Exhibition Review #2: Calligraffiti

Untitled, 2003. "Chaz" Bojorquez, Keo, Mear, Toons, Zender, and Xu Bing.

Calligraffiti: Writing in Contemporary Chinese and Latino Art is an exhibition of contrasts. Currently on display in the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the name “calligraffiti” is a portmanteau combining “calligraphy” and “graffiti.” And combination is definitely the key element here – few other shows can claim to juxtapose contemporary Chinese calligraphic with graffiti-style paintings by Los Angeles graffiti artists. These two art worlds further merge in exhibition’s centerpiece, a series of three murals created for the museum in 2003 by a team of Los Angeles graffiti artists and contemporary Chinese artist/calligrapher Xu Bing.

While calligraphy and graffiti initially seem to make an uneasy combination, the two are actually thematically linked through the notion of “writing” as art. As forms of writing, the exhibition catalogue argues, there are many “correlations between the elevated form, calligraphy, and its historically devalued twin, graffiti”; calligraphy and graffiti, therefore, are not disparate entities rather but two sides of the same coin. Thus, the exhibition seeks to problematize the labels of “high art” and “low art” that typically accompany these artistic mediuma. More alike than different, both calligraphy and graffiti “address issues of power, culture, and universality.”

The exhibition itself can be divided into three sections. The first section focuses on traditional Chinese calligraphy, as exemplified by the works of contemporary Chinese artist Gu Wenda. The second section features contemporary works that question the boundaries of what is considered “calligraphy” or “graffiti.” The paintings of Zheng Chongbin, for example, utilize traditional calligraphic structures but feature ink blots rather than characters; similarly, the two pieces by graffiti artist Gronk more closely resemble a Jackson Pollack painting than a stereotypical graffiti piece. The third and final section – featuring the three 2003 murals – fuses the two mediums. As demonstrated by works such as Untitled (pictured above), Xu’s Chinese characters flow so effortlessly into the graffiti “script” that it is often difficult to differentiate between the two. If graffiti is the “low” form of artistic writing and calligraphy the “high” form, Untitled blends the two into a postmodern milieu that purposely defies categorization.

While Calligraffiti was well-curated and attractively presented, I could not help but reflect on the irony of a major museum doing an exhibit on graffiti. “Tagging” (as graffiti is referred to by its participants) is a complex social practice; for example, MacGillivray and Curwen’s ethnographic study of Los Angeles taggers highlights “tagging’s varying purposes to sustain relationships, carry on dialogue, provide social commentary, and establish and identity by being recognized and known.” Thus, within the tagging community – a community with its own rules, regulations and social norms – tagging serves as the means by which individuals can gain status and establish their identity. As the authors note, “this interpenetration of text and identity captures one of the powers of tagging.”

Thus, while Calligraffiti does serve to validate graffiti as a form of “art,” the very act placing graffiti in an institutional setting strips these works of their social context, and therefore their much of their meaning. The works begin to function simply as images, rather than transgressive attempts to form a social identity. For example, the placard accompanying Two Talk(pictured right), a painting by “Chaz” Bojorquez, began with the following sentence: “Like syncopated notes in jazz, these two calligraphic clusters play off one another.” While Bojorquez is a cross-over artist (he quit tagging in 1986 to focus on his graffiti-style paintings, such as Two Talk), to analyze the work through such academic, formal analysis seems to miss the whole point of graffiti. Similar to how the transgressive video and conceptual art works of the 1970’s were eventually incorporated into the mainstream art world, it was difficult to tell whether Calligraffiti represented a celebration graffiti as an underrepresented art form or the process of co-opting graffiti by aligning it with established art forms (calligraphy) and categorizing its “cannon” through formal analysis.

Perhaps my analysis is too harsh; after all, I would also argue that it is undeniable that graffiti is an art form. One of the concepts that stressed throughout the exhibit is that when people discuss graffiti, they often conflate two separate concepts: art/creation and vandalism. Although it is true that taggers paint on walls that are other people’s property, that doesn’t mean that their work is not “artistic.” This argument is furthered by the juxtaposition of calligraphy and graffiti, which highlights their remarkable similarities. The two mediums each play with the expressive qualities of words, pointing to the ability of words to simultaneously express linguistic and artistic meanings. Moving beyond the low art/high art binary, it becomes apparent that calligraphy and graffiti are both textual mediums, in that they physically incorporate words (text) and that they can be read as a “text” in the post-modern sense.

In the end, it's hard to come to a singular conclusion about Calligraffiti. Regardless of whether you see the exhibit as celebrating or institutionalizing graffiti, however, I believe that all can agree that the exhibition is nothing if not thought-provoking.