Faith in the Power of Vandalism
Photo by John Narr, the photographer of The Faith of Graffiti
Norman Mailer was one of the 20th Century's literary greats. Amongst his achievements was the first major magazine article and art book about a certain controversial emerging trend… in 1974.
“Will we learn whether we are angels seeking to articulate the aesthetic of a great god, or demonic cave painters looking to kill the abominable snowman of our dread night? In any event, wherever, whatever, art is not peace but war, and form is the record of that war.”
This is just one of the many bon mots in author Norman Mailer’s 1974 Esquire essay The Faith of Graffiti. The magazine feature was turned into a book, with accompanying photos from the golden age of vandalism by John Narr, and it would be remiss if I did not mention that we currently have a hardback first edition copy for sale.
First hardback 1974 edition, available in the Books section now.
Mailer, who died in 2007, is considered one of the more interesting novelists of the 20th Century (but not without controversy, and obviously we’ll go into that). By May 1974 though he was in something of a rut. His first novel, 1948’s The Naked and the Dead, a semi-autobiographical snapshot of GIs at war with Japan, remains his best-selling book. 1959’s The White Negro saw him establish himself as a documenter of the times: in it he invented the concept of ‘the hipster’, a streetwise sage who transcends tired societal norms and provides the template for 1960s living. He was yet to write two of his most famous books: The Fight, a defining reportage of Mohammad Ali and George Foreman’s Rumble in the Jungle boxing match that would happen later that year, or 1980’s critically acclaimed The Executioner’s Song for which he would win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Photo by John Narr, the photographer of The Faith of Graffiti
Born Nachem Malech in New Jersey but raised in Brooklyn to jewish middle class parents, Mailer was, by his own admission, utterly fascinated by the black experience in America. His bluntly acknowledged admiration of black male physicality was criticised by his friend and foil, the celebrated gay black novelist James Baldwin, who felt wary of a new stereotype emerging. But while British author JG Ballard was using science fiction to challenge Anglo-Saxon polite society, Mailer was at least finding inspiration in the real world. Shown the photographs by fellow veteran John Narr that would make up The Faith of Graffiti, Mailer declared that what he was seeing was not subculture, but a populist artistic expression of huge social significance.
Photo by John Narr, the photographer of The Faith of Graffiti
Mailer’s analysis of the nascent NY scene established tropes that writers wear as a badge of honour today. He pointe out that a tag was “like a logo” and writers were taking back the city from the forces of mediocrity, bureaucracy and consumerism. “You hit your name and maybe something in the whole scheme of the system gives a death rattle. For now your name is over their name, over the subway manufacturer, the Transit Authority, the city administration. Your presence is on their presence, your alias hangs over their scene,” he wrote.
Photo by John Narr, the photographer of The Faith of Graffiti
Mailer even notices local divergences of style, quoting young writer AMRL, “also known as BAMA, who has said to a reporter in his own full articulate speaking style, ‘Bronx style is bubble letters, and Brooklyn style is script with lots of flourishes and arrows’.”
Photo by John Narr, the photographer of The Faith of Graffiti
He compares graffiti to the best of abstract art, and concludes this undersells it. Mailer saw graffiti as an inevitable push-back against the machine age on behalf of the human spirit: “All the lives ever lived are sounding now like the bugles of gathering armies across the unseen ridge,” Mailer concluded with characteristic, and perhaps necessary, bombast. It was a theme Mailer would run with. In The Fight, he writes that a victory by Ali would be “a triumph for everything which did not fit into the computer: for audacity, inventiveness, even art.”
Photo by John Narr, the photographer of The Faith of Graffiti
Right now in 2021 Mailer is considered ‘problematic’. He linked homosexuality to “the womanisation of America” and loss of any “notion in oneself as a man.” He “abhorred contraception” and stabbed his second wife with a penknife after a disastrous fundraiser for his 1969 New York mayoral campaign. His writing is of the provocatively honest kind: where high-minded, beautiful concepts mix contrast with ugly impulses. In graffiti, he found a process of self-expression that shared his love for the ferocious, the majestic, and the liberated; an art form “screaming through space on an unlinear subway line.”