Derailed

When I was going to college in the early seventies, I often spent the weekend in New York. As my bus wound its way toward the Uptown Port Authority, the phrase "Taki 183" scrawled across the side of a tenement welcomed me to Manhattan. The memory of ghetto uprising and racial hostility was still strong in those days, and this assertion of individual identity emerging from the faceless cityscape held a double message. On the one hand it was a simple declaration of presence; on the other, a warning that that presence was not going to go away. Taki's tag caught on. By the time I graduated, kids scurried about with magic markers leaving their names and block numbers on every unguarded surface.

I returned to New York as the decade drew to a olose. The city had survived its brush with bankruptcy. Its streets had lost their angry edge. Fists once clenched in black power salutes now curled around huge radios blaring disco and the "Rappers Delight." White middle class artists ventured guiltlessly into once forbidden neighborhoods, young professionals hot on their heels.

In the subways the scattered markings had become a tangled thicket of hieroglyphics as the anonymous multitude vied to put their tokens of individuality into public circulation. Occasionally this dense overgrowth blossomed into startling images, spray-painted scenes of city life populated by figures from the comic book pantheon, as some graffiti artists went beyond the assertion of existence to proclaim their right to remake it.

For a few glorious years subway riding came to feel like membership in a secret and exclusive society. The spay-paintings that surrounded me confirmed my participation in a city that reached beyond the protocols of Manhattan to the South Bronx, Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side. My fellow riders and I might be strangers to one another, but we all knew Dondi, Zephyr and Futura. The act of commuting baptized us all in the democratic spirit of our metropolis, and graffiti which gave expression to that spirit equipped us with the irony to withstand the world upstairs. Whatever our role in the city's hierarchy, as New Yorkers we shared in something else, the exhilaration of our collective energy.

New images began to appear on the trains and station walls as art school dropouts and renegades of white suburbia, drawn to this energy, offered their version of the subway experience. Graffiti artists welcomed these newcomers to their medium, just as in the world above, the neighborhoods they came from accepted the incursion of artists and bohemians into their midst, believing that spatial proximity might promote a closeness of spirit as well. Traditionally hostile communities opened to the possibility that people who could appreciate their culture might respect that culture's makers as well. For a moment it seemed as though a new and multi-racial solidarity might come about through art, that graffiti's redefinition of the city's surface might lead to a transformation of its depth.

In 1983 I attended the first gallery opening of Keith Haring, a young white graffiti artist, and watched his entire collection of paintings sell out in one evening. A few months later Michael Stewart, a young black graffiti artist, died in the care of the Transit Police.

Like so many utopian dreams, the democracy of graffiti squirmed on the pitchfork of money, social class and authority. As artists climbed the subway stairs to embrace the world of commerce, the long arm of city hall reached into the tunnels to protect the public's property from art. Private collectors spent thousands for canvasses spray-painted with images that the city spent equal sums to sandblast from the trains. New York restocked its underground arteries with silver corpuscles, paint-resistant and antiseptic, while in the world above, its streets surrendered to glassed-in cafes and sanitized exteriors. The new middle class that drew its tag across the city wanted no reminder of the unrenovated life that preceded it.

Last month the last graffiti train was officially removed from service. There was little fanfare; the press was preoccupied with the Central Park jogger and its discovery of "wilding." Tabloid headlines screeched of "wolf Packs," while more sober publications deplored the sorry state of "race relations." The slum-scarred city that graffiti had sought to depict through art and humor came back to public consciousness in the form of mindless violence. The last representation of urban rage had been expunged, leaving us to confront its bitter reality.

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