Taking Up Space: An Interview with Bio of TATS CRU, Inc.

Abstract

I began my interview with Bio with an idea of graffiti as a pure form, as the human need to create, separated from content, context, culture, and reason. Graffiti, or so I thought, was a raw material, capable of offering an unobscured view into what lies beneath. Although not initially aware of it, I was looking for the myth of graffiti: the romantic epic of renegade writers, braced in an uncompromising stance of rebelliousness against an unjust and bourgeois society. Like heroic ghosts, I imagined them creeping deftly through an underground labyrinth, moving in and out of the shadows, here one moment, gone the next, leaving beautiful signatures as the mark of their fleeting presence. The legend of the writer, of the masked Zorro of subterranean New York City, “unfolded on the trains, in the dark tunnels where they encountered danger, high voltage, cold crushing steel wheels, giant hurtling monsters” (Chalfant and Prigoff 1987, 8).During the fall of 2000, I met with Bio, a thirty-four-year-old writer from the Bronx, at his studio in Hunt's Point. He was once the embodiment of the graffiti hero, a young vandal, illegally bombing New York subway's No. 6 IRT line as part of the Tough and Talented (or TATS) CRU. “We started at the height of the scene,” he reminisces in an interview with Mhari Saito. “There was so much painting going on, with everyone talking to each other” (Saito 1996, 2). But things began to change under the heavy fist of the city's antigraffiti campaigns. With the advent of the new paint-resistant metal subway cars, or “ding-dongs,” in 1987, TATS CRU and other writers were driven out of the subway and above ground. Rather than living the myth of the New York graffiti writer, committing beautiful acts of transgression against social law and accepted order, Bio was forced to give up the struggle.In 1995, Bio and two lifelong friends, BG 183 and Nicer, transformed their graffiti into a commercial enterprise, marketing their skills to private interests and corporate advertisers. The three writers refounded (and renamed) their group as Top Artistic Talent's Cm, Inc., now an advertising agency commissioned to create graffiti for business murals and billboards, rap music backdrops, and video sets. In the past decade, the group's transition has proved financially successful. They have painted fifty murals for Coca-Cola throughout the New York area and are working on a project for the House of Seagram's. Local churches, schools, and individuals also hire the agency to create public murals and memorial walls (plate 1).