While in New Zealand last i wrote an essay about New Zealand’s graffiti community. It was published in the latest issue of Art Asia Pacific and co-authored by Ega Hiroshi, an occasional graffiti researcher from Tokyo. The essay was originally titled “Watching My Name Scroll By”, and dealt with the ways in which graffiti – as a cultural practice – is imported into New Zealand (predominately via the internet) and how that importation is resisted and modified locally. What emerged was an illogical re-confirmation of graffiti’s original carrier: the train. Despite having only a few train lines, which are mostly invisible to the city’s residents, local graffiti writers of Auckland have chosen to converge on the trains and traintracks to paint.

While i was finishing the essay a young Australian died after ‘train surfing’. I could not help linking this action with graffiti. Train surfing has all the transgression of graffiti, uses one of graffiti’s key mediums, and is bound up in masculine rituals and rites (as graffiti was/is). I felt this tragedy illuminated graffiti in a profound, and horrific way; interfacing with the City in a corporeal and primordial way. I am currently writing about this tenuous link for a small book called “Death in Vandalism” “Dead Riding” which will be released at the Tokyo Art Book Fair 2010.

Above is a video of one of Australia’s train riders. Jimmy C. is also known in the graffiti community of Adeliade as the graffiti writer ‘JAM’.