Ornament as Armament: Playing Defense in Wildstyle Graffiti

When wildstyle graffiti appeared around 1980, it signaled the close of the classic era of New York City graffiti writing and heralded the emergence of a Mannerist late phase. ¹ The Mannerist painters who emerged across Europe at the close of the High Renaissance ² prized stylistic exaggeration for its own sake; likewise, wildstyle writers distinguished their pieces from earlier writers’ tags by exaggerating letters’ visual appearance to such a degree that their sense was rendered illegible. ³ Interpreters had long asserted that classic-era graffiti were motivated by writers’ desire to assert personal identity. ⁴ In the 1980s, wildstyle represented a perverse recalibration of that writerly ambition. Graffiti writers of the 1970s had inscribed their names all over the city, making sure that everyone could read them. By contrast, wildstyle writers filled the city streets with illegible, unspeakable names that no one could interpret. The kinetic energy these words possessed was unmistakable. Their mysteriousness was intentional. The sense of exclusion they produced in most viewers was calculated. No one knew exactly what these inscriptions were about, but the words themselves were impossible to ignore.