Iz the Wiz Eases on Down the Road

I read yesterday that Iz the Wiz is dead. That is to say, Michael Martin, subway graffiti artist, has died.

I must admit that part of me misses the graffiti-covered subways of my youth. But growing up in New York City in the 1980s I hated graffiti. Back then I read Ayn Rand and thought Reagan was a great president -- I was ignorant in so many ways -- and I dreamed of standing at one end of the subway platform with a firehose filled with black paint, turning it on as the train pulled into the station. I'd be a superhero, the Slasher, as in "Yo, you slashed my tag," which is what you'd get yelled at you when you were caught crossing out some other graffitied name.

A friend of mine is a driver for New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority -- they don't call them motormen any more -- and from what he's told me, the removal of graffiti from the city's subways has been an extensive and ongoing process. Back when I was commuting to school some of the lines had been cleared of their external graffiti, leaving the interior to be covered with a dense network of twisting, crawling jet black lines making up the overlapped names and sentiments of a generation of teenagers; I assumed some engineer had come up with a graffiti-proof external coating and the paint just didn't stick any more. Then the scribbling disappeared from the inside, too, but then the old subway cars with their oily beige paint also disappeared, so, again, I assumed some kind of technological progress in the fight against illicit mark-making.

But no: It turns out that the anti-graffiti crusade is much more involved and far-ranging than that. My friend tells me he has to inspect every train car before he pulls out of the yard at the start of his run; any bit of graffiti found anywhere and that car is immediately pulled off the line and sent to be cleaned. At the end of every run, too, my friend has to go from car to car getting everyone off the train. Apparently in the good old days graffiti artists would hide on the train until it was pulled into the yard, giving them free and easy access to every train in the system. (Or anyway the ones parked in that particular yard; MTA has yards all over the city.) Every driver is issued a handle which they plug in to actually run the train; some drivers are fond of banging the handle next to the heads of anyone sleeping away at the end of the line. Then the final defense against subway graffiti is security cameras in every yard, so even if someone gets past the driver's inspection, or hops a fence or something, they get caught before they can even get the cap off their spraycan. Those places are locked down like a bank.

The New York Times obituary for Martin compares him and his fellow graffitists to the artists of 15th-century Florence. Of course the main difference between Leonardo, Donatello, and Brunelleschi and graffitists is the former created lasting works; and not just art that can still be seen, but art that is worth seeing. The graffiti artists never really did more than decorate otherwise drab train cars. They elevated the utilitarian to the status of entertainment, maybe -- maybe not quite that high -- but when some of them translated their work onto panels to be hung on walls, the result was disappointing at best.

The final analysis, then, is that graffiti is a dead end, both for its artists, very few of whom ever escaped -- is Basquiat an exception? Or did he fail to escape? And was he a "real" graffiti artist anyway? -- and for the art world. These days the art world remains enchanted with the idea of graffiti, but the actuality is a place like 5 Pointz: The Institute of Higher Burnin', a wonderland where graffiti is legal and everything is so relaxed and artistic and free, man, that last April a stairway collapsed, nearly killing artist Nicole Gagne. Maybe the owner was out spraybombing an overpass when he should've been getting the building inspected.