ABSTRACT

This short chapter examines the inherent contradictions of graffiti often thought of in simple polarities, such as legal vs illegal, or art vs vandalism. My aim is to challenge these conceptual binaries by focusing on one of the most enduring and least understood aspects of graffiti writing, namely the tag. The impetus for this comes from a provocative legal piece produced with an ‘illegal aesthetics’, i.e. tags. The chapter starts by contextualizing my own first ‘reading’ of graffiti tags, then talks about how the ‘writing’ of graffiti is practised, and concludes with a detailed discussion of TWIST (Barry McGee) and AMAZE’s (Josh Lazcano) collage of graffiti tags that vividly represents the contradictions of this subculture and its reception from the public. This chapter attempts to glorify in a small way, the most basic, and arguably the most hated, form of graffiti – the tag.