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FUTURA 2000, Break, 1980. Aerosol paint on New York subway car. Destroyed. Photo by Martha Cooper.
CRASH, Untitled, date unknown. Aerosol paint on subway car. New York.
BLADE, Whole car tag, 1980. Aerosol paint on subway car.
Neatness counted: no matter how capable a writer was stylistically, drips detracted from his reputation.
Qualitative evaluation was closely linked to documentation of the history of writing. BLADE maintained meticulous records of his tags, and kept track of the innovations that he and others developed. RAMMELLZEE, as already mentioned, proposed that writing had roots in medieval manuscripts and the monks who lettered them, and he inspired others to elaborate his theory. NOC 167 helped young writers define their styles, and created the whole-car piece that represented the motivating notion of ‘Style Wars’ – the competition among writers to create distinctive forms of lettering and broadcast their innovations city-wide on the sides of subway cars. All three understood subway writing as an historical phenomenon independent of fine art, with a past to be mined and a future to be shaped.
BLADE
BLADE belonged to the first generation of graffiti writers, a peer of ‘Old School’ writers like PHASE 2 whose tagging careers began in the early 1970s and were documented in the 1974 book, The Faith of Graffiti. From the Bronx, he began tagging trains in 1972, and he kept a list of his tags, organised by train car numbers. By 1980 he had completed five thousand pieces.[60] BLADE advanced stylistic developments in graffiti throughout the 1970s: he painted clouds to establish a neutral ground for his tag, he wrote in bubble letters, he used shadows to create a three-dimensional effect, and he was the first to use a character in a masterpiece: a snowman in November 1974, on a Christmas-themed car.[61] He continued to use characters of his own devising to animate his pieces, such as Joint Man, Dancing Ladies, and the Galaxy Gangster.[62] By 1976, he had mastered not only three-dimensional forms that seem to pop out from the plane of the subway car, but also an illusion of space that extended back into the picture plane.[63] This facility was evident in his 1980 swinging letters masterpiece, where his tag seemed to have become animated and filled the side of the train car, top to bottom and end to end. There was a blue sky background, with puffy white clouds. Each letter seemed to pivot freely, like a car on a Ferris wheel, suspended between a pair of metal legs: the B rocked back, the A swung forward, and the D looked ready to fly up and around its axle. The letters were shadowed in black so that they looked substantial and seemed to project into space, especially against the actual sky as the train crossed an overpass, as in this photograph. Four round faces with big cartoon eyes to the right of the E were smaller than the letters and were graduated in size so that they appeared to recede into the pictorial space.
BLADE told New York Times reporter Grace Glueck in 1983, ‘I wanted to do the most and be the best at it’.[64] This was an unusual ambition. Generally, graffiti writers aimed for quantity, and while a distinctive style was admirable, it was not a substitute for ubiquity on a particular subway line in gaining a reputation as ‘king’ of the line. Thus, it was not inevitable that a prolific tagger would become known for producing masterpieces, because the time needed to execute an elaborate, multi-coloured, whole-car design could have been spent on scores of simpler tags. BLADE was unique in his desire to produce large, striking designs in quantity. He spent about ten hours on an end-to-end piece with his name centred over the middle doors in 1980. The blocky, blue-green letters followed the conventions of linear perspective with the vanishing point in the centre of the A. The A was the farthest back in space, and it appeared to be folded so that the whole tag angled into the atmospheric bands of white, gold, and orange behind it. This central design was set off by a pair of broad red arcs that separated the deep space from black areas of indeterminate depth at either side. An atomic blast in red, white, and blue was to the left and to the right was a pop-eyed head. Richard Goldstein, the Village Voice art critic, took it to be a reference to the famous painting, The Scream: ‘A subway Munch raises the heady possibility that art can happen anywhere’.[65] Any resemblance was unintentional, though: the artist said he was not familiar with Munch’s painting when he produced his image. Rather, he claimed to be self-referential: the figure expressed awe of the writer’s ability to break the picture plane, and craned his neck, wide-eyed.[66]
SEEN, Tag, 1981. Aerosol paint on subway car. New York.
RAMMELLZEE
Queens-based RAMMELLZEE believed in the power of writing as a vehicle to reconfigure language and the circuits of power it supports, although he was not active in the yards. He described his theory of writing, ‘Ikonoklast Panzerism’, to art critic Nicolas A. Moufarrege in a 1982 interview in Arts magazine. ‘Panzerism’, he said, ‘is connected to panzer, the tank. Armor, an armored mechanism. So when I add the – ism to panzer, it means the practice of armament’. He said he substituted K for the C in ‘iconoclast’ because it was a more ‘evolved’ letter: ‘…the letter “c” in its formation is an incomplete cipher: 60 degrees are missing. A “k” is a formation based on the foki [sic] of it; a certain kind of science based on the knowledge of formation mechanics…’ Awareness of the structure of letters allows the writer to ‘arm’ them, as he believed the medieval monks had done with the points in their letters: ‘When they got to the points in the Gothic texts, we extended and made arrows’. Writers, he claimed, knew Gothic script from newspaper banners, such as the Long Island Press and The New York Times. The transformation of Gothic letter to wild-style was not necessarily deliberate, but to RAMMELLZEE it was undeniable: ‘All you got to do is look at that [the newspaper banner] and what we did on the trains: same thing. You’ve got the connection right there but we did ours in the dark and made that connection; therefore that connection is subconscious’. His own tag had evolved to be a ‘military function and formation, because when I draw it, it is not R, A, M, M, E, L, L, Z, E, E; it is R, A, M, M, Sigma, L, L, Z, Sigma, Sigma. We have turned Epsilon into Sigma’.[67] He espoused that letters are in themselves meaningful and properly understanding the concepts they signify allows one to unlock the secrets of the universe. This belief is reminiscent of part of the doctrine of the Five Percent Nation, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam that called upon African Americans to empower themselves and become self-sufficient, although he denied the influence. He collaborated with A-ONE, KOOR and TOXIC to develop his philosophy, and later was dismissive of writers such as DONDI, FUTURA, and LEE, who focused on imagery at the expense of letters when they began to paint on canvas.[68]
NOC 167
According to RAMMELLZEE, NOC 167 coined the phrase ‘style wars’, which conveys both the one-upmanship that existed among writers and the conflict over graffiti on the subways and other public spaces between writers and city authorities.[69] From the Bronx, NOC 167 began tagging in 1972 but quit in 1981, he said because his mother took a job in the federal government and if he were arrested for vandalism it would be an embarrassment to her.[70] Like DONDI, he adopted different tags to experiment with forms and combinations of letters, exhibiting creativity that inspired other writers. He also offered hands-on guidance: the Bronx writer CRASH said that aspiring writers could tell NOC their tags, and he would write them in two or three different styles to practice in exchange for a can of spray-paint.[71]
‘Style War’ was the title and theme of NOC’s whole car masterpiece