#GVM004: The Demolition Chronicles

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This document describes a major graffiti exhibition involving 100 artists producing 28,000 square feet of graffiti on the interior and exterior walls of a Pep Boys store in Jersey City. The building has been sold to developers, who will demolish it in mid-summer 2015. Topics include: history of the project, stylistic and thematic analysis of the art, and social context of the exhibition.

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#GVM004:
The Demolition Chronicles

William Benzon for Green Villain • July 2015

#GVM004: The Demolition
Chronicles
William L. Benzon
Abstract: This document describes a major graffiti exhibition involving 100
artists producing 28,000 square feet of graffiti on the interior and exterior walls of
a Pep Boys store in Jersey City. The building has been sold to developers, who will
demolish it in mid-summer 2015. Topics include: history of the project, stylistic
and thematic analysis of the art, and social context of the exhibition.
CONTENTS
Introduction: GVM004 Rises, Falls, Resonates ..................................................................................... 2
 
OK to Destroy: Jersey City’s Graffiti Jam of April 2015 .................................................................. 13
 
SP One, What’s he thinking? ................................................................................................................... 24
 
Graffiti: From Art Crimes to Family Day ............................................................................................. 26
 
Green Villain Karma: Urban Buddhism in Jersey City ....................................................................... 29
 
Good Grief! War Boys in the Promised Land .................................................................................... 31
 
Study in Pink and Silver: Why Not Call It an Installation? ................................................................ 35
 
Demolition Exhibition @ #GVM004: Graffiti at the Transition from Industrial to Informatic
Culture ......................................................................................................................................................... 38
 
Some Styles at the Demolition Exhibition ........................................................................................... 40
 
Sacred Animal Beyond Category: Super-Dope in Layers ................................................................. 46
 
Even Heather Mac Donald’s Welcome to Tag-Up at the Demolition Exhibition ...................... 48
 
Appendix 1: Time Line.............................................................................................................................. 60
 
Appendix 2: Is it Art? ................................................................................................................................ 60
 
Appendix 3: Graffing the Future: Is the next phase of human cultural evolution being
inscribed on walls by graffiti writers and street artists? ................................................................... 62
 
Appendix 4: Sharks in Formaldehyde: New York’s Met and the People Who Made It ............ 65
 

1301 Washington St., No. 311
Hoboken, NJ 07030
646.599.3232
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Page 1

Introduction: GVM004 Rises, Falls, Resonates

Let’s begin at the beginning. I am a thinker, writer, musician, and photographer. For the past few
years I’ve been functioning as senior advisor to Green Villain, LLC. I have no business card with
such a title on it and likely never will. Nor, for that matter, does Green Villain have an org chart,
official or unofficial. Not yet. Green Villain is the business of Greg Edgell and assorted associates,
as the project requires. Greg is an event producer, DJ, has a record label, and wrangles graffiti
writers and street artists on projects large and small.
The Demolition Exhibition has been our largest project so far. This paper is preliminary and
partial documentation of it. The bulk of it consists of blog posts that I wrote while the project was
unfolding. This introduction is new.
First I run through the history of the project. Then list media coverage, Green Villain’s online
documentation, say a word about each of the posts in the rest of the document, list the artists
involved, and conclude with a note about the title.

How It Happened
The demolition exhibition just happened. No, it didn’t grow up out of the ground all by itself, but
it didn’t arise through the execution of a specific plan of action – at least no plan more specific
than “use graffiti for the public good”. Rather, each step of the way we just took advantage of
opportunities that appeared before us, with Greg (aka Green Villain) doing the heavy lifting and
me providing advice and encouragement at every step.
On the public good, several years ago I’d written a report, Jersey City: From a Skatepark to the
World,1 and shown it to a number of people, including Greg. More immediately, last Spring (2014)
Greg decided to install murals wherever he could wrangle walls in Jersey City, New York City,
and elsewhere. He’d drive around looking for likely walls and, when he spotted one, he’d find out
who owned the property. Then he’d cut deals. The Pep Boys in the Newport area of Jersey City
was the 4th deal he landed, hence the designation “GVM004”–Green Villain Mural number 4.
1

URL: https://www.academia.edu/9388376/Jersey_City_From_a_Skatepark_to_the_World

Page 2

That store’s rear wall, which faces the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, has three layers of graffiti on it..
Starting in mid-August, Jurne, Curve, Twigs, and Esteam of the TGE crew laid down the first layer,
which is a traditional “old school” production based on wild style letters:

At the beginning of October Loser, Distort, Acro and Ntel of the AIDS – Alone in Deep Space –
crew went to work on the second layer, which is contemporary eclecticism with old school wild
styling here and there:

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Some points of interpretation: This is by NTEL, of the AIDS crew. If you
look closely you’ll see wording from the Preamble of the Constitution of the United
States: “We the People…” I’m not sure what’s going on with the three identical
little girls jumping rope in a dress out of the 1950s. They’re rendered in the style
of stencil work and may reference Banksy, the best-known stencilist in the world.
Banksy frequently uses images of young girls. Notice the magenta crown over the
heard of the right-most girl and the small crowns above it, as though they were
blown from the heads of the other two girls. Crowns do not get on graffiti pieces
by arbitrary artistic choice. They have a special meaning in graffiti culture. Crowns
are used to mark a so-called King of graffiti. You’re a King if you’ve mastered the
three basic disciplines – tags, throw-ups, and pieces – and have executed a large
body of work over several years that is visible in many places. Why, then, are
these girls being marked as kings, if that’s what’s being done?
We vaguely knew that the site was in play and ownership was likely to change in the future, which
would mean the demise of GVM004. But who cares? That’s just how graffiti is. It’s always being
painted over, buffed, or eroded by the weather.
In late January of 2015 the building was acquired by Forest City Enterprises and G&S
Investors. Things were beginning to move and in March the AIDS crew put up the third layer.
Loser, Acro, Distort, Snow, Yoder, Eluder, Dutch, Dzel, Nark & Werds went to work, going over
the work they’d just completed (again, contemporary eclecticism):

Page 4

Then we got the word; the building would be demolished in a couple of months. The art would
be gone sooner than we’d expected. Not good. But not really bad either. Remember? – Graffiti? –
Ephemeral. Just a fact.
We decided to go for the whole building, make a party of it: CELEBRATE! Greg made the
deal and it was on. He put the word out among writers he’d worked with over the years and guys
started rolling in and getting up all over the Newport Pep Boys. I took photos of things as they
moved along and Greg planned an open graffiti jam for April 25. Writers painted on all sides of
the building, DJs played music, and the public could see it all.

People walked around the building, drove their cars around it, took flicks, and posed for flicks.
Who knows how many graffiti-backed selfies got committed that day? A good time was had by all.
Then it was over.
Page 5

But it wasn’t. It seems the world had something to say about it.
One of the executives at Forest City was struck by the quality of the graffiti and contacted
Greg about it to complement him and the artists. Greg got back to him: How about you let us do
the inside? He cut that deal on May 1st. Now we had 16,000 square feet of interior wall space to
add to the 12,000 square feet we’d covered on the exterior.
Well, WE didn’t have to do the art. 100 artists did it. Greg managed the whole thing and I
took flicks and gave advice. Every now and then we had a few beers.
Meanwhile, Greg had been talking with people at Google about photographing the whole
building, inside and out, with their Trekker technology, which they’d developed for Street View. It
was a bit of a rush to get things, if not finished, at least get the wall space filled for the Trekker
shoot on June 13. That went fine, though we learned that there’s at least a six-month backlog of
work getting that imagery processed. Distance information from laser scanners has to be
combined with the image information so as to produce a smooth 3D projection of the imagery.

But you see what’s going on, don’t you? Photography became central to graffiti culture back in the
1970s as writers photographed the subway cars they’d ‘bombed’ (a graffiti culture term of art that
has nothing to do with explosives), knowing that sooner or later their nights of work would be
gone. When the Internet went live in the mid-1990s, graffiti took flight with it, first at Art Crimes2
and then everywhere. Green Villain’s just taking it to the next level.
This brings us to the Demolition Exhibition proper – I think that name popped out at about
the time of the Google shoot. Should we print up 500 brochures or 1000? Greg asked me. We had
no idea how many would show up on opening day, June 27, or how many would show up during
the following week until July 5, when we had to close it down to make way for the actual
demolition.
Well, if we only print up 500 and we need more, I said, we’re screwed. But if we print up 1000 and
2

URL: http://www.graffiti.org/

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we have some left over, no harm done. We ended up printing 2000 and still ran out. The opening
party was a success despite the rain and people kept coming by during the following week. Lots of
people posed for lots of pictures and lots of people – kids and adults – rode rings around the
place on skate boards, scooters, and bikes.
It’s still not over, of course. When the building is actually demolished we’ll be taking photos of
that. Even then it won’t be over. We’ve still got to get it all on line.
And whatever else comes up as the project evolves.

Selected Media Coverage
Before the Internet rolled around “media” meant print media – newspapers and magazines – and
broadcast media – television and radio. Those media haven’t disappeared, of course, but they now
post their material online. Here’s some of that coverage.
General News
Wall Street Journal
Corinne Ramey, Graffiti Artists and Developers Draw an Alliance, June 26, 2017
http://www.wsj.com/articles/graffiti-artists-and-developers-draw-an-alliance-1435359107
The Jersey Journal
Rebecca Panico, Graffiti artists take over closed Downtown Jersey City shop slated for
redevelopment, Apr. 26
http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2015/04/graffiti_finds_a_temporary_but_legal_home_on_jers
e.html
Steven Rodas, Former auto shop in Jersey City transformed into 'mecca of graffiti', June, 28, 2015
http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2015/06/100_artists_collaborate_for_mecca_of_graffiti_in_j.
html
NBC 4
Page 7

Jen Maxfield, Empty Auto Shop in Jersey City Transformed into Art Gallery For Graffiti, June 29,
2015
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/video/#!/on-air/as-seen-on/Empty-Auto-Shop-in-Jersey-CityTransformed-into-Art-Gallery-For-Graffiti/310778741
News 12
Exhibition brings graffiti art to Jersey City, July 1, 2015
http://newjersey.news12.com/news/demolition-exhibition-brings-graffiti-art-to-jersey-city1.10600874
Pix11
Andrew Ramos, Abandoned Jersey City Pep Boys Turned into Graffiti Paradise, June 29, 2015
http://pix11.com/2015/06/29/abandoned-jersey-city-pep-boys-shop-transformed-into-graffitiparadise/
Graffiti & Street Art
12 Oz Prophets
Chester Copperpot, Green Villain #GVM004, May 7,2015
http://www.12ozprophet.com/news/green-villain-gvm004/
Chester Copperpot , Green Villain Creates Week-Long Graffiti Exhibition at Pep Boys Store in
Jersey City, June 11, 2015
http://www.12ozprophet.com/news/green-villain-week-long-graffiti-exhibition-pep-boys-store-injersey-city/
Animal New York
Bucky Turco, Abandoned Pep Boys Station Transformed in Graffiti Group Show: “Demolition
Exhibition”, June 24, 2015
http://animalnewyork.com/2015/abandoned-pep-boys-station-transformed-in-graffiti-group-showdemolition-exhibition/
Street Art NYC
Lois Stavsky, Artists Convert Former Jersey City Shop into a Graffiti Mecca: SP.ONE, Mr.
Mustart, Distort, ERA, Mr. Abillity, Chopla, Pomer, Clarence Rich, Paws 21, Optimo Primo, AIDS
Crew and more, May 5, 2015
http://streetartnyc.org/blog/2015/05/05/artists-convert-former-jersey-city-shop-into-a-graffitimecca-sp-one-mr-mustart-distort-era-mr-abillity-chopla-pomer-clarence-rich-paws-21-optimoprimo-aids-crew-and-more/
Lois Stavsky, Green Villain’s Demolition Exhibition Converts Former Jersey City Shop into a
Graffiti Wonderland: Wane, Doves, Curve, Mr. Mustart, Evikt, Jahan, Mes, Themo, Distoart,
Kingbee, Era, Goomba, Stay One & more – , July 1, 2015
http://streetartnyc.org/blog/2015/07/01/green-villains-demolition-exhibition-converts-formerjersey-city-shop-into-a-graffiti-wonderland-wane-doves-curve-mr-mustart-evikt-jahan-mes-themodistoart-kingbee-era-goomba-stay-one/#sthash.nnKSBZbK.dpuf
•••
CHICpea JC
Green Villain Live Graffiti at Pep Boys, April 29, 2015
http://www.chicpeajc.com/fun/events-parties/spring-weekend-roundup/
Page 8

Snap Mamas
Leslie, Catch Me if You Can, April 28, 2015
http://snapmammas.com/2015/04/28/catch-me-if-you-can/
The Roosevelts
Joe Cucci, Jersey City Street Artists Transform an Abandoned Building into a Local 5 Pointz, Apr
29, 2015
http://www.rsvlts.com/2015/04/29/jersey-city-street-artistsbuilding/?utm_source=JerseyCity&utm_medium=StreetArt&utm_campaign=FBCPC

Ongoing Documentation

The line between documentation and media coverage is, of course, fuzzy, if only because media
coverage IS documentation. THIS is documentation that’s happened and will happen
independently of what the media have done or will do. It’s what Green Villain is doing; it’s part of
our process.
Greg and I have both taken hundreds of photos of the project over its lifetime. So far. Greg
also has time-lapse videos of some of the work and, as I’ve said, had arranged for a videographer
to fly a drone around and through the building, shooting video as it goes. The same videographer
will capture the demolition. We’d also arranged to have Google photograph the site using their
Trekker technology, which they created for Street View.
What do we do with all this documentation? That’s obvious: put it on the web. Greg’s
created a website for the project and you’ll find some photos there:
Green Villain project site: http://g.reenvillain.com/gvm004
In time we’ll prepare an exhibit for the Green Villain site with Google’s Street Art Project:
URL: https://greenvillain.culturalspot.org/home
I’ve got a Flickr album where I stash photos of the site:
Page 9

Demolition Exhibition: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/sets/72157655046573570
I’ve posted many pieces online at my blog, New Savanna. Some of them are collected in this
document, but those posts consisting entirely of photos are not included. You can find all of these
posts here:
URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/PB%20Graff%20Jam
My posts on graffiti in general are here:
URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/graffiti
And then there’s social media, where everyone else can post their photos and videos:
Instagram: https://instagram.com/explore/tags/gvm004/
Tagboard: https://tagboard.com/gvm004/search

The Posts
I originally wrote the posts as more-or-less individual stand-alone entities. There is no ongoing
narrative or argument, but there is some repetition. I’ve not edited that out, but I have fixed
some minor glitches here and there and made a few minor additions.
OK to Destroy: Jersey City’s Graffiti Jam of April 2015: This is an overview of the
project as it stood at the end of April, before we’d had any plans of doing the interior. The
photos are from the April 25th open jam, where people could come and see the artists paint.
SP One, What’s he thinking?: Two process shots and one final of a piece by SP ONE. It
looks like he changed his mind about the design as he executed it.
Graffiti: From Art Crimes to Family Day: Family flicks from the April 25th open jam, a
little project history, and some reflections on the ambiguous status of graffiti as vandalism
and as, well, art.
Green Villain Karma: Urban Buddhism in Jersey City: Linking the all but deliberate
transitory nature of graffiti with the deliberate transitory nature of Tibetan ritual sand
mandalas.
Good Grief! War Boys in the Promised Land: Cartoon characters appeared in graffiti
in the 1970s, characters from Peanuts among them. This post examines a mural that places
Charlie Brown and friends in a war zone.
Study in Pink and Silver: Why Not Call It an Installation?: Sometime during the
project Greg sprayed a corner of the service bay with pink paint. And then someone else
added silver highlights.
Demolition Exhibition @ #GVM004: Graffiti at the Transition from Industrial
to Informatic Culture: Reflections occasioned when two photographer-technicians from
Google came by to photograph the site with Google’sTrekker camera.
Some Styles at the Demolition Exhibition: Brief notes pointing out stylistic features in
nine pieces in the exhibition.
Sacred Animal Beyond Category: Super-Dope in Layers: Some comments on the
placement of one of the last pieces painted, by an artist from Dubai. Shows how this
particular wall developed over time.

Page 10

Even Heather Mac Donald’s Welcome to Tag-Up at the Demolition Exhibition:
An examination of tags and tagging and a contemplation of the radically interactive nature of
the exhibition, where people were free to make their own marks, on canvases or even on
the walls, and to ride around on skate boards, scooters, and BMX bikes.
Appendix 1: Time Line: From July 5, 2014, to July 5, 2015.
Appendix 2: Is it Art? That is, is there wide range of styles and quality?
Appendix 3: Graffing the Future: Is the next phase of human cultural evolution
being inscribed on walls by graffiti writers and street artists?: What the title says,
some things to think about when pondering the future.
Appendix 4: Sharks in Formaldehyde: New York’s Met and the People Who
Made It: A review of Michael Gross, Rogues Gallery, which is about the founding of and
behind-the-scenes scuttlebut about New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It gives you
something to think about when pondering the quasi-criminal nature of some graffiti.

The Artists
4SAKN
ABILITY
ACRO
BIES
BIZO
BRADLEY EHRSAM
BSET
CHOPLA
CLARENCE RICH
CONE
CREEO (ERA)
CURVE
DAK
DERT
DETER
DISTORT
DOVES
DUTCH
ELUDER
EMILIO
FLORENTINE
EMO
ESTEAM
EVICT

FAIPE
FALSE
FATHIMA FK
(SPOT)
FOREX
GOAL
GOOMBA
GROPE
HOACS
IDEAL
JAHAN LOH
JAMOE
JEE
JURNE
KEO
KLOPS
KNOWS (WANE)
KOMAR
LOSER
M. MUEKER
MAESTRO
MEDOW
MENT
MES

MONE
MUSTART
NAB
NARK
NERO
NOTE2
NTEL OCAS
ONCE
OPTIMO
OREO
PAWN
PAWS
PENG
RATH
REAP
REE
REPO
REVENGE
RISKY
ROACHI
RUKUS
SAEZ
SEBS
SERVE

SHANK (DMOTE)
SKUF
SMEAR
SNOE
SNOW
SP ONE
STAK
STAVI
STAY
TENK
THEMO
TIER
TIPE
TWERK
TWIGS
VEER
VEW
VOR138
WEN
WERDS
WOSA
YODER
ZA ONE

A Note About the Title of this Document
As I’ve already explained, “GVM004” is the identifier Green Villain uses to designate this
particular mural site. We’re now up to GVM022. The main title thus identifies the site, albeit in a
Page 11

somewhat cryptic way unless you know the code, which isn’t secret, of course. But neither is it
common knowledge. When you stick a pound sign (#) in front of “GVM004” it becomes a hash
tag, used to identify items in social media; hash-tagging started with Twitter. The presence of that
hash tag in the title indicates that media are integral to the Demolition Exhibition and not
secondary. As for the subtitle, “chronicle” is a bit anachronistic and implies an elevated tone that
cuts ironically in some direction or another.

Page 12

OK to Destroy: Jersey City’s Graffiti Jam of April
2015

On Saturday April 25, 2015, some 20-30 graffiti writers and street artists converged on the now
empty Newport Pep Boys store in Jersey City, New Jersey. What were they there for? To “get
up” as the lingo has it. To spray paint on walls.
That activity is vandalism in Jersey City, as in most other cities America (though, like a
number of cities, Jersey City also has a public mural program). And a number of these artists have
police records for committing such vandalism. For that matter, I once got a summons for
“aggravated trespassing” while taking photographs of graffiti on posted land belong to CSX, the
large railroad conglomerate.
But it’s not vandalism if you have permission. And these writers had permission. The
permission was arranged by Greg Edgell, proprietor of Green Villain,3 “a small group of social
entrepreneurs and creatives that in the past few years have developed a diverse portfolio of
projects and partnerships.” Those projects include a number of mural projects in Jersey City,
where Edgell lives, and across the Hudson River in New York City.
In the Fall of 2014 Edgell had contacted Pep Boys management about putting art on the rear
wall. Why? Because it is very visible, facing the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail where it is seen by
thousands of commuters everyday. He got permission and by the end of November the wall had
been covered.

3

URL: http://green-villain.squarespace.com
Page 13

Winter rolled on through, gave way to Spring, and Edgell learned that the Pep Boys building
was going to be torn down to make way for new construction. This wasn’t a big surprise, as he
already knew the building would be coming down. But not so soon.
All that art, gone!
What to do?
That’s obvious, no?
Cover the whole building before it comes down.
So Edgell got permission from the owner and put out the call. The artists who came, came
knowing their art was slated for destruction. But then that’s how it is in the graffiti world. You
pretty much assume your art won’t last. If it isn’t buffed (that is, painted over) by the authorities,
other artists will go over it sooner or latter. Failing that, the weather will erode the paint.
But then, nothing’s permanent. Nothing. Hence as the sticker says –

*****

Page 14

Here you see the roll doors of the Pep Boys’ service bays, each allocated to a different artist. The
second one in was given to Chopla. Here’s the top segment of that door:

We’ve got some little squiggly designs: some that look like snowflakes, some spirals, what have
you. In the middle, though, we have a decapitated figure of some sort holding a aerosol can in its
right hand, with its head rolling on the ground. I suppose it means something, but that’s not why
I’m pointing it out.
It’s the aerosol can. In a graffiti project of this scope it’s almost guaranteed that someone is
going to paint an aerosol can. While graffiti doesn’t wallow in self-consciousness, that selfconsciousness is there, and has been there from the beginning in the early 1970s.
Chopla has filled the lower part of the panel with a skeleton, one of several he contributed to
the Pep Boys project. It’s clearly visible behind some onlookers and the scaffold Choppla’s
standing on:

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Notice the date, 2015, at the lower right. That is, of course, common. You date your art. And
Chopla’s put something of a signature at the middle to the left of center here:

This is the front entrance to the building and it changed considerably once we
decided to do the interior and invite the pubic in.
Those are the glass front doors of the building. Chopla’s put his name there in block letters.
Other artists have used bubble letters. These are known as throwies or throw-ups. Why?
Because it’s easy to throw them up on a wall in five minutes or so. Up at the top we see the
single line names known as tags or handstyles. They’re even quicker.
Page 16

That’s where graffiti started in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with quick tags. If you’re
committing an act of vandalism you better do it quickly. Tags and throwies are ideal. Tags and
throwies are based on names, not legal birth-certificate names, but a name you take as a graffiti
writer.
This too is a name:

It says Themo, though you’ll have to do a bit of analysis to resolve those forms into the name.
This kind of work, known as a piece (from masterpiece) obviously takes longer to do than a tag
or a throwie. This is not something you’re going to do in broad daylight in a visible and highly
trafficked area. Unless, of course, you’ve got permission.
In the past couple of years Themo has taken to splattering paint on the surface he’s painting,
which is clearly visible in this close-up:

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He belongs to the PFC crew – a crew is an informal group of writers who often paint together.
Themo often paints with Era, as he did on this occasion. Era’s piece is next to his:

Notice that the two pieces interlock smoothly on along their common border:

When a group of writers works together on a wall, the result is called a production. This next
flick shows part of a very large production the AIDS (And It Don’t Stop) crew put on the rear,
track-facing, wall of the building:
Page 18

The large yellow mass is some kind of animal creature. The eye and nose are obvious at the right,
as is the creature’s mouth. Given that, it’s easy to spot the legs and between the legs, riding the
creature, is a small blue humanoid. The name of the artist, Loser, rides the creature’s neck.
At the left, along the top half, we see a piece by Distort. The “O” has been rendered as the
barrel and cylinder of a pistol. The imagery of graffiti tends toward the strange, macabre, and
weird.
This is from the other end of the production:

The name at the lower right is Yoder and the name at the upper left is Elude. That’s Dutch at the
upper right and fragments at the lower left.
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If we go around that corner (the northeast corner) we find this soup of letters and creatures
(known as characters):

That’s, in effect, a roll call of the AIDS crew. Here’s sticker the one of the crew slapped on a pipe
at the site:

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The AIDS sticker is on the pipe at the right, near the top:

Obviously, a good many of the artists who contributed to the building slapped a sticker on one of
those pipes, or tagged one of them. But some of those stickers belong to artists and others who
just happened by. This sticker belongs to Plasma Slugs:

Page 21

He’s from Brooklyn and, rather than writing his name, he uses that slug-looking creature as
his mark. If you look around Jersey City, New York City, and elsewhere (such as Amsterdam)
you’ll find variations of that slug.
The point of stickers is obvious. It’s quick and easy to slap one up somewhere. Where there’s
one sticker, others are likely to follow. It’s a way of getting your name out there.
And that was the point of graffiti back in the day: fame. You remember that TV comedy,
Cheers, about the bar where “everybody knows your name”? Well graffiti is about turning the
world into a place where everybody knows your name. It’s a way of making your mark in the
world, of proclaiming “I am.”
The people who started graffiti were mostly poor and mostly forgotten. And so they
proclaimed their existence on the cars of the New York City subway system and fought a battle
with the authorities for two decades before more or less giving up on the subways. By that time,
however, graffiti had been adopted by hip-hop and extreme sports and had made its way around
the world.
And now, for the first time in its history, Jersey City has had an open graffiti jam in broad
daylight in a very visible space. It’s certainly not the first time a group of writers have gotten
together and painted, but those times and places where out of public view. This is different. Just
what will come of this difference, that’s not at all obvious.
You couldn’t have seen this five or ten years ago:

You couldn’t even have seen it a year ago. What will have changed when the child’s old enough to
hold a can and wield it with style and grace? That won’t be too long from now, but we’re living in
strange times. Will another hurricane have blown through and flooded Jersey City like Sandy did
in 2012? Will a woman have been elected President of the United States? Will this graffiti jam
have become an annual event in Jersey City?
Page 22

*****
This post originally appeared in 3 Quarks Daily, rather than my personal blog, New Savanna. I’ve
written two other posts about graffiti for 3 Quarks Daily:
June 2, 2014: Graffiti and the Spirit of the Place
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/06/the-site-of-graffiti-linked-poetry-andmuen.html
June 30, 2014: Graffiti is the most important art form of the last half-century…
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/06/graffiti-is-the-most-important-art-form-of-thelast-half-century.html
I’ve written a good many graffiti posts for New Savanna:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/graffiti
Here’s all my posts on the Pep Boys graffiti jam:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/PB%20Graff%20Jam
These posts are about various Green Villain projects:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/g-zone

Page 23

SP One, What’s he thinking?
Look at this flick, taken at 1:17 PM, Saturday 25 April 2015, at the Pep Boys Memorial Graffiti Jam
in Jersey City:

SP One’s working on a piece. SP One is standing in front of a letter form, but what’s immediately
to the left of that letter form? Decoration, just decoration.
Now look at this shot, taken at 1:48 PM:

No one’s standing in front of it, so we can see the whole piece clearly. Knowing this is by SP One
it’s easy to see that letter form as a combination of “S” and “P”. The “One” is obvious enough.
Page 24

Given the way I framed the shot we can’t see much to the left, but what’s there seems to be
pretty much what was there in the previous shot: decorative background.
Now look at this shot, which I took much later in the day (early evening, 6:49 PM, hence the
different light):

There’s a very obvious “S” over there at the left, on top of what appeared to be just background
in the previous two shots. Was it part of the original design, of did it insert itself in process?

Page 25

Graffiti: From Art Crimes to Family Day

Back in the day, when graffiti was just getting started in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was a
criminal act. A minor crime, to be sure, but still criminal. And it still is, for the most part,
vandalism.
But things have changed as well. By the 1990s graffiti had been picked up by hip-hop, extreme
sports, and had gone international. It was a crime all over the world.

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And now, what happened in downtown Jersey City this past Saturday, April 25, 2015? The
Green Villain, aka Greg Edgell, organized a graffiti jam at the Newport Pep Boys store.
In the Spring of 2014 Greg Edgell started his plan to take over walls in Jersey City, where he
lives, and New York City, across the river. Find a good wall, contact the owner, get permission to
put graff or street art on it, find the artists and let them do it. The Newport Pep Boys in Jersey
City was the fourth hit, Green Villain Mural Number 4: GVM004.
Why this building? Because the rear wall is big and visible. It faces the Hudson-Bergen Light
Rail, where it is seen by 1000s of commuters a day. All systems were Go. By November 2014 the
AIDS crew had that huge rear wall covered.4 Five months later word came down that the building
had been sold and would be demolished to make way for new construction.

Edgell did the only sensible thing, got permission to do the whole building. On Saturday April
25, 2015 20-30 writers from three states converged on the Pep Boys building, all systems GO on
all four walls, North, South, East and West. Edgell & friends DJ’d at the southeast corner as
onlookers toured around the building on foot and in cars and SUVs.
Jersey City had never before seen anything like this. Sure, there’s been out-of-the-way spots
where writers would gather and get up on the walls. But this is not an out-of-the-way spot. It’s
very visible. People brought their kids and the kids loved it. Naturally.

4

URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/11/friday-fotos-work-in-progress-gvm004.html

Page 27

What happened to the art crimes? They’re not gone, of course. Some of the artists who got
up on those walls also have criminal records for vandalism. For that matter I once got a summons
for “aggravated trespassing” because I was photographing graffiti on posted property.

The social conditions that propelled the original writers to protest and proclaim their names
on walls and subway cars, they haven’t disappeared. Just a couple days after the Pep Boys walls
were painted Baltimore broke out in riots over police treatment of a black man. Back in April of
1968, almost fifty years ago, and about the time graffiti was itching to be born in Philadelphia and
New York City, Baltimore broke out in (much worse) riots over the assassination of the Rev.
Martin Luther King.
Injustice and inequality stalk the land. Graffiti is still a crime. But it’s now also family day.
You make sense of it. I can’t.
Page 28

Green Villain Karma: Urban Buddhism in Jersey City
The painting continues on the Pep Boys site, as you can see in these flicks, taken 5 May 2015.
Notice the incomplete Goomba head (upper left):

And the front façade is almost completely redone:

Note: The right-hand side of the façade was completely redone before the June
27th opening.

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But that’s not what’s on my mind. What’s on my mind is impermanence, one of the eternal
themes of philosophy. Tibetan Buddhists celebrate this theme with sand mandalas. Here’s a short
Wikipedia paragraph:
The Sand Mandala … is a Tibetan Buddhist tradition involving the creation and
destruction of mandalas made from colored sand. A sand mandala is ritualistically
dismantled once it has been completed and its accompanying ceremonies and
viewing are finished to symbolize the Buddhist doctrinal belief in the transitory
nature of material life.5
Here’s a link to a time lapse video of one being created and then dismantled:
https://youtu.be/r2PQg6mws4k
This is a discussion of the sand mandala sequence from House of Cards, Episode 7, Season 3.6

URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala
URL: http://www.quora.com/House-of-Cards-Netflix-series/What-significance-do-the-Tibetansand-painting-scenes-have-in-Season-3-Episode-7-of-House-of-Cards

5
6

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Good Grief! War Boys in the Promised Land
One could, of course, dismiss it because it’s comic strip imagery, and therefore Not Serious. One
could also dismiss it as graffiti, and therefore Not Serious.
But I can’t do that, not while I’m being a Martian Anthropologist. In that role I have no choice
but to take what the natives do as being quite serious. That is, serious in the sense that it
indicates what’s going on in their society.
Here’s Woodstock, a character from the comic strip, Peanuts, which is surely smack dab in
the center of post-war (WWII) American culture and which has featured in graffiti culture since
the mid-1970s–that is to say, from the beginning:

The headband establishes Woodstock’s hippie cred and the music-blaring transistor radio
reinforces it.
The “Greenvillain” sign is a shout-out to Greg Edgell, who runs Green Villain, the production
company that’s organizing the graffiti on the soon-to-be-demolished Pep Boys building in the
Newport area of Jersey City. This is painted on the southwest corner of the building.
But why the brown? Is it supposed to represent bare dirt? What about the black loops? Since
I’ve seen the whole mural I’ll tell you what it is, it’s barbed wire. Woodstock is strolling around
on a battlefield. Vietnam perhaps? After all, the war there was going hot and heavy when the
flower children gathered in the mud at Woodstock, New York, and listened to Jimi Hendrix
transform “The Star-Spangled Banner” into a war protest anthem.
Here’s what we see when we turn the corner:

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Woodstock’s pal, Snoopy, is there to the left, on the top of his dog-house flying in the sky (in his
mind it is, no doubt, a Sopwith Camel), and riddled with bullet holes. He’s wearing the cap and
the scarf of the WWI flying ace he pretended to be. He’s saluting valiantly as his plane goes down
(we’ll see the smoke in the next image).
I can’t really read the imagery below as a name, but, if that IS what it is, then that name is
obviously written in characters from Peanuts. We’ve got Charlie Brown at the left: the zig-zag
pattern of his jersey gives him away. To his left we’ve got Lucy yelling about something (notice the
pattern in her dress) and then, I believe, Schroder (I’m looking at the hair). There seems to be a
football below. Finally, at the right, we have Linus, clutching his security blanket, which is itself the
last letter of the name.
Look up top, just right of the middle. There’s eight tiles that haven’t been covered in (sky)
blue. They’ve got “TRUBL” on them. That’s from whatever had been there before and it has,
presumably, been left untouched as a courtesy.
Here we see the smoke billowing from Snoopy’s damaged Sopwith Camel and we can see
explosions in the air here and there:

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If you look near the bottom right you can see what appears to be Snoopy in silhouette, perhaps a
representation of the WWI flying ace wandering the battlefield behind enemy lines after he’s been
shot down at night.
I read the name as “BSET”, where the “S” is on the boy’s Superman jersey. Notice,
though, that above the boy’s foot there’s what appears to be a gemstone of some kind. Perhaps
it’s wandered here from the Uncle Scrooge comic?
One more tick to the left and we can see more barbed wire and some character in an
army helmet:

This, clearly, is war. Here’s the whole front panel:

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And here’s the whole thing in one shot:

What war? Vietnam? Not really. Just war, but war being fought by the characters of one of
America’s most beloved comic strips, Peanuts. America as war? The war that is America?
Ironic? I suppose so. Though I think it pushes as bit beyond irony. Post-modern. Surely. Very
much so (heard in the voice of Martin Sheen in the briefing scene from Apocalypse Now).
Deconstructive? In the popular sense of the term, surely. Perhaps even in the more robust and
demanding sense that Derrida originally gave the term. If you want to argue that line you might
want to follow through on the fact that graffiti is, after all, about names, and that its practitioners
call themselves writers.
And now we’re getting downright Biblical: Handwriting on the wall.
American exceptionalism, that is, America as the Promised Land. That makes Snoopy and
Woodstock into War Boys in the Promised Land.

Good Grief!
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Study in Pink and Silver: Why Not Call It an
Installation?
What, pray tell, is this?

It’s two bottles on a shelf or something.
Well, yeah, that’s obvious. But what kind of bottles...

look like beer bottles, maybe
but beer bottles aren’t silver
neither are they. that’s paint
not applied very carefully either, looks like it was sprayed

and the spray caught the wall too.
*****
And so the conversation goes. Here’s some context:

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That’s obviously graffiti to either side. It looks like the pink paint was just sprayed wherever it
could go without covering the graffiti. I’d guess that the graffiti to the right was first, then the pink,
and last the graffiti over the pink to the left (on the orthogonal wall).
Notice that the paint’s on the floor, too. And those bottles, and the plumber’s helper. Silver.

I am further guessing that nothing was moved or (carefully) positioned in this process. Certainly,
Page 36

the bottles weren’t sprayed silver off in a corner somewhere and then carefully placed into the
scene. I’ll bet if we scratch the silver paint on them we’ll see pink below.
Same with the plumber’s helper; pink beneath the silver. Notice how the silver bleed’s around
the edge and onto the floor. No masking tape there. So you think if we lift it up we’ll see the
concrete floor unadorned with pink?
*****
Believe it or not, there’s an aesthetic to this, a discipline. Taking it as you find it – no moving
anything to get an unobstructed surface – and just painting it all pink, that’s a discipline. Painting it
pink, whatever’s there, where it is, turns it all into a surface. Adding some silver here and there,
but not being too careful about boundaries, articulates that surface, but doesn’t really pull objects
from it.
Who’d ‘a thought?

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Demolition Exhibition @ #GVM004: Graffiti at the
Transition from Industrial to Informatic Culture
While the human act of marking walls goes back 10s of thousands of years, aerosol graffiti is quite
recent and, in its current form, is often propagated around the world through digital images
residing on the web. With that in mind, consider the following photo, taken at the site of Green
Villain’s Demolition Exhibition in the Newport area of Jersey City:

The man is Omar, and he works for Google Street View. The contraption on his back is a
Trekker camera,7 which Google developed for photographing streets. While the camera was
originally development for deployment on top of a automobile which drives the streets and
photographs the scene, this version allows access to off-street areas. In this case Omar is walking
around a building that is covered with graffiti. Omar’s compatriot, whose name I forget, went
inside the building with a slightly different version of the camera, one mounted on a frame you can
push along the floor.
The building used to be a Pep Boys store. Pep Boys, as you know, services automobiles and
sells parts, accessories, and supplies. Pep Boys is thus about the automobile, a technology which
dominated American life in the second half of the 20th century, though it originated in the 19th
century.
Street View is also about the automobile, but it’s 21st century technology based on
computers. Google itself arose in the last decade of the 20th century as a search engine for the
web; and that is still the center of its business. At some point, though I forget just when, it also
started serving up street maps, and it created Street View to augment that business.
Street View images live online. They don’t come bundled up with paper maps you buy at a gas
station or from AAA. The camera is itself 19th century technology, with antecedents going back a

7

URL: http://www.google.com/maps/about/partners/streetview/trekker/
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century or three before that, but the Trekker system combines lasers and GPS and digital
computing, all late 20th century tech.
Graffiti of the sort on and inside this building originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is
based mostly, though not entirely, on paint delivered by aerosol cans. The aerosol can8 originated
in the mid-20th century. During the 1970s and 1980s the subway system of New York City was
the most important site of graffiti development. Subways are, of course, train technology, which
dates back to the early 19th century, with electrification9 coming at the end of the century.
So, graffiti originated with the application of paint using 20th century technology to trains
based in 19th century technology. When the web bootstrapped onto the Internet in the mid1990s graffiti followed almost immediately. It will be six months or more before the images Omar
took will go live on the web. But when that happens, a new era in graffiti culture will have begun.

8
9

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerosol_spray
URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_locomotive#History
Page 39

Some Styles at the Demolition Exhibition

NARK
The Demolition Exhibition, covering 28,000 sq. feet of walls in the Newport area of Jersey
City, opened on Saturday June 27. Of course artists and others had been in and out of the
building for the last two months, so the boundary between official opening hours and the rest of
time and space had been somewhat porous. But that will all come to an end sometime in July,
when the building is demolished and returned to dust.
With all that in mind, I thought I’d offer a few comments on some of the styles in view. As far
as I know graffiti styles have not been subject to classification and analysis beyond the standard
distinction between wild style, in which the letters and cut up, confused, and disguised, and all the
rest. So there is no official nomenclature. Nor do I intend to introduce any here.
But I do think it’s useful/helpful to note that it’s not all alike, especially if you’re not familiar
with graffiti.
*****
These pieces exhibit a ‘flat’ style, which may be the most common style in the show. There
may be some 3D cues here and there, but they’re minimal. There’s no attempt to imply and
overall 3D space. Notice the way patterns are deployed across the surfaces of the letters:

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REVENGE (Note: replaced before the 6/27 opening)

CURVE

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SNOE
This, in some ways, is flat. But the 3D cues (drop shadows) are very strong, though there is
no overall 3D space. Notice the treatment of color, the gradient from one side to the other:

WANE / KNOWS
Here we’ve got a 3D space, though the space is shallow:

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SPONE
Here we see another shallow 3D space – after all, it only has to contain letters – but the
surfaces have been rendered with trompe l'oeil lighting to give the effect of a highly reflective
metallic surface:

VOR138
The next two have quite a different feel. They’re more ‘biomorphic’. It’s not simply that the
forms are rounded, but they give a sense of plant growth. Note that the first has strong 3D cues
while the second does not:

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TWERK

ACRO / MUSTART
This too has a somewhat biomorphic feel, but feels less contained than the previous two,
more outward motion, and the detailing is styled somewhat differently:

ERA / CREEP
And then there’s this, which all but explodes off the wall:

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JAHAN LOH
Finally, a footprint:

SNEAKER SAPIENS
I rather suspect that it wasn’t deliberate. It just happened.

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Sacred Animal Beyond Category: Super-Dope in
Layers
This is something that just happened. The artist who did that marvelous creature, whatever it is,
is not someone Green Villain knew and invited to the party. But Street Art New York came by to
flick the show and mentioned that, Hey! I’ve got this artist who’s passing thru and would like to get up.
Sure, send her around, sez Green Villain. And so this wonderful creature just happened.

Three layers:
1) The Animal is the top layer and is outlined in black (the artist, Fathima10 [&
Instagram11], is from Dubai). It's painted on
2) the wall of a small semi-enclosed office (look at the way the wall meets the
floor). The surface of that wall is the middle layer. Everything else is the
3) bottom layer: the floor and the wall behind the office wall.
Notice that Fathima’s creature goes over the door (you can see it clearly in the images below) as
though it weren’t there. It’s just a part of the wall, though she does acknowledge the small
window in the door.
Strictly speaking Fathima’s creature is street art rather than graffiti. Graffiti is based on names
and letter forms; street art is not. The distinction is important, though fuzzy.
I took that photo on July 3, 2015. Here's how that wall looked on June 5, 2015:

10
11

Her website, URL: http://www.fatfolio.com/
URL: https://instagram.com/fatspatrol/
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May 27, 2015:

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Even Heather Mac Donald’s Welcome to Tag-Up at
the Demolition Exhibition

A defense of graffiti’s egalitarian values in an age of oligarchic excess, financial
gamesmanship, and ecotastrophe
Who the Eff, you ask, is Heather Mac Donald? And just why are you addressing her?
Heather Mac Donald is a well-known commentator and is the John M. Olin Fellow at the
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. As the name indicates, it’s a Manhattan-based think-tank
that, in its own words, “has been an important force in shaping American political culture and
developing ideas that foster economic choice and individual responsibility.”12 Four years ago Mac
Donald wrote two critiques of graffiti for City Journal, a quarterly published by the Manhattan
Institute. The pieces were occasioned by Art in the Streets, an exhibition at the Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art, which billed it as “the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti
and street art.”13 And that, so far as I know, is true. It’s by no means the first time graffiti’s made
it into a museum, but it was the first major retrospective.
One piece, Radical Graffiti Chic,14 is about graffiti and graffiti culture generally while the other,
Crime in the Museums,15 is a review of the exhibition. Needless to say, she was not impressed.
But she WAS angry and disgusted. Graffiti after all, is vandalism, as we all know. Moreover Mac
Donald asserted that it’s not particularly accomplished or interesting as art, it does nothing to
better the lives of poor communities, and, in the museum world it’s just something for rich
oligarchs to play with while they’re safe in their urban aeries. I rather agree with the last, but have
URL: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/
URL: http://www.moca.org/museum/exhibitiondetail.php?&id=443
14 URL: http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_2_vandalism.html
15 URL: http://www.city-journal.org/2011/bc0417hm.html
12
13

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severe doubts about her other objections. But I don’t want to go into that here, as I’ve already
responded to some of her remarks in two pieces:
The Sky’s Falling! and Graffiti’s to Blame:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/06/skys-falling-and-graffitis-to-blame.html
Crime in the Museum, from Antiquities to Graffiti:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/06/crime-in-museum-from-antiquites-to.html
Rather, I want to look at a stunt she pulled when she went to see the show. As she tells it in
Crime in the Streets:
Once allowed inside the show, I went to Martha Cooper’s influential photos of
bombed subway cars and made ready to write my tag on the wall next to them,
eyeing a guard conspiratorially. “Oh, no, please!” intervened the watchman
apologetically. “You can’t do that.” I tried again next to the timeline entry
celebrating the start of Fairey’s stickering campaign in 1989. “You can’t write on
the wall,” another guard told me.
Hypocritical to the end, MOCA is selling graffiti spray paint in its bookstore
along with its $55 Art in the Streets catalogues.
Of course she knew very well that she wouldn’t be able to write on the walls.

Before getting to that, though, I want to bring up another point. Perhaps a bit pedantic, but
it’s also a point of honor, and of truth. Unless Mac Donald has a secret life as a bomber – that’s
graffiti lingo for someone who gets up (more lingo) all over the freakin’ place 24/7 – she doesn’t
have a TAG. She has a name and its signature, but that’s not a tag.
It’s not merely that a tag is one’s nom de plume – or, if you will, nom de guerre – but that it’s
Page 49

carefully and deliberately styled. It’s the foundation of graffiti. A skillful tag can be spotted at a
glance. So Mac Donald’s merely talking about defacing a wall with her signature, not a tag.
As to whether or not she should have tried that stunt, that’s an interesting question. If she’d
consulted Socrates, who drank hemlock for his work among Athenian youth, he might well have
advised her: “If you’re willing to pay the fine and do the time, sure, go ahead.” [I’m thinking, of
course, of the Crito.16] But obviously she wasn’t. She was indulging in a bit of theater so she could
use it in her review. It was a cheap no-risk trick.
But she does have a point. There is some hypocrisy there. Anyone who’s involved with graffiti
knows of the criminal risk involved and we all think about it. Just what we think, that obviously
varies from one person to another. Some of us do think we’re living in a world that calls for
trespass and while others just want to get up and over. As I’ve said, I don’t want to argue the
point here and now. I want to switch the game a bit.
I want to look at the Demolition Exhibition,17 which recently concluded its one-week run in a
now-abandoned Pep Boys store in the Newport area of Jersey City. Why only one week? Because
the building’s slated for, you guessed it, demolition. Green Villain, a small production company,
made a deal with Pep Boys to do, first the rear wall (facing a commuter railway line), and then
when the building was sold and slated for demolition, the entire exterior. GV then made another
deal with the developer, Forest City, to do the interior and open the building to the public for a
week. That’s what’s just concluded: one week (June 27 to July 5) and 100 hundred artists, free.
If Heather Mac Donald had shown up she’d have been welcome to tag-up or sign her name
just like anyone else:

Of course, those canvases got pretty crowded, and some of the earliest tags and signatures got
covered over:

Here’s an online version of the Jowett translation, URL: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/crito.html
An article in the Wall Street Journal, URL: http://www.wsj.com/articles/graffiti-artists-anddevelopers-draw-an-alliance-1435359107

16
17

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Signing a canvas put there for that purpose might not be transgressive enough for Heather Mac.
But she could’ve signed the wall, just as others have done:

Trouble is there’d have been nothing transgressive about that either, not at the Demolition
Exhibition. Not everyone did sign a wall. But many did. Many did.
Why? You know those old cave paintings? There are places on those walls that are covered in
hand prints. People would put their hands on the wall and then blow pigment over them, leaving a
print on the wall. Why’d they do that?
There’s plenty of space on the walls, especially if you go small. See:

Page 51

Maybe that’s not quite the spot she wanted – there are others. After all, it’s in the bathroom.
Look to the lower right of the mirror:

As she knows, bathrooms are traditional locations for wall markings, not just in graffiti culture.
That wall is pristine in comparison to others I’ve seen, at the old 51 Pacific spot,18 for example.
But maybe, upon reflection, H MacD would have decided that walls just weren’t her style.
Well then, the floor’s available. If you want you could go large:

This is a warehouse loft where Green Villain held underground parties. The interior walls were
covered with graffiti, as was the alleyway behind the building. Edgell curated and managed the
graffiti and had it changed periodically. Here’s an article about the bathroom, with photos, URL:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/08/everyone-poops-graffiti-on.html

18

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Or go for elegance:

As I said, it all starts with hand styles. Without a decent hand style, a graffiti writer’s got nothing.
Want to boast? If you’ve got the cred, by all means show it:

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That’s a crown, reserved for a “king” of graffiti. It’s not something you bestow on yourself. And if
you go putting a crown on your tag, or throwie, or piece, without having earned it, you’re going
to get in trouble.
And then there’s this:

I don’t know whether the writer is Greek, which is certainly possible in this city, or just likes the
look of Greek letters. But whoever did that the wanted their name to be known. Without even
looking I counted that name in two other places at the exhibition, perhaps three (check the
canvas close-up for one of them).

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Whatever the Demolition Exhibition WAS, it was NOT a museum show. Not with skate boarding
and BMX couch jumping:

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And not with the DJs spinning – vinyl, yes! – five decades of prime American pop, rock, soul,
jazz, hip-hop, house, reggae and whatever the hell else:

You had to be there!

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These days everyone’s a photographer:

Smart phones clicking all over the damn place. Stills and videos straight to Instagram.19 That’s why
we created the hashtag: #GVM004. In a world of social media who needs a museum? Well, maybe
that’s not quite the question. The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art notwithstanding,
19

Here’s the instagram page for #GCM004, URL: https://instagram.com/explore/tags/gvm004/
Page 57

museums and graffiti don’t mix all that well. For one thing, you need to see graff at scale. Photos,
even the best photos, don’t give the flavor. At the demolition exhibition we worked to scale.
All originals, baby! And like the classic graff of the New York subway system, all gone tomorrow.

We should remind ourselves that museums are only about two-centuries old. They aren’t eternal
– is anything? And museum culture is, to no little extent, robber baron culture, as Michael Gross
detailed in his history of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, Rogue’s Gallery.20 The world we’ve
got now is the product of the values that built museum culture. Maybe it’s time to hit the reset
button on all that. That’s what graffiti is doing, hitting the resent button on expressive culture.
That’s what the Demolition Exhibition is about:

R•E•S•E•T!
It’s not something that happened because we don’t yet have a graffiti museum. It’s not something
conceived as a step toward a graffiti museum.
It’s something else. The event itself is now receding into history. Before long the building will
be gone. And then it’ll be replaced by a mid-rise apartment building.
But people will have their memories. And there’s all those photos and videos on the net. Will
it resonate?
Call it a small gesture in a big world, the Anthropocene.
What’re the values of graffiti culture? No one does. It’s in flux, after four decades graffiti’s not
settled down. There are lots of people involved with graffiti, the writers, the photographers,
curators, gallery owners, property owners, the police, and who knows what else. They’ve each
got their own values and interests and nothing’s settled. We’re still trying to figure things out.

20

Gross’s webpage for the book, URL: http://mgross.com/writing/books/roguesgallery/
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It’s not settled down.21 Museum culture is over. Graffiti culture is not.

Bring it on home!

I’ve examined graffiti through the lens of Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, URL:
https://www.academia.edu/9709527/Reading_Latour_Assembling_the_Society_of_Graffiti

21

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Appendix 1: Time Line
Date
July 5, 2014
August 14, 2014
October 1, 2014
January 24, 2015
March 14, 2015
April 1, 2015
April 25, 2015
May 1, 2015
June 13, 2015
June 27, 2015
July 5, 2015

Milestone
Reached agreement with Pep Boys management to paint the rear façade.
First production began.
Second production began.
Building acquired by Forest City Enterprises and G&S Investors.
Third production began on rear façade. Pep Boys agrees to allow the entire
exterior to be painted.
Pep Boys closes its doors to the public.
Outdoor gallery opening where local and international artists paint while the
general public watches.
Forest City grants access to the interior.
Google Cultural Institute uses Trekker camera to capture the entire project,
inside and outside.
Demolition Exhibition opens to the public. DJs, merchandise vendors, River
Horse craft beer, and BBQ pitmaster.
Final day of the exhibition.

Appendix 2: Is it Art?
As often as not that question is asked in a context where the implied answer is, “no, it’s
vandalism”. While that IS and important issue, and one that DOES interest me, that’s not what I’m
thinking about now.
I’m thinking more about a version of the question that implies that ART has some essence, so
identifiable mark, that proclaims it to be art. In that version, one proceeds by explaining what that
essence is and how you identify it. This is a difficult question and, in fact, some aestheticians and
critics have simply given up on it. There seem to be so many very different things that people call
(legitimately) art that it’s too difficult specify what it is.
I’m sympathetic to that problem, so sympathetic that I’m not going to attempt to identify an
essence and then pin it, or not, on graffiti.
I’ve got something else in mind: variety. Variety in style, variety in quality.
One post I did in connection with Green Villain’s recent Pep Boys project, Some Styles in the
Demolition Exhibition (see above), identified four different styles. Describing the differences is
tricky, but seeing them is not. How many distinctly different styles were on display in that project,
as I made no attempt at a complete survey in that post? Ten, twenty, but certainly not 50 – there
were only about 100 artists involved. And of course we didn’t even come close to sampling the
whole space of graffiti.
If you examined that whole space, how many different styles would you find? I might well be
able to find 100 in the work I’ve photographed in Jersey City, and that’s just one relatively small
region. World-wide would it be 1000, less, more? I don’t know. Are those significant numbers?
What’s the comparison? I don’t know.
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My point is simply that there is significant stylistic variety. We’re not dealing with a hodgepodge of more or less opportunistic and unschooled variety. There’s systematic variety, driven in
part by the competitive need to differentiate yourself from others and, in part, by a desire for
visual exploration.
Whatever it is that people mean by “art”, surely it implies systematic variety. We can identify
that without having to identify a recognizable essence of art.
And we can do the same with respect to quality. Off hand I’d say that the Demolition
Exhibition had three, maybe four, ‘quantum’ levels of quality. Buy that I mean that all the pieces
within the same level are of roughly the same quality and all are better than those in the level
below and not so good as those in the level above. Would others recognize the same levels? I
don’t really know, but I’d like to find out. I think there’s a good chance that knowledgeable
observers would – and I stress “knowledgeable.”
If you aren’t familiar with graffiti, you can’t really see what’s there in any deep way. It’s just a
bunch of complex lines and patterns, or not so complex, depending. You can’t discriminate among
styles or levels of excellence.
Off hand, without thinking about it, I’d say there are at least two quantum levels of quality
below what’s in the Demolition Exhibition and one, maybe two, levels above. That’s five, maybe six,
quantum levels of quality. How significant is that? I don’t know.
How many different quality levels are on display in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC?
And, in each genre on display there, how many levels below museum quality? Again, I don’t know.
But that’s the kind of question you need to ask if you want to know: Is it Art?

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Appendix 3: Graffing the Future: Is the next phase
of human cultural evolution being inscribed on
walls by graffiti writers and street artists?

DUNE UNO: The Bottle, Gil Scott-Heron 1949-2011
I have a bias about the future, the deep future. We can’t predict it, for it’s too strange. It’s not
simply a continuation of current trends into the future. Oh, sure, there is that.
But there is also radical change, captured in the concept of a singularity, a “moment” in
human history that so changes the dynamics of human society and culture than those living on the
past side of it cannot imagine much less predict the nature of life on the far side.
We are now living in such a singularity. It is breaking over and around us like a 12-foot wave
breaking over surfers in the Banzai Pipe.22 We don’t know what the world will be like when the
last energies of the wave have dissipated. All we can do is be prepared to create a new way of life
on those shores.

Images Images (Photos) Everywhere
I am an intellectual. My main mode of acting is through thinking. And what I am thinking is that
those distant shores began appearing before us in Philadelphia and New York City in the late
1960s and early 1970s. I am of course talking about graffiti, not just any writing on walls, but the
particular kind of writing that appeared on those walls at that time, writing using aerosol paint as
its instrument.

22

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banzai_Pipeline
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At the time most good citizens thought of it as vandalism; from a legal standpoint, that’s what
it is. In his essay to the first “bible” of graffiti, The Faith of Graffiti, Normal Mailer called it art. I’m
calling it messages from the future.
I note first of all that we are living in a renaissance of images. Everyone has a cell phone and
uses them to take photos. As a recent Google report observed:
Since the dawn of time we’ve been captivated by images. But the web has
turbocharged our ability to view, share and create more imagery than ever before, to
the extent that visual imagery has become the dominant form of communication in
the 21st century. No wonder smartphones and tablets sans keyboards are
increasingly popular – they prioritize imagery above all else.
This bias towards imagery is creating a new sensorium – how we perceive and
sense the environment around us. It has not only influenced how we engage in the
digital space, but outside of it too.23
In 2011 380 billion photos were taken, that’s 10% of all the photos ever taken. 24Most of those
photos, of course, are quick and dirty. But as people take more and more photos they will
inevitably be come more discriminating. The quality will go up.
It’s in that context that we have to think about the impact of graffiti. In an increasingly visual
culture, visual imagery is ever more important. Graffiti is everywhere, and spreading. Photos of it
are all over the web. Last year Google’s Cultural Institute launched the Street Art Project25 to
showcase graffiti and street art from around the world.

From Human Origins to the Renaissance
With this in mind, let’s go back in time. While we’ve found cave paintings26 roughly 40,000 years
old, we’ve got stone tools going back almost 2 million years. That’s important, as I noted in a
review of Steven Mithen’s book on music (“Synch, Song, and Society”,27 Human Nature Review 5,
2005, pp. 66-85):
Obviously we have no record of these utterances, but the archeological record
does have indications of cultural conservatism. The repertoire of stone tools was
both limited and unchanged between 1.8 and 0.25 million years ago; Mithen gives
particular emphasis to the constant form of hand-axes (164). Mithen suggests that,
because their finely wrought form exceeds the practical demands of butchery,
wood-working, and cutting plants, these hand-axes may have been fitness
indicators in the sort of sexual selection regime Geoffrey Miller has advocated.
Beyond this, I note that Ralph Holloway (1969, 1981) long ago suggested that
strongly conserved hand-axe form was an indicator of social norms. Those forms
could not be conserved from one generation to the next unless there was a
deliberate intention to do so. One has to note the significant features of an
existing axe and discipline one’s knapping motions to produce that result. That is
considerably more exacting than simply producing an axe with a sharp edge and
appropriate heft. The motivation behind such exacting form, then, is not practical.
URL: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/memes-with-meaning.html
URL: http://blog.1000memories.com/94-number-of-photos-ever-taken-digital-and-analog-inshoebox
25 URL: https://streetart.withgoogle.com/en/#home
26 URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting
27 URL: http://www.human-nature.com/nibbs/05/wlbenzon.html
23
24

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Nor can it be merely aesthetic, which would allow for considerable individual
variation. That leaves us with a desire to conform to social norms. Given the
importance of such norms, that may in itself be a sufficient motivation for their
form, to serve as a visible token of social solidarity. In any event, Holloway’s
observation does not contradict Miller’s, and now Mithen’s hypothesis. Norms
are norms, regardless of their specific purpose and norms that serve multiple
ends are likely to be particularly strong.
My point is a simple one: the oldest evidence we have of specifically human cultural norms is of
something that can be seen and therefor copied. Cave art, so far as we’ve discovered, is
considerably newer. Other than those stone tools, cave art provides our oldest evidence of
human craftsmanship.
Now let’s turn our attention to more recent events, the European Renaissance. Notice the
sequence in this chronology:
Filippo Brunelleschi
Nicholas Copernicus28
William Shakespeare29
Isaac Newton30

Invented one-point linear perspective
Championed the heliocentric view of the solar
system
Playwright often credited with inventing the
modern sensibility
Synthesized the conceptual foundations of classical
physics

1377-1446
1473-1543
1564-1616
1642-1746

It was the visual arts that kicked off the change, not literature and not science;.They followed.
Filippo Brunelleschi was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance:
Besides accomplishments in architecture, Brunelleschi is also credited with
inventing one-point linear perspective which revolutionized painting and allowed
for naturalistic styles to develop as the Renaissance digressed from the stylized
figures of medieval art.31
There is, of course, no assurance that the future will unfold according to patterns followed in the
past. But if that happens, then our future is now being written on walls around the world.

The Case for Graffiti
Assuming that the visual arts are leading the way, why choose graffiti?
On the one hand, the “legit” art world is in turmoil. You can’t tell the hucksters from the
genuine artists and, in any case, there is no definitive sense of direction. Artists, dealers,
collectors, and museums are thrashing about.
Meanwhile, in the course of two decades from the late 1960s to the late 1980s graffiti made
its way around the world and did so pretty much outside the art world.32 Graffiti represents a
new starting point,33 a new conception of image space34, and it’s the only form of abstract art to
attract a mass audience.
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
30 URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton
31 URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Brunelleschi
32 URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/08/through-duchamp-and-beyond-graffiti-in.html
33 URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/06/graffiti-hit-reset-button-on-culture.html
34 URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/11/graffiti-aesthetics-space-of-writing.html
28
29

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Further, as it’s spread, graffiti has attracted other styles of art and imaging making and given
birth to street art. Think of them together as an aesthetic laboratory in which all styles of art will
be tested and tried. It’s through that experimentation that the enduring forms of 21st century art
will first emerge, for that is where they will receive their sternest test and widest exposure.
On the walls of the world, the World-Wide Wall.35

Appendix 4: Sharks in Formaldehyde: New York’s
Met and the People Who Made It
I have two reasons for including this book review: 1) the book tells about the ethically suspect
and even criminal activity involved in creating a revered cultural institution, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, and 2) it suggests that the social fabric that sustains that museum, and by
implication similar museums, is fraying.
*****
Michael Gross. Rogue’s Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the
Metropolitan Museum. New York: Broadway Books, 2009.
Full Disclosure: After I’d published a piece analyzing the literary style of David Patrick Columbia,
Michael Gross contacted me, thanking me for mentioning his book in that piece. He indicated
that the book had angered some influential people and, as a result, the book wasn’t being
reviewed. I did some digging around on the web, had a bit more correspondence with Gross, and
ended up asking him to get me a review copy, which he did. Here’s my review.
There are two ways to read Michael Gross’s latest book, Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the
Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum. The title and subtitle offer a tell-much
extravaganza – over 500 pages worth – of juicy gossip about the rich and powerful folks behind
New York City’s Met, one of the finest art museums in the world. Stick this Rogues’ Gallery in
your weekend bag or on your night stand and read it at your leisure. It won’t disappoint, and you
have the added frisson of knowing that you’re displeasuring the socialite who hired white-shoe
lawyers to write threatening letters in an attempt to “curtail,” shall we say, the book’s circulation,
or, at least to produce changes in a subsequent printings and editions.
I mean, if such a letter isn’t a roguish stamp of disapproval, I don’t know what is. How can you
resist the urge to find out what was so deep, dark, and dastardly that someone spent real money
to protect keep you from wallowing in reading the dirt? Well, not all of it, just some of it, near
the end, the stuff that bears on the question: Who will deserves to replace Brooke Astor as the
doyenne of New York City philanthropy?
With only a little more effort, however, and perhaps a little thought here and there, you can
read a more substantial book, one that raises a serious question: Is the social web that created
and sustained the Met about to disappear, leaving the Met with the life prospects of a beached
whale?
Even as he was having fun digging into the archives and tracking down skeletons in Fifth
Avenue closets, Michael Gross was, in effect, rethinking the nature of The Metropolitan Museum
35

URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/07/you-know-you-want-to-see-it-world-wide.html
Page 65

of Art. Rather than thinking of it as a big solid structure that house and protects three millennia’s
worth of art treasures, Gross came to present it as a fragile network of social relationships that
somehow manages to balance the good, the bad, and the ugly in such a way that The Beautiful has
a home.
By contrast, consider Gross’s previous book, 740 Park, which is about another building, an
exclusive apartment building in New York City inhabited by the wealthy. I’ve not read the book,
though I read about it, perhaps even a review of it, in The New York Times back when it came out.
I can imagine that the gossip dished out in one book is as good as that in the other. But an
exclusive apartment house is just an exclusive apartment house. The residents may travel in the
same or over-lapping social circles, but that's it. They are not bound together by a common
enterprise.
The Met is a very different kind of building, one that houses an institution of importance on
the world stage. And so the relationships among the people who made and make-up the
institution, they're more intimate than the relationships among the residents of 740 Park Ave.
Gossip about the residents of 740 Park Ave. is just gossip, albeit gossip about very wealthy and
powerful individuals. Gossip about the people who built the Met is the history of an institution
told at the level of individual desires and actions.
And, if gossip is a moral activity directed at maintaining social norms, then Rogue's Gallery
becomes something of an intervention directed at the institution itself. Gross is revealing what
those norms have been and how they have changed over time and he is doing this precisely at the
moment when that fragile nexus of relationships may be dissolving - which is what he discusses in
the last few pages of the book. The building and the art works are still there, but the world is
changing around it and the social nexus that built the building and collected the artworks, that's
disappearing.
What, then, were those norms and standards? When it originally oozed into existence in the
late 1860s and early 1870s the Met was a play to show that America, meaning its wealthiest
citizens, had arrived on the world stage. It featured art of European and ancient provenance,
though sometimes that provenance was a bit dodgy, a problem that’s persisted well into the mid20th century. American art didn’t come into its own at the Met until after World War I, that is,
until America had proved itself in world combat and diplomacy. And it took a powerful New York
City official, Robert Moses, and a particularly flamboyant director, Thomas Hoving, to finally make
the Met an institution of and for the people rather than a club for the competitive collecting
habits of the wealthy.
Along the way you have robber barons and their descendants using collecting to put a good
face on their wealth. Some were genuinely smitten by and appreciative of the art while others
seemed rather more interested in using it as a means to social prominence. Curators cultivated
donors, donors manipulated dealers, and everyone looked the other way when it was convenient
to do so. All of this seems rather standard to me. And, while many of the details were titillating,
some even delicious, I can’t say that any of it was terribly surprising or shocking. It’s not that I’ve
got any immediate familiarity with the social world Gross has documented, I don’t, but simply that
I’ve lived a bit and know that nothing is what it seems, there’s no purity anywhere, and that Art is
not so fussy about the company it keeps as we would like to imagine.
The question remains: Is this mélange of motives enough to carry the Met into the future?
For example, The New York Times recently had at an article about one Andrew Hall, a fund
manager who's getting a nine-figure bonus paid out of bailout money and who's bought a German
castle to house his 4000 item art collection, the sort of collection that was, not so longer ago,
folded into an existing museum, such as the Met. It doesn't seem likely that Hall's going to donate
to the Met, the Modern Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, nor any other existing
museum. And what about those Arab princes building universities and art museums out of whole
cloth in a race against time, remaking their world before the oil dries up?
Page 66

We aren’t in Kansas anymore, no we’re not.
Nor is it clear just where we are and where we’re headed. The vanity, corruption, backbiting, social climbing, and double-dealing, all the juicy stuff, that will persist. And it may be
sufficient to sustain the Met on life support. But growth and transformation, that requires
inspiration and unshakable faith in, dare I say it? Beauty. Where’s that in this first decade of the
Twenty-First Century?

The Tree of Knowledge?

Page 67

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