The Faith of Graffiti [Paperback]

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.