It was 7th April 1983 when the German TV channel ZDF aired “Wild Style!” for the first time. The movie was only the peak of a wave starting in New York City which hit Europe in the early 1980s. Graffiti began to influence above all youngsters who soon would start to imitate what they saw in printed and moving pictures.
“STYLE”, “BRONX”, “BEAT” or even “GRANDMASTER FLASH AND THE FURIOUS FIVE” have been one of the first words sprayed in a naive and self-educated way in Munich. The pieces were often painted along with figurative elements, directly impacted by the American model, showing pop cultural references and links to the hip hop lifestyle.
Peter Kreuzer, professor of ethnology, and criminal defense attorney Konrad Kittl (who has first been featured in the 2014 issue of
Klick Klack magazine) started to take photos and document this unique and new phenomenon appearing in Munich. Their collection soon contained several hundred shots of the first graffiti attempts by artists like LOOMIT, BLASH, RAY, BUTLER and ROY.
ZAR ZIP FLY ZORO is the first German publication ever that focusses on a city’s graffiti heritage by digging for its genuine origins. With this 142 paged treasure the authors pay tribute to the artists who paved the road for Munich, to become one of Europe’s top notch graffiti cities within the next decade. Make sure to check out this goody, presenting rare and mostly never published works in a minimalistic layout framed by an essay from Gregor Schliep.
It is 1983 in Munich, the walls are grey and bare, marked only by a few political slogans and the odd declaration of love. Then, suddenly, abstract sign language, peculiar characters and cryptic combinations of letters begin to appear, their meaning a puzzle to all who chance upon them. The pieces begin to spread across the city and mark the start of the graffiti movement in Germany and throughout Europe. Photographic archives, from Defence lawyer Konrad Kittl and anthropology academic Peter Kreuzer reveal the first layer of graffiti in Munich: experiments with colour and form; unprecedented and free from rules or preconceptions.
Language: German or English (2 different books)