Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York's Urban Underground

by Gregory J. Snyder

Overview

A rare look into the world of contemporary graffiti culture

On the sides of buildings, on bridges, billboards, mailboxes, and street signs, and especially in the subway and train tunnels, graffiti covers much of New York City. Love it or hate it, graffiti, from the humble tag to the intricate piece (short for masterpiece), is an undeniable part of the cityscape.

In Graffiti Lives, Gregory J. Snyder offers a fascinating and rare look into this world of contemporary graffiti culture. A world in which kids, often, shoplift for spray paint, scale impossibly high places to find a great spot to “get up,” run from the police, journey into underground train tunnels, fight over turf, and spend countless hours perfecting their style. Over the ten years Snyder studied this culture he even created a few works himself (under the moniker “GWIZ”), found himself serving as a lookout for other artists engaged in this illegal activity, spent time in the train tunnels in search of new work, created a blackbook for writers to tag, and took countless photographs to document this world — over sixty included in the book.

A combination of amazing “flicks” and exhilarating prose, Graffiti Lives is ultimately an exploration into how graffiti writers define themselves. Snyder details that writers are not bound together by appearance or language or birthplace or class but by what they do. And what they do is reach for fame, painting their names as prominently as they can. What’s more, he discovers that, though many public officials think graffiti writing will only lead to other criminal activity, many graffiti writers have turned their youthful exploits into adult careers—from professional aerosol muralists and fine artists to designers of all kinds, employed in such fields as tattooing, studio art, magazine production, fashion, and guerilla marketing. In fact, some of the artists featured have gone on to international acclaim and to their own gallery shows. Snyder’s illuminating work shows that getting up tags, throw-ups, and pieces on New York City’s walls and subway tunnels can lead to getting out into the city’s competitive professional world. Graffiti Lives details the exciting, risky, and surprisingly rewarding pursuits of contemporary graffiti writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814740460
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2011
Series:	Alternative Criminology , #21
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Gregory J. Snyder is Associate Professor of Sociology at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York’s Urban Underground.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue xi

Introduction 1

1 Getting In

Starting the Blackbook 13

A Brief History of Graffiti Writing 23

Crime Space vs. Cool Space: Breaking Down Broken Windows 47

2 Getting up

VERT: First Contact 59

Writers Block: Blackbook in the Streets 65

Welcome to ESPO Land 73

ESPO: Illustrating Struggle 81

Into the Tunnel: Under Manhattan 85

A Pilgrimage to MEK: A Bronx Graffiti Tour 89

Legal Graffiti: Contemporary Permission Spots 97

Style Points: ESPO s Brooklyn Mural 105

Illustrating Criminal: Split PSOUP 115

AME: Bombing Styles, Inventing Self 119

AMAZE: Out-of-Towner Gets Up in the Tunnel 129

The Grate Graffiti Solution: ESPO s Public Surface Announcement 137

3 Getting Out

Over the Wall: Graffiti Media and Creating a Career 147

Writing Style: It's Not What You Wear 159

Career Opportunities: Rewriting Subculture Resistance 167

Timmy Tattoo: Timmy's Long Island Tattoo Shop 173

Gabe Banner: Market Wise 177

ESPO/Steve Powers: Dreamland Artist Club 181

CODA: Graffiti for Life 189

Appendix: The New Ethnography 191

Glossary 199

Notes 203

Bibliography 219

Index 227

About the Author 241

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Outstanding, innovative, and multidimensional. . . . I can easily see this book becoming the new ‘best book on graffiti.’ "

-Joe Austin,author of Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City

"Will prompt readers to look again at graffiti scrawls they may previously have ignored."

-Kirkus Reviews,

"In his first book, fan and socio-anthropologist Snyder doesn't just celebrate urban street art and its rising stars, but takes a thorough look at its history and future, the language of public art and the idea of the graffiti artist as criminal—including an intriguing challenge to the 'broken windows theory' cited by law enforcement and NYC government officials as central to their efforts. Along the way he decodes a backdoor in the East Village covered with a dozen different tags—'in the same way that the sedimentary layers of ancient ruins inspire archaeologists to tell tales of past civilizations'—profiles rising and established stars, and takes a raw, detailed tour of the scene. . . . Snyder's 'the kids are alright' assessment, buttressed by many examples of thrill-seeking taggers finding successful careers in art, design, publishing, and (commissioned) mural-painting, is well-articulated, convincing, and quite possibly reassuring for the urbanites living among (or perhaps raising) today's writers and bombers."
-Publisher's Weekly Starred Review

,

"Graffiti lives! proclaims author Snyder in this new, vaguely academic account of graffiti in the urban underground—particularly New York."
-New York Post

,

“Graffiti writers, the book argues, cannot be understood merely as practitioners of vandalism and social disorder, but also as members of a diverse subculture who, in many cases, have used their experiences to build legitimate careers.”
-The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

"The book contributes to our understanding of graffiti, getting beyond simple explanations of graffiti or generalizations about graffiti writers. Open-minded art lovers, as well as visual sociologists, will enjoy the integration between images and text.Snyders book makes an admirable contribution toward our understanding of this fascinating form of vandalism, art, resistance, space claiming, and identity making."

Social Forces

"Graffiti writers, the book argues, cannot be understood merely as practitioners of vandalism and social disorder, but also as members of a diverse subculture who, in many cases, have used their experiences to build legitimate careers."

The New York Times

"Outstanding, innovative, and multidimensional. . . . I can easily see this book becoming the new & best book on graffiti"

Joe Austin

"In his first book, fan and socio-anthropologist Snyder doesn’t just celebrate urban street art and its rising stars, but takes a thorough look at its history and future, the language of public art and the idea of the graffiti artist as criminalincluding an intriguing challenge to the ‘broken windows theory’ cited by law enforcement and NYC government officials as central to their efforts. Along the way he decodes a backdoor in the East Village covered with a dozen different tags’in the same way that the sedimentary layers of ancient ruins inspire archaeologists to tell tales of past civilizations’profiles rising and established stars, and takes a raw, detailed tour of the scene. . . . Snyder’s ‘the kids are alright’ assessment, buttressed by many examples of thrill-seeking taggers finding successful careers in art, design, publishing, and (commissioned) mural-painting, is well-articulated, convincing, and quite possibly reassuring for the urbanites living among (or perhaps raising) today's writers and bombers."

Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review

"Graffiti lives! proclaims author Snyder in this new, vaguely academic account of graffiti in the urban undergroundparticularly New York."

New York Post

"Graffiti writers, the book argues, cannot be understood merely as practitioners of vandalism and social disorder, but also as members of a diverse subculture who, in many cases, have used their experiences to build legitimate careers."

The New York Times

"Graffiti lives! proclaims author Snyder in this new, vaguely academic account of graffiti in the urban undergroundparticularly New York."

New York Post

"Graffiti lives! proclaims author Snyder in this new, vaguely academic account of graffiti in the urban underground—particularly New York."
• New York Post

“The book contributes to our understanding of graffiti, getting beyond simple explanations of graffiti or generalizations about graffiti writers. Open-minded art lovers, as well as visual sociologists, will enjoy the integration between images and text….Snyder’s book makes an admirable contribution toward our understanding of this fascinating form of vandalism, art, resistance, space claiming, and identity making.”- Social Forces

From the Publisher

Starred Review.

In his first book, fan and socio-anthropologist Snyder doesn't just celebrate urban street art and its rising stars, but takes a thorough look at its history and future, the language of public art and the idea of the graffiti artist as criminal-including an intriguing challenge to the "broken windows theory" cited by law enforcement and NYC government officials as central to their efforts. Along the way he decodes a backdoor in the East Village covered with a dozen different tags-"in the same way that the sedimentary layers of ancient ruins inspire archaeologists to tell tales of past civilizations"-profiles rising and established stars, and takes a raw, detailed tour of the scene with guidance from writers like ESPO, MEK, and AMAZE (their trip through the "Freedom Tunnel" from 72nd Street to 125th Street under Riverside Drive is especially exciting). Snyder's "the kids are alright" assessment, buttressed by many examples of thrill-seeking taggers finding successful careers in art, design, publishing, and (commissioned) mural-painting, is well-articulated, convincing, and quite possibly reassuring for the urbanites living among (or perhaps raising) today's writers and bombers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

Not all graffiti artists are hoodlums, declares Snyder (Sociology and Anthropology/Baruch Coll.). Possibly the best thing about this ethnographic thesis on New York graffiti artists is that the author doesn't pretend to be one of them. He exhaustively lays out his own background-Irish-Catholic kid in Green Bay, Wis.; ardent lover of punk rock and hip-hop in college; misfit graduate student at the New School in New York City-before getting much into those of the men he is writing about. (This is not, by and large, a woman's world.) Snyder follows ethnographic discipline to a fault, explaining time and again what his methods of field research were and how he came into contact with the graffiti "writers" who spread their art over the walls, tunnels and store grates of New York. More suitable for a paper being presented to a degree review board than for a general-interest book, this approach doesn't leave much room for his actual on-the-ground research, most of which was conducted in the late '90s and is now out of date. There are some worthwhile passages amid the portentously deployed academese, however, particularly those on the writers' actual working methods. Snyder may hammer home a few points with numbing repetitiveness, but the points are worth making. First, the connection between rap culture and graffiti is weaker than most people believe; many of the artists here identify more closely with punk than rap. Second, graffiti as an art form doesn't necessarily have a direct link to criminality. The author points out that it's frequently thicker in tourist areas like Soho than in poorer, less-trafficked locales, showing that for most writers having their work seen is more important thananything else. Snyder, who clearly became too close to his subjects to retain much objectivity, too breezily brushes aside citizens' concerns about graffiti. Nonetheless, his book will prompt readers to look again at graffiti scrawls they may previously have ignored. A few kernels of insight buried under layers of grad-student balderdash.

Kirkus Reviews

"Graffiti Lives [is] an important text for emerging research connecting cultural criminology and green criminology."

Crime, Law & Social Change - Avi Brisman

"Layered, fascinating and compelling, Graffiti Lives is of interest to scholars and general readers alike. Raw, energetic pictures complement the intense prose. The book is as exciting as the transgressive art it documents."

M/C Reviews

"In his first book, fan and socio-anthropologist Snyder doesn’t just celebrate urban street art and its rising stars, but takes a thorough look at its history and future, the language of public art and the idea of the graffiti artist as criminalincluding an intriguing challenge to the ‘broken windows theory’ cited by law enforcement and NYC government officials as central to their efforts. Along the way he decodes a backdoor in the East Village covered with a dozen different tags’in the same way that the sedimentary layers of ancient ruins inspire archaeologists to tell tales of past civilizations’profiles rising and established stars, and takes a raw, detailed tour of the scene. . . . Snyder’s ‘the kids are alright’ assessment, buttressed by many examples of thrill-seeking taggers finding successful careers in art, design, publishing, and (commissioned) mural-painting, is well-articulated, convincing, and quite possibly reassuring for the urbanites living among (or perhaps raising) today's writers and bombers."

Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review