Wednesday, November 7, 2007

This article was published in November 1993 on the World Wide Web site of the Bronx Beat Online, the Columbia Journalism School's weekly newspaper.



The Greying of Graffiti



by Loch Adamson



Lifting a cardboard box away from the wall he was about to paint, 36year-old Henry Torres, known to many in Manhattan and the Bronx only as Part, groaned. "Unhh, my back hurts," he said. "I'm getting old, man."



His friend and fellow graffiti writer Joe Wippler, or Ezo, laughed.



''You're not that old," he replied.



"Yeah, my body is starting to fall apart," Part added. "Huh," scoffed Ezo, who is 32. "1 don't believe that."



Between them, the two men share decades of experience writing graffiti, and nostalgic memories of late nights spent refining their imagery in train yards and subway tunnels. Simple "tags"-the identifying scribbles of adolescence-are beneath them now. They paint only murals and "pieces," graffiti shorthand for stylized masterpieces. On this Saturday afternoon, in broad daylight, Part was preparing to paint a signature piece in a one-room gallery space at the back of On Da Down Low, a hip-hop and graffiti store in the Bronx. Part's wall was the last: Several other artists, induding Ezo, had already painted the adjoining walls.



Last March, the owner of the On Da Down Low, Darwin Bharath, or Sien, converted a storeroom in the back of his retail shop into an ad-hoc gallery for graffiti artists with the help of a career-development grant from the Bronx Council on the Arts. This fall, Sien decided to invite some of the "old timers," as he described them-graffiti artists who began writing in the '70sto paint the walls and showcase their work.



Few people who ride the trains in New York past walls vibrant with color think about the inevitable greying of the graffiti writers themselves, but



the brazen youths who first ventured onto the subway tracks and scaled train yard fences fifteen years ago are now approaching middle age. Many members of that vanguard have given up graffiti, but some-like Ezo and Part-still write, defying the passage of time and the continued threat of cleaning solvents.



As Part readied his wall, Sien appeared in the doorway carrying a milk crate full of spray-paint cans and a plastic bag full of brand new spray-can tips. With close-cropped hair and large eyes, he looked gaunt and young, much younger than his 25 years.



Ezo eyed the bag of spray-can tips in Sien's hand. ''Where did you get those?" he asked.



''Poem,'' said Sien, referring to to graffiti artist and founder of Flashback magazine.



"Let me have a couple," said Ezo.



Sien reached into the bag, pulled out a few tips, handed them over. Ezo carefully turned the plastic nozzles in his palm, reading their shapes under the light. Manufacturers make different tips to create specific spray-paint effects, from wide, diffuse bands to focused, clear lines. Like any artist checking his brushes, Ezo scrutinized the small white cylinders.



Part selected one of the tips, fit it onto a can of cream-colored spray paint, and then tugged a latex surgical glove onto his right hand. In broad, fluid strokes, he began sketching his "piece" onto the paint-spattered wall before him. With a hiss of pressurized air, bright arcs looped across the old, tangled colors.



In this space, graffiti writers don't have to worry about inclement weather or swift police of~icers. No one questions an artist's right to paint his elaborately stylized moniker. This room, with its wooden floor, cluster of spotlights, and high ceiling, resembles a room in any small gallery, except that its walls are not white-they're covered with searing colors, and complex, interlocking letters, stretching from floor to ceiling.



There have been other, larger graffiti galleries in the Bronx. Most writers remember Fashion Moda, a well-appointed space in the South Bronx run by an Austrian art dealer in the mid-'80s. There were other, less glamorous venues as well, such as Paint Spot, and Black & White in Color. The heady days of the late '80s, when Manhattan dealers such as Sidney Janis channeled a few chosen graffiti artists, such as Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith



Haring, into the byways of contemporary art have passed, however. And in the last decade, the scene has fractured, polarizing generations of writers.



Older artists don't necessarily take younger ones "under their wings, and show them stuff anymore," said Ezo, who had some of his earliest images included in a show at Sidney Janis in 1983. And young writers, just coming up, don't seem to care about the work of the older crews. ''The scene has shifted, it's definitely shifted," said Martha Cooper, a photojournalist and author who has published two books on graffiti art, Subway Art and R.I.P. "But it's hard to say whether it's peaked, or where it's going."



Ezo dates the shift to the mid-'80s, citing the pressures created by the art market, as well as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's vigilant antigraffiti campaign. Poem-purveyor of spray-can tips, magazine editor, and one of the graffiti artists featured at Down Low gallery in Decemberlamented the crackdown: "The MTA deterred a whole generation of writers."



In the insular gallery scene of the '80s, only a few artists thrived. Some, like Ezo, disliked it, and found ways to profit by their skills as urban muralists instead, creating images for arts councils, retail storefronts, and major advertising campaigns. In mid-October, for example, Ezo completed a twostory mural for Coca Cola in New Jersey. Depending on the size of the wall, he can earn anywhere from $800 to $20,000 for a single piece.



Money is a real concern. "1 worry about it all the time," he said. "1 consider myself lucky to get work, but I could stand to be more lucky, too." Since 1983, Ezo has primarily supported himself and his family-he has two small children, ages 4 and 9-with his art. And he is proud of his perseverance. "It's very much about being true to who you are," he said. "If I had stayed behind a desk~ it would have killed me. I've been gearing for this since I was six years old. Stopping now would be ridiculous, and what kind of a lesson would that be to my children?"



Although he makes his living with legitimate work, Ezo reluctantly admits that he still participates in outlaw expeditions. "1 have to," he said. "It just keeps the edge on." His wall in Sien's gallery is a hybrid-part mural, with an image of a bounding Rottweiler puppy and a portrait of Jimi Hendrix, and part "piece," with large, abstracted and interlocking letters spelling out his tag name.



The streets of the Bronx may yet bristle with color, but the galleries and hybrid spaces that showcased graffiti have vanished. Sien's back room seems



like an anachronism, a reminder of the past, and, perhaps, a glimpse of the future. At the moment, the young entrepreneur can afford to be a purist about the graffiti on his walls because the hip-hop store funds the gallery.



"1 want to keep it raw, more down-to-earth, more underground," he said of the art. ''When you keep it raw it's like getting a product that's not merchandised, or watered down to satisfy the majority of the crowd. We're doing it for us, anyway. As long as you're doing something for you and not caring about what other people are thinking about it, then it's going to excel."



Sien also wants to make the space available to young artists who seek to experiment, and leave a semi-permanent record of their work where others are sure to see it. "1 have a lot of friends who do graffiti," Sien said. "and these are friends who are basically doing their stuff out in the street. This is a way for them to display their work, without just going out there are doing illegal stuff."



Cooper is remains skeptical of protected, indoor sites. "You have to ask whether it's still graffiti," she said, ''because it's not out there on a wall."



Sien doesn't hesitate to make distinctions, characterizing the ubiquitous, indecipherable tag names scrawled on the sides of buildings, trucks, and tunnels as "garbage." He is not interested in garbage, only in "pieces" for his second show. These mini-murals are samples of work by older artists who have dedicated years of their lives to perfecting their skills and their visual identities, and Sien respects their tenacity.



"If you started painting in the '70s, and you're still painting in the '90s, I see that as a great achievement," he said. ''Not a lot of people keep the art alive, and I feel it's important. A lot of kids coming up nowadays, they don't respect the old-timers, the people who first started it because they look at the old style as too old, like it's no good any more. But that's the original style, that's where it all came from. So you've really got to give the props-the respect-to the people who started it, the pioneers."



Impermanence has always been a given in graffiti art. Most writers' work is regularly "buffed," or scrubbed away, by city workers. Visual history, such as it is, exists largely in photo records. As a result, perhaps, graffiti styles seem to be recreated with every successive generation.



Typically, young writers start by tagging and bombing-"throwing up" simple line letters or curvy bubble letters-and move on to piecing, if they can. "It takes time to do a piece," added Sien. "It takes effort, it takes



imagination, it takes colors. Anybody can just come and write their name on a wall with a marker and a spray paint. There's no art in that."



Older artists, who have the skill to "piece," want to see their work last for a while. The boom in commercial commissions have given some the freedom to paint for a living, and achieve some measure of permanence. There is a balance to be struck, however, between the freedom of the street and the restrictions inherent to commercial work. To the artists, the differences are readily apparent.



Most people, however, don't make distinctions between murals, pieces, bombs, and tags. ''They've generalized anything that's done with a spray can as graffiti," Cooper said. "But a mural is extremely planned out. People just don't make distinctions between types of graffiti, though. Of course it's art. What else could it be?"



Sien sees more than just art when he looks at graffiti. "This is my life," he said. "A lot of people, I think, if they was to find themselves and what they really want to do, this world would be a better place. Because when you find something that you want to do, you do it to the best of your knowledge, and you make it great."



As Part worked on his piece, Sien sat on the floor with his sketchbook, and drew. He and Ezo talked about paint colors, comparing the merits of Popsicle Orange, Irish Blue, Cascade Green, Daisy Yellow. Part fussed over an area of freshly-painted purple, which had begun to drip. He blew on it, but the paint still ran, so he brushed it back lightly with one finger. Ezo, watching Part work, said the really good spray paint colors were simply no longer available. ''They took out the lead and the fluorocarbons," he said. "It was bad for you, but it looked great."




*The Warning

Let every critic know,

whether they wish me well or ill,

that I shall pay any price,

bear any burden, meet any hardship,

support any friend, oppose any foe

to assure the survival and

the success of my creativity.



~Sienonimus

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