Writers' Block: Graffiti News

I started a regular stint writing on graffiti for the Bay Guardian. Its called "Writers' Block" in tribute to New York's original Writers' Bench as well as a play on words for a suppressed medium or restrained creative force. In my first article I explored the phenomenon of crushed newspaper dispensers and placed them in a broader historical context of modern graffiti's evolution and spread across the globe. I think I'm going to just republish all the articles on the blog for organization purposes, so enjoy and tell me your thoughts!

Modern graffiti practice -- born out of New York’s behemoth subway system nearly 40 years ago -- has diffused across the globe arguably faster and further than any other subculture of our time. Many thought the prohibitive end of New York subway graffiti in the mid-1980s might mark the death of the movement itself. But the phenomenon has instead grown vibrantly, evolving in imaginative and cunning ways while unexpectedly inspiring thousands of offspring movements worldwide. Regional mutations of graffiti now prosper in urban centers from São Paulo to Tokyo, as well as the sprawling suburbs spanning Paris and Phoenix, and even in small town America.

San Francisco was one of the earliest cities outside of the East Coast to contribute heavily to graffiti’s development. Young writers painted on freight trains in attempts to mimic their eastern counterparts’ love for subway cars, but they also brought the medium to life on the more stationary public spaces; walls, rooftops, billboards, and street furniture all gained color in rhythm. To this day the city is a hotbed for the creative evolution of style, approach, and placement. Graffiti tattoos the skin of our city, breathing vivaciously yet ephemerally in the rapid changing visual landscape.

During my morning routine in San Francisco’s SOMA district I come across hundreds of graffiti pieces. The moment I step outside my flat, vibrant names call forth on the neighboring walls, twisting and swinging frenetically in with an incandescence that is brighter than the fog-smothered sun rays. A school of simply stenciled koi fish meander curiously along the concrete sidewalk, snaking up the side of a storefront’s iron cage that is painted with a woman’s statuesque face locked in distant meditation. I jaunt over to the newspaper dispensers and reach for the daily only after appreciating any new stickers and wild, hand style lettering or drippy, dirty tags and rotating wheat paste prints, all competing equally for my attention. And I take a moment to imagine the people out there who took the time to get up, the thrills they must have felt, the inspiration that brought them out to the streets to write a shadowed name or post up a devilish cartoon character.

Is the newspaper vendor not the prime placement for graffiti -- both literally and metaphorically -- in this post-subway train era? Covering the pervasive street furniture are the etched names of hundreds of locals. Some invent complex calligraphy and craft intricate geometrical balance to stylize their nom de plumes. Some choose the course of improv for the signatures and let the muses of the moment guide their ink-saturated markers. And still others invest countless hours of preparation to the act of clandestinely posting up ready made stickers during the dead of the night or even the grind of the day.

A writer’s obsession with the news dates back to a now infamous article published by the New York Times in 1971 on the city-wide popularity of Taki 183 and his many pen pals. As soon as the article hit the streets circulating around the boroughs, young people quickly realized just how famous Taki had become. It spawned even more imitators and helped catalyze a movement. The irony of Taki’s expanded notoriety is that he refused to provide his last name in the article. Even though roughly the whole city discovered that “Taki 183” referred to a Greek 17-year-old named Demetrius who lived on 183rd Street in Washington Heights, nobody knew a thing about him beyond his omnipresent signature.

The writer’s signature is not an autograph in the traditional sense. The graffiti autograph is the mark of an alter ego coming into being. And that alter ego is the work of art itself, just as Calvin Broadus Jr. creates the living artwork known to many as Snoop Dogg (or in comic art, just as Bruce Wayne offers the performance piece Batman). Rather than a mark of ownership over another piece of work, the graffiti signature is a disjointed movement towards self-ownership. Instead of glorifying the originator of the artwork, the writer’s signature celebrates its own existence in a self-referential movement leaving the creator of the work anonymous. The writing of the autograph affirms an identity, its personality shaped through the stylization of the letters. And though graffiti puts emphasis on an individual’s yearning for self-affirmation, the practice is ultimately not an indulgent or egotistical project. The graffiti signature takes place in the context of a city’s public space, an environment that provides a vehicle for developing a social identity and facilitating collective dialogue among all people as free and equal citizens. The signature is a coded cry for both personal and social recognition.

While writers rarely make the news in all-out Taki 183 glory, the graffiti-strewn surfaces of newspaper dispensers distribute the news to the people. Each piece tells an intricate story saturated with drama, intrigue, and mystery. Every day we choose whether to make the effort to read these encrypted tales, whether to participate in the dialogue. We choose our responses from indifference to engagement and enthusiastic appraisal to vehement disgust. Some people challenge their underlying assumptions about the stigma of graffiti whereas others stubbornly adhere to their beliefs about its devastating harm to our quality of life. But I suggest at the least to pay attention. Otherwise you might just miss out on some of the most compelling, awe-inspiring stories that San Franciscans tell each other every day all over the streets, all over the news.

Rejuvenating San Francisco's Graffiti Debate

The San Francisco city government is working harder than ever to rid the streets of graffiti. Last week a number of city administrators, police officers, homeowners, and more than a few concerned citizens met in Chinatown for the “Anti-Graffiti Street Huddle.” Such a firm title suggests to the populace of San Francisco that the question of local graffiti is not open to discussion. The city will stop at nothing to "beautify" the city. In fact, they are already disseminating their hardheaded position with speculative and poorly researched propaganda videos.



Little might these agitated anti-graffiti huddlers suspect that the value of modern graffiti is a richly debated issue among city dwellers around the world. In fact, it has been for the past thirty years. And millions celebrate the beauty and life illegally placed public markings bring to the street.

Many proponents of graffiti argue for its legitimacy by pointing out the aesthetic qualities of the craft. Graffiti is an art form, they say, and as such should be respected by legal codes as somehow above the ranks of “petty vandalism.” Or perhaps, we can respect graffiti as in tension between vandalism and art.


While I myself agree wholeheartedly that graffiti is an art form, in fact the most compelling and challenging art form in contemporary times, I feel that this argument already takes off on a wrong start. As soon as this “art” position rears its head in forums and discussions the hard liners swoop up a simple logical opposition. In KQED’s forum on the subject in preparation for the huddle Paul Henderson, chief of administration at the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, voices the paradigm syllogism; 1) graffiti is a crime 2) a crime cannot be art 3) graffiti is not art. Simple enough position despite its silliness implying that illegality excludes art.

Endlessly arguing over whether graffiti is or is not an art is not pertinent to convincing public officials and people in general who are set on their aversions to the writing on the wall. We have to dig deeper in bringing to light the causes at the basis of their distaste for the craft. And to do so, perhaps the initial orientation of “is graffiti an art?” can be used as a didactic tool for posing an all more fundamental question. Let's try rejuvenating the graffiti debate.

Why is graffiti a crime anyway? For many, such as our exemplary point of reference, Mr. Henderson, this question may sound ridiculous. Graffiti is a crime insofar as the “vandal” does not have permission to mark the private or publicly owned surface. The legality of publicly placed fixtures and markings comes down to "permission"; for instance, in the admitted case of advertisements. Such legal advertisements bombard the city dweller with visual messages, oftentimes of offensive nature, far more than any illegal markings and murals. These advertisements garner their public permissibility on buildings and buses, subways and streets, billboards and street fixtures by, in essence, buying their access.

All that distinguishes the permissibility of advertisement and the illegality of graffiti is the lack of the latter’s money. With money, an individual is enabled the buying power to access and mark the publicly viewed surfaces under the authority of the private property owners. Hence, the private individuals who have the funds to own property therefore dictate to the public citizenry what they are allowed and not allowed to see in the public streets. The public sphere is therefore reserved for the visual spectacles that oil the productive machine of consumption, marketing cultural experiences and instilling desires for goods and services to the citizenry at large.

Is there not a problematic antagonism in the fact that the free citizenry do not have any direct power over what they see in the public sphere? Why do private individuals own and have full legal discretion over the publicly viewed surfaces of their property? In our current political and
legal climate can we even assume something such as “public space,” which might allow the free expression of the people, actually exists? Why is this not a first amendment issue anyway?


In reflecting upon the consumption of democratic values primarily by the small population rich enough to own property, I always come back to wonder what it is about graffiti they find so offensive? Does the fantastical tag of local adventurer, “Chan”, make us feel attacked and brutalized as we walk by its drippy ink on the wall? Does the cartoonish image of a “Girafa” cut into the deepest recesses of our security with its long, pointy neck? Perhaps the intense movement and complex geometrical balance of a “Revok” mural calls into question the very basis of our bourgeois principles telling us to keep our personal expression where it belongs, in our personal homes or in the sterilized museum.

Some worried citizens may throw up their hands and shout, “but these kids are disrespectful gang members!” While I do not have any statistics to point to, I attest that some graffiti is certainly gang related and aimed towards marking territory, but the larger majority of the art form is dedicated to creative personal expression, the craft of calligraphy, and playful visual interplay with the city streets.

What makes graffiti different than advertisements is that it is a “quality of life” crime, our trusty interlocutor may argue. But does spray can art and illegally placed public installations really disturb or hamper the aesthetic appeal of the city any more than advertisements? In fact, a good portion of the population prefers the free expression of graffiti imagery and calligraphy while most of everyone finds advertisements invasive and abusive. And at least graffiti is not trying to sell you something. All the graffito achieves is suggesting to the viewer that someone out there in the anonymous public streets is alive, and wants to be hard, and is quite concerned with stylizing his or her personal signature.


If we want to start having fruitful debate about graffiti we need to seek out the origins of this worldwide phenomenon. In a globalizing market economy where the gap between rich and poor widens, freedom of expression is becoming more and more subsumed under constant surveillance, and codes of behavior become stricter and increasingly enforced, the booming popularity of graffiti tells us in its urgency something hugely relevant. Graffiti is a symptom of social apparatuses where not everyone feels implicated in the public governance and free expression of the citizenry. Ultimately, to write graffiti is to yearn to affirm one’s individuality in a city where idiosyncrasy is suppressed and voices of the outskirts often unheard.

Instead of spending billions of dollars buffing over the messages left on the walls by these thousands of youth and young adults, perhaps we should invest in the education and social infrastructure to facilitate the empowerment of these neglected voices. Rather than incarcerating people for minor acts of vandalism, we might spend those billions of dollars to catalyze the self-determination of all individuals pushed to the borderlands. And we may have the funds to help inform the free expression of the many personalities yearning desperately to cultivate themselves.