Describing an Outsider Art Movement from Within: The AAT and Graffiti Art

Abstract

Knowledge organization is the study of the order, whether natural or imposed, of knowledge. As researchers in this field of science have increasingly acknowledged the importance of different epistemologies, or ways of knowing, that merit not only acceptance but investigation, I have chosen to examine how a particular artistic community describes their processes and products via historical discourse found in graffiti zines from the mid-1980s to 1990s in comparison with the overarching art community discourse as evidenced by a popular controlled vocabulary. The focus of this research project is to examine the sufficiency of vocabulary contained within the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) for use in representing concepts from the graffiti art movement. Introduction Graffiti art has been studied from a number of perspectives, citing the movement into criminal justice, sociology, history, and art (Ferrell, 1993; Lachmann, 1988; Forster et al., 2012; Masilamani, 2008). The works themselves have value to researchers from all of these areas of study and as a global art movement and ever expanding online archive of artistic output, it behooves library and information science to be aware of the processes in place to collect, organize, and access these uncoordinated collections. As precursor to a larger examination by the author, this domain analytic study will advance discussions on the epistemological construction of an art community and the organic knowledge organization revealed in the social construction of terminology by its members as evidenced in the selected graffiti zines. Major historical art movements are represented with descriptive terminology available in large structured vocabularies such as the Getty Research Institute’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). Participants in newer, smaller, or outsider art movements may not find terminology in such readily available vocabularies to represent concepts, contexts, and methods commonly used by their community of practice. Sometimes referred to as graffiti art, the movement began in the late 1960s in Philadelphia and New York with the proliferation of graffiti tagger names in concentrated areas of these cities and quickly spread and evolved into larger, more detailed and artistic renderings on city walls, subways, and the ubiquitous train cars (Austin, 2001; Castleman, 1982). As the movement spread across the country, several graffiti magazines, or zines, began to appear. These were originally photocopied sheets of photos of graffiti art compiled by graffiti artists themselves, sometimes with artist or crew names and general locations of works contained therein. Some of the popular zines became more like modern magazines, printing in color and accepting subscriptions from around the country and even overseas. As the Internet developed,