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SAMO is a graffiti tag used on the streets of New York City from 1977 to early 1980. It accompanied short phrases, in turns poetic and sarcastic, mainly painted on the streets of downtown Manhattan. The tag, written with a copyright symbol as "SAMO©", and pronounced Same-Oh〔http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHrZbS1yjmc〕 has been primarily associated with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, but was developed mainly as a collaboration between Basquiat and Al Diaz, with help from a few friends. Diaz had previously been part of the New York graffiti scene (he knew the first writer of sayings, FLINT.i..For Those Who Dare when they both attended the High School Of Art and Design) using the tag “Bomb I”. Later Basquiat took on the tag himself, creating some non-graffiti work on paper and canvas using that tag, just before and after killing off the SAMO graffiti by painting “SAMO© IS DEAD” around the streets of downtown in early 1980. ==History== Basquiat claims the name was first developed in a stoned conversation with high school friend Al Diaz, calling the marijuana they smoked “the same old shit,” then shortening the phrase to "Same Old", then "SAMO".〔Faflick, Philip. “The SAMO Graffiti.. Boosh Wah or CIA?” ''Village Voice'', December 11, 1978.〕 The character of SAMO was first developed by Basquiat, Diaz, and Shannon Dawson while they were fellow students at City As School high school. Basquiat took the lead in creating a character called SAMO, selling a false religion, in comics made in high school. The concept was further developed in a theatre-as-therapy course in Upper Manhattan (called “Family Life”) that was used by the trio as part of the City As School program. "Jean started elaborating on the idea and I began putting my thoughts into it," remembered Diaz.〔Hager, Steve. ''Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene''. St. Matins Press, 1986. page 42.〕 Basquiat, Diaz, Shannon Dawson and Matt Kelly worked on a comic style endorsement of the false religion, photocopied as a pamphlet “Based on an original concept by Jean Basquiat and Al Diaz.”〔Hoban, Phoebe. ''Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art'' (2nd ed.), Penguin Books, 2004.〕 The City As School 1977-8 Yearbook includes a photo of the SAMO graffiti: SAMO@ AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO PLASTIC FOOD STANDS… “It started…as a private joke and then grew” Diaz and Basquiat would later tell ''The Village Voice'' in an interview.〔 They took the joke out of the school, giving out small stickers with SAMO aphorisms or the SAMO pamphlet on paper on the subway, and writing down the phrases with marker pens as graffiti, often with an ironic copyright symbol attached. In 1977, while they were still students, Basquiat and Diaz started to put up the first SAMO© Graffiti in Manhattan. Henry Flynt claims that Shannon Dawson (later of the band Konk) played a major part in the trio of writers in the first wave SAMO graffiti writers,〔Flynt, Henry. “The SAMO© Graffiti” http://www.henryflynt.org/overviews/samo.htm〕 but most accounts, including those of Basquiat, claim the writing was done by the duo of Basquiat and Diaz.〔 When asked about other people, Basquiat said “No, No, it was me and Al Diaz.”〔Basquiat, Jean-Michel. ''JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT- An Interview'' (ART / New York No. 30A) video. 1998. 34 mins. Interview by Marc Miller.〕 Basquiat remembers writing the tag with marker on the subway on the way back from Manhattan to Brooklyn, where he lived as a high school student, but unlike most of the graffiti taggers of the time, SAMO was primarily written on walls, not subway trains. Al Diaz graduated from City As School in 1978, and Basquiat dropped out of school and left his father’s home in Brooklyn to spend time homeless and living with friends in Manhattan in June of that year. From that point the SAMO graffiti took off in Lower Manhattan. SoHo, parts of East Village, and the area immediately around the School of Visual Arts were prime targets for the Graffiti. The ''SoHo News'' noticed the graffiti, and published a few pictures of the idiomatic phrases with a query about who had done them. According to Henry Flynt, who photographed much of the graffiti, "The collective graffiti employed anonymity to seem corporate and engulfing. The tone was utterly different from the morose and abject tone of Basquiat's solo work. The implication was that SAMO© was a drug that could solve all problems. SOHO, the art world, and Yuppies were satirized with Olympian wit.".〔 Diaz had been a young and early member of the New York graffiti scene of the 1970s, and his tag “Bomb I” was included in Norman Mailer’s famous book The ''Faith of Graffiti'' in 1974.〔Mailer, Norman. ''The Faith of Graffiti''(photography by Mervyn Kurlansky & Jon Naar) New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974. Pictures available at http://www.ekosystem.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3419〕 By late 1978 the two were using spray paint to quickly get up larger phrases. “We would take turns coming up with the sayings” said Al Diaz.〔 Many of these retained the same ideas as the comic strip SAMO of high school: : SAMO© SAVES IDIOTS AND GONZOIDS… : SAMO©…4 MASS MEDIA MINDWASH But they also used it to make critical comments towards the art scene in SoHo and college students comfortably studying in art schools: : SAMO©… 4 THE SO-CALLED AVANT-GARDE : SAMO as an alternative 2 playing art with the ‘radical chic’ sect on Daddy’s$funds Some of the comments seemed to look critically at consumer society as a whole: : MICROWAVE & VIDEO X-SISTANCE : “BIG-MAC” CERTIFICATE” : FOR X-MASS… : SAMO© One biographer noted that "while some of the phrases might seem political, none of them were simple propaganda slogans. Some were outright surrealist, or looked like fragments of poetry."〔Fretz, Eric. ''Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography''. Greenwood Press, 2010.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「SAMO」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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