Style Wars: Graffiti Art From the Subways of 1980’s New York

Words by Maya Bewley

Skeme’s mother stares disapprovingly into the camera and lets out a disgruntled sigh. Her son, Skeme, stands awkwardly behind her, looking stubbornly away. The room seems warm over the roll of film and the gaudy kitchenware flickers brightly in the background. It’s 1982 and they’re talking to the directors of Style Wars because Skeme is one of New York’s notorious subway graffiti artists. He goes out at night and paints his name on large deteriorated trains that return in the morning with carriages of irritated passengers. Like a stereotypical mother, she is disappointed. ‘’Society should go down in the subway and lock them all up … but his contention is that he’s immortal, like most 17 year olds are immortal, right?”. But there’s some unintentional truth to her sarcastic reproach.

Until they are caught, or the train gets soaked in cleaning oil, Skeme and the other graffiti artists obtain a kind of temporary immortality. The feeling of being immortal rather than the immortality itself. He explains: “It’s called going all city. People see your tags in Queens, uptown, downtown, all over”. For short moments he achieves this god-like status. His name is paraded down the track as the subway shuffles from one end of the city to the next. It’s this feeling that’s infectious and dizzying, it’s at the heart of the art of the original subway graffiti artists in New York. It circulates throughout Style Wars and is hunted down across the murky subway tunnels underneath the city. 

Skeme and his Mother

Directed by Tony Silver and street photographer Henry Chalfant in 1982, Style Wars re-animates the earliest days of New York’s subway graffiti movement. Cops, detectives, the mayor, concerned citizens, train drivers, art dealers and of course graffiti-writers are swept into the film’s 70 minute runtime. There’s a weird kind of nostalgia for watching a group of teenagers from nearly 40 years ago- knowing they’re probably in their 50s by now but on the cusp of a cultural metamorphosis back then. Everything feels in-the-moment. Graffiti glows like radioactive waste through the 16mm film and classic hip-hop records reverberate over shots. 

NYPD Riding the Subway in The 1980's

Outside Skeme’s kitchen looms a larger battle for the city’s concrete canvas. While transport police hurry to clean up the plastered trains, graffiti artists fight over their share of metal territory. The feud is between those who want to create unique, individual pieces, and those who just want to make as many as possible. CAP, a smug, self-assured young adolescent is part of the latter crowd. His signature tag is a simple three letter bubble spelling the contorted letters in curled arches: ‘C-A-P’. ‘’The object is more. Not the biggest or beautifulest, but more,’’ he says.

For CAP, subway graffiti isn’t a one-of-a-kind creation. It is a process of self-replication, an assertion of power- and that means overwriting each artwork in the way. Though infuriating as it was for the artists whose pieces were ruined, (you’d half-expect a mob of angry graffiti-writers to come teeming round the corner) CAP’s approach inadvertently asks questions about the nature of art. At what point does a graffiti signature become art? Is it when it’s hyper-stylised and colourful? Or when it’s constantly reiterated, evolved into performance? The film doesn’t provide much for an answer, but leaves it to the viewer instead. CAP continues to finish the final curve on the letter ‘P’.

CAP's Graffiti Tag

Meanwhile, Kase 2 is part of the group of graffiti-writers who are at war with people like CAP. Known as the “King of Style”, his works are vibrant, detailed and explosive. They puncture the drab mundanity of the subway car with their garish colours. Kase takes pride in his individuality, the way his letters won’t look like anyone else’s. ‘’If I get really into it and start camouflaging it, I don’t even think you’d be able to read it’’, he says, as though it were a challenge. When you look at one of his pieces, the letters are woven so closely together that you can hardly read them. Rather, they form an indecipherable, vivid amalgamation of dynamic lines and shapes. Having pushed the limits of what a graffiti tag should look like, Kase’s style proved incredibly influential, generating a new subgenre called ‘computer rock’.

Skeme's Graffiti on a Subway Train

Despite their artistic differences, both styles of graffiti-writing stake a claim to a city that alienated the artists as young individuals. Anti-graffiti adverts advised that they should ‘make their mark in society, not on society’. But it was hard to see how this would be possible if it was a city that was never really made for them. Bit by bit, each spray-paint swirl helped to drown out the sterility of monotonous architecture and neoliberal advertising. And although best efforts were made to scrub them clean, subway graffiti achieved immortality by becoming a timeless symbol of New York itself. Art for them was anywhere they decided. 

Style Wars is available to stream for free via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiJaIauyL_Y 

Alternatively, a better quality version can be found on Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B07FFG6VG7/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r