This condition is not bad, or worse than any other economic condition that has structured societies in both the near and distant past. You shouldn't cry over it, or be all hysterical like the French philosopher Baudrillard ("Disney is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real," he screams, as it if is it were the end of the world). Relax, stay cool; this is not a catastrophe; it is just a new cultural and social environment, a space, an atmosphere that is hospitable to human life (you can fill your lungs with this late capital stuff). An environment that is totally commodified, our creative responses and products are radically different than those of other ages. This, I think, is why UW professor Steven Shaviro stressed a few years ago, when he spoke with Kathy Acker at Bumbershoot, that "the locus of innovation" has changed. The gallery, the university, even bohemian neighborhoods may have been the "locus of innovation" for another age, but in the current social environment, it's moved to other locations: the streets, the Internet, dance clubs, video games, comics.
Now picture this: A woman is standing in a large basement much like the one in the opening of Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, except instead of 1,369 bright light bulbs covering "every inch" of this big space, there are thousands of TVs, monitors, radios, Walkmans, cell phones, computers, modems, printers, and Xerox machines -- made by zaibatsus in Japan, gesellschafts in Germany, and corporations in America. (Indeed this room is much like the rooms that the data center Exodus, an Internet bandwidth wholesaler in South Seattle, rents out to Internet providers -- the walls in these data rooms are lined with thousands of servers and modems.) These electronic devices bombard the woman with information, beeping noises, and flashing lights. They want her to submit to their digital will. But she doesn't yield, nor does she resist; instead she marvels at these amazing machines; she admires them; thinks they are wonderful. Soon she can't help herself... she starts to shape their noises and parts into patterns, forms, songs, and pictures, which, when she leaves the cluttered basement, will remain as imprints, impressions -- "evidence," as the San Francisco street artist Twist calls it, of her presence in this electronic environment. This is art in the age of late capitalism. This is hiphop. This is graffiti writing.
"In our society we say that having enough money buys the right to disseminate information, and the more money you have, the more information you get to put out. Isn't it great to give [society] the finger and say, 'No, I'm going to put my information in this big juicy spot'? I think that is at the core of it," explains Cause-B, who is a local graffiti writer and co-curator at Consolidated Works' exhibit of contemporary graffiti writing, called Evidence. Cause-B, who is an alert young man with lots of curly hair, is absolutely right: This is exactly what is at the heart of graffiti writing, and in a larger sense, why hiphop is the most important, immediate, beautiful, and revolutionary form of artistic expression in our age. It's an art that rebels against the current order by brazenly utilizing it as raw material for its final products. This is the correct response to our times, instead of panicking, or feeling nostalgic for the past when things seemed so simple and art had an "aura," as Walter Benjamin put it in Art in the Age of Mass Production. We should embrace this hyper and overdeveloped late world, and use it to realize new and bold forms of art. For example, the proliferation of surveillance cameras, another social phenomenon peculiar to our age, is not something to be alarmed about, as author Mike Davis is; instead we should applaud the arrival of these devices, because they present new artistic opportunities and possibilities. So let's welcome the surveillance cameras, and spend our energy determining ways we can express thoughts and ideas in a world watched by their electric eyes.
BRUTALIZING THE BOURGEOISIEThe reason hiphop culture has such a bad reputation is that the materials it uses to make art are privatized. The buildings, trains, and billboards on which graffiti is written are owned by private companies; the music that the DJ mixes and makes new music from is copyrighted; the media images and figures that disco rappers constantly refer to in their rhymes ("Watch me George Jet on you because I'm NASA" -- Rahzel) are the intellectual property of big media corporations; and the downtown sidewalk on which the breakdancers perform is for consumers and not the general public. This is why so many say that hiphop music is not real music, or as Meg Shiffler, the curator of Evidence, puts it, "[why] some consider [it] to be nothing more than vandalism, and those who participate to be social miscreants." ("So-called street artists are nothing but vandals, and should be treated as such," wrote William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1994 National Review. "People who commit graffiti often share two things in common: anonymity and a lack of talent," reported Dan Rather on the evening news back in 1982). Hiphop essentially brutalizes bourgeois sensibility, because what is most dear to the bourgeois is respect of private property.
What is even more disturbing is that part of the bourgeois' holy war against the methods, modes, and means of hiphop is inspired by their belief that there is some alternate social environment that exists outside of this one, which is saturated by corporate capital -- that there are spaces still free of money, mass media, electronic surveillance, and billboards, and it is in these alternate spaces that "authentic" art production (theater, opera, classic concerts) should occur. This delusion is a consequence of their imperfect (or incomplete) appropriation of aristocratic culture, which placed a high value on the arts and refined culture. The bourgeois, who ascended in the first stage of capitalism (if we are to use Jameson's model), adopted these aristocratic principles, and preserved them through the ages, so that even to this day their evaluation of art and its methods are informed by an age when horses shat all over the city streets, and serfs were lashed to an inch of their lives when they forgot to feed their lord's farm animals. There is no other world today except this one, composed of cities that sprawl into infinity, 24-hour cable networks, continuous airplane traffic, and satellites -- which, if we see our social world as a kind of large fish tank, form the sparkling surface of the water. Beyond the satellites there is nothing else -- just dead moons, and frozen planets.
TWIST"Maybe I'd feel different if I owned something," said Twist (Barry McGee), in a recent interview. "But the idea of owning something is just so distant, so impossible. It's not even realistic. I'm really cynical about the whole thing. That always comes up at lectures: 'What if you were a homeowner? How would you feel about graffiti then?' The whole idea of ownership is different when a 13-year-old has power. Those sensationalized news reports say, 'He did $700,000 worth of damages.' Damages? Those advertising billboards are subversively affecting you. I think that's damage. Or your seven-year-old boy singing along to something on television. I think that is damage." Though an enemy to most, Twist is a hero of our times -- the figure we should emulate and congratulate, because he and others like him make this form of life sensible, beautiful, possible. We don't need more sculptors, conductors, or ballet dancers; we need more Twists.
Twist has been a graffiti writer for about 10 years now. I'm not graffiti savvy enough to say which school he is part of, but he is currently one of the most popular and successful artists around (he was even featured in Newsweek last year). His work has been exhibited in Boston and that magnificent supercity (to borrow a word from H. G. Wells), SĂŁo Paulo, and now it is here in Seattle -- the last city in America -- in Consolidated Works -- the last gallery in the Western world. His large installation is a marvelous mix of tags, bottles with weary faces on them, pictures of streets, alleys, walls -- in a word, things that float in and out of the urban mindset. The work is both funny and sad, lazy and rigorous, delicate and rough, simple and complex. In total, it captures a large slab of our urban condition (which is the only condition; if you don't live in the city, then you live in a museum, in that horrible diorama where cavemen are displayed as they were in the days when volcanoes ruled the world), a condition marked by, as film scholar Vivian Sobchack once put it, "urban exhaustion, postmodern exhilaration, and millennial vertigo."
The other graffiti work on display at Consolidated Works is by Amaze, who is also from San Francisco, and writers from local graffiti crews By Any Means and Mad Crew. Their art is exciting in many respects: It is more fluid, more lyrical, more colorful than the graffiti writing of old. I also noticed this fluidity, this ease and dexterity, in the young breakdancers who performed on the opening night of the show. They were more articulate, or had a larger vocabulary in terms of movement, than the breakers of the mid '80s. In fact, my contemporaries (the first wave of breakers) were like crude robots designed by Sears when compared to these liquid and dazzling young creatures engineered by Immunex or Gattaca. Second, there are more b-girls directly involved in this third wave of hiphop. They are not just spectators, or fans who follow their boyfriends, but serious contributors to the art.
REFLEXIVE ARTTrue, an exhibition of graffiti in a gallery is not a new thing, even if it still shocks the bourgeoisie. This relationship between galleries and graffiti art can be found as far back as the 1982 movie Wild Style, which is about a graffiti writer from the Bronx (played by the legendary "graf artist" Lee Quinones), who with Fab Five Freddy (the greatest hiphop name of all time) crosses the bridge into Manhattan to meet and deal with the "gallery types." (Blondie's rock/rap "Rapture" is played at the moment he crosses this bridge.)
What's new about this exhibit is that as a gallery, Consolidated Works represents the latest (if not the last) stages of the form. Constantly threatened by redevelopment in it's Paul Allen-curated neighborhood, Consolidated's loose character and chronic confrontations with death (their situation is not unlike that of Scheherazade in A Thousand and One Nights, who has to keep telling stories to her husband, Schahriah, the legendary king of Samarkand, so that he won't kill her) speaks to an age where nothing -- funding, locations, an audience -- is certain. This "late" gallery is now exhibiting an art that is not only a product of late capitalism, but has reached its final stages as well. Though aspects of this can be seen in all the work here, it is most evident in Twist's installment, where he creates a double effect of graffiti within graffiti that has been whited out by anti-graffiti paint. This implosion can mean only one thing: that graffiti writing is no longer talking to us, but to itself. The potential collapse of this late gallery and late art in our era of late capitalism makes this moment (the show is on for the whole of April) all the more pleasing, because there is nothing more beautiful than the twilight of something -- be it a family, a dynasty, a day, or of course, a period of art.
