Like a bouquet from Latin America

Since tagging began on the New York subway in the 1970s there has been a running battle in rail transport systems across the globe between the spray-paint of the night-artists and the chemical detergents and anti-graffiti gels employed by transport authorities. The signs of the struggle are the shadowy dark grey palimpsests you can discern on many railway carriages, remnants of an epic conflict hidden from view, like scars on a whale’s flanks from a struggle with a giant squid. London Transport says it costs £10 million a year to clean off the inscriptions left by Drax and his ilk. (That’s enough to buy a second-hand Boeing 747 and still have some change left over.)

As a result of such efforts much of the taggers’ oeuvre now exists only as photographs posted online, or featured in magazines and coffee-table books. The taggers—or writers, as they call themselves—seem resigned to this; maybe they even welcome it. In a recent interview Drax described his technique thus:

“You use what sticks best, looks good and doesn’t drip. And you don’t really care about them getting the paint off because the main thing is to get the thing done and photographed.”

Asked, presciently, by the interviewer if he’d ever sprayed a plane, Drax said “No. But I’d like to.”

The emergence from pseudonymous graffiti culture of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat means that tagging now gets a degree of recognition from the art world. The sculptor Claes Oldenberg was an early admirer. He described the experience of riding on the New York subway system around 1985 to an interviewer in these terms

“You’re standing at the station. Everything is gray and gloomy and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a bouquet from Latin America.”

“The city is like a newspaper anyway,” Oldenberg went on, “so it’s natural to see writing all over the place.”

This remark of Oldenberg’s draws attention to one of the distinctive features of tagging: it is a calligraphic art. Other calligraphic traditions–Chinese or Arabic, say–are on a different level of sublimity, evidently, but they have had a thousand or more years to mature, while tagging has only had a couple of decades. In general, calligraphy privileges design over legibility. And tagging takes this to the limit: it is hard to make out what tags say at all.

Drax’s tag, for example, which is emblazoned all over the Westway, looks initially as though it might written be in some non-Roman alphabet. Like street slang, the free-form fonts that taggers use are deliberately devised not to be easily decoded, but rather to create an impression of style and power. In this respect there is an analogy between taggers and their mysterious country cousins, the crop circle makers, whose symbols are avowedly extra-terrestrial.

Edward Johnston, Eric Gill, and the joy of fonts

Waiting for trains on the London Underground gives travellers an opportunity to compare and contrast the wondrous complexity of the tags to be seen on rolling stock and bridges and perimeter fences with the simplicity and elegance of the Edward Johnston typeface, the style that has graced all London Transport notices since 1916. The Johnston font family is a hard-edged, elegantly simple, sans-serif design, the predecessor of Eric Gill’s celebrated Gill Sans. London Transport’s use of the Johnston typeface is one of the longest-lasting branding exercises in the history of modern graphic design. The fonts are designed for effective signage, for maximum legibility. That is to say, they are the opposite of  the opaque graphic style developed by the taggers. This is one of the reasons that there can be no truce in the battle between tag artists and transport authorities. They inhabit fundamentally incompatible design worlds.

The grafitti on the Westway itself, however, as opposed to those on Underground rolling stock, have been left undisturbed by London Transport authorities, perhaps in tacit recognition of the fact that in the desolation of Paddington Basin any decoration is an improvement on its blighted concrete surfaces. And neophyte taggers generally respect the work of their predecessors. In fact this is the main selection principle in this museum of graffiti; respect as a form of curation. If later taggers respect existing tags enough to leave them clear, the inscriptions last as long as the paint endures; if not, they are soon obscured with a dense web of overlapping inscriptions, the illegible in pursuit of the unreadable.

A retrospective of creative vandalism

The retrospective display of wit and creative vandalism at Paddington now extends over more than three decades, from the late 1960s to the present day. You could write a history of graffiti based on it. In the dawn of the modern graffito age, I recollect, when political slogans rather than self-advertisement were the fashion, two celebrated inscriptions went up here. These, unlike the tags of today, were monochrome, and comparatively legible. The first went like this:

WISE UP PUNTERS! BANKS, MULTINATIONALS AND A CONSENSUS OF APATHY RULE.
THE ECONOMY IS THE SECRET POLICE OF YOUR DESIRES

It seems this slogan has now vanished for ever, choked and covered over with ten years of tags, time’s apt response, perhaps, to the hectoring tone of the original. Across the tracks, though, another graffito from the same epoch still survives, this one with a more engaging, if less straightforward message. Running in a single line along a wall on the south side of the tracks, immaculately hand-lettered in a style that resembles the classic Johnston sans-serif font more than it does the baroque typefaces used by taggers today, it says,

FAR AWAY IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE

It’s hard to believe that this antique hippie incantation has survived two decades of snow and soot. Closer inspection reveals, in fact, that it has recently been touched up. Could this be the work of the government’s Heritage Department, busy countering the detergents and gels of the Transport Police? Certainly such a period piece is worth preserving, redolent as it is of a long-gone era of peace and love and nebulousness. Doubtless it will soon be due for a second life as an advertisement for a travel agency. Come to think of it, British Airways might be interested. It’s a slogan that wouldn’t look out of place on the tailfin of a plane. ★

Afterword

The large-scale redevelopment of Paddington Basin, which began a few years after the original publication of this piece, has meant that few graffiti survive there today. But “Far Away Is Close At Hand…” was photographed in the 1980s (see above), by Nigel Rees, host of the long-running BBC radio 4 quiz show “Quote…Unquote”, and he subsequently devoted a programme to the history of the inscription.

Listening to a recording of the programme I was puzzled to hear him say that the wall the slogan was painted on had been demolished in 1981, shortly after the picture was taken. Puzzled, because I was quite sure I’d seen it more than a decade after that, in 1995, when I wrote the piece above. Could that have been in a dream? An acid flash-back?  Or was it possible that the inscription, rather than being touched up by conservationists, as I suggested half-seriously in my original piece, had actually been recreated by latter-day retro graffiti artists?

Remarkably, it seems that the latter is the case. The version I saw was a reproduction of the original inscription, one made ten years after the destruction of the first—repainted by the original graffitists. Here is an extract from Nigel Rees’ reply to my e-mail to him enquiring about this:

You are quite right to say you saw it in the 1990s. It was repainted by the original artists and then removed again. In December 2004—after I had mentioned the whole business on “Quote…Unquote”—they wanted to do it for a third time but were defeated by the modern security apparatus at Paddington.

Nigel Rees published some further observations on the inscription in “Quote…Unquote” Vol 14, No 1, January 2005 (with additions from a later version of the same piece in his Brewer’s Famous Quotations, 2006). These include an account of a mention in the heavy-handed satirical Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph.

In the 1970s, Rees writes, “passengers going in and out of Paddington Station in London were beguiled or puzzled by words painted at the side of the track: ‘Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere’.”

“This elegant graffito,” Rees continues, “became almost famous—not least when Michael Wharton, the ‘Peter Simple’ humorous columnist on The Daily Telegraph, discussed the work of the unknown artist as if he were an Old Master:

Dr Anita Maclean-Gropius’s monumental catalogue raisonné, ‘The Master of Paddington’ (Viper and Bugloss, £65), published last year, dealt in detail with all the works confidently or tentatively attributed to the Master and his School. It was, of course, savaged in a long review by Dr J.S. Hate, Keeper of Graffiti at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in the British Journal of Graffitology …

In Rees’ account of the fate of the inscription, he explains that he eventually got round to photographing it in May 1981 just as builders were demolishing the wall on which it was painted in order to redevelop the land behind. It was pointed out to him that the first six words had been taken from the poem “Song of Contrariety” (1923) by Robert Graves:

Far away is close at hand
Close joined is far away,
Love shall come at your command
Yet will not stay.

He concludes his account of the affair with a communication that he received over twenty years later, in 2004, when he was contacted by a listener named Helen Issler, who told him that the “Master of Paddington” was, in fact, two people: her husband, Dave Hall, and his brother Geoff. They had made the painting, she told him, “one Christmas Eve (no trains) in probably 1974 or thereabouts.” Being graduates of Oxford University, they placed it so that it was visible on the Oxford line.

Helen Issler confirmed the Graves allusion. But the last four words, she suggested to Rees, came from lines by another poet, the classicist Ruth Padel. Rees contacted Ruth Padel and asked for her assistance in tracing the quote. At first she could only think of her first poetry collection, in 1985, a pamphlet called Alibi (“alibi” being Latin for “elsewhere”).

“But then,” Rees records, “she remembered she had also written an article in Classical Quarterly entitled ‘Imagery of the Elsewhere: Two Choral Odes of Euripides’”. Dave Hall, the graffitist, agreed that this was the source.

“Yes, that was it,” he told Rees. “I don’t think I ever read the Classical Quarterly article, but it was a great title.”

Nigel Rees asked Ruth Padel what the inscription might mean, and why it struck a chord with so many people. She commented:

“Well, it is by a railway line, carrying people far away. And metaphor, according to Aristotle, means carrying across from one place to another. Those choral odes of Euripedes were basically about going away.”

In the tagging world, meanwhile, in the years since the first publication of the article above, the graffiti artist Drax has created a online display of his artworks (one of these is reproduced above). In the end Drax’s designs have fared better than the World Tailfins commissioned by British Airways. Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister, thought that the customised tailfins were unpatriotic and told the head of British Airways so. They were dropped soon afterwards—less than a year after they were introduced—and the Union Jack restored. This is a shame; many of the designs worked very well. The tailfins are long gone and painted over now, but images of them have been preserved by Lockon Aviation Photography, from whose online archive the illustrations at the head of this article are drawn.