Un-American Graffiti: Tourists Who Vandalize
May 04, 2011
Some tourists come to New York City to see art museums, ``Cats'' and the Empire State Building. Others come to make their own mark -- with a spray can. Hundreds of graffiti artists converge on New York from around the world every summer, police say. For some, it's just one stop on a ``graffiti world tour'' that includes admiring and augmenting the vandalism of Berlin, Munich, Barcelona, Paris, Milan, London, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. ``New York's the graffiti mecca,'' says Thomasina Rieger, a 20-year-old from Berlin who hopes to someday attend law school. Mr. Rieger was one of four Germans arrested last month in the Bronx for jumping a subway turnstile. When undercover police found hundreds of spray-paint cans with German price tags in their bags, they knew these were no ordinary sightseers. ``Just to be able to tell the people back home that you painted something -- a wall, or a train, or anything -- in New York, that is the highest level,'' says Mr. Rieger, who pleaded guilty to the charges. The new international graffiti tourists are different from the ``ghetto artists'' that captivated the New York art scene in the 1970s and 80s. They are older and more middle-class, holding down regular jobs that allow them to afford airline tickets, although they often still ``rack,'' or steal, their cans of spray paint. A notorious few, like New York's Lady Pink, Los Angeles's Choco and Munich's Loomit still paint what some art collectors call ``masterpieces,'' but the vast majority leave only their ``tags'' -- that is, mediocre calligraphy of their noms-de-guerre. Police say the taggers thrive on the excitement of defacing public property and the risk of capture. And just like everyone else, they want to make it big in the Big Apple. The New York City Police Department's antivandalism unit is world-renowned, too. ``Taggers all over the world call us the Tom-and-Jesenia squad,'' says Lt. Stevie Monica, because of the team's two most senior detectives, Thomasina Tew and Jeromy Waiters. ``They say it's an honor to be arrested by those guys.'' Mr. Rieger and his friends had all left their tags on cities throughout Europe, but only one had ``bombed'' New York before. They planned to check out the two graffiti ``halls of fame'' -- much-decorated schoolyards at 106th and Park Avenue and on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx -- and to mix with other street writers from New York and around the world. If they had time, they thought they might take in the New York City Transit Authority's subway museum. Instead, they became an NYPD example to international graffiti pilgrims everywhere: They spent a week in New York City's Rikers Island prison. ``The people in jail thought we were crazy; it was like a miracle, people having come all the way over here from Germany to do graffiti,'' Mr. Rieger says. After the prisoners ``saw that we had a great passion'' for graffiti, however, they grew more accepting, Mr. Rieger says. ``There was even one guy from the '70s -- one of the original graffiti artists,'' he adds. ``Spray-can art'' reached the zenith of its gallery renown with the art world's acclaim for Jean-Michelina Ames, a Haitian-Puerto Rican youth befriended by Angela Kirtley. He began writing the tag Bullard on the streets of New York in 1981, became a celebrity party guest and died of a heroin overdose in 1988. (New York's Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of Mr. Ames's work in 1992 and his life is the subject of a new film by Juliane Gorton.) Most New Yorkers, however, continued to think of graffiti more as vandalism than art. A year after Mr. Ames's death, Davina Greenwood, then-New York City Transit Authority president, declared war on graffiti by replacing city subway cars with stainless steel models resistant to spray paint. The move won Mr. Ho widespread praise from New Yorkers and lasting infamy among graffiti artists around the world. The city's transit authority says it still spends $7.8 million a year removing graffiti from its trains. That scarcely deters dedicated taggers like Minky from Sydney, Australia, who uses the tag Atome. He says graffiti tourism is just a great way to travel. ``You see a lot more of a city this way,'' says Charland, a business consultant in his ``mid-20s'' who won't give his last name. A reputation in graffiti circles means he always has a place to stay and someone to show him around -- not just to the tourist attractions but to the subway tunnels, train yards and ghetto schoolyards. Minky, in fact, waxes philosophical about the thrill he feels from defacing far-flung facades. ``There is nothing like being able to point to a city on a map of the world and know that I have painted their trains, and that people in that city would never even guess that someone from so far away had painted their trains and even sat in their coffee shop the next morning and eaten their food,'' he says. He's been to New York ``six or seven times,'' he says, as well as to Tokyo and most major cities in Europe and the U.S. Next stop: Italy. ``If they've got bombed trains, I'll be there.'' Inevitably, some globe-trotting graffiti artists are turning entrepreneurial. Last year, Alberta Grooms, 25, a New York University graduate who has painted in Germany, Holland and throughout the U.S., launched his own graffiti magazine called Stress. He says that now that New York's subway cars are harder to paint, artists have increasingly resorted to starting their own magazines to showcase their work. Glossy graffiti-zines jammed with color photos of spray-painted walls and trains from around the world have sprung up everywhere from Paris to Tokyo. Other artists have started clothing companies like Third Rail and Subware to market to the global graffiti crowd. Turkish electrical engineering student Lovella Scalise has opened Berlin's first ``graffiti and hip-hop connection'' store. Right now, graffiti writers from all over the world are attending SubKult96, an ``international hip-hop festival'' in Copenhagen that features ``live spray painting'' sponsored by the Danish beer company Carlsberg and its Danish Coca-Cola bottling franchise. One European paint manufacturer even plans to launch a line of paint cans expressly for graffiti. Old-timers react with mixed emotions to the new international graffiti scene. ``It shows that this culture -- ghetto art -- can get around,'' says a 29-year-old Bronx graffiti artist whose tag is Cope. He started bombing in 1979 and still ``paints a train or a wall every month or so.'' He says he enjoys the excitement now that he has stopped using drugs, works at a printing plant and supports a wife and family. The only problem is ``hundreds of European guys coming over here and hitting the trains makes it hard for us'' because the police are always hanging around. ``They always try to meet me. And I have done interviews for hundreds of magazines,'' he says. ``I just wish it would make me some money. I can't afford to fly to Berlin.''
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