Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987
Reviewed by Katie Uva
Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987.
Bronx Museum of the Arts, September 25, 2019 to March 8, 2020
On October 30, 1975, The New York Daily News thudded onto curbs, newsstands, stoops, and doorsteps around the city trumpeting the (paraphrased, but nevertheless evocative) attitude of President Gerald Ford toward New York: “Drop Dead.” There was no question that New York was in trouble: rising crime, declining quality of life, mounting public debt, and arson all plagued the five boroughs.
Yet this was a city that resoundingly refused to die. It was also a city in constant motion, and the nascent hip hop scene captured this vitality and movement in multifaceted ways. DJ Kool Herc isolated the instrumental break on records he played, queued up a second copy of the same record, and kept the break going continuously, an intervention he called “The Merry-Go Round” which soon became the foundation of hip hop. Extended breaks provided an expansive space for rapping and breakdancing; in school gyms, on sidewalks and playgrounds, and eventually in clubs around the city, hip hop emerged as an original New York art form, a mix of music, dancing, and visual art in the form of graffiti.
Graffiti itself was set into motion in these years in an unprecedented way. While many have noted that the act of writing and drawing on public spaces without permission dates back to ancient times, graffiti took on a new dynamism in the 1970s. Bold, colorful, highly sophisticated lettering done with speed and precision (thanks to spray paint) moved from stationary locations like walls, benches, and security grates to the highly visible and highly challenging arena of subway trains. The danger and risk of sneaking into train yards, the collaboration and vision it took to execute a large, complicated piece, and the bittersweet satisfaction of seeing one’s work travel around the city but quickly be removed or covered over by the MTA created a polarizing graffiti that some celebrated as urban folk art and others saw as a public nuisance.
Graffiti on train cars added a new intensity and level of difficulty to graffiti as a practice, and also brought its most ambitious creators into view of new audiences. Henry Chalfant, the subject of the Bronx Museum of Art’s Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987, was one such person. Newly arrived in the city and struggling as a sculptor, he saw graffiti on subways and turned his attention to photographing and documenting the cars. He developed a technique of taking a picture, running a few steps, and taking another picture that allowed him to create a single large collaged image of an entire train car. Over time, his pictures often became the only record of specific graffiti works, as train cars were promptly removed, cleaned, and then placed back into service. Through his respect for the graffiti he documented and his growing collection of lost works, Chalfant gradually gained the trust of graffiti writers, many of whom at first were wary of him, as they recount in a film playing in the gallery, as “an old white guy.”
Three of Chalfant's train car images.
Photo by author.
A room of lifesize train cars with
Chalfant's images blown up to show original scale. Photo by author.
The exhibition itself offers a treasure trove of material--there are the snapshots themselves, overlaid to create a total train image the way Chalfant originally did. There is also an enjoyable room of lifesize train car cutouts with Chalfant’s images blown up onto them, to give visitors a sense of the original scale of the lost works and an unabashedly Instagrammable museum moment. Also on display are a selection from Chalfant’s collection of black books, the sketchbooks that writers used to develop ideas, doodle, and write messages to each other. These provide an additional window into the interests and techniques of various writers and another glimpse of Chalfant’s importance, as one of few people (alongside Martha Cooper and Martin Wong) who had the presence of mind to take seriously the artistic process of young people who were often dismissed as hoodlums and vandals.
An image from Chalfant's black bookcollection shows the influence of comic books on graffiti writers. Photo by author.
The exhibition provides a few engaging splashes of broader context--short videos include interviews with DAZE, SHARP, and a few other writers Chalfant befriended in the 1970s and who are still working as artists today. There are also a few amusing PSA’s from the 1970s and 1980s where celebrities and athletes try to dissuade kids from doing graffiti, as well as a video of Ed Koch assessing images of the graffiti his administration worked tirelessly to eliminate. Lastly, a section of images of graffiti around the world in the 1980s hint at the legacy and global impact of graffiti in a way that sometimes gets elided when people celebrate graffiti as a local creation and local phenomenon.
While there are many compelling images and the exhibition is laid out in an inviting way, there are some missed opportunities for more context and historicity. While there are a few interviews with specific writers, one doesn’t get a strong sense from this show about the range of styles, how they evolved over time, or how comics, pop art, and other visual styles influenced writers, all of which add important depth to appreciating graffiti as an art form. There is slight mention of Chalfant collaborators like Martha Cooper and Charlie Ahearn, but more could be said about the collective vision this older generation of trained artists and filmmakers had when it came to interpreting graffiti, and the politics of graffiti moving from organic urban creation to something immortalized in publications and monetized in galleries is something this show doesn’t delve into.
Despite these limitations, there is a wealth of material here for visitors to enjoy, and the range of media on display gives a good sense of the work produced, the technique it took to capture an ephemeral form like graffiti, and how graffiti was part of a larger cultural moment in New York.
Katie Uva is an editor at Gotham.