City Kid 1982 Vondelpark. Courtesy of Reference Studios
When most people think of Graffiti, they think of 1970’s New York, the birth of rap music and tagging on subway cars, but around the same time in the heart of the Netherlands, there was a parallel movement going on with angry and frightened young Dutch kids taking to the city walls. Graffiti Artist AGAIN, who saw and participated in the birth of the Amsterdam scene, is describing what made it special in the book Amsterdam on Tour.
“When I was in elementary school, my teacher would always say if America or Russia push the button, then we are all gone,” recounts the Dutch Graffiti artist, who has been disseminating his work through the streets for 37 years. “Every time a plane flew very low over Amsterdam, I was afraid that World War 3 broke out – that was the feeling in Amsterdam.”
This threat of impending doom, mixed with a housing crisis and a fed-up feminist movement in the mid-Seventies sent people to the walls to write down exactly how they were feeling at a time when it didn’t seem like society was listening. Without media representation to create a uniform style, the focus was on political messaging, varying in script from very stylised to unadorned handwriting.
Courtesy of Reference Studios
“There was a shortage of housing for young people in Amsterdam, so people started to squat in houses,” AGAIN says. “Then the police came to kick those guys out of their house, so the riots started. It was very violent and very crazy, very rebellious. It had a dark edge, it has also a beautiful edge, because it was the typical Amsterdam identity that was created back then, which people really love about Amsterdam – like Berlin, Kreuzberg right now or 10 years ago.”
By the late 70’s the political messaging gave way to stylised tags and names, like AGAIN, which let everyone know who was behind the work. With the turn of the decade, the city had developed its own typography, with a signature curve to letters.
“It became more ego graffiti,” the Dutch artist says. “So the graffiti became a nickname. It wasn’t political anymore. You invented a name, a nice-looking name, and you styled it, kind of a logo – a mix between a logo and an autograph.”
Vamp infront of her piece 1985. Courtesy of Reference Studios
But only a few years later, the style would be almost completely erased as the documentary Style Wars (1983) made its way across the Atlantic, inspiring European graffiti artists to pursue the more colourful approach that had caught hold in New York of tagging. Although AGAIN laments the loss of the city’s distinctive style, he admits that the positivity of the American graffiti scene was a breath of fresh air to Amsterdam’s restless youth.
“The New York style was fresh, it was positive, a totally different feeling. Amsterdam style was a little bit rough, it came from a very dark era, a lot of homeless people, drug abuse and squatters and riots,” he says.
Today, not much of the 70s and early 80s graffiti remains in the city as it has gentrified and become a hub for start-ups, with its advantageous tax laws and scenic canals, but before street art became pop culture, Amsterdam had its own scene.
“Amsterdam on Tour” is available at carharrt-wip.com
Images courtesy of Reference Studios