NEWS
EVENTS
This Guy's Cleaning Up!
Indie | Monday 1st November 2010 | Osh
The UK’s Paul Curtis, better known as 'Moose' is one of the pioneers of ‘reverse graffiti’- creating art by cleaning the dirty from walls using a shoe brush, water and elbow grease.
Firstly for those who do not know, what is reverse graffiti?
Reverse graffiti is the name I gave to a process of creating art that looks like graffiti but has been made by removing grime or moss from the surface of a wall or pavement instead of adding something, like paint. The contrast between the clean and dirty areas are often as strong as using paint, but the process is in reverse - we reface and don't deface. I haven't called it reverse graffiti for ages, I call it grime writing or refacing. I think some college kids bought the domain and are making a fortune advertising for airlines and clothes brands
How did the whole concept come together?
It started in the 90's when I was running a small independent record label and we desperately needed some press. I'd held the idea for years since working as a kitchen porter in my teens. I saw how vibrant clean marks could be and then spotted the perfect locations in Leeds where drunks had cleaned bold lines with the slumpy shoulders on the walls of the ring road tunnels
How long have you been involved with this?
This is the 12th year I've been doing this amazingly. We were in the puff daddy issue of the face back in the summer of 1999 but were at it before that. What is this based upon..is this heavily on being environmentally friendly?Every mark I make is an environmental message, showing how polluted the world is where we are. But it's also about waste too, I've done the billboard cut out thing for years too, as soon as the date on the poster runs out it's legitimate to use as far as I'm concerned, it's litter, even before it's sell by date it's still litter. My method of message writing looks for opportunities like this.
What message do you hope to convey through this new art form? That in a lot of cases we probably have enough to be going on with and that we don't need to keep upgrading our things. Upgrade our attitudes and habits. In effect this process has turned dirt into a commodity, companies are falling over themselves to get a piece of green advertising without realising the irony of encouraging more consumerism and more dirt. We are recycling this dirt, reclaiming it when it's the last thing you'd think of reclaiming. I think this philosophy can be taken up in every day life
You did a commissioned piece for the police and then you got arrested and charged under the Anti-Social Behaviour Act and were ordered to clean up your work. How did you feel about this?I have been arrested a couple of times but never charged. Once i was arrested for ' criminal damage' though that argument is massively flawed as nothing is damaged and if they arrest me they would have to arrest all the street cleaners In the country. Why were they bothered with dirt anyway, not their job. They said I'd left marks on the wall when really I'd been removing marks, but if they want to find people who made the marks they should see who was polluting the air in that region and arrest them. You shouldn't be clever with policemen. They said they'd let me go if i dirtied the wall again! Really really. In the end we cleaned it off they were so pissed off they were going to throw me in a cell. Cleaning it off was in legal terms like returning a stolen car to it's owner.
This movement has grown worldwide can you see people and the government being more accepting of this now?
I have worked for the police, the GLA, the dept of work and pensions and TFL, it's overground now and has been accepted in some areas for what it is - a practically zero impact form of message writing. Though there are those, like Leeds city council who tell me that they will ' never work with me'.
You have been commissioned by a few big brands which one was the most fun to do?I have to be really careful who I work with as it can work against the principles of the idea. I loved working for the police as it felt part of this whole reversal I am playing with. It felt really wrong and right at the same time. We were cleaning the size of prison cells onto the floor showing people the size of their prison bedrooms if they were caught with a firearm.
I love working for Greenpeace, that's when this thing makes most sense. I went to Oslo on the rainbow warrior to say yo to Obama. You earn your prize. I also got chased up and down the Thames by the river police doing a recent piece for them. Think Jim'll fix it for grown ups. That's easily the most fun I've had with it. Larger companies need to exert so much control on their output that they stifle much creativity. They're normally no fun to work with.
You have your company Symbollix, tell us a bit about this?
Symbollix was set up ages ago as a spanner in the works for conventional thinking. We try to turn things on their heads allowing us to take a Fresh look at them. We started with graffiti and to come at the process from the opposite direction trying to make it positive and acceptable.
Once you remove the parts of the process of making graffiti that the public find so disturbing with processes that are positive and do no harm (cleaning) and you witness the same response you realise that the public here has a problem with harmless self expression and the questions are being asked of them and their rigid ideas.
Your work is very inspiring what do you hope for the future?
I'm very proud of being called inspiring. I hope the future isn't orange but it's a colour we get to choose individually and not from the dulux paint chart.
Tabatha Taylor
