Graffiti. A scribble on the wall? From the‘Jazz woz ere’ scrawled on the bus window with a cheap permanent marker to multicoloured murals with more than just a hard hitting message.
Graffiti has been described as a stain that plagues our urban environment, another social evil added to the ever growing list. Why are the views on graffiti so negative?Why is not regarded as the art form that some people believe it should be? To answer these questions we must really come to understand not just the mentality that a graffiti writer has, but also the culture that fuels such controversial activity.
Modern Graffiti has been disapproved and disregarded as an art since the "pioneering era" between the years 1969 – 1974.When writer ‘TAKI 183’ began to scrawl his tag name whilst on his travels as a foot messenger this sparked up media attention from the ‘New York Times’ in the form of an article called ‘TAKI 183' Spawns Pen Pals’ from this graffiti worked its way into the media and also onto the walls. By the time of the early 70’s to the early 80’s Graffiti had evolved from ‘TAKI 183’ commuting scribbles to a so called ‘epidemic’in
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New York city, or in other words the culture of graffiti was expanding and developing very quickly. With figures such as ‘Friendly Freddie’ who has been often credited for expanding graffiti and hip-hop music far past its Bronx roots, graffiti was finding new homes across the world. Cities seemed to be the hotspots for graffiti and by the time of the early 90’s almost every major city had many graffiti artist roaming the urban jungle and painting without rest, with the rising spread of graffiti it wasn’t long before the media again started to deem it in a negative way and so, naturally the general public adopted this negative view and so the variousstereotypes emerged about graffiti, it seemed as though the media was focusing on the petty vandalism that was labelled graffiti but in actual fact was nothing more than a thirteen year olds depiction of Sally down the road.
Many graffiti artists or writers feel that this is a unjust way in which they and their art work is viewed, I spoke to graffiti writer ‘Alpha’ who has been painting the London streets for 10 years, since the young age of fourteen. He told me ‘Graffiti has always been there for me, through the good times and the bad times, when I was young I found it hard to express myself, I was dyslexic and found myself finding it hard to put my feelings on to paper, the only way I seemed to be able to really show my true emotions was through art, but the sketches in my note pad weren’t enough, I wanted the world to know how I felt. It seemed as though if you wanted your message to be portrayed you needed to pay for it either with money or a court case, just because a message has been legally paid for and has been given permission to be placed there, doesn’t nessercerly mean that its giving out a good message, I remember reading a quote when I was around sixteen years old, it read "People with money can put up signs ... if you don't have money you're marginalized...you're not allowed to express yourself or to put up words or messages that you think other people should see. Camel (cigarettes), they're up all over the country and look at the message Camel is sending...they're just trying to keep the masses paralyzed so they can go about their business with little resistance." – Eskae’ this really gave me a insight into the deeper side of graffiti, the side that wasn’t just about ‘tagging’ and getting your name everywhere, it showed me the side that really wanted to portray a message, something meaning, something that when a person walks by it makes them think about the issue or topic displayed. I discovered I can have an effect on which the way people view and treat the world they live in’
Alpha was keen to explain to me the thin line in which people judge what is vandalism and what is graffiti, he told me that”people assume that because something is written without permission on a wall it is vandalism, but if it is done in the more ‘legal’ approach e.g. in gallery’s or legal wall’s people tend to appreciate the art of the graffiti, rather than the society’s concept on what is right or wrong”. It seems evident that graffiti is more than just writing on walls and more than just ‘vandalism’ it is a art form, a channel of unique expression understandable only by those that posses the ability think for themselves and have their own views of events of the world and are notcontrary to believe anything the media spews out of its perverted mouth. It seems as though the fact is that many believe it is wrong but to what extent are they willing to try and understand the concept behind graffiti, and really take in the message rather than reject it without any real attempt of understanding the hard work and thought that went into the graffiti displayed in front of their eye’s.
To help overcome this ignorant view, artists such as Banksy have emerged, they strive to help challenge people’s views of graffiti, his art has been portrayed as thought provoking and questions the lifestyles that people (especially in urban environments) live. His style is unique when compared to other graffiti artists, instead of painting ‘murals’ and spraying ‘pieces’ he produces stencils. These are in a sense frames of pictures that when sprayed leave a image (often very realistic looking) on the wall, he has manipulated these stencils to create his art and it makes them very unique in terms when in comparison to other ‘graffiti’ that is in London. One of his ‘pieces’ is of rats with humanistic characteristics, displaying the idea of the ‘Rat Race’, this and countless other examples of his work have created a kind of cult following and has managed to capture peoples inner feelings though his art. Banksy has also used his art to display his political opinion, which is not uncommon as this is what graffiti is often used for even if it’s not 100 colours and took countless hours of hard work.
Graffiti has had close links with music since the ‘pioneering era’ and beyond, just as music is a way of self-expression so is graffiti and so the two grew together becoming closely interlinked and having great influence on each other. UK hip-hip group ‘Task Force’ are closely linked with Graffiti and have made various songs about graffiti such as ‘Graf Da Bus Up’ and ‘Graforiginnes’ and are constantly making references to graffiti culture in their music, helping to positively reinforce the media stereotype of Graffiti and people’s attitudes towards it.
Graffiti is clearly about communication very human activity, and believe it or not has been vital in our understanding of history and also in the understanding of people’s ideas and political views. The first person living in the cave wrote on the walls to express him or herself, the Egyptians drew many pictures on their walls and thanks to this we know what we know today, without this ‘Graffiti’ our knowledge in such areas wouldn’t have been so complex and accurate. More importantly the idea of graffiti is still thriving today, this idea of self expression with no limits, no political correctness, just using the world as your notepad, displaying ideas and opinions that’s have not been perverted by power and by money but instead messages that come from the writers heart, a real depiction of human lifestyle in the era that the graffiti has been written in. The fact remains that for as long as man has a surface to write on, no matter how many cameras are put up, no matter how hefty the prison sentences or fines may be, there will always be the writing on the wall.
Written by Tom Gale
Product Account Summary
Brief: To research, plan and produce various elements of a new teen magazine aimed at either sex aged 16-19 years
When my group were given the brief the majority of us already had a solid vision of how we would like to see the magazine. So we divided the magazine industry into different genres of what we thought made up what type of magazines are sold and came up with a variety of different genres such as music, films and fashion. We found that these all came under the main category of ‘lifestyle magazines’, and found that these magazines are most dominant on the market. As a group we all already had a definitive idea on how we wanted our magazine to look and read and found that we had already come up with the premise of the magazine early on in post production. We all settled on the idea that our magazine covers were to be minimalist and appealing to the eye before we had done any market research because we all felt that we were all capable in the photography and image department based on a previous task set by our teacher also we all felt that magazines loaded with front cover content looked tacky and were far too common place and agreed the mode of address should be informal but at the same time intellectual.
When we started to do our research we wanted to gauge an idea of what magazines were and were not selling at the moment and to do this we used an ‘ABC Consumer Magazine Roundup’ website on the internet. From here we looked at the circulation figures of magazines from all aspects of the market from women’s monthly magazines to music magazines and analysed what were selling and what were not. To much of our disbelief we found that most of the magazines that we thought were doing well ,due to ignorance, such as the men’s lifestyle magazine ‘FHM’ were at a lost of 15.1% and failing to sell 56,114 than in their previous year. This how ever did not affect us as we had no intention of branching off into this type of magazine with the likes of ‘Zoo’ and ‘Nuts’ as due to recent findings, these magazines were at a loss and we all had our different views on what was wrong with these magazines whether it was their misogynistic nature or the lack of vocabulary. However as we were aiming our magazine more to teenagers we looked to the teenage magazine circulations and found they were all dominated by female magazines such as ‘Sugar’ and ‘Mizz’. After much more cross referencing and researching we had finally our set of ideologies as to what our magazine would abide by, it was to be; released monthly as to stand out as more of a collectible opposed to a disposable weekly that is forgotten about, it was to be aimed at males but still appeal to females as to not narrow our target audience and the whole premise of the magazine was to be ‘alternative’ in terms of music, fashion, films and culture as we had not come across another magazine like it. As a group we watched in class as our fellow magazine groups bustled around the class asking questionnaires as research for their magazines, we how ever chose not to do this as we thought they were unreliable, after all they were asking their opposition in terms of how their magazine should unfold. So we developed our idea to our liking with intent of getting feedback at a later time. This I feel was a vital decision that I feel helped us. We did have a idea that involved a viral marketing campaign via ‘Myspace’ that involved setting up a page for the magazine and taking feed back, we however decided against this as it would of taken just as long to set up a ‘Myspace’ and receive a substantial amount of feedback than it would creating the magazine.
The idea of our magazine being alternative comes from the lack of magazines like that out at the moment and we felt it went hand in hand with our focus on aesthetics. We do have 3 competitors though in the form of ‘Flux’, ‘Pop’ and ‘Dazed and Confused’. We stemmed many of our ideas from them as they are monthly and appeal to both sex. We also identified them as being alternative just by looks as the covers of ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Flux’ portray an alternative look of magazine via the use of models on the covers as they stray from the normal cover model and all 3 of the magazines have a focus on image. We also found that these magazines all have a rather solid loyal fan base as well.
After analysing 3 covers 2 of which from our competitors we came up with a name for the magazine, originally we thought of ‘Trend’ but didn’t think it fitted, we then saw that the name was staring us in the face, ‘Alt.’, we liked this because it summed the magazine up and was small and easy to remember. We then split the magazine into 4 parts film, music, culture and fashion and each person in the group was given a category. I chose film as I feel it went hand in hand with my other as-level film studies. Also I already had an initial idea of ‘top 10 action films’ and an idea for a front cover. This however I changed later on as I thought that ‘action’ films was not too alternative and therefore not in touch with the magazine. So I came up with another I dear of an article on cult films, I had dropped the ‘top 10’ idea as I felt it was too clichéd and I also asked my peers and they advised me to do that as well. I then came up with mock ups for my front cover and a first draft of my article and I exhibited them to my peers and drew feed back and acted on that opposed to a questionnaire at the start of production, this gave me more freedom to implement my own ideas and these ideas were well received any way.
Our first piece of production as a group was to come up with a style in which the mast head was going to take, we had decided on a style similar to that of ‘Pop’ in which the title also looks like a logo and is easily recognisable so we quickly found a suitable font in the form of ‘Billo’ and came up with this;
ALT*
We liked this as we felt it was open to lots of different colour combinations to suit the different covers colour schemes, we also replaced the ‘.’ With a ‘*’ when we found it looked better, our peers agreed. From here we all took our verified mock ups and set off our separate ways and started taking photos for our double page spreads and front covers with the intention of getting them into Photoshop Elements on the Mac computers to manipulate the photos to our liking. Luckily in our group was some one highly skilled in this area who was a tremendous help in regards of this as she changed colours of existing images and changed the look of other photos such as making colour stand out more. We did have some problems along the way, on of the people in my group had completed his cover and in a flash Photoshop closed down unexpectedly and erased it as well as corrupting the data with in my plugged in USB which included a copy of my front cover. We were unable to recover the cover so had to start again.
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