Tag Lines : Two Graffiti Practitioners Profess Their Craft to a Class of UCLA Undergraduates

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne. Chaucer knew the dilemma well. Six hundred years, and art has not gotten one speck easier.

But hark! The voice of hope! OK, it’s actually the voice of a tagger named “Nuke.” But his advice on Tuesday was good enough to confer on a room full of UCLA undergraduates: “Hook up, calm down, know what you’re gonna do--and then bust.” Don’t laugh. They took notes.

Say what you will about graffiti, no one ever said the life of a spray painter was a cushy one. Some look at the Los Angeles River bed and see a pox of tangled ganglia, a lurid mess of bulbous letters and oversized chicken scratches. But to the connoisseur, issues abound: The fluid New York style versus the more linear Los Angeles approach, the challenge of can control, the issue of tips. The shallow derivativeness of the post-Chaka era. Not to mention the fact that it is, ahem, against the law.

These and other fine points of the craft were up for grabs Wednesday, when veteran graffiti artists Joseph (Nuke) Montalvo and Erick (Duke) Montenegro, ages 23 and 24, respectively, were the guest lecturers at World Arts and Cultures 130, a course in the role of public art being taught by visiting professor and well-known muralist Judith Baca.

Baca, an arts activist, said her aim was to explore the “fine line between community sensitivity and censorship”--the subject of a video preceding the Nuke and Duke lecture.

“I do not believe that we can in any way condone aerosol art as a medium,” Hannah Dyke of Graffiti Busters of Sylmar told the camera, complaining that taggers in her neighborhood have become so arrogant that one local group was calling itself JMU, for “Just Missed Us.” A spokeswoman for the city’s anti-graffiti Operation Clean Sweep said tagging creates blight, not art.

But in this setting Nuke and Duke got in the last word, with a wide-ranging look at graffiti and the outlet for self-expression they say it offers for the poor. Although they did not detail it for the class, both young men were raised in the less privileged quarters of Los Angeles, and--inspired by the very murals Baca helped paint--say they found in graffiti an alternative to gang life.

Over time, they said in an interview afterward, each honed a style, gradually taking his work more seriously. Eventually, they joined Earth Crew, a group of environmentally concerned artists (they use spray paint that is devoid of CFCs) that has done murals throughout the United States and Mexico.

“We have a creative impulse that never stops, no matter what you do,” Baca told the class. “Like a river, it will flow, and if you block it, it will find many ways to flow around the obstacle.”

All right, one smarty-pants in the back row conceded, but “a lotta people say tagging’s already dead in New York.”

Clad from head to toe in black--black sweat shirt, black baseball cap, little black beard and ponytail, and big black shoes--Duke fixed him with a long-suffering glare while the gentler Nuke, sporting an American Indian medicine wheel, patiently explained that tagging has simply gone underground in the Big Apple, and anyway, it is different there.

“In New York, they had to bust things quickly because they were working on subways. Here we have more time,” Nuke pointed out. “We’re more into the line, getting that can control.” He paused, giving the class time to realize how tough it actually is to master a spray paint can. Simply deciding which type of nozzle to affix to your canister is an issue, not to mention a hallmark of Los Angeles graffiti, where, according to Nuke, taggers are renowned “children of the can.”

The nozzle determines the line, he says, and offers vast options for the resourceful artist, ranging from the delicate script afforded by Lysol can tips to the broader strokes that come with a so-called “basketball tip”--a nozzle (Nuke and Duke won’t say from which aerosol product) that is a sort of poor man’s airbrush, creating a swath of paint as broad as a basketball.

Then there is the matter of the notorious tagger Chaka, who was arrested a few years ago for spray painting his name on thousands of lampposts, road signs, underpasses, curbsides and other virgin corners of the land.

Nuke and Duke look sad when the Chaka thing comes up, since they view his notoriety as a sort of low point for the medium. Before Chaka, they say, taggers--or “writers,” as they refer to them--took time to practice and develop their marks. A tag would evolve from a set of mere letters to, say, a stylized squiggle or a fat, colorful blurb, and from there, the work would broaden to encompass sections of concrete, and eventually, entire walls.

But after Chaka, they said, taggers began to value “quantity over quality,” and the true visionaries of the medium were overshadowed by the knockoff types.

Still, they say, they have their heroes, known if not to the average Angeleno, at least to each other: Angst, Hex, Mear, Slick, Anger, Risky, Power, Skill, Toons, Teck. The list goes on. And these, Duke told his students, are the taggers who will leave the legacy.

“The ones that have heart,” he advised the class, “will stick in the game. Entiendes ?”