Breaking the rules in Art
a cura di Gaia Moretti
It’s rather tricky because society, too, has changed a lot. We are much more familiar with the phenomenon of graffiti and how it came about at the end of the 1960s. Primarily, each movement that starts as countercultural at grassroots level, if it has a strong impact, inevitably ends up being drawn into the mainstream. What changed everything was the advent of the Internet, which radically altered means of dissemination, the public and the methods for receiving all of this: what took years to spread beforehand, could now take two weeks. The process of dissemination being faster, makes the assimilation one faster, too, such – as for instance – the assimilation of counterculture on the part of official culture. All this transformation also took place in the field of graffiti because the Internet has evidently led all the writers around the world to share their work, raising the bar and, at the same time, increasing risks in order to do so because it is a lot easier to track you.
Yes, it was primarily our choice. Initially there was a need for it, then it became a choice; they are individual masks, so as well as keeping us anonymous, they are something we wear when we want to change our personality and have some sort of expressive freedom, more legitimate at times.
Yes, that’s right. Right from the start we gave special consideration to protecting our identity and minimizing the risks we ran. At the same time though, what was a need for us at the start, became a primary element of our way of acting and thinking. In our work we nevertheless process many clichés of the graffiti world with irony, and the mask can be an example of that. We started using it in an easy-going way, somewhat teasingly and then that approach resulted in the emergence of three aliases with masks who rework many stylistic elements of the world of graffiti in their own way.
That was definitely because our mentors, who at the time were the entire Como-based school, i.e. Ema Jons, Tiff, Black One, Covari, Danilo Vadis, had enlightened us as to the fact that using a pole and a roller enables you to create something more imposing than others: it’s less likely to get covered up, it’s higher up compared to others and it’s simply more powerful. Also, we had trained as painters and therefore feel perhaps closer to brushes than spray paint which, however, we use a lot. Initially, we started doing grafitti like everyone else aged 14-15, but that was at a time when in the Italian provinces grafitti were highly technical, they had to be accurate, clean and without drips. Over the years, those requirements cleared up, leading to the emergence of much wilder and “dirtier“ styles. In any event, as early as a year after trying graffiti with no success, we discovered the works of some people from Como who came from the local punk scene, and who had started painting with poles and rollers. This took place alongside others who were already doing this in Italy, such as Blu and Run for instance, but – while they had a more descriptive style – the Como-based punk group painted in a much more painterly, expressionist and primitive way. We went wild with excitement, saw their stuff, met them and started with poles and rollers ourselves. This enabled us to do illegal, unauthorised works in very little time but covering massive areas; then little by little we took back control of spray paint cans and used them again in a dirtier and stranger way. Even the name CANEMORTO is part of our rejection of the names used by standard graffiti crews, of the American acronyms, but aimed to be something manifestly more ignorant and creative.
Ah, but that’s something that everyone wants to know. This is a good explanation however.
From a certain point of view it is. That was a time when we wanted to make a sort of stylistic statement and therefore the idea was to go to Lisbon for two months and paint all day long, unauthorised. This happened also at a time when everything called street art had become much more institutionalised. There were festivals and commissions that would pick projects on the basis of what could or couldn’t be done. What was called street art had become largely detached from what was graffiti’s aggressive attitude – painting wherever and in whichever way you wish. It was important to us to bring the focus back to this attitude with an aesthetic of our own, a more pictorial one.
Of course, we tried to get passersby involved by asking them to be offensive to us. In some cases there was no need to: they were angry that we were creating obscene works, others played along. We work a lot on parallelisms between fact and fiction, where you have these three clearly fictional characters, surreal, exasperated and dramatic but whose actions are performed and actually accomplished. Everything is based on this concept which has subsequently become the element on which we have worked – and still do work – a lot, truly so, to create a fictional universe that invades reality.
The thing we’ve liked ever since we were kids, and still do like, is that, the minute you meddle in a public space in an unauthorised manner, your work is immediately under the spotlight. Whereas if you were to do a painting, you would have to go through a long and boring process of selection and acceptance of your painting, based on a variety of external, social and cultural factors. When we paint a wall on the motorway in two hours, some 300 000 people may see it in a month; to have a painting reach such numbers in an enclosed space you would probably need to work all your life. To create an unauthorised work that has not gone through any social screening, but is before everyone’s eyes, is the goal of graffiti culture and what makes it unbelievable. Add to all of this the intrinsic desire to paint ever bigger things and take over the largest possible area. Leaving a two-metre mark rather than a two-centimetre one gives you incredible freedom, and there is also the thing of imposing on others, which is almost a fascist way, yet you have no choice but to look at what I’ve done. Clearly we are just saying ‘fascist’, in those terms we’ve never had any political approaches. However, when you are constantly forced to see things governed by society in the public space, such as for instance what to buy, why should you feel guilty when instead I’m showing you a painting that shows nothing but its own pictorial character? There is no subliminal message, no request, no political slogan, it’s just pictorial art set in the public space.
Any artist, who doesn’t come from a rich family, is forced to deal with money, such as through selling objects. In the West there are no artists without some economic return. We, too, make art which has no economic return, i.e. illegal walls, but then we also make things that can be sold. There is no contradiction. As in every context, there are different ways. There are street artists who become famous for wall pieces bearing political slogans, and then as soon as they achieve some fame, they start doing brands here and there, advertising for every kind of company. But even the more radical ones, such as Blu and Bansky, have done shows and silkscreen printing to earn a living. Saying ‘ make art without a return’ is a somewhat romantic concept but it’s a not very realistic one. And more than 50% of what you make is invested in other projects which is then a way of carrying on with those projects.
In our view, what is called street art isn’t art, but decoration, design, craftsmanship: this is not to belittle these disciplines, but because often what you pretend should be art is in actual fact commissioned decoration of public spaces, and this is the great limitation of street art. Now, all those who have an ounce of artistic sensitivity and who have been classed thus, try to meet that tag. These days we don’t really like being called street artists because inevitably this is a concept connected with a figure who makes a certain kind of work, with an alluring aesthetic, on a wall, on commission which is then submitted to a jury and so on. It is no longer art. We have paid – both in a good and bad way – the consequences of the choice we made right from the start, of painting in a public space with a style close to the evolution of painting of the last one hundred years and thus expressionist, wild, far from the idea of standard beauty. And this, as a consequence, has always left us out of the circles of international street art festivals because, naturally, when you organize a festival and must put works in public spaces, you wouldn’t want people not to understand those works, and therefore you end up lowering the quality and selecting artists with a certain decorative aesthetic so that even if my aunt goes past she’ll think: ‘look how nice that is!’. This has led to the collapse of artistic research in the world of street art and turned it into a purely decorative phenomenon.
Any of the projects we have done. Nothing has ever been imposed on us. Every time we have received a suggestion for a project that could jeopardize our artistic freedom, tying our hands, we have turned it down. So far, all the things we have done have always been based on decisions made in complete freedom, where limitations were dictated more by materials, technical problems or time issues but never on content.
Instagram.
It’s the mirror of a plurality of people who you are only able to see behind an object. But perhaps it has not even died, it has just changed, society has changed, the tools through which society shows itself such as social media for instance: counterculture is however alive and kicking and even more connected – at global level – more than it ever was, and this is the good side of the Internet. The negative one is that all the countercultural movements are swallowed into society itself and this happens very quickly. Sometimes this is not even a bad thing. Thus it has not died, it has just changed. The 1960s after all were a very different reality.