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From the Streets: Documenting graffiti and culture
- 2. identity social commentary style status territory ego ephemeral political art language subculture vandalism business global public New Orleans, 2015 palimpsest
- 3. Art Crimes http://www.graffiti.org/faq/graf.def.html, accessed 15 July 2015 Jerusalem, 2006 TERMINOLOGY
- 5. graffiti writer graffiti artist Bates, Lindsay. Figure 2.1 in “Bombing, Tagging, Writing: An Analysis of the Significance of Graffiti and Street Art.” University of Pennsylvania, Graduate Program in Historic Preservation Thesis. Jan 1, 2014 New Orleans, 2015 New Orleans, 2015
- 6. HISTORY OF URBAN GRAFFITI Ushuaia, Argentina, 2010
- 7. DOCUMENTATION STRATEGY Graffiti writing and street art, at its most basic level, is a form of communication. It is also form of self-expression, feeding off its own aesthetic. Buenos Aires, 2010
- 8. DOCUMENTATION STRATEGY New York City, 1995
- 9. Cairo, 2006 Cairo, 2009 EGYPT, FOR EXAMPLE
- 10. Walls of Freedom: Street Art of the Egyptian Revolution image © Eliot Benman for NYTimes EGYPT, FOR EXAMPLE
- 11. New Orleans, 2015 THE PERSONAL & PROFESSIONAL
- 12. Over 500 folders File folder—location (city, train line, …) Subfolder—writer or artist Subfolder—master Subfolder—edited File naming convention Backs up to hard drives and uploads to web-based services Relies on #hashtags to for easy web collection access via social media #boradaexplorer_graffitiwriteralias #willtravelforgraf THE PERSONAL & PROFESSIONAL
- 15. ESSENTIAL DESCRIPTIVE METADATA • Type of work (tag, throw-up, stencil, mural) • Style of writing • Medium (spray can, wheat paste, multimedia) • Date of documentation • Brief description of piece • Tear down or removal date • Cover up or “buffed by” date? • Alias • Associations (such as crew name) • Location of piece (both geographic and structural placement) New Orleans, 2014
- 16. PRESERVATION meaningful documentation strategy required New Orleans, 2015
- 17. THANK YOU @jwax55 All photos by me unless otherwise identified Istanbul, 2004
Editor's Notes
- Hello. I’m going to talk about the nature of graffiti and why it is important for archivists to consider the community’s digital life and then some challenges we have for bringing it into our collections. I will focus my talk on the urban graffiti writer and local communities and individuals or crews that write to establish themselves amongst their peers. I will not talk about major urban street artists that have skyrocketed into mainstream pop culture. The presence and aesthetics of graffiti culture has no doubt become a major part of our society that can be studied and discussed on for its artistic merit as well as on social, economic, and political levels. But for now, I just want to raise some awareness of graffiti writing and how we can be sure it’s available to be viewed, studied and discussed in this manner for years to come. This is a personal interest of mine. I work right now at the National WWII Museum, which basically has nothing to do with graffiti. I was drawn to graffiti through artist friends in high school; I managed to work some of it into my grad studies by looking at graffiti sketchbooks from a preservation angle. And I’ve just been checking it out wherever I go—I guess that makes me an enthusiast. So here I am today, talking to you.
- What is graffiti? It is identity, style, status, territory, ego; it’s art, language, subculture, vandalism, social commentary, public, ephemeral, political, global, and it’s business.
- What is graffiti? The definition of graffiti from the website Art Crimes is: illicit marks in which there has been an attempt to establish some sort of coherent composition…upon a wall or other surface that is visually accessible to the public. It’s etymology comes from the Italian word graffiare meaning “to scratch” and the Greek word grafein meaning “to write”. The singular noun forms of these words referred to marks scratched on to rocks or other formations such as the surfaces of an ancient Roman and Egyptian architecture that were often found on heavily traveled pathways. We can liken it to the “I was here” tag still seen today.
- Graffiti writers and artists first and foremost are a community that gels around a common language, purpose and aesthetic. Some terminology that unites this community: flick = photograph of graffiti, bomb or bombing = to paint name in any form on many surfaces, blackbook = notebook or sketchbook, throw up (or throwie) = a name painted with two colors, an outline, and a fill-in color, tag = a graffiti writer’s signature (n) or to mark one’s name on any surface (v), piece = short for masterpiece, a large, complex composition with lots of visual effects, burner = a piece with intricate style and impressive use of color, wildstyle = name for any unreadable or fresh style, also name of graffiti’s most famous film.
- What is graffiti? Let’s look at the difference between a graffiti writer and a street artist. Lindsay Bates, in her 2014 thesis written for the UPenn graduate program in historic preservation, made this handy vendiagram about urban art. If you think of urban art as the outer most circle, then within that you have graffiti as a category and the inner most circle is where you writers and artists share a space. Writers are exclusively about stylized lettering and work mainly in a public sphere. Graffiti artists employ lettering and other imagery and have crossed into the gallery scene and other sanctioned, legal arenas. A writer and artist could be one in the same, but one may not consider themselves the other. Both are about appropriation and/or reclamation of spaces. Thank you, Lindsay, for breaking this down for us. In her thesis, she argues that graffiti is mainly considered part of a counterculture, but instead, it should be considered a “valuable form of [cultural] heritage”. Heritage, as defined by Cambridge Dictionaries Online, is defined as “features belonging to the culture of a particular society, such as traditions, languages, or buildings, which come from the past and are still important.”
- Let’s talk about the history of graffiti and it’s development. It’s widely accepted that urban spray can writing began in West Philadelphia with a guy named Cornbread and took off in the 1970s in New York City as people began tagging subway cars to gain notoriety where there were few other ways to gain it. By the late 1970s, intricate styles develop, pieces get bigger and more colorful along with more daring placement and locations of pieces. Graffiti becomes associated with gang culture and urban decay but also gains acceptance in the downtown artist community. Crews form and competition between them become a thing. As the country and cities begin to pull out of the economic depression and recession of the 1970s and 1980s, removal of graffiti is a must. However, at this point, it’s become a part of mainstream culture and urban history. The history of graffiti is not just about the development of a late 20th century art form but of urban development, minorities and economic welfare, and the built environment from post-war expansion to modern gentrification.
- Alright, why do we care? Arguments about heritage aside, graffiti writing and street art, at its most basic level, is a form of communication. It is also a form of self-expression, feeding off its own aesthetic. Though considered deviant and criminal, it’s presence can indicate an individual or a group of individuals legitimizing their existence in a world that is unaccepting, inhospitable, or otherwise inaccessible. Writing graffiti is a surreptitious adventure, but that does not make these people’s lives and need for self-expression illegitimate. Whether graffiti writers or street artists spray their compositions in a sanctioned location or an illegal surface, what do you have? Thought. Language. Culture. Graffiti is freely available to the public and part of our shared experience. Some compositions, like this one I took in Buenos Aires, could be considered outsider art is art, could it not? I want to propose that we consider graffiti writing a type of performance art because if we put it into that category, we have a model to follow as a documentation strategy, and if that is insufficient, we may be able to come up with other creative ways to document it. I think it is no different than collecting the works of artists of more traditional mediums. Tanya Clement wrote in “Documenting Dance: A Practical Guide” that the purpose of the guide was for “raising awareness through conscious planning for documentation and preservation.” Without it, future productions, scholarship and analysis, efforts to build publicity and funding for the dance community would be a lot more difficult.
- Parallels between graffiti and documenting art or performance art could become a whole new talk. There is a lot of literature on documentation of performance art, especially dance, and In my brief survey of it, I came across Eugenia Kim’s 2012 An Artist’s Digital Preservation Toolkit. She poses some questions that both creator and curator may ask not just about dance but about graffiti. 1) When does the documentation and preservation process begin? 2) Which aspects of the process should be kept and which should be “let go”? 3) What tools should be used for capturing, preserving and sharing the process? The essence of this is that the process “requires a partnership between creator and curator to make sure that minimum standards are met while essential needs are recognized.” What those minimum standards are and what the essential needs are is something we’ll have to figure out as we look more closely at the graffiti community. Now let’s talk a little more about graffiti in context and how it relates to personal digital archiving. My take: we need to understand the creation of graffiti so that we can fully understand the best ways to document it. It isn’t entirely possible for an archivist to save the day here; that’s not what I’m proposing. But if this type of material is relevant to your collections and your work, some of these things may or should concern you.
- I took this picture in 2009 in pre-revolution Cairo. I was very surprised to see a throw up of this size with this kind of visibility on a wall in Mubarak’s Egypt. Who is Basem? Basem is a guy’s name. You can tell by the basic, uneven lettering that he’s new to the game, isn’t so accomplished with the spray can, doesn’t have an elaborate, developed style. And why would he? There was no where to practice. Public forms of self-expression are pretty much verboten in conservative religious societies and on top of that in military dictatorships. Do you know what Basem risked to get this up there? Did he later participate in the political activism that was only a couple years later? There’s a story in there.
- Also, we can spend a lot more time talking about grassroots political movements and post-2011 revolution in Cairo. This book here is a great work bringing it all together. Attempts to thwart It’s publication and distribution by Egyptian authorities only adds to the story. The story gets more interesting now as buildings in downtown Cairo, the epicenter of the revolution, where a lot of the graffiti went up, gets torn down for redevelopment.
- The example I just gave you about graffiti in Cairo is an example of how and who documents graffiti. The history of documentation begins with photographers, amateurs and professionals. Martha Cooper, grandparent of graffiti documentation; started shooting graffiti while working as a journalist in the late 1970s NYC, shoots film and digital, gained momentum via traditional print media with her classic book Subway Art, published with another major professional photographer, Henry Challafant. Today, Anthony Bora, a millennial; not a trained photographer; he’s a hobbyist with a passion for graffiti and photography, gained momentum via social media, shoots 100% digital, still prints photos for himself and to give back to artist, starting to sell his work and has built connections with gallery owners and others that are interested in publishing some of his work in print form. Bora came up with a folder structure and file naming convention for storing his digital photographs. He has his own workflow for how to manage masters v. copies, but at first he didn’t save the master file before he made edits. On social media, he tags his work with consistent hashtags so he can instantly pull up a collection of one writer’s stuff: #boradaexplorer_uzit. Marthat Cooper is also on Instagram, has a blog and though I didn’t ask her, I bet she shoots mainly in digital today.
- Community recognizing need to document themselves. With 1) death of a young writer you see the #uzitarchive hashtag. But also because pieces are torn down as neighborhoods are gentrified or pieces get buffed (a term for written over by another writer) because of competition or beef between two crews. Instagram has provided a new venue for the graffiti community to thrive. Instagram helps individuals maintain their anonymity and allows them to share their work and promote others. The post on the left is from the Instagram account of a New Orleans based-writer who recognizes that “graffiti needs documentation.” He goes on to say he will create his own zine in an effort to do so. It was these posts a year ago that made me realize these guys have a vested interest in their work and their legacy. I saw their need to create an archive or store collections. It wasn’t just ephemeral to them. This is from within, whereas Martha Cooper started from outside.
- Other places we see graffiti documented are websites such as Art Crimes and Drips Gallery, which are both is international in scope and provides users with a database of images searchable by location, artist and style. Wooster Collective, which serves a more local community and started as a listserv. There’s YouTube, blogs, social media (as discussed). These efforts are often crowd-sourced, submission-oriented, international in scope. Mostly homegrown, these sites contain stories, testimonials, sometimes scholarship and are basically giant catalogs of graffiti from around the world. A few major websites also operate as businesses, selling supplies, publications and apparel. Does this amount to a type of performance art? Do we have to operate under a “if you blink, you’ll miss it” mentality? So how you gonna get it?
- Do we need to create a descriptive schema to capture the creative and contextual elements of graffiti? I think we will, in the least, have to wrestle with some archives fundamentals. The founders of the Dripps Gallery and the other grassroots websites identified what is important for cataloging graffiti for searchability. But lets think a little further about archival description. Creator, won’t know—anonymity is very important. Dates, probably won’t know. Provenance—nope, most likely it will be an artificial collection. Format—very diverse. Further description needed: alias, associations (ie, crew name), location of piece (geographic and placement), type of piece (tag, stickers, throw-up), format and media used, date of documentation, name of person documenting, brief description of piece.
- Maintaining a collection like may be more digital heavy than analog. And digital curation will play a greater role. Documentation strategies will have to include digital curation,