From Streets to Studios

With their comicbook motifs, big block letters, and pixel dots, the paintings of John Matos (a.k.a. Crash) look like classic works of Pop art. But what distinguishes the artist’s “Aeroplane 1” (1983) – an image of a propeller spinning in a white circle, before an abstract background of red, orange, and yellow – is that it was made with aerosol spray-paint, not oils or acrylics.The word “crash” may look like a comic-book sound bite, but it is actually this graffiti artist’s signature, his “tag.”Born in 1961, Mr. Matos began spray-painting public surfaces in New York, most notably subway cars, at the age of 13. Within a few years, he was discovered by the art world and began producing works on canvas for hip East Village galleries. This rise from working on the street to art-world prominence is typical of the 12 artists shown in the Brooklyn Museum’s “Graffiti.”Despite the title of the exhibition, none of the works here actually qualifies as “graffiti” as defined by Webster’s: “unauthorized writing or drawing on a public surface.” All of these works were made in studios and intended to hang in galleries and private collections.In the late 1970s and early 1980s, some spray-paint artists like Mr. Matos moved indoors and turned to canvas because of two very different sets of pressure: a police crackdown on street work, and the encouragement of art-world professionals, including gallery owner Sidney Janis, whose collection of graffiti art, from which these works were selected, was donated to the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 following his death.While none of this group equaled the fame of sometime street artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, their mainstream acceptance represents the exception, not the rule, of the much larger phenomenon of graffiti, most of whose practitioners were widely dismissed, rightly or wrongly, as little more than vandals with flair.The visitor will quickly see why these 12 artists were embraced by the art community: Their work displays considerable skill and imagination. But this does not mean that it stands up to the scrutiny of museum viewing.The problem is not so much lack of talent as the inherent limitations of the medium. It is the unfortunate paradox of this exhibition that presenting these works as museumquality art, divorced from their sociological or historical context, actually highlights their weaknesses. Spray paints cannot be mixed, they lack the density, texture, and tactile quality of other paints, and it is almost impossible to render precise detail with them. As a result, these images lie flat on the canvas surface, and prolonged viewing offers little more to ponder than the passing glance, which was all that people saw of racing subway trains.This problem seems most pronounced in those works that aim for representational illusionism. Chris Ellis (a.k.a. Daze), for example, is obviously deeply intelligent and inventive, but his three portraits lack the liveliness of work in oil or acrylic and ultimately feel more like illustrations than paintings.The more effective pieces are those that remain closest to the classic art done on the subway. “Subway Door” by Michael Tracy (a.k.a. Tracy 168) – the only work not on canvas – covers both sides of a metal door with scrawled words and a kaleidoscopic pattern of circles, capturing the hastily rendered, improvisational flair of subway design.The most impressive work in the show is “Train Act” by Anthony Clark (a.k.a. A-One), which measures nearly 7 feet by 17 feet, dimen sions that recall a subway car. This work presents a complex graffiti surface, with a wild mess of scrawled phrases, dollar signs, and a recurrent figure in profile with a large Afro before a background of rich patches of color. The piece was created by a single artist, but its allover abstraction suggests a collaborative collage, layers and layers of spray paint applied by several artists over time.Also notable are text-based works by artists such as Randy Rodriguez (a.k.a. Kel 1st), Melvin Samuels Jr. (NOC 167), Kwame Monroe (Bear 167), and Michael Tracy (Tracy 168). Many graffiti artists preferred to think of themselves as “writers,” and these works capture this other aspect of the art form. Mr. Tracy’s “Crazy Tracy” (1984) is an excellent example of the artist’s much-copied “wild style,” which transforms the letters of the alphabet into free-flowing forms that reveal themselves as recognizable text only to the initiated or those who take the time to look hard and crack the code.While the larger context of the work on display is briefly described in wall texts, the exhibition could have done a better job of fleshing out the impact of its various influences.The organizers might also have included photographs of graffiti on public surfaces to show viewers the original context of this style of art.Still, some of the extended context of graffiti art can be gleaned from the work itself, in particular Mr. Monroe’s lyrical cityscape “Sunday Afternoon” (1984). The painting depicts a brilliantly colored sky that shifts from red to orange to yellow above a skyline of rectangular buildings, smoke stacks, antennae, and water towers. Across the canvas’s bottom edge, and on the face of the buildings, is writing in graffiti, which culminates on the right-hand side of the canvas with the artist’s tag, Bear 167, and an indication of the work’s date, ’84.Appearing in the area of the canvas where a painter typically signs his name, this tag seems unusually understated. Yet, within the context of the painting, it is enormous, spanning the width of several buildings.This visual paradox alludes to the tensions that arise when street art enters the studio and is forced to adjust its scale to the delimited borders of the canvas.“Sunday Afternoon” is also the only work in the show that presents graffiti in its specific urban setting. Significantly, it does so from a considerable distance. The vantage point suggests that the artist has traveled far from his origins; his vision now extends far beyond the ghetto walls. This is a work of subtle intelligence and feeling, at once hopeful and nostalgic. It views the complex reality before it with knowing dispassion, providing an example of the sort of descriptive wide-angle perspective that would have made this intriguing but ultimately disappointing exhibition a more rewarding experience.Until September 3 (200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, 718-638-5000).

From Streets to Studios

From Streets to Studios

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