ON YOUNG GRAFFITI, see flickr-link.

In many ways you could say that every wholepiece, throw up, tag or doodle you encounter on citywalls, trains, busses, cars and so on is to be considered expressions of graffiti, and also young graffiti, as most graffiti-painters (or writers rightfully as they are refered to) I know of is under 30, and in western civilisation below 30, is young.
The pieces I have sought out over the last month or so, are, with few exceptions, mostly tags and doodles, defined by their somewhat naïve and primitive graphic layout and textual messages, which I have found more than enough to conclude, that these were made by considerable younger painters, than those of more classic graffiti whole-pieces.
What I in particular find interesting about these young graffiti doodles and tags is not so much the semantics, as it is the apparent messages.

The never ending discussion about graffiti mostly revolves around two issues, namely: Is graffiti art? Or Is graffiti vandalism?
Firstly: Graffiti isnt only, either art or that, vandalism. It is two highly different conceptual terms which finally defines partly graffiti and partly vandalism. None the less a very persistent conflict exists between the two concepts, because graffiti as such, also questions the cultural consensus it literally lives upon, the right of private property, the proprietary right, which again serves to define graffiti as vandalism.
You cannot use the proprietary right to define whether something is art or not: graffiti is in one way vandalism if a whole-piece is done on a subway train, but does it mean that it is also NOT art?

Graffiti is generally considered vandalism, which it also is, but is also generally described from the approach: How can society win the fight against the destructive and beastly paintjobs on public and private walls, trains and so forth.
It’s without any doubt a relevant approach on graffiti, but, it is not the only one. The proprietary right cannot rule out the aesthetics and cultural links that graffiti expresses, from which also a very commercial and lucrative culture has developed.

The young pieces I have documented I think adds another parallel, not to the discussion as such, but to what kind of tool graffiti can be, and also a statement about which informal room they occupy.
Of a good hundred pictures taken I can almost guarantee that not one is made by the same painter/writer. And it hasn’t been hard finding them, therefore I easily conclude, to nobodies surprise I guess, it is a very common way, to “get it out of the system”, so to say, and therefore also is to be considered a very contemporary picture of where a large part of teens are.
And I have, as an old fart of a dad and in terms of social work, times over and over, experienced, that if you want to be even with teens; if you want to see them at eye-level as the cliché goes, one crucial starting point, is being able to relate to their informal moves and ways, without a patronizing approach. In other words: As art often is, these doodles are to be considered as resources, a way of independent interpretation and relating to the reality they inhabit.


“Wheres the line between what is up for sanitation and freedom of speech or what is destroyed cultural values? Who would dare sanitate the lines and of the Vikings, the catacomps of mideveal churches, Cy Twomblys or Keith Harings drawings? Who today knows, what in the future will be consired valuable or not, chosen from what is to be found on our city walls?”

Staffan Jacobsson:
Den spraymålade bilden – graffitimåleriet som bildform, konströrelse og läroproces.
Aerosol Art Archives, Lund, 1996.

...a little voluptious, but he he has got a point.