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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH
DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12345
451
— WHY DO GRAFFITI WRITERS WRITE ON
MURALS? The Birth, Life, and Slow Death of Freeway
Murals in Los Angeles
Abstract
For three decades graffiti writers have marked the Olympic Festival freeway
murals painted in celebration of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles (LA). These
high-profile murals, which once symbolized LA’s status as the ‘Mural Capital of the
World’, became palimpsests on which graffiti writers painted their monikers, perhaps
unwittingly contributing to their eventual destruction. Local government, muralists and
residents have bemoaned the murals’ slow death, though have not been able to identify
or understand the motives for such vandalism, interpreting it as ‘mindless’, ‘animalistic’
vandalism perpetrated by ‘kids’ who simply lack respect. I argue that the burial of these
murals under layers of paint must be understood in the context of competing claims
made to public space. Relying on rare personal interviews with the graffiti writers who
participated in their destruction, I answer the question ‘Why do graffiti writers write on
murals?’, while situating the birth and life of the Olympic murals within a larger historical
discussion about Chicano/a mural making, urbanization, freeway construction, and the
growth of the graffiti subculture in the United States’ paradigmatic global city.
Introduction
In a city where outward appearances take precedence over enduring form, for
many Angelenos the most recognizable vestiges of Los Angeles’s (LA) Olympic past are
the 1984 Olympic freeway murals. The LA Olympic Organizing Committee (LAOOC)
commissioned 10 freeway murals as part of the Olympic Arts Festival––a 10-week US
$20 million multisite cultural program for international dance, theater and visual arts
used to impress the throngs of Olympic visitors and to demonstrate ‘L.A.’s coming of
age as a city of culture’ (Paley, 2005: 13). The murals were part of a growing trend in
US cities to rely on public art to spur economic revitalization and foster profitable
place distinction (Miles and Adams, 1989; Deutsche, 1996; Lippard, 1997). As a visual
manifestation of ‘Olympic urbanism’ (Liao and Pitts, 2006; Muñoz, 2006), the Olympic
murals provided just that.
But given the amount of writing on LA by members of the LA School (Nicholls,
2011), in addition to the attention the city has received from scholars internationally,
it is striking that LA’s Olympic urbanism––the large-scale and often contentious
planning and development that accompanies the hosting of the Olympic Games––has
received little attention in the urban literature (Chalkley and Essex, 1999; Hiller, 2000;
Andranovich et al., 2001; Gold and Gold, 2008; Chen et al., 2013). Likewise, the Olympic
Festival freeway murals have received scant scholarly attention despite becoming
iconic aspects of the urban landscape and helping to ‘officially’ establish LA as the
‘Mural Capital of the World’. Such neglect may help explain why their very visible
destruction over the last 30 years has been so generally under acknowledged and deeply
misunderstood.
In this essay I shed light on the destruction of the Olympic freeway murals
by graffiti writers. I rely on interviews conducted with the very graffiti writers who
‘bombed’ (wrote on, or ‘tagged’) the murals over the course of three decades, which forms
the basis of my empirical case study and provides an informed answer to the question
‘Why do graffiti writers write on murals?’. I expose some of the primary motivations
ESSAY 452
and justifications used for writing on these officially sanctioned and authored pieces of
civic art, revealing a range of reasons that includes ignorance, hostility, competitiveness,
creativity and a perhaps unconscious form of contestative ‘do-it-yourself ’ (Iveson,
2013) and ‘bottom-up’ urbanism perpetuated by a subcultural underclass (Morgan and
Ren, 2012), or members of what Daskalaki and Mould (2013) convincingly refer to as an
‘urban social formation’.
LA actually became a nascent ‘mural capital’ and Olympic host city simultane-
ously in 1932, long before the highly visible struggle between muralists and graffiti writ-
ers began. Ideologically and logistically unrelated to the 1932 Olympic Games, Mexican
muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros painted the first large-scale social-realist outdoor mural
in the US just a few miles from the site of the first permanent Olympic Village. As an early
showing of radical imagery and innovative use of space, Siqueiros painted his América
Tropical on a rooftop above the city’s original pueblo and then soon-to-be revitalized
plaza area (Goldman, 1974; Estrada, 2008). The central motif of the 80ft-long mural,
which has recently been restored after it was quickly whitewashed upon its completion
at the behest of powerful local boosters, depicts an indigenous man bound to a cross
under an imposing symbol of US imperialism in the form of an eagle. Siqueiros’s work,
as well as the reaction to it, would help give rise to the critical spirit and social realist
aes thetic of the Chicano/a mural movement 30 years later (Rosen, 1973; Goldman, 1974;
1990; Simpson, 1980; Del Castillo et al., 1991).
Also concomitant with the 1932 Games and the painting of América Tropical,
freeway planning and construction in the city began. While major federally funded
freeway construction may not be easily interpreted as typical ‘Olympic urbanism’, such
widespread regional development was used to attract the Games as well as visitors to the
burgeoning metropolis. As Dyreson and Llewellyn (2008: 2009) put it, ‘in no other host
city has the Olympic moment coincided so completely with the global debut moment
as in Los Angeles’. Consequently, Olympic-spurred development in all of its forms that
was taking place in the pre-second world war era would continue to radically transform
LA’s built environment for the next 40 years. Once major infrastructural development
was complete, it would be those same freeways that would ‘wear the city’s brightly-
colored Olympic party clothes’ in the form of murals in 1984 (Sanders, 2013: 24).
Although the desire at the national level to host a global sporting event was
roughly the same in 1932 and 1984––equally fueled by the need to assert superiority in
the face of impending war and an aspiration to maintain global economic superiority––
the city’s bidding and promise of accommodating development was quite different.
Whereas the LA of 1932 was ripe for expansion in the form of utilitarian infrastructure,
by 1984 the city was preoccupied with expanding its post-Fordist economy and posi-
tioning itself as a ‘world city’ (Friedman and Wolff, 1982). And given the particular
demands associated with the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, LA relied on
the spectacle of the Olympic Arts Festival and infusion of symbolic capital much in the
way the LA of 1932 relied on the functionality and monumentality of a freeway system
(Roche, 2002). Combined, these two periods of Olympic urbanism would help position
LA as, indeed, a ‘global city’ and the ‘capital of ‘postmodernity’ (Soja et al., 1983; Davis,
1985; Soja, 1989; Beauregard, 1991; Scott and Soja, 1998; Scott, 1997; Dear and Flusty,
1998; Abu-Lughod, 1999; Dear, 2000).
Conception
As part of the preparation for the Games, LAOOC Vice President Robert Fitz-
patrick looked to the local freeways just as he looked to local galleries and museums
to host receptions, dance performances and film screenings. As the most logistically
and financially ambitious part of the Festival, the 10 commissioned murals would be
painted along the main route through downtown connecting the Rose Bowl in Pas-
adena to the center of Olympic activity on and around the University of Southern
DEBATES 453
California campus. As Fitzpatrick (1984: 248) explained, ‘the decision was made to
draw on what Los Angeles had to offer, rather than to bemoan what it lacked [and] on
any given day a few hundred visitors may pass through the Municipal Gallery … while
hundreds of thousands of motorists will see murals painted alongside the freeway’.
Murals would be a fitting way to reach such a large number of visitors because, as he
saw it, the city ‘provides few opportunities for people to congregate: it is horizontal
rather than vertical; vehicular and private rather than pedestrian and public’ (ibid.: 248).
Fitzpatrick was perhaps inspired by an earlier lust for the region’s freeway sys-
tem articulated by the influential architectural critic Reyner Banham. As Banham ([1971]
2009: 5) declared, ‘the language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is
the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality … and the city will never
be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture,
cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented life’. The newly laid brutalist form of the
freeway was for Banham a unifying force, which provided a comprehensive unity for
an otherwise disjointed and infamously dispersed built environment. So important was
the freeway to Banham that in 1971 he famously ‘learned to drive in order to read Los
Angeles in the original’ (ibid.: 5; see also Banham, 1966).
But for many working-class communities of color, the brutalist form of the free-
way system, like the 49 miles of concretized LA River (Gumprecht, 2001; Baca, 2005;
Gandy 2006; Arroyo, 2010), represented a scar on the face of the natural landscape and
an implacable socio-spatial divide. Even at their most benign, ‘freeways were not felt
to be “in” the rest of the city’ according to urban planner Kevin Lynch (1960: 56). Criti-
cisms and concerns have been most forcefully articulated by Chicano/a residents who
between the 1930s and 1980s witnessed whole communities in LA destroyed, displaced
or ghettoized by massive freeway construction and other aggressive forms of urban
restruc turing (Acuña, 1983; Diaz and Torres, 2012). What Raúl Homero Villa (2000: 71)
calls ‘technomilitaristic’ and ‘repressive urban-planning discourses’ materialized not
just to facilitate mobility, but to act as agents for slum clearance in the ‘blighted’ barrios
of East LA. Like that of Olympic urbanization, such planning was done in an effort to
create a ‘postpueblo supercity’ (ibid.: 57).
Eric Avila (1998: 26) argues that while urban scholars and activ ists rightfully
disparage the destruction of place by freeway development, such criticisms ‘often
obscure the counternarratives, counterstrategies, and counterexpressions that
assert and maintain humanity, even in a space as inhuman and alienating as the Los
Ange les freeway’. As he suggests, it was actually the tabula rasa of the freeway that
lent itself to the exploits of graffiti writers and critical Chicano/a muralists long before
the Olympic Arts Festival followed suit.
One-color placas (barrio-based wall writing) produced on freeway walls were ‘a
highly visible reminder of the Other’ for those who relied on the freeway as ‘safe passage
through the ghetto or the barrio’ (Avila, 1998: 25; see also Jaffe, 2012). One of the most
prolific of these early freeway graffiti writers was Chaz Boroquez, a local gang member
and creator of the senior suerte icon––a black fedora-wearing calavera––often painted
next to stylized roll-calls on retaining walls through LA’s eastside districts during the
1970s (Phillips, 1999; Aranda-Alvarado, 2004; Chastanet, 2009). Like other large-scale,
stylistically intricate, and often cryptic placas, Chaz’s work may have been overlooked
as indecipherable vandalism by the majority of predominantly Anglo commuters.
By 1984 the 10 Olympic Arts Festival murals would emulate and, in a sanitized
form, legitimize a vernacular form of expression and radical use of space conceived
of by graffiti writers and members of the critical Chicano/a mural movement (Arreola,
1984). In addition to muralists Alonzo Davis and Kent Twitchell who acted as artistic
director and artist coordinator respectively, it was members of the Chicano/a mural
movement who contributed to the Olympic urbanization effort. The commission would
include larger-than-life children at play (L.A. Freeway Kids by Glenna Boltuch Avila),
ESSAY 454
a grand depiction of the cosmos (Galileo, Jupiter, Apollo by John Wehrle), vibrantly
colored cars painted with broad brushstrokes (Goin’ to the Olympics by Frank Romero),
a social-realist image of female athleticism (Hitting the Wall by Judith Baca), and the
official Olympic insignia superimposed over a graphic of LA’s central plaza (Luchas del
Mundo [Struggles of the world] by Willie Herrón). As Alonzo Davis describes it, the
murals were intended to show LA’s cultural diversity and ‘give people driving by a color
bath’ (quoted in Giovannini, 1984). Such vibrant color schemes also made allusions
to the Chicano/a aesthetic sensibility and perspective, according to Avila (2014: 144),
through the ‘imposition of hot colors [that] bring a working-class aesthetic of Mexican
origin to the freeway’.
The Olympic Arts Festival freeway murals were seen by some, however, as the
deathblow to the autonomous, critical and community-oriented Chicano/a muraltradi-
tion. They signaled the cooptation of a traditionally radical art form that had been
prev alent in the surrounding neighborhoods for over a decade prior to the 1984 Games
(Schrank, 2009; Coffey, 2012). Whereas murals once acted as a form of visual articula-
tion and contestation for some of the most marginalized communities making claims
to space (Goldman, 1990; Latorre, 2008; Rosette, 2009), the expressed intent of the
Olympic murals was to show that ‘art is not a form of propaganda but an instrument
of truth, an opportunity to put aside differences and rejoice in being alive. [They] seek
neither to preach nor to dictate a hierarchy of taste’ (Fitzpatrick, 1984: 248).
Many graffiti writers and gang members from the very communities that valued
wall writing as a form of territorial demarcation and identity expression viewed the
new murals as little more than a new type of graffiti deterrence and a manifestation of
top-down aesthetic development used to silence them (Craw et al., 2006; personalinter-
views, 2006–10). This reading of the role played by such murals may have actuallycon-
tributed to the increase in the amount of graffiti produced on their surfaces over time
(Schrank, 2009: 159). By the early 1990s, many in the graffiti community saw the Olympic
murals and similar ‘public art’ murals that came after them as part of an ‘‘official’ urban
aesthetic’ and as ‘marks of ‘official’ cultural authority’ representing the ‘snug relation-
ship between visual culture and capital investment’ (Schrank, 2009: 159). In fact, as
scholars point out, the use of public art and community murals was becoming a prevalent
aspect of artist-driven gentrification in US cities at the time (Deutsche, 1996; Ley 2003;
Cameron and Coaffee, 2005; Mathews, 2010). Such an interpretation and resulting
distinction afforded these conceptually safe and aesthetically sanitized murals little
cultural capital or ‘street cred’ and therefore respect. Within a decade of being painted,
graffiti writers would turn the Olympic murals into huge palimpsests.
Birth
Before the painting of the Olympic Festival freeway murals, art on the freeway
would surely have been seen by many Angelenos as antithetical to the starkness and
intentional brutalism of this hypermobile nonplace (Vidler, 2002; Augé, 2008).1 For
noted LA art critic Christopher Knight, graffiti and murals ‘intruded on the privacy of
1 Prior to 1984, several murals, such as Kent Twitchell’s Freeway Lady (1974) and scores of WPA and Chicano/a murals,
were painted adjacent to freeways so that they could be seen from lanes of traffic, but were not actually painted
on freeway infrastructure. Only six murals were legally produced directly on public freeway infrastructure in Los
Angeles before the Olympic Festival murals were painted in 1983 in preparation for the 1984 Summer Games.
They are: Robin Blair’s Circle of Life painted on a Foothill Freeway sound wall in 1971 (though the only record of
its existence is as a photo of the work in progress in an LA Public Library Photo Collection archive); Sandy Bleifer’s
1975 Can of Cardines––a 10 × 20ft-long ‘roadside editorial’ (Brodsly, 1981: 53) depicting a sardine can with its
top rolled back exposing a dozen crammed and crumpled cars––painted on a Ventura Freeway underpass in the
San Fernando Valley; Betty Gold’s Holistic #1 and #2 under the San Diego and Harbor Freeways respectively; the
Bowermans 1982 Running on the Hollywood Freeway bus turnout; and Mark Bowerman’s 1983 Family at the 2 and
134 interchange. The most celebrated and documented of these early legal freeway murals were those painted by
Congreso de Artistas Chicanos En Aztlan on the support beams beneath the I-5 freeway in Barrio Logan’s Chicano
Park, 125 miles south of Los Angeles in San Diego, beginning in 1973 (Rosen and Fisher, 2001).
DEBATES 455
driving on the freeways’ (quoted in Giovannini, 1984). And from a critical perspective,
the freeway could likewise be described as an ‘abstract space’ of ‘mundane mobilities’
(Lefebvre, 1991; Scott, 2013). But consistent with a traditional urban planning perspective,
and as Brodsly (1981: 2) asserts, the freeway can also accurately be interpreted as
the ‘most awesome work of design in the daily lives of most of us’. Indeed, it is the
‘cathedral of its time and place’ (ibid.: 5), but one that lacked an altarpiece. In 1983, and
commissioned by the LAOOC and Arts Festival committee, Kent Twitchell provided
just that with the production of his monumental 7th Street Altarpiece appearing in two
18 × 97ft sections on opposite sides of the 110 Freeway in Downtown.
One side of the diptych depicts artist Lila Albuquerque, hands open to either side
of her face with palms facing outward. The other side portrays artist Jim Morphesis, in
the same pose, same disinterested stare, same larger-than-life photorealistic headshot.
As the most prolific muralist in LA, both in terms of the size of his murals and the
number produced, Twitchell also experienced the most praise for and existential
challenges to his work.
It was the destruction of these two murals that prompted Twitchell to petulantly
proclaim ‘the mural capital of the world has become the graffiti capital’ (Twitchell,
personal interview, 2013). Twitchell’s 7th Street Altarpiece was the first of the Olympic
murals to get hit by a recognized member of the LA graffiti community. Graffiti writers
Gin and Duce’s bombing of 7th Street Altarpiece initiated a 30-year battle for wall
space that prompted at times heated discussions about beauty, belonging, criminality,
community malaise, moral panics and zero tolerance (Wilson and Kelling, 1982; Rogers
and Coaffee, 2005; Kramer, 2010).
During that time, law enforcement, local politicians, the general public,
inaddi tion to muralists and journalists understood those who wrote on murals and
con tributed to their ‘slow-motion elimination’ to be nameless, faceless, aggressive and
‘ani malistic’ young people acting out as a result of an unprecedented loss of respect for the
city as well as for the Chicano/a community, and frustrated ‘spray-paint hyenas’ who
refused or lacked outlets for other forms of artistic expression (Cromer, 2010; Baca,
personal interview, 2011; De La Loza, personal interview, 2012; Rojas-Williams, per sonal
interview, 2013). Kent Twitchell sums up their influence, stating that graffiti writers
who ‘tag’ murals are ‘barbarians acting out as a result of postmodern thinking that
encourages uncivilized vandals to believe there are no absolutes and that destruction is
just another valid perspective’ (personal interview, 2013).
Such perspectives concerning appropriate aesthetic composition and place ment
have been instrumental in pushing for the criminalization of graffiti to the tune ofmil-
lions of dollars per year in abetment and, for some graffiti writers, lengthy prison sen-
tences and violence at the hands of anti-graffiti vigilantes (for example, see Riccardi
and Tamaki, 1995; Blankstein, 1997; Phillips, 1999; Good, 2011). The attack on graffiti
is at once tacit support for the preservation of moral geographies (Cresswell, 1996;
McAuliffe, 2012) and what Edensor (2005) calls ‘authoritative spatialization’, or the
normative spatial codes and dominant ideological structures that are manifested in and
on public space.
Cultural criminologist Jeff Ferrell (1996) understands graffiti as, above all else,
an illegal act perpetuated by those who both consciously and unconsciously challenge
spatialized morality. He sees graffiti as a visual expression of anarchic action taken
against and engendered by the spatial controls and physical partitioning of activities
put upon urban inhabitants by policymakers, property owners, law enforcement and
other dominant communities. Similarly, Cresswell (1996: 58) has pointed out the link
between the illegality of graffiti and its physical placement. He asserts that graffiti is
criminalized for its transgression against moral landscapes and orthodox spatial
codes, thereby signaling ‘inappropriate geographical behavior’. The source of graffiti’s
ESSAY 456
crimi nality, he argues, ‘lies in its being seen … and in the subversion of the authority or
urban space’ (ibid.: 58).
Like Cresswell (1996), Iveson (2011) and Young (2014) see the almost universal
anxiety and disgust for graffiti written on both public and private spaces as revealing
of a complex ‘common sense’ and ‘taken-for-granted’ appraisal of the workings of the
form, function and appearance of the neoliberal urban environment. For Young (2014:
145) unauthorized wall writing and street art ‘makes its own space, not as a parti-
tioned,permitted, semi-tolerated activity, but as an emergent, auto-poietic practice, a
de-territorialising tactic that exposes the multiple boundaries and borders of the prop-
ertied cityscape’. Inversely, as Iveson (2007: 135) argues, ‘legal graffiti projects reinscribe
a respect for private property relations, and the consequent control by owners over the
appearance of public space in which they are located’.
From a structural economic perspective, graffiti is also understood as a challenge
to authoritative spatialization due to how it reveals a contradiction whereby urban space
is treated as a commodity with exchange value on one hand, and as a collective resource
with myriad use values on the other. For Lefebvre (1991) and Harvey (2001; 2014) this
contradiction is inherent in the capitalist production of space. To use Foucault’s (1986)
terminology, the continued production of a more ‘heterotopic’ or diverse and mutually
contestative space is possible, but perhaps counterintuitively, only through ‘anti-social’,
‘criminal’, ‘deviant’ and ‘disorderly’ acts committed against existing spatial manifesta-
tions of power.
The resulting disorderly and anarchic system of producing space engenders
another kind of order for Lefebvre (1991; 2003). That is, a logic and order arising from
a nonhierarchical, unplanned and openly ‘practiced city’, which lends itself to the
fight for spatial justice (Soja, 1996; 2010). For Lefebvre (1991: 56), refiguring the
dominant organization of space must be accomplished in the street, materially, with the
useof‘bull dozers and Molotov cocktails’, or symbolically, whereby the street becomes
a ‘place for talk, given over as much to the exchange of words and signs as it is to the
exchange of things. A place where speech becomes writing. A place where speech
can become “savage” and, by escaping rules and institutions, inscribe itself on walls’
(Lefebvre, 2003:19).
While far from engendering an immediate or recognizable overthrow of the cap
-
italistic, hierarchical and planned city system, from a spatial perspective graffiti is after
all, and is generally understood to be, illegal. It is the act of illegally occupying and
writing on infrastructure that defines graffiti as such (Bloch, 2016a). Graffiti signifies
the presence of a person acting ‘out of place’ by making a personalized claim for space,
which rebukes conventions for private property, the rule of law, standards regarding the
appropriate appearance of infrastructure, and more regarding acceptable public behavior
(Bloch, 2012a). To accost, hunt down and even violently attack those who illegally paint on
walls is to preserve a system whereby those who legally own, oversee or pay may lawfully
enter, alter or personalize the deeply superficial appearance of the city (Bloch, 2016a).
In this essay I discuss with several prolific members of the LA-basedgraffiti
com munity how they perceive one of the most contentious aspects of graffiti even
among writers themselves––that is, the act of ‘hitting murals’. My goal here is not to
roman ticize or justify illegal graffiti writing as a counter-moralizing act or defensive
guerilla-style form of ‘self-provisioning’ that is consciously performed in the interest
of forwarding community, social or spatial justice (Kinder, 2014). Rather, I elucidate
graffiti writers’ reasons for writing on murals to expose the complexity and multipart
context of engaging in unpopular though prevalent forms of illicit, trangressive and
bottom-up urbanism. I also contribute to the debate over the illicit marking of public
space by graffiti writers more broadly, which has hitherto been reduced by many to easy,
uninformed and taken-for-granted moralizing over the proper function of space and
the sanctification of dominant urban aesthetics.
DEBATES 457
— Methods
I conducted personal interviews with many of the very graffiti writers who
played a role in the destruction of the Olympic murals. I recorded informal though semi-
structured conversations with 108 individual writers between 2006 and 2015, asking
them to talk about their graffiti careers.2 The respondents ranged in age from approxi-
mately 19 to 45 years, were predominantly self-identified or identifiable as Chicano/a
or Latino/a, followed by white of various ancestry, and in far smaller numbers writers
were identifiable as black, Asian American or mix race. Of the 108 writers, nine were
female. Each writer was selected for their notoriety or status in the graffiti community.
Of the 108 writers, about 10% were fully retired (meaning they fully abstained from any
sort of illegal or legal writing), about 80% were semi-retired (meaning they seamlessly
moved back and forth between actively doing legal and to a much lesser degree illegal
graffiti; mostly engaged in producing legal ‘graffiti art’ or ‘graffiti murals’, but caught
the occasional tag; or had left ‘the scene’ altogether but still ‘caught the occasional tag’
just for fun or if there was little or no risk in getting caught) and 10% were fully active
writers.3
After recording the initial round of one-on-one interviews in private homes,
at organized back yard get-togethers, in agreed-upon meeting places in public, which
included sites of illegal graffiti production, or in a few cases via email or hand written
letter from those writers physically incapacitated, incarcerated or living outside of
the LA area, I transcribed each of the interviews with assistance from students in the
Department of Geography at the University of Minnesota between 2008 and 2010. I
then coded each transcribed inter view and extracted references to ‘freeway bombing’,
‘hitting murals’ and allusions to space, legality and identity. The interviews excerpted
for this essay represent a small, though representative sample of the popular practice
and commonly addressed topic of freeway bombing.
The importance of ‘bombing freeways’ as part of a writer’s repertoire was artic-
ulated in 102 of the 108 interviews, though ‘hitting murals’ was raised by respondents in
only 38 of the interviews, with 28 of those respondents acknowledging the contentious
politics of writing on murals. I initiated the issue or later contacted respondents to
follow up on the topic of writing on murals in 10 of the 38 cases.
I relied on my own ‘insider status’ as a once prolific and respected ‘bomber’ to
gain access to these members of the otherwise highly guarded and anonymous graffiti
community, and was therefore also able to rely on data generated from the qualitative
method of participant observation (Adler and Adler, 1987). Such closeness did, however,
force me to reflect on my own positionality and the degree to which my status and close-
ness unduly affected the objectivity of this research (Dwyer and Buckle, 2009; Holstein
and Gubrium, 2013; see also Beer, 2014). But being that my goal in writing this essay is
the explication and contextualization of a visible and hitherto misunderstood practice,
I am confident that my personal participation and position is more demonstrative than
unduly prejudicing.
Possessing status did not, however, come without its own potential peril. The
issue of hitting murals is a controversial and uncomfortable topic among writers who
as a group do not possess a singular view on the practice. As a writer myself who has
‘gotten out’ and gone into what is perceived to be a position of power as an academic
researcher aligned with an institution of higher education, I found myself wanting to
justify my reasons for ‘coming home’ and asking such provocative questions about mural
bombing. To accomplish this I relied in part on the technique of photo elicitation (Harper,
2 I received technical and logistical assistance from Robert Alva and Robert Reiling.
3 McAuliffe and Iveson (2011) and MacDiarmid and Downing (2012) problematize the strict legal/illegal graffiti
binary and emphasize that graffiti writers who do choose to produce legal graffiti or murals in sanctioned spaces
actually drift between legal and illegal involvement, showing how the path out of the graffiti subculture is not
smooth or unidirectional, even when desired.
ESSAY 458
2002; Clark-Ibanez, 2004) and what I call ‘place-based elicitation’ (Bloch, 2016b). In an
effort to regain any trust I had possibly lost given my new status or the perception that
I was being judgmental of those who had bombed murals, I showed an image taken
in 1996 of my own moniker boldly written over the top of a mural, and in some cases
even returned to the very walls that I and my respondents at different times had ‘hit’ as
active writers.
The picture I showed included my ‘tag name’ written in block-style 10ft high
by 5ft wide letters painted in black and silver over the top of Margaret Garcia’s Silent
Prison painted at the entrance to the 110 freeway in downtown LA in 1984. While I later
learned the name of the mural that I had almost completely covered in 1996, at the
time of writing on it I did not possess the type of learned visual literacy needed to see,
let alone identify, the mural. Encouraged by a drive for fame and adventure, combined
with the desire to avoid detection by patrolling police and roving gang members, my
concern was for what I was writing on the wall, not for what was already written on
the wall.
In retrospect, I recall being oblivious to the politics of bombing murals as well
as to the very presence of the one I had personally bombed. I felt neither a concern for
composition nor hostility toward the artist. Given the fact that it was already heavily
tagged and framed by a freshly painted grey wall, the one thing the mural consciously
provided me was evidence that it would act as a lasting platform for my name given its
neglect in terms of not being cleaned of graffiti. In this regard, the mural’s utility and
function as a ‘landmark’ was appealing to me. Such an approach as mine sits at one
end of a spectrum of intentionality that was articulated by my respondents, who, at
the other end of the spectrum, articulated rancor toward or respect for murals more
generally.
Life
What appeared on Twitchell’s 7th Street Altarpiece prior to Gin and Duce’s two
color ‘throw-ups’ in 1992 were errant markings and sporadic gang tags not attributable
to a member of the socially cohesive global graffiti subculture whose adherents produce
graffiti that is both stylistically identifiable and systematically reproduced. However,
since that first graffiti produced by a recognized and identifiable member of the ‘graffiti
community’ did appear on the mural, few in the policymaking, mural-preservationoraca -
demic communities have made the effort to ask ‘Why do you write on murals?’.4
When I asked why he and Gin hit Twitchell’s mural in 1992 (Figures 1 and 2),
thereby legitimizing the bombing of murals for a whole community of writers, Duce
unambiguously answered ‘because we loved that thing … it was a compositional issue
for us’ (personal interview, 2012). Elaborating, he recalls:
It was all about placement for [Gin] and me. We wanted this giant guy in
the mural to present our names to everyone with his hands. At first I didn’t
want to hit it, but it was a picture opportunity. It would look really great and
be a great piece to have. Back then we were like a lot of writers––we were
collectors of images and pictures, like kids who collect baseball cards. It was
also a high-traffic area that we knew would ride for a long time, and it did.
We wanted it to have an impact. But really we just wanted to incorporate our
piece into the mural, not to destroy it outright. We wanted it to be unified. I
respected Kent [Twitchell] because I knew who he was. So that justified it in
my mind.
4 For a notable exception, see Halsey and Young (2006).
DEBATES 459
Aside from his expressed interest in composition, Duce is articulating one of the
primary motivations for writing on murals: that is, for it to be seen and to last, or ‘stay up’.
What appealed to LAOOC Vice President Fitzgerald and the 10 commissionedmural-
ists appealed to graffiti writers as well: the monumentality of the freeway, a massive and
often captive audience, and ideally, the belief that their work would last unmolested for
an extended period of time. As Fitzgerald (1984: 249) put it ‘the Los Angeles Olympic
Organizing Committee commissioned several works of public art [because] it wasimpor-
tant that the Festival leave a visible legacy to the people of Los Angeles, much as the
bronze and marble statues of athletic heroes are part of the legacy left by the ancient
Olympics’.
In graffiti vernacular, ‘spots’ or locations that afford lasting power for a ‘tag’, or
written moniker, are known as ‘landmarks’. Especially in the days before cell-phone
cameras and graffiti websites, graffiti writers sought out high-profile landmarks to
ensure that their work would receive a large and lasting audience, especially as graffiti
removal efforts increased. Graffiti writers, like Fitzgerald and the 10 commissioned
muralists, were therefore equally drawn to LA’s most frequented and hopefully durable
public spaces.
As innovators of style and pioneers in terms of finding new spaces on which
to produce their work, Gin and Duce had perhaps unwittingly ignited a trend in the
graffiti community that had to that point been primarily the practice of gang members
and ‘toys’––or those who lack skill and respect in the graffiti community. Ferrell and
Weide (2010: 55) confirm in their well-informed article on location selection by graffiti
writers: ‘when a reputable writer paints a spot, it by definition becomes more desirable
for other writers to paint that same spot, or other spots like it’. They go on to offer atax -
onomy of additional considerations in selecting desirable and appropriate spaces on
which to write, such as ‘audiences and visibility’, ‘longevity and durability’, ‘availability
and competition’ and ‘seriality and accumulation’ (ibid.: 55; see also Austin, 2001). Given
these concerns and a fundamental desire for exposure, far from acting out mindlessly,
disrespectfully or ‘animalistically’, graffiti writers such as Gin and Duce express the
same motivations and desires as their harshest critics in the mural community. Given
a fuller understanding of the complexities associated with rational spot selection and
the distinctly human desire to interact illicitly and aesthetically with public space
(Williams, 2007; Brighenti, 2010), Duce’s actions should not be seen as paradoxical
even in light of his stated admiration for the mural that he defaced and unwittingly
helped destroy.
Gin and Duce on Kent Twitchell’s 7th Street Altarpiece, Harbor Freeway,
1992 (photo courtesy of Robert Alva)
ESSAY 460
Even before Gin and Duce hit Twitchell’s mural, graffiti writers and muralists
had long shared barrio wall space, even if uneasily. As Sanchez-Tranquilino (1995: 65)
argues, when critical Chicano/a muralism became ‘officially approved’ by ‘community
leaders’, it became the art of the dominant community juxtaposed against graffiti, which
further came to exemplify ‘“subdominant” social values’. In fact, as he argues, there was
no evidence of a ‘graffiti problem’ before ‘community murals’ became a bureaucratic
solution to existing barrio placas and all other forms of unsanctioned graffiti (ibid.: 65).
Before sanctioned community murals were seen as part of civic beautification efforts,
do-it-yourself and spontaneous forms of street art necessarily coexisted with community
murals as an expression of aesthetic autonomy, nonhierarchical expression and equal
claims made to city space.
Nonhierarchical collaboration on shared walls dates back to the pre-Columbian
tradition of artistic expression and use of the commons. As Latorre (2008: 100) points
out, in pre-conquest America there was little to no spatial or aesthetic demarcation
bet ween text (‘calligraphy’) and images (‘glyphs’), but muralists such as Judith Baca––
long-time critical Chicana muralist, director of the Social and Public Art Resource
Center (SPARC) in Venice, CA, and contributor to the Olympic Arts festival––sees
the distinction between murals and graffiti akin to ‘being able to speak in articulate
poetry and being able to make a crude remark. Both are expressions, but the quality of
the expressions is very different’ (personal interview, 2012). Similarly, eminent mural
historian Shifra Goldman distinguishes between graffiti and murals, whereby the former
is ‘aimlessly aggressive’ and the latter is ‘collective and directional’ (1976: 75). Other
muralists such as Willie Herrón, who also took part in the Festival, have been more
ambivalent about ‘appropriating the space that belonged by custom to placas’ (quoted
in Sanchez-Tranquilino, 1995: 65).
Power washing graffiti and soot off of Kent Twitchell’s 7th Street Altarpiece,
Harbor Freeway (photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Mural Conservancy)
DEBATES 461
Herrón, a former graffiti writer himself, is widely recognized as one of the
first critical Chicano muralists. His legendary 1972 mural The Wall that Cracked Open
incorporates gang graffiti into his piece commemorating the violent death of his brother.
Instead of suggesting that his mural possessed the moral or aesthetic authority to rep-
resent or reappropriate space from the local community, his composition provides a
space through which existing placas continue to speak. Still others in the entrenched
Chicano/a mural community lament what they interpret as a loss of respect from
Chicano/a graffiti writers.
Ernesto De La Loza is a Chicano muralist, outspoken critic of illegal murals and
graffiti, and the creator of the now covered and once iconic Inner City Kickin’ It mural
painted along Sunset Boulevard in the Silver Lake district of LA (Bloch, 2012b). He sees
the increased writing on murals beginning in 1992 as evidence that ‘the new generation
has lost its way’ in terms of understanding the history of identity politics and the larger
Chicano/a struggle for acceptance and territory in a ‘hostile Anglo society’. According to
De La Loza (personal interview, 2009):
These kids have no respect. They are not taught respect in school, they have
no art education, and they don’t know who they are as Chicanos or anything
else. They just mindlessly walk the streets vandalizing other people’s property. I
consider my mural my property because I did it and intended for it to stay here
forever. Taggers don’t care about anything or anyone but themselves.
But as graffiti writer and self-defined Chicano graffiti-muralist Eye One sees it,
‘going over some outdated mural like Ernesto’s is not necessarily a sign of disrespect.
What is a sign of disrespect is the fact that some of these old-school “radical Chicano”
muralists think they own the walls just because they got permission and a paycheck from
the City to paint on them’ (personal interview, 2011). Adding to Eye One’s sentiment
and his evocation of cultural authority and economic incentive at play in legitimizing
mural production, Colt (personal interview, 2004)––one of the most prolific freeway
and mural bombers in LA history––put it bluntly, saying:
These muralists got paid five figures to paint these murals in the first place, so
I’m like, ‘yo you got your money, what the fuck do you care’. And the art in those
murals on the freeways is really pathetic. There’s a whole lot of graffiti writers I
can think of who are infinitely better than any of the muralists who were paid to
paint that bullshit. And all of the writers I know of would have done it for free
just to get the recognition from their peers … Sorry, but you get no love from
me. I’ll just hit that shit without looking back.
With the escalation in graffiti by 1992, the desire for equitable collaboration and
layered composition articulated separately by Sanchez-Tranquilino, Duce and Herrón,
as well as the expectation that murals would be honored with unwavering respect, would
surrender to a more aggressive and competitive style of freeway bombing evinced by
Colt. Between 1992 and 1996, what had been a back-and-forth struggle between graffiti
writers, muralists and graffiti removal teams, which played out on the face of each of
the 10 Olympic murals as well as on several post-1984 murals painted throughout LA,
became a graffiti deluge by which all graffiti eradication and mural preservation efforts
were overwhelmed.
Slow death
Appearing in LA, Philadelphia and New York City in the early 1970s, contempo-
rary forms of systematic and stylized wall writing painted on urban infrastructure
predates so-called ‘hip hop graffiti’ (Ley and Cybriwski, 1974; Cesaretti, 1975; Chastanet,
ESSAY 462
2009; Schacter, 2013). But by the early 1980s it was in fact the New York ‘wild style’ form
of intricate wall writing that became one of the ‘four elements of hip hop culture’, which
includes DJing, MCing and B-boying (Chang, 2005; see also Rose, 1994; Lamotte, 2014).
Although graffiti writers have been equally aligned with and inspired by the ethic and
aesthetic of the low-rider oldies, heavy metal, hardcore and punk music scenes,the
adop tion of the appellation ‘hip hop’ was driven by the almost simultaneous nation wide
release of mainstream print media, movies and music that highlighted hip hop-style
graffiti and coincided with the painting and unveiling of the Olympic freeway murals.
These media include the hugely influential Subway Art (Copper and Chalfant, 1984),
the films Wild Style (Ahearn, 1983), Style Wars (Chalfant and Silver, 1983), Beat Street
(Lathan, 1984), and Breakin’ (Silberg, 1984), the release of early hip hop act Whodini’s
1983 album with its graffiti-embellished cover and soon after Run-DMC’s first record
(Simmons and Smith, 1984), and in academia the publication of Castleman’s ground-
breaking ethnographic study of New York City graffiti writers, Getting Up (1984).
It was perhaps an unfortunate coincidence that the Olympic murals were
painted on the very surfaces that possessed such meaning for a burgeoning subculture
of spatially conscious young people for whom graffiti was the visual expression of
contemporary urban culture. What the subways provided for New York City writers in
terms of adventure, exposure and mobility, the freeways offered the writers of LA. As
Wisk One, the first ‘all city’ bomber in LA, put it:
fools would be riding skateboards, taking buses, and travelling by car from the
Westside and the Eastside to meet up at ‘writers benches’ in the Valley to show
off new copies of graffiti books and movies, share flicks, sport their homemade
markers, and write in each other’s black books. By 1984 it started jumping off
like crazy and the freeway was the new frontier for us (Wisk, personal interview,
2011).
Tempt One, a legendary graffiti writer known for helping to pioneer the ‘Eye-
writer’ technology for artists living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson’s and
other progressive neurodegenerative diseases (http://www.eyewriter.org, accessed
August 2014), reflects on his own foray onto the freeway:
By the mid-1980s our sole purpose was to go ‘all-city’ on the freeway tip.
Angst’s room was set up like a war room. He had a map with thumbtacks at
key points. We’d start in Pomona at 9 pm and bomb ‘til sunrise, ending up in
Santa Monica––east to west. The next night we’d go from Long Beach to the San
Fernando Valley and so on. Hitting major freeway routes about three nights a
week while blasting a mix of hip hop, oldies, and hardcore (Tempt, personal
interview, 2011).
Although systematic, stylized, nongang graffiti began to appear on freeways in
1984, as well respected writers like Tempt, Wisk, Ser, Cab and others legitimized the
dangerous practice, most of the writing was confined to ledges along overpasses, guard
rails, center dividers, support columns, the backs of freeway signs (or ‘heavens’) and
other forms of utilitarian infrastructure. It was a series of events later, in the early 1990s,
that led to the exponential growth of the subculture and precipitated the destruction of
the freeway murals.
The well-publicized arrest of the prolific graffiti writer Chaka in 1991 (Anima
1991; Sahagun, 1991), the LA riots of 1992 (Johnson et al., 1993; Abu-Lughod, 2007),
followed by Fox Television’s popular ‘front page’ exposé on ‘daredevil taggers’ and ‘tag
bangers’ (a combination of ‘tagger’ and ‘gang banger’) helped transform what had been a
DEBATES 463
relatively tight-knit community of writers and self-proclaimed ‘artist vandals’ into a far
more aggressive and loose-knit graffiti counterculture. Just as graffiti had been placed
under the banner of hip hop in ‘84, by ‘92 it fell under the headlines of gang activity.
By 1992 the homicide rate in LA rose to an all-time high, with over 1,000 murders
citywide, including 53 killings directly related to the LA riots. Gang membership was
also at its peak, as was the proliferation in the overall number of graffiti writers and
‘tagging crews’. The justified fear and rampant paranoia people felt during this violent
era, which even among graffiti writers is known as the ‘dark days’ due to the increased
danger posed to writers, contributed to the idea that all forms of graffiti, particularly
when done illegally and lacking in colorful imagery and apparent artistry, was evidence
of a violent demarcation of property.
Whereas gang members have in fact traditionally used graffiti in addition to
threats and physical violence to lay claim to territory (Phillips, 1999), writers use graffiti,
or nongang-related ‘tagging’ and what Sanchez-Tranquilino (1995) calls ‘barrio calligra-
phy’ to gain personal fame, challenge abstract notions of authority and assert theirfleet-
ing presence over a wide geographical area. The easy conflation of the two distinct
though visually expressive street-based subcultures could not be more distorted.
For gangs––a group for whom territorial demarcation is part of their raison
d’etre––tagging presents a vivid existential challenge. So threatening was nongang
graf fiti to turf integrity in the gang-ridden streets of LA during the early 1990s, the Mexi-
can Mafia purportedly issued a ‘green light’ on taggers (Philips, 1999; personal commu-
nications, 1992–96). The edict allowing for the killing of taggers regardless of their race
or ethnicity was passed down from the veteranos in the California State prisons to the
‘pee-wees’ on the streets who were responsible for violently maintaining the integrity
of the barrio and its drug trade. Much like ‘moral entrepreneurs’ in racially segregated
and economically fragmented places like LA who belong to aggressive neighborhood
watch groups, homeowners’ associations and chambers of commerce (Becker, 1963;
Davis, 1990), gang members are acutely aware of the challenge that graffiti presents to
territorial control and declared authority over place identity.
Within the graffiti community, however, the early 1990s is also characterized as
the most productive in terms of the amount of graffiti being produced, innovations in
style and placement, and the sheer size of individual pieces being painted on localfree -
ways. There was a heightened competition for space resulting in part from post-riot
‘crisis-generated restructuring’ that pushed graffiti writers onto the freeways and away
from the heavily patrolled spaces of a rapidly redeveloping Downtown (Soja, in Scott
and Soja, 1998). The combination of increased street violence, amplified media atten-
tion, and rampant criminalization and restructuring resulted in a form of brazen and
destructive bombing that would last for the next decade.
What had been symbols of LA’s ascension to global city status in 1984 were
becoming neglected relicts by 1994 as the city hosted globally televised matches as part
of the FIFA World Cup. LA’s graffiti-covered murals came to symbolize a blighted urban
landscape that made the city seem more like its role in films such as Colors (Hopper,
1988), Boyz n the Hood (Singleton, 1991) and American Me (Olmos, 1992) than it did in
glossy soccer programs and in booster literature celebrating the new metro rail system,
Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall, and Community Redevelopment Agency
projects from Downtown to Hollywood.
Toomer from the TKO (Total Knock Out) crew was considered one of the pri-
mary instigators of so-called tag banging and all-out mural destruction and had been
one of the most prolific downtown bombers in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Mohan,
2003; Pray, 2005). Like his contemporaries such as Chaka, Wisk, Sleez, Triax, 125, Oiler
and Sacred, he has made a name for himself hitting walls along empty lots and the
façades of gutted buildings. He recalls when bombing murals went from aesthetically
ESSAY 464
motivated, as was the case with Gin and Duce in 1992, to spatially coordinated as a
result of the reduction of available downtown spots as well as intercrew hostilities or
‘beef’ (personal interview, 2009):
By the late ‘90s it was an all-freeway battle between us and the WAIs (We All In)
and MTAs (Metro Transit Assassins) in which we fuckin’ just overwhelmed the
whole city. I remember, at that point, driving at six o’clock in the morning to see
the damage, and saying to myself, ‘Fuck. I’m gonna go to jail’. Because it was
so … it was just ridiculous. We had, like, every fucking freeway, the 110, the 10,
the 101, the 5, the 710, the 405. We just had all the sound walls destroyed. We
had giant rollers, just big blockbuster rollers on every rooftop, every downtown
mural was killed. We just had everything crushed. There were no fucking limits
whatsoever. We had to hit murals and everything else if we were going to let it
be known that for TKO there were no limits whatsoever.
For many writers with whom I spoke there was an unsettling distinction bet-
ween what Gin and Duce had done and the mentality associated with what writers
like Toomer were doing. As Chalk put it, ‘The wanna-be gangster mentality took over
and it just grew in a matter of, like, a year. Then there would be some tags in the past
on the murals, but then, bam! They were destroyed because of all the beef and macho
bullshit’ (personal interview, 2011). However, she, like Wisk, also related to and actually
appreciated the appearance of a ‘nicely bombed mural’. As Wisk comments, ‘Ya, I have
to admit it, it looks fresh sometimes when [murals] get hit. Besides, graffiti is part of LA
culture and history too. Why should I have to respect or appreciate some kinds of wall
art and not others’ (personal interview, 2011). Regardless of the subjective appreciation
for art, bombing murals became more about opportunity and perceived necessity and
less about compositional issues as writers started to care less about what their peers
thought aside from the fame they acquired for simply ‘getting up’.
Ferrell and Weide (2010: 55) point out how writers learn ‘moral codes’ as they
‘constantly evaluate and criticize one another’s graffiti and graffiti-writing locations, in
this way socializing novice writers into the process of discriminating between appro-
priate and inappropriate graffiti spots’. But as Wisk adds:
Even though a bunch of us were speaking out against destroying murals,
we didn’t reach everyone, and those we did reach sometimes didn’t care to
listen because of the whole new ‘I just don’t give a fuck’ mentality in the
graff community. While I blame that on a lack of leadership from the older
writers like me, you know, you can only talk so much. But ultimately who’s to
say how those walls should look anyway. It’s all about taste I guess. The murals
are sitting right there, so they get written on. It is not some sort of sacred art
or off-limits wall just because it’s a mural … I happen to like the murals and
the graffiti, and honestly together they actually look fresh. I guess the person
who cares most about having their name on that wall is going to get off their
ass and put in the most work to make sure it stays that way … and right now it
looks like graff writers won those walls fair and square, whether you like it or
hate it.
Final blow
Many of the graffiti writers I interviewed articulated a creative, competitive,
do-it-yourself and anarchic perspective in terms of securing and aestheticizing wall
space. Many of my respondents also resented the fact that they were being criticized by
DEBATES 465
members of the entrenched Chicano/a and mainstream mural communities (Cock croft,
1993), even as no civic entity or public art institutions to which theselegit imate muralists
were beholden seemed to be doing much for the preservation of environmentally
damaged and already defaced murals. While organizations such as SPARC and the LA
Mural Conservancy (MCLA) do in fact work to restore murals with the use of private
donations and public funds from the LA Department of Cultural Affairs, California Arts
Council, and National Endowment of the Arts, their ability to save the Olympic murals
has been hampered for years for logistical and legal reasons.
As with other types of civic stewardship, the bureaucracy involved with per-
mitting and preserving sanctioned murals is daunting. Unlike neoliberal, public–private
sector and mega-event development, unprofitable––that is, often cultural––forms of
urban development that do not possess clearly articulable ‘spectacle as an added value’
are often subject to first rounds of disinvestment and the most severe form of dereliction
(Harvey, 1985; Jakle and Wilson, 1992; Zukin 1993; Muñoz, 2006: 177). Because LA’s
form of Olympic urbanism in 1984 was largely arts based, the city has struggled, or has
been unwilling, to preserve its Olympic heritage. In addition to the lack of local funding
for preservation, the slow death of the Olympic freeway murals can also be attributed to,
paradoxically, their federal protection and ‘recognized stature’ under the 1990 Visual
Artists Rights Act (VARA; 17 USC § 106A).
As murals were covered with graffiti by the late 1990s, preservationists became
overwhelmed. The laborious process of meticulously removing top layers of acrylic spray
paint by hand from the murals would prove futile as cleaned murals would be ‘hit’ again
within hours. As layers of spray paint built up on the mural surfaces, preservationists
were forced to turn to high-pressured water blasting. However, the logistics involved in
working with such equipment along the sides of busy lanes of traffic were prohibitively
difficult as well as costly. But as the murals became increasingly ‘blighted’, thecitybellig-
erently declared a ‘zero tolerance’ approach and launched one of its many wars on graf-
fiti (see also Iveson, 2010).
In a typical gesture toward appeasing a morally outraged public and exerting
control of the appearance of the city (Kramer, 2010), city-sanctioned and funded ‘buff
crews’ such as the Hollywood Beatification Team began haphazardly painting over the
graffiti on the murals with thick gray bucket paint, thereby further burying the surface
of the mural in the process. Since these were graffiti removal crews operating under
city contract obscuring the murals in the process of covering graffiti, several muralists
including Judith Baca informally evoked the then recently passed VARA (1990) in an
effort to halt both the increased destruction of their work as well as the damage being
done to the image of the ‘mural capital of the world’.
VARA recognizes visual artists’ ‘moral rights’ to their works. The act preserves
the integrity of a piece of art displayed in private or public spaces––i.e. sculptures, fres-
cos, tapestries, installations––barring even owners of the work and municipalities from
‘destroying, distorting, mutilating, or modifying’ protected works (VARA, 1990). Most
important in terms of applying VARA protection to murals, the mural, like any form
of visual art, must simply possess ‘recognized stature’ in the eyes of ‘members of the
artists community, or by some cross section of society’ (VARA, 1990; Carter v. Helmsley-
Spear, Inc., 1994). Being that the intended purpose of the Olympic freeway murals was
to attract widespread attention to the 1984 Summer Games, and to the image of the city
more generally, securing recognition and protection under VARA was all but assured
by a judge.
Although there was still no legal precedent for VARA because a claim on behalf
of a muralist had not yet been brought forward or decided by the courts, by 2000, while
under pressure from the MCLA and individual muralists, the Cali fornia Department
of Transportation (Caltrans)––the agency primarily responsible for graffiti removal on
ESSAY 466
freeways––and the city’s Department of Public Works became concerned about being
found culpable for illegally harming murals in the process of graffiti removal.5 The
unintended consequence of evoking VARA, therefore, was that murals were being left
untouched by all but graffiti writers, for whom local laws, let alone untried federal acts,
are hardly a deterrent.6
The city and state agencies responsible for maintaining murals painted on public
property also claimed to have insufficient funds for preservation. However, as the bot-
tom portions of the murals were becoming buried under graffiti while the top portions
were facing environmental damage from car exhaust, fading from the harsh southern
California sunshine and peeling from water seepage coming through the porous con-
crete, Caltrans continued spending upwards of US $20 million on graffiti removal
as the city continued spending over US $10 million per year in ‘beautification’ funds
earmarked in part for graffiti removal. Other agencies including the Department of
Public Works, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the LA Unified School District, and
the County of LA also spent a yearly combined US $64.5 million painting over graffiti
(Blankstein, 2008; SPARC7). As a result of these spending priorities, combined with
fears of a VARA legal fight, walls directly adjacent to the dying murals were routinely
buffed and sand blasted clean.
By the early 2000s, graffiti writers were therefore being tacitly encouraged to
write on the mural surfaces where their work would stay for longer periods of time. As
Judith Baca acknowledges:
There is a policy that says that any graffiti on a wall has to be removed within 24
hours, except if it’s on a mural. So that has actually shifted the emphasis on to
painting on murals. Because if you want to get your mark up, if you want to get
your tag up, and you want it to stay up, hit a mural (quoted in Olney, 2009).
And such byzantine realities of wall stewardship are not lost on graffiti writers.
As Trigz candidly puts it (personal interview, 2014):
I’ve hit a lot of murals while bombing freeways. I don’t need to defend myself
but what happened is the city was buffing like crazy and the Highway Patrol was
creeping and waiting for us to write on stupid shit that would get buffed the
next day. Then they stopped buffing the murals ‘cause they wanted to fix them,
but they never had the money or whatever. So they kind of just went to shit and
I started hitting them because they already looked like shit and were already
destroyed so I figured ‘fuck it’.
Trigz points to the strategic logic in hitting murals and is articulating a primary
justification widely used by writers––that is, if a mural is already written on, there is
no harm in adding yet another layer. So by the end of the decade, for those able to
decipher the writing on the walls, each ‘spot’ became a veritable who’s who of the graf-
fiti and street art world. To the general public and city officials, however, these spaces
became chaotic menageries of color and blight. Caltrans and the city reacted to the
5 The applicability of VARA to public murals was made certain in 2006 when Kent Twitchell was awarded US $1.1
million from the city of LA, a building owner and nine other defendants including a private graffiti removal company
for the illegal removal of his graffiti-scarred and sun-faded Ed Rusche mural. The six-story high mural adorned the
façade of a privately owned office building in Downtown LA (Robinson, 2000).
6 Potentially making the matter of removing graffiti from murals even more legally complicated is the fact that legal
scholars have suggested that the recognition of copyright and moral rights under VARA can also be extended to
graffiti (Lerman, 2012). What is in question in applying VARA is whether or not a work of visual art possesses widely
recognized artistic merit or stature, regardless of its legality (Bougdanos, 2002). Such a claim has never been raised
outside of academic law review articles however.
7 URL http://sparcinla.org (accessed 4 January 2011).
DEBATES 467
Alonzo Davis’s Eyes on ‘84 soon after completion, 1984 (photo courtesy of
Alonzo Davis)
Graffiti painted by multiple writers, including Revok, Gore, Erie, Besto,
Lagz, Adze and Duer, atop Alonzo Davis’s Eyes on ‘84, 2011 (photo courtesy of José
Tchopourian)
ESSAY 468
illicit reaestheticization of public space by literally wiping the slate clean. By 2012 the
walls on which many of the graffiti-scarred murals sat were returned to their original
brutalist shade of gray (Figures 3–5).
Not wanting to ‘subject the population of LA to a bunch of graffiti’ (personal
interview, 2013), Twitchell personally asked Caltrans to paint over his mural, thereby
‘preserving it’ for some future resurrection. However, Alonzo Davis, the artistic coor-
dinator for the Olympic mural project, stated that he would ‘rather see the graffiti than
just a gray wall’, acknowledging that he ‘can’t claim that space indefinitely, but at least
others can, which at least creates a diversity of color, which was our initial goal in
painting these murals back in ‘83’ (personal interview, 2013). As he put it, ‘anything on
that wall is better than nothing’.
In a brutal irony, given Twitchell’s and Davis’s contrasting perspectives, as
Twichell’s 7th Street Altarpiece was being relocated and fully restored in late 2012,
Davis’s Eyes on ‘84, which depicted the Olympic insignia and traditional African-
American tap es tries, was being permanently erased. Caltrans cited ‘concrete cancer’
(a degradation of the wall’s surface as a result of corrosion and carbonation) as the reason
his graffiti-covered mural could not be restored. Davis attributed the brutal erasure
of his mural to Caltrans’ bureaucracy and local government’s abandonment of both
its mural tradition and its commitment to cultural diversity (personal interview, 2013).
Coda: possible rebirth?
In 2002 the city of LA issued a moratorium on the production of new commercial
advertising on both public and private property. The move was made to halt the pro-
liferation of electronic billboards as well as unpermitted signage. Because the city could
not, as per First Amendment restric tions, distinguish between commercial signage
Concrete wall on the northbound Harbor Freeway in downtown Los
Angeles buffed free of Davis’s mural and years of graffiti, 2014 (photo courtesy of José
Tchopourian)
DEBATES 469
and ‘fine art murals’, the moratorium extended to all hand-painted murals as well
(for a discussion of hand-painted commercial signage in predominantly Chicano/a
neighborhoods in LA, see Rojas and Chase, 2006).
Existing murals entered a state of limbo given the frustration muralists were
experiencing and the lack of funding public arts organizations were receiving dur-
ing the 11-year moratorium (MCLA Director Isabella Rojas, personal interview, 2013).
Artists and organizations were loath to restore or preserve murals that possessed an
uncertain future, and even more frustrating was the city’s attempt to maintain its title of
‘mural capital of the world’ by hanging ‘mobile murals’ consisting of printed graphics on
75ft long sheets of vinyl paper along freeway walls. As the graphics fell and were stolen
and the mural ban stayed in place, there was an increase in the production of large-scale
illegal graffiti murals being painted across LA by recognized members of the graffiti
community. In fact, as I have pointed out elsewhere (Bloch, 2012b), in recent years it
has been these illegally produced graffiti murals painted by Eye One, Cache, Mear CBS
and others that have remained largely free of errant graffiti and tacitly accepted by local
communities and government for, as Halsey and Pederick (2010) perceptively put it, for
essentially contributing to the erasure of ‘graffiti’.
As I complete this essay, several of the original Olympic murals have been
repainted and preserved as part of the 30-year anniversary celebration of the 1984
Games and the Olympic Arts Festival. But if the established mural community and their
private benefactors and governmental protectors continue to disregard and misread
the graffiti community’s reasons and justifications for writing on them, the restoration
will be short lived. As with other forms of local development, civic boosters and policy-
makers must learn to read and understand competing forms of expression and bottom-
up claims made to space.
Stefano Bloch, Urban Studies Program, Brown University, Box 1833, Maxcy Hall, 108
George Street, Providence, RI 02912, USA, stefano_bloch@brown.edu
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