In defense of tagging.

Tagging is often ostracized as the bastard child of everything we talk about when we use the term ‘Street Art’. When our grandma tells use she hates the defacement of public property, it’s probably tagging that she’s bringing to mind. Even those of us who profess to protect all writing on walls –be it political or poetic- will often add “I love all graffiti… save for tagging.” Yet we forget that the phrase Street Art is itself quite contemporary, a 21^st Century term. The phrase -meant to elevate ‘graffiti’ from the grit of the streets- takes root into popular jargon about the time our more complex species came to rear their pretty heads. That Cambrian explosion of stencils, stickers & paste-ups etc, truly kicks in on a worldwide scale in those early years of the Naughties (when people were still awkwardly calling it "The ‘00’s" ). While it was necessary to define these new lines of media as distinct from the spraycanned sprawl that had spawned them… we can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, especially if it was that boiling soup that birthed our new forms. The forgotten father of all this Street Art is not Art at all, but angry kids on the Street with a three-dollar spraycan & something to prove.

In Style Wars (1983), Detective Bernie Jacobs of the NYC Transit Police declares, “Graffiti -as the name itself- is not an art. Graffiti is the application of a medium to a surface.” His definition is simple, making no mention of style. Let us also draw the line there for our discussion- at those rushed, one-colour scribbled sprays that say nothing of substance at all, only the writer’s chosen name. Let us ignore whatever influences might have inspired the flicks & flecks of the Posca Pen. Does the tag have anything left to say? Not really, but nor is it trying to say anything more insightful than simply “I Was Here”, a sentiment older than Art itself. What it speaks of is where it is: placement, not statement. It’s not about Art; it’s about getting your name out.

There are two ways of getting your name out there. You can go ‘All City’ as it is known in NYC, hitting all the subway cars to cover the entire town. A numbers game. As the mustachioed-villain of Style Wars puts it bluntly, “The object is more. Not the biggest and the beautifulest (sic) but more. Like a little piece on every car, is what counts. Not, one whole car, on thirty cars that goes by.” This is certainly the method that turned TAKI183 into a household name. Style Wars credits TAKI183 in kick-starting New York tagging, and indeed many early NYC writers have admitted to putting up TAKI’s name around town before they starting to throw in their own. And after the New York Times ran an article about him in July 1971, it was a craze amongst normal people who had never tagged before (and never would again) to pull out a Sharpie in TAKI’s name.

Or, you can focus your attack. Hit higher. Live larger. Tag taller. The same New York Times article quoted TAKI confessing that he’d once been caught by a Secret Service agent tagging an official car in a Presidential Parade. Big ups to that. A little earlier, a writer by the name of Cornbread was writing his name not everywhere he went, but where no one had previously dared. He penned his pseudonym on the Jackson 5 tour jet during their first official Motown tour in 1970. He scribbled on the side of an elephant in the Philadelphia Zoo. This tradition lives on in what has affectionately been dubbed ‘giraffiti’, wherein height is everything. That which is meant to make us crane our necks up & wonder, how’d they do that? It’s about getting your name out, by getting up.

Even earlier, we have the early pixacao pieces of mid-20^th century Brazil. In Sao Paulo, the southern hemisphere’s largest city, the government would paint political slogans directly onto the street’s surface. Dissident citizens would use mops dripping with black tar to cross them out in different jagged shapes. This was no art, for these were not artists. There was no message but the erasure of another. And yet a certain style or a kind of arcane font arose from the layered zig-zags that came from this fusion of censored scripts. ‘Piche’ is Portugese for ‘tar’ and modern pixacao pays something of an accidental tribute to this history. Again, the message is in the medium: in Sao Paulo today, most pixacao is done with foam rollers dipped in latex paint. And although the modern pixacao is different in the sense that it hugs the higher windows of abandoned buildings, it no less shouts the otherwise hushed voices of the street. While not directly political, the message is along the same lines. In no other country is the poverty gap between the rich & the poor wider, and the iconic lines of pixacao are a way of claiming abandoned buildings back from the rich land developers who might otherwise infringe upon the space of the slums.

Bleeding hearts aside, tagging of all types serves a serious purpose for Street Art, even in the middle-class streets of the first world. Around the outskirts of all our favourite hotspots, dollars to donuts they’re also dotted with tags, especially around the entranceways. What matters is not who put each tag up, but where they put them, collectively. Not only does each tag give props to the placement of the previous, it says something to every subsequent sample. More than hinting how long a writer could potentially paint a piece without being busted, the sheer amount of tags also speaks of how long a piece may stay up before being buffed. A whole wall of tags gives us a kind of strata, a layered benchmark of temporal depth where we can read the history of the space. If we’re going to accept that Street Art has evolved enough to be more than Just Another Genre & is indeed a Medium Unto Itself, we have to accept tagging’s important role in that artistic process, even if it isn't Art in its own right.

Tagging continues to speak the narrative of Street Art. In many ways, the bigger piece is still, stationary. Placed in a location where it is likely to remain for some time, it is an Object made to be admired. Meant to inspire an appreciation of style, skills, can-control etc; there is content to consider. A tag, on the other hand, is all context. Forget whoever put it there; they have long since left & they did not stay for long. What matters is where it is & why it is there, rather than who it is from. If we must hate the players, let us not hate the game.

Even when combative, cross-outs & disses of “Toy” are at least a creative confrontation, all adding something to the surface. The enemy isn't even always the dreaded council buffing , as a whitewash can provide a shapely blank canvas for new pieces to rise from the ashes. What’s worse is the newer council trend of running paint rollers over only the curved edges of a piece. Akin to leaving a decimated corpse out in the open as a warning to others, the piece remains but it is utterly illegible. It doesn't matter that you can no longer read the name; what hurts Street Art is that you can no longer give props to their skill.

In Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sounds of Silence, they declare that “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls & tenement halls”. In the naked light under halo street lamps on narrow streets of cobblestone, ten thousand people (maybe more) are rushedly tagging without speaking, voicing theirs without listening, writing names that no one dare share. Taggers leave seeds while Street Artists are sleeping, planting visions for softly creeping into their brain. And for this to happen, my old friends, these seeds must remain. Or at least echo back to talk to you again. For we should all profess that no whispered sounds at all be silenced, for silence like a cancer grows.

cover by smc3

This article originally published in ST2K presents GET UP OR GET OUT Magazine. These guys made it, so hit them up if you're really jonesing for a hard copy & they might still have some. They also run galleries, workshops & street art tours around Sydney.
Melinda Vassallo, author of Street Art of Sydney's Inner West
Acid Midget, who prolifically documents Sydney's street art scene
Konsumterra Konsumterra, who gets retro props for still reppin' an awesome livejournal