“The Politics of Graffiti” OR “Mild-Mannered Modern-Day Picassos”

I once thought about getting a tattoo. It was going to be my mIRC chat name Lost_BoyZ done up in wildstyle. I even went so far as to commission a friend to do some sketches. My parents would’ve killed me if I went through with it.

Really, they would’ve.

Thankfully at the time I was dating a girl who had gotten a tattoo down there of a frog holding a crystal ball. She made me think twice.

There’s something about graffiti that’s always turned my crank. I love going online and looking up pieces: The colours, the large scale cryptic messages, the letters that flow in and out of each other so that where one begins is a mystery and where another ends is anyone’s guess. It’s urban art, with the city as canvas as well as being part of the picture. It’s beautiful stuff, really. In Craig Castleman’s “The Politics of Graffiti” I got to see it from the other side. Well, not so much “see” it as read it, and not so much “get” it as find out about the overblown anti-graffiti initiative by former New York City Mayor John Lindsay.

Lindsay seemed to have a hard-on for graffiti. He referred to it as something that New Yorkers needed to band together to “defend it [the city of New York], support it, and protect it!” against graffiti. He called it a “blighting epidemic”, and of the writers themselves said they were “insecure cowards” seeking recognition and that graffiti writing itself “is related to mental health problems.” WOW. What could’ve spurned this hatred for graffiti? Was his home vandalized? His infant child covered in TAKI 138 tags from head to toe? No, something much worse. He was planning on running for president.

All kidding aside I think that the extent to which graffiti angered Mayor Lindsay was not only indicative of some serious mental issues, but was also illuminating of how far removed Mayor Lindsay was from the middle class bracket of his constituents. Castleman writes, “The mayor’s anger over the continued appearance of graffiti on the subways exploded publicly on June 30, 1973. Steven Isenberg explained, ‘When the Mayor went to mid-town to publicize the parking ticket step-up, he took the subway back to City Hall and what he saw made him madder than hell.’ Immediately upon his return to his office the mayor called a hurried press conference at which he snapped, “I just came back from 42nd Street in one of [MTA chairman] Dr. Ronan’s graffiti-scarred subway cars, one of the worst I’ve seen yet.’ The mayor stated that the extent of name marking in the trains and stations was ‘shocking’…” I’m sure it would be to someone living in the cushy upper-salary brackets. But for the people that took these trains everyday, I can’t help but wonder what they thought of the massive expenditures relegated to anti-graffiti policies of Lindsay’s reign.

I tried to see it from Lindsay’s point of view. Aside from this being a political platform, what is it about graffiti that angered him? Maybe he just didn’t like it, maybe he thought it was ugly. He probably did. This was something new and many people are opposed to new because new means change, and for some, change is some bad medicine to swallow. I loved Claes Odenberg’s take on graffiti in his book “The Faith of Graffiti”, he says, “I’ve always wanted to put a steel band with dancing girls in the subways and send it all over the city. It would slide into a station without your expecting it. It’s almost like that now.” This almost-a-simile is exactly what graffiti is, it is an assault on the visual cortex, an assault that breaks up the monotony of the various shades of gray.

The point where art and the publicly shared space is where graffiti is made, this is my take. Mayor Lindsay didn’t see it this way, what he saw was that graffiti “tended to nullify many of his efforts to provide the city’s subway passengers with a ‘cleaner and more pleasant environment’ in which to travel.” Something, I’m sure, would resemble an operation room; Cold, clean, smelling of anti-septic. This might be possible if there weren’t any people around. Shades of grey do not contribute to feeling alive; check that against the faces of people walking around on cloudy days versus the faces of people on blue skied sunny days. People like colour.

I can’t help but wonder if Mayor Lindsay really believed the stuff coming out of his mouth or if he believed that people believed that what he was doing was for their personal betterment. I’m not from New York, nor have I ever spent any respectable amount of time in the Big Apple, but I don’t think that saying New York has bigger problems to deal with than graffiti would be completely out of line. To say that “graffiti is a form of behavior that leads to other forms of criminality” is like saying that marijuana is a gateway drug. Come on, the only thing that marijuana is a gateway to is a bag of Doritos and a Wendy’s milkshake. And the only thing that graffiti is a gateway to are stained fingers, pants, and shirts, and maybe even a cameo in Marc Ecko’s upcoming movie ventured based on his smash hit video game “Getting Up”. What am I babbling about? Click here. And then click here.