A View 30 Years Later: "Style Wars" and "Meeting of Styles"

"Style Wars," released in 1983 and directed by Tony Silver with Henry Chalfant, documents the 1970s and 1980s graffiti movement in New York City. Mapping the growth of graffiti as part of the rise of hip hop culture, the documentary also records graffiti's contested social and legal status, interviewing Mayor Ed Koch, directors of the MTA Police and the Vandal Squad, gallery elite, as well as parents of writers and everyday subway writers to reveal a divided public opinion about graffiti being either vandalism and a symbol of "loss of control" or an exciting form of art.

Watching the documentary in 2013, at age 26, where writers from age 12 to 22 are interviewed articulating opinions about legality, freedom, publicity, and aesthetics is a jarring experience, essentially watching the formation of positions about graffiti and style that have a calcified or "common sense" status emerge from the field of the contingent.


Notably, style emerges as a way of achieving recognition occurring within a competitive framework, rocking a style referencing the rocking, physical, aural, and visual that is expressed in getting "loose" while expressing the various pillars of hiphop:  rapping, DJ-ing,b-boy and b-bgirl breaking [dancing], and graffiti.

"Style Wars" then also marks the confrontation over styles of life, styles of urbanism: control-based and clean public transport systems, versus inscribed upon, messy, and colorful subway cars that make explicit ongoing commentary between official (police) and unofficial (writers) discourses, new kinds of visibility. It also illuminates styles of mattering, for instance, in an interview with Skeme, an all-city writer, his mother also participates, both the writer and his mother speaking to the camera, using it as a mediator to express the differend (Lyotard) between their different world views. "I bomb to be all city, to take over the line" Skeme argues, "but to what ends?" his mothers counters, "'All city'? You see what I am dealing with here, what does that even mean?" Later on in the interview it comes to light that Skeme tells his mother when he goes on "missions" to the train-yards and layups to do whole-car productions. "I want my mom to know what's going on, in case I end up in jail." She shakes her head, sighs, looking at the table and the interviewer, whose voice is obscured throughout the film, who speaks "Not every writer would keep their mom in the loop." Here a glimpse of what a clash of idioms looks like emerges, but perhaps also an optimistic moment for potential future understanding, or not. It is unclear if the police chief's view of "benefit to society" in arguing that writers should "take up sponges and mops" to "really do something for their community" instead of paint cans, and Skeme's mother coincide. But what is clear is that a war over styles of citizenship, of being part of polis, is in process.

 

These wars, over urban appearance, civic value, and public speech are still unravelling. In spaces such as "Meeting of the Styles Chicago," it is less a war than a kind of museological exposition of ongoing tensions and debates in graffiti culture and graffiti style, fast forwarding "Style Wars" thirty years to a point where writers have children, grandchildren, and steady jobs, but still seek to participate and have an impact on writing culture. Many writers have bombed the system, but also have participated in the system. Less partisan and dramatic than "Style Wars," "Meeting of Styles Chicago" is an annual practice of commemoration and visual reflection about graffiti's past and future in Chicago, less war than wondering.

Unsocial Sociability: Why Public Art is Not Just Touchy-Feely

Hello 2013. It has been awhile, and intense work on getting this dissertation written has unfortunately traded off with my ability to gallavant around and just BE and observe the constantly blossoming art scene here in Chicago, and blog about. But I miss you, Chicago. And I am thinking about you. I am also recently thinking about how graffiti art, a kind of art that has a definite, strong, and deep community, can also be helpful for non-graffiti writers or savants in thinking about the way that urban community works, or, its energetic dynamics.

The argument is as follows: Cities, per folks such as Nigel Thrift, Lauren Berlant, Georg Simmel, and others, are simmering spaces of tension, malice, skin-of-your-teeth tolerance, and sensory overload, spaces that we are drawn to, but simultaneously annoyed, terrified, and burned out by.

These above accounts of the urban, a space of love, hate, and slightly detached enjoyment, among other things, share deep resonances with Kant's account of antagonism, rehearsed by Benjamin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine in their 1999 text, "Polemicization."

Arditi and Valentine quote Kant:


"The means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society, in so far as this antagonism becomes in the long run the cause of law­governed social order. By antagonism, I mean in this context the unsocial sociability of men, that is, their tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up. This propensity is obviously rooted in human nature. Man has an inclination to live in society, since he feels in this state more like a man, that is, he feels able to develop his natural capacities. But he also has a great tendency to live as an individual, to isolate
himself, since he also encounters in himself the unsocial characteristic of wanting to direct everything in accordance with his own ideas. He therefore expects resistance all around, just as he knows of himself that he is in turn inclined to offer resistance to others. It is this very resistance which awakens all man's powers and induces him to overcome his tendency to laziness. Through the desire for honour, power or property, it drives him to seek status among his fellows, whom he cannot bear yet cannot bear to leave. (44)"

In other words, that which elicits in us the desire to excel is a profound dissatisfaction innate in human society. The MUCK, and irritability that the social elicits energizes attempts to order society, but such communal undertakings cannot fully erase the resentment and discomfort that participants may feel in such an endeavor.

Kant's account of antagonism is compelling to me: it is easy to love a city, it is difficult to love stranger-co-urban citizens. The idea of the city in all its density that one might want to have a relationship with is much more frustrating, inefficient, noisy, and shallow when encountered in real time/space and people.

Arditi and Valentine note that "For the first time conflict, antagonism, is recruited to philosophy as a positive good" (50) a mechanism for social projects.

So what does this have to do with graffiti?

I am working on my last two chapters about Meeting of Styles Mexico, and Meeting of Styles Chicago, and am thinking through how to describe the festival. It is a space of celebration, friendship, demonstration, excellence, skill, education, and intense energy: generations of writers getting together, young writers getting to meet and learn from older famous ones, families chilling in the autumn air with the music of spray cans filling the air, beers being drunk and blunts smoked as outlines, contrasts, characters and auras are laid down, creating new fantastic scenes where there was just rubble before. But it is also a space where anxiety, frustration, anger, and worry crop up. Are there ever enough spots? What happens when someone messes up the color scheme, or is in the wrong spot? Why do the young kids keep lining out pieces with discarded cans so work has to be redone on Sunday? What if there isn't enough paint sponsors, or gallery space? And how does a graffiti community hold on to a sense of Mexico or Chicago style history in a scene that is increasingly global?


I think that what public art, and especially transitional graffiti scenes like Meeting of Styles teach us, is that you can have unsocial sociability-- you can have simmering beef, competition, worry, and posturing, but still have excellence, skills development, and beauty at the same time.

The benefit of public art, especially graffiti, is that it is an aesthetic lineage that is incredibly dense: lettering styles speak volumes about histories of stylistic development from different cities and people, the skill of the writer, while at the same time still holding something close, not fully readable, and maybe not meant to be fully decoded, a kind of "sacred text" per Raven.

Public art doesn't necessarily need to help us all get along and completely mediate the ongoing antagonism and cranksterism that makes up an urban everyday-- it might just provide a thought provoking, beautiful, skilled and surprising new surface to serve as a reminder that even though cities are spaces of malice, brokenness, and disagreement, they are also spaces that can hold intimate, loving, friendly, and competitive practices that both challenge and release creative energy.

Public art, a form of publicity MEANT to work through anonymity and the author leaving the scene, speaks to the productivity of urban citizens working to articulate an individual style, and create a groove of deep calm amidst the din of everyday city life, or to inject some noise into muted, greying city spaces, but also beholden to physical and social networks to provide creative inspirations (other writers and artistic styles) and mere surfaces (the layers of track, wall, and viaducts that make up urban canvas) to realize it.

Sandy and the 9/11 Construction Site: Is Rebuilding] differently enough

Disaster imaged by a city icon under threat. In several Hollywood blockbusters key icons from New York City’s landscape are turned into detritus, attacked, or mobilized, in various circumstances. A meme floating around facebook  enthymematically gestures to a cannon of New York disaster films, including Ghost Busters II, Godzilla, and, not included, Planet of the Apes. In the recent images from Hurricane Sandy’s landing on New York shores one of the many chilling images that caught my attention was the above image of Ground Zero construction site flooding.

It is a beautiful image, water cascading like a waterfall from the flat construction site bove, filtering through various tunnels and scaffolding to create a variegated crystalline flow that breaks above the lower level below, almost like the terraces in Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water house.  

In a way, spatially, disasters of two kinds: one the result of geopolitical distributions of resentment, terror, U.S. Empire, and an assortment of motives known and beyond knowing, but decidedly linked to human calculation, and another, the seeming blunt and faceless vengeance of Mother Nature at her worst. However, Hurricane Sandy is not some deus ex machina turned foul, it is the result of decades of overconsumption, lax environmental policy, careful attempts at sidestepping difficult collective decisions, and the residues of disasters felt in third and fourth world coastal cities to an even greater degree.  The image evidences the profound vulnerability that we all face vis a vis “nature” in an era of global warming. Further, it illuminates the threat of profound loss, a wound so great that it floods the capacity to remember and even honor its own memory, in the wake of natural disasters beyond reckoning.

The relationship was made clear to me while on a phone call with my mother. My family is all located on the East Coast. “I couldn’t sleep last night.” I said “The images, the destruction, it is frightening to know your home town is getting the crap beat out of it.” She answered: “I couldn’t either. That hum from the train, buses, cars, the normal noises. It was quiet. It was like 9/11. That eerie quiet.” The hunched shoulders, tight breathe, and sense of foreboding that I’d felt the last 48 hours, to the point of calling my family every four hours to check in on them, made a certain sense. The sense of betrayal that I was not physically there.

Among humorous references to New Yorkers “preparing” for the Hurricane by stocking up bottles of wine and complaining  what reveals is an affective economy of fear, and anxiety  that reveals not so much through public statements, though some, such as Governor Cuomo have at least admitted the need for rebuilding differently because of "greater frequency of flood patterns", but more importantly, through images.

Images of a transformer exploding , of a building façade crumbling,

 of a crane hanging of the side of a several story tall building: everyday objects, architectural tools or components of structures taking on a life of their own and becoming threatening. Uncanny.

But the image of the 9/11 memorial also, for me, unlocks a central component of Hurricane Sandy’s landfall that provides an instructive link between the trauma and tragedy of a city under terrorist attack, and a city under assault by nature: both require a more careful, and collective response, and in a bizarre way, both highlight the potential for care and compassion latent in New York City, a city largely defined as callous and “rude.”

The images reveal an anxiety about agency: how do we respond to, prepare for forces that are seemingly beyond our control, and more forebodingly, threaten to erase every human effort at remembering, and responding to disaster?

Ariella Azoulay argues that analyzing images helps us make sense of complex situations. Although she discusses images of quotidian violence in the militarized daily life of Israel-Palestine, her insight is helpful in a broader context. The images taken by journalists, and everyday citizens illuminates a desire to make sense of a situation seemingly beyond any individual’s control, a desire to hold on to some agency, and to care for a history the physical traces of which are vulnerable to being washed away in a very powerful storm. 

I am extremely lucky that those close to me are warm, and dry. I know that millions across the globe are not so fortunate and my prayers and good wishes go out to them. A discussion has been going on via images, and dialogue, for several years about the need to live in a more sustainable way with nature, and with each other. To make difficult decisions about changing consumption and energy use patterns. What the 9/11 memorial/Sandy image reveals is that crisis is not a one time occurrence. It has complex histories, pasts and futures. The nearest approximate to coherent action we can take is to think about how to work more holistically, and collectively to thinking about the distribution of disaster, risk, and vulnerability globally, and attempting to work towards understanding responsibility, rather than merely piling up sandbags. The flood can always burst through.