Rafael Schacter on Graffiti

Graffiti has a long pedigree, whether our starting point is the wall paintings of Lascaux, the carved crudities of Roman toilets or the G.I. inspired Kilroy of World War II’s European theater. But Graffiti – notice our use of the capital G – and its focus on individual tags has a more recent provenance and should be regarded as a legitimate art form, with its own canon, its own ‘kings,’ its own rules of engagement. That’s the message Rafael Schacter delivers to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast.

Schacter, an associate professor in anthropology and material culture at University College London, has a decidedly non-traditional c.v. for an academic. Before entering the ivory tower he was a fixture in the London underground music scene around the turn of the millennium, in part as one half of Ill Logic & Raf, a duo focus on DJong and music production.

In the academy he heads the Material Culture section of UCL’s Anthropology Department and has penned a series of monographs centering on Graffiti, the most recent being 2024’s Monumental Graffiti.

The podcast can be downloaded by right-clicking this link. A transcript of the interview appears below.

David Edmonds: It is perhaps an unusual topic to specialize in, but Rafael Schacter, an anthropologist at University College London, studies graffiti, especially the practice of writing a name or tag in spray paint on public buildings. This is now a worldwide phenomenon, but who does it and why?

Raphael Schachter, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Rafael Schacter: Lovely to be here.

David Edmonds: We’re talking today about graffiti. What is graffiti?

Rafael Schacter: Well, it’s a difficult question to answer, but I will try and be brief. So graffiti broadly illicit name writing in public space, but one that is part of a wider visual subculture emergent from the east coast of the USA in the late 60s, early 70s.

David Edmonds: So, I was going to ask you about the history. Is that where it comes from?

Rafael Schacter: Yeah, so Graffiti, with a capital G, as I’ll call it, has lots of different names. Hip hop graffiti. Or, I personally prefer just graffiti writing, but this form of practice did emerge from the U.S., some people say first in Philadelphia, the late 60s, the start of the 70s, moving to New York. Often there’s a kind of classic New York Times article called “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals,” which was published in 1971. And that often is a key marker because it was seen to be a moment in which more people started to take up graffiti writing from that point.

David Edmonds: And you talk about graffiti writing, if I were to scroll “Tories out” on my local wall, would that be graffiti?

Rafael Schacter: Well I would say well done first. No, following that I would say that that’s what I would call political graffiti, so lowercase p, lowercase g, which is a very common form of graffiti. I focus on Graffiti, capital G, post-East Coast USA form of name writings. But there are of course lots of different forms of lowercase g graffiti, from political graffiti, a very important form of public communication, but also what’s called latrinalia, so graffiti writing in toilets, and a myriad of other forms of writing which can take place in churches or monuments and has historically for hundreds or thousands of years.

But I wouldn’t put that within the capital G Graffiti form of practice, which is about name writing. It’s about writing your name. It’s a game which is formed into a huge visual subculture.

And I think it’s a very kind of clear form with a canon, with a clear series of what they call kings or very key important historical figures, with a really kind of clear set form of aesthetic regulations, which for me, places Graffiti, what I call kind of capital G Graffiti or graffiti writing, as actually a very specific genre of art, and a very specific subculture.

David Edmonds: One of the factors, I guess, that’s interesting about Graffiti is that it tends to be done in private, if not in secret.

Rafael Schacter: Yes, that’s correct.

So one of the things actually that is fascinating to me about graffiti is the way that the image is so publicly visible, it’s meant to be seen, both by the kind of internal public of other graffiti writers, but also by the public at large. But the practice or the performance of writing it has to be done in secret, invisibly. So you have this particular relationship between visibility and invisibility, where the name must be seen.

And actually, the name is really a part of the self, the name is really a portrait, as much as it is an image. But equally, the body itself is invisible. Often they will have multiple names, actually, but that name is really, it’s their self, it’s who they are.

So of the many Graffiti writers I know, their Graffiti name and their birth certificate name will be used interchangeably. So really, I am talking about their chosen name and the name the writers choose, which becomes really part of their identity, which is chosen both because of the way the letters kind of fit together or can fit together, the possible alphabetical relationships between the kind of letters, but also the sound, the meaning that it connotes, that really is a key part of that Graffiti writer’s identity.

David Edmonds: We mentioned that it’s often done in secret, without prying eyes. Is it also done usually alone?

Rafael Schacter: That’s a good question, actually. And there is this archetype of the lone, disaffected hoodie-wearing graffiti writer, which is generally pretty much untrue apart from the hoodie. And yes, some of them do like writing on their own.

In general, though, it’s quite a collective practice. One of the things I talk about and write about quite a lot is taking away this view of this disaffected, angry, violent young youth and really seeing it as a very collective community practice. The Graffiti world is a highly, highly social world.

David Edmonds: So this would be a group, perhaps, of three or four relatively young people, mainly male, saying let’s go tonight and graffiti this particular place.

Rafael Schacter: Absolutely. Of course, there’s so much that goes alongside that, which is sitting around, you know, looking at Graffiti together, doing sketches together. It’s a very homosocial practice of people coming together. And I mean, I’ve said this previously and kind of got in trouble for it, but Graffiti writers are nerds. They might not want people to know that, but they really are. They like drawing. They like drawing together. It just so happens that the type of drawing that they do is very visible and most often illegal.

David Edmonds: Illegal, visible and often in places that are quite inaccessible. Is that part of it? Is it part of the challenge to graffiti a place that makes people wonder how the hell did they do that?

Rafael Schacter: Yeah, that’s perfect. I mean, that’s exactly right.

And actually, that’s part of the image. So, you know, Alfred Gell, who’s an anthropologist, I have taken a huge amount from in my own work. But Gell always talked about how every image, every painting, for example, is a performance. And when we see that painting, we kind of mentally, even if not consciously, go through the performance of how that came to be. Often, it’s the separation between what we know about drawing, and I’m not a very good painter, and then seeing an incredible painting that then creates this kind of cognitive block where we’re like, “How did that come to be?” That’s the magic of art for Gell. And likewise, it works exactly with that in terms of Graffiti.

When you see an image, like up high on like a bridge, and you’re just like, “How did that come to be?” So that performance is part of the image. So when you see the images, you’re also seeing, even if not consciously, the magic of how it came to appear.

David Edmonds: You want this to be seen, so we’re talking about urban settings predominantly. Is that right?

Rafael Schacter: It definitely is an urban act in most general.

As part of many of these kind of canonical regulations or canonical rules or canonical goals, going all city, which means appearing on every subway line across the city, or really being able to take over an entire city, being in every place, north, south, east, west, that is definitely an aim. That doesn’t mean there is no Graffiti within rural areas, but it’s a different kind of practice with a different kind of viewership.

David Edmonds: You mentioned that it started in the US and it’s traveled. Are there many cities untouched by this graffiti revolution?

Rafael Schacter: I mean, not many that I’ve been to, to be honest. I really, really do think that people have not understood how incredible it is, how far Graffiti has travelled. It still blows my mind today.

This is an art form that was started by a group of kids in New York, broadly. Kids who were just going out and playing, messing around. And that moved in quite an incredibly short period of time to develop into a really highly developed, complex art form and then move from that into an international framework, which no one at the time would have believed.

David Edmonds: I’m assuming, but correct me if I’m wrong, that this is a movement that stems from the political left. But does Graffiti have a message?

Rafael Schacter: So actually I think in kind of conventional capital P political terms, there’s not really a kind of identifiably left- or right-wing element of graffiti writers. They are for the most part just a slice of society wherever it emerges.

What I think is more interesting politically is what it does in terms of the relationship to space and the relationship to public space. In terms of the way that space is appropriated by Graffiti writers, the way that the city is used as a space of play rather than a space of consumption. The way that Graffiti writers navigate the city, the way they play with the city, the way they engage with it, is for me something which is truly political but in a non-party political sense.

David Edmonds: What does it do to a public space? There will be lots of people I imagine who see graffiti in a part of a city and see that as threatening or as a signal that this is somehow a bad part of town.

Rafael Schacter: Yeah, absolutely. I think for me the wars on graffiti, and there have been many of these wars which were in general taking a quite kind of low-hanging fruit target, not dealing with the actual kind of real issues that cities face, but dealing with a very kind of literally superficial issue.

These wars on graffiti and the media kind of stereotyping of Graffiti writers and graffiti as this really dangerous, violent act, at the end of the day it is just pigment on surface. And so I think this vilification of graffiti has created what is for some people a palpable fear. But I think actually in studies it’s been shown that issues with lighting or issues with visibility and walls create a lot more fear for people than name writing in public space.

David Edmonds: So are you telling me that there’s no correlation between areas of cities that have a lot of graffiti and, for example, crime rates or poverty rates?

Rafael Schacter: I mean I’m not saying exactly that but what I’m saying is the correlation between Graffiti writers and crime, or violent crime for example, is simply totally unsubstantiated. I’m not saying that areas that Graffiti takes place haven’t got more crime because maybe that local council is simply not supporting or doing enough to prevent drug dealing, violent crime, but Graffiti writers are painting their name in space. They’re not undertaking violent crime.

David Edmonds: I understand that distinction, but you’re suggesting that if you suddenly walk into an area of a city where there is a lot of Graffiti it wouldn’t be entirely irrational to think that you might be in an area of town where there are high poverty rates or high crime rates.

Rafael Schacter: I mean I would say that you were wrong. So, I think in some places that may be the case, but graffiti for example in sites in East London, very kind of new, trendy kind of hotspots, there is often a lot of Graffiti in those zones.

And Graffiti there is linked with creativity, with innovation, with newness. So actually, it’s something that property investors have been seen to focus upon to want to buy somewhere which has Graffiti because that’s the next cool place.

So, there are these links with gentrification as well, but it’s so site specific. You can’t have like a single rule where graffiti exists, this also exists. It’s really totally changeable.

David Edmonds: We have a very famous street artist in Britain called Banksy. Do you draw a distinction between the Graffiti artist you’re interested in and Banksy?

Rafael Schacter: So Banksy or otherwise I call him the B word. Banksy of course I end up talking about a lot because his fame is unprecedented. Banksy really is not just famous as a Graffiti or street artist but as one of the most famous artists in the world.

So interestingly Banksy and many of what I call the first generation of street artists were 99% Graffiti writers. Their practice has started within graffiti and then migrated towards street art. This was kind of like the kind of mid- to late 90s, graffiti had been around for quite a long time and a lot of artists within Graffiti wanted to change who they were speaking to and how they were working.

And by moving from text to image that gave them an opportunity to have a much larger quote unquote readership or viewership because they were moving outside of the internally focused letter writing into a larger kind of more appreciable form of image production.

David Edmonds: One thing I guess they both have in common is that they haven’t asked permission from anybody and obviously if there’s a Banksy lots of people welcome that but other people don’t welcome that. The attention it brings, people who live in an area where their building is graffitied might not appreciate that. Is that an issue?

Rafael Schacter: Banksy is a very particular issue in that if Banksy produces a work on your home your life has changed for better or for worse. People have found it extremely stressful to have their home become a tourist site, to have their home totally change in value because of the production of his work. I think though within Graffiti in general private homes are not something that are commonly written upon.

That’s not really part of the canonical rules. You don’t write on private homes, you don’t write on private vehicles, you don’t write on religious sites, for example. It is spaces which are deemed to be public that are sites which are most normally written upon.

But yes, street art and Graffiti in its earliest days did have a lot of very similar correlations, a similar what I call ethic because the practitioners had come from the same background, they were all Graffiti writers. Well today that has changed radically because what is called street art today — which is very different from what street art originally was, which was really a quite broad plethora of different forms of intervention in public space. So from stencils to more kind of broad installation practices.

Now street art has just come to mean public muralism, what I call neo-muralism and something which is very, very closely related to broader gentrification projects.

David Edmonds: We touched on this earlier the demographics of it and the predominantly young men. I’m assuming that they’re like footballers in that they have a kind of career and then they move on to something else. You don’t get 75-year-old Graffiti artists.

Rafael Schacter: I mean that’s actually a really nice way of putting it and it does start at a very young age. Graffiti writers start writing Graffiti at 10, 11, 12, really very young. It is very male-dominated. I always say this is a sociological issue,  in that what girls and boys are, what they’re supposed to do when they’re young. Boys will be boys, boys will jump over fences and get muddy and that’s seen to be socially acceptable. So Graffiti writers they are a more male-dominated group but there have always been canonically important female writers throughout the whole history of graffiti. With street art coming into street art at an older age normally like less 11, 12 and more maybe early 20s. there are a lot more female practitioners. There are also a lot of female artists that are doing work very related to Graffiti in terms of like urban interventions.

I think what you do see now in terms of this kind of like career you do see now graffiti writers in their 50s. That happens and these are often very expert practitioners who will do really quite extreme forms of graffiti practice, but in a much more kind of slow, much more thoughtful, much more pinpointed way.

David Edmonds: Let me ask you about what it’s like being an academic who studies this because your data, unlike in most areas, must be very difficult to collect. You’re necessarily dealing with an art form which is illegal. So how do you go about gathering information?

Rafael Schacter: Yes a great question. So I’m an anthropologist; I do ethnographic research, that’s always been my method of data collection. So from my master’s and then from my PhD I was doing kind of quite intense long-term ethnographic work, field work. I’ve got interlocutors now that I’ve had for over 20 years.

That means being in a very grey area, often, but it also means more than my own work. How I talk about my interlocutors work is something which I have to be very careful about in that what I don’t want to give the magic away. There is a magic to it which sometimes I feel by talking about it in an academic sense I can destroy, but also being careful not to put my interlocutors in danger themselves.

So that really is the kind of the fine line.

David Edmonds: But how do you find them in the first place?

Rafael Schacter: To be honest I found my main group of interlocutors painting in the middle of the siesta in Madrid on the street. That was a very interesting first meeting with a group of writers who, like many Graffiti writers, can spend the daytime painting on shutters in a way which is more kind of socially acceptable, painting kind of large-scale pieces which the shop owners have allowed them to.

And at night time I might be doing something very different.

David Edmonds: And you now have a position of trust in the community as it were so that if you want to go out and talk to new people, you can speak to some of your contacts and they say, “Oh Rafael, he’s OK.”

Rafael Schacter: I feel silly saying that, but I kind of I hope so.

What I’ve got is I’ve got a group of long-term interlocutors, they’re friends, whose work I am still obsessed by. You know Graffiti itself as a form of art practice is something that I still am captivated by. Whether we’re talking about the kind of beauty and the performance of a single tag that’s done in one kind of beautiful movement and becomes really like a dance, or we’re talking about wider forms of urban intervention, engagement with the city which just also fills me with like the potential and the possibility of the city.

David Edmonds: Give me an example.

Rafael Schacter: So you know artists that are expert navigators of the Parisian catacombs and who know every kind of nook and cranny of these miles of tunnels, and will have exhibitions or film screenings or performances that take place in these sites. Actually, one of the things that I really love as well is the way that artists from Graffiti have transformed their practice into a contemporary art practice, but still utilize and engage the same ideas and the same themes — whether that’s about surveillance, whether that’s about ephemerality, whether that’s about the body and performance — and move their Graffiti practice into that space.

You know I really find what Graffiti says about the city, how it engages in the city, how it utilizes the body, how it utilizes space. These things are for me a really true form of art practice that I’m constantly engaged by.

David Edmonds: One thing that makes one believe they’re true forms of art practice is that there’s no financial benefit.

Rafael Schacter: So I think that’s you know this idea of commitment is really key here, because within Graffiti the idea of selling out it’s like the bogeyman of Graffiti, like selling out is the worst possible thing you can do. Selling out doesn’t mean being a successful artist. Selling out means using the street and using Graffiti as a way to become successful for a kind of wider general public.

So one of the most successful graffiti writers in the world who’s become an artist, Barry McGee, formerly known as Twist or Twister, who is a magnificent and extremely successful contemporary artist and still one of the most respected Graffiti writers in the world because he doesn’t use his Graffiti instrumentally; he doesn’t use it to become successful. His art practice is totally influenced by his Graffiti practice, but he’s not simply using it for gain. Graffiti is inalienable; graffiti cannot be bought and sold. Actually, one of the reasons why often Banksy’s works that are stuck under plexiglass are attacked by Graffiti writers is because not because they don’t like Graffiti but the idea of making permanent something which is meant to be impermanent is problematic.

So the conceptual idea of Graffiti — it can’t be bought and sold — but you can still be a very successful artist outside of that framework.

David Edmonds: I’m getting the feeling that you’re very pro graffiti.

Rafael Schacter: I’m still having looked at Graffiti for 20 years plus, I’m still captivated by it.

It’s more that the way Graffiti is vilified and the way it is presented as either as vandalism or as non-art, is just to me very problematic.

David Edmonds: What’s your favorite piece of graffiti?

Rafael Schacter: There’s not really a singular piece, there have been important works like I really remember you know when I was probably 8 or 9 seeing a large piece of Graffiti near my house and it really like sticking into my brain and being like, “Well, how did that come to be there?”

I think the other thing about Graffiti is that it doesn’t really work in the singular you know it works as like an oeuvre, it works in the multiple. There may be like singular images which can captivate me, can really take my mind, but it’s more the kind of broader form of practice that becomes really captivating.

So 10Foot, an artist I work with a lot, one of the most famous Graffiti writers in the world, his practice in terms of scale, his work existing everywhere is totally captivating, you know, it blows my mind. But then there are other writers, Twist for example ,who I mentioned before, who, yeah, the single individual tag can just blow my mind through its performative beauty.

David Edmonds: If I want to see a piece of 10Foot graffiti, where can I go?

Rafael Schacter: The North Circular, which is a ring road around London, is a great start or the North and South Circular, he’s everywhere on that.

But he really is in every town in England. He’s in every small island, he’s all over Mexico, the States, I mean his work really is everywhere to the point where people just can’t believe how much there is.

David Edmonds: Rafael Schacter, thank you very much indeed.

Rafael Schacter: Thank you, really appreciate it.