WHAT WERE MYSPACE & LJ BEFORE THEY EXISTED? PT2
I get lots of emails, blogs, messages, etc. about art pieces my friends make, murals they are working on, graffiti they are doin, or whateva. All this stuff comes into my home or computer right in front of my eyes. It rolls in and I sip it in. I'm in touch with what the people I know are up to and I never have to leave my desks for the most part. It's crazy to have all that visual information come right to me.
I read a book called "The Tipping Point" a while back and it reminded me of this series I am working on. In the late 70's and early 80's there was a lot of crime in NYC and the Transit authority tragically tied this to Graffiti among a few other things. During this time you could see entire trains plastered with throw ups and pieces, at times covering an enitre train with bright loud colors, shapes and designs. These trains would pull up right in front of you, this will never happen again unless some company like bacardi or IKEA decides to rip this art phenomenon off with some stupid subway ad. I wish I could have seen this just once.
Here is a quote from Dainiel Oliver Tucker
http://www-atdp.berkeley.edu/Studentpages/cflores/historygraffiti.html
"In the 1970s and early to mid `80s, the subway was always the ideal and most popular "canvas" on which graffiti was painted. In the late 80s in New York, graffiti was forced to go through a transformation. Officially, subway graffiti died on May 12, 1989 although graffiti can still be found on subways, the car is usually taken off the line before anyone can see it and buffed clean. New York and other cities began to build secure, fenced, barbed wire topped train yards and they developed stricter laws and more severe penalties relating to graffiti. At that point a vital part of graffiti culture was lost. "The subway system was seen as a network system for graffiti," said Pamela Dennant.[11] And now it was gone. For that to be the case, for subway art to be lost, is a sad thing. Because of the network the subway had become, writers came to depend on it for communication and for display to the public and especially to other writers. On the video Style Wars, Skeme commented that his work, "...is for me and other graffiti writers...all the other people that don't write, they're excluded. I don't care about them. They don't matter to me." [12]"