American Graffiti. Margo Thompson

[80] His ASIA piece from 1981 showed the flow that DOZE admired. The first A’s cross-bar tied directly to the lower curve of the S, the I reversed the curve and the second A leaned into it, while the bottom of the I kicked into the second A’s cross-bar. The far leg of the second A curved to echo the S and close the tag, while two arrows extended away, shooting energy outward. This final letter covered the subway doors, and the arrows pointed in the direction the door opened. DONDI added a boast at the top, ‘DONDI rocks again’ and typically credited his crew, CIA, at the bottom. His graphic facility enabled him to change his lettering style depending upon the audience he intended to address: a complex wild style with densely interlocked letters drew the notice of writers, while a plainer style was legible to a broader public.[81]

      SIEN 5, BFK, date unknown. Aerosol paint on freight train car. Destroyed.

      CLOWN, Untitled, date unknown. Aerosol paint on freight train car. Destroyed.

      DONDI used unadorned letters in ‘Children of the Grave’, a theme to which he returned three times, in 1978 and twice in 1980. These were whole car, top-to-bottom pieces: ‘DONDI’ in italic capitals covered the windows. The phrase ‘Children of the Grave’ referred to a song by the heavy metal band Black Sabbath, and was written inside the letters of the tag. In ‘Children of the Grave Return, Part 2’, the letters in olive green, yellowy-tan, orange-pink, and ice blue were blocky and three-dimensional and marched across the length of the car. In the third version, ‘Children of the Grave Again, Part 3’, the letters were in a similar palette but more curvilinear, with a loop at the top of the O that joined the N’s serif in a flourish, outlined in black and casting black shadows. The effect was clean and elegant. The decorative effects lay outside the lettering, where DONDI painted a hand reaching in from the left in ‘Part 2’ and appropriated two child figures from comic-book artist Vaughn Bodé in ‘Part 3’. These elements and the caption lent the compositions their emotional resonance, a tinge of despair. The writer’s name by contrast was slick and declared a subjective presence in the face of the lack of opportunity implied by the song title. This was social criticism, rejecting the perception popularised in media such as The New York Times that subway writers were antisocial, juvenile delinquents.[82] Rather, DONDI’s piece suggested that they were children in a dangerous environment, facing a bleak future, yet claiming their right to participate in the public sphere by writing on trains.

      ‘Children of the Grave, Part 3’ established DONDI’s reputation beyond his fellow writers: photographer Martha Cooper documented its execution. In her pictures published in Subway Art in 1984, DONDI’s seriousness about his craft is evident and resembles a fine artist’s studio practice. Writers prepared sketches before tackling trains to devise their designs, even labeling the diagrams with the names of aerosol paint colours to determine how much of each would be needed. All of this advance work is evident in the Subway Art spread, where DONDI has his paints arrayed along an open subway car door, in front of his sketchbook where he has outlined his piece and drawn the cartoon children for reference.[83]

      FUTURA 2000

      FUTURA 2000 lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, near the 1 line, where he began tagging in 1971. Early on, he was aware of graffiti’s expressive potential and standards of quality. He admired PHASE 2 for his lettering style and aerosol technique. Another older writer, STAY HIGH 149 was famous for incorporating a stick figure appropriated from the logo for the television show The Saint and the sentiment he expressed with the caption ‘Voice of the Ghetto’.[84] The idea that graffiti spoke for a disenfranchised constituency resonated with FUTURA.

      FUTURA’s early career ended in autumn 1973. While he and his friend ALI were painting in a tunnel there was an explosion, and ALI was severely burned.[85] FUTURA ceased writing on trains, and in 1974 he joined the Navy, serving until 1978. After his tour, he returned to New York where ALI, inviting reconciliation, contacted him to ask him to join Soul Artists, a group of graffiti writers who worked out of an abandoned laundromat on sign-painting commissions.[86] There FUTURA met ZEPHYR, a younger writer who had begun tagging trains in 1977, and by the end of 1979 they were writing on trains together.[87] In spring 1980, ZEPHYR invited him to run another graffiti studio, this one supported by businessman and art collector Sam Esses.[88] Where Soul Artists was a commercial enterprise, Graffiti 1980, also known as the Esses Studio, encouraged the production of writing as fine art: graffiti on canvas. The two months spent there, and an exhibition of graffiti art in October 1980 at Fashion Moda, an alternative gallery space in the South Bronx, led to FUTURA’s breakthrough design for a whole car piece where his tag was minimised.[89]

      ‘Break’, as the train was titled in the absence of a tag and to indicate its significance in his stylistic development, was an atmospheric, abstract arrangement of fields of colour. FUTURA said of his intentions, ‘I don’t need to see FUTURA here, now I want to see just color. I want to see a couple of design elements that people would put into their pieces, and see what does that hold for us. Is that interesting? And it was, it was almost a painting’.[90] On the left, white was broken with cool tones of blue, purple, and magenta, while magenta, green, and orange dominated the car from the windows to the centre doors. Just to the right of the doors, the cloud of colour was bounded by a black outline. Bright white around a field of purple broke through, and a second cloud of warm hues completely covered the rest of the train to the right. Scattered over the atmospheric field of colours were triangles and circles in white and black. ‘Break’, ‘Futura’ and ‘2000’ were written in thin black aerosol lines, so that the lettering was absolutely subordinate to the independent fields of colour. The clouds of brilliant hues inspired Richard Goldstein to credit the Russian expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky as an influence, although FUTURA said he only saw Kandinsky’s paintings at a museum some time later.[91] The comparison stuck and was sometimes invoked when he exhibited abstract canvases in succeeding years.

      DONDI, Children of the Grave Return, Part 2, 1980. Aerosol paint on New York subway car. Destroyed.

      ZEPHYR

      ZEPHYR, from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, began writing seriously in 1977 and associated with a group of writers in Central Park. At first, like most writers, he dedicated himself to producing quantities of tags but eventually he collaborated with other writers from whom he could learn style such as NOC 167, FUTURA 2000, and DONDI. A window-down piece from 1980 may show DONDI’s influence with the serifs and crossbars lined up neatly, drawing the eye through the piece to the dramatically-enlarged leg of the R at the end.

      ZEPHYR painted regularly with DONDI on Sundays in the train yard near his home at the end of the 2 line in Brooklyn, and in 1980 they worked together on a whole car design of ZEPHYR’s, ‘Heroin Kills’. The third contributor to this piece was Charlie Ahearn, a filmmaker based in Times Square who was in pre-production on a film about writing, rap, and break-dancing that would be released as Wild Style in 1982. Ahearn asked to come along on one of ZEPHYR and DONDI’s forays as part of his research for the film, but ZEPHYR was reluctant to take the risk and responsibility of having a ‘civilian’ with them. DONDI was inclined to let Ahearn accompany them, perhaps because he had already been trailed by photographer Martha Cooper when he painted his ‘Children of the Grave, Part Three’ train in May. Unexpectedly, Ahearn brought paints and an idea for his own piece.[92]

      ZEPHYR had made few political pieces, preferring to

81

Cooper and Chalfant, 70–1.

82

Austin, 154–7.

83

Cooper and Chalfant, 32–7.

84

Hoekstra, ed., 134; Futura 2000, “Futura Speaks,” available from. Accessed 20 May 2006.

85

Hoekstra, ed., 134; Futura 2000, “Futura Speaks”; Michael T. Kaufman, “An Underground Graffitist Pleads from Hospital: Stop the Spraying,” New York Times, 18 October 1973, 49.

86

Interview with ZEPHYR, 4 November 2006.

87

Hoekstra, ed., 134.

88

Interview with ZEPHYR, 4 November 2006.

89

Miller, 192n2.

90

FUTURA quoted in Miller, 120.

91

Goldstein, “The Fire Down Below,” 55; Hoekstra, ed., 135. Carlo McCormick surmises that it was the Kandinsky retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1982 that FUTURA saw, and that he visited it with Kiely Jenkins, a downtown artist. (Interview with Carlo McCormick, 27 July 2006.)

92

Interview with ZEPHYR, 4 November 2006.