Headline: Design or Vandalism? Remarks on the research ofgraffiti through album covers
Author: Jacob Kimvall
Publication type: Catalogue Essay for the exhibition ”Cover
Art - Eläköön vinyyli!” at Vantaan taidemuseo Artsi,
Myyrmäkitalo, Paalutori 3, 2016-06-17 to 2017-01-15
Published in: Cover Art - Eläköön vinyyli! BOX SET
Date/issue: June 2016
Language: English
Editor: Maria Tjader-KnightIn 1985 New York dance music label Sleeping Bag Records released a record titledSleeping Bag Records’ Greatest Mixers Collection. The album is a compilation ofeight of the label’s tracks, mixed by prominent DJs from New York City, hence thetitle focusing on the mixers and not the recording artists.

The album cover was designed by two graffiti writers, Gnome and Gemini, and it
displays a detailed full colour drawing with a scene of several rows of subway trains
with graffiti pieces, and two figures in the moment of producing the pieces of graffiti- one sitting on top of one of the subway cars, seemingly watching out for thepolice, and the other painting bold straight letters on another car. Above the scene
levitates the title of the album in legible block letters. The title is also repeated on
the lower part of the front cover, but then written in a hand style usually used fortags.

As a researcher on the visual culture of contemporary graffiti, record covers such as
the one above, provide a unique source of material, where it is possible to study
graffiti as visual communication and design in a nexus of complex relations. Graffiti
is often understood as singular, site-specific paintings, or acts of vandalism,
conducted in a non-commercial context. A record cover has, on the other hand,been designed and produced to communicate the content of the music; pressed,printed and distributed through complex, often transnational networks; bought byretailers and sold to consumers, collected, enjoyed and sometimes sold and bought
again within the second hand market. These album covers are thus multiple, not site
specific, they are not paintings (even if the Sleeping Bag Records' Greatest Mixers
Collection may have paintings as part of the motif, or in other cases as part of thetechnique) and they are produced and circulated in a context of complex
commercial relations.

Graffiti is also primarily discussed in a framework characterized by a dichotomous
relationship, oscillating between claims that it should be labelled either art orvandalism. A problematization of such polarisation has been a point of departure formany popular as well as academic investigations into the phenomena, including myown doctoral dissertation The G-Word – Virtuosity and Violation, Negotiating andTransforming Graffiti (2014), where I suggested that graffiti could be understood as
what Michel Foucault called discursive formation built up around interdependent
points of incompatibility. From this perspective it is not relevant to discuss if graffiti
is art or vandalism – rather just acknowledge that it can be both – and it can be bothat the same time but in different cultural and institutional contexts. Again, we cantake Sleeping Bag Records’ Greatest Mixers Collection as an example. From theperspective of the police, this cover displays a crime scene – of two people withcriminal intent entering a train yard and painting the trains. From the perspective ofsubcultural graffiti, the person is a style master who creates burners on the trains,and as such “an example of true grace under pressure”.1

But as in many polarised discussions the poles have a tendency to become harddrawn, either this, or that. The concept of ‘Vandalism’ is often understood asvandalism in ‘criminal damage’, and the concept of ‘Art’ often as art as in ‘fine arts’ –singular objects produced and displayed for the primary purpose of aesthetic
pleasure and/or intellectual reflection. Even if this relationship is not irrelevant, it
seem to have obscured other relevant aspects, for example the fact that a lot ofgraffiti is used as visual element in contexts where the art pole could just as well beconsidered as ‘applied art’ – as design or decoration of objects with more mundane
uses. “Graffiti – Art or Vandalism?” is a question posed in headlines of innumerable
newspaper articles, but fewer ask “Graffiti – Design or Vandalism?”

1

Craig Castleman, (1982), Getting up: subway graffiti in New York. p. 24.

In subcultural contexts graffiti has been used as design on clothes, for example inback pieces of jackets, or as typography and illustration on albums, posters andflyers, at least since the 70s. In broader commercial context graffiti has been used toflavour advertisements, for example as a backdrop for fashion models, at least since
the 80s. And for the last few years, for example, McDonalds has started to use
graffiti wallpaper as scenography and interior decoration in some of theirrestaurants.2 And when I am writing this piece, the international high-fashion brand
Moschino has just been accused of copyright-infringement, for using a graffiti-pieceby Rime, in their clothing collection.3

One way of understanding the use of graffiti in a marketing context could be to see
it as a conflict between an authentic subcultural art form and mainstream society,where the latter is exploiting the former in a commercial context. But the borders
between fine and applied art, as well as between (authentic) subcultural and(commercial) mainstream contexts, are of course blurry and ambiguous, and I haveno wish to participate in constructing new polarities in the field of graffiti. Consider
the case of Michael Holman’s production Graffiti Rock (1984). It was an attempt tocreate a hip-hop television show, mimicking music and dance shows such as Soul
Train and American Bandstand. As such, it was an early, but moderately successfulattempt to make subcultural hip-hop to reach a broader audience. Today primarily
remembered probably in a subcultural context, and venerated as a kind of ‘minor
classic’ there.

2Mark Duell (2016). ”Bad taste? McDonald's under fire for revamping Brixton branch with walls andlampshades covered in GRAFFITI”, MailOnline, 2016-03-04. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article3476872/What-s-Brixton-like-Graffiti-yeah-ll-McDonald-s-criticised-graffiti-covered-lampshades-revampedrestaurant.html> [retrieved 2016-05-08].
3The Fashion Law (2016). Graffiti Cannot be Copyright Protected, Claims Moschino, Jeremy Scott, The
Fashion Law, 2016-04-20. <http://www.thefashionlaw.com/home/graffiti-cannot-be-copyright-protected-claimsmoschino-jeremy-scott> [retrieved 2016-05-08].

Graffiti Rock did not only use graffiti as part of the name, but also had graffiti as atitle and as scenography in the space where the musicians and dancers performed.
The final televised show also used graffiti as typography rendered in the at the timelatest video-animation technology, when words such as ‘fresh’ and ‘word’ flow in thespace, not visible for the participants at the scene of recording, but only for theviewer of the show through post-processing. Another case is the hip-hop classic
Wild Style (1983) where the graffiti writers Zephyr, Sharp and Revolt have painted, orperhaps ‘designed’ is the better term in this context, a graffiti piece that became thelogo of the film, part of the poster and also the cover of the soundtrack.

Works such as these point to the problem of making a clear cut distinctions between
subcultural and mainstream contexts, as well as between fine art and applied art –and they are perhaps most accurately described as examples of interdisciplinary andintermedial gesamtkunstwerk – artistic works utilizing lyrical, typographical, musical,choreographic and visual expressions.

The concept of gesamtkunstwerk could also be used to understand many of thealbum covers using graffiti as graphic design. In a strict sense album covers could ofcourse be simply described as packaging design, and thus produced in order tomarket the primary content – the music on the record. But at least in recordcollecting contexts the album covers are regarded almost as important as the actual
record. For example, at the database discogs.com, where users collect informationof record releases, and also trade records, the users are asked to grade thecondition of both ‘media’ and ‘sleeve’ of each individual item. In a broader sense
the covers are thus more than just a package, and in many cases better understoodas an aspect of the final product. In this sense record covers could be considered as
luxury packaging, whose primary purpose is to arouse a desire for the product.44Lasse Brunnström and Karin Wagner (2015). Den (o)hållbara förpackningen, p. 26 and 351-384.

In most cases where design and marketing are aspects of graffiti, the different
examples are extremely diverse, and if they are preserved at all, they do end up in
different archives and it would take a researcher enormous amount of time only toidentify them. But since albums are collected with their covers, a large number ofexamples exist in similar formats and in several different available contexts. Throughthe second hand market and today’s web databases such as discogs.com it ispossible to access and systematically compare many different objects.

Let’s now return to the initial example of Sleeping Bag Records’ Greatest Mixers
Collection. If we first consider it from a subcultural graffiti perspective it is possible
to see that the picture has been produced with colour design marker on paper, atechnique in graffiti most commonly associated with the medium of the black book –hard bound sketchbooks, “which is used for personal artistic development and forcollecting other artists’ work”.5 This would mean that the cover contains at least
three different layers of intermedial relations. First we have the media that isembedded in the motif – the graffiti painted subway trains; the second media would
be the drawing utilising the technique usually used in black book; and the third
media is the record cover, communicating the content of the music.

The straight lettered words on the subway cars – Larry Levan, Francois K. etcetera –are the names of the DJs who have mixed the tracks on the album. There are also
smaller words written in hand styles, mimicking tags, on various places on thesubway cars. In most cases these are the titles of the tracks on the record, or thenames of the recording artists. This is obviously an approach that subverts the musicindustry’s common hierarchy – focusing either on the song – the hit record – or the5Eric Felisbret & Luke Felisbret (2009). Graffiti New York. See also Alain Mariduena (2009), New York CityBlack Book Masters, and Sacha Jenkins and David Villorente (2008), Piecebook: The Secret Drawings ofGraffiti Writers.

artist – usually the singer – and as such could be seen as something that
foreshadows today’s DJ-cult, with superstar DJs touring the world. But the focus on
the DJs must be understood as a marketing strategy, and a plausible interpretation
would be that it targets consumers for whom the DJs are often more important than
the recording artists themselves: the clubbers and dancers of the New York City.
This would suggest that this record's primary target group is a small but subculturally well-initiated audience.

The title of the album, some of the tracks, as well as the names of the DJs and ofsome of the recording artists, are all written in fairly legible letters. But the coveralso contains less legible lettering. At the very centre of the cover, in blue and whitewild style lettering are the designers own names – rendered as one two man top tobottom whole subway car, Gnome and Gemini, followed by the letters CWK on thenext car. There is not much information of these two artists in the internationalgraffiti literature, but it is nonetheless possible to identify Gnome and Gemini as two
well-respected graffiti writers from New York, who seem to have primarily been
active in the mid-80s. There is a portrait and also a piece by Gnome in Henry
Chalfant’s and James Prigoff’s book Spraycan Art (1987), where Gnome is presented
as an important and influential graffiti writer from Brooklyn. The most detailed
information on these artists that I have found is in David Villorente's and Todd
James' book Mascots & Mugs: The Characters and Cartoons of Subway Graffiti(2007), focusing on Gnome but mentioning Gemini and that they both belonged tothe crew Craftwork, abbreviated CWK.6 This could be considered on one hand as
the signature of the cover or on the other hand, as a part of the cover and themarketing strategy. Either way, it adds to the subversion of the hierarchy of themusic industry.

6Villorente and James also mention that Gnome “did illustrations for two classic record covers, for Just Ice andMantronix”. In my research for records using graffiti as album cover design, I have been able to identify fivedifferent album covers, and they all seem to be joint productions by both Gnome and Gemini.

But as a marketing strategy the ‘wild styled signatures’ in the middle of the covercan be seen in relation to one last aspect of the cover. When I wrote that the coverdisplays a scene of several rows of subway trains with graffiti pieces, I failed tomention that it is possible to identify the trains as subways from New York City. This
aspect might not be as obvious today, as it probably was in the early 80s, whensubway graffiti was still primarily a phenomenon identified with New York City. In the1983 documentary Stylewars, a young woman with a French accent proposes thatthe graffiti on the subway trains is “a symbol of New York for foreign people,especially French people”.7

In his seminal text on visual semiotics from 1964 – “Rhetoric of the Image” – Roland
Barthes coins the term ‘Italianicity’ to point at the connotations of Italy in a French
advertisement for pasta and canned tomatoes.8 Many of the album covers using
graffiti as graphic design, especially those from the 80s, including this specific one
discussed here, would in analogy to Barthes concept be said to utilise an aspect of‘Newyorkicity’. To the previously suggested possible primary target group, of local
subcultural clubbers and dancers, a second possible target group could besuggested – most likely a significantly larger group of consumers – all the people in
the world who in the mid-80s dreamed of and desired to go clubbing and dancing
in the New York City.

78Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver (1983). Stylewars. Released on DVD 2003.
Roland Barthes (1977). Image, music, text. London: Fontana

Bibliography:
Brunnström, Lasse & Wagner, Karin (2015). Den (o)hållbara förpackningen.
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Castleman, Craig (1982). Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York. Cambridge: MITPress
Chalfant, Henry & Prigoff, James (1987). Spraycan Art. London: Thames and Hudson
Duell, Mark (2016). ”Bad taste? McDonald's under fire for revamping Brixton branchwith walls and lampshades covered in GRAFFITI”, MailOnline, 2016-03-04.
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1900-2000, by Teleman, Sara and Berg, Andreas (ed.), Arena: Stockholm (2013).
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The Fashion Law (2016). Graffiti Cannot be Copyright Protected, Claims Moschino,Jeremy Scott, The Fashion Law, 2016-04-20.
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