Graffiti artists gain recognition for their work

By KEVIN DEAN
School of Communication
University of Miami

PRAGUE– Graffiti artist Vladimir was alone tagging in the dark streets of Prague.

As church bells rang out signaling that it was half past midnight, a shadow slipped out of the dark and glided towards Vladimir.

The golden light from the streetlamps above showered down upon the silhouette, revealing the face of Jarda, a 17-year-old local graffiti artist.

The two had seen each other tagging on the streets and at hip hop shows, but it was here that they came face to face for the first time.

Jarda said that he was going to do a late night job and knowing that Vladimir, then 16, was a talented writer, asked him to come along. Vladimir obliged and off they went into the night.

Near the Tesco department store on Národní Trida, Jarda vigorously shook a spray can of paint and began to tag the wall with his name.

He was only halfway through with his tag when a Tesco security guard spotted the pair.

“Don’t try to run or I’ll shoot you in the leg!” the security guard yelled as he dashed towards them, gun in hand.

Vladimir and Jarda froze, dropped their spray cans, and could do nothing but allow the guard to drag them inside Tesco and into the supermarket’s small jail cell in the rear of the store.

While waiting for the Prague police to arrive and arrest the two boys, the security guard teamed up with a few more guards and then, for hours, took turns delivering harsh blows to the helpless boys.

Between beatings, Vladimir and Jarda huddled in the jail cell and talked about their love of graffiti for hours to take their minds off of their horrible situation.

The police eventually came, took them to the station, gathered more police officers, and then gave the boys several more rounds of nasty beatings before fining them each several thousand crowns and releasing them into the morning.

Nine years have passed since their tumultuous evening together.

The two writers have remained close friends ever since and have watched each other’s writing styles evolve from hasty bombing to crisp, classic letters and murals.

Part of the second generation of Prague’s graffiti scene, the pair is a catalyst to the scene’s assortment of b-boys, graffiti artists, hip hop DJs, and break-dancers. From arranging impromptu graffiti battles to throwing parties, they are constantly infusing the scene with fresh ideas

“I’m a fella,” Jarda says laughing. “In Czech, you can say to your friend, ‘hey, my freak,’ or ‘hey, my fella’ and it means that you are the man around town.”

“Well, I think that I’m the fella around here,” the 26-year-old Prague native says, then quickly adds, “But it’s a quiet fame.”

Quiet, maybe, but definitely deserved.

On July 24, 2004, Jarda and Vladimir’s graffiti team ABX took first place in the Czech leg of the European graffiti competition Write 4 Gold, even though Jarda was the only ABX team member to compete.

According to the rules of the contest, the first team to sign up is guaranteed a spot in the competition. A group of Germans didn’t sign up in time and they complained that since they were better than several of the registered teams that their team should take precedence and be allowed to compete instead.

The contest organizers complied and, disgruntled with such an unfair decision, Vladimir and Pois 811– an original member of TCP, the most famous crew from Prague since their formation in 1992– refused to compete.

So Jarda borrowed the less-talented Phoe, a member of the local crew WHS, and 2Day, who holds no allegiance to any crew, and led his makeshift team in competing under the ABX name.

Nevertheless, they were the only team that took the event’s fairy tale theme and created a fluid design that spanned the length of the 10-meter-long blank wall they were given, as opposed to most teams that simply threw together a jumbled mess of sloppy letters.

The victory sent ABX to Chemnitz, Germany, to compete in Write 4 Gold’s final competition.

Jarda says that if Vladimir and Pois 811 competed with him, then they could’ve won the competition’s grand prize of 1,500 spray cans, easily over a year’s worth of free paint.

But Vladimir and Jarda don’t care about contest results because they realized years ago contests like Write 4 Gold, not to mention graffiti entirely, simply didn’t exist.

Before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, spray cans weren’t even available to the public. If you were lucky enough to score a cheap can of paint, then most likely it was a very poor quality Czech brand with not much color, greatly limiting the graffiti artist’s abilities.

Shortly after the fall of Communism, writers like PoPay from France began to cover parts of Prague with vibrantly colored text.

“The city was absolutely gray at this time so … when [Popay] came from the west and made text with pink, then it was something very special for us,” Vladimir says of the first time when he first saw graffiti as a 14-year-old. “That was the beginning for me.”

From there, Vladimir and his friends would slyly shuffle into paint stores, stuff cans of paint into their jackets and then bolt out into the streets to tag small, low traffic areas of town.

Jarda remembers being 15 years old and writing the Czech word “Nic” (pronounced “nitz”) on the walls of the subways. When translated into English, the word means “nothing.”

So when old men would stroll up to Jarda and ask what he was writing, he would turn to them and scream, “NOTHING!”

The joking around quickly stopped when Jarda and Vladimir realized that the entire city was essentially void of all graffiti, meaning that almost every wall was a blank canvas awaiting their artistic touch.

At that time, nobody in the town really knew what graffiti was and the police didn’t enforce graffiti regulations like they do today. Writers could sneak into a train yard at night and paint freely on the trains, the only stipulation given to them by the conductors was that they didn’t cover up the trains’ numbers.

Soon, American graffiti documentaries like Wildstyle, Stylewars and Beatstreet began to filter into the community and local artists began to emulate the New York City styles of graffiti lettering and life that they saw in the films.

Jarda feels that the most passionate writers in the city today still look towards these films for inspiration.

“Some of those movie are 30-years-old, but it’s the same way that we live today,” he says. “We don’t have much money, but we are throwing parties every weekend and meeting in the streets of Prague to do graffiti jams. We like the streets.”

By the time of their first encounter, Jarda and Vladimir were already engrossed with graffiti and their new friendship set forth a chain reaction of events that ensured 1995 would be an eventful year for the graffiti scene.

A half-year after meeting they teamed up with 10 other writers to form the graffiti crew NNK, and when they realized that NNK contained the best local talent, they divided the crew into two new ones– ABX and SciFi– to strengthen the scene’s competition. Jarda, Vladimir, and Pois 811 stuck with ABX.

Two years later, Vladimir, then 18, moved out of his parents’ house and into a rent-free squat owned by punk rock musicians and anarchists.

The only graffiti artist in the house, Vladimir was able to focus entirely on his art now that he didn’t have to pay rent.

“[Graffiti] was something like a drug for me at this time,” Vladimir says. “ … I was insane, crazy, crazy about it.”

It was here that he first began to dabble in creating posters, flyers, and freehand illustrations and his work began to create a buzz within the graphic design community.

Spearheading the growing scene of 1997, Jarda and Vladimir began to photocopy snapshots of the best graffiti around town, assemble the pages into a black-and-white ‘zine called Terorist Magazine, and then pass out copies to their friends.

The publication has grown significantly since then. It still spotlights the best graffiti that Prague has to offer, but now, Vladimir and his brother Paul, 27, put out one color 70-page issue every two years and then distribute it worldwide to graffiti communities ranging from Australia to New York City.

After the creation of Terorist Magazine, hundreds of new graffiti artists began to slowly filter into the city. Soon, too many writers with poor styles and imitation b-boys began to leech off of the scene, diluting the hard-core, tight-knit community of years past.

Writers started bombing all over town, and when tags started to appear in treasured Old Towne and on the Charles Bridge, residents started to complain.

This prompted Jarda and a handful of other writers that deeply cared about preserving the graffiti scene to write a letter to the government proposing that 46 popular graffiti locations would be made legal. The government somewhat consented and declared only four spots legal, the biggest one under the bridge near Barandovski Most.

But the scene’s rapid expansion has caused for both Vladimir and Jarda to inevitably drift away from the graffiti scene. Both of them still compete with ABX and are still staples in the community, but Jarda now spends lots of time designing Web pages and Vladimir’s love for graphic design and illustrations have caused for him think about stopping Terorist Magazine.

“A few years ago, I knew any tag in the city … but now someone is painting in some part of town and I don’t know him,” Vladimir says. “Since Terorist is my view of this scene, it’s hard now for me to make a real view of the city. I am trying to pass it on to someone else.”

Today, Vladimir has come a long way since his days in the squat.

Recently, his work was spotted by an Eastpack representative in Prague and he was commissioned to go to an Eastpack store in Kuwait City to make a painting on the outside of the building. It was the first piece of graffiti ever created in the city.

Now he is focusing almost entirely on making comic-book-style illustrations, cinematography, and designing brochures and pamphlets for music festivals and magazines.

Once a week, he teaches a one-hour class on experimental film and visual communications at FAMU, Prague’s largest film academy, and he MCs for his rap group PSH, which will perform on Aug. 20 in Prague at the open-air festival Hip Hop Kemp.

He has begun to respect the buildings he used to tag and his love for architecture has led him to collect architecture books and make architecture-inspired comics.

Despite his fame, Vladimir realizes his role in the community.

“Many times people come up to me and say that my art and music has opened up their eyes, so I feel a responsibility to … ” he trails off to listen to a handful of young rollerblading-gypsies beatboxing on a nearby park bench, remembering that he too was once a teenager looking everywhere around him for inspiration. But then he realizes that your greatest influence is yourself and says, “Don’t make anything for someone else. Always create for yourself.”

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