“Authority imprinted on emptiness is money”

Marking the recent passing of Norman Mailer, the Complex blog reminds readers of Mailer’s famous essay, “The Faith of Graffiti.” I read that a year or two ago in the course of researching a story that dealt indirectly and in part with the evolution of graffiti from what it was when Mailer wrote about it (expression of the disenfranchised), to what it means in the marketplace now (cool, hip, edgy: insert your profitable adjective here).

In the end, I did not cite the essay in that particular piece — mostly because that evolution was more of a single background point, not the subject of the article — but this morning I dug up my early draft of it, and here are two paragraphs that I later eliminated:

In 1974, Norman Mailer published “The Faith of Graffiti,” and mused on the attraction of scrawling one’s tag name on subway cars: “Maybe something in the whole scheme of the system gives a death rattle …. Your presence is on their presence, your alias hangs of their scene.”

That one line — “your presence is on their presence” — is the one that really struck me. I was interested in how that idea applied to tags — but also to logos. I had a little on some of the pioneers of translating the graf idea onto apparel, who basically failed, and more recent examples that have succeeded, and brought graf-style expression both into exclusive downtown boutiques, and eventually into shopping malls. I’m not saying that there’s no difference between street artists and branders. What I’m saying is that whether you’re Polo or the hippest little underground brand, the goal can be fairly described as: your presence on their presence.

What, Norman Mailer asked graffiti writers back in the 1970s, explained the power of the tag, the name? “The name is the faith of graffiti,” one of them told him. Mailer seemed bowled over by this observation. But it’s another of his musings, elsewhere in his essay, that jumps out thirty years later: “Authority imprinted upon emptiness is money.”

So there’s that. As these bits strongly suggest (at least to me, re-rereading them now), one reason this stuff didn’t make it out of the first draft is that I hadn’t really worked out a way to draw Mailer’s thinking into what I was writing in a manner that was, you know, coherent. That authority-printed-on-emptiness line comes in a passage in Mailer’s essay that’s sort of about how the art market works, and I was trying to repurpose it to make it about how brands work. In my defense, I’ll say that “The Faith of Graffiti” as a whole still strikes me as being more notable for a handful of very vibrant phrases and passages, and for a very determined romanticism, than it is for having a clear point of view. I can only assume it would have felt very different to read it back when it was written, and graffiti’s cultural role was so removed from what it is today.

On a somewhat related note, Ryan McGinness once did an amazing design series that visually translated/transformed logos into tags, and tags into logs. It was pretty incredible, but I’m not sure if it was ever published. I think there were some trademark issues. I bring this up to acknowledge that I claim no originality in musing on the tag/logo connection.