(Note: This Glossary will expand and contract as the project continues. Check back for updates.) Cholo Writing – Gang-related writing, largely developed in and around Los Angeles by Latinos in the mid-Twentieth Century. Cholo writing continues today in much the same form as earlier epochs. Guerilla Marketing – drawings, paintings, leaflets, wheat-pastes, and other materials …
Author Archives: James Cockroft
Toward a Graffiti Lexicon, part 1
“Can this have been quasi-intentional, a concerted effort to obliterate meaning by scrawling graffiti on one of the theater’s most profound texts?”[1] The above quote comes from a review of Young Jean Park’s play Lear! — a sort of reworking or reimagining of the Shakespeare play — and gives a window into the common usage …
Propaganda
Abroad – New Weapons in Europe’s Culture Wars – NYTimes.com. Ahh, the power of wheatpaste.
On the need for an expanded lexicon
I’ve been writing and thinking about graffiti for over five years and I’ve repeatedly run up against the failure of language to capture the nuances of the concept. Graffiti, if we believe the dictionary, refers to “writing or drawings scribbled, scratched, or sprayed illicitly on a wall or other surface in a public place.”[1] This …
Broken Windows, pt. 1
Rogan Furguson of The Great Whatsit provides a nice introduction to the Broken-Window Theory, and I couldn’t pass up making a few comments. The Broken-Window theory comes from a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article by George Kelling and James Wilson—conveniently titled “Broken Windows“—and is commonly used to initiate or toughen legal penalties for graffiti writing, loitering, …
Black-Magic Stealth Funk
From the NYT, one of the best descriptions I’ve come across in a long time: Spacious, Black-Magic Stealth Funk. As, “… in Bitches Brew Revisited, a septet led by the coronetist Graham Haynes, powered by the drummer Cindy Blackman and colored by the guitarist James Blood Ulmer, jazz became whatever it was Miles Davis intended in 1969: …
Icons
I began this series of works during the summer of 2006, and completed two paintings before pretty much giving up on painting altogether. If and when I return to the brushes and palates, I’ll pick up where I left off.
