Art crimes
The
beginning.
Graffiti,
of course, has been around since man learned how to write. In New York City the
trend of "tagging", or writing one's name, on subway cars is most
often credited to Taki 183, a seventeen year old from 183rd Street in the
Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, whose job as a messenger required
him to travel on the trains everyday. Taki began writing his name all over the
trains and stations of the transit system, and it wasn't too long before people
started to notice. On July 21, 1971, the New York Times ran an article entitled
"Taki 183 Spawns Pen Pals."
Of course,
the New York Times wasn't the only one who noticed. All over New York, more and
more kids became enamored of the idea of their name traveling across the city
every day and being seen by thousands upon thousands of commuters.
With so
many youths competing for attention and space, it soon became necessary to go
beyond simply scrawling one's name in black marker on a train wall to be
noticed. A greater level of originality became more valued, as did more
ambitious works. Logos, stylistic variations, size, and color were added to
make pieces stand out from the crowd.
Why
Paint the Subway.
There
seems to be little reason to risk one's life for something as meager as a
fleeting moment of self-expression, soon to be cleansed away by a fresh coat of
paint. But there are others who see it a different way: the dreamers and the
adventurers, the bridge-climbers and the rebels. The graffiti writer falls
squarely into this category.
Kingtwo,
an old-school graffiti artist, described it like this: "The best feeling
about writing on a train is something you can't describe until you do it.
Graffiti was a way to express yourself, even though we knew it was illegal. We
never considered the risk we took. When you did a masterpiece on the train the
feeling was so great you can't imagine it."
