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Faith of Graffiti

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This is it. Look no further, wait no longer. Here is the winner. The best book ever written about graffiti...hand down. The Big Bang in the world of graffiti books. Whatever Norman Mailer got paid to write this book, it should be doubled.

I've been re-reading Norman Mailer's "The Faith of Graffiti" , and it seems astounding Mailer grasped a street aesthetic born of marginalized , nonwhite urban youth. This is an important essay I suspect Eric Michael Dyson or Cornell West would come to admire. Mailer is susceptible to the charges of depicting these artists as noble savages, but he does make the connections between the impulse to transform the environment by adding a bit of one's personality upon it with the shattered reconstructions of Picasso's vision. Nice polemic, this. What impresses me is that he refined the existential-criminal-at-the-margins tact he controversially asserted in his essay "The White Negro", backing away from the idea that violence could direct one to knew kinds of perception and knowledge, and emphasized an aesthetic response to a crushing , systematized oppression. Living long enough ,I suppose, made Mailer aware of strong trend in urban style that added value to circumstances and individual growth that didn't involve a fist, a gun or a knife.


Mailer would argue that modern architecture and the corporate power it represent is violence against them and their right to exist, and that graffiti is an aesthetic response to an economic reality that wants nothing to with individuals or their dreams or their latent talents. It creates an intimate relationship with the surroundings that other wise seem designed to urge one to end their lives anonymously. Mailer, though, was talking about a particular quality of prolific taggers , "writers" as they called themselves, and rather rightly discussed them that they were artists no less than the gallery variety. Without patrons, easels, formal training, their walls of the city became their canvas--in those canyons, in those tunnels, on those billboards, all things that hover over them and diminish them in stature, there is an opportunity to declare "I Exist".



The irony of it all, I guess, is that Mailer can be said to tread on the Noble Savage sentiment, but what he asserts in both "White Negro" and "The Faith of Graffiti" is there is a need, nay, a requirement for self-definition among those who are denied the means to do so for reasons of race, gender, economics, and that the form these taggers have taken is a way of making something that resonates. What he argues , essentially, is that the impulse, inspiration and discipline of committing yourself to unsullied artistic expression is the same , whether it happens to be in European salons, SoHo Art Galleries, Museum Walls, or on the side of a Brooklyn water tower; he rejects art as the domain of the white culture the final aim of which is a fat commission and corporate sponsorship and college courses and brings it again to something that is human in it's dimension. As it regards black American culture, the likes of Amiri Baraka, Cornell West and Eric Michael Dyson would find quite a bit to agree with about Mailer's treatise. Urban culture is now the stuff of dissertations, has been codified as an aesthetic with it's own critical parlance, and is now a legitimate part of the larger cultural landscape of America, and Graffiti, like it or not, is an essential element of this mid 20Th century development. Mailer was the first one to write seriously , on his own terms , about this. One can argue with Mailer's tone, his arch style and his interest in neo-primitivism, but I think his interest in the young men he interviewed and spent weeks with as a writer was honest and his ideas about their work were sincere. In a forward to the book, he reveals that the title was given to him by an artist who was seriously injured from a steep fall that happened when he was tagging a structure from on high. He was talking about having faith in something, an ideal, that motivated you beyond your limits. I can only paraphrase, but it came down to him telling Mailer that the name of the book that would come out of this would be "The Faith of Graffiti".

The Faith of Graffiti deservedly remains an icon and reference in the documentation and vindication of graffiti, and the urban cultures it represents. Taking the form of a photo-essay with images taken by John Naar in 12 days between December 1972, and January 1973, with a text by Norman Mailer, it saw the light first in 1974 gaining cult status. A much expected reprint with a few additional images, was finally offered in 2009.

The volume operates as a sample case study documenting relatively early graffiti manifestations, although some of those involved were already talking of a dead scene at the time. While quite innovative in formalizing the work, what Naar and Mailer documented referred to a cultural form that with its shifts and transformations was already quite well developed.

These early years present a nice raw sense of graffiti in the city, and Naar's images offer an stimulating document. However Mailer's essay feels not only a bit disconnected, maybe even dated, but other than for the congratulatory hyperbole of graffiti it feels in a manner that it barely scratches the surface. The New/Gonzo Journalism employed by Mailer uses an openly personal and subjective approach that more often instead of feeling that it aims to offer the close and critical account of an experience, ends putting him egotistically at the center of the narrative.

However it is true that Mailer makes a strong case for the recognition and importance of graffiti, and in that context the essay has often been idealized to extremes. Unfortunately what he often does throughout the analysis is to put it superficially, and in my opinion unnecessarily, in parallel to the annals of high art, from renaissance masters to what was heralded at the time as contemporary masterworks displayed at the MoMA. This leaves the actual intellectual underpinning in the same muddled cultural waters of intellectual justification, social distinction. And Mailer is close to making a rather explicit defense of graffiti belonging to the same predicament. And most importantly, while he succeeded relatively in some circles with this glorification of graffiti, it leaves aside plenty if not all of the social intricacies, disputed spaces, and implications for visual communication that the emergence of graffiti in US cities represented.

On a historic sense the book is a great touching point to discredit the hyperbolic history of hip-hop graffiti. In particular how it is often assigned unquestionable paternity of a whole rebirth of an urban expression. While hip-hop graffiti in NY and the influence it exercised is essential, it requires a far more rigorous and delicate account. If anything, "The Faith of Graffiti" shows the existence of a well developed graffiti presence well before hip-hop was consolidated placing it as a fundamental cultural presence from where hip-hop and other expressions emerged. While urban graffiti in US cities had much to change into formalized expressions, here it shows in early 1973 a rather mature cultural form, which was rather self-sufficient from an also emerging hip-hop scene that would take still a few years to provide its early milestones.

Ultimately, and taking into account the 35 years passing between editions, it would have been exciting to have been offered something beyond a few extra pictures and an afterword. An adequate essay putting the work in context would have been welcome. And probably more important the geolocation of some of the images, and a critical take on how those spots-neighborhoods, and taggers, have changed over time would have been tremendously stimulating. Of course, this would have made it take an expanded analytical character not present in the original. But with so much time since the Faith of Graffiti made its mark it seems like a somewhat missed opportunity.

When The Faith of Graffiti was first published, in 1974, modern graffiti-writing culture was just reaching the first of its several ascendancies. The streets and trains of New York were `destroyed' with the writers' tags. This book was the first to look at proliferate tagging not as a nuisance but as a sub-cultural movement. Jon Naar photographed his New York environment over an intensive, two-week period to produce an extraordinary time capsule. Norman Mailer later lent his voice to the project with a flawed, but well-meant, interpretation of the seemingly foreign values that had taken hold in this American city. Even though the book soon went out-of-print, it quickly rose to, and has maintained, the status of a cult classic among writers in the graffiti underground.

Now, some thirty-five years later, The Faith of Graffiti has just been re-released in its second edition. While the title remains unchanged, and its content includes virtually all of the photographs and text of the original, the book has been entirely redesigned. More photographs are included and the presentation packs a stronger wallop. The principal explanation for this is not the inclusion of additional imagery, but that Jon Naar's photographs are now presented full-frame. There is a greater sense of context associated with each image. We see the compositions as the photographer saw them. We, the book's audience, no longer need to dress up graffiti as graphic design in order to appreciate it.

After we flip past Mailer's introductory text, it is as if we, the reader, are riding a train back in the day. It is a magical train, one not bound to its rails, and our trip takes us through many of the old neighborhoods. We catch a succession of fleeting glimpses framed by our window, this book in our hands. We see spray-painted markings and may even recognize some of the names. We see fellow travelers and random pedestrians, most as absorbed in their own world as we are in ours, oblivious to the graffiti around them. We see tags on trains, trucks, on walls and on the pavement. We catch glimpses of the writers themselves, although our opportunity to converse with them is preciously short. We see the social landscape of a time gone by. Lights flash as we enter a tunnel. In momentary darkness, we contemplate the bright, neon-colored tags now seared into the backs of our eyes. Eventually we reach our destination and step back onto the wintry platform of our present concerns. Exiting the train, we carry with us the look, taste and smell of New York in the 1970's.

The Norman Mailer's text is great! And probably is the first one of this kind. At the beginning of graffiti arts.
And pictures of Naar very moving

Marco

This is fine documentation of a unique art form - gritty and powerful pictures that tell the story of a unique art form no longer observable but indicative of the spirit of the sixties. Jon Naar's pictures grab the images and Norman Mailer's introduction puts grafitti in the larger context of art and artfulness. The silent taggers who never thought of themselves as political show us politics of another kind - thanks to Naar the record of their work is here for all to see and appreciate

Oh! The Bronx got famous! I remember when graffiti started --the weird messages we began to see all over- the magical subways that began to pour out of dark tunnels. The elevated #4 Train. This captues it, the mystery, ,anger, desparation, and joy of those times and our times now. So glad we have not been forgotten, so glad the Bronx as it was lives on in these pages. Bronx in the house! God Bless.

The first edition of "the faith of Graffitti" by Norman Mailer and Jon Naar was a Masterpiece. An introduction to Grafffiti. This second edition has been enhanced by the addition of many more select photographs taken from Jon Naar'.s immense Graffiriti library. A perfect coffee-table book.

This book is a true classic It came out way back in the early 70's which says it all - before the films etc made the sub-culture popular.

The photos are unbelievable - you need to get a copy.

As is for many books, especially of well known authors, there was a p.r. party (in New York in 1974) to launch this book. It was a great, fun evening. Upon entering the space where it was being held, we were given large markers and it was suggested that we write graffiti on the walls. I remember that I wrote:
"With schizophrenia you're never alone!"
Of course this is off a little, medically, but it was done in the spirit of the moment (after all, this wasn't exactly an AMA convention).
Anyway, this is a rememberance that just popped into my head from days gone by. I remember liking the book and probably have it somewhere in my library.
JZ Morris