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ABSTRACT
This essay theorizes the notion of the emplaced vernacular, a type of vernacular expression that is mobilized by the production of aesthetics in particular places. I argue that 1970s graffiti in New York City emerged as an aesthetic rupture in response to the spatial exigencies of postwar urban renewal projects. Analysis of The New York Times coverage of graffiti writers “Kilroy was Here” from WWII and “Taki 183” from the 1970s demonstrates how the force of this emplaced vernacular was disciplined within dominant spatial ideologies, producing an aesthetic that continues to enable and constrain contemporary efforts of vernacular subjectification.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks are due to Kevin DeLuca, Danielle Endres, and Helga Shugart at the University of Utah, whose guidance helped produce the notion of the emplaced vernacular, and to Glen Feighery, who encouraged me to explore the historical dimensions of graffiti in New York City. Special thanks are also due to Greg Dickinson for his feedback on the spatial components of this argument, to the anonymous reviewers for their insights, and to Rob DeChaine for his strong editorial leadership.
Notes
1 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 91.
2 Joanne Reitano, The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 2.
3 Ibid., 3.
4 David Grimstead, as quoted in Ibid.
5 Jack Stewart, Graffiti Kings: New York City Transit Art of the 1970’s (New York: Melcher Media, n.d.); Janice Rahn, Painting Without Permission: Hip-Hop Graffiti Subculture (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2002).
6 Don Hogan Charles, “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals,” The New York Times, July 21, 1971
7 Ibid.
8 Associated Press, “Transit Association Ships a Street Car to Shelter Family of ‘Kilroy Was Here,” The New York Times, December 24, 1946.
9 Ibid.
10 Charles Skilling, “Kilroy Was Here,” Western Folklore 22, no. 4 (1963): 276–77.
11 Ibid.
12 Karen L. Adams, “Gang Graffiti as a Discourse Genre,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 1/3 (1997): 33–360; Ella Chmielewska, “Framing [con]text: Graffiti and Place,” Space and Culture 10 (2007): 145–69; Daniel D. Gross and Timothy D. Gross, “TAGGING: Changing Visual Patterns and the Rhetorical Implications of a New Form of Graffiti,” Etc.- A Review of General Semantics 50 (1993): 275–85; Nick Lynn and Susan J. Lea, “‘Racist Graffiti: Text, Context and Social Comment,” Visual Communication 4, no. 4 (2005): 39–43; Lachlan MacDowall, “In Praise of 70K: Cultural Heritage and Graffiti Style,” Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 20, no. 4 (2006): 471–84; Janice Rahn, Painting Without Permission: Hip Hop Graffiti Subculture (Westport, CT: Westin & Garvey, 2002); Yiannis Zaimakis, “Welcome to the Civilization of Fear’: On Political Graffiti Heterotopias in Greece in Times of Crisis,” Visual Communication 14, no. 4 (2015); Victoria Carrington, “I Write, Therefore I Am: Texts in the City,” Visual Communication 8, no. 4 (2009): 409–25; Elinor Light, “The Rhetoric of Visual Play: An Analysis of Postsubject Voice in New York City,” Visual Communication Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2017): 40–53.
13 Carrington, “I Write, Therefore I Am.”
14 Lynn and Lea, “Racist Graffiti,” 42.
15 Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62, no. 1 (1995): 20.
16 Ibid., 21.
17 For an excellent review of literature surrounding the vernacular as it relates to public address, religion, performance studies, and education, see Robert Glenn Howard, “The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 5 (2008): 490–513. In addition, see: Gerard A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008); Jeffrey Bennett, “‘Born This Way’: Queer Vernacular and the Politics of Origins,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (2014): 211–30; Anjali Vats, “(Dis)owning Bikram: Decolonizing Vernacular and Dewesternizing Restructuring in the Yoga Wars,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 4 (2016): 325–45. For vernacular engagements with the visual, see Charlotte Eubanks, “Visual Vernacular: Rebus, Reading, and Urban Culture in Early Modern Japan,” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 28, no. 1 (2012): 57–70; Taberez Ahmen Neyazi, “Media, Mediation and the Vernacular Public Arena in India,” Visual Communication 10, no. 3 (2014): 367–400; Christina M. Smith and Kelly M. McDonald, “The Mundane to the Memorial: Circulating and Deliberating the War in Iraq through the Vernacular Soldier-Produced Videos,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 4 (2011): 292–313.
18 Ono and Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” 23–25.
19 Howard, “The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media,” 496.
20 Ibid., 497.
21 Howard, “The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media”; Smith and McDonald, “The Mundane to the Memorial.”
22 Doreen B. Massey, For Space (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2005), 12.
23 See Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1996); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1991); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1990); Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Doreen B. Massey, For Space (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2005); Tim Cresswell, Place, A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); Tim Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1996); Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). For a sustained discussion of the changing meanings of place and space as well as the role of Christianity and the hard sciences in forming the notion of space as abstract and infinite, see Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
24 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity.
25 Cresswell, Place, A Short Introduction; Tuan, Topophilia.
26 Massey, For Space, 11.
27 Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics: The Rhetorical Performances of the Civil Rights Memorial,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2000): 31–55; Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2005): 27–47; Greg Dickinson, “Joe’s Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2002): 5–27; Sonja Modesti, “Home Sweet Home: Tattoo Parlors as Postmodern Spaces of Agency,” Western Journal of Communication 72, no. 3 (2008): 197–212; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007).
28 Blair and Michel, “Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics”; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism.
29 Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting.”
30 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 13.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
35 Rancière, Dissensus, 135.
36 Michael K. Middleton, Samantha Senda-Cook, and Danielle Endres, “Articulating Rhetorical Field Methods: Challenges and Tensions,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 386–406. Also see Elinor Light, “Visualizing Homeland: Remembering 9/11 and the Production of the Surveilling Flâneur,” Cultural Studies ⇔ Critical Methodologies 1–12 (2016); Sara L. McKinnon et al. (Eds.), Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016).
37 Greg Dickinson, “The Pleasantville Effect: Nostalgia and the Visual Framing of (White) Suburbia,” Western Journal of Communication 70, no. 3 (2006): 212–33; Raka Shome, “Space Matters: The Power and Practice of Space,” Communication Theory 13, no. 1 (2003): 39–56.
38 Brian L. Tochterman, The Dying City: Postwar New York and the Ideology of Fear (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 5.
39 Ibid., 4.
40 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, Inc, 1961), 22.
41 Tochterman, The Dying City, 4.
42 Brian D. Goldstein, The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., 20.
45 Tochterman, The Dying City, 4.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 4.
49 Tochterman, The Dying City, 3.
50 Ibid., 190.
52 Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place, 31.
53 Tochterman, The Dying City, 219.
54 Goldstein, The Roots of Urban Renaissance, 11.
55 Jack Stewart, Graffiti Kings: New York City Mass Transit Art of the 1970s (Abrams, NY: Melcher Media), 20.
56 Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, Subway Art (London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 1984).
57 Rancière, Dissensus, 139.
58 Carrington, “I Write, Therefore I Am.”
59 Goldstein, The Roots of Urban Renaissance, 7.
60 “A Kilroy Really Was There,” Special to The New York Times, October 31, 1946; “Associated Press, ‘Transit Association Ships a Street Car to Shelter Family of ‘Kilroy Was Here,’” The New York Times, December 24, 1946; “Who is ‘Kilroy’?” The New York Times, January 12, 1947; “Kilroy the Immortal,” The New York Times, March 27, 1957; Don Hogan Charles, “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals,” The New York Times, July 21, 1971; “Underground Graffiti” Letters to the Editor, The New York Times, March 9, 1972. I have included one additional essay because it explicitly discusses the graffiti aesthetic emerging around the time of Taki 183: Frank J. Prial, “Subway Graffiti Here Called Epidemic,” The New York Times, February 11, 1972.
61 Philip Wander, “The Third Persona: The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism,” Central States Speech Journal 34 (1984): 1–18; Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91–111; Michael C. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 1–17.
62 “Who is Kilroy?”
63 “A Kilroy Really Was There.”
64 Charles, “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals.”
65 Ibid.
66 “Underground Graffiti.”
67 Prial, “Subway Graffiti Here Called Epidemic.”
68 Ibid.
69 Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place, 40.
70 “Kilroy Was Here.”
71 Ibid.
72 “Transit Association Ships a Street Car”; “Who is ‘Kilroy’?”; “Kilroy the Immortal.”
73 “Transit Association Ships a Street Car.”
74 “Who is ‘Kilroy’?”
75 “Kilroy the Immortal.”
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid.
78 Stewart, Graffiti Kings; Rahn, Painting Without Permission.
79 Charles, “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals.”
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 Prial, “Subway Graffiti Here Called Epidemic,” para. 7.
85 Charles, “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals.”
86 Robert W. Snyder, Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
87 Rancière, Dissensus, 38.
88 “City and State Anti-Graffiti Legislation,” New York City Government Website, http://www.nyc.gov/html/nograffiti/html/legislation.html.
89 Sean Gardiner and Jessica Firger, “Rare Charge Is Unmasked,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 20, 2011.
90 Mona Abaza, “Walls, Segregating Downtown Cairo and the Mohammed Mahmud Street Graffiti,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 1 (2013): 122–39.
91 Suzanne Vranica, “‘Fearless Girl’ Steals the Conversation,” The Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2017, Business Section.
92 Colin Dwyer, “Sculptor of Wall Street Bull Says ‘Fearless Girl’ Horns in on His Work,” NPR, April 12, 2017.
93 Bethany McLean, “The Backstory Behind That ‘Fearless Girl’ Statue on Wall Street,” The Atlantic, March 13, 2017.