SWOON: I try to cultivate a respectful ethos even within a very brazen activity

What used to be defined once by the word “graffiti,” has drastically changed in the past decade. Not simply gifted artists came to the streets, but also highly qualified ones, and what used to be perceived before as vandalism, has acquired the form and content of real art. The escapades of the famous British anonym Banksy is only a small part of such a versatile and full-blooded phenomenon as street-art.

The 34-year-old English artist Swoon (real name is Caledonia Dance Curry) is one of the most famous street female artists in the world. She graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which is a highly prestigious educational establishment, and was facing a career of a successful commercial artist, however she chose a path way more complicated, and back in 1999 her first works appeared on New York’s walls.

Swoon is a unique artist because among the street experimenters she is one of the few masters of psychological portrait. She creates portraits of her family, friends, and people from her neighborhood. The technique she uses is close to engraving, when the picture is first cut out on a wooden surface or linoleum, then is printed on paper; Caledonia also uses silk graphic. The accomplished works are stuck in the streets. In her choice of places the artist also breaks the traditions of graffiti showiness: it is more likely to see her works on the walls in quiet, unremarkable neighborhoods, where people are doing a lot of walking.

The images created by Swoon has little in common with the social affectedness of the works by Banksy’s and his followers, as well as the decorative-comics obtrusiveness of the graffiti works we usually see in the streets. The palette of her works is restrained, the colors subdued. In a sense, these are exquisite graphical works with an ingenious composition: people’s silhouettes can be placed in a virtuoso paper ornament, cut in large paper sheets. The author focuses on the emotional state of the heroes: they often hide in melancholy, they can be lonely or isolated, submerged in their own world; we become witnesses to a real drama, as all characters have their own story to tell.

The recognition came very soon: in the mid-2000s Swoon began to receive frequent invitations to art galleries; the artist did enter the world of officio art, but she played according to her own rules. Caledonia’s brightest works in the recent years are the so-called art flotillas. Jointly with her partisans from the creative team Justseeds, the artist constructs boats and rafts, which are real floating installations: each of the fantastic ships is a real work of art, executed from absolutely routine materials, sometimes of the rubbish gathered in the neighborhood. Each of these flotillas of art and anarchy has turned into a sensation: Miss Rockaway Armada floated along the Mississippi in 2006, Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea sailed around New York in 2008, Swimming Cities of Serenissima impressed the Venice Biennale in 2009.

In January 2007 Cally, as the artist’s friends call her, paid a visit to Kyiv. Our conversation started specifically with this trip.

Ms. Caledonia, in 2007 you came to Kyiv to make an installation in the Pinchuk Art Center within the framework of the exhibit GENERATIONS.USA. How did you feel about the city?

“When I was installing in Kyiv I made a mistake and thought I was going to be there longer than I was, meaning that I saw very little of Kyiv. I went out one day and wheat pasted in the middle of downtown. The Day that I had set aside to go to explore Kyiv has never happened, because the previous day I had to quit my installation mid-day and go catch my plane. So I loved the city but I had a very short amount of time there and never really got to explore it at all.”

How and when did your street art start?

“Well, getting to New York was such a huge shift for me from the life of a small town, I had been so excited to have such proximity to the art world, but almost instantly I began to perceive it as stifling and alienating, almost nothing spoke to me viscerally, so much of the work that I was seeing felt cold and distant and irrelevant. It was all so many huge austere objects for investment and the constant sense that the joke must be on you. At school I was getting the feeling of being herded into a corral, like we were all going to find the one thing that we would base our career on, beg some gallery to show us, and then go on repeating that action for the rest of our lives. I remember a specific day where I just lost it in the middle of painting class I put my brushes down and walked away from my canvas, my teacher asked me what was wrong and all I could say was that something had to change but I didn’t know what.

“There were a couple of formative experiences at this time. I remember seeing a show of documentation and notes by Gordon Matta-Clark, at first I was reading the plans and thought he must be joking, all of this stuff about entering abandoned buildings and chain sawing out sections of the floor before anyone noticed. Then when I saw the pictures, and they were so devastatingly beautiful, so temporal and strange, created from the decaying parts of a city, which was at that time being evacuated en masse. It struck me through and through and I knew that in whatever tiny way I could I would try to create something which embodied some of the same principles of creating temporal moments of beauty which were more a part of the city itself than a singular object. I started to notice people who were working with the city in all kind of different ways.”

Was it then that you started to do street art?

“One day you don’t even see all the stuff going on right in front of your face, and the next day you are obsessed, it’s a total perceptual shift. The impermanence and immediacy of it appealed to me instantly. It was slightly violent and totally generous at the same time. At first I just wanted to be a part of that collage of information so I started postering these little transparent collages that were intended to blend with all of the imagery and layers already existing on so many city streets. I wanted to make something which wasn’t an object and couldn’t belong to anyone, but which was simply a moment that passed with the changing. I guess I started that process around 1999-2000. I was working originally with small stickers, and then with billboards, and then I started working with the ad spaces in the subway, and from there I was working with the walls and postering and stuff. I knew I had no graffiti background whatsoever, so I had to come with something totally different.”

What was it that attracted you to working in the streets?

“I loved the layers, the natural beauty of a thousand coincidental markings and factors. From where I was at the time it seemed like the street was the only place where real beauty was occurring. It was the only place that was open to spontaneity. Being illegal, it’s naturally unregulated and in that way supremely free. And there was a lot of space for anger, for cutting yourself a place to be in the world – like new plants breaking through soil, I think that the birth of anything new is almost always preceded by a breaking. Graffiti is so much a history of the young generations saying here I am. Here we are. It’s a long story, but the most important part was that I needed to find a truly publicly accessible art form, one that is both available to the public, and happens in a place where anyone can participate. Working on the street, by its nature, creates this situation. I also just loved the collage of the city streets.”

Do you have any difficulty reconciling the time and energy commitment that goes into your outdoor pieces with the ephemeral nature of street art?

“I’ve always loved the idea of making things which do not outlive their relevance, which exist for a time and then are gone. Some things I keep and protect, but I like giving some things to the present moment for as long as they last. And if in their decay they somehow embody the difficult things that we feel about the passage of time, well, they are expressing something in that process that I never could have put into them with my own hand.”

Do you have a tag name?

“Now I do, but when I first started I didn’t have a name, but then I was doing so many different things, I was doing the billboards, and subway ads, and I had started postering... I found that with artists who were doing a lot of seemingly different things, when they signed their name, it made me really happy because I could connect their disparate pieces, I could trace their thought process, hear their voice in the conversation. I appreciated it coming from other people and I realized that contrary to the way it is usually viewed (as a territorial mark) signing your work can be sort of an open, almost friendly gesture, to show yourself, and to not be totally anonymous. I decided to take a name at that point.”

In your opinion, what is more memorable, an image or a tag, a name on the street?

“It all depends, anything that hits hard, that is perfect for that space and time will be remembered, whether it’s a crooked roller tag that says ‘dirt’ seven storeys up or a masterly stencil crouching on a lamp base.”

How do you feel about the fact that you’re doing something that was deemed illegal?

“I have my own internal moral code about what I do. If the joy that it brings to me and others outweighs the potential damage, then I don’t feel conflicted. I try to cultivate a respectful ethos even within a very brazen activity. The truth is, I think the walls of cities should be a public sounding board, a sort of a visual commons, and so I don’t feel too conflicted about participating in what I see as a vital part of city life.

“Between cabaret laws and ‘quality of life’ laws, there are so many laws in this city which are aimed at making the city appear to be the kind of place where law and order are the only dictates that drive us and that everyone who lives here makes a bee line from work, to their homes to watch friends re-runs on television and then straight back to work again. I am not interested in that city. That city is a cancer that has spread across the country in the form of housing developments and the suburban dream. It’s maybe a kind of a passionate stupidity that makes me ignore the law, but when I want something to happen, my first instinct is to try and make it happen, right then. I want to make the city that I live in, with my own actions, and my own hands, now, today, and doing it through laws and bureaucratic channels just doesn’t make sense to me. There isn’t time. That thinking is too indirect and abstract for me. I want to see a city created out of the direct actions of citizens on the place that they live. I want to know you live here. I want to see your name on the wall and your fingerprint all over the place. It’s an organic order forcing its way up from beneath the imposed order dictated by laws and urban planning.

“I really think that the prankster myth is valuable here. Throughout history, pranksters have been looking at fences and then pushing them aside. It’s about taking situations, and changing one thing, and then looking at it in another way. Through action, you can move the perception. In this case, the boundary between public bulletin board and private real estate investment is thrown wide with a gesture as tiny as a marker tag. It’s almost like a magic trick.”

Is the illegal part, in itself, important? If it is, why?

“Yes, it’s important. Not to say that I don’t think legal murals are good, but the only way to be truly free is to be outside of the limitations of the law; outside of the laws of commerce as well. Legal walls are fine, exhibitions are fine, but there has to always be a current of totally spontaneous unsanctioned expression running through our lives. This is the place where the truth will be told.”

Have you ever had problems with the authorities?

“I have mostly had problems with the law that could be talked through... There are obvious challenges like the illegality, but then there are more subtle challenges that have nothing to do with the law, like being hated by graffiti writers for taking up space and breaking the rules of graf, at the same time as being loved by the corporate next big thing mongers (with friends like these who needs the NYPD)... but it’s also the most rewarding work I have ever done.”

What reactions have you had from the public in response to your work?

“Many and varied, but mostly an intense and surprising amount of positivity. Once in a little alleyway in London I got growled at by a jowly man with a briefcase hollering ‘vandal!’ out the side of his mouth while I was in the middle of a conversation with a third grade teacher about how she wanted to bring her class by later on to see the piece I was putting up. That seemed like a pretty accurate cross section.”

Of all your actions and graffiti works, which was the most difficult to make and why?

“The boats are far and away the most difficult thing I have ever done, from the million logistical details, to the scale of it, to life on the water. It’s incredible, but incredibly difficult.”

You integrate your work in the urban landscape. How do you choose a spot?

“Got instinct. I am in love with the liminal, third-space, left-over parts which are often right in the middle of the most vital parts of the city, but sometimes tucked away a little more. I like areas where people are doing a lot of walking. Advertising is always trying to place itself a million miles above us, looming down with the shiniest flashiest most disconnected depictions of beauty, just out of reach like the rest of its promises, and I find myself trying to get down below that, at eye level, where people are walking and to depict the life that exists here at the bottom edge, our ordinary reality as it remains connected to the ground.”

What is your work about, if you had to summarize it?

“Human connection. Paying attention. Moments of surprise. Participation in the creation of your urban environment.”

I wonder if the arrow should really be pointed to the place off the wall where pedestrian viewers and your work intersect – they find each other not on the walls but in the city. Is your art a cutout or a relationship created between viewers and the city?

“Brassai said this thing which became instantly important to my working aspirations the minute that I read it. It was while he was photographing stone carvings done all over the city walls by Parisians in the 1930s, and he said, ‘many graffiti born on the walls of Paris have struck me with the force of an event, as if the world were suddenly larger.’ When I ask myself what he means by the world becoming larger, I think of this space that you’ve mentioned, the momentary intersection of a paste-up on the wall and the pedestrian whose eye it catches. If it’s truly going to become a space of it’s own, however fleeting, something has to happen in that split second, That something is, I hope, a moment of recognition, a wink from another human presence which is there but not there, like a little reflection of self embedded in the wall.”

What do you think street art possesses that other genres lack?

“The certainty that if you want your world to be different, it’s up to you to make it different, using the skills that you know best, and whatever tools you can get your hands on. Now. Not later when you get permission and money and all of the right everything. Now. However you can.”