From Vandalism to Veneration: American Graffiti art enters the gallery scene

The text below is the excerpt of the book American Graffiti (ISBN: 9781783107049), written by Margo Thompson, published by Parkstone International.

From 1981 to 1983, the graffiti artists featured in New York/New Wave pursued their professional ambitions in solo exhibitions at commercial galleries. The star of the show, Jean-Michel Basquiat, developed an international reputation almost immediately, with multiple shows at the galleries of Annina Nosei in New York, Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles, and Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich. LEE was the first former writer to join a SoHo gallery, the Gladstone Gallery in late 1982. In the East Village, the Fun Gallery and Rich Colicchio’s 51X, which opened on St. Mark’s Place in spring 1982, were enthusiastic supporters of graffiti art as a movement. DONDI, FAB FIVE FREDDY, and FUTURA 2000 had one-man shows at both spaces. Fashion Moda continued to represent graffiti artists, especially those who lived in the Bronx, like LADY PINK, CRASH, DAZE and the ‘Gothic Futurists’ RAMMELLZEE, A-ONE, KOOR, and TOXIC. These exhibitions generated excitement about graffiti art among other dealers: Bruno Bischofberger and Tony Shafrazi kept an eye on what was happening at Fun, and as will be discussed in the next chapter, the Dutch gallerist Yaki Kornblit re-opened his Amsterdam gallery to show the works of graffiti artists.

The former writers were reviewed in the art press, but were rarely situated in relation to high culture: the comparison of FUTURA 2000’s paintings to Kandinsky noted in the last chapter was exceptional. Graffiti art was constituted as a movement through another set of terms that emphasised the authenticity of the artist’s voice and positively attributed primitive qualities to him. Supporters argued that graffiti artists expressed a vibrant yet misunderstood subculture, ghetto youth, and that they were not merely products of the art marketplace. For them, graffiti artists’ lack of formal training meant they were unencumbered by artistic conventions and offered a fresh alternative to modernist traditions. Not yet cynical or corrupted by market demands, writers offered a new style that had not been commodified. Whether graffiti became something less authentic when it moved into a commercial space remained nagging questions for critics, dealers, collectors, and the former writers themselves. Detractors suspected that graffiti and East Village art generally was so much hype foisted upon unsophisticated and eager art consumers. The former writers were cast as true primitives, outsiders prone to corruption by the art world. It was an inaccurate label, and unfair, because it denied the writers the agency that Basquiat, Haring, and Scharf were presumed to have in developing their styles and motifs. Once the writers had been corrupted, of course, their art was no longer authentic in critics’ eyes.

The ambivalent position graffiti art held in the early 1980s ties it to a shift away from modernism outlined by art historian Hal Foster. Modernism, which was once shaped by avant-garde provocations has now ‘receded’ as a historical moment, and something else roped to a surging culture industry has replaced it, he wrote. Basquiat and graffiti art embodied this development, which Foster called the ‘subversion of the subversive’. SAMO’s aphorisms and writers’ tags in their original locations transgressed social conventions that represented young people of colour as stereotypes and denied them their authentic voice. The mass media and modern art appropriated and assimilated these challenges from the outside, in a transformation of subculture into mainstream culture that Dick Hebdige has described. As Foster wrote, ‘Thus the streetartist Samo becomes Jean-Michel Basquiat, the new art-world primitive/prodigy’. The success of this move required a ‘taxonomic shift’ with reference to art historical precedents to prove that graffiti was properly classified as art, not vandalism.

Foster observed that as the writers were recognised as artists, ‘anonymous tags become celebrity signatures. Rather than circulate against the code, graffiti is now mostly fixed by it: a form of access to it, not transgression of it’. LEE, DONDI, FUTURA 2000, and FAB FIVE FREDDY illustrated Foster’s description of graffiti art: ‘Like the cartoons and comics of much East Village art, graffiti art is concerned less to contest the lines between museum and margin, high and low, than to find a place within them’. Quite simply, those graffiti artists wanted to succeed in the culture industry, which made them not avantgardists, but postmodernists.

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