Peachy the Magazine February March 2015 | Page 102

The Art of Graffiti

Barry McGee, Houston Street and the Bowery, New York, 2010, photo by Farzad Owrang. From the
exhibit “Art in the Streets,” Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, 2011.

An idealized definition of graffiti holds
it out as American artistic expression on a par with Jazz and Abstract
Expressionism. It is the tool of politically active street artists who use their
art form to hasten societal shifts which
recognize and value the voice of the
“other.” While this is an apt description of some notable artists who had
their roots in graffiti such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat (a.k.a.
SAMO), this was the exception, not the
rule, for most early “writers.”
In 1971 The New York Times wrote
an article on TAKI 183, a stocky Greek
kid from 183rd Street in the Bronx who
was “tagging” all over town. It certainly was not novel for an adolescent
to mark his name in indelible ink on
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the property of others, but there was a
nascent power in what he was doing
which lay in the vast repetition and the
sudden omnipresence of his “work”—
thousands of TAKI 183 tags appeared
across the city, seemingly overnight.
His job as a messenger allowed him