kings of the American scene, have succeeded in making aerosol art look like abstract art. Every square inch is coverd in graphics or colours in such a way that the eye of the beholder can never be still. Copyright Duo