Idiotic interventions and ludic inequality

[imomus]

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?

Comments

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Taggen?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Any grafitti on your monastery walls, Eustace?

It would be nice to think it might eventually evolve into illuminations, or books of hours, or mosaics, or something.

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

It is nice to read this. I've sometimes felt that a certain amount of apologetics about tagging is communicated in order to seem racially respectful, or to try to give hip hop culture legitimacy.

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

I think the most repulsive aspect of tagging is its constant "me, me, me." I'm sick of people whose sense of freedom is to scream their presence in the face of everyone else.

As for "Why the hell not cars, taggers?" - because they're gutless conformists as you suspect.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually, some cutting edge taggers do spray cars -- some even while the drivers are inside:

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I approve of this because the kids accept that what they're doing is an annoyance rather than art. Between tagging and cars, tagging is definitely the lesser evil as far as the quality of life is concerned.

What disturbs me here is that they tag only the people kind enough to stop and give them directions. That just ups levels of anomie and mistrust in the urban environment in the end. It saps trust and kindness to strangers. And again it just leads to this misanthropic kind of vigilante world where it's every man for himself and only the strong survive.

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

[sakuraamplifier.livejournal.com]

I'm so happy to learn I'm not alone in my hatred of tagging. It seems to have become something anyone with a taste for art is expected to appreciate, but I find it contemptible, both for the underlying "me, me, me" philosophy and, on a much more basic level, its ugliness.

banksy...

[(Anonymous)]

uuugghhh, banksy.

i cannot begin to express my disgust at how crazy about this guy people are here in the states. so so many art kids i know have suddenly decided to be radical street artists in the past year, largely thanks to this stuff. it's wild. radical subversion by way of pop culture. and they all have heir long rants about taking back the public space. taking it to the streets. i feel very middle-of-the-road about tagging, or any similar street art stuff. i'm not particularly for it or against it. there are valid arguments from both sides, in my mind. but the fact that it's being propagated by this artist whose book is sold at urban outfitters and who is being so deeply idolized by this whole young generation... like i said, wild.

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

You're not the only one who feels this way, in the last few months have seen the rise of individual or collective The Splasher (http://gothamist.com/2007/01/23/against_streeta.php) in new york, who goes around splattering paint on various works of street art, and accompanies the splashes with wheat pasted screeds decrying street artists as the vanguards of capital. Shepard Fairey's gallery show had a stink bomb nearly set off (http://gothamist.com/2007/06/22/breaking_allege.php) in it, by distinct but sympathetic people. It's been quite a story around here on the local blogs.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Someone's been reading their Hakim Bey (http://www.hermetic.com/bey/), eh?

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Oh thank God.
I´ve long lived in dread that you would support this awful habit like all the other artistic people who think they´re being liberal and innovative by approving of it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My point of comparison is Japan. I love how, in Japan, there's almost no grafitti and tagging. You can see out the train windows. A building has its own shape and its own colour, not a tangle of ugly, self-asserting signatures. And I love how Japan's superlegitimacy and safety give its people freedom. The freedom, for instance, to use non-smashed vending machines at any hour of the night and day.

But Japan is a hip destination for influential evangelists of Western irreverence. People like Barry McGee, whose slideshow at the Watarium last month more or less instructed the Japanese to start tagging and grafitting because "it's an incredibly creative culture, the new high art". And we can imagine Ariel Schlesinger doing a pecha kucha presentation at SuperDeluxe, and telling his audience how to short circuit green tea vending machines with salted water in such a way that they give all their contents free to one person -- a smart designer, say -- rather than dispensing them to working people who are thirsty and can pay.

In Japan, these street culture evangelists should be listening rather than talking. The superlegitimate we culture has a lot to teach the vigilante me culture.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Did I just agree with everything in this post? Yes, I think I did.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Thing is, I am not a bohemian. I'm a deeply devout shopkeeper, a lifelong follower of Franklin's maxims, which have worked very well for someone who hails from the lower castes. We love our gardens, our creature comforts, our simple pleasures. It takes a lot to get our sort to start smashing windows--we cling to peace and order until the last possible moment. We know how hard-won and precious it is, and don't take it for granted for a single second.

But even a boogie sort like myself has at least a grudging respect for the mooncalves on the fringes who at least walk the walk--some are even friends. But most of these new self-styled "radicals" are just punks, and not the good kind. I rail against them with some regularity; while the older "lifer" artists proclaim me as more punk than punk, the clueless kids think I'm a stuffy old fart. The suits don't help, but the only thing worse than an old man in a suit is an old man in Pumas.

These kids want to take real risks? Make something unapologetically beautiful, and give it away.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi, is there somewhere on the web that I can hear Spratch o Thyme - remember you had an MP3 from when it was on Radio 4(?)? I just want to let a friend of mine in Scotland hear it and I don't want to rip my CD.

Cheers

[imomus.livejournal.com]

A Spratch O Thyme (http://imomus.com/mixingit.mp3), Mixing It, BBC Radio 3.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

these look to me like signs that berlin is inevitably reaching a certain , er, maturity (the kind places like sydney arrived at some 5 years ago) . another 2 years we might see berlin in Monocle's liveable cities list. :-(

[rodebrecht.livejournal.com]

Oh, tagging is annoying if it's done with paint, if it's a thing forever stuck on the walls it's been put to. There's a level of beauty, though, in the glowing and temporary very limited Laser Light Tagging (http://graffitiresearchlab.com/?page_id=99#video) done by Graffiti Research Lab (http://www.graffitiresearchlab.com/).

Or, what's even more lovely, if the defacing of public property only exists on a photo (http://www.flickr.com/photos/lichtfaktor/564892547/).

[(Anonymous)]

Also, it would be nice if more people tagged with chalk.

That rat has a microphone

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

I have a soft spot in my heart for taggers and graffiti artists. Like many rappers, they represent the disenfranchised, they represent the inability to understand the concerns of the propertied-elite, because they've never had, and most likely never will have, any property worth protecting. What they do may not be pretty, but it's meaningful

If property were more fairly distributed, if people did not inherit wealth, if instead, personal wealth reverted to the state at death, if the average human had a fairer chance at the conventional, bourgeouis dream, no one would tag any more



Am surprised to find such anti-Banksy sentiment on this page. The guy frickin snuck his work into the Met (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4382245.stm), where it went undiscovered for a week. Then he satirized Paris Hilton (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5310416.stm). He has moved beyond the ignominy of street tagger and into the realm of unpredictable performance artist. I can't wait to see what he does next

Re: That rat has a microphone

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Then he satirized Paris Hilton.

Having decided early on never to pay any attention whatsoever to PH, I must also, logically, ignore people who satirize PH too. They're two sides of the same coin, and that, in a very real sense, is the problem with a lot of "satire".

[sarmoung.livejournal.com]

I don't have such a problem with tagging, or I've just to learned to put up with it. It doesn't make any claim to be art, it's more like dogs urinating against a lamp post (or other trickier, more challenging sites) to mark territory. It's a vital/viral part of the city and, whilst I don't think I'd miss it, it's symptomatic of the place where I live and I can't say I'll be remotely upset if the new Olympic developments up the road are plastered tout suite after completion as I think them the far worse of the two.

(Iain Sinclair (http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sinclair-territory.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) had a somewhat different take from yourself on tagging at the end of Thatcherism, but then he has since moved to Hastings, I think. As you suggest, perhaps taggers could turn to producing Bayeux-like tapestries of urban discontent. One reason to reintroduce the teaching of needlework at schools.)

But I don't think at the time of Sinclair's writing that people were using graffiti/tagging as an extension of an art school portfolio or angling for a potential design job. There's some people around these parts who scrawl with their Myspace addresses appended.

Here's some pleasant lichen-enhanced 19th century Russian tagging from Kazbegi in the Caucasus:

(http://photobucket.com)

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

The problem with "urban culture":

[(Anonymous)]

i started tagging when i was 12 and growing up in washington, dc. i like to think it wasn't born out of a selfishness; i think i was motivated by a desire to be a part of some secret sect that no one really understood. in washington in those days there were only about a dozen guys getting up but they were *everywhere*. cool "disco" dan, bear, cast--those guys were so prolific that it was really admirable to me at that age. i also had a pretty unstable home life and no friends, so it was a way for me to go out and have fun on my own. now, i was taught by others that i met along the way a sort of passed down code: public buildings were okay, rooftops and walls above roofs okay, cars, private property never. i don't think it was because of gutlessness--i think most graffiti writers don't have an anarchic streak in them. they wouldn't want someone tagging their car either. but asthetically they don't see a problem with tags and bubble letters popping up on walls and bridges and train cars. your random squiggles are another man's flower between the cracks. for me it always represented the thrill of living in the city: disarray peeking through the general order. those kids in the video really dishearten me; they're taking advantage of people who've done no wrong and (much like those who have commerce or destruction as their motives) they really don't get what it's all about.

of course nothing is sacred, the many bad apples will always spoil the fun eventually.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

I've never found myself in agrement with you more wholeheartedly.

The Missing Link

[(Anonymous)]

There is a huge controversy going on in NYC that directly pertains to this thread - I can't believe no one mentioned it yet. The Splasher, anyone?!
sorry for the messy links - I don't do code.
http://gothamist.com/2007/01/23/against_streeta.php
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10A17FB3D5A0C7B8EDDAF0894DF404482
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/arts/design/28splasher.sidebar.html?ex=1183867200&en=a17380507497e58a&ei=5070
http://coagula.com/?p=24

Re: The Missing Link

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Oh, sweet schadenfreude!

[deadbatteries.livejournal.com]

i don't know. i don't exactly like banksy, for instance, but london is even uglier to look at without him.

[flying-squid.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

[(Anonymous)]

I have to say, that video of those laser taggers in barcelona annoys the hell out of me as much as the real taggers. I mean I like a lot of those non-destructive public interventions like the clear tape or the chalk people,
but these guys are pretending to be proving some point on freedom of expression but they are not saying anything beyond "fuck", "cock" and stuff like that. They are basically just being like little kids painting swearwords on the wall and congratulating each other for being so radical and clever.He said poo! Its just this big selfcongratulatory and absolutely meaningless thing. I know this kind of crowd from when i lived in barcelona, masses of 25 year old kidulst always dressed like they are in Ibiza and making everything they can to prove how free their minds are and how backwards everyone else is, thus making everyone else's life impossible. Because if they have rented this huge sound system to make a party on a tuesday night right over your appartment and you have to work the next day fuck you, you are part of the Oppressors!And it always has to be beautifully designed, like Yomango (http://www.yomango.net/) who pretend to make a revolution by shoplifting as much as they can and making big publicized shop lifting performances.
The kid from DC who wrote a few comments above had a more valid point than these laser taggers somehow, tagging seems more valid to me when there's not a million people out there doing it one over the other but when its more of a secret few who do it for each other and for finding a place in the city and it's hardly a constant ocular annoyance and aggression to the neighbors. You have to be careful of getting too sensitive about the urban enviroment being clean or you end up like those old guys who are always walking around taking posters and stickers off the walls!

[bricology.livejournal.com]

I think just about all unauthorized public art is fraught with a lack of appreciation of context. There are (for lack of better terms) graffiti artists such as Swoon who sometimes create appealing pictures (such as here (http://farm1.static.flickr.com/21/30557151_7dfbc11d20_o.jpg)), but by placing their work in public, within externally-imposed parameters (a blank space that offers the opportunity to work without detection, etc.), they are effectively privileging themselves over everyone else who has an interest in that space.

I, for one, find the patina that old building surfaces develop, to be beautiful. There are few things I find more appealing than honest rust, fading paint, weathered wood, and so forth. These are the same surfaces that so often end up getting tagged or bombed. Why should the desire of one person to forever alter a surface they don't own (whether it's a public wall or the body of your car) take precedence over your wishes or anyone else's?

In that respect, the laser taggers only differ by the time-frame; they "claim" a surface for minutes or hours, rather than decades. But what of the people who might prefer to see large walls or buildings in their natural state, rather than covered with someone's laser treatment, even in a passing moment? It reminds me of how disappointing it sometimes is to visit cathedrals and other old architecture in Britain and Europe, and have scaffolding obscuring the view of the buildings. Yes, I realize that scaffolding is necessary to be able to repair the building. Laser tagging is little different in its visual commandeering of public or private surfaces, and there's nothing "necessary" about it.

Unless one is some sort of fanatic about the sharing of all property, I can find no way to justify tagging any surface which does not belong to the tagger, whether it's a private house, a business, a public structure, or nature (it never ceases to amaze me how many rocks, trees and even plants have been tagged here in SF).

In any society, the acceptance of social contracts through which we can coexist is implicit but must be safeguarded. America is (unlike say, Japan) a nation of "freedoms-to" -- meaning that a person has the freedom to do countless things in public that might annoy a great number of other people; they, on the other hand, are not guaranteed the "freedoms-from" the imposition of my annoying behavior. One can play a loud radio, one can have a car alarm that is set off by passing traffic, one can ride a nearly unmuffled Harley -- there's no end to the things one might do to negatively impact the peace of others who share the space. But wouldn't our lives be better without having to endure everyone else's "freedoms-to"? Twenty years ago, one seldom had the "freedoms-from" other people's tobacco smoke. Thankfully, laws have been passed to address that, and the "freedoms-to" have been replaced with "freedoms-from". Graffiti and tagging are merely the visual equivalent of secondhand smoke, car alarms, and the like.

[geweih.livejournal.com]

Tagging, in this neighbourhood at least, constitutes a remapping and appropriation (signing) of the streets – of course its banal, its about repetition. Of course its maladjusted, spiteful, narcissistic but it is also, truly, ludic.

Art, which often made claims about its subversion is still a discourse at the edges of which policemen are to be found. The formal legitimacy of Twombly’s marks are debated but beyond the (spurious) elevation of a few ‘classics’ to the status of gallery ready canvases the constantly appropriated, re-appropriated and overwritten texts that flow around the city are literally surplus. Un-monetised.

Art? Who cares? It’s there whether you like it or not and the “social conscience” exhibited by ever dull relational aestheticians finds it sometimes hard to allow for subversion, intervention or provocation.

Perhaps when the illustrators move in then indeed the party is over but for now at least, here, those tags mean deflated property values, which mean in turn lower rents. The American and British executives that have been snapping up property stay away. They are persuaded that this is a high crime area. It is not. It is just in drag.