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THE ELEMENTS OF HIP HOP

GRAFFITI

Graffiti is another example of a popular, anti-authoritarian culture that has been widely co-opted by corporations in order to give their advertisements a raw, authentic look - - one that has an element of much sought-after "street credibility". The modern era of graffiti began in New York City during the early 1970s, when the introduction of aerosol spray paint in cans combined with a burgeoning hip hop culture to create a critical mass of new artists and aficionados. Centered mainly in the outlying boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx, graffiti artists tended to be self-taught young men with limited access to formal artistic education; their work was often both an outlet for creative expression as well as a form of social protest.

The most famous graffiti works from this pioneering era were painted in the expressionist, free-form mode known as "wildstyle", and the compositions often covered the entire side of a subway car. The New York City transit system was an intrinsic part of the movement; artists sought to have their images shown to a wide public as the cars traveled throughout the city on elevated tracks. Talented graffiti artists such as Lee Quinones (b. 1960) and Fab Five Freddie (an alias for Fred Brathwaite, b. 1959) actually entered the mainstream art world for a number of years as their work caught the broader public's imagination. A debate ensued as to whether graffiti represented a legitimate form of art or was merely a kind of vandalism. Eventually, the city government declared graffiti art to be a public nuisance that promoted an image of lawlessness, and by the middle of the 1980s a crackdown had essentially eliminated the presence of graffiti in the transit system.

In the 1990s, graffiti experienced something of a revival, celebrated as a prime example of what is now called "outsider art". Although graffiti artists had broken into the fine art mainstream in the 1980s, only quite recently have designers expressed interest in graffiti and, just as importantly, so have their clients. Nowadays some companies, in the unending quest for an advertising strategy that will reflect popular culture and appear non-commercial, have hired graffiti artists to produce murals for them. This tactic has sometimes led to popular backlashes, however, as activists have resented being upstaged and co-opted by urban street culture; in an ironic twist, commercial graffiti art masquerading as street art has at times been defaced by activists with more graffiti.

In the design field, recognizable sylistic elements of graffiti, such as its expressive brushstrokes, clever use of symbols, and "allover" style, have been thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream. It is arguable that the chaos and overprinting that characterized the grunge aesthetic, for example, has roots in urban graffiti. Wildstyle graffiti was influential because of its near illegibility, its interlocking, abstract letters flowing chaotically across the compositions. In addition, it is now commonplace to see urban trains and buses festooned with advertisements that cover the entire vehicle, an "allover" strategy that was originally used by street artists to emblazon whole train cars with their graffiti.

("Graphic Design A New History", p388, Eskilson)

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