Daze
words by Adam Gildar
photos by Matthew Novak and Adam Gildar
Go back to the 1970's and 1980's when graffiti was still the calling card of New York City's urban youth who with cans of stolen spray paint and a disregard for the frustrated local authority, converted the empire state's subway cars into brightly hued moving canvases baring their names and characters across the five burroughs, among them a young South Bronx writer going by the name Daze.
For Chris "Daze" Ellis, graffiti seemed first as it does to many of the uninitiated, a colorful combination of symbols letters and characters often indecipherable, yet intriguing all the same:
"I was like anybody else, I was curious about it, and I had a lot of questions about it you know. You look at a train going by and you're thinking 'well how was that done? Who did it, and how did they do it?" and I was really curious about it, but I didn't really know anyone who did that."
With its own unique vocabulary of images and codes, graffiti is very much a secret cult to the outsider. The opening narration in Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver's classic 1983 graffiti documentary, Style Wars, which featured Daze among other legendary New York writers iterates the notion of New York graffiti as a nefarious guild: "Graffiti writing in New York is a vocation. Its traditions are handed down from one youthful generation to the next. To some its art, to most it is a plague that never ends, a sign that we've lost control."
The induction of Daze into this verboten trade lead by rebellious youth came when he enrolled in the High School of Art and Design in 1976. There he met the writers behind the bombs, tags and burners adorning subway cars, writers who answered many of his questions and introduced him, as he remembers, to an all consuming obsession:
"It just became my whole life luckily. When I wasn't painting trains, then I was doing designs in my book, or I was spending countless hours on subway stations trying to document work that I did and other people did or going out and getting paint, stealing paint, whatever, or hanging out at subway stations just watching names go by."
As Daze embarked on his individual path of extralegal art, the city was at odds with itself. As some art critics began lauding graffiti as a new fresh movement born outside the insular circles of high society tastemakers, others saw it as little more than juvenial vandalism done by a bunch of misguided kids. To the unsympathetic and unequivocal city officials it was a widespread crime epidemic worthy of declaring a war.
In 1979 Fashion Moda, an experimental art gallery opened in Daze's South Bronx neighborhood. Founded by Austrian artist Stefan Eins at 2803 Third Avenue between 147th avenue and the local shopping center known as the Hub, as Daze recalls the gallery immediately symbolized a cultural exchange based on its choice of location: "Here you had this European guy from Austria doing an art gallery in the middle of the South Bronx, which in itself wasn't really an art destination for anybody." It was exactly this antithesis of an art scene that drew Eins to the neighborhood telling Calvin Tomkins in a 1983 interview for the New Yorker that he selected the location "partly because of its media image as the worst ghetto in the nation." However, Fashion Moda proved more than a publicity stunt. With a mission to directly involve the local community, Daze remembers how Eins opened up his space to local graffiti writers:
"The smart thing he did, was that he didn't really exclude the people in the neighborhood, and I was one of those people. A lot of people in the nieghborhood would kind of wander into the space and wonder like 'What is this? What's going on here?" You know, they couldn't really figure it out. It wasn't really a store, and they weren't used to being in art gallery type situations. But little by little people kind of warmed up to it, and say 'oh well, you do art here, you show art? I do art too.' you know and Stefan would invite them to show him their art."
By allowing writers to take their spray paint creations from the streets into the white walled showroom, Fashion Moda challenged distinctions between vandalism and fine art. This lack of pretension and willingness to permeate social and aesthetic boundaries, Daze recalls, enticed a variety of young avante gardists to the space.
"Artists would come and would be anxious about showing in the South Bronx, because to them it symbolized
something completely different. It symbolized a context that wasn't enveloped in anything commercial and they would have the freedom to do projects that were really experimental and underground at the time."
The inclusive environment at Fashion Moda created an atmosphere of cross pollination between illicit and formal creative communities allowing Daze and other legendary writers such as Crash, Zephyr, Lady Pink, Rammellzee and Lee Quinones among them to comingle and collaborate with future art stars like Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, John Fekner, Kenny Scharf, Judy Rifka and Denver's photographic link to that New York, Mark Sink.
In 1983 Style Wars debuted on PBS with the opening lines ""They call themselves writers because that's what they do..." the film exposed New York's local phenomenon to national audiences, and gained many of the characters depicted in the film including Daze both fame and infamy well beyond the limits of the New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority.
With one hand still spraying the uneven surfaces of subway lines and the other creating crisp canvases, when interviewed in the film at an art opening, the twenty year old Daze foreshadows things to come. While many of the graffiti writers in Style Wars expressed enthusiasm about the prospect of turning their unlawful pastime into a paying profession, and proving to their high school art teachers that graffiti wasn't a waste of time, in the film Daze explained his motives for crossing over as a desire to leave a more permanet mark: "The real subway graffiti that's done on the trains is slowly dying out and this is taking its place. The lifespan of an average piece today only lasts a few months. This is something that could last a lifetime"
A quarter of a century later, Daze's adolescent predictions proved all too true. The mass attention garnered from documentaries like Style Wars and the commercialization of hip hop culture was a double edged sword depending on how you view graffiti. On one hand, graffiti spread. Expanding outside the confines of New York City What had once been a microcosm of the big apple soon found root in almost every major city around the globe, with each new location came new styles, further twisting, pulling and distorting the letters of writers' names and adding new effects to the ever more detailed characters. Modern day street artists, the lovechildren of graffiti writers and the art school radicals, continue the contemporary dialog by taking from both traditions to create new forms including stencils, wheatpastes, and sculptural elements to add to their spray creations. And while while these new generations push at the edges of graffiti culture, pioneering old school writers like Daze and his friends have been memorialized in museums and galleries around the world.
However, at the same time that graffiti was gaining a foothold elsewhere, as Daze envisioned, New York's subway culture disintegrated due largely to MTA policies dedicated to its eradication. Called the Clean Train Movement, by 1989, the MTA with a much expanded budget had successfully wiped subway graffiti in the city off the map. Now the only letters likley to be found on the lines are those painted by city workers.
Maintaining a studio in the Bronx with his longtime friend Crash, Daze, has witnessed a significant shift in the city from a wild concrete playground filled with poor artists, who acted first and received permission or penalties later, to an economically driven metropolis
"Things have gotten so much more conservative in a very wierd way. Conservative in that people are just so obsessed with money, whereas this culture, whether it's street art or it's graffiti art, it came about from people who were making something from nothing. You know, they didn't have a lot of money, they didn't have a gallery space or money to have a studio space, so they just painted in the street. It's that 'do it yourself' mentality that I really like. Not waiting for people to give you the opportunity, but creating the opportunity by just being active."
Already observing the waning of New York graffiti in the early 80's, in the years following Style Wars, Daze distanced himself more and more from illegal art, gravitating towards authorized public murals and what he considers "more contemplative" gallery work. In the last two and a half decades he has incorporated brush work and drawings with spray paint to create canvases and site specific installations in galleries across the US, Europe, Japan and South America, most recently at Denver's resident street art showroom, Andenken.
In a time when photo sharing websites like Flickr and Photobucket make international exposure as instantaneous as fame is fleeting, locale specific style and culture absorb into the global exchange almost before they have time to fully develop. Nearing the midcentury mark in his life, with only a few distinguishing age lines here and there and the help of some black hair dye, Daze's boyish features along with his creative style haven't changed much since his days bombing New York's trains. Still exploring the letters in his name, its this adherence to the looseness of the past rather than the polish of the present that has allowed Daze to take a moment in history and make it something as he said "that could last a lifetime."
Illiterate Interviews DAZE at Andenken from Illiterate Media on Vimeo.
