Can't Stop Won't Stop (23 page)

Crazy Legs and the Rock Steady Crew at the Dyckman Street playground, uptown
Manhattan, 1981. From left: Lil Crazy Legs, Kippy Dee, Lennie Len, unknown friend,
Crazy Legs, Fast Break, Take One, Ken Swift.
© Henry Chalfant

 

 

Pop artists made art out of pop culture. These tough kids are reversing the process, making pop culture out of art.

—Kim Levin

It wasn't about your little local neighborhood. It was always you were going all-city, that's what you were supposed to do. So why shouldn't art be all-city?

—Charlie Ahearn

To uptown kids like Crazy Legs and DOZE, their culture was simply what it was. It didn't need external validation. It even thrived with opposition. It needed nothing but its own codes, its own authority. But downtown, other people were beginning to see something big in it. “It was a high school youth culture,” says Charlie Ahearn, an East Village filmmaker who was venturing to the Bronx to soak up the new energy. “And to me, it was a radical avant-garde culture.”

The youth movements seemed to look like a single culture, just as Afrika Bambaataa had envisioned years before with Zulu Nation, an expression of a new generation of outcast youths whose worldview felt authentic, original, and liberating. This first wave of downtowners—white baby boomer outsiders, young white bohemian dropouts, white art rebels, Black post-jazzsters—were enthralled. They were the earliest adopters, the ones who placed themselves closest to the fire, and they would be central in bringing hip-hop to the world.

Soft-spoken sculptor named Henry Chalfant had come of age during the stifling fifties in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, a tiny white-picket fence town north of rusting Pittsburgh. His father ran the family's steel-pipe manufacturing firm. His mother had helped found a private-care institution for handicapped children. In the Allegheny Valley, Chalfant's very name evoked aristocracy and connection. His great-great grandfather, the area's pioneering Henry, was an inkeeper and proprietor so beloved that a town east of Pittsburgh had been named for him in 1914. But the younger Henry felt alienated in the land of his ancestors.

“We used to argue over whose family was poorer while being driven to school by the chauffeur,” he says. “I was definitely unhappy where I grew up, which was very privileged, very white, very hide-bound, rule-bound, and rather empty.

“So you know,” he chuckles, “I drove fast—hot rods, motorcycles. Generally I was a menace in that way.” When he graduated, he sped toward the California sunset, where he enrolled at Stanford in 1958. He majored in classical Greek, immersed himself in art and became a sculptor, and when Berkeley students closed the McCarthy era with their Free Speech Movement and antiwar demonstrations, he was drawn into that as well.

In 1967, he left the Bay Area for Europe with his wife, the actress Kathleen Chalfant, to soak up art and sculpture in Barcelona and Rome. But on frequent visits back to New York City, he became intoxicated by the colorful, intricate graffiti on the sides of the subway cars. These weren't Pompeii scrawls in the dustbins of history. They were alive, mysterious, alluring, dangerous. In 1973, he and Kathleen moved to New York permanently, and he began to photograph the tags. “What immediately peaked my interest was seeing what seemed to be all these rebellious kids. What I ended up doing was living it to the hilt the second time through—not my own adolescence, but vicariously through these writers,” he says.

From the summer of 1976 to 1979, Chalfant went out on weekends to document the train art. Writers began to notice the balding white man, standing for hours on subway platforms with an expensive camera, snapping furiously and sometimes futilely when the trains screeched into the stops, and figured he was either a cop or one of them, a die-hard junkie for aerosol art. One day he found
himself staring at a writer named NAC, who was also taking pictures. They got to talking. When Chalfant let him know what he was doing, NAC told him to drop by the Writer's Bench at 149th Street after school one day. The writers befriended him and brought him into the fold, passing him through their crews, calling him to brag about their latest victories, which he then went out to capture on film. Chalfant's hobby became a daily obsession. In turn, he opened up his Greenwich Village studio to them.

Uptown, ZEPHYR and FUTURA were gathering writers at Sam Esses's studio to begin translating graffiti for the art gallery world. Chalfant's Grand Street studio, by contrast, was a library of subway style. The photos were the best the writers had ever seen. After 1978, Chalfant had begun using a motor-drive on his camera. While standing in one spot, he could shoot entire cars on a flat angle. The photos presented the cars as if they had just pulled up to the station in their full glory. Younger writers especially flocked to Chalfant's studio to study the photos and learn the styles.

Like the ambivalent anthropologist, Chalfant realized he had altered the scene. “In the old days before photography, you would get style from a king. He would grant you this style and then you could copy the outline if you were part of his crew,” he says. “But when people from other parts of the city start rocking your style, you weren't happy. Someone like SKEME, he was getting a lot of fame and for about a year, he was taking over everything. And a lot of his style came from my photos of DONDI.” But Chalfant's interest had never been merely academic. He wanted to be taken, he says, “by the daily surprise of it all.”

In September 1980, Chalfant displayed his photos publicly for the first time in an exhibition at the O. K. Harris Gallery in Soho. He was astonished at the reception he got. The few print reviews he got were brief and lukewarm, but the streets spoke loudly. “They came to the gallery as if on a pilgrimmage,” Chalfant says.
¹

From across the city, hundreds of graffiti writers arrived dressed in their flyest customized denims and sneakers, all color and swagger and joy. The writers took over the gallery, gazing at the twenty shots of whole-car murals in a rush of recognition and future shock. They spilled out of the tiny gallery back onto the street, tagging each other's books and the storefront walls. They formed new
crews, secured affiliations and made plans. Chalfant, the quiet student of the youth culture, and all of his less worldly art-world peers were awestruck anew at how big the thing really was.

Dondi White brought Martha Cooper, a newsphotographer for the
New York Post
and an urban folklorist to meet Chalfant. Cooper and Chalfant were aware of each others' work and had privately nursed a professional jealousy, but in person the vibes melted away and they greeted each other as long-lost colleagues. Both understood that the writers' eye-zapping virtuosity and the art's butterfly ephemerality demanded documentation and advocacy.

Chalfant shot the trains as if they were already in the museums. Cooper contextualized them as they rushed through the grimy backdrop of the dying city—”Art vs. Transit,” as her famous shot of a 1982 train by DURO, SHY 147 and KOS from CIA illustrated, a metaphor for bottom-up urban renewal. Together they began making a case for graffiti. Glazed to boredom by abstraction, “the art-world was ready for it,” Chalfant says.

Events snowballed. Once the Esses Studio closed, the energy ZEPHYR and FUTURA had gathered moved into spaces like ALI's Soul Artists workshop, the center of “Zoo York,” and the Fashion Moda storefront gallery in the South Bronx. In October, Fashion Moda's “Graffiti Art Success for America,” put together by CRASH, opened in the South Bronx. In December, the New Museum brought many of the pieces down for an exhibition at its location in Greenwich Village. All of a sudden, there no longer seemed to be an expiration date on a graffiti lifestyle. Writers considered making a living at it. Major museum curators and gallery owners, eagerly sniffing out the new, began to venture out of their safe Manhattan turfs with their checkbooks.

The week after Christmas,
The Village Voice
announced the art-world's new alignment with street culture in a cover story by graf's public defender Richard Goldstein called “The Fire Down Below.” There were fashionable black-and-white portraits of PINK, ZEPHYR, FAB 5 FREDDY and FUTURA 2000 and a full-color pullout section featuring Chalfant's iconic photos of classic trains by Lee Quiñones, BLADE, SEEN, DONDI, KELL and FUTURA. The sense of anticipation was palpable. Goldstein quoted FAB 5 FREDDY, on his way to a gallery opening of his works in Milan: “With a little time and paint, anything is possible.”
²

The walls of northern segregation could come down, for one thing.

As New York City staggered out of the 1970s—bloodied and broke—it was more separate and less equal than ever, the culmination of three decades of top-down urban renewal, Third World dislocation and white flight. During the decade, more than 1.2 million whites, fully a quarter of the white population—including almost a third of whites in Brooklyn and half of whites in the Bronx—had abandoned the city. Poverty rates soared, especially in those two boroughs.
³

Pop culture mirrored the segregation. Movies like
Badge 373
and
Fort Apache: The Bronx
looked, especially to Blacks and Latinos, like exploitative tales that reinforced race and class hatred more often than they raised empathy. At the end of the ‘70s, Puerto Rican and Black activists, led by the former Young Lord Richie Perez and other veterans of the Black and Brown Power movements, organized to boycott such films and demand more faithful and truthful media representations. At one protest, two brown Bronx girls carried a picket saying, “Fort Apache—Indians are not savages. Neither are we.”
⁴
Even pop music, with its long history of crossover and miscegenation, offered little hope. After disco, radio cleaved into ever more rigid rock (white) and urban (Black) formats.

Yet graffiti had infected the young post-hippies gathering in Central Park. Through the decades, the locus of the city's young bohemia had shifted northward, from Greenwich Village to Central Park's Bethesda Fountain, and then into the heart of the Park at the field behind the Naumberg Bandshell. The “parkie” scene embraced native and immigrant sons and daughters of philosophers and kings, hard-hat workers and maids.

To ZEPHYR, a Jewish kid from the Upper East Side who cut classes to hang out, the scene behind the bandshell was an opening into a different world. “You get out of school, fuckin' get your little bag of reefer, going to the park, meeting up with your homeboys, kids from Brooklyn, the Bronx,” he says. “It was extremely mixed, like a freak scene of young kids. Some of the kids were really from wealthy families and then some were like more down and out, some were homeless. But it was really cool because that scene went on for, I'd say, the better half of a decade.”

There, the “parkies” found a safe space to experiment with drugs (especially marijuana and psychedelics), sex and style. “The cops had a total hands-off
policy. There was fucking clouds of pot smoke. It looked like the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert. Imagine that every day, seven days a week.” When he met writers like BILL ROCK, MIN ONE, REVOLT and others there, ZEPHYR's secret obsession with graffiti flowered. Through graffiti, the parkies' scene began to mix with the punk-era art-activists of the East Village.

As soon as they were able—1973, to be precise—Charlie Ahearn and his twin brother, John, had moved from their upstate middle-class collegiate suburb of Binghamton to New York City to become contemporary artists. Charlie enrolled in the Whitney Museum's program and found an apartment in the middle of the heroin-bingeing East Village. He and John became part of an artists' movement there called Co-Lab—a collective determined to, he says, “get the hell out of the art world, get the hell out of art galleries and find a way to be creative in a larger sense.”

“Coming from a middle-class background, I always wanted to be as adventurous as possible, to see a larger picture,” Ahearn says. “The idea was people that are involved in any kind of struggle are interesting. It's not about going into a studio and making work and selling it in an art gallery. You go right out there. You're an activist. You're changing things by creating stuff.”

Charlie went down to the Alfred E. Smith projects in the Lower East Side, at the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, with a Super 8 camera. He filmed the kids practicing martial arts and then played the film back for them. He was as taken as they were with the all-day kung-fu festivals in Times Square, then a pre-redevelopment
Taxi Driver
carnival of red-bulb burlesque and Five Percenter ciphers. And so he collaborated with the kids to do their own kind of homage, which he called “The Deadly Art of Survival.”