On vandalism

When a slightly inebriated Oliver Payne tells us in a recent interview that his love for vandalism knows no bounds, he is revealing to us one side of a polemic which has grown to dominate and divide graffiti in recent years. For sure, the division has always been there: one between the bombers and the piecers; one which symbolizes the tension between the political imperative of defacing public property and the aesthetic imperative of style. Yet somehow the division has never been quite so pronounced, the problem never quite so severe. Whilst the key motivation of early pioneers such as Cornbread and Taki 183 might quite simply have been just getting up, the movement spawned by their actions quickly gathered momentum, with the emergence of a first generation of writers who actively embraced the aesthetic challenge of pushing, distorting and redefining the boundaries of vandalism.

Dondi - Children of the Grave Part 3

Perhaps one of the most notable of these early renegades was Dondi: working in the penumbra of sleeping train yards, cloaked in the diffuse mist of paint fumes and aerosol propellant, perhaps more than any other writer of his generation, Dondi strove so that his masterpieces would emerge fresh from the yards, dazzling and resplendent in the early morning sun, out into the slowly awakening city, and on to run throughout the day, ultimately going on to capture the imaginations of a worldwide audience of millions long after they had been buffed from the carriages of the MTA rolling stock.

Thirty years have passed since Dondi painted the third and final of his Children of the Grave series. Much has changed: graffiti and the subculture it represents have undergone a series of evolutions, culminating in the establishment of an international movement which has seen its practitioners—albeit some with varying degrees of cynicism—embrace the commercial industry which has sprung up around so-called street art, and with it, the new aesthetic challenges it presents. Yet there are also those who have rejected these challenges outright, in a calculated act of rebellion against style and the perceived threat of conformance in what has always been a thoroughly non-conformist and anti-establishment art form. As an example of this, Payne cites the London writer Tox, who has embarked upon a programme of stripping graffiti back to its bare bones, as a political act of sheer vandalism. Taking two writers from two different generations of London’s DDS crew, the effects of this shift become clear: from Zomby to Tox, we can see something of the progressive marginalization of the aesthetic, almost to the point of non-existence.

Tox tag

All this begs the question, what is to be made of this development, of this polarization of the aesthetic and the political? At first it would seem very much to be part of a larger aesthetic revolution in which a schism has opened up between art as an aesthetic mode of expression with no  political function and art as a political mode of expression with no aesthetic function. In this sense, it would seem to be a reflection of the fragmented and schizophrenic manner of expression inherent to our own condition of late Western capitalism, one which seriously undermines the effectiveness of our modes of expression: whilst the street artists are marked by the absence of a political imperative which might allow them to engage a wider audience, the bombers suffer from the absence of an aesthetic imperative which might serve to legitimate their message and thus reach a wider audience.

From a sociological perspective however, the focus has been consistently drawn towards the effects of this latter group, since for society, the problem has never been one of graffiti artists painting ever more vibrant and colourful murals with increasing degrees of technical proficiency; instead, it is that of the emergence of generations of adolescents who display a total and nihilistic contempt towards the urban environment they inhabit. Payne’s eloquent avocation of vandalism goes some way to approximating the rationale and destructive urge through which such contempt is manifested.

What we are seeing then, is nothing other than a last ditch attempt of a marginal group of society to have its say, being forced to resort to increasingly desperate tactics to make their statement in a world in which the voices of mal pensant critics are swiftly drowned out by the torrents of vacuous rhetoric and cultural complacency which dominate. A final stand against the decadent consensus of late Western capitalism: this is the voice of the Other, emerging onto the streets after nightfall, bloody and bare knuckled, armed only with the brute force of sheer vandalism. And it is for precisely this reason I believe that Payne’s love of vandalism knows no bounds.