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| Graffiti. Paris Zane Gromulsone, Art Critic | |
| Graffiti, probably, is one of the most widespread of contemporary visual art forms. It is a method that offers the opportunity to confirm one’s existence or to express an opinion in the public space. Graffiti has been used for this for a long time, but here I won’t be looking at the period when it served as a bearer of political slogans or as a way of marking out street gang territory. I will look at graffiti which has gone into art history as one of today’s visual art forms. Why Paris? Today, Spain is Europe’s graffiti superpower, but France must be given the honour of being the cradle of this art in Europe, as when this city art phenomenon began to spread, it was specifically Paris that was the centre and source of inspiration for young people from all over Europe. | |
 Graffiti in Paris. Photo: Zane Gromulsone | |
| Graffiti – street art, which emerged on the streets of New York in the 1970s – arrived in Paris ten years later, at the beginning of the 1980s. As opposed to New York, where this art came into being in the ghetto districts, the first French practitioners of this new form of expression were from a more affluent social class. They were youngsters who, influenced by their travels in America, tried out what they’d seen, on abandoned buildings and construction sites in the outer districts of Paris. Later the graffiti trend began to move out into the streets. Initially, the designs were concentrated in the capital city’s north-eastern quarters – La Chapelle and Stalingrad. The first graffiti showed a strong New York influence, and is known as the ‘New York School’. But that doesn’t mean that the French street designs were limited to attempts to copy the New Yorkers directly. Rather, graffiti in France developed as an interpretation of the art, with a European ‘flavour’ being added to the New York graffiti base. Gradually, graffiti freed itself of New York’s influence. The range of colours became brighter or, using graffiti terminology, ‘hypervitaminized’ (hyper vitaminé), but its calligraphic writing and design – more aggressive and more expressive. The original founder of graffiti art in France is considered to be Bando (real name Philippe Lehman), who, having seen graffiti in New York, began to ‘graff’ [i.e., to make graffiti] in Paris, introducing his own individual drawing style. Bando was quickly noticed and became a sort of idol among young people. It is owing to Bando that during the period of nascency of this art, some of New York’s graffiti leaders like JON-ONE and DANDI WHITE came over to draw in the streets of Paris at Bando’s behest. Their activities created examples and helped to introduce a higher level of graffiti than the “I was here” tags or signatures which were so widespread at the time. A leap in development was set off after 1984, when one of the main national television programmes, TF1, began to broadcast a show called Hip-Hop, devoted to hip-hop. Where there is hip-hop, there’s graffiti. It was to be seen on the studio set and in music video clips. Both local graffiti leaders, such as FUTURA 2000 and the PCB (Paris City Breakers) group, as well as those from other countries were interviewed. The programme, which for the first time in French television history had a black host, the pioneer of French hip-hop Sidney, became extremely popular, providing an opportunity for graffiti, despite its illegal status, to become fashionable, attracting a wide range of followers. Graffiti now breached the walls of the outer suburbs and entered the centre of Paris – the walls along the banks of the Seine, the barriers of the Louvre and the Pompidou Centre district were covered with tags and graffiti designs. They appeared on the city’s metro train carriages and on the sides of heavy vehicles. The Stalingrad quarter became the gathering place for all of Europe’s graffiti artists, a school and an unusual centre for making new contacts. Tags on shop windows, the walls of historic buildings or on cultural monuments became a more and more common occurrence, which not only irritated the majority of Parisians, but also required considerable financial resources. Things came to a head in January 1992, with a vandalism scandal and a graffiti ‘attack’ on the Louvre Museum metro station, including the works of sculpture exhibited there. Everything was covered with tags, causing many thousands of francs of damage. After this incident, Jacques Chirac, the Mayor of Paris at the time, introduced regulations to control the sale of spray paint. The intermittent cat and mouse games that had taken place between the police and graffiti artists up till then, at the beginning of the 1990s became campaigns worthy of the FBI, involving indepth investigations. Most of the abandoned buildings and construction sites which had been the main graffiti artists’ zones of activity were done away with. Court proceedings replaced small fines and warnings. In 2003, the first court proceedings took place. One hundred and fifty young people were fined substantial sums of money for damaging state property. Control over the media began as well – the promotion of graffiti art in the press or on television was banned. In 2004, the French rail authority RATP sought a 150 000 franc (approximately 23 000 euro) fine through the courts from a French magazine which had published a photograph of a Paris metro carriage that had been covered in graffiti. | |
 Graffiti in Paris. Photo: Zane Gromulsone | |
| One could think that the 1990s marked the demise of this art form. But no! It was finally noticed by Paris’s art critics, collectors and curators, recognizing graffiti as one of the art movements of the late 20th century. ‘Legal graffiti’ appeared – artists began to work in workshops, swapping street walls for the traditional canvas. Alongside hip-hop festivals, graffiti art competitions or other legal events, where street art was permitted and even encouraged, official permission was given for the drawing of graffiti at specific sites on the streets as well. It began to be used in the interiors of bars and discos, and, for example, unlike metro train carriages, graffiti didn’t start disappearing from heavy vehicles. Exactly the opposite happened: often their owners even paid the street artists to make their transport vehicles unique with the help of graffiti designs. By the way, France today is the first in Europe in terms of the number of cars covered in graffiti. Taking the example of New York art galleries, where graffiti exhibitions had been held already since the beginning of the 1970s, the Parisians also began to follow suit. The first was the d’Agnès B Gallery, but soon enough other galleries appeared which focused on street art only (for example, Studio 55). In the mid 1990s, graffiti finally came under the spotlights – illegal art entered the museums (National Museum of French Monuments in Place du Trocadero, at the Grand Palais des Champs Elysees, at the Museum of Modern Art in Raspail Boulevard and others). Not everyone craved this recognition (integration into the art market). Many considered that graffiti had lost its point. Some drew attention to the essentiality of graffiti being in the streets, as this art was created for everyone, to be enjoyed for free and to be viewed in the context of the street, but loses its direct dialogue with the viewer in enclosed spaces. On the other hand galleries and museums made this wild art legal, recognized, appreciated and accessible, also taking on a collecting and protecting function. Despite the squabbles, already for a year now an open air museum devoted to graffiti has been in existence in Paris’s 19th quarter.(1) It was created by an architect of Hungarian origin, Yona Friedman, with the goal of making the museum into an original graffiti art centre and to recreate the graffiti heyday atmosphere of Stalingrad. On the museum walls, which are made of transparent plastic, graffiti artists can create works right there on the site, at any time. The walls, transformed into graffiti art works, are changed every 15 days, with the best works becoming the property of the museum with the aim of creating a graffiti art collection. Gradually graffiti is assuming a definite place in the considerations of auction houses as well. The oldest French auction house Artcurial has already held four successful public graffiti art auctions.(2) Alongside the spray-painted canvases and the most notable ‘graffitist’ sketches which have been executed in the streets of America or Europe, there is an equally large collector interest in examples with more of a historic, rather than an artistic value. This year, for example, a page from a New York Times newspaper from 1971, with the signature of graffiti pioneer New Yorker Taki 187 done in pencil, was auctioned for 1900 euros. Obviously graffiti will remain a means of expression for ‘outsiders’. No point in hoping for a Contemporary Art Centre on an island on the River Seine any more.(3) Along with the decrease in the wave of popularity of graffiti, the one-time paradise of Stalingrad has also lost its significance in artistic circles. Paris’s graffiti has moved to ‘quieter’ outlying districts (Laplace, Gentilly, the Chinese quarter of Belleville). In any case, if you happen to notice any graffiti worthy of note in Paris, it is possible that it may not be there any more tomorrow. Take a photo of it, quickly! (1) The Musée des Graffiti was opened on the 26 May, 2009. (2) The fourth Artcurial graffiti auction 1970–2010, 40 ans d’art graffiti (‘1970–2010, 40 Years of Graffiti Art’) took place on 22 March, 2010. (3) Nicolas Sarkozy has promised to build France’s History Museum (Musée de l’Histoire de France) on the site of the planned Contemporary Art Centre. /Translator into English: Uldis Brūns/ | |
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