Compilers/Editors: Roger Gastman and Sonja Teri

ISBN-10:0-9790486-1-3

ISBN-13:978-0-9790486-1-6

            When I agreed to take on Los Angeles Graffiti for review, I anticipated a book containing an assortment of philosophical, anti-social, satiric, pornographic, and scatalogical scrawlings on building walls, in toilet compartments, and other places used by the pranksters, cranks, and disaffected members of the genus Homo sapiens who have followed the path of the infamous character who wrote, carved, and chiseled “Kilroy was here” on any surface he could find for it.  I was expecting to find graffiti such as “the hell with Coke – this is the pause that refreshes” I had read more than once in toilet compartments.

 To my surprise, I found that the compilers/editors of the book’s content have a different definition or view of graffiti than mine (and, I would imagine, of many others). What they call graffiti consists of what I would call the phantasmagorical, psychedelic, iconoclastic, and/or anarchist types of art work you can see in big cities, painted on the sides of buildings, highway supports, underpasses, retaining walls, sound barriers, bus stop signs and enclosures, the walls of tunnels, trees, and even rooftops.

 Reproduced in Los Angeles Graffiti, in wild and psychedelic colorings, you find a nearly barebreasted female punk rocker with the barrel of a gun pointed at her mouth in lieu of a microphone, junkyard type scenes in outlandish shapes, a snarling policeman with snakelike entrails protruding from his body, skulls and other indices of evil or death painted into the middle of advertisements, a knight leading an army of soldiers already dead but marching on in skeletal form, and page after page of bizarre shapes and letterings that I imagine only someone on dope could manage to read.

 The pair that compiled these wild paintings for reproduction, Gastman and Teri, provide some history and analysis of what they view as graffiti. I found their text more interesting than the art work, which gets to be overwhelming and to a significant extent repetitive in style. I do not find any useful messages in the weird form of art reproduced, and it is certainly not pleasant to look at it. So, I cannot in good conscience recommend purchase of this book, especially at its price, $27.95, unless you are an afficionado of the weird or bizarre or the kind of psychedelic art work that began appearing with the hippie phenomenon. If that is your taste, the book might prove to be worth the money for you. Otherwise, it would be best to see if you can find it in a library so you can look it over before deciding whether or not to invest the money to obtain a copy.

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