On the Streets, Graffiti Is Making a Name for Itself

Graffiti: Eyesore or art form?

Would you believe eyesore and art form?

As the street-art aesthetic moves ever more steadily up from the underground of antisocial vandals and miscreants into the mainstream worlds of fashion, advertising and art galleries, our culture's schizoid state of acceptance/rejection of the outlaw medium is perhaps nowhere better expressed than by Joe Connolly, as quoted in "Infamy," a 2005 documentary on graffiti and its practitioners available Tuesday ($19.95).

"This is gorgeous, this is beautiful," says Connolly, referring to one of the intricate, multicolored murals (known as "pieces") that adorn the streets not just of Connolly's home town of Los Angeles, but of contemporary urban landscapes everywhere. Then he pivots to point to a series of tangled scribbles, examples of the even more ubiquitous "tags" -- those illegible signatures that seem to decorate every flat surface of the modern city:

"As soon as you turn around from this artwork," he says, his voice dropping from admiration to disgust, "look at this pile of crap on the side."

Known as the Graffiti Guerrilla for his one-man crusade to clean up, or "buff," those spray-painted John Hancocks into oblivion, Connolly's is but one voice of many in director Doug ("Scratch") Pray's film, which, despite an effort to be nonjudgmental about people who shoplift and deface property that doesn't belong to them, comes down solidly on the side of the outlaws.

As someone who has cleaned up his share of MS-13 graffiti from his garage door -- cursing all the while -- I have to admit that even I began to see the phenomenon in a new light after watching the eye-opening film.

Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of mindless tagging, especially when gangs use it to mark territory. But after watching Pray's film, I have a better appreciation -- no, make that understanding -- of the role it plays in the hierarchy and evolution of street art. In other words, at the bottom. Which is not to say it's unimportant. In the words of Earsnot (a New York-based tagger known not just for having "bombed," or saturated, the city with countless variations of his colorful moniker, but for being gay), tagging, or the leaving of one's mark, is "the most buttery essence" of graffiti. And he's happy to leave it at that.

"Get a graffiti coloring book," he says, scorning his more artistically ambitious peers who want to waste their time painting those silly, eye-popping murals -- you know, the ones that even anti-graffiti activists like Connolly seem to like.

Not everyone in the film sees things in such black and white terms. The artist known as Claw (short for Claudia) sees the divisions between tagging, "throw-ups" (hastily executed medium-size works) and the time-consuming pieces as more of a continuum. Having graduated from a rebellious teenager into a serious professional -- she makes a living as a graffiti-themed designer and stylist, with a stylized paw as her logo -- Claw says the members of today's graffiti-art elite are not born but made.

"If you don't bomb," she says, "then don't piece," explaining why the best and most respected artists all began as taggers: Saber, Toomer, Earsnot and others profiled in the film. Okay, maybe not Earsnot. His seems to be a case of arrested development.

"If you can't support your name," she continues, "then don't bother because graffiti is not the pretty part. Piecing is just the glossy exterior. It's like, look, we're artists. But to get to that level, you have to spend a couple of years on the street, creating a name and a rep for yourself."