Graffiti

Where Art, Expression and Vandalism Cross Paths

By Chuck Marvin
Photos copyright Jaime Rojo

On a mild evening recently, I was walking down Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg with a local graffiti artist in his late teens who goes by the street name “SAZ.”

“This is the epicenter of the New York graffiti scene,” said SAZ with a smile as we walked south past North 5th Street.

“Are you serious?” I asked. The bustling, well-lit Bedford Avenue is the last place I thought would be a big draw for graffiti artists.
“Yeah, I’m serious,” SAZ laughed. “There are always graffiti artists mixing it up with regular folk out here.”

SAZ is friendly, talkative, confident, and smart. He seems to enjoy teaching me the basics of graffiti art and society. I had difficulty finding many graffiti artists who would talk to me for this story, so he was a rare commodity.

Graffiti can be found in all cities, but it thrives in Brooklyn, and in Williamsburg it adorns almost every man-made structure that isn’t newly built. It is art to some, and vandalism to others. For its artists, graffiti is a unique community with its own language and mores. To the City of New York, graffiti is a felony offense that can reap more than a year in jail time.

For the artists, graffiti is an addictive melding of artistic exploration, social networking, and the cat-and-mouse excitement of hiding from the police, neighbors, and each other. The graffiti community is secretive and suspicious of outsiders. And it goes without saying that graffiti artists never “tag” under their real names. Tags are renderings of an artist’s street name typically three or four letters in length.

It did not go down especially well when SAZ told his friends he was cooperating with this article. SAZ talked to me anyways, and he was the only source willing to meet me in person. He believes that graffiti has social value and is worth teaching outsiders about.

Graffiti art began to pop out from all directions as we moved further down Bedford Avenue. Walls and fences bore smatterings of single-color tags. Signposts and street lamps were covered in small stickers with printed graffiti tags or artist logos. Tags and stickers can be applied in seconds, and are the safest methods to use in areas where there are pedestrians or police.

Where congestion thins in an area, graffiti grows in complexity. Single-line tags are supplanted by “throw-ups” that display an artist’s name in multi-colored bubble lettering. More involved “masterpieces,” or “pieces,” can look like fine-art murals, and usually still retain the artist’s street name as their core component. Some graffiti is elaborate and requires some time to execute. But graffiti is illegal, speed is almost always a priority, and speed is the essence of the style and economy of the form. SAZ has been improving on the time he needs for a throw-up. “I can do one now in less than two minutes,” he says proudly.

SAZ has been painting graffiti since he was fifteen. His curiosity was sparked by bathroom and locker graffiti at his high school. He engineered his first tag in a personal notebook, a tool that most graffiti artists keep and harbor over the course of their careers. He was soon marking tags around his school, and he was eventually caught and suspended by school authorities.

SAZ stopped tagging the school during his suspension, but he continued to tag and doodle in his notebooks. An experienced graffiti artist eventually saw SAZ’s notebook and encouraged him to take his art to the next level—the street. “He told me that I was wasting my talent in my notebook,” SAZ said.

Eventually, some experienced “writers” took SAZ under their wing and helped him make the difficult switch from magic-markers to spray paint. “I was horrible at first, but my friends made me keep at it.” SAZ started leaving tags all around Brooklyn, and his technique improved. He slowly built up credibility in the neighborhood, and other artists started recognizing him and his work. “It’s a pretty cool feeling when someone at a party walks up and says ‘hey man, I’ve seen your stuff.’ Younger kids who are new to graffiti look up to me now.”

SAZ leaves his house at night to paint graffiti, wearing clothes that will blend into the local environment. When painting in Williamsburg he likes to wear a flannel shirt and hipster pants. In the Bronx, he wears baggy pants and a hoodie. He usually brings two cans of spray paint per outing, which is enough to paint a handful of quick tags or a couple of intricate throw-ups. And the cans are easily concealed beneath a baggy shirt or jacket. If he needs more paint he’ll carry a cheap bag that he won’t mind discarding if he has to run from the police.

No matter how secretive they try to be, paint can easily give graffiti artists away. After a night painting around Williamsburg, SAZ will sometimes return home covered in it. “In Brooklyn having paint on you doesn’t matter, because there are lots of hipster artists walking around with paint on their clothes. It can be more dangerous in other boroughs.” If he sees someone in public with paint residue on a sleeve, SAZ will walk up and ask, “yo, what do you write?” If the person looks confused, he’s probably not a graffiti artist. If the person reacts defensively and says, “I don’t write,” then you know he is definitely a graffiti artist.

Paint residue on a person isn’t enough for cops to prosecute, but a can of spray-paint or a magic marker is a legal smoking gun. Paint is also a touchy subject at SAZ’s home. At times, SAZ will have upwards of 1000 cans of spray paint stashed around the apartment in shoeboxes. He steals most of his paint from Home Depot using a technique called “rack and return.” Home Depot and other hardware stores keep their spray paint behind lock and key, but that isn’t enough to keep SAZ from getting the paint he needs.

SAZ does his best to keep his paint out of sight at home, but his Mom and Dad are no fools. “My Mom thinks graffiti looks cool, but she warns me not to shit where I eat,” he says. “My Dad once told me he hopes they catch me and cut my fingers off.”

SAZ and I migrated to the Williamsburg Bridge overpass, and we sat down on a loading dock next to a large white wall that he had tagged with the artist RAMBO. “I want to be a famous graffiti artist, but I never want the public to know my real name, and I don’t want to be a sellout,” SAZ told me.

Since the 1970’s hundreds of “writers” have emerged from the graffiti world. Some, like Brooklyn locals Ewok and Futura 2000, were able to transition into fine-art galleries and lucrative licensing and design careers. Their successes have drawn envy from their peers in graffiti, as well as resentment from art world people. At best, the art world has mixed feelings about graffiti artists and the critics who dole out praise for their artistic prowess.

Said Ewok in an email, “It is interesting how the people who show up at a gallery and praise your art are the same people who call the cops in the middle of the night when they see you painting.”

Street Art Versus Graffiti
The term “street art” is increasingly used to describe publicly accessible art that is beyond the scope of traditional “graffiti.” Artists and art connoisseurs all seem to use the terms differently, and the distinction between graffiti and street art is somewhat of a semantic battleground. Some argue that graffiti is illegal while street art tends to be sanctioned by public arts commissions and private store owners. Others say graffiti art is limited to the act of rendering an artist’s name or initials, while street art assumes other stylistic forms such as posters, murals, mosaics, and sculpture.

Famous contemporary street artists include Elbowtoe, Banksy, and Shepard Fairey, the designer of the Barack Obama “Hope” poster.
Steven P. Harrington, who co-authored “Brooklyn Street Art” and edits BrooklynStreetArt.com with Jaime Rojo, told me he believes there are stylistic differences between graffiti art and street art, but the two art forms share an historical relationship that was integral to their development.

“The current street art crop is definitely an evolution from the tradition of NYC graffiti writers as well as a number of more public artists in New York dating back to the early 1980’s, like Keith Haring, Richard Hambleton, Jenny Holzer, and Jean-Michel Basquiat,” says Harrington. “Despite the similarities [with graffiti art] this new movement has a wider scope and a greater number and variety of participants, probably due to the ‘do it yourself’ movement that continues to take root.”

While Ewok says that his roots will always be in graffiti, he has recently been devoting more of his time to “fine art on canvas.” This month his work will be showcased at the Art Basel show in Miami. He admits that age has been a factor in this transition—the older one gets, the more a graffiti arrest and the threat of jail time will wear down motivation.

The “broken windows” theory of crime prevention says that if you repair a broken window within a short time, say, within a day or a week, the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. For New Yorkers it has perhaps had mixed results. But few would argue that the city is not a safer place to live today than when the theory was put into practice against graffiti by Mayor Ed Koch in the 1980’s. However, it has also left a skewed system of justice that sometimes treats graffiti artists more harshly than violent crime offenders.

Ewok knows this first-hand. He was once arrested for graffiti at his high school on the same day another student was caught with a loaded .357 magnum pistol. “They treated my graffiti charge more seriously than the kid with the hand-gun.” The city booked Ewok in three different precincts that day. While he was being fingerprinted at the first police station, Ewok saw the gun violator walk out the door with his parents. Ewok received a long school suspension; the other kid “was back in school the following Monday.”

Given the potential consequences of getting caught by the NYPD anti-graffiti task force, it isn’t surprising that artists like Ewok eventually prefer painting murals and canvases instead of construction sites.

While walking back toward the Bedford L subway stop, SAZ said to me, “You’d be surprised how many graffiti artists are over 40 years old.” But he admitted that he has slowed down his graffiti painting lately to stay on the right side of the law. “If someone would buy a canvas from me, I’d paint canvas too,” he said. Clearly, graffiti is mostly a young person’s game.

The immense artistic and expressive spirit that attracts so many artists and creative types to Brooklyn is a blessing and a curse for graffiti artists. Real estate development, a more lucrative form of creative expression than graffiti, has wiped out many of the legendary graffiti spots. And legal street art can keep only a handful of graffiti artists busy at one time. The others must constantly scope out new territories to feed their “writing” addictions.

“That said, there is a great amount of underground talent living in this borough,” Ewok said of Brooklyn, where he resides. “I like it for the most part—a lot of artists trying to live down-low lives.”