Norman Mailer Had ‘The Faith of Graffiti’
Pulitzer prized author, journalist, founder of the Village Voice, filmmaker and tireless button pusher Norman Mailer passed away this Saturday. Although he’s renowned for his countless award winning works, we’ve always known him for his lesser known essay that served as the text for the groundbreaking book, The Faith of Graffiti. It was an oversized masterpiece with photos by Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar detailing the mysterious emerging art form on NYC’s subway trains. The notoriously tough guy author intellectualized the graffiti movement in its early beginnings'’Faith’ was published in 1974'when hand styles were still being developed and most of the letters were very primitive. Mailer was fascinated by the art form, writing, “What a quintessential marriage of cool and style to write your name in giant separate living letters, large as animals, lythe as snakes, mysterious as Arabic and Chinese curls of alphabet.” In honor of the pugilistic legman and the groundbreaking book on graff, we’ve assembled some excerpts and images:
“Slum populations chilled on one side by the bleakness of modern design, and brain-cooked on the other by comic strips and TV ads with zooming letters, even brain-cooked by politicians whose ego is a virtue – I am here to help my nation – brained by the big beautiful numbers on the yard markers on football fields, by the whip of the capital letters in the names of products, and gut-picked by the sound of rock and roll screaming up into the voodoo of the firmament with the shriek of the performer's insides coiling like neon letters in the blue satanic light, yes, all the excrescence of the highways and the fluorescent wonderlands of every Las Vegas sign frying through the Iowa and New Jersey night, all the stomach-tightening nitty-gritty of trying to learn how to spell was in the writing, every assault on the psyche as the trains came slamming in.” -Norman Mailer
THE FAITH OF GRAFFITI
photography by Mervyn Kurlansky & Jon Naar
text by Norman Mailer
edited in 1974 by Praeger Publishers
ISBN : 0275716100
96 pages
Stevio December 8, 2007 at 6:05 am
Mailer passed away? Man, I read his foreword in this book that I bought back in the day in NYC. Classic. RIP.
Light Graffiti April 9, 2009 at 8:35 am
not bad …
ted burke September 1, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I’ve just come across this post, and I appreciate the consideration given to Mailer’s under appreciated essay. Mailer was, of course, fascinated with notions of hip and style as a means of surviving a world defined by violent flux, and it is an odd fact that he’s been an incisive and adroit commentator on black style. His essay “The White Negro” as much laid out the attitude and manner of what would become Hip Hop’s authentic center, and “The Faith of Graffiti” seemed among the first writings that considered street style not as vandalism, but as prophecy.