As TOX jokes, “I’m definitely a middle child here, FUME is our daddy,” they draw a timeline backwards, what 10FOOT called “a bastard child,” that is this living beast called graffiti and the lineage of their overlapping histories, all of them still active to some degree, but each of them noting their periods of rampant activity around their twenties. FUME starts this story then, starting to write in 1992 as an acolyte of those ’80s sensibilities captured in Style Wars and Subway Art, who only worked on trains, scornfully eschewing canvas or permissioned walls, describing the topography of public damage in halcyon terms. “Nineties London was beautiful, with lots of derelict buildings and far less cameras about. On Sundays, the streets would be empty and there would be squat parties that lasted two or three nights in a row, with the train yards wide open because they were next to these derelict buildings.” He still laughs at the cat and mouse of it all, how in that analog era, it was easy to “tune into police radios so you could get away in time,” a back door shut with advent of digital radios, just like so many other lines of access that were slammed closed in those same dark days TOX described. “Graffiti died down around 2007-2008 except for 10FOOT and a couple others,” he remembers, “We had to find our own way.”
If graffiti is everywhere now, pervasive in an increasingly permissive landscape, it is still a clandestine affair, functioning well in the shadows, taking aim when no one is looking and often cloaking itself in the garb of authority. It speaks to, and for, what is too often unsaid in the polite hush of public space, making visible the discomforts we choose not to examine, acts of self-assertion against the state, of resistance in all its futility, even when it whispers in the silence, like a madman muttering to himself, it is as loud as a primal scream. FUME tells us about this new kid BAS, who maybe even works with 10FOOT sometimes (don’t ask us, we’re not part of the surveillance state), who is the new king surpassing everyone on the trains there now. This is heartening and good to know, but it is not the knowledge of yore, the secrets of the old kings and their lost kingdoms. The young heads will always have the vitality to push us forward, but it’s the old ghosts who know how time rhymes and hold the poetry of the form, and when FUME speaks of the London Underground, it’s like the slow dance of memory: “Above ground is ugly to me, I don’t really do much work there, but underground, nothing has been changed, it’s like going back in time. You just have to keep going down, to find new spots, new tunnels and entrances that people have forgotten. Those old trains I used to paint had porous metals; you could still make out the old school tags like stains.” This art form, it seems, is not just about getting up, it is about going deep.
