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Welcome to the JazePages at graffiti.jaze.com. Jaze is ready to expand it's World of Graffiti! More graffiti from Curaçao, the Netherlands and Book-previews are comin' up soon... If you have any flix you want to post on the internet or tips and ideas for improvement, please share it with the webmaster of this large graffiti site...
 An irreverent inscription on a wall in a public place is called a graffito. The term graffiti was first used in this sense by archaeologists to designate informal writings on tombs and ancient monuments. Today, as then, graffiti deal with a wide variety of subjects and are often satirical in tone. In the second half of the 20th cent. the term has been applied to many acts of property defacement involving paint and other graphic media. © 1993 Columbia University Press.
Gathered some text on graffiti for you to read. Below first a summary of each text.
Graffiti is the expression of visual idea as seen or conceived by an individual, and has been developed from its original form through three distinct phases, the imitative, transition and apocryphal phases. The imitative phase shows drawings imitating the surroundings of the graffitist. The transition phase uses words to express social ideas, personal thoughts and messages. The apocryphal phase consists of words made to look like drawings or characters, which can be understood only by a professional graffitist. Apocryphal graffiti, known as tagging, is of two types, individual tagging and group tagging.
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When Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant set out a few years ago to make a film about what they perceived as the endangered culture of the South Bronx --graffiti, break dancing, disco rapping-- their motives were, in a sense, ethnographic. Those forms of expression were endangered, but not quite in the way the filmmakers had supposed. By the time their Style Wars was shown on PBS to wide critical acclaim, the entire Hip-Hop culture had moved horizontally through suburban culture, where it was already beginning to fade, and vertically into the reaches of high culture, where it was appropriated by artists very different from those who had invented it.
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Tagging is the compulsive painting on the walls of buildings. The addiction to tagging of a Guatemalan teen in Los Angeles is recounted. His conversion to Christianity, and life at an urban mission school fueled the way for his artistic talent to be used in Christian interaction with other ghetto youth. Chris Albisurez used to spraypaint walls in Los Angeles into the wee hours of the morning until his knuckles began to bleed from scraping them against coarse, brick surfaces.
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People who commit acts of graffiti do so without having to take responsibility for their actions. By hiding behind their anonymity, they are free to attack their victims and remain invisible for all of society to see who they are. There is safety in the city's crowds, but also a kind of terrified amazement: Who are all these people? Where do they think they're going? Is one of them watching me? Following me? Filming me? Writing my name on walls?
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Hugo Kaagman, once an acknowledged graffiti artist, leaving images in public places and publishing a newspaper, both by the spray-and-stencil method, has retained his earlier irreverence in his current stenciled-paintings. Social commentary coupled with pedestrian subjects add up to a sense of balance, rather than suggesting typical flamboyance of US graffiti.
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Please take note that all shown art is © protected by the performing artists.
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