The Development of Graffiti Art

Graffiti first appeared in the United States in the 1960s. After so many years of development graffiti culture graffiti has been scattered to many countries in the world. In New York, Berlin, London, Copenhagen and some other big cities, and slowly accepted by the people. And gradually become a kind of art, rather than the initial American street rebellion and black youth regional counter-cultural behavior. The graffiti culture that has existed for decades now is on the rise. With this, this group of street graffiti culture in-depth study and research.

I. Social Background

The fundamental economic system of the United States as a capitalist country has led to a wide gap between the rich and the poor in the American society. Such a social situation will provoke people's dissatisfaction and rebellion, thus appearing some like street basketball, street dance, graffiti, HIP&HOP, RAP songs and other unique American street cultural behavior. This is also the root of the American street rebel culture.

The New York City area from the 1960s to the 1980s was a city full of enthusiasm and fast pace, and the narrowness of the living environment threw life on the streets, coupled with the disparity between the rich and the poor in the society, for the subcultural social marginalized people living under such social pressure, has been enough to form the so-called counter-culture small groups. Moreover, the ghetto is home to a group of unemployed, out-of-school Hispanic or black youths who are regarded as a social problem. In the midst of anti-racism, anti-war, anti-sexual repression, and anti-rights repression movements, they are confronted with the racial issues, poverty, and employment constraints of their living environment, and form a geographically specific counterculture of social behaviors. These behaviors include street basketball, street graffiti, street dance, hip&hop, rap and other activities. Graffiti originated on the fringes of a dying New York society, where pieces of secular culture were rebuilt by a group of kids who dared to challenge the U.S. government authorities. Among other things, graffiti culture began in the late 1960s and flourished through the 1980s. From the late 70's to the 80's a group of graffiti enthusiasts made their living, developing their own unique graffiti art to express their own ideas and distinctive personalities. In the later years, graffiti was no longer purely a counter-cultural and social behavior, but added artistic elements to it, making it more acceptable and legitimate. It slowly went from underground to above ground.

The meaning of graffiti

Graffita is the Italian word for graffiti, and graffiti (in its plural form) is an image or drawing scribbled on a wall. Basically, Graffiti is an act close to writing, with words taking a large part, and figurative symbols or signs and graphics are also common elements, but most of the images are written in a similar way, stating the intention in a concise manner, without deliberately tracing the depiction. However, in later graffiti art, drawings, symbols and signs in turn overwhelmed words and became dominant in graffiti art. Drawings, as opposed to words, better reflect the content of the author's message and the dominant idea of his work.

The formation and development of graffiti art

In the early 1970s, when cans of spray paint became readily available, a wide variety of colorful and distinctive graffiti could be seen everywhere, from subway train cars to platforms to street walls to the walls of toilets. Early graffiti was mainly text-based, and those who created graffiti called themselves (writers) {writers} rather than (painters) {painters}, and were usually anonymous, and it was popular for them to use street numbers to pseudonymize their graffiti, such as TAKI 183, JULIO 204, FRANK 207, and their graffiti paintings were very much geographically oriented. Most of the graffiti creators are neither professional artists nor art students, but rather street kids from the Bronx, Brooklyn and Harlem. The act of graffiti itself is a rebellion against authority, and graffiti is also a form of artistic expression. Through this behavior, from an artistic point of view: performance art, can quickly attract the attention of the socio-political world, the media, as well as the mainstream art tradition of art and culture, so the graffiti text gradually reduced, and transformed into large-scale exquisite cartoon drawing images. College artists also followed, so professional graffiti people began to appear, similar alliances, associations of groups have also come out, after the graffiti art began to stationed in art galleries, for people to appreciate, collect, buy and sell, investment. Since then, the nature of graffiti has undergone a great transformation. As a result, a craze for graffiti art has arisen in countries all over the world. Graffiti art is very similar to rock and roll and rap music of the same time. In the beginning, people used this kind of creation to rebel against the system, to express their dissatisfaction, to vent their emotions, and to accuse the society. Later on, the original nature of graffiti art has been incorporated by the capitalist system, and the original counterculture art has become a real branch of art. It became a kind of art with the same nature as traditional painting. The original nature of graffiti gradually disappeared from the graffiti creations of other countries.

In the 1970s and 1980s, New York galleries began organizing a variety of graffiti exhibitions, bringing street graffiti artists into the galleries, and graffiti became a high-pressure form of art. Important events and exhibitions include:

1. The first graffiti exhibition was held in 1972 at the Blade Gallery in Soho, Manhattan, New York.

2. 1975 United Graffiti Artists (United Graffiti Artists) exhibited at Artist SPACE in New York.

3, 1980 launched the Times Square exhibition - graffiti has really begun to mass display, and attracted the attention of the art world.

4, 1983 is the peak of graffiti art, the first big museum exhibition in Rotterdam's Boyman-van Beuningen museum (Boyman-van Beuningen museum).

Four, the battle of graffiti styles

1. Early graffiti preferred a single color and used non-double entendre references, such as the symbol of the smoke wisp and hello.

2. Next, the arrow in the form of words was changed into a crown and made to be worn on the head as a sign of majesty.

3. Later, with the goal of being dazzling, eye-catching, and prominent, one began to write one's name in high-color spray paint on the subway or on the main street and surround it with contrasting colors or black, and even to decorate it with stripes, twill, stars, checkerboards, or polka-dot patterns in the hope of seeing it stand out.

4. In the mid-1970s, it came in the form of alter ego emblems, mostly featuring heroes from cartoon movies, most of them in unusual poses such as being attacked or verbally abused.

5. The background of graffiti is more and more complex, spray paint for the improvement of the device to make its function and role to play to the extreme, but also to make graffiti artistry and personality to play to the extreme. Burning suns, stars, bullets crossing the wind, painted landscapes, self-portraits, abstract symbols, etc., combine and regenerate another interesting picture.

Differences between graffiti artists and graffiti artists

1. Graffiti artists do not have the baggage of tradition, they can create freely with their own preferences and thoughts, and convey their emotions directly; graffiti artists who have been trained in school use an aesthetic attitude to reconcile with the status quo of society.

2. Graffiti artists appear to create a style that stands out to the masses by signing their work in a way that has no special markings; graffiti artists are integrated into society in a style that removes the personalization of the artist, whose work is styled like an advertisement or a political manifesto, and who sign their work in standard printed characters.

V. Aesthetic View and Sociological Exploration

When it comes to graffiti, he usually gives people polarized views; most of them see it as a bad, defacement, madness, aggression, intimidation; but there are others who see graffiti as a truly aesthetic product, a personalized monologue of the suppressed or those who have no voice. John Cage, for example, argued that we should cherish every graffiti mark; the 1974 writer Norman Mailer, in her book The Faith of Graffiti, saw the phenomenon of graffiti as a rebellion against the racial nature of a sinful industrial and commercial civilization and romanticized it as a disordered demonstration of social freedom; and art critic Suzi Gablik. Suzi Gablik, on the other hand, sees those street kids as being discovered by an art market hungry for freshness.

6. Representatives

1. Keith Haring was a leading figure in the New York School during the 1980s. He has a very obvious aversion to the conceptual art and extreme master art popularized in the 1980's band, but for the graffiti everywhere in the street and some of the artists of the old Pope's works have a strong interest. American Pop artist Tom Otterness's work "Dodo Bird" has a cartoon character's joyful and fun character which has a great influence on him. Harlem's works are full of very joyful images of small characters, but also a large number of sexual symbols, depicted in a very smooth and simple, clear, strong sense of play and entertainment. Many of his works have been called (Untitled). His (villain) images are now also widely used in clothing, interior decoration, and advertising design. It can be called a generation master of graffiti art.

2, Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jean-Michel Basquiat) non-academic origin. The use of African images, bright colors, involving the topic of people of color in American society, can be said to be a typical example of people of color asked in American society.

3. Kenny Scharf (Kenny Scharf) draws on cartoon animation, surreal and other specialties, showing a cheesy, rich visual world, a strong stimulation of the visual.

4. Lee Quinones

5. Futura 2000

Graffiti culture around the world

Awareness of graffiti, must be traced back to its origins, China's graffiti culture, although slowly growing, but still can not be compared with the graffiti culture of the Western countries, the group decided to use the weekend to look online. The group decided to use the weekend time to go online to find some of the more classic graffiti cultures around the world. Through this activity, we have a deeper understanding of the differences between Chinese and Western cultures through our understanding of graffiti culture.

Haikou street culture graffiti taking

In order to have a deeper understanding of the development of graffiti culture in Haikou, this group decided to conduct a thorough investigation of graffiti in various streets and alleys in Haikou area. On the weekend of this week, our members Zhong Chen and Cen Kaijie went to the neighborhood of Haixiu Road to take photos of some of the graffiti. Through this activity, we gained a deeper understanding of the influence of graffiti culture on the local community, and fundamentally recognized the widespread and popularity of graffiti. It is a successful step towards the research of this topic.

Graffiti culture around the world

To recognize graffiti, we must go back to its origins, and although China's graffiti culture is slowly growing, it is still not comparable to that of Western countries

This is the first time we have studied graffiti in China.