The Mole People by Jennifer Toth

Author:Jennifer Toth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 1993-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

GRAFFITI COMES FROM THE ITALIAN WORD, GRAFFIO, WHICH MEANS TO scratch. It is used to describe many different kinds of wall writings, and dates back at least to ancient Egypt. In ancient Rome, an inscription on private property asked people not to scribble on the walls. New York graffitists take credit for beginning, in the late sixties, the wave of contemporary graffiti writings not only in the United States but in Europe as well. A New York Times reporter tracked down a Washington Heights teenager named Demetrius, who signed his nickname and his street name, “Taki 183,” on hundreds of walls, stoops, monuments, and subways. “Not for the girls,” he said, “they don’t care. You do it for yourself.” Most of his successors were boys, but a few were girls, like Lady Pink.

Much of the rationale for New York’s graffiti is explained in Lee’s words—the need for self-assertion, particularly among urban youth whose creativity is stifled by an overbearing city; the need to be remembered; the need to define themselves differently than society has; and the need to feel in control, in some small way, of surroundings they deeply fear.

Chris Pape says graffiti writing was “just something to do. If we had Little League where I grew up, I probably would have put my energy into baseball and now I’d be with the Yankees.” He pauses and then smiles, “Well, maybe not the Yankees.”

Whatever the motivation, Lee, whose full name is Jorge Lee Quinones, contends that the public appreciated both the graffiti art and the artists when they were at their peak nearly two decades ago. “The art captured a movement which New Yorkers understood, a message of color on darkness, individuality, continuity, and survival,” he says. They also respected the artists beyond the art, for the danger they ran to paint the subway cars, bringing the trains to life with color and imagination amid the dark and crumbling city.

“I was always scared shitless down there in the tunnels,” Lee recalls, although also always intrigued by the subway system. “We were poor and didn’t travel much, so as a kid I would get excited whenever my mother took me on a subway train. I was almost infatuated with the construction, the speed of the machinery, its power, the darkness and mystery of the tunnels. It was like a big monster: neglected, derelict, desolate, dark, and dreary like the city itself. Each gray car looked like a sad clone.”

Lee began graffiti writing in the subways when he was fourteen and “saw graffiti as an actual thinking and physically challenging process. I saw the meditation and discipline it took. I thought, wow, I can express myself in the same heroic, anonymous way. People could see it and say ‘Yo, that kid was daring; he worked through the night to do that, while I slept.’ I wanted to be respected, whether they liked what I did or not. I could turn out color and change the way people looked at the system. I had control of the subway.

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