[EN]
Emilio Fernández Herrero: How long you carry in the world of the urban art?
Mathieu Tremblin: I started name writing graffiti around 2000 and urban intervention around 2005.
EFH: Why did you start painting?
MT: I went with my friends who were doing graffiti in abandoned factories and in the streets of Rennes, while I was doing street or documentary photography. I started to do it with them because I felt it was a playful and simple way to interact with urban space.
EFH: How would you define urban art?
MT: Art gestures happening in urban space or art forms related to urban space.
EFH: You would include to the graffiti inside the urban art?
MT: Yes. From my French cultural perspective and considering the visual art side, I would make more distinctions inside of urban art like: epigraphy graffiti ≠ name writing graffiti ≠ public art ≠ stencilism ≠ Street-Art ≠ muralism ≠ urban intervention…
EFH: There are differences between the graffiti and the urban art with stencil or other technicians? In addition to in the technicians or forms of realization, refer us to the differences with regard to purpose and aims.
MT: At the beginning of 2000, Street-Art term started to be used to make a distinction form name writing graffiti and stencilism forms regarding artists coming from this background but replacing their name or tag by a viral form of signature related to visual communication and illustration. But before that, Street Art had another meaning related to street performance and had equivalent in many langages, “art de rue” in French and “StraßeKunst” in German. I will say that globalization totally introduced confusion in terminology because of the domination of Global English worldwide regarding global market of art.
For me the distinction is between urban art and graffiti doesn’t make sense. It makes more sense to speak about Global Street Art considering it’s this type of Street-Art I described extended to a global audience and to recognize this notion is instrumentalized by various powers for their own goal mostly against any type of spontaneous citizen appropriation of urban space. Then you could distinguish it from urban art, as a term gathering a bunch of visual art practices, legal or illegal, taking place in urban space.
If you would like to be even more precise on those visual art practices, it should be based on various criterions, not related to the technical disciplines but on the methodologies of creativity, the type of audience, the type of surface and space invested…
EFH: Why you do not keep the anonymity like some urban artists?
MT: From my point of view, anonymity participates on two strategies:
1. Hiding from authority because you’re taking risks to produce your intervention and you don’t want to get sued or identified as author.
2. Creating attention and curiosity through the desire of revealing the secrecy – basically a marketing strategy.
I do not define myself as a street artist. I’m defining myself as a visual artist so rooted to contemporary and actual forms of art because I do not limit my work to urban intervention. So I agree when someone call me a urban artist because it’s part of my practice but would you name an artist showing his work in art spaces, a museum artist or a gallery artist?
My art practice is rooted to history of art especially the part which concerns one century of urban interventions and actions. I’m acting in urban space as a citizen, so it’s a matter of personal responsibility to assume the action I’m doing, as any citizen making a political statement on a public place. I don’t need to hide my intention behind a nickname.
EFH: What try to reflect in your works?
MT: I consider my practice as an exercise of freedom. I try to challenge the relationship of uses, powers and domination happening in urban space form a citizen point of view. Then each intervention carries its own message depending on the context it’s dealing with and to the situation it’s creating.
EFH: How and in what inspire you to realize your works?
MT: I’m approaching urban landscape as an ecosystem so I’m observing the type of interaction between vagary, anonymous gestures, existing signs and architecture that can be read as traces in our everyday life and close surrounding.
EFH: You want to transmit some message to the society or to the people to which arrive your works?
MT: My values are related to opening urban space to appropriation, empowerment and self-expression.
EFH: What seems you the incursion that the urban art has in the museums?
Something that is conceived for the street keeps on being urban art when it takes out of her?
MT: Regarding the incursion of urban art in museum, I don’t find it so much relevant for the most part of the artworks shown. I personally prefer to create site specific artworks inside of art spaces or exhibit art objects or installation conceived specifically for this purpose.
Global Street-Art as a formal register of practices I described previously could make sense as it’s not the street aspect of it that defines it.
Urban art forms could be brought into a museum but most of it would instantly become a still life of it, as it will cut the work from its context as urban space is a chaotic lived space and exhibition space is a ‘supposed to be) neutral and mental space. Most of the time this shift from urban space to exhibition space is not interesting.
Urban intervention can be shown as documentation and keep being relevant until the artist chose not to revendicate the documentation as an artwork in itself.
EFH: It is increasingly near the urban art of the contemporary art?
MT: I don’t make difference between urban art and contemporary art. Urban art is contemporary and contemporary art can be urban. Creating actual art is going beyond existing definition of art. A work of art that need the urban art label to be appreciated is a bad work of art. And the same goes for contemporary art.
EFH: You realise exhibitions in museums? With which aim realise exhibitions in museums?
MT: I mostly work with artist run space or non-profit art spaces. I’m rarely invited in museums or have the opportunity to show my artwork in private or commercial galleries.
Art spaces are spaces dedicated to experimentation and research. So I conceive entire show around problematics as most of curators or artists-curators are doing it. It depends of the topic, but I create art pieces and installation with awareness of art history and with specific acknowledge and issues of the white cube.
EFH: You sell your works to the public? And in the museums?
MT: Let’s be realistic. Only 5 % of any artworks that are meant to be sell are actually bought. So I don’t see the point of reducing my freedom of creation in order to stick to any salable format if I’m not even certain it will be bought after I invested time, energy and money into it. My work is 99 % non profit oriented and diffused under open source format.
I sold five artworks in those past ten years because the formal choices I made met the curiosity of some collectors ans fit to technical conditions for being salable.
EFH: It can an urban artist like you live of his works?
MT: I get paid when I do residencies, workshops, curation, exhibitions and lectures as any artist should be, and because I ask. Sometimes, I chose to work without fee because the issues of the invitation worth it.
EFH: Have some referent inside the world of the urban art?
MT: I have some tutorial figures in the field of art history who created a body of important work in term of creativity process, empowerment of citizens and audience like René Magrite, Georges Maciunas, Robert Filliou, Adrian Pipper, David Hammons, Jeremy Deller, Francis Alÿs, Gianni Motti, Trevor Paglen, Roman Signer, Robert Milin, Gilles Mahé, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Eva and Franco Mattes, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. And some I met like Alain Declerq, Carole Douillard, Harmen De Hoop, Adam, Akay, Brad Downey, Jeroen Jongeleen, Olivier Kosta Théfaine, HONET, ZEVS, Evan Roth, Aram Bartholl, Addie Wagenknecht, Vladimír Turner, EPOS 257.
EFH: What think about Banksy?
MT: Banksy is a smart artist playing with market of art and mass media attention. I like the fact that he’s bringing his involvement at a new level beside his own practice by inviting other artist and organizing independent art show.
EFH: You think that Banksy has contributed with his work to put fashionable the urban art or to that it was accepted by the popular « society »?
MT: I think Banksy has contributed to disrupt the reading of the non-profit oriented and open to appropriation aspect of urban art by using traditional mechanism of market of art recognition to valorize his practice and gain mass media attention.
EFH: It has influenced Banksy in the development of the urban art to world-wide level?
MT: Yes in a bad way. Young generation of urban artists are more paying attention to the buzz effect of the visual reception of their art forms online than to the real efficiency of it in urban situation, how they could be instrumentalized by various powers, from mass media, to marketing and advertising agency and political governants. This awareness through online communication and viral and social network is bringing a lack of discourse and exigency regarding the societal issues that acknowledgement of history of art and philosophy could bring to the artists and the audience.
EFH: How you think that it is perceived the urban art by the society? Better that the graffiti?
MT: Art in urban space has always been a component of urban landscape. Global Street Art has been used by mass media and political power
EFH: How they have influenced the new technologies in the development of the urban art? And Internet?
MT: At the beginning of 2000, Internet was a powerful tool for self-media attitude that urban artists used to bring recognition of their practices by a large audience of Internet users without the traditional filters of the art world because they weren’t doing so much shows at the time and were only practicing in the city and diffusiong their works online.
In 2016, digital technologies and network have influenced art practices in the same way they have influenced common people. We are connected all the time and the way we experience the world is altered by digital tools. This influence and the way artists are playing with it by bringing URL artifacts into IRL landscape is called New Aesthetic by Scott Contreras-Koterbay and Łukasz Mirocha.
EFH: You think that the media have put fashionable the urban art?
MT: Urban art did gain popular recognition due to Internet users that appropriate those forms through documentation. Mass media did just recycle this attention and turn it into trend.
Interview by Emilio Fernández Herrero, PHD student, Universidad Complutense of Madrid, August 2016.
Tags: interview
