“This Is Not a Watermark”, Mark Byrnes, The Atlantic Citylab, www.citylab.com, 15th July 2013.
[EN]
This Is Not a Watermark: Meet French Street Artist Mathieu Tremblin
A look into the mind of the often subtle urban interventionist.
Mark Byrnes: What do you usually try to express in your work? What do you hope viewers get from it?
Mathieu Tremblin: When I walk through the city, I’m practicing a kind of urban survey focusing on details which reveal relationships of power between users (urbanity) and city workers (urbanism) in order to get a complex view on how citizen are dealing with their surrounding, at a body or at a mind stage. Then I try to input interventions in dialogue with this already-there situation which might become relevant within the context. My interventions are brief and unsigned forms in order they could be read as a random gesture done by any citizen. Mostly, my work appears as a comment on specific topic related to an observation I made or an experience I lived as anybody does when sharing point of view via Facebook status, photo-blogs or graffiti on the wall for example. But as I experiment life through art, I want to make city playful, poetic and open to appropriation. I hope to provocate direct interactions and discourses without mass media filters. When you do art in urban space, it’s more like an invitation to share powers because at some point action becomes as important as reception. So I expect people at least to notice and even destroy my work — because vandalism is in itself a way to make (destructive) conversation. I hope while promoting alterity and fighting against our control freak society model, it could perhaps brings them a new frame on looking at things. As Hakim Bey uses to say « In effect, chaos is life. All mess, all riot of color, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement – is chaos. From this point of view, Order appears as death, cessation, crystallization, alien silence. ».
MB: Your bio says you live in Rennes and Arles, what are those cities like and how do they influence what you do?
MT: Both of those cities are like average/small size ones with a specific urbanization story and cultural scene.
Rennes as Arles are cities where urbanity takes a large place. Citizen are less afraid of taking the public part of urban space in charge. You can cross the city by feet easily so you’re less in a rush, open minded to everything. Also without the common violence that you cross in megalopolis, there’s a lot of uncontrolled spaces with which you can interact.
Rennes, the so-called capital of Brittany, is a north-western city where the third part of the population is students which make it a good background for the independant/alternative music scene. The model of urbanism city council implement since thirty years is « ville-archipel » which consists in thinking city as an island and keep building in a certain perimeter in order the biggest city does not swallow up all small villages around. And so because during the last century main activities were administration or industry, the last fifteen years, a lot of this factories closed and the city becames a perfect playground for all kind of experimentations, especially post-industrial ones.
From the time I start studying (1998) to the time I became an artist (2006), I met a lot of friends and with some of them (BIP and Ripoulain), we implemented a certain dynamic using photography, graffiti and site-specific installation to end up with this attitude where we are making forms of art in symbiosis with the context of its creation or diffusion, using for example wastelands or galleries as temporary studio, turning everyday life spaces in experimental art spaces.
In 2011, I moved to the south of France to join my girlfriend who was studying photography in Arles and even if I’m still working in north-west of France regularly, we stayed there. With the photography school and the international festival of photography each summer, there’s a lot of artists moving to the city for few months periods which is a good basis for cultural exchange. Besides, Arles is a tourism destination with a strong territorial marketing based on architecture where there’s a lot of Roman antique monuments mixed with medieval and meridional buildings and also based on Van Gogh because he used to live here for a short period of time but pictorially prolific one. So there’s already a lot topics to deal with when you decide to act in the city. By the way, Arles climate is always gentle and, believe it or not, but when you work outdoor rainy days are lay-off days, so it’s good to have a place where you can do whatever you want without being worried about climate. People seems to be cooler than in most French cities (Mediterranean way of life is close I guess) and doing interventions in the city seems simpler. For example recently I wanted to do a « Tag Clouds » with the authorization of the city council because I was invited by Zazie association to make a small workshop. And the responsible just said that if we didn’t minded to do intervention without asking owner’s permission but legitimating it by saying city council agreed, it was ok – and yes it’s definitely ok to practice art like that for me !
MB: What method did you use for your « Parisian Style of Graffiti Removal » project?
MT: « Parisian Style of Graffiti Removal » is actually a serie of images inspired by the way city workers do cover graffiti done over human size commercial billboards in Parisian subway especially. They just cut geometric shapes of colored paper and paste those posters to hide writer’s signature. Finally they modified reluctantly the reception of the advertisement. Messages slides from « cryptic handwriting versus stereotyped ads » to « geometeric abstraction versus stereotyped ads » and find a kind of autonomy. So I took pictures around Beaubourg-Les Halles Parisian neighborhood because there’re a lot of graffiti spots and halls of fame there where you could fine any European writers signature. And I added the same shape over elements covered by graffiti. I edited it as a collage of posters. But it could also been understood as a preliminary sketch for a massive intervention where I could cover real walls. I just have to find the interesting frame or relevant opportunity to make it happen.
MB: In « Tag Clouds », have any of the original taggers voiced displeasure over what you did? Has anyone tagged over « Tag Clouds » yet?
MT: I consider « Tag Clouds » as a traditional graffiti fresco work. I mean I come from a local graffiti scene, and painting over a wall covered by tags to make something more complex – letters or characters whatever – is what writers do. But what is interesting is the final mural is dealing with writer’s ego – their names – direct communication – being known by anybody is what writers are searching for – but in the same time removing all alterity or identity – handstlyling is the real deal of writing culture – making it properly decorative and appreciable by any passer-by – which is also the purpose of a graffiti fresco, showing technical skills for decoration.
This work sounds like a kind of oxymoron, you could understand it as a way to « make dirty signature proper as institutional visual communication » sterelizing wild graffiti writing by removing all traces of alterity and in the same time it’s « giving the opportunity to anybody to be able to read graffiti calligraphy and get in touch with it ». So agreeing with or being against the piece as a writer is a complex thing to decide because I’m half playing with tribute and normalization of the local graffiti scene. As I just translate writers names at the same scale, they usually continue to play with blanks adding their signature between regular typography I painted with stencil. In fact, the project is giving a focus on some walls writers do not pay attention anymore because they seems to be filled with tags and mostly it generates new graffiti challenge instead of killing the energy behind it.
MB: What kind of reaction have you gotten from your « Getty Images » project? Has there been a difference depending on whether someone saw it in-person or on the internet?
MT: Receiving « Watermark » as a visual game related to image bank and intellectual property is only the first step of understanding and not the reason why I did it there.
« Watermark »‘s idea came in the frame of a residency with other artists as an envy of criticizing the way Mons city council was dealing with territorial marketing regarding Mons 2015 (the time and event when the city’ll be cultural capital). This work is just a way to say that their though about city’s identity is superficial and that they seem more obsessed by controlling their image than doing things right. No matter how hard they try to make things work, the problem is they want to bring their identity to some kind of capitalism/globalization ideal/stereotype which is far from inhabitants every day life. And finally regarding this fantasized vision of Mons, I made a projection of the current view I had, something like a cheap stereotyped post-industrial middle town landscape from a mainstream image bank you discover while you arrive by train. And what is ironic is that each time the documentation of this intervention is published on the Internet, my pessimist version of city’s identity get stronger.
Then regarding real feedback, I don’t get so much. Except when your work is dealing with authorized public art where city council is involved, bringing intervention without permission to its end is more about finding a technical solution to make it happen than anything else, because cops or parking lot manager don’t care about political topic, they care about property.
MB: Is there a work of yours that you’re most proud of?
MT: The work I prefer are mostly the less spectacular and the most precarious ones. Those I would have love to discover by random in the city without knowing if they were intentional. Because those implement the perfect distance from a gesture to its reception : all is in a balance. The precious and only rare thing about art nowadays, especially in urban intervention, is to experiment the work by your own, so for me the smallest of the invisible or the far from conventional forms and city center the work is, the best it is. Poetry lies in human scale relationship. « Parking Tickets Bouquet », « Fruits Skewer », « A Trap for Kings » matter more from my point of view than larger scale other projects I did because those are dealing with spontaneousness and economy of means.
The only thing I’m proud of, is to be able to keep the envy of doing it and sometimes succeeding in giving the envy to other people to do the same. Creation is a matter of energy and at the end that’s this freedom and non-commercial way of sharing with people which makes life better.
Complete interview by Mark Byrnes, The Atlantic Citylab, July 2013.
Tags: interview, publication
