Renegade artists illegally make their mark on Knoxville's underbelly
by Joe Tarr
As motorists cruise up and down Interstate 640 near Western Avenue, they're no doubt accustomed to a barrage of billboards, signs and corporate logos jutting out above the trees and enticing them to pull over for a Big Mac, or fill up at Pilot, or watch Friends.
As they drive over a bridge above some railroad tracks, most of them are unaware they're driving over an illegal museum of sorts, containing another kind of media and messages. Along the two cement highway trestles are intricate splashes of color, words distorted beyond legibility for most neophytes.
The artists are breaking the law—trespassing and vandalizing—but most of their work is undeniably skillful. This graffiti is seen by few, just the smattering of artists who paint here, the railroad workers, and curious people in the know.
"I look at it as a response to commercial saturation. Look everywhere and you see logos and advertisements, but none of it is personal," says one artist, who sometimes signs himself "Music."
The murals change frequently, regularly being painted over by new artists who go by names like Jeka, Neuro, Mean and Mesko. It's one of a handful of spots around Knoxville where these renegades practice their craft. While many other cities have free spaces for graffiti artists to paint, Knoxville has none. Most of it is done in the dead of night, out of sight.
Depending on how you define graffiti, it has been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, although it has taken starkly varying forms and delivered just as many messages—the political, the obscene, the territorial, the artistic. The current wave of graffiti was inspired by and is an integral part of hip-hop culture, which was born in the late '70s. The four main components of hip hop are DJing, MCing, graffiti and breakdancing. All these forms carry their share of negative stereotypes, but graffiti is the most illicit, because most of it is done without permission, and because a lot of it is mistakenly associated with gangs.
Gangs use graffiti to mark territory and identify themselves. But graffiti that grew out of hip hop is created for artistic and egotistical reasons.
"The cops think it's a gang thing. The only thing gang-like about it is it's territorial," says the artist Music, who also goes by the crew name STW—Spread The Word. "For some people it's competition."
Bryan Deese teaches a mural painting class at Laurel High School, and many of his students are interested in the world of graffiti. Although he's careful in talking about it, Deese opines that "graffiti art is the most important art of the 20th century. It's done away with the gallery, with the whole avant garde and who is in control of the art and the whole route of how to get established [in the art world].
"It's told the galleries, we don't even want you. It's taken art to the people."
In the '80s, some graffiti artists—Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat— became so well known that galleries started to feature their work.
A Nashville native, Deese has gotten a significant amount of recognition nationally for his work. He paints only with permission and stresses to his students not to break the law, he says. The techniques he teaches takes too much time to be employed by vandals breaking the law, because they'd invariably be caught, he adds.
"I always go and get permission if I do stuff. In my class, that's what I stress," he says.
Much of modern graffiti manipulates letter form and type to the point that letters and words are distorted beyond recognition to the average viewer. Most of the words are merely the artist's name, or his crew's name, or a short message. The letters take on three-dimensional shapes, and better artists add textures, shadows and flourishes.
"You have to look for the hints and learn what not to look at. You have to cut out all the extras and find the letter forms. And you have to learn the technique to know what part is connected to what," Deese says.
"The way I like to think about it is it's the natural architecture of letters," says Music.
"This is CDK," he says, pointing to piece painted by a crew that calls itself Criminal Design Knoxville, underneath I-640. "It says 'Fuse.' It's pretty much impossible to read."
Many graffiti artists end up becoming graphic artists. Such is the case with an artist named Zero—a former Knoxville resident who has since moved to San Francisco. (One of his works appeared in "Knoxville Found" in the Nov. 9 Metro Pulse.)
Some graffiti artists travel around the country by hopping trains, painting along the way. As a result, a lot of graffiti is in train yards. Artists frequently sign their area code to identify their home region, Music says.
Some graffiti does include figures or abstract forms. A parody piece underneath the 640 bridge shows Santa Claus holding a decapitated body and a demonic snowman holding a child's head. Above the snowman is: "Dead Babies for Christmas".
One talented artist who calls himself Neuro (short for neurotic) painted a beautiful mural with a framed-in face. The sides of the tracks are littered with empty spray cans.
The average mural can be created in 30 to 45 minutes. Most artists start by rolling over old pieces, and then go to work with their cans, using various size nozzles for different brush lengths, Music says. "Most of the people try to go for clean lines because spray paint is real fuzzy," he says. There are 150 spray paint colors available in the U.S., but artists create more colors by mixing paint from half empty cans, he says.
When Music first started painting, he says there was an undeniable rush from doing it—breaking the law, claiming your own space, and creating a work of beauty. (In retrospect, he adds that part of the rush may have come from the fumes—he now always wears masks when painting). Today, Music says he's more concerned with the art and the respect of other painters than with getting his pseudonym spread around the city.
There are clearly limits for him. Painting the underbelly of a bridge where hardly anyone will see is okay; defacing more personal space is not.
"Anything residential is definitely off limits. It's definitely an urban thing. It tends to be in industrial areas, underpasses and abandoned buildings," he says. "When I was scribbling [quickly tagging his name or logo], it tended to be on dumpsters, because they're dumpsters."
To a lot of people, graffiti is plain and simple vandalism. And it's prosecutable. Graffiti artists can causes thousands worth of damage, hurt businesses, and intimidate citizens, says Captain Randal Lockmiller of the KPD. Fortunately, he says, it seems to be on the decline in Knoxville.
"They're very talented individuals but if they're doing destruction to private property, I don't call them artists. I call them delinquents," Lockmiller says. "They could take that talent and put it to better use."
"Some of them are very talented, I'll give you that."
Deese doesn't defend the vandalism aspect of graffiti art. "If you're a business owner and the back wall of your business gets painted on, you're probably going to be pretty angry and that's your right. But at the same time, if given the chance, there could be really good things come out of this medium," Deese says.
Deese says his hometown of Nashville is more accepting of graffiti art. Years ago, several of the artists approached businesses to ask permission to paint on their walls.
"It took a while, but Nashville I found began to be more accepting, especially when they began to realize these guys are more creative energy than destructive energy," Deese says. "You'd get a wall in one area, and suddenly businesses would approach you and say, you can come paint on my wall, too."
The artists became protective of the businesses, warning other artists not to vandalize buildings whose owners didn't want them painted and covering up the work of those who wouldn't listen, Deese says. He's gotten permission to paint on a few Knoxville walls: the back of Whatever, at 1821 W. Cumberland Ave.; Tent Masters, 1920 Grand Ave.; and the Bearden Fisher Tire, 5001 Kingston Pike (the painting is visible from Northview Road).
Getting a public space is something that many of the artists want. It's why Music talked to Metro Pulse.
"One good thing about San Francisco over Knoxville is there are a lot of good legal places for people to go and paint. Shopkeepers just let people go and paint on their walls. Knoxville doesn't," says the artist, Zero. "There are places in the Old City that are nice places to paint. Places off the beaten path where I don't think people would mind too much."
However, Lockmiller says that a sanctioned wall might encourage illegal graffiti around it. "I consider graffiti like a cancer. If you don't get it where it is, it's going to grow. Because if someone sees a tag somewhere, they'll think it's okay to tag here."
Although he's adamant about getting permission, Deese understands the urge to simply take your own space. He says there needs to be more public art space—especially in a world nearly overrun with corporate logos and imagery.
"If you've got the money to buy the public space, you're A-okay and you can put whatever you want on it. You can quote yourself as God...You can say buy my cars, drink soda. But people get really angry when joe schmo just took [the space].
"I bet if someone offered to rent their wall for $200,000 a month, they'd probably jump at the chance. But when they just go and take it, people get really upset. But that makes me sound like an advocate of vandalism. What I think needs to happen is for there to be public space. You hear all this talk about public property, public property—well, not if you want to paint on it, buddy. There are lots of spaces in parks where people could paint."
January 11, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 2
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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