Graffiti and the Critical Power of Urban Space

Scholars of graffiti have written mostly about South Bronx hip-hop culture in the 1970s and 1980s. This form of graffiti rose to prominence in an urban space that had been remade by the economic and social shifts that followed World War II, including the relocation of manufacturing and industry outside of the city and the departure of the middle class from urban centers, which left marginalized groups in inner-city spaces that were either neglected or remade to accommodate highways and housing projects. Graffiti is, however, just one part of a larger set of strategies of urban visual and spatial intervention that arose in response to suburbanization and economic globalization. Graffiti, along with street demonstrations, hip-hop block parties, and the squatter movements in cities like New York, Amsterdam, São Paulo, and West Berlin are all examples of individuals’ attempts to remake urban space and the urban experience, both for themselves and for the other city residents who take part in or witness the effects. As one of a number of strategies of spatial intervention and resistance, graffiti should be understood as a composite practice, consisting of an image as well as an act and a specific space. The action that creates a graffito is as important as its visual component, and its spatial context is also crucial to its analysis, since graffiti is a response to the restructuring and regulation of urban space which simultaneously remakes this space.

The composite nature of graffiti, as well as its role in remaking space, were both aspects of the practice that were well understood by the American artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Keith Haring. Each engaged with graffiti-making in different ways and at different points in the development of its postwar subculture. In doing so, these artists thematized graffiti practice and thereby exposed its larger contexts—historical, economic, social, spatial—to audiences outside of the immediate communities where it was produced. The particular ways each engaged with graffiti and the role it played in their practice as artists is best explored through an examination of the Berlin Wall artworks each made: Made in America by Matta-Clark, executed in 1976, and Haring’s Berlin Wall mural, painted 10 years later in 1986 (Figures 1 and 2). In writing graffiti on the Berlin Wall, the two artists drew the attention of viewers, in West Berlin and abroad, not only to graffiti as an urban intervention strategy but also to the globalization of the economic and social processes from which graffiti had emerged. In doing so, Matta-Clark and Haring each made the composite nature of graffiti practice more apparent, foregrounding its spatial and performative aspects. However, the artists’ works were also reflective of the particular political and cultural politics of the time and place in which they were made. Thus, although both works consisted of, and were about, graffiti practice, each evinced a different relationship to the political situation. While Matta-Clark’s work is a critique of Western political authorities, revealing divisions within the Cold War west, Haring’s mural represented a criticism of the authorities on the eastern side of the Wall, thereby focusing his viewers’ attentions on the east–west Cold War divide.

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Figure 1.

Gordon Matta-Clark, View of Made in America (1976) from The Wall (1976–2007).

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Figure 2.

Keith Haring, Berlin Wall mural (1986).

The effectiveness of Matta-Clark and Haring in revealing the wider contexts of the Berlin Wall and of graffiti practice was partly a function of their status as artists, invited to the city by esteemed institutions to paint on the Wall. In their Berlin Wall works, and in their oeuvres as a whole, these artists granted graffiti as an art form and as a strategy a viability it was often denied by civic authorities. The specific site of the works was key to the artists’ thematization of graffiti because of the symbolic and material connections of West Berlin and the Berlin Wall to the urban processes of the postwar period. From the late 1950s, an aggressive propaganda campaign led by the United States had framed the Berlin Wall as not only a spatial but also a moral and symbolic divide that separated the freedom of the “West” from the oppression of the “East.” ¹ Within this campaign, West Berlin was presented as a “show window” and divided Berlin as a microcosm of the global east–west divide. Matta-Clark’s Made in America and Haring’s Berlin Wall mural were each created at a key moment in the evolution of West Berlin’s symbolic resonance and its urban development. In 1976, the image of the bright, shining, modern city of the 1950s and 1960s was being replaced by an image of resistance and dissent. This was in part because, as in many Western European and American cities during this time, West Berlin’s residents were beginning to publicly protest postwar housing policies that had focused on developing high-rise, apartment complexes, such as Gropiusstadt (begun 1962; Figure 3), in outer urban districts while older housing stock in central neighborhoods was demolished or allowed to deteriorate. Members of the city’s squatter movement in particular used the built environment itself to critique official urban planning policy as well as the political and economic values with which West Berlin, through U.S. propaganda efforts, had become linked. Partly as a result of critique, West Berlin officials were, by 1986, when Haring painted his mural, attempting to revive the iconography of the early Cold War as part of their reassertion of control over the city and its built environment. ²

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Figure 3.

Horst Siegmann, Gropiusstadt in the Neukölln district of West Berlin, 1968. Housing complexes like these were built in many cities in Western Europe and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, as municipal urban planners widely embraced modernist planning principles endorsed by the CIAM (International Congresses on Modern Architecture or Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne).

A comparison of Matta-Clark’s Made in America and Haring’s Berlin Wall mural provides an entry point for a discussion of the struggle for control of urban space in Western Europe and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s and in particular, how the ephemera painted, pasted, and scratched on the Wall and in Wall-adjacent districts was deployed as a weapon within this struggle. Specifically, this analysis complicates the dominant, somewhat facile understanding of graffiti on the Berlin Wall as simply and only an expression of contempt, by loyal Westerners, for the dictatorships of Cold War Eastern Europe. Through an analysis of Matta-Clark’s and Haring’s works, the role of graffiti practice in calling global attention to changing cities and urban experiences and in shaping public discourse around urbanism in the 1970s and 1980s is made readily apparent.

Gordon Matta-Clark’s Made in America was partly a performance piece and partly an ephemeral installation. ³ The artist executed the work along a stretch of the Berlin Wall in October 1976, having traveled to West Berlin for the New York—Downtown Manhattan: SoHo exhibition cosponsored by the West Berlin’s Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) and Berlin Festspiele GmbH, the organization that mounted the yearly Berlin “Festival Weeks” (Festwochen) cultural fair. Made in America consisted of billboard advertisements for German consumer products (Milka brand chocolate, Schultheiss beer, the Wienerwald fast food chain), which Matta-Clark pasted onto the westernmost wall. Near these ads he painted the phrase “FROM USSR MIT LOVE” and stenciled “MADE IN AMERICA” at several points along the wall. Under each “MADE IN AMERICA,” Matta-Clark painted red, square shapes and on these stenciled yellow stars, in the upper-left corner, along with a hammer and sickle, creating a hybrid Soviet–United States “flag.” Made in America survives as a short film, called The Wall (1976–2007), which was compiled more recently by Matta-Clark’s wife, Jane Crawford, along with Alex Gunuay and Peter Gordon. ⁴

Made in America articulates themes such as waste and destruction of urban space that are present in Matta-Clark’s oeuvre as a whole. Growing up in Greenwich Village, New York, in the 1950s and 1960s, Matta-Clark had witnessed the changes wrought by postwar surbanization. In the early 1970s, through Matta Clark’s involvement with the artist-run restaurant Food and other SoHo organizations, such as the 112 Workshop, the artist contributed to that neighborhood’s evolution into the center of the New York art world. Its transformation had begun in the 1950s, after SoHo, an industrial center, had been left vacant by changing forces that fueled the rise of service industries and relocated both manufacturing and much housing outside the inner city (Shkuda, 2010). These experiences, along with his training in architecture at Cornell University in the late 1960s, deeply informed his artistic practice (Attlee, 2007; Lee, 2001; Walker, 2009). In works like Fire Boy, Jacks, and Pig Roast (all 1971), Fake Estates (1973), and Window Blowout (1976) he engaged questions regarding the use or neglect of urban space and the changing experience urban space and sociality. Graffiti was one practice that served these aims. In Graffiti Truck (1973), for example, Matta-Clark drove his battered truck to the South Bronx and invited residents to spray paint messages and images on it. He then parked the truck near Washington Square and offered fragments of the truck’s exterior, cut out with an acetylene torch, for sale to passersby. ⁵

In Made in America, Matta-Clark’s own graffiti, in combination with the marks that were already on the Wall, operated in a similar way. To Matta-Clark, the Berlin Wall represented the same kind of social and spatial control that modernist high-rise housing had come to symbolize. In a short text written when he created the piece, he called the wall the “moral and physical renewal of a preworld war Bauhaus vision.” “The German design machine has conquered America and the world,” he continued, “only to return to Berlin through its wall” (Matta-Clark, 1993, p. 386). By scrawling and painting on it, Matta-Clark undermined the Wall’s power as an instrument of control as well as implicitly challenged the principles that had informed postwar planning policies. Matta-Clark’s quick, sloppy application of paint and of some of the advertising emphasized the Wall’s ugliness and the desolate character of the space that abutted it. The Berlin Wall appears an accretion of detritus, both of the “trash” of the contemporary, urban visual field (advertising and graffiti), and literal trash, which is seen scattered among overgrown weeds around its base. In his text, Matta-Clark suggested the Wall itself was an eyesore, noting, “. . . some have chosen the luxury of hideing [sic] it behind bushes or trees . . .” (Matta-Clark, 1993, p. 386). Through his work, he sought to confront the perhaps reluctant viewer with the Wall as a material and spatial reality and as an unremarkable and vulnerable structure. ⁶ Graffiti practice was a means to this end. Through his performance, Matta-Clark activated the space around the Wall, using the physicality of the Wall as a contrast to and comment on the space around it, which it both created and destroyed.

Matta-Clark’s Made in America was executed on parts of the Berlin Wall located in the district of Kreuzberg, which like SoHo in New York City was an important center of West Berlin’s artist and activist community. It was also an important center of the growing squatter movement, which arose as a critique of postwar planning trends, but also in response to a lack of low-cost housing in West Berlin. In protest and out of desperation, activists illegally occupied or “squatted” in vacant housing located in these inner-city districts beginning in the 1970s (Katz & Mayer, 1985; MacDougall, 2011). For both Matta-Clark and members of the squatter movement, graffiti was a means of remaking and re-signifying space and of turning city space itself into a medium of communication. ⁷ In West Berlin, graffiti was not just scrawled on walls or sides of buildings; rather, façades of occupied buildings were transformed into visual expressions of resistance through collages composed of graffiti, hand-painted banners, found objects, and other debris (Figure 4). Doing so was part of squatters’ efforts to quite literally make a place for themselves, creating homes wherein they felt emotionally invested and connected. Through graffiti, squatters were making their districts visually unique and distinct places within the space of the city and linking these places with a specific set of values. Graffiti was also a means of building community, for both Matta-Clark and West Berlin activists. In a literal sense, creating signs, banners, and painting on their squats were collaborative practices through which the members of West Berlin’s alternative scene fostered connections with one another. For Matta-Clark as well, graffiti was an act in which place and community were forged through destruction. As Pamela Lee argues, “What some regarded as a gesture of defacement for Matta-Clark was an act of deeply social consequences, a protest against contemporary models of urbanism and notions of public and private space” and a means of positing “a larger sense of community against the alienation of modern housing . . .” (2001, p. 164).

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Figure 4.

Manfred Kraft, Façade of the squat located at Admiralstraße 20 in Kreuzberg, 1983.

Both Matta-Clark and members of West Berlin’s squatter movement viewed the visibility of graffiti practice—the spectacle of its creation and of its traces—as key to its power as an instrument of critique and urban intervention. With Made in America, for example, Matta-Clark had addressed the visibility (or invisibility) of the space near the Berlin Wall at a time when it had faded from public view and was not yet known for its graffiti. ⁸ Matta-Clark was not just creating graffiti, but enacting graffiti practice, privileging the space and act as much as its visible marks by executing Made in America as a performance piece. Working within the context of an international and government-funded arts exhibition, he was moreover rendering his commentary visible beyond the confines of either SoHo or West Berlin, to public officials as well as art world denizens. Similarly, squatters’ graffiti practice is part of what made Kreuzberg and other districts, which had been ignored in the 1960s, more visible within the city and in global mass media. Although there were squats from the early 1970s, activists first occupied housing in Kreuzberg on a large scale after they grew frustrated with city officials’ inaction, resorting to squatting in an effort to draw attention to their complaints (MacDougall, 2011). It was therefore important that city officials know that buildings had been occupied. Festooning squats with graffiti and banners was as important in this regard as demonstrating in West Berlin’s streets.

The aesthetics the squatters embraced were part of their “spectacle” of urban occupation and critique. As for Matta-Clark in Made in America, messiness and dirtiness heightened the visibility of their urban interventions and was part of their rejection of mainstream values. For both the artist and activists, the image of chaos and muck was calculated as a visual antidote to the image of centralized control and surveillance that the high-rise housing block—and, for Matta-Clark at least, the Berlin Wall—had come to represent. The squatters were, like Matta-Clark, reclaiming space deemed “unusable” and outside the confines of the real estate market. The sloppy appearance of both Matta-Clark’s artworks and of activists’ dress, squats, or DIY publications were likewise a means of challenging the image of progress and perfection that was represented by the austere seamlessness of the kinds of architecture that predominated in West Berlin and in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. As one of the organizers of a large demonstration held in 1981, called the “Do Something Spectacle” (Tuwat Spektakel), declared, “the city already stinks and we want to make the shit hit the fan” (Widerliche Auswüchse, 1981, p. 32). These strategies of affronting mainstream sensibilities and staging spectacle became even more central to the squatters’ tactics from 1981, when the forced and at times violent “clearance” of some West Berlin squats led to greater militancy within the movement. As a leaflet from that year proclaimed, “the West Berlin government has declared war on us . . . wants to annihilate our living space and our personal connections” (cited in Karapin, 2007, p. 84). Accordingly, the movement’s activities, rhetoric, and self-representation focused increasingly on individuals’ control over urban space and their agency within urban governance. These were particularly provocative issues in West Berlin, which technically remained an “occupied” city, governed by the former Western Allies. In illegally occupying housing, the squatter movement was challenging the authority of these governments and raising the question of which of the city’s stakeholders had the power to occupy, use, or alter its urban space.

The squatters’ critique of West Berlin’s role in geopolitics was made explicit in their banners and graffiti, which at times borrowed phrases from propagandistic rhetoric, thereby linking their critique of housing with a critique of Western policies as a whole. “It is better for our youth to occupy empty houses than foreign lands,” read a banner on one Kreuzberg squat; another invoked the Cold War more specifically and wryly: “You are entering the occupied sector of Berlin” (Figure 5). Through such public, visual declarations, squatters took control of West Berlin’s public image away from institutions of authority, reconfiguring the city spatially but also symbolically. Squatters thus redefined West Berlin in terms of divisions within the Cold War west. As an extension of this, West Berlin’s activist community would in the later 1980s increasingly include the Berlin Wall itself in their protests, putting antigovernment graffiti and other ephemera on its surface. One of the largest and most visible examples of this use of the Wall occurred in May 1987 when, as part of a boycott of a controversial national census, protestors covered the Berlin Wall with their blank census forms.

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Figure 5.

Manfred Kraft, Photo of the Rainbow Factory squat in Kreuzberg, 1984. The sign reads, “You are entering the occupied sector of Berlin [Sie betreten den besetzeten Teil Berlins].”

The fact that Matta-Clark and West Berlin’s squatters deployed similar aesthetics and spatial intervention strategies is not mere coincidence. The larger exhibition of which Made in America was a part, New York—Downtown Manhattan: SoHo, was partly intended, according to Berlin Festspiele artistic director Ulrich Eckhardt and Academy of the Arts president Werner Düttmann, as an examination of “an especially trenchant example of the conditions of urban cultural development in the industrial age” as well as artworks from artists who “were forced to look at the social urban problems of their environment” (Eckhardt & Düttmann, 1976). Thus, the Festwochen exhibition implicitly highlighted the similarities between the urban interventions of SoHo’s artists and West Berlin’s activists, both of which were rooted in the processes that had led to urban decay in both cities. The further concerns articulated by Eckhardt and Düttmann, regarding the “problems of living together” and “the chances and dangers of an open society,” would soon appear very prescient (Eckhardt & Düttmann, 1976). By the early 1980s, West Berlin’s squatter movement was extremely successful in changing the global perception of what West Berlin signified as well as shifting the focus of public discourses on housing and urban governance. Within West Germany in particular, graffiti in West Berlin, on the Wall and on squatted tenements, was pointed to as a sign of the city’s decline, particularly through the 1980s when the amount of graffiti on the Wall increased precipitously. ⁹ In an article on the “downfall” of West Berlin in the news magazine Der Spiegel, the city’s “crisis” state was illustrated with a large image of the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall, juxtaposed with a photo of protestors running through a city street (Krüger, 1983). Once the “show window” and “capital” of the “free world,” West Berlin had for many come to represent fringe groups and values.

The members of the squatter movement had clearly made their mark on the city by the time Keith Haring came to West Berlin to create his own Berlin Wall artwork. Haring was invited to the city by Berlin Wall Museum director Rainer Hildebrandt as part of an international art competition Hildebrandt had sponsored, titled “Overcoming the Wall by Painting Over the Wall” (Überwindung der Mauer durch Übermalung der Mauer). Haring painted his mural on a stretch of the wall located near the museum over the course of 6 hours, as East German border guards eyed him warily and news crews and onlookers gathered to watch him work. Haring first painted over a 350-foot section of the wall with yellow paint, obscuring the graffiti that by this time covered the surface of the westernmost wall and creating a clear ground on which to paint. Haring then painted a chain of human figures in the German national colors of red, yellow, and black, fused through their feet and hands. This image symbolized the future reunification of East and West Germany but was also, according to Haring, a universal image of peace. As the artist explained to People magazine, “It’s about the ridiculousness of all walls and enemies and borders” (Small, 1986). Within a day of its completion, parts of the mural were obscured by other graffiti, Haring’s fame having made it, according to him, “the most important painting [on the Wall] to obliterate” (Gruen, 1992, p. 153).

In the years since Gordon Matta-Clark created Made in America, a distinct kind of graffiti practice had developed in New York City’s South Bronx neighborhood, part of the hip-hop subculture. Despite distinct differences between them, the hip-hop scene of the South Bronx and the squatter community of West Berlin both grew out of urban contexts in which exclusion from urban governance and dissatisfaction with urban development policies led marginalized groups to establish unofficial social, cultural, and economic systems. In both cases, the resulting subcultures were predicated on an engagement with urban space that was alternative to mainstream culture, and also to economics. In addition to their political activism, for example, squatters in West Berlin established cooperative businesses such as daycares, cafés, bookstores, and repair shops within their squats, as well as collective living arrangements wherein residents took turns cooking and cleaning for one another (“Außen Rot, Innen GmbH,” 1979; MacDougall, 2011). In the South Bronx, hip-hop spurred a new musical genre as well as an underground economy that supported it, for example, through the buying and selling of mix tapes and the management and promotion of DJs, MCs, and the clubs where they performed (Birkhold, 2011). Graffiti practice was central to each group’s efforts to remake and appropriate urban space and was deployed in similar ways. In the words of the sociologist Jeff Ferrell (2004), hip-hop graffiti practice, like squatters’ similar practice, “disrupt[ed] the latticework of authority [and] reclaim[ed] public space for those who [had] been systematically excluded from it.” It also “confront[ed] and resist[ed] an urban environment of fractured communities and segregated spaces . . . [and] actively construct[ed] alternatives to these arrangements” (pp. 35, 37).

Keith Haring was closely linked to the South Bronx hip-hop scene. He first became known for the graffiti he created in New York subway stations, which was partly inspired by the hip-hop graffiti Haring saw on New York subway trains (Gablik, 1982; Haring, 1984; Hastreiter, 2005). Haring’s style was, however, distinct from that of most South Bronx graffiti writers. Influenced by commercial art imagery, especially that of comic books and advertising, Haring used a bold, graphic style to create iconic motifs such as the “radiant baby.” In developing his aesthetic, he was influenced by a desire to create images that were direct and immediate and could, according to the curator Jade Dellinger, “communicate his message with the effectiveness of advertising” (Dellinger, 2006; Haring, 1984). In the early 1980s, Haring began to paint public murals that merged his graphic style with the graffiti scene’s ethos of outdoor, unsanctioned art. Works such as his SoHo (1982) and Crack is Wack! (1986) murals, the latter created without permission from the City of New York, are tied to graffiti practice, but can also be placed within a tradition of activist, public mural making which had come to prominence in the late 1960s and 1970s. Generally associated with the grassroots political movements of this period, murals like The Walls of Respect in New York reflected the values endorsed by such movements and were also an extension of their members’ political activism. These works were often motivated by local political and social concerns and focused on building, defining, and displaying community identity. As a result, these murals were often intended to, like graffiti, assert the presence of a previously excluded community. As critic Lucy Lippard (1984) wrote, they “. . . serve[d] as political as well as esthetic outlets, a message to the world (‘We are here’) . . .” (p. 40).

Haring’s Berlin Wall mural was a continuation of his activist and commercially oriented public art practice. The work’s colorful, affirmative image of social harmony visually confirmed the existing notion, first articulated by John F. Kennedy in 1963, that West Berlin was an extension of a global community; every “free man” was “ein Berliner.” Thus, the message behind Haring’s mural was as simple and direct as its imagery, and the intended audience of the mural and the community it represented was broad and inclusive. As Haring put it, the mural was “for people and it doesn’t matter which side of the Wall they’re on” (“Keith Haring Paints,” 1986). Despite the aesthetic and message of Haring’s painting, which perhaps allied it more with activist murals than with subway tags, it retained the status of graffiti because its creation was an illegal act. This was moreover crucial to its import, part of “overcoming” the Wall. While he painted, Haring was swarmed by onlookers asking for autographs as well as television and radio reporters, creating what he described as “the biggest circus I’ve ever seen” (“Keith Haring Paints,” 1986). This was for Haring a major goal of the mural. Asked by a reporter at the press conference for the event why he had done it, Haring responded, “everyone in the entire world is going to know that I painted the Wall.” “By me doing it with this international reputation,” he continued, “[it] draws the attention of the whole world to the Wall” (Press Conference with Keith Haring, 1986).

Haring’s mural united a dispersed community which was based on the notion that all peoples of the free world were citizens of West Berlin and viewers of his work. The fact that Haring’s work existed primarily as a reproduced and, in some instances, commercially sold image was a crucial aspect of communicating this idea. The imagined residents of West Berlin experienced the work as they experienced West Berlin itself: virtually. The work culminated, not with Haring’s completion of it, but with viewers’ experience of it through their consumption of mass media, including the television programs, magazines and newspapers that covered Haring’s visit, and the series of postcards Hildebrandt produced to sell in the Wall Museum shop. The community forged by the mural was indeed united by experience: the experience of consumption.

Like Matta-Clark in Made in America, Haring was performing graffiti practice and consciously leveraging the spectacular aspects of its creation and imagery. Indeed, both Matta-Clark and Haring were interested in exploring the relationship between commodity culture and the formation of community, and their interest in graffiti practice was part of this exploration. Their mutual use of advertising imagery in conjunction with graffiti called attention to urban space as created and sustained physically but also economically. For Haring, engaging with, and attempting to subvert, culture of commodity was key to his overall practice. As he wrote in his journal in June 1986, he wanted to adopt “a different attitude about selling things, by doing things in public and by doing commercial things that go against the ideas of the ‘commodity-hype’ art market” (Haring, 2010, p. 210). Haring was ultimately interested in the transformation of the marginalized object, image, or practice, which broke “as many rules as possible,” into a commodity and in consumption as a way to make the experience of his art accessible and inclusive. This desire led to his opening of the SoHo-based Pop Shop in 1986, which sold items such as T-shirts, buttons, and posters embellished with Haring’s designs. His use of a visually appealing aesthetic and of more conventional forms, such as the painted mural, were means through which Haring worked to create a community from his audience. The works’ accessibility helped in transforming them into affordable commodities, the purchase of which allowed the consumer to take part in the collective experience of his art. As he would later recount, it was in part the “direct relationship between artist and audience” fostered by hip-hop graffiti that informed Haring’s artistic goals and practice (Haring, 1984).

Whereas Haring was interested in transforming art object into commodity, Matta-Clark was interested in the conversion of commodity to refuse. As we have already seen, defacement was for Matta-Clark a means of forging a community of viewers that was, according to Pamela Lee, defined by absence and loss (Lee, 2001). Dissolution of value and destruction of property was also part of his critique of consumer culture. In Made in America, for example, the use of advertising together with graffiti highlighted the tension between the creation of community through consumption versus the creation of community through vandalism. This juxtaposition furthermore allowed Matta-Clark to address the reification of social relations in commodity culture, a theme that is emphasized in the direct address of the slogans in the ads he chose, as in the phrase “Am I not irresistible?” in the Milka ad. The sloppiness of his painted phrases and flags accentuates the slickness of the advertising and of the Wall itself, which he wrote, “stands proud in its shoping [sic] market ferro concreet [sic] newness—especially as it has grown taller and slimmer and whiter in spiritual harmony with a show place city” (Matta-Clark, 1993, p. 386). ¹⁰ Matta-Clark thereby suggests that the apparent pristine wholeness of the world defined by both the Wall and advertising, the world of the “show place city” and the Cold War west, in fact conceals destruction and alienation. Matta-Clark subverts the viewer’s expectation of a wall that neatly divides the world into binary groups, such as victims and perpetrators, good and evil. Moreover, by highlighting the Wall as vulnerable and part of continually changing built environment, Made in America complicates an interpretation of the Wall as a conventional monument, signifying a single, stable set of values or ideals.

The influence and cultural cachet of the system of art making, display, and critique that was the context for Matta-Clark’s and Haring’s works helped to render the alternative political, economic, and social systems of the squatting and hip-hop scenes more visible to a global audience. Ultimately, Haring’s work, and indeed Haring as an artist, received far more exposure than either Matta-Clark or Made in America. There are several reasons for this, but one that bears directly on the current discussion relates to the differing statuses of urban subcultures and their graffiti in 1976 versus 1986. As the cultural theorist Dick Hebdige noted in his book Subculture (1981), “Youth cultural styles may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions; by creating new commodities, new industries or rejuvenating old ones” (p. 96). There was a speedy cooptation of graffiti in the 1980s. Haring’s fame was itself fueled partly by the expanding popularity of hip-hop and graffiti and by the continuing influence of SoHo as a center of the global art market.

Haring belonged to the group of artists that came to SoHo and the nearby East Village neighborhood following these districts’ reclamation in the 1970s. By the time Haring arrived, the neighborhood was less the forgotten, dirty, and dangerous district of abandoned warehouses that it had been in Matta-Clark’s time. Gentrification was well under way. Some lofts had already reached luxury rent levels in 1971, beginning a steady increase in area real estate prices that continued through the 1980s and 1990s (Shkuda, 2010; Zukin, 1989). Hip-hop and graffiti were both rapidly becoming mainstream in the 1980s as well. The summer before Haring created his mural, Run DMC released “Walk this Way,” the first hip-hop track to break the Top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100. Exhibitions such as New York/New Wave at P.S. 1 helped usher graffiti into the world of museums, galleries, and the art market, although some artists and curators expressed “deep ambivalence” over its significance and status (Gablik, 1982, p. 33). ¹¹

The integration of alternative practices and forms into mainstream economic systems was echoed in West Berlin by the government’s attempts to repair its urban image. Although the dire pronouncements of the West German press regarding the city’s “downfall” were exaggerated, members of West Berlin’s cultural and political establishment sought to respond to reports of the city’s supposedly imminent demise. These efforts culminated in the events surrounding the 1987 celebration of the 750th anniversary of the city’s founding, which according to the West Berlin Senate’s planning documents was designed to return the city to the global limelight by “cast[ing] the eyes of Germans and other peoples on Berlin and in so doing clearly show our role vis-à-vis our location in the middle of Europe” (LArch; B Rep 150/416; Mitteilung Nr 105). In addition to various festivals, lectures and conferences, the jubilee, overseen by former Berlin Festspiele GmbH director Ulrich Eckhardt, included extensive architectural events and initiatives designed to “restore and refresh the urban-image” (LArch; B Rep 150/416; Mitteilung Nr 105). West Berlin’s government set out to both literally and figuratively clean up the city and thereby reassert their power to regulate space and determine its symbolic meaning. ¹²

Haring’s visit was not officially sponsored by any government agency, yet his image of generalized, unproblematized unity fit neatly within the government’s narrative of dissent in the city through which it attempted to explain away the vociferous critiques of postwar political, economic, and urban development policies. In official jubilee documents, the government presented Berlin Wall graffiti and West Berlin’s alternative scene in nonthreatening terms as part of the city’s long tradition of “openness and tolerance” (Offenheit und Toleranz) and “its ability to assimilate and integrate the new without robbing it of its uniqueness” (LArch; B Rep 150/416; Mitteilung Nr 105). This was essentially a revival and revision of the postwar narrative of Berlin’s division, as told by the U.S. Information Agency and other propaganda outlets. Postwar subcultures had, through their visual and ephemeral interventions, made the political, economic, and social divides within the west readily apparent, but now the government worked to refocus the world’s attention on the divisions between east and west, painting them in stark black and white terms.

The Wall continues to be pictured and described most often as a singular and monolithic east-west divide. Once called a “vox populi in visual form,” the Wall’s graffiti-covered surface is treated as equivalent to the entire border installation and the global Cold War divide, as for example in Hermann Waldenburg’s 1990 book The Berlin Wall (p. 17). While this is not an entirely false view, considering the Berlin Wall only in terms of its graffiti leads to an incomplete understanding of both the Wall and of graffiti practice. Comparing Matta-Clark’s Made in America with Haring’s Berlin Wall mural, it becomes clear how much is lost by excising the graffito image from the act that created it and from its spatial, political, economic context. A Getty Images stock photo of the Berlin Wall, in which traces of Matta-Clark’s work are visible, was used as recently as 2011 on the websites for the San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe in articles dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the 1961 closure of the intra-Berlin border. The captions accompanying the photo do not mention Matta-Clark or that the graffiti is part of a larger, performance piece, leading the reader to assume that the phrase “FROM USSR MIT LOVE” is a straightforward repudiation of the eastern regime by a nameless West Berliner (Ströbele, 2011; Young, 2011).

A discourse in which the Wall symbolizes only the east–west Cold War divide, moreover, leads one to assume that, when the Wall “fell,” so too did the divisions it maintained. On the contrary, many of the political, economic, and spatial inequities made visible by those who occupied and redeveloped SoHo, the South Bronx, and Kreuzberg persist. The recent Occupy Wall Street Movement, for example, has once again raised questions regarding control over urban space, and its members first drew attention to the erosion of public space by occupying Zuccotti Park, a “public” park that is privately owned (Kayden, 2011). Finally, the conventional view of the Berlin Wall implicitly validates Western interpretations of the Cold War and its own role within it and obscures a more complete picture of both the struggle and the structure. It is revealing, for example, that some East Germans regarded the images and slogans painted on the Berlin Wall as an insult to those who had lost their lives trying to cross the border. As member of the East German resistance Marianne Birthler commented recently, “we could not understand why someone would want to paint on a gallows.” ¹³ Even in 1986, some regarded Haring’s imagery as incommensurate with the violence and repression that the Wall enforced and maintained. According Haring, the man who began painting over his mural the day after he completed it told him, “the wall should not be colorful or artistic. It should remain gray” (Gruen, 1992, p. 154).

Understanding the specific economic, political, and social context of specific Berlin Wall artworks, as well as the motivations of their makers, is crucial for assessing what this graffiti meant and the effects it had. Certainly, much of what was written on the Berlin Wall did not reach the level of critical engagement or aesthetic sophistication of Haring’s and Matta-Clark’s artworks. However, in spite or perhaps because of this, it is crucial to interpret the graffiti on the Berlin Wall and in nearby districts as individual works. Rather than reduce all Berlin Wall graffiti to “rhetorical backdrop,” we should, as Ella Chmielewska (2007) argues, consider how “different forms of graphic marking interact with their urban contexts” and “inflect their specific context with different meanings” (p. 147). Seeing all graffiti as a singular totality empties individual works of their critical nature; it transforms visual ephemera into surface decoration, trivializing dissent. It also prevents a true assessment of the role graffiti plays and has played in the physical, as well economic and social reconfiguration and re-signification of specific urban landscapes. Instead of seeing graffiti on the Berlin Wall, or indeed on any wall, as a “backdrop” or only as images, we should understand graffiti as a practice, and one that is, at least in part, a manifestation of the social and economic processes that have defined and shaped specific urban spaces at specific moments in time.