Graffiti (singular graffiti, or graffito only in graffiti archaeology) is writing or drawings made on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written "monikers" to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire.
Modern graffiti is a controversial subject. In most countries, marking or painting property without permission is considered vandalism. Modern graffiti began in the New York City subway system and Philadelphia in the early 1970s and later spread to the rest of the United States and throughout the world.
Graffiti is distinguished from murals, an often legally permitted form of street art.
Etymology "Graffiti" (usually both singular and plural) and the rare singular form "graffito" are from the Italian word graffiato ("scratched").The Italian singular form "graffito" is so rare in English (except in specialist texts on archaeology) that it is not even recorded or mentioned in some dictionaries, for example the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary. In ancient times graffiti were carved on walls with a sharp object, although sometimes chalk or coal were used. The word originates from Greek —graphein—meaning "to write".
History
Prehistoric
Most petroglyphs and geoglyphs date between 40,000 and 10,000 years old, the oldest being cave paintings in Australia. Paintings in the Chauvet Cave were made 35,000 years ago, but little is known about who made them or why. Early artists created stencil graffiti of their hands with paint blown through a tube. These stencils may have functioned similarly to a modern-day tag.
Ancient
The oldest known written graffito was found on the Greek island of Astypalaia and is dated to around 500 BC. Most graffiti from the time was boasts about sexual experiences, but also includes word games such as the Sator Square, "I was here" type markings, and comments on gladiators. Graffiti in Ancient Rome was a form of communication, and was generally not considered vandalism. The Alexamenos graffito was later seen as blasphemous and removed. It may contain one of the earliest depictions of Jesus. The graffito features a human with the head of a donkey on a cross with a Greek inscription translated as .
Medieval The only known source of the Safaitic language, an ancient form of Arabic, is from graffiti: inscriptions scratched on to the surface of rocks and boulders in the predominantly basalt desert of southern Syria, eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Safaitic dates from the first century BC to the fourth century AD.
Ancient tourists visiting the 5th-century citadel at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka write their names and commentary over the "mirror wall", adding up to over 1800 individual graffiti produced there between the 6th and 18th centuries. Most of the graffiti refer to the frescoes of semi-nude females found there.
Among the ancient political graffiti examples were Arab satirist poems. Yazid al-Himyari, an Umayyad Arab and Persian poet, was most known for writing his political poetry on the walls between Sajistan and Basra, manifesting a strong hatred towards the Umayyad regime and its walis, and people used to read and circulate them very widely.Hussein Mroueh (1986) حسين مروّة، تراثنا كيف نعرفه، مؤسسة الأبحاث العربية، بيروت، [Our Heritage, How Do We Know It], Arab Research Foundation, Beirut
Graffiti, known as Tacherons, were frequently scratched on Romanesque Scandinavian church walls. When Renaissance artists such as Pinturicchio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, or Filippino Lippi descended into the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, they carved or painted their names and returned to initiate the grottesche style of decoration.British Archaeology, June 1999
Contemporary In the 1790s, French soldiers carved their names on monuments during the Napoleonic campaign of Egypt. Lord Byron's survives on one of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion in Attica, Greece.
The oldest known example of graffiti monikers were found on traincars created by hobos and railworkers since the late 1800s. The Bozo Texino monikers were documented by filmmaker Bill Daniel in his 2005 film, Who is Bozo Texino?.
Contemporary graffiti has been seen on landmarks in the US, such as Independence Rock, a national landmark along the Oregon Trail.
In World War II, an inscription on a wall at the fortress of Verdun was seen as an illustration of the US response twice in a generation to the wrongs of the Old World:
During World War II and for decades after, the phrase "Kilroy was here" with an accompanying illustration was widespread throughout the world, due to its use by American troops and ultimately filtering into American popular culture. Shortly after the death of Charlie Parker (nicknamed "Yardbird" or "Bird"), graffiti began appearing around New York with the words "Bird Lives".
Modern
Modern graffiti style has been heavily influenced by hip hop culture and started with young people in the 1960s and 70s in New York City and Philadelphia. Tags were the first form of stylised contemporary graffiti, starting with artists like TAKI 183 and Cornbread. Later, artists began to paint throw-ups and pieces on trains on the sides of subway trains and eventually moved into the city after the NYC metro began to buy new trains and paint over graffiti.
While the art had many advocates and appreciators—including the cultural critic Norman Mailer—others, including New York City mayor Ed Koch, considered it to be defacement of public property, and saw it as a form of public blight. While those who did early modern graffiti called it "writing", the 1974 essay The Faith of Graffiti referred to it using the term "graffiti", which stuck.
An early graffito outside of New York or Philadelphia was the inscription in London reading "Clapton is God" in reference to the guitarist Eric Clapton. The phrase was spray-painted by an admirer on a wall in Islington, north London, in the autumn of 1967. The graffito was captured in a photograph, in which a dog is urinating on the wall.
Films like Style Wars in the 80s depicting famous writers such as Skeme, DONDI, MinOne, and ZEPHYR reinforced graffiti's role within New York's emerging hip-hop culture. Although many officers of the New York City Police Department found this film to be controversial, Style Wars is still recognized as the most prolific film representation of what was going on within the young hip-hop culture of the early 1980s.Labonte, Paul. All City: The book about taking space. Toronto. ECW Press. 2003 Fab5 Freddy and Futura 2000 took hip-hop graffiti to Paris and London as part of the New York City Rap Tour in 1983.David Hershkovits, "London Rocks, Paris Burns and the B-Boys Break a Leg", Sunday News Magazine, 3 April 1983.
Commercialization and pop culture
With the popularity and legitimization of graffiti has come a level of commercialization. In 2001, computer giant IBM launched an advertising campaign in Chicago and San Francisco which involved people spray painting on sidewalks a peace symbol, a heart, and Tux (Linux penguin mascot), to represent "Peace, Love, and Linux." IBM paid Chicago and San Francisco collectively for punitive damages and clean-up costs.
In 2005, a similar ad campaign was launched by Sony and executed by its advertising agency in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, to market its handheld PlayStation Portable (PSP) gaming system. In this campaign, taking notice of the legal problems of the IBM campaign, Sony paid building owners for the rights to paint on their buildings "a collection of dizzy-eyed urban kids playing with the PSP as if it were a skateboard, a paddle, or a rocking horse".
Global movements When graffiti is done as an art form, it often uses the Latin script even in countries where it is not the primary writing system. English words are also often used as monikers.
Africa In the early 1990s when Amadou Lamine Ngom, known informally as Docta, fought to publicize graffiti and street art in Africa. Graffiti quickly became a way for artists to raise awareness about social, political, and environmental issues. Murals of venerated figures began to appear to encourage people to not litter near the murals. Now festivals such as FESTIGRAFF in Dakar, Senegal, exist to promote artists and experimentation.
South Africa
Graffiti has become an important part of post-apartheid South African culture, with many works being a result of implemented by-laws that legalize graffiti and street art, such as murals and installations, in public spaces and even being promoted as tourist attractions. Cape Town is one of the most recognized areas for graffiti in South Africa, having a background for it in the 1980s when racial discrimination and segregation had become so prominent that the people began to find ways to express these struggles in larger scales. It became a way to share demands against the injustices that they were witnessing against black and colored communities, and Cape Town continues to be a place for these voices to be heard, as they are currently fighting for issues like over gentrification.
Specifically in Claremont, Cape Town, four mediums would be primarily used: “koki” or fibre-tipped pen would be the most used with a 51% found distribution, spraypaint being 46%, stickers 3% and paint being the least at 1%.
Senegal In Dakar, Soly Cisse, a 1996 graduate from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, is an artist who has taken inspiration from graffiti and has translated its visual concepts into his paintings and installation work.
Europe
By the 1980s, American graffiti and hiphop had begun to become more widespread on the European graffiti scene, and at that time in the 80's American graffiti was most closely associated with the punk rock scene. By the 1990s new styles of modern graffiti had reached Eastern Europe and by the late 1990s all European countries had graffiti scenes. Contemporary social and political issues have a major influence on what occurs in graffiti scenes in many countries and this can be seen in countries such as Portugal, Germany, and England.
In the early 1980s Blek le Rat was one of the first stencil graffiti artists in Europe to begin creating stencil art on the streets of Paris and he began by creating stencils of rats and it has been commented that prior to this "...graffiti was still largely dominated by lettering and tags inspired by the New York subway movement, Blek introduced figurative stencil art to the streets of Europe. His intervention proved revolutionary. The stencil allowed complex images to be executed rapidly, reducing the time spent illegally painting in public spaces while making the work instantly recognizable. Banksy would later adopt and refine this very technique, turning it into one of the defining visual languages of contemporary street art."
Street art festivals are also present in Europe with UpFest in Bristol, England, and the East Side Gallery in Berlin, Germany and some of the earliest graffiti exhibitions outside of the USA were in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Germany