Art Vandalism or Conversation?

Photo by Jean-Pierre Caissie

“It’s a phenomenon unique to public art: the possibility of response,” wrote Jean-Pierre Caissie, the artistic director of Dare-Dare, on his blog last month. “Artistic expression is usually a one-way street. The artist expresses himself and the museum presents his work. A few attempts at responding to the artist have ended up in a court date. But street art, or ephemeral public art, offers the opportunity for passers-by to comment.”

Roaming from site to site around Montreal—first Viger Square, then the Park With No Name, and now Cabot Square—Dare-Dare specializes in ephemeral public art. I’ve been lucky enough to chat with Caissie about the various projects that Dare-Dare has helped curate and a common theme that keeps emerging is the opportunity for public interaction and response, something that isn’t normally possible in a gallery or a museum. Dare-Dare takes art from the gallery to the street and opens it up to the public.

What happens then is entirely unpredictable. In 2007, Chih-Chien Wang built a “nest” of cardboard boxes, illuminated from within, underneath the Van Horne Viaduct. People would come at night and drink nearby, but every so often, somebody would knock down all of the boxes, either deliberately or by accident. Each time, he rebuilt the nest in a slightly different way. Not long after, Caroline Dubois and Julie Favreau turned a long-vacant storefront into a space of perpetual construction and reconstruction. Many neighbours, surprised to see the shop doors open, stopped by to chat.

It’s not uncommon to pass by street art—stencils, graffiti, paste-ups and so on—that has been commented on. Caissie has a few examples, including one—a “raton voleur” that spills out from one of Franck Bragigand’s painted manhole covers on St. Viateur St.—that adds so much to the original work that I had always assumed it was painted by Bragigand himself. Two years ago, somebody pasted a long-form poem onto a laneway wall; “Too bad it’s not that good,” somebody scrawled underneath. Last spring, Fauxreel’s controversial Antlerheads were literally defaced by Zato, another street artist, who transformed their Vespa scooter heads into morbidly grinning moster faces.

Compare that to galleries, where any attempt to comment on art is considered vandalism rather than dialogue. Caissie points the way to a handful of news stories about people attacking, defacing and otherwise leaving a mark on various pieces of art.

Sheung Wan Graffiti

Street art in the lanes of Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

Produkt Paints the City

Every year, city officials decry the rising tide of graffiti that is washing over Montreal, vowing to drain it away with ever more haste. In April, $1 million was invested in a crackdown on graffiti, including $340,000 in the downtown area alone.

For the most part, they’re responding to the concerns of the general public, many of whom consider graffiti to be unsightly vandalism and a sign of civic disorder. The reality, however, is that street art—a catch-all term that refers to graffiti, stencils, stickers, posters and any other type of unregulated, unsolicited art found in city streets—is as varied and diverse as the people who create it.

Alex McLean, 27, who goes by the tag name Produkt, is one of those people. For nearly a decade he has wandered the streets, alleys and railyards of Montreal, covering walls and other surfaces with portraits and drawings that blend finely-detailed realism with cartoon fantasy. Whether they realize it or not, many Montrealers have seen his work, and some might recognize his recurring characters, such as an austere eagle or a man on all fours, dressed as a dog.

“I like to create stuff where the cartoon world and the real world interact. Because I’m painting on a lot of walls and surfaces and found objects, I also like working with stains and textures,” he explained, sitting in his airy St. Henri studio on a sunny afternoon.

“There’s something really liberating about it. It’s interacting with the real world. If you do a painting and hang it in the gallery, how many people are going to see it and how many lives is it going to affect? [Street art] is about communication. You want as many people to see it as possible.”

Several years ago, McLean studied art at Dawson College, but he dropped out when he realized that he was learning more from working in the streets than in the classroom. (“I never got into that whole art school mentality of doing a crappy painting and writing a 60-page paper about it,” he said.) His initial medium was spray paint, but after a run-in with the law—he was charged and fined for several thousand dollars—he switched to more discreet paintbrushes and markers, which had the added bonus of allowing him to craft more detailed paintings.

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