Graffiti writer VANDAL from New York is part of the exhibition „Illegal“

When did you begin to make graffiti?
In 1978.  For a very short time my tag was „HARRISON“ but it was way too many letters, I knew graffiti was vandalism, and liked the straight lines and symmetry of the letters in VANDAL. The „D“ was always the hardest letter for me because it was half-round LOL!

What has inspired you?
My friends. These guys were all extraordinary visual artists. When they were not actually painting trains or writing on the streets, they spent all of their free time honing their styles and skills in their omnipresent black books.

Have you named yourself as Vandal? What was your idea? What has inspired you to do graffiti? And was it the most spectacular work for you to do wholecars?
Yes, VANDAL was my idea. I often express myself with tongue-in-cheek. Making my tag the literal description of the activity felt clever and subtly ironic.

What got me started writing was simple peer pressure. Not that anybody said, hey Barrett, why don’t you start writing graffiti. It was more that graf was what the cool kids were doing and I wanted to be cool.

Painting colorful „pieces“ (which is short for masterpieces BTW) on the outside of the train cars was much more satisfying than tagging insides or writing on the street. To be fair though I never did a true T2B (top-to-bottom) „whole car“. That was something only true graffiti masters accomplished.

My writing „career“ was very brief, barely 2 years and around 20 trains. I was lucky that a few of them came out well and were captured by the great photographers Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper who published them.

Fot0s: Barrett Zinn Gross

What had inspired you and which were your ideas and feelings? What did you want to express? Was it something like a revolt against whatsoever?
Teenage angst is one of the most powerful forces in the universe and I had it in spades. My older brother exposed me to smoking pot and other drugs and the jam band, psychedelic, progressive rock culture. After being exposed to and marinating in that stuff, mostly leftovers from the 60’s, kids my age craved something different and more energetic. The „Me Generation“ narcissism of our parents, who were all getting drunk and divorced, drove us away from seeking calorie-free spiritual enlightenment that was popular at the time. Instead we created punk rock and hip-hop. Graffiti was one piece of the puzzle of new culture emerging from the inner cities which totally reset music, dance, and art in the early 1980’s.

How long did you do the graffitis?
About 2 1/2 years, from the fall of 1978 until winter 1981

What was the reason to stop?
I went to college in the fall of ’80 and I was pretty much done. When I came back to the city in ’85 I was more interested in documenting work my friends were doing than creating any more of my own. They had gotten so much better at it and I had regressed.

At Saarbrücken what did you think when you had seen the exhibition Illegal with all the exponats of the illegal graffiti scene?
I was blown away when I first heard my piece was being included in the show. I thought someone was playing a joke! Then I connected with Uli and heard the story of how he found my piece in Banksy’s studio. The museum is beautiful and Uli did a masterful job assembling all of the street art and artifacts for this show, laying them out with a deft aestehtic touch and putting each one into the proper historical context with his notes. To be included in the same exhibition as BLADE, LEE, DONDI, FUTURA 2000, QUIK, and all the other graffiti kings projected onto the museum wall and attend the opening in person, it was like a dream come true.