interview part one.

Unfortunately, I’ve been sick all weekend and sound like a nine year old, but at least when you read this it will be in your own voice.

In this post I will go over the interview I had with gues and task. The conversation I had with these artists answered a lot of questions I had, myself, created very different possibilities for.

After immediate hellos, I climbed up onto a stool and placed my green folder on the high top table in the back room of the Dunedin brewery. There were four of us and a basket of pita bread hummus being picked at in the center of the sticker pressed table. I thanked task and gues for taking time to talk to me about their work and smiled at my friend sitting across from me, who made the interview possible. Graffiti, to me seems such a life decision similar to the FBI with its identity protecting aliases and the scarcity of details being told to anyone for fear of being found out. I was lucky to even know they own cans of spray paint.
I fired questions at them and took quick notes which piled onto my page in surprising form. They were so unbelievably positive about their work all the while creating for themselves a culture completely separate from that of the gang related street tagging. The bombing they do, which I immediately questioned the point of, is to gain recognition for their work, the more people who see their names somewhere the more likely they are to associate their street work with their alias. This shows other artists their progress in the art, as well as opening the eyes to on lookers who might not normally take an interest in this type of art. Gues asks me for a pen and paper and begins to draw his alias in graffiti style as he helps answer the rest of my questions. Most graffiti artists, including the two I sat in between, are affiliated with different groups, the name gues and task are under is DVK. This helps the people within a group gain recognition wherever one of the group members may live or visit. Groups form camaraderie across cities states and seas that represent a certain message, style and/or association thus reinforcing the idea of strength in numbers.
The ideal placement for their artwork, task when on, is on run down, abandoned buildings, something I found fitting to my answer in previous blogs. The reasons however were different from mine. Run down buildings are ideal because they hold the artwork longer. If task or gues or any other artist were to tag a newer building, the possibility of their artwork being removed would be higher. In tagging old buildings, more people will see their work because it will most likely be ignored by owners, authorities, etc. longer.

They went on with understanding that some places are just inappropriate creating a stronger tie to the average person in agreement that they wouldn’t want spray paint all over their house either.