Ascribing, Inscribing, Describing:
‘Spatial Stories’ of Graffiti / ‘Spatial Stories’ as Graffiti

"Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor" (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1994: xxxvi).

"…The hand that writes is the body in language responding to the call and care of being" (Moussa Balkacemi, Algerian musician, quoted in Chambers, in Clarke (ed.), 1997: 238).

"Could he write something original? He was not sure what idea he wished to express, but the thought that a poetic moment had touched him took life within him like an infant hope" (Joyce, Dubliners, 1914: 71).

In Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cites, the protagonist, the Venetian traveller Marco Polo, recounts to the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan tales of the various cities in the Khan’s empire. One evening, Marco Polo speaks of the city of Dorothea. He begins,

"There are two ways of describing the city of Dorothea: You can say that four aluminium towers rise from its walls flanking seven gates with spring operated drawbridges that span the moat whose water feeds four green canals which cross the city, dividing it into nine quarters, each with three hundred houses and seven hundred chimneys. (…)
Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: ‘I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people were hurrying along the streets toward the market, the women had fine teeth and looked you straight in the eye, three soldiers on a platform played the trumpet, and all around wheels turned and coloured banners fluttered in the wind (…)’" (Calvino, 1974: 9).

What emerges from this passage is a principle duality of representing the city. On the one hand, there is a quasi-scientific, geometrical and apparently objective reading; on the other hand, there is a partial, historically-specific and subjective narration of the city. The latter is a particular individual’s "spatial story", an "anthropological, poetic and mythic experience of space," while the former can be likened to the authoritarian discourses of urban planners and administrators, "the clear text of the planned and readable city" (de Certeau, 1984: 93). These versions of the city in and as narration are often contradictory and conflictual. Contrasting "spatial stories" are read, written and told, continuously recomposing the texture of urban space.
This notion is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the graffiti writer, who is both literally and metaphorically reading, writing and telling stories of urban life as graffiti in a process of perpetual inscription over and across (the spaces of) authorised discourse. As spaces and places are transformed, graffiti itself becomes a story (as opposed to being simply a medium), or rather a collection of polymorphous tales, dealing with an individual and collective social becoming and the emergence of a sub-cultural ‘life world’ (Schutz, 1972). This ‘life world’ and the shared meanings, norms and values implicit to it are embattled with the ‘life world’ of dominant culture over physical territories in the city. Both worlds overlap and intersect in the sights and sites of urban life and produce graffiti as a veritable story of ‘cosmologisation’, an intermixing of cosmologies.
In order to approach the "spatial stories" told either directly (verbally) or indirectly (in and as spatial practice) by graffiti writers about their experience of the city, it is necessary to begin with the stories read and heard by writers. Fame is the master narrative for those who practice a type of "spray-can art" that is largely associated with but not limited to hip-hop forms of cultural expression. Here, the underlying motivation of the wall inscription is the drive to popularise an individual’s and a group’s name and perhaps to create a cult or a certain mystique surrounding that person or group. The message is not usually political in its overt content but rather attains a political effect relative to its form and context. Thus the graffiti produced in ‘bombing’, ‘piecing’ and ‘tagging’ one’s own or a group/ crew’s name differs greatly from the often radical sloganeering in which a depersonalised political message is ordinarily the fundamental incentive. Furthermore, directly political inscriptions show few indications of attention paid to aesthetic factors such as the proportion of the written letters or the skilled execution of the paintjob. For the spray-can artist, on the other hand, an investment in the aesthetic features of his or her writing is a central way to achieve fame. Next to a large quantity of tags (signatures sprayed or else written with markers), pieces and throw-ups (often rough and simplified sketch-like versions of pieces, which in turn are carefully painted pictures), the writer can impress through style. Whether the inscription demonstrates an understanding and command of established aesthetic codes or radically departs from traditional forms of expression and strives for innovation, a writer’s style becomes the currency of his or her prestige.
Another way to innovate and gain prestige is through inscribing a place that possesses certain qualities, which are simultaneously challenges. Berlin-based writer Esher explains, "You can gain fame by finding an innovative spot; by taking graffiti where it really hasn’t been yet. So you aim to discover a new spot: something busier, bigger, higher - seemingly out of reach."
"You always check for new spots," argues Kasie, also from Berlin, "You try to discover something that’s interesting; where many people pass or lines (of public transportation) meet."
What precedes the writing is a reading - a scanning and investigating of the city from the perspective of prospective fame. Former graffiti writer Joek notes, "You begin to assess and hierarchise places: How visible is the spot? How ‘paintable’ is the surface? What colour and texture does it have? How high is it? Is it climbable? What are the conditions for drawing at night? How dangerous is it? Is it difficult to get to and from the spot? How much time might one allow oneself to paint there? What is the spot’s strategic relevance to other pieces in the area? And so on…"
Together with the cognisance of various stylistic regimes and techniques, the established taxonomies and properties of place constitute new discursive formations, bodies of knowledge and narratives that are "stories (that) ‘go in a procession’ ahead of social practices [the acts of spray-painting] in order to open a field for them" (de Certeau, 1984: 125). The particular experiences of the graffiti writer writing in the city, the practices performed and "spatial stories" thus told are shaped by but also shape these knowledges and discourses.
Despite the danger of stating the obvious, it is important to note here that not all writers share a similar degree of ambition to innovate, nor do they pursue fame with an equal conviction. From this follows an unequal circulation and application of graffiti-specific knowledge.
Nonetheless, it could be argued that most committed writers share a similar understanding of the hierarchies of place, which are based on the degree of visibility, challenge and novelty constituted by a specific spot. As Joek explains, "To have a piece along a train line is generally of high prestige. To do a piece on a wall in a station is of still higher prestige and to do a piece somewhere like Bahnhof Zoo [Zoologischer Garten station, one of the busiest stations in Berlin, where three subway lines, five city-wide railway lines and inter-city and international rail traffic conjoin] is extraordinary. Painting trains is prestigious; they’re heavily guarded and (sub-) culturally significant."
Based on such widely accepted classifications, which tend to be more expansive and include sites along motorways and inner-city areas away from train lines, merely a number of graffiti writers begin to gather strategic information on how to access certain spots and how to maximise the available time for painting without being noticed. "Some writers check the spot from a distance a couple of nights in a row," explains Cross, "They know exactly when, for instance, a train will arrive at a cleaning bay or a car depot. They note when the driver leaves, when the security teams arrive, when the cleaning staff finish work and the security teams depart before the next driver arrives. In a ten to twenty minute time-window, they can rock the train."
Esher notes, "A good writer could also be a good thief. There are guys out there who not only look at blueprints, maps and track charts to plan their approach and escape, some study criminology. They get out books on police tactics, how the cops organise arrests, how they develop a certain look at suspects. They adopt the gaze of the cops and learn how to behave and dress inconspicuously. They also develop an eye for plain-clothes cops: three guys in a sedan, recent make, German model? You might want to be careful."
The acquisition of these forms of knowledge, the reading of certain stories, texts or scripts so to say, must itself be understood as a type of writing that serves as a basis for the actual writing of the sprayer, the graffiti. This preposition is largely founded on the notion that the spatial practices implicated in ‘reading’ certain patterns of places (i.e. going to the yard, observing and noting the security shifts) constitute what de Certeau calls "enunciative practices", "manipulations of imposed spaces, tactics relative to particular situations" (de Certeau, 1984, quoted in Mirzoeff, 1998: 148). These practices are enunciative in so far as they entail alternative articulations within and of city space. The way a place is used with the intents and purposes of gathering graffiti-relevant information is ‘a different story’, composed of formally unintended, possibly subversive acts of moving, looking and hearing. Thus the graffiti writer as reader is also at once a reader (of the city in the widest sense) as writer (of personalised meanings in response to specific visions and auditions).
But what kind of a spatial story does the writer as graffiti writer tell? Both directly in the form of a verbal account of bombing, tagging and piecing and indirectly in and as symbolically meaningful spatial practice? In a section entitled "The Experience" in Backjumps magazine, a self-professed magazine for "aerosol-culture", Henry Chalfant, who is perhaps most famous for his photographs taken throughout the eighties of New York writers and their pieces, recounts,

"We hooked up one cool midnight in Manhattan and drove out to East New York in my Vanagon. New Lots was considered easy at the time so we went there… It was the good old days - there was a hole in the fence - and we crawled through it into the yard. The guys set up their paints and started working (…). After about an hour, Min suddenly said, ‘Yo, chill’. I looked up just in time to see three ‘work bums’ coming at us through the rows of trains, wielding pipes menacingly. We grabbed the crate of cans and ran, scrambling down the gravel embankment and back through the hole in the fence where we had entered.
We decided to go to another spot. Min knew the hatchway into the Sutphin Ave layup that lay underneath the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens. We drove here and found the hatch on a quiet street alongside the expressway, opened it and climbed down. Once inside, to get to the layup we had to crawl on our bellies over the third rail, and under the rows of idling F trains. Being so close to all that electric current made the hair on my neck rise. I can still smell that oily metallic odour of the trains, hear those mechanical sounds that resting trains make and feel the rush whenever a train sped by within a few feet of our crouching forms (Backjumps, Issue 16: 4)."

A tenor of adventure, sensual intensity and of an industrial sublime permeates the tale. In places ordinarily inscribed in depersonalised and functional narratives, tales that have more to do with the economic organisation of public transport, for instance when and where to park specific trains destined for certain passenger or maintenance services, the writer experiences intensity and poetics. In his or her acts, the ‘landscape of organisational power’ is transformed into a landscape of pleasure, desire and fantasy; turned from a terra administrativa to a terra intensiva/ sensitiva. Through the spatial practices of the writer, a neutral place becomes a personalised space.
If we hold ‘place’ to be a site of disciplinary order, a location where "the law of the ‘proper’ rules", then space is its reincarnation in action: as a location traversed and populated temporarily, spontaneously, possibly intrusively. As de Certeau notes, "Space is a practiced place" (de Certeau, 1984: 117). What mediates the relationship between place and space is the story told about the particular location in question. "Stories (…) carry out a labour that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places" (ibid., 118).
The story uttered by the writer transforming the ordinary train yard devoid of passion into a "liminal zone" (Shields, 1990), a locale "in which the codes of normal social experience (are) reversed" in conditions of acute imminence, is that of fame. Fame in the sense that one is driven by the desire to popularise one’s own or the crew’s name through the quantity or quality of inscription, and fame in the sense that one is taking on and acting out the mythical persona one is striving to construct and advance in various forms of inscription.
Thus in the yard and on the rooftop, in short, on a mission, the writer’s mundane identity is shunned in favour of an imaginary one. As Joek explains, "Your name becomes your superhero alias. You play a role; you live out a role. I can live out my own personal adventure film where others only drive or ride to work. Some writers will put on black clothes and wear terror masks, almost like urban ninjas. They approach through secret passages, evade the authorities who become your ‘enemies’, and try to escape unscathed with the ‘damage’ done." As the place is being practiced, written on and written in (the logic of graffiti), it becomes a space - the metamorphosis recorded in the visible inscription. (The process is, of course, reversible: if the train is cleaned, or rather ‘buffed’, the wall painted over and the tag removed, the space is reordered as an organised place and place of organisations.)
Simultaneously, in the course of place transformation/ space becoming, the writer experiences a similar becoming of his or her own. Involved in action and intensity, exciting sights and sounds, tales of conquest, flight and capture, the writer is transported into a more a dramatic, a more passionate life .
Although this being is grounded in the realm of imagination, fantasy and myth, the cosmos of the action hero, the writer’s identity is not wholly imaginary or delusory. Throughout the community, or rather throughout the discontinuous group of people who practice graffiti, similar mythical sensations circulate and thus validate and materialise subjective projections and imaginings. A shared sense of drama, for instance, connects writers in situations of pursuit and escape. Joek recounts,

"We were doing some tags near Bahnhof Zoo. All of a sudden these plain-clothes cops were running toward us. Instantly turbo-adrenalin started rushing through my veins. I darted off in the direction of a busy underpass, stumbled and slammed on the ground but felt no pain. I got up and raced through the bushes lining the underpass. In heavy pursuit, seeing that to cross the busy street was my only chance of escape, I jumped a ledge of a height of approximately three metres. I lost my cap and nearly got run over but made it to the other side. There, another band of cops were chasing my friend. They didn’t seem to notice me, and I walked away from the scene slowly and headed off home. As soon as I reached my apartment, I called up everyone from my crew to check if they made it alright. Nobody was arrested. It was the coolest feeling! We compared our accounts of the chase and felt heroic."

Shared experiences substantiate subjective impressions. As much as the physical presence of the inscription of one’s alias throughout the city materialises one’s individual becoming, so too does the formation and formulation of collective meanings and memories materialise both an individual and a communal becoming. These developments are implicated in a relation of reciprocity: The individual writer’s self-actualisation is part and parcel of the communal becoming; while conversely, the formation of collective memories and meanings forms the basis of the writer’s self-realisation.
One writer remembers the feeling of genuine importance he experienced upon walking into the Berlin club Boogaloo with paint on his hands, "It was obvious I just came back from a mission. All writers were sitting in one corner. I shook hands with a couple of the guys and recounted my evening’s adventure. This was at a time when every sixteen year-old had a tag. I was down with the big guys, doing pieces." The writer reinvented as glamorous and heroic is certainly a function dependant upon the participation and endorsement of a larger group, while he himself as actualised mythic figure, as personification of certain norms, values and ideals, gives meaning and form to the group at large.
This relation of reciprocity between the writer and the group underpins a ‘life world’, a diegesis conjured up by the proliferation of certain narratives, an "atopia, another place, a diverse way of inhabiting the world (Chambers quoted in Clarke, 1997: 236)" based on an ensemble of shared impressions and practices. Thus the spatial story of the writer as graffiti writer, dealing with the circumstances and processes of inscription, is a story of place-to-space transformation, individual and collective becoming through activities and experiences that "respond to the call and care of being" and, in the interweaving of the former and the latter, of life world inception and integration.
So far there has been an emphasis on the practices surrounding inscription. But what can be said about the tags’, pieces’, throw ups’ form, content and context? The story of graffiti as writing (in the objective sense) marks a departure from the acts of inscription to the inscription’s expression.
In their study of graffiti, Back, Keith and Solomos suggest that, "graffiti writing invokes a technology of communication that is neither entirely logocentric [from the Greek logos - speech, word, reason] nor merely symbolic, but instead creates a regime of communication that refigures the public sphere just as it is defined by the surfaces of inscription on which this and other forms of wall writing occur" (Back et al, quoted in Slaydon and Whilock, 1999: 75). They urge to think about "writing as invariably aimed at an audience (and) articulation as invariably and simultaneously both aesthetic and political, crystallising complex desires, dreams and claims" (ibid., 70, 71). From these observations follows that on the level of expression, graffiti is still a story of subjectivation and identity formation, place-space transformation and contestation.
While on the more phenomenological level of feeling and impression the writer may experience a becoming, a transformation of the self, during and in relation to the practices of inscription, identity can be constructed and transformed on the level of representation through the expressive dimension of the piece. With a degree of agency vis-à-vis certain structures and strictures constituted by the symbolic codes of graffiti as a linguistic system, the writer can (re-) present his or her self to an audience of close initiates as well as to the wider public. The combination of the condition of relative anonymity alongside a panoply of styles to draw from and develop allows for a certain freedom of identity expression or even self-idealised expression. Kasie asserts, "When you write, you represent yourself and your vibe, your mood, what you feel like. You express yourself, but you can kind of be who you want to be."
"For some writers the feeling can be empowering," notes Esher, "Sometimes you see people checking out your pieces, and then you overhear them talk about you based on what they imagine just through seeing your ‘graf’. It can be fun to listen in on what or who they think you are." Identities are malleable and change in and through writing, depending on the knowledge of and command over the lexicon of styles. By the same token, places are transformed and turned into spaces.
In the preceding discussion of place-transformation, the emphasis has been on spatial practice. In the act of walking, running, hiding, crawling, climbing, painting and escaping - in short, through a range of localised "enunciatory operations" - an "ordered", "normal/ normative" and "geometrical" place is rewritten and retold (hence enunciatory) as an "anthropological, poetic and mythic" space (de Certeau, 1984). But on a much more concrete level, spaces are created and re-created as their physical texture is recomposed through the actual inscription. To tag a place is to lay claim to it, to stake it out, to exercise certain self-declared rights to it and rites of self-declaration on it. The inscription, based on the fact that it is a meaningful invocation of a technology of communication, not only changes the surface - a random scribbling could do that - but it turns an ordered place into an appropriated and personalised space. As Back et al have argued, this points to "a refiguring of the public sphere." This notion unfolds along three dimensions: A physical, a symbolic and an aesthetic one.
In graffiti, public places are prone to be written on and thus ‘rewritten’. But the range and scope of physical re-figuration within the public sphere only begins to emerge when one considers writers who tag and piece with a sensitivity to a city-wide or local context. Here, the piece is not an uncanny apparition, a brief and shocking glimpse of what unruliness lurks in the sub-cultural strata below the otherwise ordered and disciplined public arena. It is at once the act of and the representation of the act of an invasion, contestation and appropriation (repossession?) of material spaces in the public sphere. "The background and the environment of the spot are important," explains Kasie, "I always try to customise my piece in view of its immediate confines. It’s my way of being sarcastic about the spot. I kind of respect it by noticing its character, and then I shamelessly do my thing with it. I make it speak for me, I make it tell my story, a different story." This act is more than a type of "narrow declarative individualism": It is a writing over and across the places of authorised discourse, a re-figuration of the public sphere through an inscription of certain places into the life world of the graffiti writer. As such it becomes a symbolic and politically significant act.
The symbolic dimension of the inscription is at one and the same time a struggle over inclusion in the public sphere and a non-discursive anti-mainstream political gesture. Back et al write, "We would argue that graffiti as a communicative technology is crucially implicated in an emergent spatial politics of entitlement and belonging within the city" (Back et al, quoted in Slaydon and Whilock, 1999: 97). The authors emphasise the redemptive properties opened up by graffiti to marginalised or disenfranchised groups. Those without a platform, forum or voice make themselves heard/ seen through their inscription - be it a monochrome tag or a colourful piece. This may be a gesture of resistance against marginalisation on the grounds of race, class or ideological conviction, hence a political enunciation permeating and refiguring the public sphere in so far as it carves out a space for its pronunciation, but it is not a discursive form of articulation. No arguments or motions for debate are brought forth.
A similar condition can be charted in relation to the anti-mainstream attitude running through Berlin’s graffiti scene. Esher, for instance, claims that graffiti is "a way to fight back against the mainstream." He argues, "As billboards bomb the visual field of everyday life, the writer bombs back by using a similar visual technique to make an antithetical statement." But even in the most literal realisation of this contention, in writing on and over billboards, the political dimension of the message does not exceed a simple statement of disrespect for and resistance to the norms and values of a dominant culture. Cets, Comic and Kizoe have painted over billboards in the district of Marzahn. They sprayed their pieces time and time again across two specific boards that were repeatedly ‘buffed’. After the fifth time, Kizoe commented, "If Hornbach and Hoeffner (the firms advertising on and owning the billboards) are up for it, this can go on for decades. But if we stop feeling it one day, we’re just gonna saw or burn this shit down ‘cause it’s either we who advertise or no one" (quoted in Overkill magazine, Issue 11/ 1999: 21). This echoes Kasie’s remark that, "graffiti is illegal advertising - going against commercial advertising, which we are forced to see." Nodal/ focal points of consumer culture might be somewhat challenged or defaced in a spirit of opposition and defiance, summarised succinctly by Kocs 43, who toasts, "Big up to all who somehow or other offer resistance to dumbing-down, police terror and total surveillance, narrow-mindedness, fascism and the endless sea of blind, deaf and dumb individuals driven by consumption" (ibid., 30). However, the actual inscription is ordinarily devoid of more specific political agendas and demands, driving writers like William "Upski" Wimsatt to wonder, "When is graffiti gonna change something besides just a wall?" (Wimsatt, 1994: 104).
As a spatial story of place-transformation and individual and communal becoming graffiti changes quite a few things. But as an arena for discursive and organised political activity, it somehow collapses under the weight of its own aesthetic baggage. The continuous emphasis on style has the effect of turning "the message into the medium," as Eshun puts it (1998: 73), wherein the writer’s name, the message, is more a form or channel that allows in repeated inscription for the individuating proliferation of a vast array of aesthetic styles, which are as much if not more expressive than the writer’s name as logos. Here, any discursive message is already compromised by the calligrammatic (calligram: an image in the shape of writing ) nature of the tag, throw-up or piece, which turns the text into drawing, breaking down words into lines and arabesques, significant in a different register than the logological. The function and effect of any written argument or rallying statement on a literal level is destabilised by graffiti’s specific investment in style. The form holds the written captive on the level of allusion where the verbal is one of the many - not the primary - connotations of the inscription. And yet, graffiti as a unique technology of communication transmits (albeit somewhat unspecified) political attitudes and a complex set of norms, values, desires, dreams and claims indicative of the graffiti writer’s life world. Hence it can be argued that the aesthetico-expressive dimension of graffiti refigures the public sphere in so far as it refigures and "challenges the very status of language, dialogue and discourse within (it)" (Back et al, quoted in Slaydon and Whilock, 1999: 70).

As graffiti restructures and develops the terms of communication within the public realm; as it constitutes a forum if not for the formulation at least for the exclamation of resistance, and as it changes and claims spaces within the public sphere, the authorised discourses within the city and administrative/ normative narrations about it are confronted by anthropological, subjective and mythical spatial stories. As these spatial stories, dealing with individual and collective becoming and place-space transformation, are read, written and told, they reveal by metonymical transfer, wherein a part stands for a larger whole, an emergent sub-cultural life world. This life world is not merely an abstract symbolic order, it is materialised and physically enacted as graffiti recomposes the texture of urban terrain. The spaces in the city reinvented, re-inscribed and re-produced are shared and thus contested territories between the life world of a dominant and an alternative culture.
As both worlds overlap and intersect in the sites/ sights of urban life, they produce graffiti as a story of cosmologisation. While the graffiti writers’ experiences of the city may be discontinuous and contradictory, the writers always tell a spatial story of cosmologisation in their very tags, pieces and throw-ups. This becomes evident if one begins to conceive of the writing on the surface as suture and the surface of the writing as palimpsest. In the piece as suture, the edges of two distinct worlds are joined. Below the paint lies the cosmos of a rational and disciplined society, while from above the paint, extending outward from its two-dimensionality, rises the diegesis of the graffiti writer. The piece becomes a permeable membrane that allows both worlds to flow into each other with the effect that, as Back et al have noted, the surface of inscription gives meaning to the writing and vice versa . This is only possible if we conceive of the surface as a type of palimpsest, written upon several times (but at least twice) with remnants of earlier, imperfectly erased ‘writing’ still visible.
The initial inscription - that of urban planners, bureaucratic committees and other officials - is more a writing in (-to their ‘discursive empire’) than writing on, designing, ordering and structuring the surface. The second inscription is a writing over (the discourse of authority) that does not completely efface the first. An example for this kind of palimpsest are painted trains, particularly whole cars, that show traces of the trains’ initial design and layout - the lines and patterns of their panels, doors and handles - appearing from underneath the coat of paint applied by the writer. In the surface-as-palimpsest both worlds are conjoined and begin to flow into each other through the piece-/ suture-as-membrane.

But despite the overlapping and intersecting of life worlds, producing certain openings and corridors, the cosmologisation implicit to graffiti does not allow for an easy passage of people from one realm to the other. Writers struggle to gain acceptance as artists within the world of dominant culture while uninitiated individuals are denied entry to the esoteric cosmos of graffiti writing, unable to make any sense (except a sense of nuisance) of the tags, throw-ups and pieces. And yet, although this invisible barrier is hurtful to the public and the writer in a variety of ways, causing misunderstanding and often antagonistic relations, it is the very foundation that sustains graffiti as something special, something more imaginary, something passionate, intensive and volatile.
No wonder it’s called ‘bombing’.

All quotations of Berlin-based writers have been translated from German to English.

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