TO BE SEEN (trt 26:40) Script 

SWOON: The original impulse to work on the street was about creating something which functioned within the city and didn’t function in any other way. You couldn’t buy it, you couldn’t sell it, you couldn’t own it. (I: 12:09/O: 23:00)

SHARON ZUKIN: Streets are the most public spaces in any city. Streets are the veins through which the blood of the city flow. Streets are also mirrors of the city; they’re places where people put themselves on display and stores and advertisers put their wares on display. Streets are curious places of co-existence of commercial and non-commercial, artistic and ugly uses.

SWOON: Every time you take a wall or you take a billboard, or you take a piece of sidewalk, you’re kind of saying this space doesn’t belong to one person, this space belongs to everyone. Like for me, its not really saying this space is mine, it’s about saying this space is ours. That this space is a space of uncertainty. Anything can happen here. It’s about spontaneity and public interaction and a little bit of wildness.

SHARON ZUKIN: We’ve been living through an intense battle, for the commercial and safety control of streets, in which corporations, including stores as well as advertisers and billboard companies, and the police, are trying to control the areas through which the most traffic, the most people, the most messages flow. Putting artwork up in the streets is one of many ways to try to claim a space of the city for a non-commercial, non-authoritarian use.

ANETTE BALDAUF: One of the things that I really like about New York, New York in general and Soho and the Lower East in particular, is this element of street art that I think adds this really vital and vibrant quality to the city. It is a certain energy I think that you don’t really get from the visual surroundings that’s so much composed of advertising and traditional branding. So this clash with street art, even if it is ugly and dirty and falling off the wall, and, you know, falling apart, and falling off the wall, I think it adds a very important quality to the city.

RYAN WATKINS-HUGHES: Street artists, by putting their work on walls, take, basically take it to the masses. You make it once and then you can make a 1000 copies of it; makes it so that the distribution of the work becomes available to the individual artist. And, you can find ways so that you don’t need a lot of financial backing to get your work out there.

STUART EWEN: We live in a world right now, where in the world of marketing, any space, certainly any public space, and much private space, that hasn’t been transformed into an opportunity for an advertisement, is called dead space.

SWOON: You put something on a wall. It’s a fairly simple act, but in a way it kind of declares that this space is now a space where lots of input can be added. Because you see that effect – a tag goes up, a sticker goes up. The wall starts to collect things. People call it the Broken Windows theory, that’s not what I call it.

STUART EWEN: In an environment where virtually every moment of human attention has been transformed into an opportunity for a sales pitch, anything that goes up that’s not about selling, anything that goes up which is designed to encourage thought rather than consumer behavior, is by definition subversive. It sort of undercuts the notion that human fulfillment is something that takes place across a retail counter, or a purchase on the internet. 

SWOON: I am hoping through these kinds of actions to create like a public domain, like a visual, physical public domain. Where whether or not you want to draw a picture of a flower or write Fuck Bush, or whatever the hell you want to write, to me its really important that in this time of media domination, kind of closing down the circuits of communication amongst people, that we sort of fight to open up those spaces.

WOOSTER COLLECTIVE (Marc Schiller): Not many people have access to galleries or access to the media. They don’t have a platform for somebody else, that they don’t know, to see their work and either smile or think or question. And the street gives everybody an equal opportunity. If you can get up, if you have the ability to put your piece in a place that will last for a few days or a few hours, then you’re all equal. Nobody has more access than anybody else. And that itself is very liberating.

SWOON: I got to New York and I started to visit the galleries immediately. And over and over again I was suffering from this totally stifling sensation of wow, I don’t even want to breathe in here. And I felt that it was so much about precious object-hood, it was so much about the commodity and the really kind of sterile environment that commodities are supposed to be exchanged in. And, you know, then you walk out the door, and within 20 paces something is living. Things are changing, things look like they are growing, there’s like this whole kind of life force – that you don’t know where it’s coming from, you don’t see these people doing it. It just sort of appears to be happening. And, at first I didn’t even see it, and then when I did start to see it, it affected my brain like a virus. And I was like, wait a minute, what are all of these things. And it became like this little language, like code and symbols, that I started to follow, to read the city by.

DAN WITZ: I started out it was pretty much an innocent act of rebellion. I didn’t see much value in making, especially in my early 20s, of making products to put in galleries that people would buy. That didn’t seem to have enough meaning and nourishment for what I had in mind for myself as an artist.

SKEWVILLE: We went to school for design and graphics and stuff. Then I worked in advertising. So it was kind of like, really, what really inspires me about this, is that I get to do it. No one’s going to fuck with me. In the corporate world, or anywhere else, you just got to do what everybody else tells you.

VINNIE RAY: The act of working on the streets and being involved in the streets, and working without sponsorship, without any type of looking for money, it is a pure, it’s a kind of art in a very pure sense. It’s really trying to go from your mind to expression to viewership. There is no curator, no market value; there’s nobody but you, wheat paste and the balls to go out and do it.

DAN WITZ: Can you see what I did here? I painted the door out, but left the graffiti. Because whatever frame you put up, it looks like the most amazing, spontaneous modern painting. 

WOOSTER COLLECTIVE (Sara Schiller): Marc and I were asked to take a group of people on a walking tour, and we actually thought about 10 people would show up. We didn’t think anybody was really interested in street art. The Wooster Collective had just started and the website wasn’t as vibrant as it is now. To our surprise, I think about 75 people came to learn about street art. At the end, I think everyone felt we had opened their eyes to something that had been right there before their feet for years and that they never noticed.

RYAN WATKINS-HUGHES: I studied painting, and I still paint, but now I’m more interested and focused more on working with projects that get out of the gallery and start to exist in different locations. Relapsed.net came out of looking at the city we live in, looking at advertising space. I wanted to move into actual consumer spaces and the idea of what it is to brand something.

MICHAEL DEFEO: I kind of stumbled into it by accident when I was silk screening and I ended up with a ton of flower prints of all different colors, and I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I knew I wanted to share them with people, but I wasn’t quite sure how. And by seeing a lot of work in Soho and this neighborhood as well, I decided that that would probably be a good idea. About ten years ago I just started gluing them up all over the place. Just to put them up in the street and do this planting, this nature thing, this thing without text that everybody could understand. Just a symbol, that crosses all languages.

FAILE: (Patrick) It started with Aiko and myself and another artist named Patrick Miller. Getting together to do a street collaboration, which started off as A Life, which was a bunch of female nudes that we wheat pasted on the city. Later it became more of an exercise in branding. 

MICHAEL DEFEO: Contributing stuff to the street – it’s not going to last, it’s not a forever sort of thing, and its available to everyone. Its not something just for certain income brackets. But at the same time, you know, it’s become a commodity. And of course this isn’t a new phenomenon, it happened in the 70s and 80s with Haring and Basquiat and stuff. You know, this stuff is being secured by large corporations that want to use it to sell youth a certain form of rebellious imagery.

FAILE: (Patrick) Advertising is clean, it’s on a grid, like a magazine, but the stuff we do is just a little bit, more loose and more versatile. A different way of approaching the viewer, but I think it is the same thing. (Aiko) It’s a both, it’s the yin and yang, you know. (Patrick) I think there is a spectrum of street art. You can’t put one definition on what street art is. You’re going to have artists that are out there that are more on a commercial end. Where they’re branding it. They’re getting their stuff up to get their name up. (Aiko) Brandalism. (Patrick) The word she brought up is Brandalism. (Aiko) Yeah.

WOOSTER COLLECTIVE (Marc Schiller): Advertisers are realizing that ads no longer having an impact with youth. So, one of the reasons that advertisers are trying to co-opt street art, because they know that street art is connecting with people. So they’re trying to actually come out of a major problem, and that is that advertising isn’t selling their products. So street art, graffiti, those kinds of things, which are speaking to people, are now starting to be pulled in.

FAILE: I think it is because of the idea of the individual in society. When you see a person that’s a renegade artist, out on their own, on the street, working, that don’t answers to anyone, and they’re out just doing what they want to be, expressing the idea of the individual, I think brands like Nike find that appealing. 

WOOSTER COLLECTIVE (Marc Schiller): There’s this clash, and the clash is coming to a head, because more and more advertisers are saying, that’s where the energy is, that’s where the juice is, that’s where the creativity is, we need that with our brand. So let’s adopt street art sensibilities, or street art itself into these campaigns. 

RYAN WATKINS-HUGHES: I’ve already seen, you know, multiple pieces that on first look I thought they were, you know, some person’s artwork, just an art campaign, and then you get closer, and you realize that it’s an ad for Sprite. They have stickers now, they don’t say Sprite on them, they just say “Thirst.” At first look its just someone putting stickers up for their tag, but then you realize that’s the same logo that some beverage company is using, and they’re paying kids to go out and put these things in the same places that people are putting their skateboard stickers.

WOOSTER COLLECTIVE (Marc Schiller): Street art is actually a very visual way of communicating, of expressing thought. Advertising, good advertising, good marketing, should be the same thing. So on a personal level, I think it’s made me a much better marketer and it’s made me a much better artist.

RYAN WATKINS-HUGHES: You see young people doing something, and it used to take a generation for it to end up in the mainstream. And now you see, you know, punk rock kids doing something and two weeks later its on MTV.

VINNIE RAY: There’s a war for space on the street, right. It’s thought space, it’s your mental environment, and there’s a war for it, because the advertisers have the budgets to take over.

RYAN WATKINS-HUGHES: From the city’s standpoint, graffiti is bad because it is vandalism. And yet the 6-foot tall poster for some over-priced fashion company isn’t vandalism, that’s advertising. The difference between street art and advertising isn’t that far off. Most graffiti artists are very big on selling themselves, they’re advertising themselves. The difference being, in general, they don’t have the financial resources to pay for the space, so they’re taking it back. I’d say there are far more corporate vandals out there than there are guys with spray paint.

WOOSTER COLLECTIVE (Marc Schiller): I actually don’t even mind graffiti, I don’t mind tagging, cause its part of the urban experience. New York is not Manhattan the movie. New York is, what you see on the street.

SWOON: I used to live on Myrtle Ave, which was totally covered in billboards. And there was a period of time where the billboards were popping up new everyday. And I was like, um, I don’t like this. Not only do I not like this, but they’re at street level and I can interact with this. So I organized like 20 people to make paintings and to cover all the billboards in one morning. We were like, holy shit, we are a force. You know, we can change this neighborhood in an hour.

DAN WITZ: Successful rules for street art is that it lasts for a while. You know, it’s not immediately taken down. Successful street art probably dialogs with other street art, you know. Works with the graffiti, works with the environment. A successful piece also, people see it. I think it takes some risk and some courage to go out there and do it. You know the point of putting stuff on the street is that it reaches all sorts of people, and hopefully, you know, has some impact on them.

VINNIE RAY: I think that if it resonates to the person more than just a mere glance, if it somehow comes off the wall, if they consider it even for 5 more steps. That’s what I think would be good street art. Not to just sort of fall into the wall, it has to come off the walls. The “Want Peace” piece project that I did was in the subways. It can work anywhere where there’s paint. At first glance you say wet paint, but then it is like Want Peace. And again, it’s that street art vibe of getting it in your face and promoting thoughts.

SWOON: Basically I’ll just start with a sheet of paper, make a really loose drawing and then refine the drawing with the x-acto knife. So that what is really happening with that is that the paper is kind of nothing and the wall is everything. You know, you put it up and all you’re really putting on the wall is a blank sheet of paper. And it’s kind of the wall that makes the thing happen. Some of them are just friends and family, they’re just, sort of, human portraits. And some of them are a little more specific, like watching, you know, the guy who sells fruit on 7^th Ave, or bicycle delivery people, or just the different kinds of people that inhabit this, this sphere. And kind of drawing in to them lots of elements of urban life and different stuff. And just sort of making them, I don’t know, like an x-ray of the city, or something. And postering them, with a bucket of wallpaper, paste back onto the city that they were inspired by.

DAN WITZ: I’m interested in what painting can do that nothing else can do. Photography can’t do it, sculpture can’t do it, no image can do, what can paint on a surface do. And one thing that I find fascinating is that it can make something look like it is real. Something looks like it is floating; something flat looks like it is coming out of the wall. This is an effective sort of seduction strategy, for you know, especially for younger kids. I use a lot of, almost sort of, lowbrow painting techniques, as a sort of entry strategy for a lot of my pieces.

MICHAEL DEFEO: In some ways, you can’t tell whether or not this sort of abstract scaffolding structure is being build or if it’s falling apart. And I kind of like that. How it ties into street art, I mean, it comes up and then it comes down.

SKEWVILLE: We’re kind of limited in our, in what we do, because most of the stuff works over wires. We’re kind of really limited, to where we can throw stuff up. So it’s all about the money shot.

DAN WITZ: There’s this relationship it has with the photograph you take of it. Because there’s the piece as it exists on the street, and then there’s the photograph of the piece. And then there’s the piece on the web site, there’s a piece in a book. Most of my pieces, I think, are better in real life.

MICHAEL DEFEO: What’s fascinating is that this work, that people put up in the streets, meant to be viewed in the street, is now being viewed by people sitting in front of their computer. 

WOOSTER COLLECTIVE: (Sara Schiller) Whether you’re in Detroit or a small town in France, you feel connected and inspired, yeah, I want to go out and create art and put it up, because I know through the internet, it can reach other artists. (Marc Schiller) What the Wooster site did was to open it up into a real community, where people could interact with each other and they could see what others are doing that week.

RYAN WATKINS-HUGHES: I started doing the Reverse Shoplifting, which is, I take cans and I remove the label from the cans and I replace the labels with labels that I’ve designed with my photographs. And put the barcode back on them, put the price tag on them, and then, put them in a grocery store, and see what happens. I’m working with ideas of taking art off the pedestal and putting it into the city. Putting it into something that someone could stumble across the website, just surfing the internet, or could stumble across one of the other pieces just going grocery shopping.

DAN WITZ: My whole group, I came up with the musicians and artists, and they were dying like flies, from either drugs, mostly heroin overdose, and HIV. And it seemed to reach a critical mass, and it seemed to require some sort of elegy. And so I created this grim reaper character, which also, since I put it up near cope spots for heroin, which was all over my neighborhood, you know, it became like a warning sign. This is like two in the morning, Lower East Side, with a ladder going up to the second story of a building. So it was gnarly, it was hairy. And I got lot of cop trouble, lot of chased around, a lot of hiding, but I didn’t get arrested. 

MICHAEL DEFEO: The police become your ultimate critic, when you’re in a situation with them, because if they don’t like your stuff, you’re in trouble.

DAN WITZ: I was putting up a paper poster on the streets, and there was another guy who was putting up paper posters on the street, also white by the way, this Revs guy, Cost and Revs. And they were just putting up all over the place this things which said Revs and Cost. And people didn’t like them, they were obnoxious to the status quo, or the powers that be, and that guy went to jail. What’s the difference between what I did and he did? None. But someone made a, actually I was on a TV show where they had both us, they did little documentaries on both of us, and they had the graffiti crimes task force people, who never said a word about me. Its like they decided what I was doing was art and what the other guy was doing wasn’t art. Who decides that?

SWOON: People will approach me, and they’ll say, I really love your work but I really hate graffiti. 

PUBLIC PERSON #1: It’s nice, it’s like a palimpsest of layers of people’s work.

PUBLIC PERSON #2: They’ve ruined it.

PUBLIC PERSON #3: I think people in New York really appreciate it.

PUBLIC PERSON #4: I think vandalism could be very cool if people take proper advantage of it.

PUBLIC PERSON #3: It adds beauty to the city.

PUBLIC PERSON #5: Is that Chinese art?

SWOON: I don’t draw a huge rift between what I’m doing and between graffiti. And I don’t separate, like this is graffiti and this is art. I really feel that it’s sort of part of the same phenomena. 

PUBLIC PERSON #4: This mural behind me would have been pretty good, even though, that was itself, vandalized. 

PUBLIC PERSON #6: Graffiti is different because it conforms to its own set of values. Whereas a lot of street art has a more open feeling. It can do whatever it wants.

PUBLIC PERSON #5: It’s different, it’s different.

SWOON: I think if you ask the question about it being a class issue, I clearly have an advantage written all over me. Which is that I don’t fit the description of the bad guy that you are looking for.

STUART EWEN: The real challenge that faces us, not just as artists but as political people, is not just figuring out what kind of artistic expression opens up new possibilities of thought, but also what are the strategies of distribution, what are the strategies of continuation, of an ongoing presence that will begin to hammer away at the empty images which are everywhere.

SWOON: This work is about an instance in which you’re not thinking about commerce and you’re kind of working against capital, and you’re just creating a moment that’s totally free.

END