Hip-hop Graffiti or Urban Painting?

I would like to turn your attention to the confusing yet slightly addictive website www.visualorgasm.com . If the URL alone doesn't entice you, please click on it to peruse some of the features of the site. Mostly, at the top of the page, you can click on the various canvases used by hip hop graffiti artists. I'll pause here for you to click around...

It took me a little while to figure out what was going on and only through random investigative clicks of my mouse did I see the potential of the site. Visualorgasm.com has hundreds of photos of graffiti done by relatively anonymous artists from all over the world. Once I found the pictures and learned how to navigate the "galleries", I spent a good while amazed by the handiworks of so many artists.

This site is a great accompaniment to the book "Painting without Permission", that I analyzed for my annotated bibliography. The book written by Janice Rahn investigates Vancouver based graf-artists, their origins, inspirations, etc. Although the book includes a few illustrations of the walls and trains painted, the black and white photos do not do the works justice. Enter Visualorgasm.com. Though the artists mentioned in the book are not always available on the website, the huge sampling of train cars, walls, and canvases compliment the book and allow readers to grasp what Rahn writes about.

Although available to the public, the website seems relatively private. Graffiti is a highly controversial art, often times illegal. The site promotes sharing of ideas between artists not in the same geographic location. Therefore, the contributors are largely anonymous, only known by their various tags. Some of the jargon used on the site is unknown to me, especially when talking about the writers and their locations. I almost feel as if I have walked down the wrong street in NYC and have a huge neon sign pointing at me that says "DOESN'T BELONG HERE".

The site is a great archive for the wonderful paintings done by some amazing artists, but the term 'hip-hop' graffiti still confuses me. I'm not sure why a music style has its own art form...can you imagine 'country' graffiti? or even 'classical' graffiti? I understand that the origins of hip hop do include the tagging characteristic of graffiti. By the art form and the music style have become so independent of each other (at least from my viewpoint) that I question the name "Hip-hop graffiti". The only two similarities that I see are the rebellious nature of both activities and the usually urban essence. I would prefer to call 'hip-hop graffiti' the potentially more accurate 'urban painting' (that's the best I can come up with). Now my only problem is convincing the homeboys in the South Bronx to pick up what I'm putting down...


word.