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The Faith of Graffiti
The Faith of Graffiti is the classic, definitive look at the birth of graffiti as an art form, pairing the fascinating 1974 essay by Norman Mailer—National Book Award and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner’s Song —with the stunning, iconic photography of internationally acclaimed photographer Jon Naar. Back in print for the first time in three decades and expanded with 32 pages of additional photos, The Faith of Graffiti is a landmark in the history of street an essential, contemporary, and still-relevant meditation, in words and pictures, on the meaning of identity, property, and city life.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
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329 people want to read
About the author
Norman Mailer
339 books1,411 followersNorman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.
Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 11, 2023
“Do we learn then whether we are angels seeking to articulate the aesthetic of a great god, or demonic cave-painters looking to kill the abominable snowman of our dread night? In any event, wherever, whatever, art is not peace but war, and firm is the record of that war.” —Norman Mailer
December 1, 2010
I've been re-reading Norman Mailer's The Faith of Graffiti by Mailer, and it's astounding Mailer grasped a street aesthetic born of marginalized , nonwhite urban youth. This is an important essay I suspect Eric Michael Dyson or Cornell West would come to admire. Mailer is susceptible to the charges of depicting these artists as noble savages, but he does make the connections between the impulse to transform the environment by adding a bit of one's personality upon it with the shattered reconstructions of Picasso's vision. Nice polemic, this.
What impresses me is that he refined the existential-criminal-at-the-margins tact he controversially asserted in his essay "The White Negro", backing away from the idea that violence could direct one to knew kinds of perception and knowledge, and emphasized an aesthetic response to a crushing , systematized oppression. Living long enough ,I suppose, made Mailer aware of strong trend in urban style that added value to circumstances and individual growth that didn't involve a fist, a gun or a knife.
What impresses me is that he refined the existential-criminal-at-the-margins tact he controversially asserted in his essay "The White Negro", backing away from the idea that violence could direct one to knew kinds of perception and knowledge, and emphasized an aesthetic response to a crushing , systematized oppression. Living long enough ,I suppose, made Mailer aware of strong trend in urban style that added value to circumstances and individual growth that didn't involve a fist, a gun or a knife.
May 11, 2008
I though Norman Mailer's essay in this book was amazing-- a really insightful and poetic analysis of graffiti in the 70s. I especially liked the way he talks about graffiti's effect on spaces.
This book is a good introduction to graffiti studies.
This book is a good introduction to graffiti studies.
February 18, 2021
I am making it my business to read all Norman Mailer and so have read a lot of his stuff. This one is about graffiti, which is one of the core elements of Hip Hop which I also love, so is a perfect marriage for me. It is also testament to the sheer breadth, diversity, and multifaceted nature of Mailer's writing - even when you have read a lot of his stuff, you can still be surprised at some new area that he has decided to explore. You also know he is going to go at it with everything, take some risks, and at least try to do something brilliant (even if sometimes he fails badly).
This book is as much about the photographs, which cover the early 1970s New York Graffiti artists, as Mailer's musings on what it all means. Mailer only writes about 30 pages or the 100 or so that there are in total. Even in that amount of writing he is in quite florid and philosophical writing mode, which others might find it a bit patronising or pretentious, but I don't really mind. Whatever you think of Mailer however, it is hard not to agree that he is well ahead of the curve here, strongly making the intellectual case for graffiti as art, and seeking to place it in the wider context of art history of the time well before any one else was thinking in this way as far as I know. Also for me, I thought it was interesting that most of the graffiti talked about here is largely just tagging or words in big bubble letters, rather than the more complex and impressive murals that seem to come later and would seem to me to be what people expect more in terms of their art.
Also, as much as Mailer wanted to be a great novelist, this piece plays to his probably greater strengths as a journalist. He is at his best talking to the young, poor New Yorkers about what it feels like to tag their monikers on the New York subway then talking to the Mayor of New York as to why he is so upset about graffiti specifically. He describes where he goes, what it all looks like, seeks to put himself in their positions, and pontificates on their motives and feelings and generally seems to be enjoying himself very much in the 'enfant terrible' intellectual arguing against the establishment role.
I think if you like Mailer then you will like this I think. Whether his theories about how advertising and pop art have subliminally influenced graffiti artists or how stealing and hiding aerosol paint cans is some kind of existential rebellion against poverty and poor architecture are convincing or not, seem to me to beyond the point. He is asking these questions and I think they are interesting things to think and talk about. If however you don't like Mailer's larger than life personality, which is all over this, then you will still probably enjoy the photos which impressively capture an early simpler phase of graffiti's history before it all went global.
This book is as much about the photographs, which cover the early 1970s New York Graffiti artists, as Mailer's musings on what it all means. Mailer only writes about 30 pages or the 100 or so that there are in total. Even in that amount of writing he is in quite florid and philosophical writing mode, which others might find it a bit patronising or pretentious, but I don't really mind. Whatever you think of Mailer however, it is hard not to agree that he is well ahead of the curve here, strongly making the intellectual case for graffiti as art, and seeking to place it in the wider context of art history of the time well before any one else was thinking in this way as far as I know. Also for me, I thought it was interesting that most of the graffiti talked about here is largely just tagging or words in big bubble letters, rather than the more complex and impressive murals that seem to come later and would seem to me to be what people expect more in terms of their art.
Also, as much as Mailer wanted to be a great novelist, this piece plays to his probably greater strengths as a journalist. He is at his best talking to the young, poor New Yorkers about what it feels like to tag their monikers on the New York subway then talking to the Mayor of New York as to why he is so upset about graffiti specifically. He describes where he goes, what it all looks like, seeks to put himself in their positions, and pontificates on their motives and feelings and generally seems to be enjoying himself very much in the 'enfant terrible' intellectual arguing against the establishment role.
I think if you like Mailer then you will like this I think. Whether his theories about how advertising and pop art have subliminally influenced graffiti artists or how stealing and hiding aerosol paint cans is some kind of existential rebellion against poverty and poor architecture are convincing or not, seem to me to beyond the point. He is asking these questions and I think they are interesting things to think and talk about. If however you don't like Mailer's larger than life personality, which is all over this, then you will still probably enjoy the photos which impressively capture an early simpler phase of graffiti's history before it all went global.
May 11, 2024
“Cousin to graffiti, form might talk across the air to form - a rose of exceptional petals growing by the side of a jungle river might feel able to inspire similar petals in another rose high on the jungle cliffs, too high for its pollen to rise. We do not begin to comprehend the telepathic power of things. What, indeed, did Picasso teach us if not that every form offers up its own scream when it is torn. Radio is then no more than a prosthetic leg of communication, whereas plants speak to plants, and are aware of the death of animals on the other side of the hill. Some artists might even swear they have known this from the beginning, for they would see themselves as stimulants who inject perception into the vein of one or another underground river in the blind vision of the century. And like a junkie, does the century move into apathy from the super-brilliance of its injections?”
“The ambiguity of meaning, the whole hollow in the heart of faith, has become such an obsessional hole that art may have to be converted into intellectual transactions. It is as if we are looking for stuff, any stuff, with which to stuff the hole, and will convert every value into stuff for this purpose. For there is no doubt that in erasing the pastel and selling it, art has been diminished and our knowledge of society enriched. An aesthetic artifact has been converted into a sociological artifact - it is not the painting which intrigues us now but the ironies and lividities of art fashion which made the transaction possible in the first place. Something rabid is loose in the century. Maybe we are not converting art into the comprehension of social process in order to stuff the hole, but rather are using art to choke that ideological spaghetti, that the glee is in strangling the victims.”
“Graffiti is the expression of a ghetto which is near to the plague, for civilization is now inimical to the ghetto. Too huge are the obstacles to any natural development of a civilized man. In the ghetto it is almost impossible to find some quiet location for your identity. No, in the environment of the sum, the courage to display yourself is your only capital, and crime is the productive process which converts such capital to the modern powers of the world, ego and money. With a difference. For the kids work together. The cave painting is now collective. Some will yet be bastions of a fat and dying world. But the beginning of another millennium of vision may also be with them. For we do not know with what instruments we will draw in years to come nor by which materials.”
“The ambiguity of meaning, the whole hollow in the heart of faith, has become such an obsessional hole that art may have to be converted into intellectual transactions. It is as if we are looking for stuff, any stuff, with which to stuff the hole, and will convert every value into stuff for this purpose. For there is no doubt that in erasing the pastel and selling it, art has been diminished and our knowledge of society enriched. An aesthetic artifact has been converted into a sociological artifact - it is not the painting which intrigues us now but the ironies and lividities of art fashion which made the transaction possible in the first place. Something rabid is loose in the century. Maybe we are not converting art into the comprehension of social process in order to stuff the hole, but rather are using art to choke that ideological spaghetti, that the glee is in strangling the victims.”
“Graffiti is the expression of a ghetto which is near to the plague, for civilization is now inimical to the ghetto. Too huge are the obstacles to any natural development of a civilized man. In the ghetto it is almost impossible to find some quiet location for your identity. No, in the environment of the sum, the courage to display yourself is your only capital, and crime is the productive process which converts such capital to the modern powers of the world, ego and money. With a difference. For the kids work together. The cave painting is now collective. Some will yet be bastions of a fat and dying world. But the beginning of another millennium of vision may also be with them. For we do not know with what instruments we will draw in years to come nor by which materials.”
February 25, 2020
Must read for people interested in nyc graffiti
July 27, 2024
Es un tesoro. Un precioso testimonio de la primera edad del graffiti neoyorquino y lo que representó para quienes creían en un mañana con futuro.
December 27, 2016
Warrig doch bij vlagen erg interessant essay van Norman Mailer, maar vooral de foto's door Jon Naar geven dit boek meerwaarde. Waar Mailer niet altijd even overtuigend graffiti in een 'formeler' kunstkader weet te plaatsen - hij werkt vergelijkingen met bijvoorbeeld Matisse, Giotto, Rauschenberg en Pollock nauwelijks uit -, laten de foto's zien hoe graffiti soms 'echt' op een surrrealistisch (a la Miró, niet a la Dalí) of action painting-schilderij kan lijken, of hoe een muur of trein een canvas kan lijken.
December 9, 2007
Utterly corny in it's approach, this book is still the forefather of all books on the subject. The pictures are absolutely amazing. Recently re-released under the title: "the birth of graffiti" with many of the same pictures and ones that weren't published in the original. However, this version is oversized and just wonderful to look at. The writing comes across a bit eccentric and lost in regards to the subject matter, but that's well besides the point.
August 15, 2007
This is an amazing book of photography of New York graffiti in the very early days. Beautiful pictures in an oversize format.
February 21, 2012
A little long-winded, but pretty definitive. Photos by Jon Naar are indispensable.
December 18, 2013
"Read" it for the pictures, not Norman Mailer's writing. Awesome document of the birth of the current street art craze.
April 17, 2017
Like the way Mailer tracks the tradition of fine-art, graffiti and 1970's urban scene.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews