Aaron Marquette

Pioneer Paper

(Re)Presenting Writing

 

Richard Goldstein’s article “This Thins Has Gotten Completely Out of Control”, appearing in the March 1973 New York Magazine issue’s “Graffiti Hit Parade”, offers a compelling challenge to the dominant framing of graffiti in the early 1970s. Goldstein stands as one of graffiti’s most cunning defenders.  In the early 1970s New York mayor John Lindsey, elected in 1966, formed the Anti-Graffiti Task Force and employed the rhetoric of urban crisis to frame the growing phenomenon of graffiti as a threat to the moral order (Austin 2001). The Anti-Graffiti Alliance, along with the Metropolitan Transportation and the popular press, pushed for laws aimed at eliminating graffiti.  Whereas the urban crisis discourse constructed writers as deviant vandals, Goldstein’s article makes the claim, describing interviewed members of the United Graffiti Artists,  that “these kids [writers] all turn out to be ordinary fourteen- to –fifteen year olds” (Goldstein 1973, 36).  Goldstein compares graffiti to both art and sport; writers engage both in creative innovation as well as competition.  Goldstein’s persistent critique of the urban crisis discourse earns him a place among the most important commentators influencing the development of hip-hop as a social movement.    

           

 

Goldstein, growing up in a working class background, had early dreams of becoming "a Dostoevsky from the Bronx" but after discovering the “New Journalism“of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer he became enthralled with using literary means to describe real life (Goldstein and Amas 2003).  Goldstein’s career has focused on the link between culture and politics: “ In the sixties he wrote about the nation's counter-cultures, in the seventies about political liberation movements, and in the eighties about the Aids epidemic,“ and Goldstein is also credited with being the first label graffiti as art (Goldstein and Amas 2003).  Of course Goldstein was not the only person to consider graffiti as a form of art; it was his influential early writing on graffiti challenging the dominant conceptiona of it that  earn him this distinction.  Goldstein did more than just present graffiti as art, he complicated this view as well by presenting graffiti as a movement (not simply an artistic mode of expression).  Goldstein’s early work on rock and roll and counter culture sharpened his analytic lens on style.  His dual role as a journalist and cultural critic directed him to approach hip hop both as an observor and as a social anaylist.         

To understand Goldstein’s pivotal position in the hip hop movement one must first dispense with certain prejudices concerning journalists.  Despite the label, reporters do more than simply report the facts; they select which facts to include, as well as exclude, and then organize these facts to form a (re)presentation.  Mediated accounts of graffiti actively shape the phenomenon itself.   Just as one act of writing cannot stand in for the whole range of practices that take on the name of graffiti (such as tagging, throw ups, masterpieces, etc), no one type of writer can stand in for the range of people with diverse backgrounds, motivations, and understandings of the act itself.  The Anti-Graffiti Alliance’s discourse of urban crisis seizes on the illegality of certain forms of writing under the name graffiti, but their concept of graffiti can not give an account of graffiti ‘art’ that hangs in galleries.  The urban crisis framework is incapable of recognizing graffiti as art.  Within this frame the current social structure is naturalized into a moral order (what is becomes conflated with what ought to be); uses of public space in ways not authorized by the state come to symbolize a rejection of social order itself.  Goldstein in contrast emphasizes graffiti as the creation of writers, portrayed as active agents, who express themselves as well as address, that is engage in dialogue with, both other writes and the larger public.  The dual language of expression, of the self, and dialogue, an address to someone or something, is meant to call attention to both the agency of individuals and the influence of systems (discourses, interactions, institutions) on practice.  Goldstein confines graffiti neither to a restrictive classification of art, street culture, commodity, nor vandalism.  In Goldstein’s article graffiti is all of these things, yet not reducible to any single category.  Graffiti sells, hangs in galleries, stakes a claim to fame, offers a challenge, holds the promise of social recognition, experiments with technique.  Not only did Goldstein’s article offer a counter discourse in which to articulate conceptions of graffiti, it also inspired writers by aligning graffiti with art as graffiti pioneer Futura 2000 suggests in a 1996 interview

Fall 1972. When New York Magazine featured an article on graffiti, written by Richard Goldstein, (the same Richard Goldstein who eight years later would still be sympathetic to the art, with his cover story in the Village Voice) I explained to my mother, there is more to being a graffiti artist than just writing your name on a wall. She never shared my passion and saw no art in graffiti (graffiti.org). 

Futura 2000’s story illustrates the effect Goldstein’s counter discourse had directly on the participants of the movement.  Goldstein legitimated graffiti through opening the possibility for graffiti to be perceived as art within mainstream discourse.  To be clear, while Goldstein associated graffiti with art (and positioned graffiti as art), he did not reduce graffiti to art.  By interviewing actual artists and stressing that they were “ordinary people” Goldstein (re)presented writers as a set of kids engaging in concrete practices with diverse interest, rather than a homogenous group of artists, entrepreneurs, or rebels.

After Goldstein’s influential New York Magazine Article he continued to complicate the dominant framing of graffiti.  In Taking the Train Joe Austin characterizes the Times as functionally joining the Anti-Graffiti Alliance with a stream of antigraffiti editorials in the early 1980s (2001, 154).  These editorials, negating the countercultural challenge to Lindsay’s framing of the “graffiti problem”, largely directed “their moral wrath toward those who claimed that writers were legitimate artists” (154).  Shortly after the article “Graffiti: The Plague Years” appeared in the Times, Goldstein responded with an article that contained a full page of train masterpiece photographs, symbolically challenging the Times antigraffiti discourse ( 191).  This defense of graffiti is characteristic of Goldstein who strived to portray graffiti as complex and multifaceted as Austin notes, “Goldstein consistently used his place at the Voice to call attention to the work on the walls as well as the work on the trains” (191).  As a journalist at an elite publication Goldstein was able to extend legitimacy to graffiti as something other than vandalism.

Goldstein’s influence on hip-hop extends beyond the element of graffiti.  Austin contrasts John Lindsay’s technocratic liberalism with Goldstein’s countercultural progressivism (92-93).  Lindsay attempted to problematize graffiti as a threat to the social order and offered technological solutions.  This limited perspective misses the conditions that give rise to graffiti.  Goldstein on the other hand not only acknowledged graffiti as (counter)cultural, but he even went so far as to claim that graffiti is a progressive movement.  In 1973 Goldstein’s New York Magazine article highlighted issues that would later become pressing for the other three elements of hip-hop, these are the issues of countercultural opposition, commodification, and status.  Goldstein added to the available cultural repertories so that hip-hop could become recognizable not as deviance or as unintelligible black noise (to use Tricia Rose’s phrase), but as a countercultural movement.  Goldstein saw writers staking a claim to public space and through his journalism he extended their voices to the mainstream public.  Goldstein provided an alternative framework to understand graffiti and in the process erected the scaffolding for serious reflection on the hip-hop movement.   

 

 

Works Cited

Austin, Joe.  2001.  Taking the Train.  New York, Columbia University Press.

Goldstein, Richard.  “This Thins Has Gotten Completely Out of Control.”  March 23 1973 New York Magazine.

Goldstein, Richard and Knut Olav Amas.  “Culture and gender in neo-conservative America, Richard Goldstein talks to Knut Olav Amas.”  Eurozine 7-17-2003.

Graffiti.org.  1996.  “Futura speaks.”   http://www.graffiti.org/futura/futura.html