The works in the Brooklyn Museum show, mostly aerosol spray paintings, are not devoid of compelling qualities. The canvases of Melvin Samuels Jr., known by his tag, NOC 167, combine monumental letters, gaseous colored spaces, cartoon images and illusory flares of light to create a baroque, visionary extravagance.
Those of John Matos (Crash) deftly simplify images, like that of an airplane's spinning propeller into the workings of some cosmic machinery. Paintings by Kwame Monroe (Bear 167), Sandra Fabara (Lady Pink) and Chris Ellis (Daze), in which expressive cartoon faces loom large, intimate potentially interesting narratives; and compositions based on single words stylized into near abstraction by Randy Rodriguez (Kel 1st) and Michael Tracy (Tracy 168) have much graphic energy.
The show's biggest picture, Train Act by Anthony Clark (A-One), is so evenly congested and layered with pictographic images and calligraphic marks that it starts to have an all-over abstract quality, like a Jackson Pollock painting.
But the grandiose ambitions of the paintings in the show remain incompletely fulfilled because imperatives of speed and spontaneity required by subway painting override the kind of focused decision-making about formal, material and representational aspects that studio painting needs. In the gallery the graffiti paintings look overblown and too-hastily made.
In its own time the deficiencies of graffiti-style studio painting became evident, and by the mid-1980s the fad was over. Some of the artists, like Fred Brathwaite (Fab 5 Freddy) and Aaron Goodstone (Sharp) went on to have productive careers in art and entertainment. Some dropped out, and some, like Monroe and Clark, died young.
Yet the influence of graffiti and other forms of youth culture, like skateboarding and tattooing, lives on in the works of artists like Barry McGee, the Clayton Brothers and many others, which is why the Brooklyn Museum's treatment is disappointing. An exhibition telling the story of graffiti's rise, fall and continuing half-life in all its sociological and art-historical complexity could shine a more revealing light on the dreams and myths that animate contemporary American art and culture.
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