Idiotic interventions and ludic inequality

It's late June. I'm at the Backjumps opening at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg. Actually, I'm there sort of by accident. I was at another opening the night before, and left my bike, so I'm back to pick it up. I wander in, and before long I'm being photographed (for my pirate eyepatch, mostly) by some people who'll put together a Backjumps book.

The Backjumps show is in an art gallery, but it isn't exactly an art show. Not like the drawing and painting opening held the night before, anyway. The flyer calls it "urban communication and aesthetics". Street art. The crowd are younger and cooler than last night's art crowd, if slightly less articulate. In the corridor there's a DJ scratching at some Technics turntables. All around the hall -- taped, in fact, to every single pillar -- are signs saying "Bitte nicht taggen!" Do not tag. Which is both ironic and appropriate -- and just a bit odd -- because this is a show mostly dedicated to those fearless urban pioneers, taggers and grafitti artists.

Now, I hate tagging. I hate how I can't see out of the windows of Berlin trams because kids have scratched their names into the glass. I hate the fact that even if I could see out, what I'd mostly see is people's stupid names scratched on public property. But never on private cars. Why the hell not cars, taggers? Afraid of being beaten up rather than celebrated as an artist?

Tagging has to stop. I mean, even to be celebrated it has to stop. Otherwise we'd all just be tagging on top of tags, and you'd never see the tags. The world would just become this horrible tangled mess and nothing would stand out. Before long you'd get people stealing stolen bikes, which would annoy the original thieves, and people appropriating appropriations and intervening in interventions. It would just never end.



But back to the Backjumps opening. The gathering irony is compounded by a film I join a reverent crowd in a darkened room to watch. In this film a masked man climbs a gigantic canvas Lavazza billboard at night on Alexanderplatz. He's a kind of James Bond of appropriationist intervention -- pretty fucking macho. He skillfully cuts around the figure of the sexy model advertising the coffee brand then daubs a message across the top: "Model kidnapped, returned for ransome". Cojones, amigo! Respect!

The sexy subversion wilts, though, when I walk out of the screening and almost collide with a Lavazza stand. They seem to be sponsoring the show. It's all a set-up. The brands haven't lost control after all. They've just upped their game, and paid some studs with spray cans to give them cred. There they are, underwriting this show: Nokia, Berlin Public Culture Funds, dozens of hip magazines and a website called Reclaim Your City, which won't let you enter before you've read a notice which declares: "The content of this website should not encourage any illegal behaviour. The sole purpose of all pictures shown on this website is to document and display artistic intervention in public space."



This call to responsibility reminds me of a satirical manifesto erratum slip I included with a 1994 box art project by artists Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard. "Burn down the academy!" declared paragraph 17. But the erratum slip took quite a different tone. "Our thanks go to Reginald Longley of London Fire Brigade for pointing out that arson is, quite rightly, illegal. We do not for a moment endorse any act of fire-setting. We rather intended to represent, by 'The Academy', a state of mind, and by 'Burn down', a wish for peaceful, democratic change."



Verily, we live in the age of intervention. I've written articles hyping it myself -- an interview with British designer Alex Rich which I titled Gentle Interventions, after a show he once staged in London. I described how Alex and his friends in Abake once intervened in an East London park, repairing all the broken benches. When the council found out what was going on they were naturally furious. Only they could mend broken benches! What would the world be like, after all, if everyone went around mending things for their own ends? We'd soon be living in some kind of vigilante world, wouldn't we? Could you call in the interventionists to mend the benches they'd fixed when they broke again, for instance? Or would they be off at an art opening, or showing a client their portfolio?

Still, Alex Rich and Abake are the acceptable face of intervention, reclamation, re-appropriation. I like "gentle", and I like civic-minded. I like the idea of making little improvements to the world. Goody Twoshoes woz 'ere!

The unacceptable face of intervention is sponsored "subversion" -- that farcical moment when the streets are "reclaimed" from Nokia and Lavazza by masked guerillas who turn out -- gah! -- to be sponsored by Nokia and Lavazza. The unacceptable face of intervention is when Shepherd Fairey builds his Andre Giant image to the point (worldwide recognition and hip admiration) when he can sell it to a shoe company as a readymade brand, retrospectively turning the whole thing into an ad campaign. And, as Jonathan Jones pointed out in an excellent piece in yesterday's Guardian intent on reclaiming the streets from crap grafitti artists, the unacceptable face of intervention is bloody Banksy.



Now, I don't know much about Banksy. I've managed to stay out of the path of his hype machine. His work seems to be a set of lamely populist -- yet streetwise! -- Hallmark cards or Bill Tidy cartoons. I have to agree with Jones that it's marginally more witty than most grafitti and tagging, though.



I do know that Banksy was one of the targets of Charlie Brooker's satirical wrath in Nathan Barley, though. And something else Brooker was particularly incensed by in that show -- and particularly strong in spotting as a problem of our time -- was something we might call "ludic inequality". Nathan, supported by his private income and a vast sense of confidence and self-entitlement, plays while others work. He and his tribe act like overgrown, spoilt toddlers against a backdrop of real suffering. Nathan's "interventions" mostly consist of horrible -- and semi-murderous -- Jackass-style pranks on his workmate Pingu.



Now, have a look at this Pecha Kucha presentation by Ariel Schlesinger, from the last Berlin pecha kucha evening. It's called Minor Urban Disasters, the name Ariel -- an Israeli interventionist -- has also used for his Flickr pool. I enjoyed the presentation, which, like the Flickr slideshow, comes across like a series of micro-disasters reported on by a rolling news channel so desperate for news that it's taken to inflating the tiniest irregularities into massive crises.



During his presentation, though, it's the insinuation that Ariel caused some of the disasters himself (on quiet news days) that gets the biggest whoops and laughs from the crowd. In a way, this slideshow reminds me a lot of the investigations of ROJO, a Japanese group of artists, journalists, architects and designers who scour Japan for quirks just like the ones Ariel and friends found in Berlin, Paris and Tel Aviv. But ROJO don't set stuff on fire, or smash stuff for laughs, or tell you how to short a Coke machine.

So what Ariel really makes me think of is Israeli artist Yael Bartana's unsettling videos of Israelis driving 4X4s up and down sand-dunes on beaches Palestinians have been excluded from by (Banksy-decorated) security fences. He also makes me think of some of Doreen Massey's points about globalization. It's a hell of a lot easier for some people to flow, or to play, or just to goof off, than others.



Seeing a stack of delivery scooters Ariel cheerfully admits to having tipped over like dominos, I couldn't help thinking that while he goofed about for his designer friends, some poor scooter messengers had just had their working day worsened by this "intervention". Just as in Borat or a Michael Moore movie, I was made uncomfortable by the way the ludic, the comic and even the righteously subversive comes, all too often, at the expense of those less free.

That moral perspective is something I wouldn't expect an artist to lose sight of. As for "urban communicators", though, who knows?