A visit to the Historisches Museum Saar on Saarbrücken’s Schlossplatz is the perfect complement to the “Urban Art Biennale” on the Hüttenfabrik museum grounds and in the city center of Völklingen. The special exhibition “Illegal” can be seen there from 18th May 2024 until 23rd February 2025, in which a selection of pieces by 123 national and international artists presents key works and never-before-shown rarities, all of which were created illegally directly for an audience on the street, all of which are characteristic of the prehistory and later development of streetart and graffiti in the USA and Europe. The focus is on music (including record covers), literature and avantgarde art. The majority of photos and reproductions of the early works are projected onto the room surfaces by beamer, and these are large, approximately original size, supplemented by rare originals, facsimiles and musical audio samples. The museum promises a “visually and audio powerful presentation” and thus an “immersive experience”. – Irxnschmoiz
Street art and graffiti are a worldwide phenomenon. No art has a bigger audience. “Illegal” tells the story of street art and graffiti in the USA and Europe for the first time. Key works and rarities that have never been shown are exhibited, all of which were created illegally directly for an audience on the street – not for museum contexts. The artist BANKSY: “People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish. But that’s only if it’s done properly.” or “People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish. But that’s only if it’s done properly.” This selection of works by 120 artists from over a dozen countries is the result of intensive research. The exhibition explains why these artists in particular were trendsetters for street art and graffiti before BANKSY. Almost none of the works of this short-lived art still exist today. Their documentation was also often created illegally and under adverse conditions. The show focuses on references to pop music, avant-garde art and literature. – Historisches Museum Saar
During the exhibition period, there will also be a number of additional events on the topic, such as several lectures or workshops, as well as films such as the legendary film “Wild Style” by Charlie Ahearn from 1982, “Harald Naegeli – Der Sprayer von Zürich” by Nathalie David from 2021 or “Stencile Stories” by Ulrich Branché from 2023. The film screenings will take place at Kino 8 1/2 in Nauwieserstraße 19 on 11.10., 18.10., 25.10., 8.11., 15.11. and 29.11. You can find more information about the offers and dates at the end of the flyer and on their website.
Graffiti – Write Your Name
Man-scratched signs on walls have been around since the Paleolithic Age, but they have only been called “graffiti” since the archaeological excavations in Roman Pompeii in 1856. Graffiti are often spontaneous, illegally applied messages referring to the author, unadorned words addressed to the general public or simple drawings. From the end of the 1960s, they were no longer just scratched or written with charcoal and chalk, but also done with markers or spray cans. This contemporary form of graffiti is also known as style writing or hip-hop graffiti. As early examples from around 1967 in Philadelphia and New York show, writing one’s own name became increasingly more important than the message. The focus is now on the quality, style or quantity of the written characters. Spray cans could be used to create large, colorful name pictures, veritable masterpieces. The generally condemned method of writing an alias with a (text) marker, so-called tagging, can reach the level of calligraphy and gestural, abstract painting in its highest quality form.
Streetart – Send a Message
Streetart is dominated by images rather than text. Like graffiti, it was created illegally. In contrast to graffiti, however, it aims to send out messages. Names alone, which are the main focus of graffiti, play no role. Street art deliberately takes place in places that match the message or the form of representation. While graffiti is generally limited to the use of markers and cans, street art encompasses a variety of techniques. The best known is based on the use of stencils, also known as “stencils” or “pochoir”. There are also wall drawings, paste-ups, wild posters and cut-outs, small-format stickers, mosaics and plastics, among others.
Rue Visconti – The Origin of Streetart
For decades, illegal works by influential street artists were created in Rue Visconti in Paris. This narrow, long alley near the Paris Academy of Fine Arts and its surroundings can be described as the cradle of street art. It has been home to famous artists for centuries and is home to numerous galleries. Illegal street art in Rue Visconti began in 1962 with Christo/Jeanne Claude’s “Iron Curtain” made of oil drums, the first illegal monumental sculpture. It separated the alley, which was only four meters wide, as a reaction to the Berlin Wall that had just been built. The first artistic wild poster artist Daniel Buren pasted his conceptual paper works with vertical, colored and white stripes here in 1968. In the 1980s, life-size figures by Jérôme Mesnager and the “first” street artist Gerard Zlotykamien were also created in Rue Visconti. BANDO, the first French graffiti writer, left his “tag” next to an early life-size stencil of BLEK LE RAT in 1984, which inspired many French artists to work illegally on the street.
BLEK LE RAT & BANDO – Rue Visconti, Paris, 1984
BANDO is the first style writer in France to influence a generation of writers throughout Europe. BLEK founded the Parisian stencil graffiti movement, also known as the Pochoirists. In France, BLEK was one of the first to bring life-size figures into urban spaces.
The early Documentation of Streetart and Graffiti
Streetart and graffiti began in the 1950s and 1960s with individual, initially unknown pioneers, before this art movement opened up to a worldwide circle of interested parties around 1980. The question of the value of the works created by the anonymous artists was raised, as was the accusation that they were not art. The discussion was furthered in 1949 when members of the “Affichisten” artists’ group officially declared illegal poster tear-offs from the street to be art. The first person to document graffiti and street art was Brassaï. He photographed illegally scratched and painted works in Paris from as early as 1933 (!) and presented them to a small, select public. By 1960, Brassaï had single-handedly managed to have his photos of anonymous scratched graffiti shown in museums and printed in illustrated books and mass magazines. The popular French poet Jacques Prévert increasingly used Brassaï’s photos on his book covers around 1960 and wrote one-liners in the style of slogan graffiti. From the mid-1960s, street art and graffiti were no longer created anonymously on the street on both sides of the Atlantic independently of each other for the first time. During this period, artists such as jazz poet Ted Joans in New York and Guy Debord in Paris subsequently claimed authorship of well-known anonymous graffiti from the 1950s.
Ira Sullivan & Chicago Jazz Quintet, Bird Lives! Vinyl album, 1963
A few years after Charly Parker’s death, Joans’ Graffiti titled Bird Lives!” records and books. The slogan was also repeatedly featured in paintings and documentary films about Charlie Parker.
Jacques Prévert, Henri Crolla, Chanson Dans Le Sang, Vinyl Album, Disques Cepedic – CEP 356, France, 1960
Streetart and graffiti on record covers began with this LP. The language of the poet Prévert and Brassaï’s graffiti is reduced to the essentials and the sometimes blunt language of the street.
GÉRARD ZLOTYKAMIEN (*1940), Personnages disparus, spray graffiti, Argenteuil b. Paris, 1968
This photograph is the earliest spray graffiti that can be attributed to a street artist by name. His roundish creatures with empty eyes and hollow mouths, their heads separated from their torsos, mostly in black or white, were intended as an appeal to the world’s fields of the dead”.
1968 – Political Movement and Trendsetter
Around 1968, there was a worldwide social change that gave street art and graffiti their first big push. Even if the motives differed in detail, the aim of the “1968 movement” was to fight for more civil rights, more democracy and more social justice and to break with social rigidities and outdated values and morals. Demonstrations followed in many countries, including France, and the student movement in West Germany. Many workers joined the student protests at Paris University in May 1968. The result was a general strike throughout France. In addition to new ideas of what art meant and was defined as such, new materials also emerged: screen printing, marker pens, spray cans and stencils changed the appearance of street art and graffiti. Works could now be created much more quickly. In the long term, the 1968 revolt led to cultural, political and economic reforms. The hundreds of different political posters from May and June 1968 with their simple graphics and concise slogans (shown here in two photos) were important for subsequent posters and street art in Europe. Many of the ideas and slogans of 1968 (e.g. “Ne travaillez jamais” / “Never work”) had been anticipated and influenced by the Situationist group, a small artistic experimental movement. The decade after 1968 also brought a variety of illegal-activist conceptual art onto the streets. The artists mostly acted anonymously and with a political message. The aim was to democratize art.
ARTUR DIECKHOFF (1948-2020), “You ask me, what should I do? And I say: Live wild and dangerous”, ca. 1981
First artistic wildlife poster in Germany, Hamburg. Often falsely attributed to Rimbaud, this saying was found on postcards and posters in countless student shared flats in the 1980s.
Punk and Art School from 1980
The 1968 movement saw the development of so-called avant-garde art, which is associated with pop art, conceptual art and performance art, among other things. Around 1980, a group of new artists emerged from the scene; they had often even completed an official art degree, but were strongly influenced by a punk attitude. Influential examples (including BANKSY) were the anarcho-punks around CRASS in England, the NEUE WILDE MALER in Cologne and Düsseldorf, the neo-expressionist painters and pochoirists, i.e. artists who used stencils, in Paris and the East Village art scene in New York. They all moved between the art academy and the spirit of punk. They were sometimes more, sometimes less political, and committed to the do-it-yourself credo: “Vite Fait bien Fait” (fast is good) or “Quick ‘n’ Dirty”, meaning: rather rough, short and sweet than technical perfection. This could also be applied to their favorite music: musical pieces with three chords and lengths of just three minutes – street art as the visual equivalent of punk rock. “The immediacy of stenciling was part of its counter-cultural appeal. You could make a lot of visual noise quickly”, JANE BAUMAN, stencil graffiti artist from California and lender of this exhibition. Often stemming from earlier protest culture, political graffiti by feminists and early LGBTQIA+ as well as environmental and animal rights activists and members of the peace movement also helped to jump-start streetart.
JANE BAUMAN (*ca. 1960), Flipper [homage to the San Francisco punk band of the same name], spray-painted stencil graffiti, corner of 9th Street and 1st Avenue, New York, early 1980s
The upside-down and flipped map of America is reminiscent of the 1950s TV dolphin Flipper. Coming from the San Francisco punk scene, Bauman also collaborated with stencil graffiti artists such as David Wojnarowicz in New York.
JENNY HOLZER (*1950), from TRUISMS, 1977-79, wild posters, 91.4 x 61 cm, installation New York, 1977
The paste-up pioneer JENNY HOLZER is the first female street artist. She has exhibited in well-known museums worldwide for decades. In 2015, Holzer was invited to Banksy’s group exhibition Dismaland – 35 years after she exhibited in the Times Square Show (New York), the first show with graffiti writers and street artists.
DAVE KING (1943-2016), PENNY RIMBAUD / JEREMY RATTER (*1943), Crass logo, 1977
This gimmick stencil, 29.5 x 21 cm was published on 13.04.2019 together with a flexi-disc to the song ,,Do they owe us a living?”. The logo of the anarchist punk band Crass criticizes symbols of domination. It was also designed under the premise of being used as a template for graffiti.
OBEY / SHEPARD FAIREY (*1970), “Andre the Giant has a Posse”, Los Angeles, 1989
The international sticker campaign was initiated by skate punk Fairey – inspired by John Carpenter’s film “They Live” (1988). In the film, the main character uses special glasses to expose outdoor advertising as national brainwashing by aliens who demand obedience (OBEY).
SPAZE / CHAKER ABDALLAH, member of the graffiti writer crew DLK [Dibbe Labbes Klan], blackbook, 48.5 x 34.5 cm, Saarbrücken, 1994
Like every blackbook, this sketchbook also contains accompanying photos of illegal works and often also drawings by other writers. This piece was made by SPAZE, a member of the DLK crew aka Dibbe Labbes Klan, named after a Saarland specialty.
BANKSY (ca. *1974), Ant, stencil graffiti, Bristol, ca. 1992-1997, earliest documented BANKSY stencil
Even though BANKSY probably started graffiti tagging earlier under a different pseudonym, this work marks his first step towards street art. Instead of his graffiti tag, the young BANKSY began to stencil a monstrous ant in the spotlight.
BLEK LE RAT / XAVIER PROU (*1951), Tom Waits stencil, cardboard, 123 x 93 x1 cm, 1983
Graffiti from this stencil has appeared on three book covers since 1985. The template was the cover of a Waits album from the fall of 1983. In Paris, BLEK‘s huge pochoirs [stencils] influenced street artists and graffiti writers.
OZ / WALTER FISCHER (1950-2014), Graffiti, electricity box, 58.3 x 156.0 x 27.7 cm, Hamburg, ca. 1991
Unprecedented in the history of street art, OZ created tens of thousands of illegal works between 1977 and 2014, for which he was imprisoned for a total of 8 years. Apparently hit by an S-Bahn train while spraying, he died in 2014. Ten years after his death, his tags are still omnipresent in Hamburg.
Style Writing in and out of New York
Based on older prison, hobo and gang graffiti as well as graffiti of the “I was here” type, New York style writing graffiti, also known as hip-hop graffiti, began to grow in 1967. What was new was that graffiti appeared en masse throughout the city. Individual creators could now be distinguished in their own style. As competition increased, there were rapid developments in the scene, spurred on by the tools that were now widely available, such as marker pens and spray cans. Initially monochrome, linear and legible with markers on the walls of one’s own neighborhood and then the entire city, larger, more elaborate and sprayed graffiti was now also found on subways. Around 1973, the wall taggers were replaced by new protagonists who sprayed subway cars and later freight trains with larger, multicolored and complex works, the so-called (master) pieces. These often have multi-colored fillings and outlines. They reached their peak around 1980 with unprecedented technical virtuosity. With the political pressure against this spread of graffiti in illegal spaces, they became famous through film, TV and illustrated books and jumped with this popularity to Europe and from there to the whole world. In Europe, graffiti continued to develop and spread. It was carried to every corner of the world via Interrail trips, copied sketchbooks and then graffiti brochures (“zines”) and, together with street art, also to the Saarland and the Greater Region.
A New Kilroy: TAKI 183. International Herald Tribune. English edition for France, 24/25.07.1971, p. 14. Text without second photo identical to [Mark Perlgut]: “Taki 183” spawns Pen Pals In: The New York Times, 21.07.1971, p. 37
The article triggered a graffiti boom in New York. A short time later, the mayor had to pass a law against graffiti. The article also appeared in Europe with a different title and was possibly the first to be published about style writing graffiti.
TAKI 183 / DEMETRIUS (ca. *1953), JOE 182, JUNIOR 161, etc. Marker tags, 183rd Street, New York, 1971
Photographed by Don Hogan Charles, the first black photographer for the New York Times To do this we went to 183rd Street, where the tagger TAKI 183 lived. As a bike courier, TAKI 183 was one of the first to leave his day all over New York, not just his neighborhood.
Beyond New York – The other Graffiti Movements
Not all graffiti culture developed from New York. Long independent of New York, their own graffiti scenes also developed in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. In Los Angeles, the subculture of Mexican-American youth became the so-called Cholo gangs after racist riots in 1943. Cholo comes from the Aztec word “xolotl”, meaning dog. Used pejoratively in the United States for people of Mexican descent, cholos transformed the term into a sign of pride in the 1960s when they marked their territory with elaborate black lines. In Philadelphia, graffiti also developed from gang culture. Gang members initially only wrote their gang name in their neighborhood, until “Graffiti Writers” spread their own pseudonym throughout the city. With the Pichação, a unique and internationally relevant form of graffiti emerged in Brazil in the 1980s from the logo lettering, which was often reminiscent of runes By heavy metal bands, in contrast to graffiti, which was soon considered art in Brazil, Pichação works were rigorously pursued. Monochrome and mostly on walls, Pichação letters are often of the same height and distance from each other with small paint rollers .
Credits to all the Artists
Flyer with Workshops, Lectures and Film Screenings
The historical museum – Historisches Museum Saar
INFOTHEK
Exhibition: ILLEGAL – Street Art Graffiti – 1960 till 1995
Webpage: https://www.historisches-museum.org/illegal-street-art-graffiti-1960-1995
Duration & Opening Hours: 18.05.2024 till 23.02.2025 – Tuesday till Sunday, 10am till 6pm
Museum: HISTORISCHES MUSEUM SAAR
Website: https://www.historisches-museum.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/historisches.museum.saar
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/historisches.museum.saar
Cinema: KINO 8 1/2
Website: https://www.kinoachteinhalb.de
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/achteinhalb
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kinoachteinhalb
Photographer: IRXNSCHMOIZ
Hashtag: #irxnschmoiz
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kampagne24
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