Graffiti is made to disappear. The first teenagers who wrote their names on New York subway cars expected the cleaning crews within days, sometimes within hours. Yet one of those names sent a New York Times reporter looking for the boy behind it, and within fifty years the same gesture had climbed a chimney of the Pompidou Center and reached the separation wall in the West Bank.
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From a Name on a Wall to Street Art
Graffiti, in the strict sense, is writing. In late-1960s New York, teenagers began putting their nicknames on walls, buses and subway cars with markers and spray cans. The writers called it getting up: being seen in as many places as possible. Over the years the name grew, until it covered whole trains.
Street art came later, around 1980, when artists began bringing images to the wall instead of names: a stencil cut from cardboard, a printed sticker, a poster pasted at night, a few ceramic tiles. What separates the two is the reader. A tag speaks first to other writers, who know how to decipher it. Street art speaks to anyone walking past.
Both share a condition a studio painter never meets: the work is usually illegal, and usually destroyed. Some artists answered by painting faster, others by finding a material that lasts, or by making the destruction part of the meaning.
The twelve artists here were chosen for what each of them did to that first name on the wall. Each took it somewhere new, into a theory, a whole subway car, a stencil, a mosaic, a photograph, a poster or a sentence aimed at the art world.
12. TAKI 183 (year of birth not disclosed)
Four letters and three digits, TAKI 183, written on a bus terminal at 179th Street and Broadway. By his own account it was his first tag, made at about sixteen. TAKI was a teenager from Washington Heights. The letters came from Demetraki, a Greek form of Demetrius, and the number was his street.
Writing a name on a wall was not new. In the mid-1960s, a boy who signed JULIO 204 was already doing it, but only in his own neighborhood. What set TAKI apart was his job. He worked as a foot messenger, and he wrote his name wherever his deliveries took him, among strangers.
A neighborhood habit had become a citywide puzzle. By the summer of 1971, the name had appeared in so many places that the New York Times went looking for the person behind it, and on July 21 it ran the story under the headline "'Taki 183' Spawns Pen Pals." To me, that is the strangest part: millions of people had seen the name, and nobody knew who carried it.
The article then did what the tags alone could not. Hundreds of teenagers across the five boroughs read it and grasped a new game, in which a name was worth the distance it traveled. Before TAKI, a tag marked a block. After him, it competed for the whole city, and the contest soon moved onto the subway cars, which carried a name everywhere at once. None of his tags survive, but the subway writing of the 1970s grows out of them.
At a Glance
Born: Not disclosed
Died: Living
Nationality: American
Known for: Writing his name and street number across New York around 1970
Where to see the work: Not on view, since his street tags were all erased
11. Rammellzee (1960 to 2010)
Along the A line in the 1970s, the cars and stations carried the names of writers such as DONDI and A-One. A young man from Far Rockaway, in Queens, painted beside them, and he drew a stranger conclusion than any of his neighbors on the line. Rammellzee decided that the letters of the alphabet were weapons, that they had been disarmed, and that his job was to arm them again.