A Brief History of Graffiti

Graffiti can be many things.

The ephemeral lasts.

That's just so damn cute, isn't it?

From the scandalous scrawling of Roman citizens

to the radical graffiti of revolutionary Parisians.

It can be scratched, written, even painted.

But what does it mean?

For tens of thousands of years,

humans have been leaving their marks on walls.

From caves to city streets,

graffiti is something that seems to bubble up wherever humans go.

It's an explosion of creativity.

Graffiti surrounds us, but is it a blessing or is it a curse?

When does vandalism become graffiti?

When does graffiti become street art?

And when does street art just become, well, art?

In this film, I'll show how the best graffiti is

shaping the world of art with its sheer vitality.

Graffiti is a state of mind, it's not a thing. It's not a product.

And that graffiti can be political

and even help us to come to terms with the past.

It is really, genuinely moving.

I'm Dr Richard Clay and this is my brief history of graffiti.

It's underground art history.

Is graffiti the artless scratching, scribbling and spraying of vandals?

Or is it something much more interesting?

For me, graffiti is almost always the latter.

This is Berlin's Reichstag -

it's the seat of the German parliament, but it's also a symbol.

It stands for one of the most important events

of the 20th century - the defeat of Nazism.

After a devastating street battle in Berlin,

the young men and women of the Red Army took the Reichstag.

As the dust settled, they lay down their arms.

And some began writing on the walls of the ruined building.

I've been looking at marks left on walls all over the world.

And these are probably the most moving of the marks that I've seen.

Marks left by Soviet soldiers

who survived the battle for the Reichstag.

This graffiti is deeply moving -

a list of friends calling themselves the Brandenburg Boys.

The towns and cities they fought in

on their gruelling march to victory on 2nd May 1945...

..and a vengeful comment.

"This is for Leningrad."

I just can't get over the fact that it's all painted with charcoal

from a burned-out building.

It's painted with crayons used to mark maps,

it's painted with chalk,

it's painted with the tools that soldiers had to hand,

I just can't believe it's survived.

It is genuinely moving to be in this space,

with these marks,

left by these men and these women

who fought for what turned out later

to be freedoms in Europe and in Russia.

It is really, genuinely, moving.

This compulsion, this urge to leave a mark that says,

"You need to know that I was here,"

seems to be at the heart of this graffiti.

Why?

The clues might lie deep in our past.

I've travelled to Burgundy, France,

to look for some of the earliest examples of graffiti.

The cave system of Grottes d'Arcy was first occupied

well over 30,000 years ago.

Generations of families who lived here also used these walls in

the darkness of the cave system in ways that celebrate their humanity.

A handprint.

HE CHUCKLES

It's not a print, it's a stencil, it's...a child's hand.

This floor would have been lower.

Could this have been a child reaching up?

And then having paint blown onto their hand to leave

their own personal mark.

In this age before writing, the mark of the hand reveals an urge

to put a lasting message on the wall saying, "Remember, I was here."

But deeper into the cave,

the walls also provide further clues as to the origins of graffiti.

The people who lived here so long ago decided to paint

even more thought-provoking symbols on the walls.

There's a massive mammoth. It's incredible.

And one in ochre and then another in a different medium entirely,

in black.

HE CHUCKLES

It's extraordinary.

It's incredible.

There's almost movement in it.

A real economy of line, really carefully considered.

It's almost Picasso.

This is art, and it's high quality.

The painter has chosen the location of each of the paintings carefully.

The line drawings use bulges in the rock surface to create

an impression of volume.

They've animated the rock itself, it's absolutely incredible.

I do love art that's best seen on your hands and knees!

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but it's almost like IMAX art.

You see it so close up, so in-your-face,

if you're down on your knees.

The mammoth starts to tower over you.

Makes you feel...small.

These paintings, beautiful records of people's engagement

with the world around them, remind us of how much we hold

in common with our ancestors.

To create art on walls and leave a mark of our brief existence

seems to be at the heart of this urge to make graffiti.

But how did they create that haunting image of the hand?

Street artist Xavier Prou lives a short distance from the cave system.

I've dropped by his studio to delve deeper into the technique

used to create the hand stencil.

Today, we've been to some caves, amazing, absolutely amazing,

300 metres into the mountainside.

But there's a couple of spots where there'd be an animal,

and then a hand.

He's put their hand against the wall and somehow

they've sprayed around it and take their hand away,

and more than 30,000 years later, the mark remains.

Incredible.

It's absolutely extraordinary.

Absolutely extraordinary.

So, how?

Amidst piles of spray cans, Xavier digs out the raw materials

for Stone Age art. Scallop shells and red ochre.

He wants to try using the Stone Age version of the spray can.

Blowing hard out across a tube immersed in the ochre paint,

he can create a fine spray of colour.

That's amazing.

That's...that's it. You've got a Stone Age hand!

We reproduce what people were doing before us.

But we refined it.

The spray can is portable, it's quick, it's precise.

Yeah.

It opens up a whole new world of opportunities

but, fundamentally, it's the same.

It's absolutely the same.

Whether using a spray can or a scallop shell,

this urge to mark the walls around us seems to be part of what makes us human.

As more sophisticated civilisations like the Roman Empire appeared,

our lives became more complicated,

and so too did our graffiti.

Are ancient cities really all that different to modern cities?

Thousands of voices, clamouring for attention.

But the spoken word, it comes and goes - the written word,

that lasts longer.

Write those words on walls, and walls become arenas of conflict.

In the Roman world, graffiti wasn't just about "I was here" -

it would also be used to let the world know whose side you were on.

Researchers like Jorge Cardoso are revealing the images

and the messages scratched into the walls of the old Roman city of Lyon.

So, Jorge, what is it?

The image is very, very simple.

You can see it here, it's the helmet of a gladiator.

Oh, yes!

And he's holding a sword, a gladius. OK?

If you get back here, you can see his shield.

This gladiator was found scratched into the walls

of a large third century town house.

Why this gladiator was such a big deal

that somebody would want to scratch this into a wall?

I think he was a kind of supporter.

Is this guy particularly special and worth supporting?

There's a clue here. You can see it.

It's a double X with a line for one.

The Roman numerals XXI - 21 -

almost certainly represent the gladiator's number of kills.

It appears to be the work of a superfan, in their own home.

You've got people who are prepared to scratch into their own walls

images of a gladiator because he has killed 21 people.

There must be other fans.

At the arena, I'm getting a sense of a kind

of football hooliganism of the ancient world.

It shows that people were really interested in games

and supported gladiators.

Roman graffiti wasn't always about showing your allegiances

in relation to the arena's dark world.

It can also give us a tantalising glimpse

of the conflicts within ancient society.

This wall painting from 59 AD in Pompeii

memorialises a deadly street battle between locals and visitors

from the nearby cities of Capua and Nuceria.

Lyon University professor Pascal Arnaud

is using graffiti to reveal the deep conflicts in Roman society

that gave rise to shocking events like this.

This is Pompeii's amphitheatre.

These are not gladiators, these are people from the audience

who have started fighting each other.

Instead of just watching the violent spectacle in the arena,

the Pompeiians launched a savage attack

on the visiting team and its fans.

And people have tried to escape

and the Pompeiians are now killing them in the street,

using any kind of weapon they could find.

But it's the written graffiti from elsewhere in Pompeii that lays bare

the raw hatred between rival cities like Pompeii, Capua and Nuceria.

In the graffito, we can see

that some among the Pompeiians say

that one victory allowed people from Capua

to perish altogether

with the people of Nuceria.

People from Pompeii were not ashamed at all.

This was their day of glory, to have killed the hated neighbours.

Other graffiti from Pompeii tells us the opposing side of the story.

A sympathiser with the victims from Nuceria hopes

the Pompeiians will get speared on a meat hook for their crimes.

The graffiti reveals in gory detail

the vicious rivalries between Roman communities.

This is a very frightening kind of graffiti war.

That was the actual life and relationship

between neighbouring cities.

These struggles in the arena, that's an afternoon's entertainment, right?

Whereas the writing on the wall outlasts the entertainment

and memorialises identity around violence and struggle

in-between matches.

And fortunately, thanks to Vesuvius only,

we have preserved that aspect of municipal pride.

The Roman world shows that graffiti can be

political as well as personnel.

Writing on walls is clearly

not always a meaningless act of vandalism.

And here, in present-day Lyon, 2,000 years later,

wars on walls are still raging.

If there's one thing that I've learnt in Lyon it's that graffiti

is open to interpretation. But then I kind of always knew that.

This kind of thing, that's more unusual.

Graffiti that is entirely unambiguous - "God is love"

or "Christ the redemptor".

Evangelising Christian graffiti isn't something you see

every day in Britain nowadays, that's for sure.

But it seems to me that in Lyon a struggle is still continuing

between different groups of society, different communities of belief.

Here we've got a stencil artist.

He's gone to the trouble of creating this piece

that seems to be so pro-Catholic,

and somebody has actually bothered to chip out the face.

This is an ongoing war of the walls.

It's a war of words.

Graffiti can reveal power struggles between communities.

Walls often become sites of conflict.

And 18 centuries after the height of the Roman Empire,

graffiti would ultimately become a revolutionary weapon.

Paris, France.

From the 1790s onwards,

this was a city awash with radical political ideas

and haunted by the spectre of revolutionary violence.

But even from such a turbulent period,

graffiti still survives in dark, secret places.

This place...

..has millions...and millions of people in it.

This is where the dead of the city's graveyards were moved.

This is indeed...

the empire of death.

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, overflowing Parisian cemeteries

were emptied into this tunnel network.

Originally a quarry for the limestone that built Paris,

it soon became an enormous tomb.

Now, that is astonishing.

Now you really get a sense of how far underground we are.

There are shafts like these sunk across Paris.

In the 19th century,

when the graveyards were cleared above ground,

the bones were decanted down here.

They used to have ropes down these shafts to pull them round

so that the bones wouldn't get jammed in here.

While above ground 18th- and 19th-century graffiti has been lost,

down here it should have survived the centuries.

The question is, can I find some in the 230km of tunnels?

It's underground art history.

I've found the underground.

I'm just looking for the art.

First, I find a name - Pierre.

He engraved this in 1779.

Could he possibly have imagined that more than 200 years later,

people would be standing here reading it?

It's as if he wanted to be remembered,

a kind of stab at immortality.

It's amazingly powerful.

14 years after Pierre had left his name on the wall,

the French king lost his head.

Decades of revolution were under way.

And 1881.

1841.

Carved into the stone.

There are traces being left, you know, this graffiti that survives

down here, these signatures, these...you know, a boat!

Who knows when that was put there?

This stuff would have been happening upstairs too,

but we lose all of that, the modern city becomes clean.

We lose all of that. And it's preserved downstairs.

I don't know, caves...catacombs,

they're like museums of the ephemeral -

the stuff that we would otherwise have lost, buried.

In 1871, France was still in turmoil.

Having just lost a war, a new moderate republic took shape.

But radical Parisian workers rebelled,

forming a commune that took control of the city.

Soon, revolution gave way to deeper violent conflict.

If we go deeper into these tunnels, this vast network of tunnels,

we find graffiti left by revolutionaries

of the Commune of the 1870s,

who made their last stand against their enemies underground.

The graffiti left by the Communard revolutionaries adorns

the deepest recesses of the catacombs.

Statements like "the Republic or death"

inspired generations of revolutionaries.

But while they were scrawling political slogans on walls underground,

the Communards were exploiting new technologies upstairs.

They would take the idea of writing on walls and industrialise it.

Invented in the 1790s,

lithography allowed revolutionaries

to create one political message on stone

and then print thousands of copies.

These could then be stuck up on the walls overnight.

It was an incredibly powerful new tool.

Stephane Guillot the foremost lithographer in Paris,

has agreed to show me

the secret of this revolutionary process.

In the early 19th century, it completely changed

not just visual culture but the culture of our streets.

Suddenly, it was possible to produce images of the highest quality

and produce thousands and thousands of them, but they're so cheap.

You can stick them on the walls of the city.

You can have a political point of view

and plaster the city with these images.

Imagine how shockingly new it must have been.

Inspired by that solitary 30,000-year-old hand,

I'm going to create a political poster

that resonates in today's climate -

a call for "liberte d'expression", freedom of speech.

Ah, thank you. That's very considerate.

I'm almost there, I'm almost a lithographer.

-Can I be your apprentice?

-Sure. If you have money.

I'm a bit short of money.

So, this is Arabic gum.

It's very easy to put your hand in the Arabic gum

and then print your hand on the stone.

Right, two seconds in there, two seconds on there.

Lithography is the creation of an image on stone

by etching the surface with acid.

This etched stone is then inked up and pressed onto paper.

First, my handprint in Arabic gum

creates the centrepiece of the poster.

Then the word "liberte" is drawn using a greasy black ink.

As an art historian, I'm usually called upon to look

and not participate.

But as Stephane's temporary apprentice, I've been put to work.

We build up the image using wax pencils and ink.

Next, Stephane adds a wash of acid over our picture.

You see how white it is? You see the reaction?

Absolutely, it's immediate.

The gum, greasy ink and wax pencils protect our picture from the acid.

It's this protected area, our image,

that will carry the ink onto the paper in the press.

Now...

the stone is prepared.

We have to remove, totally move,

the acid from the stone.

Then we will leave the stone for two hours

and we will start the printing process.

-So it's the waiting game?

-Yes.

As we wait for the chemical changes to take effect,

it's time to choose the colours.

So we will use this...

This is a primary blue.

Almost...cold blue.

Oh, beautiful blue.

That's deep blue. That is a good blue.

Yves Klein, eat your heart out.

-It's Stephane bleu.

-Yeah.

C'est beaucoup mieux.

Revolutionary red.

There couldn't be any other choice for a poster to celebrate liberty.

A Swiss visitor to Paris in 1817 said that the walls were screaming

because of all the lithographs that were all over the walls.

In 1871, the Communards' witty and satirical messages

flooded the streets, grabbing the attention of the public.

In one afternoon, a printer on a press like Stephane's,

could produce well over 1,000 posters.

Stephane's lithographic press is over a century old,

but in his expert hands, it can still apply a pressure

of 2,000 pounds per square inch to create each copy.

It's like the Trois Glorieuses,

the three glorious days of revolution in 1830.

Beautiful days. Beautiful blue skies.

And the flag of the alarm.

I love it, I absolutely love it.

Texture.

And, you know, the spray.

It's really rich textures.

The revolution didn't end well for the Communards.

They failed to dislodge the government

and they were butchered in their thousands.

Since the arrival of lithography, posters created such controversy

that successive governments turned to censorship.

Those ubiquitous "defense d'afficher"

or "post no bills" signs, still visible on so many walls in France,

have their origins back in 1881.

Mass-produced posters and graffiti had become very dangerous indeed.

As the 19th century progressed,

increasingly powerful print technologies

started to be put to work, serving a very modern master...

..advertising.

Cities like New York, probably the most image-stuffed place on earth,

saw the madmen of advertising plaster commercial imagery

across every available blank space.

Lithography in the early 19th century changes everything.

Suddenly imagery becomes part of the vocabulary

of commercial advertising.

Images layered over images layered over images on the street.

In the 20th century, we end up with posters

that are the size of buildings, multistorey images.

And in the late 20th century, this kind of circus,

this republic of commercial signs, it's all-encompassing,

and yet still graffiti finds its place

in the nooks and the crannies in this forest of symbols.

Cities changed. Walls became covered in advertising.

As the 20th-century rolled on and urban areas sprawled,

some inhabitants of the city made their mark

in the gaps between the ads.

This new graffiti that hit the urban sprawl of '60s and '70s America

created a moral panic.

SIRENS WAIL

To those in power, it was symbolic of decay.

For them it was barbaric, it was vandalism.

And it harnessed a new technology -

the paint spray can, invented in 1949.

This new kind of graffiti would eventually spread

across the globe and energise the world of art.

You know what?

We're kidding ourselves if we don't think

that graffiti is implicitly, if not explicitly, political.

Every blank wall tells us that this space is under control.

This is why the authorities in New York City were

so obsessed with the explosion of the throw-ups and of tags

that emerged in the '70s and in the '80s,

with the birth of stencil art.

It is political, but on the other hand,

if somebody decides to tag the side of my house,

I'm going to want to break their legs.

Born in Philadelphia in the 1960s, modern graffiti rapidly spread

through the boroughs of New York City.

The Big Apple of the '70s was near bankrupt,

crime rates soared and garbage filled the street.

In this brutal environment, a young Brooklynite called Lee

made a name for himself as a graffiti king.

In his Brooklyn studio, he's still painting, to great acclaim.

This is the great day in Harlem in that famous photograph.

But this is the great rush hour in the Bronx.

And that's why it's called Benchmark.

Because it's taken at the bench, 149th Street, Grand Concourse,

which was one of the main stables where we would come

to talk about all our works and, you know, work out our quirks

and all kinds of stuff, you know, and collaborations.

The young Lee was surrounded by a like-minded peer group.

They provided support and were a sounding board

for the new, radical ideas that defined New York graffiti.

You know, it was a very innocent, honest movement.

And, you know, we never thought it was going to last for so long.

That's what's represented in the bubbles.

The very subtleness of bubbles, you see them, you watch them,

and then they just go, "Pop!" They're gone.

Lee made a name for himself creating increasingly audacious pieces

on the subway trains of New York.

-You're famous for having painted a whole train.

-Mm.

That's a totally different league of painting.

In 1975 I was already thinking of the concept of creating something

so grand and out of scale that it would be talked about for,

you know, decades later.

Lee and his crew treated the painting of subway cars

like a quasi-military operation.

Doing those cars in the yards, there was no room for error,

there was no time, there was

a very small window of time to create something

and you had it pretty much all pre-planned beforehand,

so that you could at least have a striking chance to create,

finish and successfully launch your piece.

Needless to say, with work like this, Lee and others

got noticed by the gatekeepers of the mainstream art world.

The man who helped Lee into the gallery was Jeffrey Deitch,

until recently, director at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Lee was in good company.

Deitch was also instrumental in the careers of pop art giants

like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

Back in...sort of the late '70s, you were part of

the art world and you saw this stuff and thought,

"This isn't just vandalism, this is art."

You descended into the subway and it was this astonishing world.

For some people it was like descending into hell...

THEY LAUGH

..others, it was like an artistic heaven.

The conventional sense of order

in New York City had just dissipated,

and the subway belonged to the kids, and so the trains

were covered with amazing wildstyle graffiti on the exterior.

The interior was this maze of tags, all kinds.

I found it remarkable, so my circle of friends,

we would go down into the subway just to see this,

just to experience it.

And just take a ride, it wasn't important where we went,

we just wanted to see what was on the trains.

For Deitch, the best subway art was truly exciting,

and needed to be taken seriously. But not everybody was convinced.

There was some criticism.

People said, "Street art belongs on the street.

"Aren't you distorting what this art is about by putting it in a museum?"

And my response is, "Every serious artist I know,

"with a few exceptions,

"they want their work ultimately to be in a museum."

They believe in what they're doing,

they want to be part of the history of visual culture.

There's not a sub-category of art called street art,

and then there's real art.

The best of the art that emerges on the streets

is absolutely real art. And the best of it

is as good as the contemporary art

that begins in the galleries.

Lee's graffiti crew were among Deitch's first proteges

from the world of street art.

I wanted to understand what drove a man like Lee from the thrill

and the notoriety of the street into the relative quiet of the gallery.

Was part of the move into the galleries to find a space

-where your work would survive?

-Mmm. Out here, everything changes.

Architecture changes over time, attitudes change all the time.

The work on canvas is done and it's preserved, it is

that arrested moment in that time, and it's there forever.

Lee's paintings are sought-after.

Recently, Eric Clapton paid 120,000 for some of his work.

But Lee continues to draw inspiration from his roots.

In this image, he deconstructs wildstyle graffiti.

I felt that wildstyle lettering, the way they were configured

and sculpted in a two-dimensional way to painting, were actually,

in real life, three-dimensional windows into our lives.

The fact that it was unlegible to the average person didn't mean

that we didn't know exactly the dance that those letters were having.

So I wanted to revisit that in a fun way.

It's more inviting for me, as a challenge, to take two Es

and interlock them into each other,

it's like two twins almost phasing each other out.

But they have to coincide, because if not,

they would just self-destruct,

and the name would just be "To Oblivion."

Lee's painting is infused with the energy of his best work

from the '70s and '80s, but given time and money, he's moved on.

Yes, it is art, but it hasn't turned its back on the street.

More than 40 years after Lee painted his whole train,

graffiti artists like Brooklyn's Rusk are still at it.

Rusk isn't after gallery space.

In fact, I think he might have

more in common with the Parisian revolutionaries.

He's fighting a war on the walls - with words.

We live in a world where's there's imagery everywhere,

and there's advertising everywhere,

and blank walls are still a statement - somebody owns this.

Do you see what you're doing as wrestling with advertising

and all that kind of thing?

This is part of my visual landscape, there is...

an endless amount of advertising inundating my plane of vision,

and I want to add my contribution,

I want to see people reacting to the world around them and just become

part of the unconscious environment that you walk by every day.

Even, like, vinyl lettering is objectionable to me, I see...

I see hand-painted signs and think they're beautiful,

the touch of a human hand really enlivens an environment,

and so when you can see some kind of stale wall enriched by...

by someone who cared enough to put something there.

It's an element of the city now, graffiti, it's been around for...

really as long as time, it's just a really innate human impulse.

I think you might have slightly changed the way

even I think about graff, cos I've always felt if somebody

painted on my house wall,

-I'd probably want to do them a damage.

-Sure!

But now I'm starting to think maybe I should give them a break.

Cheers, man.

Of course, Rusk is well aware that there's a power struggle afoot.

The walls of our city streets are covered with images trying to

sell us products or tell us what to do.

Today's graffiti artists are working in the gaps,

subverting these messages with their spray cans.

The most exciting street art has an element of surprise,

it leaps from the wall when you least expect it.

And it can change the way you see the world around you.

Former architect and godfather of stencil art, Parisian Xavier Prou,

better known as "Blek le Rat", is a leader of the scene.

We are leading a revolution in art,

so we are the consequences of pop art movement,

of surrealistic movement too, but we are really living a revolution.

Blek's witty and smart art on our city streets has made him famous.

As a trained architect, he knows it's not just about what he paints,

but where he paints it.

I realised, not with my first stencil but after a while,

maybe one or two years,

that the place was very, very important, and the environment around

the place where I put my stencil was very, very important also.

If you put your images in a very posh area,

it will be completely seen and understood completely differently

than if you leave the same image

in a worker area of the city.

This is the most interesting thing in graffiti in my opinion.

-Is there something about leaving a mark that outlives you?

-Yeah.

When I'm painting in the street, when I'm finished my work,

really the feeling that I leave

my trace somewhere, it's very deep.

I leave my trace for future generations

and people will see it after my death.

And it's very important for me.

And I think it was very important for the people who made the hands

on the caves also, they were thinking about to leave a trace, of their...

"I was here."

Even though Blek's work is politically engaged, at its core

it echoes the simple impulse behind that hand in the cave.

"I was here, don't forget me."

Blek's art, and the work of those he inspired,

like the work of the ever-popular Banksy, is in vogue.

Like the '70s,

the art world is again turning

to the street for inspiration.

In the Palais de Tokyo - a major Parisian gallery -

a pair of graffiti artists

have fused the art world and the street, with striking results.

What a project.

14 artists, a work signed by all of them and all their visitors.

A little taste of the work of Sowat and Lek.

Who's going to tell me that graffiti isn't art?

Look at the sophistication of this stuff.

Three artists perhaps?

Look in close...and it collapses...

then it finds form again.

It's just exquisite.

Sowat and Lek, two eminent Parisian graffiti artists, were commissioned

to lead a 14-strong crew to cover the interior of this space with art.

And then just the whole space, the ceilings, the walls, painted.

Look at the movement.

All-over painting. Jackson Pollock, eat your heart out.

THIS is all-over painting.

Painting all over a canvas is one thing,

treating a whole building as your canvas is quite another.

It's staggering. An explosion of creativity.

The shrapnel hanging from the ceiling.

I love it, it's photocopies, it's peeling off,

like the lithographs, the posters peeling off over the course of time.

It's almost like they're saying, "Yeah, we know where our art sits.

"We get where it relates to the poster culture."

How many different hands?

EERIE MUSIC PLAYS

HE LAUGHS

With 14 artists involved, the work ranges from a kind of futurism

through nightmarish shapes to parodies of popular culture.

EERIE WHISPERING

Yeah, the problem with your graffiti artists is,

they will tag your doors.

You've got to love it.

Graffito, coming from the Italian "to scratch" -

THIS is scratching.

Chipping out in incredible detail.

You stand back, you stand back, you stand back, it's...amazing.

It's like pointillism.

But with a hard point. Pointillism!

HE MIMICS AN EXPLOSION

And I love this. The 30,000 year old hand spray-painted onto a cave wall.

"I was here." This one's left by an alien.

With so many unique artists to conduct,

how did Lek and Sowat bring this ambitious work together?

TRANSLATION:

Everyone trusts Lek so much that

they will let him and Dem189,

that also helped us create this,

erase some parts of the paintings.

And then we would intervene on top of those parts,

keep what we like, the artists were free to come back and do

the same with us, and this is how... It's like a layer kind of work.

The murals in the Palais are fantastic,

but they have a limited lifespan.

Another exhibition will eventually take place in the same space.

This work, like most graffiti, will be painted over and lost forever.

In response, Lek and Sowat did something that in my opinion

fuses the world of gallery and street art together

in an entirely original way.

We arrived to the Palais Tokyo,

we understood that just like any other shows there,

what we did was supposed to be temporary,

and from day one we figured it would be interesting to have us

artists that come from the ephemeral world of art,

and we figured we want to find a time capsule inside

the Palais de Tokyo

to do something that would be vainly eternal,

something that that is so out of reach and so complicated to see

and to do, and that is so far away from the normal showing spaces that

no-one would ever find the interest of erasing it.

Lek and Sowat found a space, an air duct, inside the gallery.

In total secrecy, they began to cover the walls of this

out-of-the-way place in a manner that takes me back to the caves.

Joining them were a small number of other artists,

including the graffiti superstar and friend of Lee, Futura 2000.

This is going to get heavy.

This desire to preserve stuff,

I know you understand that the art is ephemeral, but is there also

a realisation that you're ephemeral, that both of you are ephemeral too?

If you leave something in this inaccessible space,

there's every possibility it's actually going to outlive you.

We hope so.

We don't intellectualise things like you just did,

our only intuition is that it would be

damn cool to do something in the dark,

er, inside Europe's biggest contemporary arts centre.

We really like the idea of doing something forbidden,

hidden and out of reach to the public.

The culture we work with now is

so accessible with the internet that part of the mystery has gone,

part of what is making this a bit magical is gone,

everything is disposable, you can do a wall on the other side

of the world, I'll see it an hour after you've finished on Instagram.

And we wanted to respond to that.

Do you see your practice, your experience as artists,

-as having parallels with earlier pop artists?

-It's a cycle.

So, for a long time it felt like the art world had accepted

and embraced and loved Basquiat and Keith Haring.

Then for 30 years they stopped looking at what was

happening in the streets.

So you have this street art craze right now,

and it feels like the cycles go with lack of memory.

It feels like each generation thinks it's inventing something,

when, truth is, we're just doing the exact same thing.

Maybe the ingredients change, the colours, the aesthetics,

the places, but the raw energy is the same.

The only time I felt connected with Basquiat is the pictures of him

tracing letters on derelict buildings,

because it's something that I've also done.

But the aesthetic is very, very different,

and we haven't banged Madonna, so...

LAUGHTER

MUSIC: Justify My Love by Madonna

Lek and Sowat have pulled off an enviable feat,

to bring street graffiti into the art gallery.

For me, there's no argument. The best graffiti is art.

Challenging art.

Graffiti on the walls of our streets today, like those moving mottos

from the Parisian revolutions, still speaks truth to power.

The lithographic revolution of the 19th century changed our streets.

Advertising in our face everywhere.

Street artists are challenging that, taking the language

of advertising - "just do art" - and using it against commercial culture.

Taking the brands of global capitalism and saying,

"We're not all about money."

Asking us to rise up, saying, "Shoot the bank,"

saying, "It isn't all about cash,"

saying, "To vanquish without peril is to triumph without glory."

And all of this grows out of a tradition from the 1970s,

the aerosol tradition, this revolution,

this tool that allows artists to paint rapidly

and to throw their mark up onto the wall with great precision.

But we can also paint extraordinary works, almost like a sheila,

the beauty, the sketch, the aerosol evolves.

The blank wall is a provocation to so many individuals, whether they

consider themselves graffitists, or street artists, or just vandals.

They're angry, and sometimes their anger is directly,

specifically stated, impossible to misunderstand.

"18,800,000 dead in the Congo, and you don't have a word in the media."

These are voices that are all screaming,

clamouring for attention because they are part of a revolution that

wants to challenge the dominance of commercial culture in public space.

Do I approve? Does it matter? They disapprove.

And today, some modern democracies have learned to live with

the many and varied voices speaking through graffiti.

At the Reichstag in Berlin,

the graffiti scrawled by the Red Army could be harshly critical.

But the parliament of a reunified Germany decided to preserve

large parts of it for posterity.

Could the Soviet soldiers possibly have imagined that when they took

temporary materials and wrote on a wall in the Reichstag that you...

..and you...

..that would be reaped

in due course would be a whirlwind of liberties,

that, all right, means that governments remain anxious

about writings on walls,

but allow and celebrate multiple voices.

Multiple voices.

The fact that these marks survive is testament to the strength

and the resilience of democracy.

These marks have been deliberately preserved by members

of the German parliament.

Because they believe in the freedom of speech, they believe

in the right of people to utter uncomfortable truths on walls.

HE TRANSLATES ALOUD

On the walls of the Reichstag?

Graffiti - scratching, painting or writing on walls -

is something profoundly human.

Should we always succumb to the knee-jerk reaction of

painting over it or scrubbing it off?

Sometimes, we need to use our eyes to look,

in order to hear what people are trying to say.