MARE 139 – 139 IS THE STREET WHERE I GREW UP IN THE SOUTH BRONX.

AL Magazine 43 - February 2000

By FlyCat

Carrying out the interview with Mare was harder than expected,

since for work he is constantly shifting between Los Angeles and New York, but he was just the kind of person I wanted to start this new year of AL writing, a year that, I already anticipate, will be full of (re)evolutions... and in the end I think we can really say that this time too was worth it. For those of you who need it, I would recommend a very quick memory refresh by flipping through the pages of “Subway Art” and taking a peek at “Style Wars” to find out who Mare 139 was and what he stood for.

“I started painting graffiti in 1976 when I was attending school in the South Bronx. I didn't have any kind of artistic background or even friends or relatives who had any. The writing struck me one day while waiting for a subway train at the writer's corner at Grand Concourse on 149th Street, and when that train arrived, it was entirely covered top to bottom by colors and characters taller than me. Only later did I learn that it had been painted by Lee of the Faboulos Five. At that time I was what you call a balky writer, making tags in my school using an ‘El Marko’ model pen, until a friend of mine teased me about it. So he was the one who told me about the marker his cousin was using and what a wide stroke he had, the next day then he came to me with a real red ‘Uni Wide’ marker and together we filled the bathrooms all over the school with our tags. At that time it was really important for me to have a lot of tags around, plus I was too young and small to hit on trains, so I involved my brother in the art of putting one's name around so that I would have a buddy to hit with. Even before he started he was already totally into it. He began to get to know other writers from his school who introduced him to everything that was the real Movement: the crew, the layups (track that is usually located in a tunnel and serves as a temporary stop for trains, ed.), the depots and the meeting points for the writers themselves. Over the years we formed alliances with some of the best writers of that time such as Kid 56, Mitch77, Crash, Shy 147, Cos 207, Dondi, Duro, Kase2, Min1, The Vamp Squad and many others. This was quite arduous, because it was a way of being able to keep up with those who were the best writers in terms of style, learning from them and painting whole wagons together.

Throughout the 1980s I continued both painting subways and studying art in school, but it was in the early to mid-1980s that a small group of writers began exhibiting in galleries, a group of which I was also a member, but honestly I was never strong enough or even interested in painting canvases, so in 1985 I decided to create sculptures in ‘Wild Style‘ using metal so that I could manage to maintain the essence and integrity of what I had been pursuing for many years. I was ready to show what I was to all the other writers and to offer my homage to all those legends from whom I learned and I feel that I was able to do that successfully, as I spent several years evolving my technique and style. I think what I did represented, apart from the giant Phase2 sculpture, one of the most significant and revolutionary steps of the ‘Wild Style,’ that was pure wild style! Over the years the letter styles that used to be within everyone's reach evolved into even more abstract and wild forms that even the creators and ‘inventors’ had a hard time recognizing them.

Riding the revolutionary wave that was going on, I started using computers in 1989 and together with my brother Kel First created a multimedia agency called Voice Of The Ghetto Productions, under whose acronym VOTG we developed multimedia presentations as well as three-dimensional images in ‘Wild Style’ and animations. I think we were the first real graff writers to have a website, and we also tried to continue our discourse by helping other writers or other people who needed technological supports. We were at a critical point, but fortunately we found a little support from the industry that still had no concept of what was being presented to it. And from here the revolution still continues full steam ahead.

I now live between Los Angeles and New York. I lived in LA for five years, and that turned out to be a really sensible choice because of the diversity and history there. I left New York because I was too far ahead with my work and thought that Los Angeles, the mecca of new communication, might suit my style. This actually turned out to be only partially positive. I love the climate of the city, but I don't think people could understand my New York style and my way of doing things. Through Hip Hop culture, I learned a lot about the similarities and history of LA culture. LA had its own form of Hip Hop, obviously without the trains since the subway is newly implemented, many years before New York created what we all know. I should say that in addition to the term Hip Hop there is a real urban youth culture here. Los Angeles had cholo writing for years, and although it did not evolve into a wild style per se, cholo was a sophisticated and elegant typography of the time. So in dance, although b-boying is a New York thing, popping and locking come from the west coast, modern DJing on the other hand is purely ‘east.’ But apart from its point of origin, it is important to understand the worldwide impact of such different cultures, talents and social conditions. Hip Hop provided the world with youth art forms so that they could participate and create their own individuality; it provided the opportunity to find their own expression and make their own mark. This is the power of culture that continues and will endure through individual experiences, no matter what part of the planet you come from, what race or language you speak. The essence of what was should not not be regretted and relived, it should be renewed, it should be transformed and reborn in other forms and other spaces.”