“The artist turning graffiti tags into generic text”, Ailidh MacLean, Dazed Digital, www.dazeddigital.com, 4th August 2016.
[EN]
Ailidh MacLean: Why did you want to change the existing tags in the first place?
Mathieu Tremblin: I wanted to raise awareness on a form of name writing graffiti I found interesting and that people actually hate.
AML: Is the question of morality raised in eliminating the work that may hold meaning to the person who put it there?
MT: Do the city cleaning services ask themselves about morality when they erase all the works of graffiti writers in the city, every day? Do a graffiti writer covering a hall of fame with a big chrome piece ask himself about morality when he plays the graffiti game? The question is not about morality because morality is a dogmatic concept. As art, name writing is about ethic, especially personal ethic. I tried to stick to graffiti writing ethic and push it forward, challenging its understandment beyond the confort zone of traditional name writing rules. Because it seems to me that name writing is more about anarchic self-expression than conservative one, and that the ephemeral aspect of – meant to be destroyed or meant to disappear – is part of the deal when you intervene in urban space.
Name writing is about appropriation and interaction. Appropriation of word picked from common language turned into slang and nicknames, appropriation of tools for other purposes, appropriation of aesthetics, appropriation of spaces that belong to someone else; interaction with architecture, with other writers, with passerby, cops and cleaning services. My gesture follows the same path.
AML: Did the sense of entitlement come from a place of seeing the tags as vandalism or was it something else that brought on this approach?
MT: I don’t see tags as vandalism. Vandalism is a judgment related to the concept of ownership which depends on the cultural perspective from which you speak – in some country graffiti is not illegal, it’s even encouraged. Tagging is the most interesting part of name writing because on one side it’s a contemporary aesthetic of calligraphy and on the other side it totally challenges your perception of architecture and the way you can walk through the city in everyday life.
What brought me on this approach is the fact that around 2008, analog and digital reception of name writing and urban intervention started to be in balance especially, due to the massive access of digital tools for capturing and sharing and to the raise of social networks. Before, you could discover the work of an artist offline and them search for more about it online, but since web 2.0 and social networks you mostly discover the work of someone online and maybe after you have the chance to see it offline.
Tag Clouds is speaking about analogy between city and Internet as tags in both universe are ways to draw transversal paths in your daily routine.
AML: Some see tags as little more than marking territory and when they’re clearly spelled out in this way, it highlights that there can be little sense to them. Was this your intention?
MT: The name in graffiti culture is a visual tool that writers are adapting to the surface and the space. From an art history perspective, you could rely this practice to the one Daniel Buren started in the 60’s. The interaction with explicit type of language in urban space is a key for appreciating it. This urban calligraphy brings alterity and humanity, with its cryptic aspect a code that people have to decipher if they want to access to an alternative reading of urban space. It seems quite complex to understand for a lot of people, but as a comparaison nowadays everybody is speaking about the treasure hunt of Pokémon, Go!, how it’s permitting the players to go beyond the functional path draw by urban planners and introduce a bit of dérive or flanerie in their everyday life. It might sound obvious for the users of this app because technology is an identify filter that explain them the rule to get into it. In name writing, the practice of writing but also of reading is the tool, you don’t need any smartphone to experience an adventurous and playful journey in the city. Just follow the tags.
AML: Have you had a response from any of the taggers whose work you’ve turned into your own?
MT: When I did those interventions, I did get in touch with some of the writers when I could get in contact with them or at least I went in touch with the local graffiti scene in order to be aware on how my gesture would be received, it was about dialogue. And mostly after I did it anonymously and illegally (as other writers did their own tags), some writers interacted with the piece, feeling the blanks but always respecting the names of other writers by not covering them, until at some point one writer came and did get over the hall of fame with a bigger piece. But with the viral reception of these interventions now, which is twisted from the real life experience of the work, there is no dialogue anymore, the meaning of the work is instrumentalized by ownership-obsessed conservative haters on one side, and by anti-graffiti order-obsessed lovers on the other side.
AML: Do you see your reinventions of these tags as graffiti in itself or do you categorise it in a different way?
MT: From my perspective, it has no visual qualities because it borrows a computer based default aesthetic, it’s just an analog tag cloud. Graffiti is basically putting inscription on the wall. The mural in itself could be considered as a decorative mural painting as the one graffiti writers, street artists or lettering painters are doing. It cannot be categorize completely, because if on one hand it adheres to functional type of design present in the city, on the other hands it still displays graffiti names. This in-between status is maybe the reason it’s bringing a debate. The various level of understandement depending on who’s looking at it (writers, passerby, designer) makes this intervention paradoxical. At better it’s a tribute to the local graffiti scene like a memorial mural and at worse it’s a dystopian nightmare of normalization.
AML: The French government really cracks down on unauthorized street art in particular areas, is your work exempt from this for its difference or is it equally at risk of being whitewashed overnight?
MT: Most of these interventions were created in the same condition of classic name writing graffiti. So I get arrested in Eindhoven and had to pay a fee for doing “graffiti” because the city had a zero tolerance policy about any type of intervention in urban space. The difference, in France is related to the historical based acceptance of self-expression in urban space. The city remains not totally ruled by private property, so when you do an intervention dressed like city worker, most of people come to talk to you instead of calling the police. That’s a technic that makes you somehow legit (even if what you are doing remains illegal) and a lot of graffiti writers or artists doing urban intervention are using it.
The fact of creating a proper mural adhering to the codes of communication of authority, is creating a grey area between the graffiti hall of fame and the decorative fresco. If it had stayed in the previous state, at some point one graffiti writers would have paint a chrome piece over it or cleaning services would have erased the tags. Tag Clouds is maintaining the hall of fame in an in-between state, but in order it worked, it’s reducing it to pure ego; it’s an edgy critic of the way cultural history has been written since now: Europeans cannot conserve any cultural artifact without killing it.
AML: Can you explain the links you form between the physical tag as a statement and the virtual tag in its compartmentalization of digital information?
MT: Tags in the city are drawing graffiti writers personal paths over city map, where tags on the Internet permit cross-over surfing in database of contents, articles, texts and images.
If you go on specialized blogs like www.ekosystem.org, you realize that the names of graffiti writers are also used as tags for gathering their works. This intervention is pointing this parallel between IRL and URL reception that has started to merge since people started to share their direct experience online with their smartphones in the same time they were experiencing it, or on the opposite, since they do an online research on how a place looks before even experiencing it physically. Scott Contreras-Koterbay and Łukasz Mirocha are calling this porosity that transform the way we look at the analog world from a digital perspective New Aesthetic.
AML: Are you planning any exhibitions soon? How does your work translate in a gallery space?
MT: I’m doing few exhibitions each year with non-profit oriented exhibition spaces. Mostly I’m working site-specific, getting paid for creating uncommissioned gestures in the city. In this frame, I sometime show city-specific related documentation of my intervention in art spaces, but I do not consider documentation as artwork and I do not sell it for a living.
It don’t translate my intervention work in gallery space as my artworks shown in exhibition space are also somehow related to this particular art history related context. I do different moves which goes from photo-collage to installation.
AML: Do you plan on rolling your projects out into new cities any time soon?
MT: It wouldn’t make any sense to do any Tag Clouds now as I realized that 2016 Internet users don’t even recognize a tag cloud when they see it; uses have changed a lot since open source and free sharing minded uses are punished like Peter Sunde one of the Pirate bay founder said and since Internet turn into this tool of mass surveillance with the complicity of big corporation like GAFA (Google Apple Facebook Amazon)that Edward Snowden revealed. Internet has became the same globalized open-air shopping mall you can experience in main cities in the world. I just came back from Düsseldorf where I spent 20 days with Czech artist Vladimír Turner invited by curators Joanna Szlauderbach and Alain Bieber (former blogger of www.rebelart.net and director of the NRW Forum) in the frame of “Planet B” collective exhibition at NRW Forum, and this city was a dystopian nightmare. People were calling police every time we were doing anything in the street, despite the fact that our daily moves weren’t degrading anything: in those globalized cities, public space as urban space open to citizens’ appropriation is over and citizens integrated this fact by even supporting it. All city is ruled by private interest and even the municipality itself behave like in an private ownership perspective instead of a public one.
We miss some awareness on non-profit open-to-appropriation public spaces IRL and URL. That’s the topic I want to concentrate now as many post-internet identify artists do.
Complete interview by Ailidh MacLean, July 2016.
Tags: interview, publication
