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Chapter 3 Heretical Geography 1: The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti Copyright © 1996

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Chapter 3 Heretical Geography 1: The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The Graffiti Story The scene is New York City as it enters the 1970s. This was to be a troubled decade for the world city. The city budget was steadily heading into a large deficit and the infrastructure was crumbling. The city was on the slippery slope leading to the famous fiscal crisis of 1976. Under Mayor John Lindsay and Mayor Abraham Beame increasingly severe "austerity measures" were imposed on the city, leading to a rapid and highly visible decline in its physical fabric. Fifty-one bridges faced collapse, and many of the city's six thousand miles of sewers threatened to do the same. Roads were crumbling and the subway was in a bad state of disrepair.1 Payrolls for city workers were cut 15 to 25 percent. Park attendants, teachers, police, hospital workers, and firefighters all felt the effects of "austerity." The Wall Street Journal wrote: Basic city services, once the model for urban areas across the nation, have been slashed to the point of breakdown Evidence of the cutbacks is everywhere: the streets are blanketed with garbage. Robberies, to name but one crime, are at an all-time high. The subway system is near collapse, plagued by aging equipment, vandalism, the frequent breakdowns and derailments.2 Poor people were disproportionately affected by "austerity" — black people and Puerto Ricans especially so. In the two years following the fall of 1974 the city lost half of its Spanish-speaking workforce and two-fifths of its black employees.3 These people were also the ones most affected by the breakdown in public services, for it was they who most used the public parks, transport system, and hospitals. A desperate city government looked toward the federal government for help. President Ford's lack of interest led the New York Daily News in October 1975 to print the headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead." 31 Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. 32 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti It was during this tense and strained period that graffiti began to appear with increasing frequency on New York's material fabric. In the early months of 1971 a young man named Demetrius traveled around parts of New York City with a broad-tipped felt marker and wrote the name TAKI 183 on select walls, doors, and hoardings. By the summer months his mark seemed to saturate areas of the city. The name appeared to signify nothing other than a made-up name — not so much an identity as a pseudoidentity. The appearance of the symbol marked the beginning of a protracted series of political engagements with the issue of graffiti in New York City, beginning in 1971 and extending through to the late 1980s. The New York Times was made aware of TAKI's existence and decided to find the person behind the mark. They found Demetrius and dedicated a half page to his exploits.4 They presented him as a modernday folk hero — a colorful outlaw with an interesting hobby. Indeed the appearance of the article started a long series of exchanges in the New York media as to whether or not graffiti could be considered as a new folk art. Just as TAKI received the attention of the media, his exploits were attracting a group of young admirers who quickly began to replicate TAKI's achievements. TAKI became a folk hero, and the appearance of graffiti throughout the city spread rapidly. At first the graffiti consisted of small-scale "tags," or pseudonyms with street numbers added. These were applied to public property everywhere. The target that gathered the most attention, though, was the New York subway system. By 1973 the "tags" had become more colorful. The graffitists had discovered the limitations of felt-tipped pens and the wonders of spray paint.5 Gradually, large multicolored "masterpieces" became more common—decorating whole coaches of New York subway trains. The graphic designs were still centered around a single name, such as TOMCAT and KOOK. This was not the political graffiti of Europe or the football-fan style of England. Neither was it the "John loves Lucy" school-ground variety. It was rarely obscene. This graffiti was all style. The work would often take crews of graffitists all night in a dark and dangerous subway yard. The results were often breathtakingly striking.6 Graffiti groups and gangs began to form. "The Crew," "Challenge to Be Free," and "Fabulous Five" were notable examples. These small groups formed complicated and hierarchical communities with their own rules and ethics. The whole process from "racking up" (stealing paint) to "getting up" (producing graffiti) was highly organized. Beginners were called "toys," and the lucky ones got to be apprentices with the accom- Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 33 Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. plished "kings." The graffiti itself existed in a hierarchy of achievement from "tags" (simple names inside of subway cars), through "throw-ups" (bigger names on the outside), to "pieces" (masterpieces — symbols, names, and messages often covering whole cars). The legendary "worm" (a whole train) was only painted twice7 (see figures 3.1-3.3). The appearance of the graffitists' colorful products on the subway system soon led to an increasingly strong set of reactions on the part of the media, the government, and the public. The New York Times was chastised for its "celebration" of TAKI 183 and blamed for the increasing popularity of graffiti. Its writers, in unison with the increasingly angry Mayor Lindsay, quickly turned against the city's graffitists. I shall examine these reactions later in the chapter. The city government, fuming at the suggestion that graffiti should be considered "art," instituted a series of expensive, and largely fruitless, antigraffiti campaigns. These ranged from the use of guard dogs and barbed wire at subway yards, through the use of antigraffiti paint and acid washes, to the annual antigraffiti day in which good citizens (represented by Boy and Girl Scouts) cleaned up decorated subway trains and public buildings. The sale of spray paints to minors was banned, and people were banned from possessing spray paint in public places. Ten Figure 3.1. Tags on the New York subway. (Photo by Lynn Forsdale, from Craig Castleman, Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York, copyright 1982 MIT Press, by permission.) Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. 34 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Figure 3.2. Throw-up by IOU One. (Photo by Ted Pearlman, from Craig Castleman, Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York, copyright 1982 MIT Press, by permission.) Figure 3.3. A full-scale dedication to "Mom" by Lee. (Photo by Harry Chalfant, from Craig Castleman, Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York, copyright 1982 MIT Press, by permission.) Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 35 Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. million dollars was spent in 1972 on attempts to halt graffiti, and 1,562 people were arrested on graffiti charges.8 By 1975 Lindsay admitted that the struggle against graffiti was a losing proposition, and the New York Times was writing editorials suggesting that spending millions on graffiti was a waste of time and money.9 There were, after all, more serious problems to deal with. As graffiti was in the political spotlight it was also undergoing its strange transformation into art. In the early part of 1972 a group of street graffiti artists, under the guidance of a City College sociology student named Hugo Martinez, formed the United Graffiti Artists (UGA). Martinez wanted to find an outlet for the creative egos of Puerto Rican kids from deprived environments.10 He regularly visited a corner of 188th Street and learned the codes and secrets of graffiti. He convinced some of the writers to give a demonstration of their talents at City College on a paper-covered ten-by-forty-foot wall. On 20 October 1972 the graffitists engaged in "legitimate art" for the first time. By December the UGA was attracting the attention of the New York Times11 and was paid six hundred dollars for performing in a ballet entitled Deuce Coupe. Their performance was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal: While the dancers performed to pop music, Co-Co and his friends [the UGA artists] sprayed their names and other embellishments to create a flamboyant and fascinating backdrop. As the graffiti writers took their bows, waving their cans of spray paint, the trendy, avant-garde Jeffrey audience responded with loud applause and numerous enthusiastic bravos. "They're so real!" one young spectator exclaimed to his date.12 The UGA was granted a studio in Manhattan for rent of one dollar a year and quickly began to hold exhibitions in SoHo. Paintings sold for over a thousand dollars, and press reports were generally favorable. This was at the same time as reports of street graffiti were gradually becoming more frantic in their denunciations. One favorable review of graffiti made the connection between the gallery graffiti and its street cousin: "It would be well to keep in mind that there has often been something mildly anti-social in the practice of art and society has almost invariably profited from it in the long run. Well, that is for those of you who can't simply relax and enjoy the visual bonus that comes these days with the purchase of a subway token."13 The author was pleased to report that the "respectable standing and the 'art' context [had] not cowed most of the UGA artists." The UGA members eventually disbanded. Two became professional artists. Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. 36 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti Another, more democratic, graffiti organization that formed in the early seventies was the Nation of Graffiti Artists (NOGA). While UGA membership was limited to acknowledged "masters," NOGA was oriented toward getting kids off the streets and keeping them fed. They provided art materials and encouraged production of graffiti art, which sold for up to $300. At one point they offered to paint subway cars for $150 a piece. The Metropolitan Transit Authority rejected the plan. Just a few years after TAKI 183 hit the streets and attracted followers and detractors, graffiti began to appear in the smart galleries of SoHo. SoHo had been a mixed neighborhood of low- to medium-rent housing and small businesses. By the mid-seventies businesses had moved out, and their premises were converted into "loft apartments" and artist studios. SoHo was becoming a hip place to live and be seen, and it was also becoming expensive. The former residents and workers could no longer afford to live and work there.14 Mayor Lindsay, the sworn enemy of graffiti, encouraged the gentrification of SoHo and its art community in the conviction that there was an increasingly important "arts constituency" in the city. With this in mind, he was primarily responsible for significant increases in the state's involvement in art funding—particularly in the "bohemian" art world of SoHo, where the graffiti of UGA was being enthusiastically accepted as a new form of "primitive" art. SAMO was a graffiti artist who had, like TAKI 183, spread his name widely throughout the city. He was "discovered" by SoHo art dealer Annina Nosei, who invited him to join her gallery. As Jean-Michel Basquiat, he worked in the basement of the gallery producing the work that was to make him a celebrity. Keith Haring had used chalk on black empty spaces for advertisements in subway stations around major art centers in Manhattan. Soon his work was inside the galleries rather than outside. These artists became the most distinguished graffiti artists, and their work appeared in the most prestigious galleries. Haring's work is now available in poster form, along with Renoirs, Dalis, and Picassos. His work even appeared atop Times Square flashing out across the city he had once "defaced." The influence of graffiti is clear in the work of contemporary artists such as Jenny Holzer, who produced officiallooking plaques and posters with strange messages and plastered them around New York City. In her work Truisms (1977) she sought to "place in contradiction certain ideological structures that are usually kept apart."15 At first these posters were placed on the street. They interrupted the flow of everyday thoughts with statements such as "A strong sense of duty imprisons you" and "Ambivalance can ruin your life." These posters later appeared in galleries and on flashing signs. Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 37 The New York City government still responded to graffiti negatively in well-known instances. Lou Reed wanted to be pictured spraying graffiti in the New York subway for an album cover. The city government persuaded his record company to change the cover. Other popular culture enterprises cashed in on graffiti. The Clash featured the graffiti artist Futura in a music video. Graffiti can now be seen in a deli in Madison, Wisconsin, symbolizing, no doubt, the New York authenticity of the store's bagels and cream cheese. Michael Jackson used a graffiti-covered backdrop of generic urban decay for his appropriately titled Bad video. An electric power company advertises itself in a national magazine with white graffiti pictured on a red brick wall. The graffiti says rebelliously, "Power to the People." Perhaps a fitting end to this story is the choice by DisneyWorld (the supreme court of representations) to represent New York City not with the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty but with a graffiti-covered subway train. Naturally the city government complained. In the remainder of this chapter I step back into the story I have just told. I will concentrate on two parts of the story: the frantic responses to graffiti on the street that sought to portray it as deviant and the enthusiastic acceptance of it as art by the SoHo art community. As I will show, each of these responses (despite their apparent contradictions) reveals the power of place in the construction of "normality" and "deviance." The Discourse of Disorder The pages of the New York Times and other New York media, particularly in the 1970s, presented a discourse of disorder. In reaction to graffiti, the language and the rhetoric of the press, its readers, and government officials convey a deep fear of disorder in the landscape. This fear is prompted by the appearance in public spaces of people's names and pseudonyms. Reaction to graffiti describes it as a threat to order—as out of place — in two main ways: (1) by suggesting through a mass of metaphors and descriptive terms that graffiti does not belong in New York's public places and (2) by associating it with other places — other contexts—where either the order is different and more amenable to graffiti or disorder is more prevalent. In each case the geographical implications are powerful. Throughout the 1970s graffiti is referred to variously as garbage, pollution, obscenity, an epidemic, a disease, a blight, a form of violence, dangerous, and a product of the mad, the ghetto, and the barbarian. An Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. 38 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti examination of these reactions reveals the role of implicit normative geographies in the ordering of "appropriate" behavior. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Dirt, Garbage, Pollution, Obscenity One of the most prevalent terms used to describe graffiti is one form or another of dirt. I will give you a few of the many examples. A letter in the New York Times reads: "No civilized metropolis (Montreal, Mexico City, Moscow) would endure such garbage and its continuing proliferation in New York shocks many visitors and repulses untold numbers of local travelers."16 City Council President Sanford Garelick is quoted in the New York Times of 21 May 1972 as saying, "Graffiti pollutes the eye and mind and may be one of the worst forms of pollution we have to combat."17 Craig Castleman in his book Getting Up quotes Metropolitan Transit Authority Chairman Rich Ravitch as saying: "The subways in general are a mess, and the public sees graffiti as a form of defacement like garbage, noise, dirt, and broken doors."18 Dirt is something in the wrong place or wrong time. Dirt disgusts us because it appears where it shouldn't be — on the kitchen floor or under the bed. The very same objects (dust and grime) do not constitute dirt if they are in a different place. The meaning of dirt is dependent on its location. Because dirt appears where it shouldn't, it lies at the bottom of a hierarchical scale of values; dirt is valued by very few people. It annoys us in its persistence, in its audacity to keep turning up in places we thought were clean, pure, and pristine. Mary Douglas, in her book Purity and Danger, examines the concept of dirt and pollution. She connects the dread of dirt to a fear of disorder. Removing dirt, on the other hand, is part of the establishment of an ordered environment. We make the environment conform to an idea, a sense of order. Dirt, she says, is "matter out of place," a definition that suggests simultaneously some form of order and a contravention of that order. Dirt, by its very definition, depends on the preexistence of a system, a mode of classification. Douglas makes this point well: Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom, or food bespattered on clothing; similarly, bathroom equipment in the drawing room; clothing lying on chairs; out-door things in-doors; upstairs things downstairs; under clothing appearing where over-clothing should be, and so on.19 Dirt, then, is a mismatch of meanings—meanings that are erroneously positioned in relation to other things. Things that transgress become Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 39 dirt—they are in the wrong place. If there was no "wrong place," there could be no transgression. Another way of putting it is that transgression represents a questioning of boundaries. Here we are not talking about the boundaries of a territory; no enforcement of access is implied. We are talking of symbolic boundaries. But still we return to geography, as these symbolic boundaries not only vary with place but are constituted by place. In all of the illustrations (graffiti, Stonehenge, and the Greenham women) we shall see the use of metaphors of dirt to describe and ridicule the transgressors. Douglas's discussion of "matter out of place" is relevant to all of them and provides a useful analytical tool for decoding the reactions to these transgressions. Beliefs about dirt and pollution relate to power relations in society as they delineate, in an ideological fashion, what is out of place. Those who can define what is out of place are those with the most power in society. A note of caution is needed, however. First, Douglas's idea is devoid of any reference to the types of forces that are at play in the definition of "dirt." What counts as dirt varies widely across cultures. In each culture different types of pressures work to create these differences. Douglas fails to discuss the ways in which forces related to class, gender, and ethnicity, for instance, create notions of what is "out of place." Second, Douglas's analysis is entirely relative. We can safely assume that some things are almost universally out of place. Fatal diseases, for instance, are unlikely to be welcome anywhere. In the illustrations here, however, the objects of the word dirt are not out of place in any absolute sense. Graffiti, women at military camps, and young traveling festival-goers are not literally diseases. It is to some group's advantage to describe them as such for political, social, and cultural reasons. Julia Kristeva builds on Douglas's insights in The Powers of Horror. Like Douglas she suggests that filth is a label that relates to a boundary. Filth to Kristeva is an object pushed beyond a boundary to its other side, its margin. The power of pollution is "proportional to the potency of the prohibition that founds it."20 Kristeva's theorizations are more closely tied to power relations than are Douglas's. Kristeva is particularly concerned with gender relations, and her observations relate to the role of filth in those relations. Kristeva is more concerned with who it is that constructs prohibitions and boundaries and thus who becomes the margin. Symbolic orders are constructed through and by power, and filth represents the "objective frailty" of that order.21 When graffiti is labeled as filth it is an acknowledgment of the threat that it poses to order. A related reaction to graffiti is to label it obscene. A New York government committee on graffiti suggested that "the defacing of property and the use of foul language in many of the writings is harmful to the Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. 40 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. general public."22 However, the vast majority of graffiti in public places, and particularly on the subway system, is essentially meaningless—usually a single word like Hurk or Sony. The New York Times itself frequently refers to the fact that graffiti is rarely obscene in content. For instance, a large article of June 1974 remarks that graffiti covering neighborhood walls usually consists of multicolored designs of simple names, with few obscenities.23 Still public officials and the New York Times call graffiti obscene. What is obscene about a made-up name? One suggestion is that criticism of graffiti as obscene is linked to the crucial where of appropriateness: "All display is a form of exposure and just as the spaces of reproduction in society are maintained through regulation, by means of taboo and legitimation, of places and times of sexuality, so, in this case, do writing and figuration in the wrong place and time fall into the category of 'obscenity.' "24 Dirt and obscenity are linked by the importance of place in their very definition; they represent things out of order — in particular, out of place. Just as dirt is supposed to represent not just a spoiling of the surface, but a problem that lies much deeper (in terms of hygiene, for instance), graffiti as dirt is seen as a permanent despoiling of whole sets of meanings — neighborliness, order, property, and so on. Graffiti is linked to the dirty, animalistic, uncivilized, and profane. Disease, Contagion, Madness Less obviously connected to the idea of dirt is the idea that graffiti is linked to disease — graffiti as an epidemic or contagion. The New York Times refers to the "general graffiti epidemic."25 A review of a graffiti art exhibition in 1973 notes that it will probably do little to "diffuse the graffiti epidemic."26 The more poetic New York Daily News headlines a 1973 article "The Great Graffiti Plague."27 An August 1974 headline from the same newspaper reads "The Trouble with Graffiti: It's a Catching Disease."28 Elsewhere there are references to the recent "rash" of graffiti — a visible surface symptom of a deeper malaise. One official is quoted as saying, "Graffiti is the skin cancer of our civilization If it has value it is because it is a symptom of something rotten Turn your head because the stuff is bloody, bloodless brutality."29 Disease has been connected to dirt; it has been seen as pollution of the body. Diseases are also referred to as disorders, the results of intrusions by alien objects that do not belong in a particular place — the body. The implication, of course, is that the body of the city is ill. Tuan notes that the city has served as a symbol of order and harmony, a visible symbol of a cosmic order, a stable society. Disease is one of the roots of fear; that is Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 41 why lepers, for example, are separated from society. A disease in the city is a threat to order.30 Implicit in the use of disease terms in the antigraffiti rhetoric is the idea of separation and confinement. The causes of disease need to be isolated; carriers need to be quarantined. Like dirt, a disease is a disorder with spatial implications. In the modern imagination, it seems, there is still a connection between environment and health. Felix Driver has described the relation between Victorian social science and environmentalism. Social science, he argues, was the "mapping of types of behavior to types of environment."31 The distribution of health and, by implication, virtue, was said to depend on the influence of the moral and physical environment. Sanitary science, in particular, "examined the urban geography of disease, its relationship with local environmental conditions and the location, distribution and migration of the population."32 Hence Foucault called doctors the "specialists of space." The theoretical structure behind this environmentalism was the idea of miasmas — invisible atmospheric substances created by the putrification of organic matter and the human body itself. The prime problem was then accumulation of filth. Moral conditions were linked to physical conditions. Crime was described as a "subtle, unseen but sure poison in the moral atmosphere of the neighborhood, as dangerous as is deadly miasma to the physical health."33 Although social science and medicine may have progressed since the nineteenth century, it seems that the rhetoric of journalists and politicians still link the moral, physical, and sanitary environments in similar ways. The point is this: the use of metaphors of disease and contagion implies disorder—the spread of pollution that causes the disease and also the moral disorder of people out of place. The moral geography of nineteenth-century sanitary science is replicated in the moral geography portrayed in the New York media. To use the term disease is to imply spatial transgressions and the possibility of spatial solutions to these problems. The implications of a plague or epidemic go further than this, though. Susan Sontag has traced the history of the use of the plague metaphor.34 The word has its roots in the Latin plaga (stroke, wound) and has historically been used to describe extreme examples of calamity, usually with the implication of evil. As the use of the metaphor developed through the years it took on the implication of coming from elsewhere. Epidemics in Britain were often blamed on Germany and France, and later on the colonies, particularly Africa and Asia. Europe was constantly held to be a "pure" place threatened from elsewhere. This viewpoint has been inherited by the United States in its script for the rise of AIDS. AIDS is thought to have begun in "deepest" Africa and to have Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. 42 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti entered the healthy body of the United States through Haiti. The description of graffiti as a plague, then, implies foreign origin. As we shall see later, the metaphorical inscription of graffiti as dirt and disease are combined with a notion that graffiti comes from and belongs in the metaphorical "jungle" of the third world. A particular type of medical metaphor that is frequently used is that of madness. This form of illness is singled out as apt for the description of graffiti and its writers. As Foucault has eloquently shown, madness is civilization's disturbing other — the ultimate disorder.35 No less a figure than Mayor Lindsay is reported to have said it was "the Lindsay Theory that the rash of graffiti madness was related to mental health problems." For added effect, he went on to say that graffitists were "insecure cowards."36 The metaphorical use of madness is backed up with the suggestion that graffitists are, in fact, insane. Some of the reactions to graffiti that appeared in the letters page of the New York Times also made the link to madness, describing the minds of graffiti artists as feeble and fragile.37 The critic Roger Rosenblatt also linked graffiti to madness: "Most of the graffiti on the subways nowadays is indecipherable, which either means that the attack artist is an illiterate — frightening in itself—or that he is using some unknown cuneiform language or the jagged symbols of the mad."38 In his book The Faith of Graffiti, Norman Mailer discusses the horror felt by the "civilized office worker" when confronted with the inescapable image of graffiti. The office worker felt that if he or she were to write on public walls, all manner of filth would burst out all over. He writes: "My god, the feces to spread and the blood to spray, yes the good voting citizen of New York would know that the violent world of Bellevue was opening its door to him."39 Here Mailer uses the images of dirt and insanity and suggests the link between them and graffiti. The compulsion to spread dirt and the potential to be placed in an asylum are a spatial action and a spatial reaction. Behavior out of place demands to be corrected by putting the perpetrator in her place. Graffiti and the Place of the Other Graffiti flagrantly disturbs notions of order. It represents a disregard for order and, it seems to those who see it, a love of disorder—of anarchy, of things out of place. In the journal Public Interest, in 1979, the wellknown critic Nathan Glazer wrote: "[The commuter] is assaulted continuously, not only by the evidence that every subway car has been vandalized, but by the inescapable knowledge that the environment he must endure for an hour or more a day is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 43 and that anyone can invade it to do whatever damage and mischief the mind suggests."40 Reactions to graffiti convey the link between graffiti and rampant anarchy by using other places — other contexts — as examples of where graffiti may be in place. Most frequently the places chosen are from the third world. Graffiti is not just "out of place" because it is misplaced figuration; its "otherness" is also connected to its assumed source, the ethnic minorities of urban New York. We have already seen how the description of graffiti as plague implies the involvement of "outsiders." Dirt and madness, too, are often used metaphorically to describe the third world and its imagined inhabitants. The biographical characteristics do not always confirm the impression that graffiti is a product of traditional minorities,41 but the general belief is that graffiti is a Puerto Rican or African American phenomenon rather than, say, Austrian, Swedish American, or, as in the case of TAKI 183, Greek. Once this assumption is made, the reactions to graffiti slip into a discourse that repeatedly makes reference to the "third world," which exists outside of the dominant value structure of the United States and the "West." The third world relation to the United States itself has a metaphorical similarity to the relation between white people and ethnic minorities in the urban United States. We do not have to make great leaps of interpretation to point to the assumed origins of graffiti; the most obvious references to the perceived ethnic characteristics of graffiti are those which directly refer to Latin America and Africa. One well-known positive reaction to graffiti serves as an example. The pop artist Claes Oldenburg wrote, "You're standing there in the station, everything is grey and gloomy and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens up the place like a big bouquet from Latin America."42 Favorable and critical reviews of graffiti alike frequently refer to Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and even Russia. Along with the assumption that graffiti writers are probably from some distant place (some other context where graffiti is more appropriate), there is a heavy political question evident in seemingly pure aesthetic judgments. "Lady Pink," a graffiti artist, was referred to by one critic as a "paint-smeared Sandinista" (despite the fact that Pink was from Ecuador), suggesting that graffiti might be more appropriate "elsewhere," in a setting associated with violence and terrorism. One particular example of this kind of comment deserves special attention. "TAKI 183," the seventeen-year-old Greek immigrant I discussed earlier, is widely acknowledged as the grandfather of U.S. metropolitan graffiti. His marks on subways were widely publicized and criticized in the early seventies through the pages of the New York Times. At first the coverage was positive, painting a picture of a folk hero with Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. 44 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti an interesting and creative hobby. This was in 1971. A year later TAKI was a vandal and a public nuisance and graffiti had become "one of the worst forms of pollution we have to combat." TAKI the folk hero became TAKI the vandal. A Greek immigrant in New York became the central symbol of filth and disorder.43 Many years earlier in Greece the then revolutionary poet Lord Byron scratched his name on the Temple of Poseidon. The critic Roger Rosenblatt, TAKI's fiercest critic, found this quite acceptable: "Even Lord Byron wrote his name on the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion in Greece— technically defacing a house of worship, but enhancing it too. Run your fingers along his signature now and you are touched by him who wrote: 'The hand that kindles cannot quench the flame.' "44 To Rosenblatt, Byron's graffiti (although he does not use this term) is an enhancement of a beautiful Greek temple. TAKI's inscriptions on the decaying urban environment are sacrilege. The markings of the immigrant in "our city" are "defacements" (and sites of contestation within the contemporary dominant world power). Our inscriptions in other worlds (the signature of an author who rests squarely within the established canon) are the inscriptions of a former dominant imperialist world power on the place of the dominated. This story of a poor Greek immigrant and an established figure of world literature tells us of the role of geography in judgments of culture and aesthetics — in the interpretation of meaning. Once we begin to see the (in some senses) obvious connections between graffiti and perceived ethnic difference, the more general labels of dirt, disease, and madness can be seen in a somewhat different light than I originally interpreted them. These appellations are all descriptive terms used at one time or another to describe "aliens" within the United States or, alternatively, the third world, particularly countries that in some way or another stand up against U.S. domination. "Dirty," for instance, is an appellation frequently applied to immigrants in cities, whether the Irish in London or the Chinese in Vancouver.45 As Sophie Laws has suggested: "The idea that people with certain characteristics are dirty is very often found as part of the attitudes of a dominant group towards a less powerful one. It is a persistent feature of racism and anti-semitism as well as misogyny."46 David Ward, in his discussion of the connections between poverty and ethnicity in the North American slum, makes a similar point, connecting the arrival of immigrants in New York City during the nineteenth century with perceptions of disease, dirt, and anarchy. One commentator he discusses described immigrants as "the refuse of Europe [who] congregate in our great cities and send forth ... wretched progeny. Degraded in the deep degradation of their parents ... to be scavengers, Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 45 physical and moral, of our streets."47 One inner city area in particular— Five Points — became a national symbol for this immigrant slum depravity: "Every State in the Union, and every nation almost in the world, have representatives in this foul and dangerous locality."48 Interestingly, Five Points was portrayed in engravings as an arena of disorderly street life rather than a slumlike environment. An engraving from Valentine's Manual of Old New York (1827) looks suspiciously like a Breughel painting of carnival, with raucous buxom women and drunken men scattered haphazardly along the streets. In the case of graffiti, the press and the government choose to point to the chaotic and anarchic appearance of graffiti and suggest its ethnic dimensions while the urban infrastructure of New York was in a state of bankruptcy and disrepair. The link between chaos (in the form of dirt, disease, and madness) and immigrants is not a new one in New York's history.49 Perhaps the best-known analysis of the "third world" in relation to the themes of madness and dirt is Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.50 He describes how the inhabitants of the third world have been systematically violated through colonial oppression. Part of this violation includes the correlation of blackness with madness and dirt. Fanon turns such arguments around, describing Europe (and the United States) as insane and sunk in savagery. Any madness on the part of the third world is, in his view, a direct result of colonial manipulation. He effectively turns the discourse of disorder around on the colonialists and forces them (us) to look in the mirror. Graffiti is continually portrayed (as I have already shown) as the chaotic, untamed voice of the irrational. As such it is both resisted and condemned. Graffiti is rebellious, irrational, dirty, and irreducibly "other." In these senses it is connected to the third world and to immigrants — themselves described as rebellious and irrational. The "West," particularly the Western city, is (at least ideally) the product of reason and the inevitable progress of history. The graffiti artist (like the rebellious third world) is the insane spoiler who resists reason and introduces chaos.51 Another context in which graffiti is frequently placed is that of the European Communist world. Recently the New York Times featured a picture of the Berlin Wall as it was symbolically falling down. The picture included some bright new graffiti. The punch line was that this was the east side of the wall—another sign of newfound freedom springing up next to McDonald's and the polling booth. The implication, of course, is that graffiti, in this case, represents desired disorder — disorder in a context that we are used to thinking of as overly authoritarian and orderly. In this context graffiti is associated with freedom and democracy— the Westernization of Eastern Europe, and, inevitably, the end of Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. 46 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti Communism. How different from reactions to graffiti in New York! In one context graffiti is seen as a symptom of the end of civilization, of anarchy and decaying moral values, and in another it is a sign of a free spirit closing the curtain on the stifling bureaucracy of Communist authoritarianism. It is clear that the question of whose world is being written over— the crucial "where" of appropriateness—is never a purely aesthetic judgment. The question of geographical hegemony—the taken-for-granted moral order—inevitably imposes itself on the politics of aesthetic and moral evaluation. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The Image of the City The reactions of government figures and the media to graffiti point overwhelmingly to one fact. It is only superficially the material defacement of public property that is at stake; the real issue is the image of New York City. It is not that spray paint has been applied to the side of a subway train but that the act of graffiti creates an illusion of disorder. This notion of disorder is tightly woven into a set of ideas about "proper places." The use of terms like "dirt," "madness," and "disease" underline a fear of spatial disorder; the implication that graffiti belongs in other places — in the third world or the ghetto — suggests a fear of rampant anarchy in New York City. The fight against graffiti is a fight against all perceived forces of disorder and a conflict over the proper place to one's meaning — over different notions of dirt. To a figure such as Mayor Lindsay, graffiti is a massive and continuing defacement destroying the proper significance (meanings) of the carefully controlled facades of the urban environment. New York itself is threatened. Mayor Lindsay, when opening the Prospect Park Boathouse in 1972, remarked on the graffiti that was bound to appear on it and pleaded "for heaven's sake, New Yorkers, come to the aid of your great city—defend it, support it and protect it."52 I would suggest that it is not the material culture—the buildings of New York— that the mayor was worried about, so much as New York as a symbol of control, order, and harmony. It is not surprising that one analysis of graffiti argues that in some senses graffiti is the ideal crime for a marginalized culture. Its criminality lies in its refusal to comply with its context: it does not respect the laws of place that tell us what is and what is not appropriate. Graffiti is a crime because it subverts the authority of urban space and asserts the triumph (however fleeting) of the individual over the monuments of Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 47 authority, "the name over the nameless."53 Graffiti can be described as a "tactic" of the dispossessed — a mobile and temporary set of meanings that insert themselves into the interstices of the formal spatial structure (roads, doors, walls, subways, and so on) of the city. Graffiti also challenges the dominant dichotomy between public and private space. It interrupts the familiar boundaries of the public and the private by declaring the public private and the private public. Graffiti appears on the streets, the facades, the exteriors, and the interiors that construct and articulate the meanings of the city. To the graffiti writer, everywhere is free space. The presence of graffiti denies the dominant divisions of meaning. The practice of graffiti by dominated groups makes claims upon the meanings of spaces; it utilizes the open, free quality of spaces that are not officially free or open. As Susan Stewart suggests, graffiti attempts a " Utopian and limited dissolution of the boundaries of property" reflecting an older, Latin sense of the street as a "room by agreement" and extends it to include "the street as playground, ballfield, and billboard by agreement—or by conflict, subterfuge, and the exercise of power and privilege."54 As private space is made public, public space is made private, individualized, stylized. The style of graffiti—its fluid characters and colors— symbolizes the fluid and mobile nature of those who practice it (the kings). The transit lines become mobile billboards — moving sets of colorful names that get out and go places. It is this mobile billboard that transects the fixed, static urban environment of sanctioned meanings created by the dominant notions of property and place. To these spaces, the monumental buildings of height and anonymity, the graffitist adds personal marks on a scale perceptible to the individual. The street, in some sense, is "appropriated" by those who live in it, reclaimed from the enormous condescension of those who own it. The graffitist opposes the static, monumental politics of the dominant with the mobile, personal tags of the dominated. The urban environment is constructed around a set of "appropriate" places, areas imbued with sets of meanings deemed correct by dominant groups in society. There are places to play, pray, sleep, eat, make love, and an infinite number of other activities. The associations between the place and its meanings are powerful and often public and communicable. The built environment materializes meanings — sets them in concrete and stone. In the process of making meaning material, these images become open to question and challenge. Social groups are capable of creating their own sense of place and contesting the constructs of others. Once meaning finds its geographical expression it is no longer per- Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. 48 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti sonal; it is there — visible, material, solid, and shared. Once it is known what type of behavior is appropriate for which place, it is simultaneously obvious which things are inappropriate and unacceptable and thus challenging to the guardians of the established order. While it has been argued that graffiti is a form of existential selfaffirmation to the graffiti writer, it is also the case that graffiti means something very different from the perspective of the unsympathetic viewer. Indeed graffiti seems to threaten the existence of those who do not relate to this obscure idiom. One harsh critic of graffiti, Rosenblatt, suggests this view: Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Graffiti makes you scared [because] we do not ever see who writes HURK and SONY. The artist is a sneak thief, and just as he attacks his canvas suddenly, his work attacks you— [T]hese names (scary in their very loudness) are yelling to you in public places, where you wish to preserve your own name.55 Rosenblatt suggests in this passage a complicated connection between wishing to remain private in public and the idea that graffiti represents a symbolically violent attack on an equally symbolic category of property. The graffiti writer is a "thief." This view of graffiti is underlined by other voices of authority who clearly see graffiti as a threat to considerably more than the surface on which it is written. A Philadelphia city ordinance banned the sale of spray paint to minors, stating that "graffiti contributes to the blight and degradation of neighborhoods and even discourages the formation of business." Similarly in Los Angeles a leading police official stated that "graffiti decreases property value and signed buildings on block after block convey the impression that the city government has lost control, that the neighborhood is sliding towards anarchy."56 Here we see how graffiti is seen in relation to a context that includes property values and local business in its perception of order but excludes the spray-painted mark of an individual who lies outside of the property and business relations that get to define that context. In the case of reactions to New York graffiti we have seen a determined effort to express, in the language of common sense, a spatial ordering of types of behavior and the moral implications thereof. The landscape of New York can be seen as a normative landscape of "proper" places—that is to say, experienced contexts in which people behave themselves and act according to expectations that are, in part, spatially distributed and determined: art belongs in art school, the streets are for driving, and so on. Graffiti comes along and upsets this assumed, seem- Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 49 ingly natural world, and the moral landscape has to be outlined and stated as orthodoxy, as the right way to do things. It is at this point— when the expectations about place and behavior are upset — that the formally assumed normative geography has to be underlined and reinforced, made explicit in the discourse of reaction in the press and city government. The link between spatial context and behavior is crucially changed from an assumed, natural, common-sense, and unquestioned relationship to a demanded, normal, and established relationship that has been questioned. In the first instance the appropriate behavior is defined as the only form of behavior; in the second it is defined in relation to an "other" — a heretical geography. The appropriate is defined by the inappropriate. In reactions to graffiti there is a constant linking of geographical and moral disorder; a perceived disorder in space caused by graffiti is linked to a moral disorder, a particular inappropriateness. In reacting to the perceived transgression of graffiti, the New York media affects the meaning of New York and places within it. The powerful voice of the media defends particular meanings and derides others. In addition it is important that the always already existing meanings of places affect the nature of the discourse—for example, the assumed meaning of the ghetto, of New York, of Latin America ... The meaning of both acts and places is historically variable. The same place (or the same act) may have opposite meanings at different times. Graffiti is not inherently or essentially "abnormal," "dirty," "disorderly," or "sick." Graffiti is not naturally "out of place." In fact, the New York media discourse of normality and its implied meanings for place (the subway system, public buildings, the city itself) can be and have been presented in other terms — sickness as health, disease (disintegration) as creativity, disorder as art. Consider the graffiti-covered subway train that was chosen as a representative symbol of New York for a Disney exhibition. A characteristic of Disney World as a place is that it chooses positive images—images of creativity, health, exuberance, liveliness. It would be extremely unlikely that graffiti was chosen because it represented disorder, disease, madness, and obscenity. Disney has no place for such things. A sounder hypothesis is that graffiti was chosen as a symbol of creativity and participation (democracy) — a representation of a vibrant, colorful, creative New York City. Additionally the very same characteristics of graffiti that make it repugnant to Mayor Lindsay make it appealing to segments of the art world. Again crime becomes creativity, madness becomes insight, dirt becomes something to hang over the fireplace. Just as the reactions of the press to Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. 50 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti graffiti tell us about the role of place in the construction of order and thus of deviance, so does the more positive reaction of the art establishment. The Paradox of Graffiti as Art Paradoxically (it seems), at the same time as graffiti was painted as a wild, anarchic threat to society by one dominant group (the "authorities"), it was taken off the streets and placed in galleries by another dominant group (official culture): 57 The movement of graffiti to canvas and gallery space continues the process of substitution by which historical contingency is mythologized; mediating figures such as art students become the new graffiti artists ... social workers and photographers become spokespersons and publicists for graffiti writers; acceptable, readable and apprehensible in scale, graffiti painting is enclosed within a proper space and time and delimited for consumption as a singular artifact.58 Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. As Paul Hagopian has commented, the entry of graffiti into the gallery presented a paradox:59 the affirmation of graffiti's "status" as an art vitiated the lawlessness on which its "appeal" was based. We can construct a table of oppositions between graffiti-as-crime and graffiti-as-art. Crime Graffiti Art Outside Inside Temporary Permanent Wild Nonartifact Tame Large Small Illegible Readable Noncommodity Commodity Unexpected Expected Artifact Most of the attributes of graffiti that make it appealing as crime are nullified by the act of placing it in the gallery, making it into art. In effect, the art world has transformed and commodified graffiti by displacing it. As Atlanta and Alexander have argued: The art-world promised a way out of the ghetto only to confine the work of the graffiti painters to the more restricted code of the art-world Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 51 Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. In the process of gallery consumption little of the specific meaning of the graffiti art was communicated, or even survived the threshold of the gallery itself.60 As graffiti underwent its metamorphosis from crime to art it suffered a displacement from the street to the gallery. Graffiti in the gallery is graffiti in its "proper" place. It is no longer the tactic of the marginalized but part of the strategy of the establishment, conforming to the codes of the "proper place." The meaning of graffiti was subsumed within a lineage defined by art critics and gallery owners. Whereas graffitists take their inspiration from the signs and styles of advertising, the art world begins to place graffiti in a different tradition of "pop art" and the "primitive." One art show catalog read, "Urban-bred, the graffiti artist continues the tradition of pop-art which he admires."61 That particular exhibition was titled PostGraffiti, announcing the death of "real" graffiti and the rebirth of the pop art tradition. Long "histories" of the graffiti tradition were invoked, ranging from cave paintings to Arabic traditions of place-marking. The movement of graffiti from the street to the gallery involved a simultaneous insertion of graffiti into a tradition, a history outside of which it had previously existed. Graffiti was now legitimated by its place inside the gallery and by its place in the history of art. The appellation "primitive" was frequently applied to graffiti as art. Graffiti's appeal to the art world lay in its apparent wildness and spontaneity (which was at least partly a result of its refusal to obey the rules of place). Graffiti was romanticized as a folk art. This was despite the remarkable sophistication of graffiti techniques, the rigid apprenticeship system that graffiti artists worked through (from "toys" to "kings"), and the continued practice of different forms by the graffiti artists in their "black books." The assumption that graffiti is somehow primitive is linked to the frequent assertion that graffitists are from "the jungle" in the form of Latin America or Africa. Oldenburg's description of the subway car from "Latin America" and Norman Mailer's description of graffiti as "the impulse of the jungle"62 reflect the assumed primitive and "natural" aspects of graffiti. There is clearly a question of race and "Orientalism" in the assumptions of graffiti's promoters. I have already suggested that this assumption of the ethnic status of graffitists often appears in media accounts of street graffiti in negative ways. In the art world these third world associations are given a positive twist and are associated with unrestrained creativity. The association of graffiti with nature, the primitive, and the crazy is applauded in its new context. Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. 52 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti So as graffiti is reconstituted as art, desecration becomes a matter of taste and consumption. Graffiti as crime (and dirt) was often painted on a subway car sixty feet long and twelve feet high that moved through the city with all its delineated territories. The graffiti would remain only a few days before being scrubbed off by the "buffer"—a machine that removed graffiti with various acids. Graffiti was mobile and temporary. The graffiti writer, working in the train yard, would never see the whole thing until the train moved out of the yard. The whole process was quick and fluid, allowing no possibility of perspective or a distant view: "The transience of the painting means that the cultural meaning is involved with the process of doing, of pulling it off. The scale and speed of the transformation is an important part of appreciation of the painting."63 In the gallery graffiti is a product of contemplation and permanence. The artist can remove herself from the artwork, contemplate it from afar, and revise it. Graffiti's almost constant motion and ephemerality becomes ossified into a static and "permanent" object. By the secular magic of displacement, graffiti is transformed from the wild, criminal, reviled, and despised product of the insane and deviant into the creative, inspired, and aesthetically pleasing product of the artist. In the process of the movement from the street and subway to the SoHo gallery, the "meaning" of graffiti and the moral judgment of it are changed dramatically. It is surely paradoxical that the same act (painting a stylized logo) can be at once reviled and admired, removed and preserved. In one area money is spent to remove graffiti and in the other it is spent to buy it and add daring and "local color" to some wealthy patron's living room. At the same time that Michael Stewart, a young graffiti artist, died by strangulation at the hands of twelve transit cops, graffiti art was selling for thousands of dollars in Manhattan galleries. Graffiti is simultaneously repressed and commodified. At least part of the explanation for this apparent schizophrenia can be found in Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's book The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. The authors suggest that there are complex cultural processes "whereby the human body, psychic forms, geographical space and the social formations are all constructed with interrelating and dependent hierarchies of high and low."64 The book is particularly involved with the diverse ways in which the "high" in culture is troubled by and attracted to the "low" in culture. In each of their arenas (human body, psychic forms, geographical space, and social formations) the opposition between high and low is seen as a fundamental basis for ordering and sense making in European cultures. Transgres- Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 53 sion of the high/low divide in any of the four arenas affects the division in the other three. In other words, the transgression of boundaries between high and low space is reflected in social boundaries. In addition, the authors show how "high" discourses, "with their lofty style, exalted aims and sublime ends, are structured in relation to the debasements and degradations of low discourse. [They] tried to show how each extremity structures the other, depends upon and invades the other in certain historical moments to carry political charges through aesthetic and moral polarities."65 By "high" and "low" the authors mean the divisions recognized by the higher socioeconomic groups that exist at the centers of cultural prestige and power. Although other groups also have "high" and "low" designations, they do not generally have the authority to generalize their classifications across society. An art critic, a gallery owner, or the mayor of New York is better able to define what counts as "high" than is a graffiti artist. Clearly the discourse of "art" is a "high" discourse in society, one associated with the head and the mind, with specialized spaces and the generally educated classes. The contention of Stallybrass and White is that a "high" discourse generally defines itself in relation to a "low" discourse in order to confirm its own position as "high." We begin to see the logic of the relationship between graffiti as art and as dirt. As the authors note, this is the logic of "Orientalism" as developed by Edward Said.66 In his well-known formulation, Said talks about the "low" (in this case the cultural and geographical construction of the Orient) as a site of contradictions between mutually incompatible representations: one marked by the imperative to reject and debase and the other by desire and intrigue. The "Orient" in Western discourse is at once the inferior "other" and an "underground self." This paradoxical construction of the "other" is an oxymoronic formulation of power and desire for the "low." Said's discussion of colonial and neocolonial representations of the Middle East is certainly not the only documented example of this ambiguous relation between the "high" and the "low." Stallybrass and White themselves observe the ambivalence surrounding the slums of the nineteenth century. They describe the combination of loathing and fascination with which "social reformers" approached the slums of England. While reformers such as Chadwick and Mayhew described the slums, the poor, the prostitutes, and the filth of vagabond life, their work showed an obsessive desire for the world beyond the boundaries of bourgeois respectability. It is telling that Chadwick's report, An Inquiry into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. 54 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti was a bestseller, while in excess of ten thousand copies were given away. "As the bourgeoisie produced new forms of regulation and prohibition governing their own bodies, they wrote even more loquaciously of the body of the other—of the city's 'slums.' "67 Again we see the ambivalence with which the "high" relates to the "low." Stallybrass and White analyze the recurrent pattern of the "high" attempting to reject the "low" for a number of reasons and discovering that it is dependent on that low "other," but also Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life. The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity; a psychological dependence upon precisely those Others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level. It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central ... The low-Other is despised and derided at the level of political organization and social being whilst it is instrumentally constitutive of the shared imaging repertoires of the dominant culture.68 This formulation provides a fruitful framework for thinking about the relationship between graffiti as crime and graffiti as art. The space of the art gallery is clearly a specialized space in the culture of New York, a space separated from all those "everyday" spaces outside. It is a space associated with high culture, with the mind rather than the body, with patrons high in economic, cultural, and social capital. It is a central part of the geocultural construction of "high." The world of the inner city and the subway, of "everyday" space, is a bodily space, a space of action, a space with unspecialized and "commonplace" activities. Remember that graffiti was also continually represented in terms of the third world. These spaces, even if imaginary, are also constituted as "low" in the established discourses, peopled by the ubiquitous "man on the street." They are spaces of unreason, lacking rationality and order. An area of deviance and dirt, remarkably like the slums described in Stallybrass and White and the Orient in Said, is constructed out of the description of graffiti and its place. The relationship between dominant groups and graffiti flips between the "low" designations and its appropriation into "art." We can think of this as the rarified spaces of high culture including the "low" within it as an "eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life."69 By incorporating graffiti into its own spaces, the "high" turns graffiti into a tamed representation of the more fascinating elements of the "low." Graffiti serves as a metonym for the wild, chaotic everyday space outside. In a Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 55 sense graffiti as art is a representation of itself outside just as a stuffed animal in a museum is a representation of itself in the wild. Seen this way it is quite understandable that dominant socioeconomic groups can both revile and preserve graffiti as an example, a symbol, of the nonhigh, of the geographical, social, and cultural other. While graffiti and its writers are excluded at the social level, while the forces of the media, law, and politics are leveled against the "great graffiti plague" and a young graffitist like Michael Stewart is killed, graffiti remains symbolically central in the identification of the high and the proper. The "civilized" has to negotiate its position in relation to the "primitive." Established powers can simultaneously call for an end to graffiti and sell it, at high prices, to the residents of SoHo and Greenwich Village. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Legitimate Creativity and Specialized Space The displacement of graffiti from everyday space to specialized "art" space is one reaction to graffiti that tells us something about the power of place in relation to ideological values. It is a reaction that seeks to insert graffiti into a "proper place" and rob it of its denaturalizing powers. It is "natural," after all, for art to be in galleries — if it is not in a gallery it is not "art." In addition, by absorbing graffiti, the art world assured it an economic value; it could be bought. Graffiti in the streets was associated with devaluing property values. The ordination of graffiti as art, consciously or not, subverted the subversive. The entrapment of graffiti in the art gallery in some ways is a mirror image of the efforts of artists to break out of the specialized art space. The history of art is one of the gradual removal of artistic products from everyday life (in the form of "craft") to the specialized and removed object of intellectualized appreciation. Once an artist would have made intricately carved window frames or instruments to be used in sacred rituals. Now the artist makes "useless" products to be framed and admired. Creativity once was a part of everyday life and now it is reduced to "proper places." Galleries are "sites of legitimate creativity in a society which conceives of this phenomenon as the specialized practice of the artist."70 This removal of legitimate creativity from everyday life is connected to the rise of capitalism: In the wake of the generalization of the social relations of commodity production during the course of the nineteenth century, this theoretical specification of the "aesthetic" became the intellectual basis for the institutionalization of art as a specific, and very special kind of, commodity: namely, a commodity the exchange-value of which derives, Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. 56 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. paradoxically, not from its usefulness as such (its direct social utility), but rather from the specific form of its uselessness: its capacity to sustain "disinterested" or "aesthetic" contemplation.71 So as art developed as a commodity it was gradually removed to specialized spaces and made the object of individual aesthetic response. Graffiti, outside the gallery in everyday space, was out of place and therefore did not count as legitimate creativity. Modern artistic endeavor has begun to challenge this separation of art from the everyday. Alistair Bonnett discusses the efforts of the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and the Situationists to transgress the art/everyday barrier. Dadaism, for instance, attempted to move art out of the formal space of galleries and into clubs and public halls where they would hold anarchic "cabarets." Marcel Duchamp, a prominent exponent of Dada, is well known for taking a mass-produced urinal, calling it "fountain," and placing it in a gallery. The point of the urinal was to ask the question, "What counts as art?" and relate that to the space of the gallery. That is to say, the urinal revealed the way that the gallery as a specialized setting magically turned something into art. It highlighted the magic by which the "ordinary" could become something intellectually exciting by being placed in art space. Another example of artists questioning the art/everyday barrier is the If You Lived Here project by Martha Rosla.72 The Dia Art Foundation took a SoHo studio and presented within it an artistic statement about homelessness. The walls were covered with pictures of the homeless and about the homeless, interlaced with pieces of text such as a quotation from Mayor Koch that read, "If you can't afford to live here, mo-o-ve." Homelessness does not fit into the established subject matter for aesthetic appreciation. The exhibition succeeded in drawing connections between the art space and the space outside. SoHo is a major area of gentrification in New York, and one of the main gentrifiers is the arts community. Gentrification, among other factors, has been responsible for the removal of low-cost housing and the increase in homelessness. So here were a group of artists using a gallery to raise awareness about homelessness. The title If You Lived Here included a certain amount of irony about the effect of art on the homeless in SoHo. The title made viewers highly aware of the connection of the gallery to the particular area in which it was located. The exhibition deliberately showed the way art galleries are not free-standing, pure spaces of aesthetic contemplation but spaces that are connected to the economics and brutality of everyday life. Whereas the established art gallery is supposed to be Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 57 apart from the humdrum world, the Dia Art Gallery sketched out the naivete of such a belief. The prime directive of the graffiti artists in the subway is to reproduce the "tag" as frequently as possible (sometimes as many as ten thousand times). This massive reproduction of the sign is impossible to restrict to a few areas of high culture, where the emphasis is placed on uniqueness and originality (in the sense that the "original" is valued and reproductions are not "authentic"). The street graffiti elevation of reproduction to the highest value stands in contradistinction to the art world's elevation of the singular piece of art that one person can buy and own exclusively. There is simply no room in the gallery for all those people writing all those tags. Graffiti resists its absorption and continues its transgression of proper spaces and places. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Graffiti in a Contested Landscape The system of dominant, "appropriate" meanings in the urban fabric can be referred to as a "hegemonic" landscape: a landscape with a set of structurally "agreed-upon" signifiers, which, rather than being imposed in a deterministic fashion on the landscape, are constantly contested and negotiated. A hegemonic landscape is one that is never static and fixed but always, sometimes minutely, changing as a result of the continuing struggle between dominant and subordinate cultural groups. Culture is seen as a "signifying system through which, necessarily (though among other means), a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored."73 This view of culture combines (1) an anthropological view, which sees culture as a whole and distinct way of life, and (2) the more specialized sense of "aesthetic and intellectual activities," extended to include all signifying practices from philosophy to graffiti. Such a culture is an arena of contest — a contested terrain: The reality of any hegemony, in the extended political and cultural sense, is that while by definition it is always dominant, it is never either total or exclusive. At any time, forms of alternative or directly oppositional politics and culture exist as significant elements in society.... [Alternative political and cultural emphases, and the many forces of opposition and struggle, are important not only in themselves but as indicative features of what the hegemonic process has in practice had to control.74 In what Bourdieu calls the "symbolic struggle over common sense," dominant and subordinate sociocultural groups use geography as a weapon in domination and resistance. Geography is also used to assimilate, in a Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. 58 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti hegemonic way, the resistant elements. Just as the graffiti writer challenges the codes of the orthodox through inappropriate geographical behavior, the orthodox retaliate with the forces of geo-orthodoxy. One form of "solution" for the "graffiti problem" has been to demand that the writers, when caught, erase or paint over their original handiwork. Another is to demand that the graffitists become art students working in orthodox ways with orthodox methods in established places "where art belongs." Susan Stewart describes a typical case of this punishment: "The director of the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Task Force has announced that graffiti writers will be asked to go to vacant housing projects and paint Venetian blinds, flowers, or human figures on boarded-up windows."75 Magically, the graffitist, whose project is to destroy the facade of the dominant environment, is made to recreate it and to hide rather than point out the decay he or she is forced to live in. Graffiti writers are told that they have declared their meanings in the "wrong place" and that it will be reassigned to the "right place" through disciplinary measures. This official form of punishment is really the most obvious and least insidious attempt to assimilate, geographically, the graffitist's energy. Far more devious is the way in which the formal spaces of art galleries exploit the "illegitimate" meanings and spaces of graffiti. Again a kind of geomagic is performed by the simple act of taking graffiti off the streets and (dis)placing it in the gallery — out of the unofficial spaces and into the sanctioned and revered domains of established and commercial art. Crime, with a flick of the wrist, becomes art; the valueless is turned into price-tagged and packaged art ready for your living-room wall. Much of the meaning of graffiti lies in its subversion of the authority of urban spaces. This is also the source of its criminality. Graffiti is not a crime that actually harms anyone. Graffiti writers reject the claims of "vandalism": "Here is a thing that doesn't hurt you. When a train comes out of the darkness, voom!, all it does is excite your heart, make your eyes follow it. It doesn't take your wallet."76 The criminality of graffiti, unlike most crimes, lies in its being seen, in its transgression of official appearances. To take this and put it in a gallery negates its criminality as well as its meaning. As graffiti is assimilated into the geographical mainstream, the proper spaces, it is given new meanings. It is no longer crime, it is a commodity— a simple piece of work you can buy and take home. As a painting it serves as a symbol — a metonym — for all the public spaces so resemanticized in the great "outside." It is like one of the exhibits at a freak show that some great and brave white explorer has retrieved from one of the far corners of the earth, which can serve as a simulation for all Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 59 the other "wild things" that exist out there. Not only has graffiti been removed from the public spaces, but it has also been made static by the frame of the picture and the space of the gallery or living room. Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Conclusions A suggestion here is that places are the result of tensions between different meanings and that they are also active players in these tensions. Places have more than one meaning. Some meanings are complementary and fit neatly on top of each other. Other meanings seem to be incompatible—to be awkward and displaced—if they are located with other meanings. The incompatibility is not natural or inevitable (we need only realize that some places have different meanings at different times — meanings that may have once seemed heretical). Rather meanings are said to be incompatible by someone whose interests lie in preserving a particular set of meanings. Concerning the issue of analyzing the "creation of places," we can see that it is possible to look at the form of a place as the creation of a given "culture" and interpret it as meaning such and such. This has been the strategy of much of cultural geography. Another method, however, is to look at the way meanings are constructed by the active and continuing conflict of meanings and geographies produced by different groups of people. To do this I have looked at the discourse of those attempting to define a favored meaning for places, in this case places in New York City. Within a particular discourse (say the discourse about graffiti in the New York press), a network or web of meanings is created. These meanings are created by direct reference (the meaning of Central Park is X, the appropriate behavior in the subway system is Z) or, more frequently, by metaphors and descriptive terms applied to perpetrators of transgressions against the favored meaning of places (dirt, madness, disease, obscenity, and so on). The discourse creates a set of associations with its subject (disorder with graffiti). The object of the discourse — that which is being interpreted — is an alleged transgression, an activity that is deemed "out of place." Along with this transgression is an alleged transformation (or threatened transformation) of the meaning of a place (New York). Put another way, the transgression threatens to bring about a meaning for place that is not favored by those involved in creating the discourse of reaction. The claims made by the discourse in reaction to perceived transgression seem to be as follows: Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. 60 The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 1. Something is out of place. 2. Some act is out of place. 3. Some act is incompatible with the proper meaning of place. The implications of these changes are as follows: Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. 1. If the transgression continues, the meaning of the place will change. 2. If the meaning of the place changes, the place itself will change. 3. The new meaning will be their meaning (the meaning of the other). 4. The place in question will become their place (the place of the other). Place, then, has no determinate meaning, no natural and transcendent meaning. The meaning of a place is the subject of particular discourses of power, which express themselves as discourses of normality. In other words, there are certain realms of discourse with more power than others (such as the media). These powerful discourses ascribe meanings to place in the language of common sense, of normality. No discourse is neutral or unchanging. Discourses are ideological insofar as they attempt to define what is good and true, what exists, and what is possible (the limits to change) and insofar as they serve the interests of powerful groups. It is (in part) through these ideological discourses that meaning is created, including the meaning of places. The question of who controls the discourse (the media, for instance) is an important one for geographers because it says something about who gets to participate in the construction and dissemination of meanings for places and thus places themselves. The meaning of place, then, is (in part) created through a discourse that sets up a process of differentiation (between us and them). This operation, though, is a reflexive one, as meaning, in turn, is created in place, in context—in association with a web of meanings particular to places. The meaning of an act (graffiti) is framed within a discourse of metaphorical association (dirt, obscenity, and so on). In addition, the meaning of an act is categorized in terms of its geographical context, the place in which it occurs (New York). The meaning of graffiti in the Bronx is different from that of graffiti on Wall Street. The presence of graffiti on the subway is annoying to the authorities because the trains travel through the city to areas not commonly associated with graffiti. The meaning of graffiti is clearly changed by placing it in the art gallery. The assessment Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20. The Crucial "Where" of Graffiti 61 Copyright © 1996. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. of the meaning of an act is thus associated with place. The place of an act determines (as much as it is determined by) the reaction to the act and the meanings accorded to it. Just as the meaning of an act is associated with a particular place, the meaning of a place is associated with appropriate acts (or at least the absence of inappropriate acts). The question then is not, "What does a place (New York) mean?" or "What is the meaning of a particular action (graffiti)?" Rather the question becomes, "How do places (and actions in them) get the meanings they do? Who gets to say that certain meanings are appropriate?" And, eventually, "Whose world is it?" Cresswell, T. (1996). In place/out of place : Geography, ideology, and transgression. ProQuest Ebook Central http://e Created from unc on 2021-03-08 08:30:20.