page_title: The Faith of Graffiti
section_title: Synopsis
hierarchical_section_title: The Faith of Graffiti / Synopsis
context_page_description: The Faith of Graffiti is a 1974 essay by American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer about New York City's graffiti artists. Mailer's essay appeared in a shorter form in Esquire and as a book with 81 photographs by Jon Naar and design by Mervyn Kurlansky. Through interviews, exploration, and analyses, the essay explored the political and artistic implications of graffiti. The essay was controversial at the time of publication because it attempts to validate graffiti as an art form by linking it with great artists of the past. Mailer, too, was criticized for using the essay as a platform for own political grievances. Faith grows out of Mailer's existential philosophy of the hip, in which a Hipster is guided by his instincts regardless of consequences or perception, and upholds graffiti as a subversive and healthy check on the status quo. Like several of his other non-fiction narratives, Mailer continues his use of new journalism: he adopts a persona, the A-I or "Aesthetic Investigator", to provide both an objective distance from the topic and to engender the text with the creative and critical eye of the novelist.
context_section_description: The Faith of Graffiti is a five-part essay. Each part moves from surface-level content like interviews with the graffiti artists to philosophical musings on art and politics.
  In Part 1 of the essay, Mailer discusses the lives and inspirations of prominent graffiti artists. Mailer adopts the persona of the "Aesthetic Investigator", or A-I. To understand the motivations and drive of the graffitists, the A-I interviews four retired graffiti artists: CAY 161, JUNIOR 161, LI'L FLAME, and LURK. These graffitists strive to get their "names", how they are known as artists, in dangerous places "where people don't know how you could do it". The "name" is subversive; it challenges authority, and, akin to a gangster's hit, is linked to poverty, crime, and death. "The name", says CAY, "is the faith of graffiti."
  In Part 2, Mailer details the "existential stations of the criminal act" as graffitists prepare for their next "writing" by first "inventing", or stealing, paint. Authorities are ever-present and have recently been cracking down on graffitists, heightening their fears and stopping many of them. There exists a compulsion, however, to "commit the artistic act" in order to combat the "assault on the psyche" of modern life. Since they could be "comic strips come to life", subway cars are "their natural canvas" to "save the sensuous flesh" from the city's increasing homogeneity.
  Part 3 describes the A-I's visit to the Museum of Modern Art for further insight into graffiti artists, and he sees graffiti as an “alluvial delta” of the river or art. Art then, becomes culture, in a similar way as plants transmitting information or speaking to one another, the works of artists trickle down to the streets of the city's graffiti artists. He states "art begot art" through a "psychic sea". A-I concludes that, "when it comes to a matter of who might influence the writers of graffiti, one is not obliged to speak only of neon signs, comic strips and TV products, one has the other right to think the kids are enriched by all art which offers the eye a resemblance to graffiti". He draws references to the works of Henri Matisse, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Vincent van Gogh, and Willem de Kooning as their art may have "streamed down from the museums through media to the masses".
  Part 4 details the A-I's interview with the outgoing mayor of New York, John Lindsay. They examine Lindsay's view that graffiti was a "dirty shame" committed by "insecure cowards". The A-I notes the development of "the ugliest architecture in the history of New York" during Lindsay's time as mayor and considers that this may have been an effort to curtail the impact of graffiti on New York's reputation. However, the A-I muses that not many tourists could differentiate between subway graffiti and drawings on restroom stalls, and both announce the presence of criminality. The A-I concludes that "the fear of the insane graffiti writer in the self" shaped responses to the act from both city officials and tourists.
  In Part 5, Mailer considers the various cultural and historical uses of art. He concludes that graffiti is perhaps the most germane expression of "the possible end of civilization": it "speaks of a new civilization where barbarism is stirring at the roots". Graffiti is an expression of the ghetto; a resistance to the "oncoming universal machine" of the "mass-man without identity"; a defiant shout of identity and courage of the individual; and an expression of a "more primeval sense of existence" that promotes discomfort and, perhaps, signals an oncoming apocalypse. The A-I concludes that "graffiti lingers on our subway door as a memento of all the lives ever lived, sounding like the bugles of gathering armies across the unseen ridge".
caption: Graffiti on New York subway car, 1973
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