COMMENTARY : A Look at the Real American Graffiti

Sharp-eyed locals felt something bad coming over the town long before riots broke out on April 29. The writing was literally on the walls.

Gang members use graffiti to mark turf, warn enemies, advertise drugs or simply to put neighborhoods on notice that they are lurking. No one ever thought this obscene blight had anything to do with art. It is the opposite, a jeering warning of the presence of forces willing to pulverize civilization and its art.

The Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition “Helter-Skelter” had tried to point out that there is a dark underbelly beneath Los Angeles’ sunny-side-up image of itself. Unfortunately, the art on view was generally so juvenile that the show only confirmed the town’s unwillingness to grow up. In a recent show at James Corcoran Gallery, artist and filmmaker Dennis Hopper got a bit closer in a series of attractive abstract paintings, their pretty pastel colors scarred by gang graffiti.

He was talking in pictures about a feeling shared by many in the city. Omnipresent graffiti was the sneering suggestion of a fact L.A. would soon be shocked to find utterly real. Lotusland harbors a vandal force that authority cannot control.

The notorious Chaka comes to mind. Last winter, Chaka--born Daniel Ramos--was arrested for putting his signature on more than 10,000 places, doing damage that will cost a half-million to fix.

And yet graffiti has become a subject of study by such august cultural institutions as UCLA and the Getty Center for the Humanities. Venice’s Social and Public Art Resources Center offers tours of graffiti sites. The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs started a program to search out walls the kids can paint legally.

Such prestigious bodies concern themselves because there is a segment of the dark side that’s looking for the light--kids who do graffiti and consider themselves artists. They call themselves “writers.” Their emblematic signature is a “tag.”

Blighted educational budgets and schools denuded of art programs put kids on the streets. There they see the vortex of gangs, prostitution, drugs, and now the outbreak of a kind of urban civil war that threatened neighborhoods throughout the city. Exposed, some of the youths have banded together to seek oasis within the urban purgatory.

This mental haven is known as “hip-hop”--a subcultural triumvirate including break dancing, upbeat rap and graffiti art. Largely the creation of minority youth, it started with African-American street kids in New York. Here in Los Angeles, it joined a long, largely Latino, tradition of wall painting. It has become an international, multiracial youth movement, and although hip-hop has a socially militant wing characterized by rapper Sister Souljah, there is a fundamentally constructive side to its art forms.

All of them require daring, sharing, discipline, endless practice and athletic virtuosity. The visual artists of the underbelly do not merely scrawl walls. They spray-paint elaborate visual “pieces.” They are out to master skills and gain respect. Respect is the leitmotif of the subculture. Even Chaka is trying to get it together, with recent news that he’s pursuing college and has an upcoming gallery show.

The work harks back to David Alfaro Siqueiros’s quickly suppressed 1932 Olvera St. mural and moves forward in time through Millard Sheets’ monumental mosaics, to the populist pieces of Judy Baca, the L.A. Fine Arts Squad and Kent Twitchell. Los Angeles has a built-in propensity to big art. Maybe it’s a fantasy based on huge movie screens.

More directly, graffiti art is an inheritor of traditional high school culture. Every kid who went to Los Angeles public schools remembers classmates who could draw in pyrotechnic cartoon-style. But it was done in small spaces--loose-leaf notebook pages, bathroom walls, posters for the sock hop. The graffiti writers don’t know it but they are working in the Baroque phase of a traditional school style.

Roberto Rubalcava, 21, is the former Zorro--a one-time high school writer recently graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He conducts graffiti tours for SPARC. We toured floridly decorated walls in once-picturesque bohemian neighborhoods, some of which are now in ruins.

A brick building near Sunset and Sanborn is festooned with a garble of virtually unreadable words in elaborate arabesque letters interspersed with tattoo-parlor emblems and cartoon characters. Painting is done with the permission of the sympathetic building owners. Rubalcava is clearly out to emphasize the upside.

“These writers are not gang members,” he says. “They form ‘crews’ and adopt acronymic names like ‘CBS.’ It stands for both ‘Creating Better Styles’ and ‘Can’t Be Stopped.’ ”

The allusion to the broadcasting giant suggests that writers are playing the timeless adolescent card of both rebelling and begging for recognition, defying the system while looking for a way in.

Rubalcava guides his charge to Cine Video, a small film and television studio on Cahuenga, to demonstrate a trend in commissioned graffiti. Businesses that like association with hip youth, such as record and entertainment outfits, pay small sums to have their establishments creatively “vandalized.” In this case the writers were Skill and Toons.

In MacArthur Park, writers soaked the walls of two underpasses with their usual confrontational imagery. The sight makes innocent citizens feel they are about to be mugged. But every panel is a plea for a good cause, protesting against drug-addicted infants, pointing out that suicide is a “Permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

The tour’s piece de resistance is a huge mural at Pico and Union. Executed to celebrate Earth Day, 1990, it was done by an ecumenical consortium of crews. It combines graffiti style with colonial Mexican church decoration and the “pulque art” seen on the walls of traditional Mexican eateries.

The big mural warns of the dangers of ecological neglect with nuclear reactors belching skulls. Another stretch uses frankly Christian imagery to memorialize victims of gang murders and drug overdoses, like some urban underbelly Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial. Puppet, Droopy, Flea, Cobra, Flaco . . . dozens of them.

Rubalcava made his point. At least some of the much-maligned graffiti artists are out to help their community and better their lives. Socially conscious museum and gallery artists are more sophisticated, but they can’t touch these kids for authenticity and a determination to reach an audience that really needs to see what they have to say.

Hector Rios is exemplary. He’s 22, calls himself Hex and has been writing since he was 16. Typically he works by moonlight in the small hours. Gang guys shot at him for violating turf. One night, a police helicopter spotted him doing a boxcar down in the yards. He hid for five hours.

Rios works alone. He thinks it’s because of his family. His dad is a garment worker and militant union man who believes in taking individual action, fighting “minority injustice.” Rios graduated from Paramount High. His greatest artistic inspiration was Twitchell’s huge mural of a Chicano bride and groom on downtown’s Victor Clothing Co.

“I thought, ‘Wow! Who could paint something so big? God?’ ”

He started writing “to get away from all the garbage.” “I didn’t have any idea of harm or destruction. I just wanted to get the feelings out. I always went for mainly industrial places. I didn’t do houses, you know, out of respect for the families.”

Rios has an entrepreneurial spirit many a graffiti-hating burgher would admire. In 1988, he opened a boutique just off fashionable Melrose athwart Fairfax High. Called the Hip Hop Shop, the tiny space features a disc jockey playing rap and original Hex T-shirts airbrushed by hand. A sign next to his easel reads “50% off an airbrush for an ‘A’ in math or science.” His sculpture and sketch pads suggest he’d be a brilliant animator, but his goal is to teach high school art.

Hex’s girlfriend is fresh-faced 21-year-old Omega, a.k.a. Eartha Horn. A rare female writer, she lives with her long-divorced hippie-at-heart mother, a musician with a day job as a hairdresser.

“Graffiti is a male-dominated form,” she says. “A girl has to put up with a lot of stuff. If you’re serious, eventually you get respect.”

The facade wall of the shop is a Hex anti-drug piece. Lyrical and grotesque, its main icon is a ferocious giant rat flanked by a cautionary verse ending: “So if you fall for the cheese / You’ll get jacked by the trap!”

Hex has done a commissioned piece for L.A. Gear. The Museum of Science and Industry had him spray a work to honor Nelson Mandela’s L.A. visit. He’s lectured on graffiti art at universities. He tries to run his always-crowded shop as a haven. During the riots Hex and Omega--scared as anybody else--packed up their inventory and fled to her apartment. The shop escaped harm as did all of the graffiti art sights Rubalcava showed his visitor. He thinks that the underground art form helped protect their buildings.

“When kids see a building with a graffiti piece on it, they feel they’ve got a stake in the place,” Rubalcava said. “Hex’s shop is really popular. It took a lot of willpower to leave it alone.”

The idea lends credence to Hex’s final pronouncement: “I encourage a lot of kids to paint and focus. I think I’ve turned poison into medicine.”