Going 'All City': The Spatial Politics of Graffiti

Abstract

This essay examines the spatial politics of graffiti, primarily focusing on the development of the art in New York City from the late 1960s and early 1970s onwards. Heeding Murray Forman’s observation that “there has been little attention granted to the implications of hip hop’s spatial logics,” this work follows in the footsteps of scholarship which has incorporated a spatial analysis of graffiti, such as Tricia Rose’s book Black Noise, by arguing space is central to the politics and subversive force of graffiti as an art form. In particular, I contend that the spatial politics of graffiti must be understood within the contexts of, and as a response to, the construction of the ghetto as a space of confinement. After a brief overview of the history of the built environment of the ghetto, I posit that graffiti resists and undermines the invisibility and confinement imposed by inner city space on individuals of color in three distinct but overlapping ways. The first is through the inscription of inner city youth identity on the very streetscapes that seek to render those identities invisible. The second is through graffiti’s symbolic and literal reclaiming/destruction of the metropolitan spatial arrangement which keeps black and Hispanic residents of the ghetto impoverished and exploited. Finally, the “bombing” of trains with graffiti tags and “pieces” resists the hegemonic spatial constructions of the urban landscape by giving mobility to the inner city youth identities the ghetto is designed to confine. This essay ends with thoughts on the way graffiti forces us to rethink and reexamine our current urban spatiality and what lessons graffiti’s resistance to spatial constructs provides about how to more equitably structure our society.

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