“What Happens When a Six-Year-Old Piece of Street Art Goes Viral”, Katherine Gillespie, The Creators Project Australia, thecreatorsproject.vice.com, Vice, 27th July 2016.
[EN]
Katherine Gillespie: There has been a renewed interest in the Tag Clouds work on the internet, and I was wondering if you could comment on why it remains so relevant six years after you started it?
Mathieu Tremblin: I guess on the contrary that I’m realizing that Tag Clouds intervention in not as much relevant as it was in 2010 when I starded it. The idea of this intervention came from the awareness that the massive access to Internet at the beginning of 2000 permitted to a lot of writers living away from the main cities in Europe (where all attention was previously focused through dedicated magazines) to share their work in the way they wanted to do it (as they were doing it with fanzines). From HTML homemade websites creating a network with hyperlink, to CMS blogs gathering a community of actors and including tag clouds, and to, finally, social networks where likes and shares became the main way to get in touch with a work, online visibility of name writing graffiti and urban intervention evolved a lot those 15 last years and our experience of it ended up by being totally reversed.
In 2000, if we had encounter with the work physically and then spread it digitally, we are now mostly experiencing online documentation of real life graffiti or intervention before we could encounter it physically.
Tag Clouds was about this balance between IRL and URL experience of tagging, that people could rely to in order to understand the meaning of the intervention because of the tag clouds were still the main way to draw personal paths through contents, websites and blogs in 2010.
Now, we are in the Post-Snowden area ruled by big corporations (like GAFA – Google Amazon Apple Facebook) who are orienting through algorithms contents we can access and opinions we could develop. Reception is filtered through this global and vertical media tied up with private property rights that has become Internet, where it used to be an open source horizontal self-media space, when I started to use it in 1996. From city to Internet, users are not considered as responsible citizens anymore but as potential consumers.
KG: How does it feel to see your work go viral (and then go viral again a few years later?)
MT: Tag Clouds went already viral time by time those last years, but it came from name writing and urban intervention dedicated blogs like www.rebelart.net or www.allcityblog.com that were carefully following the work of writers and artists and trying to diffuse it in the respect of its original intent, as they were aware that experience through documentation is totally different than direct experience.
This second wave of virality came from www.reddit.com where 321Cheers took the pictures from a recent online article of Süddeutschezeitung Magazin and copy-pasted those on the platform without mention of title or author on Saturday 23rd July around 9:00 AM. As I was kind of happy that this intervention came back to its first state of reception (final mural encountered by passerby is anonymous and not recognizable as art), it ended up with 100000 views and 500 comments in few hours and a lot a clickbait blogs started to reblog it without doing the basic journalistic research you would have expected them to do (but for sure not from Reddit which is a Internet rumor forum). Especially, one of the first rebloggers entitled his article “Guy Paints Over Shit Graffiti And Makes It Legible” and transformed the simple gesture of “turning a hall of fame of tags into tag clouds” into an anti-graffiti hygienist lampoon. The real deal here is that despite of my will, the work changed of scale of audience. Offline, my work is always addressed to the citizen who see it in context as an anonymous gesture without any explanation, like a bug. Online, I only share my work with a small community of friends, writers, artists and bloggers who are aware of my values and understand that action and documentation are two different stories, that behind each document (pictures, videos and texts) lies a complex situation you cannot make the economy of if you want to understand the process and the meaning of it.
I guess that the main reason it’s now spread all Internet is not because of the quality of the work but more about the consumerist and reductive perspective this reblogging from www.designyoutrust.com brought. People are less related to the post-internet default aesthetic of the tool they are using than to the collective hatred against any dissident form of self expression in the city (and the need to fix it) that mass media and politicians are spreading nowadays on their timeline. It’s a sign of times and they made me look like the emissary of a solution against graffiti through my intervention, where my intent is actually totally the opposite, I’m pro-name writing as I’m a former writer.
Another basic explanation of this mass rebloging could also be that I never shared as a serie the documentation images of my Tag Clouds interventions before. The repetitive effect it provides while watching it online makes you think that I’m doing this all the time on every wall, where I actually took care of doing this intervention one or few times a year in order not to spoil any local graffiti scene, and mostly had contact with local writers in order to assure myself it could be well received as some kind of tribute, playing with the rules of name writing graffiti and not as a defiance or instrumentalization of it. I was aware of the potential of buzz of this post-internet gesture and I took care that the previous blogs I sent pictures in the last years made a clear statement about its meaning in order my entire work wouldn’t be define by a misreading of this specific and polemic intervention. Also the emphasis against or for the work is related to the manner it’s documented, before/after picture. In every city I did it, most of people didn’t ever notice the hall of fame of tags before I intervene (except writers for sure), neither did they with the final Tag Clouds, because they weren’t able to identify the transformation. In vivo, you just faced the result, not the process.
Now, beside all the conservative haters on one side and the anti-graffiti order-obsessed lovers on the other side I interacted with those last days, I feel like going away from this poisoned Internet. I recently came to a conclusion during a discussion with Evan Roth, artist and former founder-member of FAT Lab I have been part of: after all the mass surveillance and the speculative economy of attention Internet became the center of, it would be better not to quit but to manage a new type of use, slowing and improving the type of content you upload and reducing your relations to an accurate community you really know: being Online With Care.
KG: What were you trying to achieve with the Tag Clouds work?
MT: From one langage to another, from one audience to another, context matters but global codes of communication on Internet are creating misreading. Tag clouds is meant to be discovered in the city at a first sight so I’ll focus on the experience from this point of view, not on the effects that happen when spread on the Internet. Tag clouds is a paradoxical intervention with multiple level of reading and interpretation that all the comments on blogs are actually revealing.
The first one is process based, addressing to writers community in some way because playing with the rules of name writing. Those rules allows you to do a fresco over a block piece, over a throw-up, over a tag. Mostly when you play the graffiti game you cover a smaller piece, from a lower register, with a bigger one, from the higher register, and you put your name over the one of previous writers. Tag Clouds is mainly this principle of getting up with a decorative fresco over a hall of fame, but instead of putting one’s ego over others, it just reveals all the previous writers names, making their skilled handstyle disappeared but conserving pure ego. As RIP graffiti or dedication around a piece, it’s a way to pay a tribute using a different style, which is not mine but the one from the computer based aesthetic of tag clouds on Internet.
The second level of reading is to show the analogy between the physical tag and the virtual tag, both in form (tagged wall compositions look the same as tag clouds), and in substance (like keywords which are markers of net surfing, tags are markers of urban drifting).
The third level of interpretation is more ironic and consist in raising a debate about this adherence of common people to the codes of technocratic, functional and advertisement visual communication in the city against the type of nonprofit individual human scale calligraphy: tagging. People accept industrial designed communication everywhere and find ugly any kind of sign that doesn’t adhere to those dominant codes: signs of presence of humanity in the city. If people succeed in reading tags because I turn these into this dominant aesthetic then they might realize that it loses all its interest. Tag Clouds could be understood as a edgy critic of the European perspective from which history was written in countries: you cannot conserve any cultural artifact without killing it.
This paradoxical aspect is one of the reason I came with new types of community related interventions; for example, last May as I was invited in Lisbon for Muro festival, I did this intervention named Restoration which could be a kind of echo of Tag Clouds.
An old school graffiti fresco displaying as a welcoming phrase “Entre Com Respeito E Seras Respeitado” [Enter with respect and you’ll be respected] at the entrance of Bairro Pedro Cruz was erased by technical services in anticipation of the visit of the Mayor in the neighborhood for the inauguration of a housing project in the neighborhood. When the Cultural services realized that this fresco was considered by local inhabitants as part of the identity of their neighborhood, they asked the original writer to re-paint the piece again.
But also in the same time, in anticipation of the visit of the Mayor in the neighborhood, tags, throw ups and pieces of local writers at the entrance of Bairro Padre Cruz were erased by technical services. As I was invited artist for commissioned mural, I realized that these name writing graffiti weren’t considered by Cultural services as a legitimate part of the neighborhood identity, so I decided to proceed to an uncommissioned restoration.
KG: Let’s talk about the other projects you’ve been working on recently too. They’re really cool! What were you trying to achieve with Liberté Égalité Soldes?
MT: Liberté Égalité Soldes is an advertising slogan for the sales of Cuisinella (French kitchen store) that appeared on French billboard in January 2015 (in the same time of Charlie Hebdo’s terrorist attack) and that was inspired by national motto of France (Liberté Égalité Fraternité). I painted this commercial motto in the street of Strasbourg like a political slogan in Februar 2016, in the frame of Winter sales and State of emergency (which is a consequence of the previous terrorist attacks that happen in France).
The advertising slogan is in a way inspired by subversive graffiti written in May 1968 all over France and which spirit has been recuperated by advertisers, playing with this insurrectional and poetic imaginary for selling goods. I found this slogan outrageous in many ways, and in the frame of Loi de renseignement (mass surveillance coercitive laws), State of emergency (that permit to the police and intelligence service to act faster despite of justice institution) and demonstration against Loi du travail (which brought in the streets a lot of new spontaneous and subversive slogans that can be found on La rue ou rien collaborative Tumblr), it made sense for me to paint it and give it back a critical meaning: French governement is putting all historical values, social progresses and individual freedom on sale.
KG: Could you tell me more about Street Art Evaluation too?
MT: I conducted a survey entitled Street Art Evaluation among Internet users of my environement via Google Form.
The result of the question “What is commissioned Street Art the name of?” was reproduced in a mural inside of Bairro Padre Cruz as part as Muro festival in Lisbon. The answers proposed in this survey were mostly qualities or defaults addressed to commissioned Street Art in comments of blogs and social networks.
Pedro Soares Neves who a former old school writer of Lisbon and is now conducting research and organizing events invited me to the Festival. As he has a constructive approach, trying to gather communities around mural practices, he advises me to do this survey in English on Internet, when I wanted to prepare it first in Portuguese and do the inquiry directly in the neighborhood. The context of this festival was obviously cultural and political and didn’t have the purpose to involve the locals beside the point of sharing their houses blind walls.
My point was to prove that inside of a commissioned event organized by municipality it’s possible and important to raise awareness on cultural policy topics if/when you cannot get in touch with local community (because of the way those event are conceived, like 3 days projects and not like 3 months residencies). This mural was about Street Art understood as a form of building-size muralism which issues are reduced to decoration, framed by cultural and political communication purposes and to address the local community at all. Even if this ironic survey somehow worked in the frame of this context, it’s more speaking about the municipality than to the inhabitants.
KG: What is your stance on street art?
MT: A part of recent Street Art which could be legibly called Global Street Art or Neo Muralism is used nowadays by advertisers, real estate and municipality as a instrument of power – symbolic peacemaker, gentrification tool, territorial marketing. With commissioned festivals, it became a consensual form of globalized culture which mostly goes against the interest of local communities and in particular writers or artists who get in trouble for expressing themselves without permission or cannot even get permission to intervene. Brad Downey made a good demonstration of this ironic situation in one of his last intervention called Fiscal Shifts and Problem Solving as Mural in 2015 in Rome using the budget of a mural he was invited to paint for solving the daily problems the inhabitants were suffering of. And Rafael Schacter wrote two articles related to this topic, “Street Art Is a Period. Period. Or the Emergence of Intermural Art” published on Hyperallergic in July 2016 about the shift an art form to a cultural phenomenon and its progressive digestion by technocratic social and cultural management, and From dissident to decorative: why street art sold out and gentrified our cities published on The Conversation in Novembre 2015 and well debated on Vandalog about how creativity and Street Art in particular is used to revitalize and gentrify neighorhoods.
KG: You say you do not call yourself a street artist?
MT: Personally, I consider myself as an artist, sometimes doing actions and interventions in urban spaces, sometimes creating artworks in art dedicated spaces or on online platforms (like my Twitter account @twittOEuvres which is a text piece in itself), because I’m not tied up by the idea of original style, aesthetic skills or visual signature like most of revendicated street artists seems to be. Name writing, political graffiti, street performance, guided tour, urban furniture, city workers activities, commercial signs… are tools, methods and means that already exists in the city and that I could use for implementing a new relationship to use, power and imaginary of the city. I borrow one language for one purpose, and change of langage depending on the type of interaction I want to introduce within a territory, a context, a situation. So my work is always framed by the space I’m investing no matter if it’s urban one, exhibition one or online one. This way of doing things is directly rooted to art history and avant-gardes whom point was always to got beyond the definition of art, beyond art itself; and not only focused on name writing graffiti one, even if I must confess I really like to play with the rules of name writing in the city, especially in this complex period where art is both experienced in the same in the street and on the Internet due to daily use of digital technologies and massive access to smartphones.
Complete interview by Katherine Gillespie, July 2016.
Tags: interview, publication
