Jete Swami
(Prestel)
You’ve seen those throwback videos, with the New York subway cars chock-full with graffiti, running across the skyline of the city. But those halcyon days are gone, especially over here in the UK. Very rarely do you see a tube train with anything more than a hastily scribbled tag and London Burners is a book which explains why.
The majority of the book features beautiful pieces, vibrant in colour and bold in design, on numerous tube trains by the likes of Acab, Rats, DWS, Lemon and more, showing the art before it’s taken off the rails and scrubbed clean. Once you’ve flipped through the whole book, acknowledging the talent and risk that it must have taken to get to that point, you go back and read the testamonials and see what it means to the writers themselves.
It’s not all as you’d expect either, with quotes such as “Yes, you should be punished for graffiti, but not with jail” and explaining that one of the reasons the police crack down so hard on writers is because they know how it’ll affect their parents knowing their kid is in jail with murderers and rapists. It is this that gets you though, seeing the force and intent the police put into catching writers and it really makes no sense whatsoever.
It’s a shame that this state of affairs has meant older, respected writers no longer go out to bomb or paint because they have too much to lose as they move on in years. The “missions” described in the book are great to read and the final outcomes are great to look at, so despite the decline in hitting tubes, it’s nice to know that, in this book at least, you’ll be able to appreciate the art that’s lost 99% of the time.
Abjekt.