Taking the Train How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City by Joe Austin
Taking the Train How Graffiti Fine art Became an Urban Crisis in New York Metropolis
Columbia University Printing
January 2002
"A vandal is somebody who throws a brick through a window. An artist is somebody who paints a picture on that window. A groovy artist is somebody who paints a picture on the window and then throws a brick through information technology."
– A-One (a graffiti creative person), quoted in New Yorker
Sometimes I sit down by the tracks waiting for the trains to blow through this small town in Northwest Ohio, hoping to catch a glimpse of a city I left behind splashed in vibrant colors across the sides of a freight car. Feeling cornball for what was, in my childhood, the cryptic signs of a secret city – "TVR", "the Aves", "Thumper", "El Sereno" – letters that signified another world. Within an alcove, outside of the bar where my father worked, I stood mystified by the words "Spider Temple", imagining chained bodies being devoured past tarantulas while men in black robes chanted by torchlight committing night deeds in the temple of their overlord. I once pointed at a painting in the Fifty.A. River, asking, "Mom, what does TVR mean?"
"That means Toonerville – it'due south a gang. There used to be a show called Toonerville Trolley, and the people in the gang live near the train tracks, so they took the name Toonerville. The Aves is brusque for the Avenues, which is another gang. When I was a little kid, I knew some of them. They were nice back then, it's not similar that today." An impressive amount of data, and more than than I expected (I was simply six or seven at the time) and it was the early 1980s when the concern over youth gangs in Los Angeles was quickly condign a full-blown moral panic. Drugs, shootings, and street gangs had the public looking for answers not unlike those described in Joe Austin's outstanding book Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City.
In that location is a world of deviation between what was going on in Los Angeles and what went on in New York from the '70s through the '90s, just the soapbox was framed in much the aforementioned fashion: A groovy city on the verge of collapse versus a savage group of youthful predators. Although I sit down waiting for the signs of this "decay" to whirl past on the railroad train tracks, the tags are sanitized by distance and speed, obscuring their meaning and hiding the all also human stories behind them. Taking the Train aims to tell such a story.
Showtime with an interesting history of the Large Apple, Austin points out the ii chief discourses through which residents and visitors find meaning in the city: The Naked Urban center or the New Rome. The New Rome is the meridian of civilisation, the urban center where dreams are fulfilled, fame is won, and riches earned. The Naked City, on the other hand, is the seedy metropolis of noir films, where life is cheap and virtue meaningless.
It is these two themes that mobilize the battle for New York, with the powers that be pushing back the Naked City in order to save New Rome. Information technology is in this context that a New York teetering between 2 worlds gave nativity to contemporary graffiti writing and its institutional response. Austin tracks a loose history of writing pieced from available sources and interviews, simply without the certainty that is available to art forms that are sanctioned and legitimated past the institutions of mainstream society. Every bit an secret movement, the origins may exist difficult to track, but equally an official "menace" the response by authorities and media brand writing's status as an urban crisis impossible to miss.
Legislators looking for sensational solutions to the urban center'south (and the subway system's) issues turned to graffiti as its nemesis, claiming that graffiti (rather than the escalating violence or increasing number of train derailments) was the source of the citizen's unease in the bilious public transportation system. Using numerous interviews with the writers themselves, Austin traces the development of an fine art course against the properties of several "wars" existence fought against information technology. The end result was an art civilization that evolved as both a form of creative expression and as a strategy of resistance past which writers sought to consistently outwit the efforts of the authorities.
Similarly, Austin tracks the development of writing in the face of its provisional "acceptance" by the fine arts community during the '80s, besides every bit the evolution of the hip-hop motion, which seeks to unify writing with hip-hop music and dance equally a unique and positive urban cultural milieu. Merely Austin avoids putting writing into the ready-fabricated places for it to occupy in both the fine arts tradition and in the hip-hop community (although he does admit many of the beneficial relationships to be had within these two worlds). Instead, he opts to stick to writing itself equally culture, tracking the development of styles, techniques, and innovations inside the community.
Austin tracks the divergent trends in writing, one being to produce elaborately planned and detailed "masterpieces" and the other beingness to produce numerous "throw-ups" or hastily produced markers of identity. Similarly, he tracks the movement of writing from the outsides of subway trains to their insides; to the city walls, freight trains, and off the walls into the pages of numerous zines and media circulated around the world. Using vivid bits of information offered past the writers he interviewed, Austin is able to paint a moving picture of the unabridged "prestige economy" which has developed around writing, creating reputations through one-man (or woman) guerilla public relations campaigns through which the writers gain recognition through book, skill, audacity, or a combination of the three.
Beautifully written and a pleasure to read, Taking the Train is an amazing report of underground youth civilisation and its development and growth in the face of numerous moral panics and urban crises. With the help of inspiring ethnographic work and thorough sampling of the mass media, Austin is able to produce a sincere, thoughtful, and thought-provoking study of an unprecedented art miracle that has grown to establish its own rules and methods of prestige and circulation. By charting the writers' development of tactics in the face of increasingly hostile media, public policy, and system of surveillance, Austin's work is an exemplary contribution to the study of popular culture and everyday life.
Source: https://www.popmatters.com/joe-austin-taking-the-train
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