shok1 interview
by ammo city on feb 21, 2005, 19:20
shok1 has just had a successful show at the tobacco dock in wapping, east london. ammo city gets an earful...
ammo city: tell us about these pictures
shok1: images from my last show at "to be confirmed". it's a street brands show, a new kind of place for me to show at. i'm experimenting with putting the art in different contexts at the moment - one of the ideas i have carried over from my foundation in the ny movement was the idea of making and placing art anywhere and everywhere, liberating it from restrictions.
i painted one big installation and hung 14 new print designs. the installation is from my staying power series, which deals with the idea of people who dedicate themselves to the cultures of their youth for their whole lives. since the context was fashion, i represented an old punk lady, an ageing rocker and a ancient b-boy. it was also intended to be something of a satire on the way the fashion industry recycles youth cultures and its constant transience, what with all their industry talk about "youth culture dying".
i'm interested in the relationship between youth and seniority. obviously, in the west we are obsessed with youth, but i'm all about what i will be doing when i'm 50 ... devoting your whole life to mastering something is when you can get good. fuck this 5 minute mtv mentality. i've taught art off and on for years and one of the main ideas i try to get over is the idea of trying to make art every day. its the only way to even start to get good.
some of the prints were street posters that i put in posh frames - again, for the sake of irony - the other set i hung from a washing line with some carefully stained chesty y-fronts, to take the piss out of the fashion thing a little bit more.
ammo: what attracted / inspired you to graf art?
shok1: i don't use the expression "graffiti art". it was a misnomer right from the start and these days its being used to describe so many things, it means nothing. writing is the proper term.
i grew up drawing. we were given big sheets of that old-school computer paper with the holes down the sides to keep us quiet, so when i was a horrible teenager, the idea of drawing illegally appealed to me. in 1981, i first noticed street writing - there was an artist who wrote "baz" with an anarchy for the "a" everywhere, it impressed me. then in 1984, the new york thing came over and that was really the start for me.
ammo: what were your first writing experiences?
shok1: stereotypical things that aren't really that interesting to talk about.
ammo: do you have formal art training?
shok1: no, i had the opportunity to do that but it didn't seem to make sense to me, coming from making outsider art. i wanted to retain my freedom. i read an interview with the designer david carson a while back where he talked about doing his foundation unschooled and then studying later on. that struck a chord with me. i think if you do it that way around, you avoid the risk of an emerging persona being damaged by other people's preconceptions. there are a lot of destructive teachers out there.
my concept is all about "guerilla education" - study everything you see, take liberties at borders, find a way to get the knowledge you need.
ammo: what other media / styles / genres do you work in?
shok1: i don't like to think in terms of genre. looking back, i don't feel like i ever fitted very neatly into the writing movement and i definitely don't feel that what i am doing now does.
i understand that we are being washed away in a tidal wave of culture and the temptation is to clutch at labels, but i think this oversimplification and dumbing down of culture is really damaging. people are starting to think in sound-bites, depth is being lost. newspeak.
i switch style and media at will, whatever best expresses the underlying ideas. for example, i make some things that look more graphic or illustrative but they are still art - its all about the intent. i think way too much attention is being directed to media and technique in these movements ... i realised i had been working more and more conceptually over the years.
i think most people are still tied to old preconceptions about art ... they automatically think its "art" if its on canvas or painted "expressively" (that tired cliché of the artist with their face all screwed up orgasmically chucking paint around, cutting their ear off). there are people making art in all walks of life, people should open up their minds. look at parkour - the sportswear companies immediately tried to rebrand it as "free running" so they could turn it into a sports product. it's not a sport. it's an art-form. it has a lot in common with writing - the "something out of nothing" approach, the reinterpretation of public spaces ... i was really excited to see something truly fresh in these times of recycled culture ... the rinse cycle.
ammo: do you have a day job? how do you make a living?
shok1: i have been living from my art for a long time now. i wish i didn't have to but devoting a big chunk of my life to some empty job that i don't care about seems like a bigger "sell out" ... i would have been quite well off but i can't bring myself to do things that i feel are cheesy and i'm too proud of the movement that inspired me and my own achievements to kiss arse.
in the 80's, it was so fucking taboo to want to make money from the art, now hardly anyone seems to care. its cool to sell out. i still don't feel comfortable with it but its a means to an end - i hate money but it can buy you artistic freedom.
ammo: what/who are you influences?
shok1: my life. people. society.
ammo: graffiti has been targeted along with vandalism and public disorder as one of the agenda items for the run-up to the british general elections, what are your views?
shok1: history repeating itself. its an easy platform because the results are visible, a perfect foil for the superficial age we live in. its like the media attention on "binge drinking". come on! brits have always drank to excess, suddenly, like salmonella in eggs, it becomes a big issue. its always easy to attack visible symptoms rather than addressing the much bigger problems that cause them - poverty, boredom, no means to earn self-esteem... lets have a higher minimum wage, lets put money into the population rather than wars, lets have affordable housing, lets have a country where the ethos is not survival/selfishness. england is one of the most affluent countries in the world, so how come i know so many talented hard working people who are on the poverty line?
ammo: is it possible to be a commercial writer and if so how does this affect the medium?
shok1: i don't think that's a useful description. commercial art is something different, writing must have an element of freedom and dissidence. it is possible to be a writer who does commercial work though. i like seditionary ideas - for example, suppose a kid gives a company the tired 80's cliché that they think they want, takes the money, and uses that freedom to do some next level shit that moves things on? done correctly, that's taking from the system and putting resources into the movement ... that can be seen as consistent with the original ideology of stealing the paint i think.
its all about judo moves in the 21st century. deflecting energy, making things happen. finding a way to make something out of nothing.
ammo: what are your views on the cultural appropriation of anti-establishment art for the selling of goods by the establishment?
shok1: my heart is still sickened by it, but my mind understands that it is unavoidable. i have struggled with this issue for years. if the real people refuse to address it, all that happens is that they get designers to fake it or toys who will work for peanuts. what has been heartening to me in recent times is that there have been some more mature interactions between the two sides - the ck bottles is a good example of that, i think. the artists were placed on an equal standing as brands and - i would hope - got paid craploads.
commodification is always going to happen anyway, my beef is that millions have been made from the artform but hardly anything has gone back into it by comparison. kaws publishing the neckface book was exciting to me as an example of the movement empowering itself rather that leaving its portrayal in the hands of insiders.
the corporates have clearly realised that they have been educating their market at the same time they were plying their deceits - so 21st century heads are getting more and more savvy to marketing games ... they are being forced to be more considered about how they do it, less exploitative.
ammo: does the hanging of street art in the living room / office / board room / museum affect it's cultural context?
shok1: of course. the old preconception is that the artform loses it's vitality when taken out of an illegal context. i had a debate about this a while back with the editor of flash art; i was surprised that he shared this point of view ... i feel that most of the fine art world actually knows very little about the movement, its written off as art brut and relegated to "low art" status.
it's true that context has always been a vital component in the artform, but i think that it has much more to offer ... that idea is limiting the potential. i want to try and make good art, not just "pat on the head for the graffiti boy". i'm not a noble savage. the originators of the movement that inspired me were visionary children who scripted a manifesto that has grown to be one of the biggest art movements the world has ever seen ... albeit a flawed manifesto. i think they achieved the impossible by simply not knowing that they couldn't.
