Primitive gods, fiends from the pit, shamans and tricksters, shape-shifting spirit animals, aliens and ghosts: the final gallery of the Hayward's exhibition of photographs by Brassa? is given over to wild supernatural images which might have been found in the caves of our remote ancestors. In fact, they were scratched and scribbled on the walls of Paris from the early 1930s onwards. No doubt, naughty children had been gouging much the same archetypal designs there since the middle ages, but it took an artist of the 20th century, alive to recent discoveries in archaeology and anthropology, to see that they were cryptic, haunting and oddly beautiful.
Brassa? asserted the link between Parisian urchins and their nameless Aurignacian forebears in an article he wrote for the plush surrealist magazine Minotaure in December 1933 and he made large claims for his discovery: "This is not about playing," he wrote, "it is about mastering the frenzy of the unconscious. These abbreviated signs are none other than the origins of writing-these monsters, demons, heroes, phallic deities are the elements of mythology, no less."
Brassa? spent hours discussing his enthusiasm for graffiti with his friend Picasso, who was also an aficionado and had even executed a few examples of his own. In one case, drawn by the sight of scaffolding outside a bank which was being renovated, Picasso had been overwhelmed by the urge to scratch. The bank manager, clearly no fool, had construction stopped, ordered the chunk of wall containing the graffiti to be cut out and inlaid it into the wall of his apartment.
Brassa? is by no means the only modern artist to have learned from the form. Thirty years before Brassa? went off hunting and gathering with his camera, Giacomo Balla painted Bankruptcy, a sombre study of a defaced shop-front. Matisse was also a connoisseur, and pointed out to Brassa? the universality of the "coffee bean" emblem for female genitalia. The great Spanish painter Antoni T? pies, an admirer of Brassa?'s graffiti photographs, has frequently incorporated scrawls and jottings into his mystical wall-like compositions; Dubuffet also drew on the drawings on walls. So did Miro, Rauschenberg and, some say, Jackson Pollock.
Closer to home, David Hockney's early work included fragments of graffiti, Gilbert and George have incorporated brutal wall-scrawls into their giant works. Ian Hamilton Finlay has made allusions to daubed political slogans ("Bring Back the Birch," reads the plaque next to a birch tree in his garden temple, Little Sparta) and Jock McFadyen has rendered the look of London graffitos with scrupulous exactness.
Then, of course, there was the great "Graffiti Art" bubble of the late 1970s and early 1980s-a bubble which burst in about 1983, but which has left its sticky residues across the history books. In 1975 the New York Artists' Space held a show by the so-called United Graffiti Artists-a bunch of stroppy adolescents from Brooklyn and the Bronx who had been "tagging" the subway lines-and blessed the delinquent phenomenon with a catalogue essay by the critic Peter Schjeldahl. The gates had opened: trendy gallery owners began to fawn over the vandals.
Over the next five years, the trickle of graffitist activity swelled into a flood. The high water mark was probably 1980. In that year, a graffitist by the name of Fab Five Freddy painted a homage to Warhol-giant Campbell soup cans-on the subway and the art world responded to such overtures by flocking and thrilling to the much-ballyhooed "Times Square Show," which included tyro contributions by the likes of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Before long, graffiti art was everywhere that wanted to be somewhere: on record covers, in advertisements for vodka, on the backdrops of performances by Twyla Tharp, in videos and a film called Wild Style, and in show after show-including some shows mounted by dealer Tony Shafrazi, who had himself won notoriety as a graffiti merchant in 1974, when he spray-painted Picasso's Guernica with the slogan "Kill Lies All."
In short, the walls of our major art galleries have been in lively dialogue with the walls of our streets for the better part of a century now. With one or two striking exceptions, though, there have been no comparable efforts of appreciation and appropriation on the part of creative writers, even though graffiti is as much a verbal as a visual phenomenon. While no one is likely to blink at the story of Picasso and the bank wall, it would be hard to credit anecdotal accounts of, let's say, AS Byatt or Andrew Motion nipping out with a felt-tip to execute a swift literary "kill."
When poets have mentioned the subject, such as Philip Larkin and Tony Harrison, they have usually done so as grumpy or anguished moralists rather than celebrants. Prose writers who have tried to engage with the subject have usually ended up looking silly (among the exceptions is Brigid Brophy's novel In Transit). Norman Mailer, for one, made a clown of himself in his essay "The Faith of Graffiti," published as the text for the photograph album Watching My Name Go By (1974), devoted to the extraordinary explosion of complex technicolour calligraphy which hit New York during the administration of Mayor John Lindsay.
Starting with the laudable attempt to see what the young ghetto boys who had been branded as "vermin" had to say for themselves, Mailer soon took flight into sheer twaddle: "On then to the rim of the enigma, to the sea of vortices where the meanings whirl with no meaning..." (Quite so.) Mailer's essay did few people any favours, though one or two shards of insight flashed in the muddy prose-he had noticed, for example, that frightened middle-class commuters took it for granted that the new graffiti were silent shrieks of obscenity, whereas the reality was that they consisted mainly of "tags," noms d'art such as Taki 183 or Cay 161.
It is certainly difficult to write anything as mildly approbatory about graffiti as a rough and ready art form without appearing to suffer from a nasty case of nostalgie de la boue. A few years ago, I interviewed Kenneth Anger, the underground film-maker and occultist, a man whose popular reputation is so laden with sinister rumour that you might reasonably expect his leisure hours to be filled with blood sacrifice and the invocation of Beelzebub. On the contrary, Anger said: he liked nothing better of a dull afternoon than to set off with a pot of whitewash and paint over all the horrid gang graffiti which were ruining his Californian neighbourhood.
Writing as a citizen and (more or less reliable) taxpayer, I'm with the satanist here. When I see the words Ganja Crew and I Love You Pill Monsta disfiguring the handsome house at the end of my lane, I too feel the stirrings of my inner vigilante. And yet it would be hypocritical for me to claim that I had never had my day lifted by a witty or incongruous or simply barmy graffito; and it would be philistine of me not to admit that the illicit genre can have its beauties.
Most people will be at least dimly aware that graffiti is a practice of great antiquity: the buried inhabitants of Pompeii have left us with the best-known such crop, but there are many other sources almost as rich. The earliest systematic scholar of such ancient graffiti was one Antonio Bosio, who began to research a study of the writings in Roman catacombs in 1593 (published 1632); Basio had a 19th-century successor in Giovanni Battista de Rossi, whose Roma Sotterranea of 1864-1877 demonstrated that the wall markings were a guide to routes taken by pilgrims from the 4th to the 7th century AD.
Other scholars were not quite so high minded. In 1731, an English gentleman rejoicing in the name of Hurlo Thrumbo put together a collection of authentic smut-The Merry Thought: or, the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. As the coarse title hints, this was a sort of 18th-century precursor of the little anthologies assembled by Nigel Rees in the 1980s. Thrumbo favoured this sort of thing:
You are eas'd in your Body, and pleas'd in your Mind,
That you leave both a Turd and some Verses behind;
But to me, which is worse, I can't tell, on my Word,
The reading your Verses, or smelling your Turd.
Thrumbo expressed dismay at the practice of innkeepers who would erase such writings "without regarding in the least the wit and learning he is obliterating," but it was not until the early 20th century that genuinely high-minded enquiries into lavatorial writings were undertaken. In the Anglophone world, the ground-breaking study is Alan Walker Read's Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Elements in the English Language (1935)-a volume which establishes that many of the vulgar witticisms still found in public conveniences are of considerable vintage. On the other side of the Atlantic, German scholars were busy addressing the psychological and social dimensions of toilet wall-writing-or, as the American anthropologist Alan Dundes has named it, "latrinalia." (His paper on the subject bears the resonant title "Here I Sit," a phrase few readers will, I imagine, be at a loss to complete.)
For all the accumulation of learned literature on the subject, no one has yet undertaken what might grandly be called a poetics of the subject-an analysis of its generic and thematic properties and a discussion of how the form might rise to excellence. I have neither motive nor opportunity to outline such an ambitious work here, but I will venture to make two modest propositions: first, that the good graffito may be as legitimate a work of literature as a good aphorism or maxim; second, that many of the best graffiti are those which enter into some kind of dialogue, either (i) with their surroundings or (ii) with earlier graffitists; or (iii) with well-recognised conventions of the graffiti genre.
The first type is extremely old, and includes the familiar urinal inscription "In your hand rests the future of Britain." (Incidentally, according to Kinsey and other researchers; the graffiti in ladies' lavatories is far more sparse and far less imaginative; a finding corroborated in the early 1970s by Robert Reisner, the dean of American graffitology and the first man ever to teach a university course in the subject. But perhaps three decades of feminism have made a difference?) It encompasses everything from the fine example spotted in Smithfield market in the 1960s: "Do not feed the animals-they are dead," to the charming rejoinder added to a memorial by some fastidious (female?) soul: "In 1066, near this church, the Normans landed and were repelled by the men of Romney. So am I."
Some of these examples might well be classified, by ageing radicals who have read their situationist theory, as acts of d?tournement-a kind of semantic tampering with an original which puts it in an ideologically revealing new light. Many situationist slogans found their way on to the walls of Paris in 1968-"It is forbidden to forbid," and so on. It is doubtful whether these revolutionaries ever foresaw the day when their slogans would themselves be the objects of d?tournement, but it has happened: just a few weeks ago, in Cambridge, I spotted the graffito "Beneath the paving stones, the concrete"-a bleak and disillusioned d?tournement of the famous 1968 slogan "Beneath the paving stones, the beach."
Though usually innocent of political intentions, the second type of dialogue graffiti takes the form of an intuitive d?tournement of an existing graffito. Its classic incantations are almost universally familiar ("My mother made me a homosexual," "If I gave her the wool, would she knit me one too?" et al, ad nauseam) and have long since outworn their welcome.
The final and potentially most complex form of dialogue is that in which the scrawler relies on the readers' knowledge of some established rule of the graffiti genre. A simple example: the torrent of parodic echoes which followed on from London's most celebrated protest graffito, "George Davis is innocent OK." (Hence: "Pope Innocent is Pious OK," "Queensbury Rules KO," "Elizabeth Rules UK," "Rubaiyat Rules OK"...)
All of which only begins to scratch (or scrawl on) the almost virgin surface of a genuinely vast subject: no room here for academic graffiti ("Can one really know epistemology?"), or the mournful writings on the wall in the Tower of London, or those set to music in Gorecki's "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs." Like the graffiti artist, the journalist must work in a confined space and in haste; like the graffiti artist, he may secretly hope for a small measure of approval for his disreputable trade. I can imagine no more apposite finale for this ruminative jotting than a graffito from the men's room of an American university: "Since writing on walls is done neither for personal acclaim nor financial reward, it must be the purest form of art. Discuss." OK?
