Peachy the Magazine February March 2015 | Page 103

ART + ARCHITECTURE

to tag incessantly as he traveled daily
between the boroughs via subway. As
he began applying his tags to the train
cars themselves, his work became a
traveling inspiration to an eager tribe
of emulators. He became a folk hero
of sorts, and is generally considered to
have instigated, albeit unwittingly, the
modern graffiti movement.
At the time TAKI 183 justified his tags
by noting that politicians plastered
their names everywhere as they trod
their campaign trail to power, quite
similar to Banksy’s current accusations
of corporate “brandalism” holding
culture hostage. But when interviewed
recently TAKI 183 admitted with a
smirk, “That was just a rationalization.
I wasn’t very politically aware. We
were just killing time…I think a lot of
what the graffiti movement spawned
early on was just vandalism. But later
on real artists started doing it, and it
did become a true art form.”
The trends in the 70s were either to make
tags and scenes more elaborate and
artistic or to make the application hyperefficient allowing frenetic, ubiquitous
tagging, often with the aid of stencils.
The styles had names like “Softie,”
“Bubble letters” and “Wild Style,”
and “masterpieces” could cover an
entire chain of subway cars. The artists

borrowed heavily from each other;
appropriation was the norm to a
degree that would make Richard Pettibone shudder.
The 1977 blackout is considered by
many to have been the tipping point
of graffiti becoming a worldwide
movement. Hip hop culture and
B-boying (breakdancing) were evolving simultaneously with graffiti, and
there was enormous interest abroad
for the synergy created by these
authentically American art forms.
The Clean Train Movement effectively
took away the primary canvas on
which graffiti artists had been working, and so they increasingly signed on
with galleries, agreeing to paint “legal
walls.” But once it was off the street
and in a gallery, was it graffiti at all?
Roger Gastman contends that, “There’s
an earned respect and craft to graffiti work done outside in the streets.
There’s also an intrinsic subversion
and vanity to an art form that defines
itself by writing one’s name over and
over again on property, which doesn’t
translate when it moves into a more
sterile setting like a gallery.” However,
others such as Caleb Neelon argue
that, “Artists who master the craft
of painting on the street can create
perhaps even greater work in studio
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