The Writing's On The Wall... And The Jeans... And The T-shirt... by Nitricboy

The reappropiation of 'street art' as a consumer brand
In October of this year Todd James and Josh Lazcano were taken into custody in Manhattan's Soho district across the street from the gallery that was about to show their recent ‘graffit-inspired’ work. They were held on charges of criminal damage that dated back two or three years. It’s a story which shows up the glaring contradictions inherent in an artistic genre which has one foot firmly rooted in a tradition of subversive ‘vandalism’ and one freshly planted in the more bourgeois world of upmarket galleries and coffee table books.

So how did we get to this point?

Well, if you’re going to get all academic about it you can trace the origins of ‘political graffiti’ all the way back to the Nineteenth century and the Austrian ‘Kyselak’ (1795-1831) (being the first person to ’tag’ his name all over the country), through to the Mexican mural movement of the 1930s right up to the political scrawlings of the Hunagarian revolution in 1956. But things start hotting up quite nicely around the tail-end of the 60s with the Student uprisings in Paris (and the Situationist influence on those events) and the advent of turf-graffiti in New York and Los Angeles. By 1975 there had been over 1,200 arrests in New York for graffiti related offences, and that same city had spent seven million dollars on wiping out the product of what glossy magazines were now calling a ‘social phenomenon’.

For the next twenty years or so graffiti kept a steady pace, enjoying the same ups and downs as any social trend; evolving steadily within its own boundaries; progressing, as any artform will do, to its ‘next stage’. But over the past five years the universe known as ‘hip-hop’ within which graffiti exists has taken on stellar proportions, eclipsing every other musical genre on both sides of the Atlantic, transforming itself into what marketing personnel would call a ‘major lifestyle choice’ and creating a slipstream of ‘cool’ within which graffiti has been inevitably caught up.

These days the word ‘graffiti’ can be found scrawled on the white boards of brainstorming sessions in the offices of record companies, ad’ agencies, design houses, and clothing companies world-wide. The corporate instinct, honed over generations and capable of recognising trends before they really even exist, has wasted no time at all in harnessing the revolutionary spirit behind ‘street art’ (graffiti has too many negative connotations you understand) and effectively muzzling it until both its bark and its bite are almost unrecognisable.

The ‘powers that be’ have shrewdly recognised that while graffiti is primarily an underground culture; an illegal, subversive activity which exists mainly on the peripheries of the mainstream, it also (more importantly if you’re an ad’ man) exists as a highly recognisable media text, firmly ingrained in the consciousness of the populous. It is these, seemingly contradictory, elements which make graffiti a potentially marketable commodity.

But surely graffiti has been around long enough to ride out this current wave of corporate interest? Well maybe it doesn’t want to. After all if a graffiti artist is commissioned to produce something for a leading brand for example, then it is his prerogative to do so. He can profit from the work, make a living from his art and pursue more independent projects without worrying about paying the rent etc. He is no longer a graffiti artist, he is simply an artist. This is a perfectly acceptable hypothesis but one which throws up a few important questions regarding style and exposure.

Graffiti artists, whether they are just writing their name or creating a large-scale piece, will tend to follow a certain individual style. The same could be said for all artists but it is especially applicable to graffiti because the medium is rooted in a tradition of stylistic independence. Graffiti must be instantly recognisable as one’s own work otherwise it is open to criticisms of plagiarism. This phenomenon is far more developed in graffiti circles than it is in other artistic communities. As a result artists who have developed within this environment tend to instinctively produce work which is immediately identifiable as their own. On one level this can be seen as a positive effect as it deters plagiarists and allows the artists name to become ‘known’ more easily. However the downside occurs when an artist takes his work out of it’s underground context and begins to produce commercial work that can be viewed, potentially, by millions. It is then that the elements that once made his work unique can conspire to make it over-familiar and even ubiquitous. It is at this stage that the work is in danger of adopting the elements of homogeneity particular to corporate branding and is therefore in danger of crossing the line from tag to logo.

Another, more ironic, factor which makes graffiti a potentially vulnerable target is that graffiti has long been regarded as an example of the ‘anti-logo’. The act of creating a personalised tag and then reproducing that tag en masse mirrors corporate marketing techniques but also subverts them in the sense that while a logo incorporates a range of signifiers linked to a specific product or line of products, a tag represents nothing but itself. It stands alone; refuses to be deconstructed and therefore will always be refused entry into the not-so-exclusive club of media-bullshit.

Even if that same tag is customised in some way its core elements will remain unaffected and this gives it an endearing, indestructible quality which logos simply don’t (and can’t) possess. When a large company attempts to change the way it presents itself to the world (remember when Pepsi changed the colour of their cans?) they are hindered by the large amount of corporate ‘baggage’ that their logo carries with it, while a tag can change and evolve at will and still retain its credibility. However once a graffiti artist lends his style to a certain brand or range of products then that style loses its independence and simply becomes one more cog in the behemoth we now know as ‘lifestyle marketing’.

Graffiti, like any other artistic genre, is only capable of existing within a community while it exists outside the commercial mainstream. And in one way it will always do so. However as certain artists progress from working on trains and walls to tee shirts and jeans this community becomes stretched. It’s borders become transient, shifting uncomfortably between independent and commercial work.

Any artist who chooses to produce work for commercial reasons must realise that their work is in danger of becoming incorporated into a culture hungry for brands, especially those brands which are attached to something as highly marketable as graffiti. They must recognise that the qualities already inherent within their medium make it uniquely vulnerable to adoption by marketing strategists desperate for new and exciting ways of presenting old, and lifeless products to the buying public. They must admit to themselves that to ensure the continued progression of their chosen medium they must strive to explore the context in which it is to be produced and to learn the nature of that context in order to subvert or even undermine it. And most importantly they must learn not to rest on the laurels of their chosen style and to push themselves to produce innovative and inspirational work in order to preserve the integrity and relevancy of their art.