Walking through the doors of Deitch Projects into "Street Market" was like walking into an urban Alice Through the Looking Glass. In this fanciful installation by artists Todd James, a.k.a. Reas, Barry McGee, a.k.a. Twist, and Stephen Powers, a.k.a. Espo, the world is turned inside out, and power structures are inverted with the vitality of an amusement park. The show is mapped out as an urban street with bodegas selling the likes of cans labeled "street cred," and Graffiti Hall of Fame rooms with armor made out of Olde English malt liquor cans and trophy cases of the artists' sneakers and writing gear. More than a street market, however, the show is ultimately a marketing of the street. Parodying the strategies of artists and advertisers alike, Reas, Twist, and Espo propose a world in which the individual conquers a society driven by the mainstream market. "Street Market" is compelling not only in terms of its successful translation of graffiti into gallery art, but also as a herald of the integration of a new wave of graffiti into the visual language of the everyday.

Inside the warehouse-type space, two tagged overturned trucks greet the viewer on the left, while on the right, corner stores provide lottery tickets and beepers. Inside the buildings are the products of an over-marketed hip-hop culture, but behind this glamour, inside the creases of the installation is the residue of inner-city decay: porn, cigarette ashes, uninviting furnishings, an old television with poor reception, dirt, and grime. The show is an intricate maze of colorful bursts of signage: a pinball machine, briefcases brimming with cheap gold watches, stands with cute mock hip-hop albums, sneakers hanging from telephone wires, and readymades of found sidings of buildings with their tags from North Philly still intact. Twist's now signature droopy-faced caricatures loom over the viewer, while Espo's and Reas's signs grin overhead.

Since its inception, graffiti has fed on the visual language of advertisements and comics, the Pop art of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, as well as the art of the '80s art world, which attempted to appropriate it. The new generation of writers works off of both the Duchampian readymade and the practices of the early '80s East Village

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art scene (Keith Haring's gallery murals and the SAMO slogans of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Al Diaz). The writers' works also fuse the immediacy of the graffiti created in the lay-ups, where trains sleep when not in use, and the calculation of both sculptural "graffiti" and poster graffiti, such as that of Revs/Cost that once plastered the city. Products of both the art establishment and the advertising industry, the "Street Market" artists are simultaneously the embodiment and the antithesis of corporate America. Both Powers and McGee are graduates of art school, and James's work can be seen everywhere from The Source to the Cartoon Network. They are hybrids of their artistic identities and their tags.

Graffiti has a solid history in the New York gallery world. Almost thirty years ago in 1972, the United Graffiti Artists broke new ground with their exhibition at City College. With such masters such as Coco, Snake 1, Stitch 1, and Phase 2, graffiti began attempting to bomb the system from within the system. The New York art world's initial fascination with graffiti was sparked by the magnificent trains that penetrated the daily life of New Yorkers. This led to performances in which writers would demonstrate their talents in front of wealthy collectors and curious individuals. By the early '80s, the art world had officially collided with graffiti culture. The East Village scene was hoppin', and a new breed of artists, including Haring and Basquiat, was ready to ride the graffiti wave.

With the gradual elimination of the subway as a public canvas, however, came the fall of the art world's intense interest in graffiti. As the saying goes, "out of sight, out of mind." In 1983, the Sindey-Janis Gallery tried to pin down the graffiti-inspired works in the galleries by showing them under the title of "Post-Graffiti." To do so was a death wish. Graffiti is of the moment and in the moment. Despite the fact that a graffiti-inspired work hanging on the white-walled institution of a gallery ceases to be graffiti, it does not nullify its relationship to graffiti, and the title is thus problematic. Just one year after "Post-Graffiti," the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) initiated a major campaign to remove graffiti from the subway trains, and their increasing success led to the art world's abandonment of its urban darlings. The present wilted into nostalgia. It was ultimately only a select few artists, such as Haring who enjoyed official prolonged New York art-world success that would include significant representation in museums. Meanwhile, the writers who had initially inspired the craze were pilfered for what they were worth. In Europe, by contrast, where the graffiti-covered trains were still running, graffiti-inspired works continued to show in galleries on a consistent basis.

In 1989, the MTA put the last graffiti-covered train out of service, and at that time, graffiti policies became stricter. Tight security made bombing the trains impossible, but New York graffiti did not die with its removal from the subway. Writers began to find alternate places to work. Some took a literal dive further into the underground. The physical movement was eradicated from public display, but the mobility of graffiti remained alive and well. As the subway cars began to disappear one by one, writers began to find alternate surfaces and venues for their work. Not only did graffiti move above ground to outdoor graffiti museums and halls of fame, but it also found a new forum in graffiti zines, the mobility of which replaced that of the train. Founded in 1984, the International Graffiti Times (which later refuted the use of the very word "graffiti" in favor of "Aerosol Culture") began spreading the word not only from coast to coast, but all over the world. In later years, this dialogue continued with the Internet. To this date, there are thousands of websites devoted to graffiti. The Internet, in a sense, has become a new train with the capacity to spread itself all over the globe instantaneously.

Seeping out from walls and surprising urban denizens from impossible rooftops, the tags of writers continue to return from the wrath of the Kochs and Giulianis with a vengeance, and have come to penetrate our consciousness in a different way from how they did with the subway cars of the '70s and '80s. The tags on the street are now part of our consciousness, and for a society now used to graffiti — although not necessarily any more accepting of its intrusion — the viewer cannot remember the surface before it was painted; there is just a magnificent after.

In "Street Market," the massive overturned trucks, the most obvious indications of the elimination of locomotion, highlight the alternative surfaces that graffiti artists increasingly were forced to use. While the artists in this show, notably Reas, have substantial NYC subway cred that spans back to the early '80s, the subway never has and never will be an option for most of the younger writers.

The signs in "Street Market" are a mixture of artist-made tag signs and corporate logos, such as that of Dunkin' Donuts. In the gallery context, this points to a self-advertisement relationship between the self-given tag, the corporate logo, and the proper name of the art world. The signs in the gallery range in price from $2000 to $3000. However, like the street, the painted walls of the gallery are not for sale and cannot be sold.

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"Street Market" insists on its viewers taking notice of the visuals of the urban street. As you leave the gallery, you are confronted with a parking lot filled with prime throwups and mini-pieces. Amaze, one of the artist's West Coast compadres, looks down on you from a neighboring building. There is so much to see that is hidden above our heads on rooftops, beneath our feet in tunnels, or even around the corner in schoolyards and parking lots. Part of graffiti's charm is that it does not tell us how it got there. Its incredible feats are for us to decipher, and if we so dare, to challenge. Graffiti is a mark of art, energy, and provocation. In the land of Reas, Twist, and Espo the emphasis is on the mark of the individual, and in turn, they make us want to leave our marks. By the last day, the show had evolved, sporting more tags on its surfaces. Despite strict policing by the gallery attendant, visitors to Deitch Projects had left their own traces.

The original name of this show, first exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia as part of its "Wall Power" exhibition in the spring of 2000, was "Indelible Market." Perhaps this was better suited to the empowering nature of the work than is the more banal moniker, "Street Market." For, upon entering the gallery, the impermanent indeed becomes and insists upon the indelible. Whereas most of what a graffiti writer normally produces is up to the fate of the law and the natural elements, many of the objects in this show will end up in private art collections. It is not, however, just the illicit markings of the graffiti writer's hand that are given a sense of permanence by the new location, but also the home of graffiti. In the age of ever-gentrifying cities, "Indelible Market" insists upon a culture that will not be subsumed by the industry that continuously exploits and markets it. It reminds the SoHo gallery hopper that across the street the markings are real. Graffiti, although physically rather impermanent, lives on in the stories that are passed down from generation to generation. "Indelible Market/Street Market" reaffirms the steadfastness of a seemingly transient set of practices. The artists in the Deitch show have taken control of the situation, and in the gallery, at least, the street belongs eternally to them.

Reas, Twist, Espo, "Street Market," Deitch Projects, Oct. 5 - Dec. 2, 2000.

Photos courtesy of Deitch Projects