Style Wars (Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant, 1983)

Because I am a White Person, I Like two kinds of Stuff: public media and old-school hip-hop culture. I'm more or less on a drip feed of the former and the latter is never more than a screening of Wild Style away, but I never saw the twain meet. Until now.

Shot in 1983 but unreleased on DVD until last year, Style Wars unites two of my pet sub-aesthetics: late-70s/early-80s PBS and late-70s/early-80s hip-hop. Both succumbed, in the main, to their own devils of bland tackiness as the 80s became the 90s, but this documentary preserves a rare union of forces forever. I could watch and hear those quickly captured, softly dreamlike images narrated by that authoritatively mannered, distantly anonymous voice describe absolutely any subject, but when it's the do-it-yourself exuberance of the breakers, MCs, graffiti artists and DJs of yore? I'm sold.

Like Wild Style, Style Wars, ostensibly a film about graffiti, uses that pillar of hip-hop as a signpost pointing toward the others. Though most of the footage is or illustrates interviews with graffiti artists, the elements of hip-hop culture were so integrated by then that it would've been impossible to separate the chocolate from the peanut butter, and undesirable besides. Behind the ragtag community of spray can masters — one blankly endures constant derision from the mom he lives with, one's missing an arm, one's a self-styled graffiti "villain" who goes around painting over existing pieces — sprawls a community of dancers, musicians, promoters and hangers-on.

Much of the movie centers around the conflict — and, as a tattered, spiral-bound filmmaking manual I found once advised, You Need a Confilct — between the graffiti enthusiasts and the numerous anonymous (or at least anonymous-seeming) middle-aged men with combovers who see New York's increasingly variegated walls and trains as harbingers of civil society's imminent collapse. Then-mayor Ed Koch commands a surprising amount of screen time with his promises to the voters that he'll end the painty plague once and for all.

Paul Graham wrote that "graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world." That sounds wrong when you see just how competent these guys were in '83: competent at sneaking around under the cover of night, competent at jumping fences, competent at secreting dozens of cans under their coats, competent at building a site-specific work of art layer by layer all while keeping an eye out for the fuzz. Ambitious, certainly; incompetent, no way.

But Graham clears this up in a footnote: "I'm talking here about everyday tagging. Some graffiti is quite impressive (anything becomes art if you do it well enough) but the median tag is just visual spam." Even in Style Wars' day, you can see the visual spam already creeping in. 25 years on, it's nearly overtaken everything else; "graffiti" has become synonymous with "nonsense, hastily scrawled," at least insofar as it's experienced in everyday life. Like the other pillars of hip-hop, it's known and respected at the very top but lazy and insubstantial at the bottom: there's the elaborate, laboriously-crafted graffiti you occasionally see in galleries, and then there's the stuff about your mom you read in the bus station.

I wonder if this happens to all creative pursuits with a low cost of entry. While it's as difficult to become an excellent MC, DJ or graffiti artists as it is to become an excellent singer, guitarist or painter, it's a hell of a lot easier to become a mediocre MC, DJ or graffiti artist than it is to become a mediocre singer, guitarist or painter. Want to become a tap dancer? Those shoes don't come cheap. Want to become breakdancer? Lay yourself out a scrap of cardboard and go to town. All of these skills are, of course, hard-won, but the barriers to hip-hop's, quite possibly due to its unmoneyed inner-city roots, are extremely low.

This may lie at the root of the sort of comments one hears from older people: "Why, that rapper's just talking!" "Why, that graffiti person is just spraypainting, and all all willy-nilly at that!" "Why, that DJ is just playing records!" "Why, that break dancer is just spinning around on the ground!" And they're right, at least about the mediocre ones: those slackers are just talking, spraypainting, playing records and spinning around on the ground. But the best of the best are doing dimensions more; it's just that their gear and setting is visually near-indistinguishable from what they came up with. Or at least it was in the early 80s.

Comments

[Dan Owen]

Graffiti. I find it such a vexing subject.

Put aside members of the audience who refuse to engage with graffiti as art. You'll always have people like that. "My kid could do that," is merely a filter to establish who in the audience you want to talk to. ("Death panel" is another filter: there's no point in even starting a conversation with them.)

Lichtenstein is to comic books as graffiti is to ... what? Who hangs a tag masterpiece on their livingroom wall? There's no question that good graffiti requires a high level of skill, but it's so inextricably tied up with the context -- in this case the literal canvas -- that it's hard to take it seriously outside of that context as art. When you take if off the side of the #6 train, it becomes merely an art class exercise in exploring the potential of a medium. It stops functioning in anything other than a technical sense once you hang it on your wall. I'm going too far in saying that it's the Tweet of art, but at the same time it's anchored in the same kind of ephemeral way. If you published a collection of people's Tweets about the Iranian election protests, I'd find it frustrating in the same way as a collection of graffiti paintings: the real story feels elsewhere -- deeper, broader, tied to something bigger that lends it significance. You wouldn't say that about, say, a Goya painting, which in some larger sense "stands on its own."

Where do graffiti artists go with their work as they get older? I'd like to see a documentary about that. Do they start custom skateboard businesses and start saving for their kids' college funds? Tattoo shops? Are they curators at MOMA? Where's it all go? Are they artists or hackers?

I'm always a little perplexed when Town Fathers hire graffiti artists to paint the side of a building with a graffiti mural. The transgressive power of vandalism-art has totally different meanings for young people and old people. Young people like transgressive because it frees them to destroy the identity they didn't get to choose, and create the one they like. Old people value order and everything that comes with it. Graffiti isn't just a "celebration" of creativity: it's a kind of artistic suicide bombing, designed to disrupt the ordered context of art and culture. It's a kind of throwing Warhol's Campbell's soup can through the window of your car.

Totally different from hip hop.

Dan Owen

[differences between men and women]

It was highly contagious.
--It came on very suddenly and killed very quickly. It was said that
an infected person could be "dancing at nine o'clock and dead by
eleven."
--It was, as the name suggets, characterized by a high fever and sweating.
--It wasn't the plague, and it wasn't smallpox.

[generic cialis]

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