The Brooklyn Museum has been criticized for exhibitions like Hip-Hop Nation and Star Wars that seem to blur the line between education and popular entertainment. Is Graffiti, another show presumably with popular appeal, more of the same? Yes and no.
On the downside, the 20 aerosol spray paintings from the early 1980s on display, including works by once-famous graffiti artists, like Daze, Crash and Lady Pink, are negligible as works of art. And it does not help that the exhibition's designers have erected walls within the main gallery, where children are invited to create graffiti themselves.
On the other hand, though it does not go into its subject as deeply as it could have, the exhibition represents an interesting and possibly instructive sociological episode in recent art history: the story of an unusual convergence of avant-garde high culture and grass-roots youth culture, with each side bringing its own sets of values, understandings and aspirations.
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The embrace of graffiti by high culture goes back to Jean Dubuffet and Cy Twombly, whose paintings contain elements resembling anonymous signs found on public bathroom walls. The broader background is modernism's fascination with all things perceived as primitive. Picasso's appropriation of African tribal art, Paul Klee's imitation of children's art and the celebration of the self-taught painter Henri Rousseau are examples.
The kind of graffiti under consideration in the Brooklyn Museum's show is not like bathroom primitivism. The New York subway graffiti artists of the 1970s worked fast in the night, using aerosol spray cans. But the mix of bold, wildly distorted lettering, luminous color and cartoon imagery betrayed a practiced understanding of illustration, design, scale and theatrical impact. It was the work of talented pre-professionals.
Graffiti still had a certain outlaw allure. It was (and still is) illegal, and the artists took real risks — of being arrested by the police (or grounded by their parents) and of physical injury — in doing the things they did. So it had a romantic attraction to high-culture people like Norman Mailer, who wrote the text for a subway graffiti photography book called The Faith of Graffiti in 1974 (Praeger).
Two developments in the late 1970s conspired to bring graffiti into art galleries. One was the crackdown on graffiti in the subways by city officials; the other was the efflorescence of the scene in the East Village, where youthful exuberance, insouciant rebellion and spontaneity were the prevailing values, and artists like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who were or had been involved in graffiti, were major stars.
Suddenly works on canvas and paper by the ex-underground artists were showing and selling in fancy galleries in New York, Europe and Japan. The eminent 57th Street dealer Sidney Janis put on a major exhibition of graffiti art in 1984 and bought a lot of graffiti painting too. In 1999 Janis' heirs donated about 40 graffiti paintings to the Brooklyn Museum, and it was from that group that the museum's contemporary art curator, Charlotta Kotik, selected the present show.
The fatal problem with transferring graffiti from subways and outdoor building walls is that it is just not made for contemplative scrutiny. Below ground, in motion, accompanied by the roar of the trains, graffiti paintings covering whole cars could have exciting, hallucinatory and sometimes frightening effects. On stationary canvases in clean, brightly lighted galleries, drained of its guerrilla mystique, it dies. Not to mention that the continued ubiquity of this type of graffiti on the walls of New York buildings makes it seem depressingly stale.
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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