Graffiti and school may not seem like the greatest match, even though many writers start by scratching their names on school desks. Institutions tend to disregard graffiti culture, and vice versa. But don’t get us wrong—this doesn’t mean there aren’t any possible connections between the two.
As the culture of graffiti matures, academic investigations into it are on the rise, proving that graffiti is here to stay and that it has a significant, though often subtle, impact on our everyday lives.
Rafael Schacter is one of the rare academics who truly grasps what graffiti is all about. An anthropologist, curator, and professor at University College London, Schacter just released his fourth book: Monumental Graffiti, a 400-page deep dive into what graffiti represents in today’s cities.
In Monumental Graffiti, he applies monument as a lens to understand graffiti and graffiti as a lens to comprehend monument, challenging us to consider what the appropriate monument for our contemporary world could be. The book unpacks today’s iconoclastic moment, showing us why graffiti demands our urgent attention as a form of expression that challenges power structures by questioning whose voices are included in—and whose are excluded from—public space.
Written from twenty years of embedded research on graffiti, the book includes works from graffiti writers such as 10Foot, Delta, Egs, Honet, Mosa, Petro, Revok, and Wombat, alongside those of artists such as Francis Alÿs, Jeremy Deller, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jenny Holzer, Klara Liden, Gordon Matta-Clark, William Pope.L, Cy Twombly, and many more.
We had the pleasure of sitting down with the man himself in London for a coffee and a chat.
“No, I’m not a writer! I’m a writer writing about writing. I mean like probably everyone I wrote a few tags as a kid!”
Do you paint? Did you use to paint? If not, where does this interest in graffiti comes from?
No, I’m not a writer! I’m a writer writing about writing. I mean like probably everyone I wrote a few tags as a kid! But graffiti was not really part of my life when I was growing up. I knew people that were involved, but music became my main passion and creative outlet. It was only later, when I went back to study, that all of my interests – in art, in architecture, in the city, and in social change – came together through a focus on the practice of graffiti.
You’re probably one the world’s most respected graffiti academic by the graffiti writers. Can you tell us a bit about your path as an investigator?
I mean I wouldn’t say that *blushing*! But I do feel lucky to still be able to be studying graffiti and independent public art in more general 20 years after I started it! And it’s actually 20 years this year that I started my Masters in Material Culture at UCL Anthropology – where I first decided to focus on graffiti – and I’m still hanging around the same department today, teaching on the course where I was originally studying. That first project was looking at the production, consumption, and destruction of graffiti and street art in London (it was a super fun project, working with writers but also graffiti erasers and anti-graffiti authorities), and that led me to get funding for a PhD. For that I spent 22 months living in Madrid, Spain, working together with a collective called Nov Nueve (including the artists Spok, Nano4814, Eltono, 3TTMan, and Remed) alongside the wider collective of artists that were involved in this image world. That led on to my curatorial work and my non-academic books, as well as to my monograph Ornament and Order. As I mentioned before, I’ve been super lucky to have still been able to work and practice in this area and its something I’m continually inspired by.
When it comes to investigate on a subculture like graffiti, it is pretty hard for researchers who don’t take part in the culture to understand it correctly. It feels like most of the academic work related to this practice are slightly off or irrelevant. What do you think about it?
For me, anthropology – and in particular Material Culture studies which is what I have been schooled within – is just such a perfect way of approaching graffiti and street art. I mean actually I think it’s a great way of approaching art in more general, as I feel it provides a more holistic approach to its study which is always embedded in the social as much as the sensory. At the same time, it doesn’t take anything for granted. So, for example, the position of contemporary art at the highest point and graffiti at the lowest point of our social hierarchy of value – that it is just capital ‘A’ Art that is considered “real” art (i.e. what you find in the collections of the Tate) – is something important to note and take into consideration, but not to uphold as an objective fact. And why that may be the case – or why graffiti is considered pollution and advertising is considered acceptable for example – is something to investigate not to simply take as given. Anthropology is the way!
Since you have dedicated a great part of your life researching on graffiti, we guess that it must be important to you. Why do you think it is important to document, comment and analyse it?
I mean there’s a lot of sides to this. I mean first off, I just really feel that people in general have not fully comprehended the absolute incredible fact of graffiti, as an aesthetic, as an art practice, as a vernacular folk art. I mean the 70’s and 80s in New York in particular; I’m still blown away by the works that artists produced, and the speed of the innovations that occurred in such a short space of time. But also continuing after then, the incredible developments of the practice – and the intertwining of graffiti practice with other forms of visual and performative art too – is just continually exciting for me on conceptual and visual levels. So, I just think it’s an incredible aesthetic world. But then on the flip side, beyond the aesthetic and the practice, as a social and political form – in particular at a moment in which are cities are becoming evermore surveilled and privatised – graffiti just continues to critique and comment on these changes, even if often through what it does rather than what it just “says”. It’s a total art! And as I said, continually inspiring.
You are now teaching at University, what do you think is the most appealing part of your lectures to your students?
I think the fact that things are always, always brought back to the everyday. How does this effect you? How can you relate to this? What impact does it have on the world as you know it? I think that’s such a key starting point; to understand how critical the issues are that are being unpacked, and also how it’s our experiences that can being a real embodied understanding of it.
Is graffiti your only centre of interest as an academic? And in general?
Graffiti is key to my academic work, and ethnographically has been by far my main focus, however my two lines of interest are actually Public Art on the one hand and Global Art on the other. I’ve done a lot of work on Contemporary Art practice in Manila, the Philippines, which has also been a super inspiring project (which became curtailed by COVID, and which I’m seeking to get back to). Both areas are linked through ideas of exhibition, publicness, hierarchy, urban space etc., so whilst ethnographically very different there is oddly quite a lot of overlap.
“The book is a study on graffiti – graffiti as a form, graffiti as a message, and graffiti as a trace – but it also juxtaposes graffiti against the institutional monument…”
Please, tell us more about your latest publication, Monumental Graffiti, that you just released a few weeks ago.
Ah, I couldn’t be happier about the book – genuinely. It’s my fourth but for me personally it’s totally at another level to all my other works. This one is everything I wanted to say. Finally. Put to bed (for now).
The book is a study on graffiti – graffiti as a form, graffiti as a message, and graffiti as a trace – but it also juxtaposes graffiti against the institutional monument, using monuments to examine graffiti but also graffiti to examine institutional monuments. It also uses lots of examples from contemporary and ethnographic art to try and show what graffiti does (materially or conceptually) but through another art practice. More than anything, though, it makes an argument that graffiti is a monument – not just metaphoricall but literally – that it does what monument, in the original meaning of the term, actually does, which is to act as a reminder, and advice, and a warning.
The whole process of working with MIT has also been incredibly supportive and the physical book itself is just an absolute beauty. The design and the quality of the book is just incredible. I’m super happy.
“…one thing I know, like the “war on drugs”, the “war on graffiti” we have also seen, the multi-billion-dollar-war-on-graffiti, has obviously been lost.”
What do you think is the future of graffiti?
Uffff! I mean it’s a hard job to read the future but one thing I know, like the “war on drugs”, the “war on graffiti” we have also seen, the multi-billion-dollar-war-on-graffiti, has obviously been lost. Graffiti is not going to stop just because penalties for doing it increase because people want to do it, because many people need to do it. I’m not talking about spraying profanities on people houses or hate-crimes on religious houses of worship. I’m talking about Graffiti as a very particular, now-global visual and cultural form. I mean yes, digital surveillance has been taken to a genuinely scary level and urban privatisation is more and more common. But people find a way. So, I’m not sure what is going to happen but I’m pretty sure what isn’t. Graffiti is not going to stop.
Monumental Graffiti is available worldwide. Published by MIT Press.
Header: Enrique Escandell Barcelona Subway 2013. Taken from Subterráneos by Enrique Escandell. Courtesy of the artist.
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