“A tag is your identity, it’s your logo”, he goes on to say. I don’t have a problem with street art”, he adds, “for me it’s just the honesty of it, we wouldn’t have the big colourful pieces, or the big commissions artists are getting today if there weren’t the crawling steps, the foundation stones.” It’s what we call graffiti, it’s not street art. Toad is unapologetic about the graffiti movement “I do the illegal stuff, like the tags and throw ups because it’s the essence. Internationally, and in South Africa, you are likely to find graffiti on trains, because if it’s all about getting your name up, painting something that moves around the city and is visible to more people makes sense. And seeing all the amazing graffiti that was on them, and I knew right away I wanted to do that”. Growing up around skateboarding culture, he was always interested in graffiti, but he says “what really got me into it, was commuting in high school, especially on trains. Formally known as ‘Empty’, he started painting in 2004. One of these luminaries is graffiti writer Toad. This is a world within a world, and it has its own stars. “I know him well, he’s a DJ in Alex” or “It has to be a group, there is no way one person could be everywhere” they articulate loudly. Who hasn’t seen the king of tagging, Tapz’ work? Having sent many a property owner into a rage, Tapz has even inspired radio shows with listeners phoning in to try guess who the person behind the moniker is.

Names like Fuse, Bias and Metafour litter pillars and bridges, vying for place against Chowmein’s iconic noodle box. Joburg is the perfect canvas for graffiti. The flux of inhabitants, a lack of urban management and general lawlessness left a gap for graffiti to arrive and thrive. Apartheid was ending and crucially, the Johannesburg inner city had started to degenerate. But when it did, the internet was on the very near horizon and hip hop and skateboarding were developing. Graffiti came to Johannesburg relatively late, due in part to Apartheid and South Africa’s isolation from the rest of the world. Side-by-side on the tough streets of the Big Apple, they gave inner city youth an identity, a family and notoriety. Spend any time in the graffiti realm and you will hear jargon like ‘bombing’, ‘wildstyle’ and ‘crew’ thrown around.Ĭrucially, as this movement was finding its feet and growing, so were other youth and street cultures like hip hop and skateboarding. Skill and respect may garner you the title ‘King’, while a novice or incompetent writer is a ‘toy’. Shifting from just graffiti writing to artistry.Īs anarchistic as it may seem to those on the outside, the graffiti world has hierarchy and its own language. And finally, the masterpiece or piece, the large labour-intensive, colourful pieces that feature words and/or characters. This was quickly executed bubble letters, also usually the writer’s name. From a speedily scrawled tag, the throw-up evolved. After the article, New Yorkers began to take notice of this trend, as did many new graffiti writers who were inspired to get their name up all over New York. It focused on Taki 183, a writer who would tag his name around the city and on the subway, while working as a messenger. In 1971, the New York Times published an article ‘Taki 183 spawns pen pals’. Concrete jungle: The Johannesburg inner city provides a great canvas for graffiti artists to do their work. Hesitant to scrawl their own name for fear of getting caught, they would use an alias to create fame and city-wide infamy. Early graffiti writers began leaving their tag (or signature) with a marker or spray can. Pre the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD, one (hopefully) satisfied resident wrote on a wall “I screwed the barmaid”.īut today, graffiti on the streets of cities around the world, including Joburg, is a subculture with its own history, rubrics and beliefs.īorn in New York, and Philadelphia, in the late 1960s, the economically tough and socially turbulent 1970s saw the graffiti culture explode. Whether on a cave wall thousands of years ago, or in Pompeii. Graffiti isn’t new humans have always had an innate need to leave their mark.

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