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    Write Here: Graffiti Takes Center Stage

    Compared to gallery and museum shows, writing about graffiti presents some pretty unique challenges.

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    paint-cans
    Paint cans and respirator at the 2X2 Festival  — Photo by Jeff Regensburger.

    For starters, no one has ever provided me with a press release about new graffiti in our area. I’ve never been invited to a wine and cheese reception featuring graffiti writers or their assembled works. No obliging gallerist has ever taken the time to contextualize a graffiti writer’s oeuvre for me or share the artists’ resume. And even if they did, what name would be on it?

    Graffiti artists usually go by aliases or street names, preferring (for obvious reasons) to remain anonymous. That makes interviews or features pretty unlikely. They often paint under the cover of darkness, in areas that are isolated or abandoned. When they do work in more populous areas, they work quickly. Get in, get out, and don’t get caught. That usually leaves just enough time to throw up a quick tag or outline before moving on.

    Then there’s the clean-up. As a rule, graffiti doesn’t last long. While many lament the volume of graffiti seen in Columbus, I’ve always felt that both the City and private property owners are pretty aggressive when it comes to buffing walls. The work you saw started yesterday will likely be gone tomorrow. Works don’t hang for long.

    Oh yeah, and a lot of graffiti is done illegally.

    So, there are challenges to be sure.

    Perhaps that why I was so excited to hear about the 2X2 Hip Hop Festival being held at Rice Paddy Motorcycles on Saturday, July 25. In addition to music, DJs, rappers, and dancing, the organizers had also arranged for an exhibition of graffiti writers. They divvied up the two story wall of this iconic Grant Street business in Weinland Park and cut the artists loose. The result was the chance to see some well-known regional writers working out in the open; with good light, plenty of time, and all in one place. It meant the opportunity to talk with artists, get close to the process, and consider some fully realized pieces.

    Untitled by Ketchup, July 2015, 1454 N Grant Ave — Photo by Jeff Regensburger.
    Untitled by Ketchup, July 2015, 1454 N Grant Ave — Photo by Jeff Regensburger.

    Plus, the Rice Paddy gave permission to the writers. That creates the rare chance to examine graffiti without the endless debates on crime, vandalism, property values, and the aesthetics of our shared space. See, regardless of past history or future actions, what these artists did at the Rice Paddy was all above board.

    So, let’s take a break from the well-worn debates, look at the work, and leave the rest at the door.

    Speaking of Art

    When we consider art, it often helps to think in terms of three elements: form (What is the work made of? How is it made? What does it look like?), content (What does it say? What does it mean? What is being expressed?) and context (How does this work fit into what we know about other art? About other disciplines? About art history?).

    Form

    Most graffiti (and most of the work on display at the 2X2 Festival) is based on lettering. That’s a fairly typical approach. Writers will use their established graffiti or street name as a starting point and then morph and twist the characters to the point of near-abstraction. When this is done quickly the work will take the form of a tag (quick, stylized signatures executed in one color) or throw up (simple works often consisting of two colors, an outline (often bubble-shaped) and a fill color). In cases where more time is allowed, the works become more elaborate. These longer form pieces feature multiple colors, interlocking or overlapping letters, and the suggestion of three-dimensionality. The result is works that appear more or less abstract to all but the most seasoned viewers.

    Untitled (Gamble) (detail), Gamble, July 25, 2015, 1454 N Grant Ave, Columbus, OH 43201 (photo by Jeff Regensburger)
    Untitled (detail) by Gamble, July 25, 2015, 1454 N Grant Ave — Photo by Jeff Regensburger.

    Obviously, aerosol paint is the most common medium of graffiti writers. Just as obviously, this medium accounts for a lot of the stylistic cohesiveness of graffiti. Spray paint has specific characteristics, characteristics that play a large role in determining what we see. It’s designed to provide an opaque finish, so any kind of glazing or transparency can be difficult to achieve. It goes on in a fine mist, so don’t expect a lot of surface build up or heavy impasto. It’s also a medium that doesn’t lend itself to mixing, so most of the colors you see are “straight out of the tube”. As a result, graffiti writers will often sacrifice more subtle tones for the vibrancy of highly saturated hues. Of course, skilled writers can work around this. The detail of Gamble’s piece illustrates how writers can move from light to dark using shades of purple, blue, red, orange and yellow.

    Beyond that, and from a formal perspective, we’d look for the same things in graffiti that we’d look for in any other two-dimensional design problem: unity, balance, and some sort of visual hierarchy (that being a focal point as well as a corresponding sense of what’s of lesser visual importance). The piece by writer Vesh illustrates a good example of defining a focal point within an otherwise highly abstract piece.The eye is naturally drawn to a point near the center left, with the rest of work radiating out from there.

    vesh
    Untlitled by Vesh, July 25, 2015, 1454 N Grant Ave — Photo by Jeff Regensburger.

    Sure handedness and line quality are critical. Spray paint can be very unforgiving. There’s no eraser. The paint dries quickly. Hold the can too close or for too long and you’ll get running and drips. Hesitate for even a fraction of a second and the perfect arc of a line is ruined. Inadvertently move too far away from the wall and your line gets suddenly wider, less crisp. While seeing the finished works can help one appreciate the level of skill involved in these pieces, watching the writers actually apply paint remains the most compelling proof. Skilled writers can feather and blend areas seamlessly. Their line work is consistent and sure. There is a practiced rhythm at work when you watch experienced writers in action; something that is both fluid and graceful.

    Content

    Graffiti is the vehicle through which the writer can express their name. If you see graffiti and wonder what you’re looking at, it is this: the writer’s name. If you were hoping for some message or meaning in the work, I’ll share it with you now: the message is the writer’s name.

    This is an exaggeration of course, but not by much. Plenty of graffiti artists write and paint plenty of different things, not always their name. But the fact is, the idea of being known, of getting your name out, of getting up, is central to the tradition of graffiti writing. Writers do this by establishing a brand of sorts (i.e. their graffiti name) and pushing it out. This means making their name as visible as possible as often as possible.

    So yeah, with most traditional graffiti, you’re probably looking at some variant of someone’s name.

    One could argue that the meaning isn’t simply the writer’s name, that the meaning is in the marks, the design, and the individual style. Perhaps these writers are using their name the same way Claude Monet used haystacks or Georgia O’Keefe used flowers; to show us something new and beautiful in the world. That’s possible, but if the meaning lies in these aesthetic or formal considerations, then why limit oneself to letters or a name at all? Why not just paint whatever design is or object is going to look best?

    Untitled by Gamble, July 25, 2015, 1454 N Grant Ave — Photo by Jeff Regensburger.
    Untitled by Gamble, July 25, 2015, 1454 N Grant Ave — Photo by Jeff Regensburger.

    Now might be a good time to make a distinction between graffiti and street art. While I’m not certain there is complete agreement on the respective definitions, here is where the lines are most commonly drawn:

    Graffiti is made most often with spray paint. You’ll also find graffiti done with markers, glass cutters, or etching, but it’s mostly spray paint. It generally adheres to the letter-based/character-based/name based practices described above. Graffiti includes tags, throw ups, and pieces.

    Street art is less formally constrained. Street art may use spray paint or it may not, but it can also include wheat pastes, stencils, and stickers. Street art can incorporate the three-dimensional elements of sculpture. Artist John Fekner is credited with defining street art as, “all art on the street that’s not graffiti.” That seems wholly reasonable to me. In terms of content, it’s not uncommon for street art to contain some element of social commentary, expressed either through unambiguous agitprop or more subtle, ironic juxtapositions.

    Compared to street art then, graffiti is much more rigid; much more doctrinaire. Despite the outlaw reputation, graffiti functions very much like any other -ISM in art (Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, etc). There are a lot of formal and stylistic rules to follow for inclusion in the genre.

    …and that’s a nice segue into context.

    Context

    There’s actually a fair amount of context for the graffiti we see today. Most obviously, graffiti goes hand-in-hand with Hip Hop and its attendant cultural accouterments. This link has been well established and well documented as far back as 1983 with the release of the seminal films Wild Style and Style Wars.

    Further back still, the practice of embellishing letters, of stylizing letters, of giving letters their own brand of decorative import is as old as writing itself. Every culture that’s utilized the written word has developed it’s own traditions of lettering and calligraphy. Illuminated manuscripts like the Lindisfarne Gospels and The Book of Kells are probably the most famous Western examples of such intricate forms of embellishment. Similar examples can be found in Asia, the Middle East, and South America. When perusing these historical examples of calligraphy and lettering it’s hard to not draw comparisons to the fluid lines and twists found in today’s graffiti alphabets.

    graff
    Left: Page with Chi Rho monogram from the Gospel of Matthew in the Lindisfarne Gospels (image courtesy of Wikipedia). Top Right: Arabic calligraphy in Diwani style forming the shape of a boat (image courtesy of Wikipedia). Bottom Right: Black graffiti alphabet sketch (image courtesy of graffitiday.com).

    stella
    Frank Stella, Shoubeegi, 1978, enamel and glitter on metal 95″ x 130″ — image courtesy of SFMOMA.

    In more recent art, I’ve always felt there must be some relationship (however tenuous) between the development of graffiti and the aesthetic choices offered by mid to late 20th century painting. I’m thinking specifically of movements like Post-painterly abstraction, Hard-edge painting, and Op-art; all of which relied on interlocking shapes and vibrant abstraction to construct a fluid, edge to edge picture plane. Frank Stella strikes me as particularly relevant. His Polish Village and Indian Bird series from the ’70s are perhaps distant cousins to the interlaced wildstyle favored by many graffiti writers. Similarly, it’s easy to see the tromp-l’oeil abstraction of artist’s like DAIM as the end point of Stella’s painting/sculpture assemblages.

    Point being that while graffiti lives for the most part outside of traditional art environments, it is not wholly apart from them. It turns out that the elements of our visual language are more than capable of crossing borders and hurtling barriers.

    So What’s Next?

    Write here. That’s the invitation given to graffiti writers by The Lookout Shop and The Creative Plug. Each month, on Gallery Hop Saturday, artists and writers will ply their trade and paint works in the alley behind the shop at 1253 High Street. The works will remain on view for one month and then be replaced by a new batch of artists the following month. It’s an effort by these entrepreneurs to simultaneously showcase the work of area writers and also present the public with a perspective on graffiti writing they don’t often see.

    Graffiti writer working on Race at the August 1, 2015, Lookout Shop/Creative Plug Graffiti Jam, 1253 N. High St, Columbus, OH 43201 (photo by Jeff Regensburger)
    Graffiti writer working on Race at the August 1, 2015 Lookout Shop/Creative Plug Graffiti Jam, 1253 N. High St — Photo by Jeff Regensburger.

    In my view this is a most welcome development. Great art makes great cities. That includes graffiti and street art. Public art serves as a reflection of the community in a way no other form really does. If we’re to accurately reflect our community, we have to embrace the work of those making art at what is literally street level.

    We’ve seen small steps in that direction. Urban Scrawl is going strong. The Short North Temporary Mural Series is a welcome addition to otherwise blank walls or advertising. In May The Columbus Museum of Art offered a street art workshop with Stephanie Rond. Graffiti writers will again be featured at this year’s Independents Day festival. These initiatives, along with the efforts described above, represent great opportunities for writers, artists, business persons, community leaders, and arts advocates to meet and work together.

    Let’s keep doing that, and more.

    Right here.

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    Jeff Regensburger
    Jeff Regensburger
    Jeff Regensburger is a painter, librarian, and drummer in the rock combo The Christopher Rendition. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts (Painting and Drawing) from The Ohio State University in 1990 and an Master’s Degree in Library Science from Kent State University in 1997. Jeff blogs sporadically (OnSummit.blogspot.com), tweets occasionally (@jeffrey_r), and paints as time allows.
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