It would be a simple thing to discuss graffiti and the subcultural markings that can be seen on most street corners and discuss the intrinsic merits of the various underground art forms, except that it would be to miss the real conversation. That conversation exists in the mind. It is the response to the signs of obliteration and to the patchwork of neutral paints that cover surfaces with tonal swatches to erase the conversational marks of New Yorkers. The constantly mismatched overpainting in pigments that only approximate the original color of the surface, read as an obsessive mental tick and each time I see the traces, I am forced to experience the psychosis too. I brush the edge of someone else’s compulsion to clean or to have the same conversation over and over as I am reminded of the absent. I wonder what could have been so offensive that it required this treatment, and my mental conversation is looped in the void created by the obvious out-painting. It demands I ponder “what was there” and revisit the same discourse that this eradication always triggers.

New Yorkers literally live in two cities when it comes to thinking about graffiti, on the one hand the New York Times magazine carries pages about the glamorous black frontage on the latest midtown high-rise, created from a randomized sampling of street graffiti and then turned into high-end style, while my son reports that his friend is serving three to five years in jail for his beautifully rendered original tagging. I personally view the first as stealing someone’s artwork and I am appalled by the corporate immorality and disingenuity. They should be imprisoned for theft and tagging both. And this is where I become embroiled in the loop, because all artistic freedom should be rewarded and all attempts to legitimize the medium given their head; except I hate to see the work; a socio-political act, mainstreamed and co-opted by corporate America. The ubiquitous McDonalds creeps into my head.

I pause on my walk from the house to school, to look up and see God painted just below the skyline. It makes me smile. I look round for Pork and Spam only to realize their names no longer float meatily above my head with their humorous arrogance. Have they outgrown this phase of their career or are they simply overwhelmed by the ferocity that New York’s Mayor has unleashed against writers? Twenty years ago, my partner and I showed Abstract Techno Symbolism in our little gallery. Phase 2, Delta Dos and Sharp put up masterpieces on canvas. For our card, they went to Eighth Street and painted a forty foot mural which was photographed to form the image. Around that time Patti Astor had shows by Keith Haring and Fab Five Freddy while Jean Michel Basquiat was tagging inside and out everywhere. Things would have been very different in the artworld had they been forced onto the little “Hello my name is” stickers that crowd the lampposts today. On my way to the subway, I scan the renderings on the corner for the new and creative, the maestro and the toy. Even the vocabulary seems jaded by the onslaught of commercialization.

What bothers me is that there is nowhere left to advertise counterculture on the street, only a part of what is eradicated are the wonderfully witty self aggrandizing of graffiti in the manifestation of identity or secondary identity, or the announcement of crew affiliations. The indie films, bands and poetry readings also have a hard time finding advertising space in the purged city. I am looped into the freedom of speech argument that presents itself everyday in my head by the time I hit Third Street. A giant billboard on Houston Street announces the opening of the New Museum; they (the museum) are allowed to use a dripping paint motif, forty feet high, because they are now rich enough to pay for this variation of edgy, the epithet for the dreadful embodiment of the fake countercultural. The line between hip and hokey veers down the center of my mind like the one in the road where I narrowly miss being hit by a cyclist. I am brought back from my angry loop by the shock and the strange renderings of Chico who has made his work into a “nice little business.” Pete teams up with him and together they do store ads for the local businesses. Pete told me that Pabst Beer is buying out their spaces and paying kids to do fake renditions. As I pass another outpainting on a gate, spectacularly uneven, I think, if New York got hit by a bus it has stains on its underwear. I consider the accidental in art as I muse the splotches of the tone paintings, wondering now if they have merit in the landscape. I really need to hang the Crash and Daze back up in my apartment hall.
By Marguerite Van Cook