Street Art With Marshall Soules
An e-mail presentation by J.S. Porter
For Ray Ellenwood
I’ve never met Marshall Soules, but I think I know him in some ways just through our back-and-forth e-mail conversations. He’s open, informal, inquisitive, generous and imaginative. He cares passionately about art, literature and ideas. He has a keen sense of fairness and justice, and his heart is clearly on the side of the disadvantaged, the disenfranchised, the unappreciated.
A former Chair of Media Studies at Vancouver Island University (VIU) in Nanaimo, Soules owned and operated Raincoast Construction (Vancouver) and promoted music and dance in the Lower Mainland. He is the author of Media, Persuasion and Propaganda (2015) and has recently collaborated with B.W. Powe on The Charge in the Global Membrane (2019), providing the images for Powe’s text.
I started our interview with a question on how Mr. Soules got started as a photographer of street art.
Soules:
While at Rutgers in the early 70s, I met my life-long friend and inspiration Ray Ellenwood, who was finishing up his PhD in surrealism. We reconnected in Toronto, where Ray was teaching at York U, and began to “play” with found, ad-hoc art projects, including versions of the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), a surrealist improvisational image-making game. Ray and I made many sculptures together using found materials and continue to do so when opportunities arise.
In the 1980s, while photographing found industrial sculptures in Vancouver, I started to pay attention to graffiti and fly posters as improvisational, collaborative, found art pieces. I saw reflections of Cézanne, the Cubists, Dada and Duchamp, the Surrealists, the Nouveau Réalistes, abstract expressionism and the Québec automatists. (Ray has written extensively on the Automatist movement; see his Egregoire: A History of the Montréal Automatist Movement, 1992; updated French version 2014). Visually and theoretically, I was still finding my way with street art through the 1980s.
In 1988, I was readmitted to the PhD program at Rutgers to write a thesis on Sam Shepard’s family plays.
Maurice Charney, the Shakespearean scholar, was selected as my advisor but was a little uncomfortable with the sociological aspects of the family research, and much more interested in my quickly sketched proposal to write about Sam Shepard and improvisation. Shepard was interested in improvisational acting, music, writing, and painting. He was familiar with Gurdjieff’s enneagram (as described by Bennett) and subscribed to the idea that humans embodied a repertoire of characters (“many Ivans”). I focused on Shepard’s early plays like Cowboy Mouth, Suicide in B-Flat, Action and others."
In 1991, my partner Donna and I traveled to England (Manchester), then on to Portugal and Spain where I discovered this incredibly rich postering culture: layers of paper glued up on walls and billboards, weathered, scratched, written over, ripped open – it was dada meets surrealism and pop! And this was another form of news: politics and culture, local and global, war and peace. There’s a class war going on and it’s 'under the skirts of Mary'! An alternate narrative!
This started me on the quest to find examples of Urban Wallpaper – photos of posters, graffiti and street art in major cities around the world.
After I picked up my PhD at Rutgers in 1994, I used a 6-month sabbatical to travel around Europe and Turkey, visiting anything cyber- and photographing walls in Amsterdam, Prague, Graz, Avignon, Paris, Florence, Rome, Athens, Istanbul, Berlin. I started to exhibit these images around 1997 and continue this style of art-making until the present."
A grant in 2007 allowed me to compare Canadian visual culture with Cuban socialist propaganda (trips to Cuba in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2016). I have an unpublished manuscript called Cuba’s Revolutionary Landscape. In Cuba in 2016, I discovered a new cohort of street artists exploring an alternate narrative to the state government, not directly confrontational, but clearly proposing a different vision of reality. Later in 2016, I visited Paris and Barcelona and took a series of images that were less collage and more selections from "social murals."
Mad Cow, Manchester, UK, 1991
Compose, San Francisco, 1991
I’m making art by photographing art. An analogy to jazz would be John Coltrane’s version of “Greensleeves” or “My Favorite Things” – music about music.
But with street art, I have an additional interest in media ecology: that is, an ethnographic documentary project demonstrating that the official narrative of the times – promoted by elites with money – competes with an unofficial narrative, produced with limited resources, challenging the tenets of the elite class.
PORTER:
Thanks for that marvelous retelling of an important aspect of your creative life, Marshall.
Let me piggyback on your thought of how art is made from art. I think of Miles Davis’ “Sketches of Spain” being built on Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez?” Built isn’t quite right. Maybe interspliced with or interlaced with is better. In literature, you have the example of Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote being made from Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Joyce’s Ulysses from Homer’s The Odyssey.
My wife and I recently went to see the Canadian film Antigone, which plays off the ancient Greek tragedy of the same name by Sophocles. If you haven’t yet seen it, you must. It’s fabulous for many reasons – one of which is its street art and posters.
This remaking of the made, this “tomb raiding,” happens all the time, but we don’t always take note of it. Through your work, I’m coming to the realization that the made is constantly being remade and recycled into new cultural contexts.
Soules:
There’s so much to say about your “tomb raiding” analogy! Remix culture is an important notion in media ecology, touching on Guy Debord’s ideas of détournement (rerouting, hijacking), Adbuster’s culture jamming, and other satirical performance practices. Many of the street art photos I’ve taken show how images have been turned back on their sources, either for parody or shaping social awareness. Of course, advertising is a common target because it’s so ubiquitous and in-your-face, but so is political and cultural propaganda. My abiding interest in persuasion and propaganda is inextricably influenced by street art. Propaganda imagery often riffs on advertising or pop iconography, subverting the original for persuasive effect. Michel de Certeau’s approach to popular culture in The Practice of Everyday Life is nicely summed up in his idea of poaching: “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others” (xii). This poaching trope pretty well sums up advertising, street art…and countless musical versions and borrowings.
PORTER:
:Marshall, you once said to me, “I think of street art as a good example of palimpsest, writing over a previous text, layering up meaning, erasing, annotating.” Does your photography add yet another layer? Your Barcelona photograph of a wall painting entitled “C215 Annotated,” for instance. Is that your title or that of the street artist? The image provides the cover image of your and B.W. Powe’s The Charge in the Global Membrane and has a great deal of text on text. What’s happening in the image?
Soules:
You’ll notice a small cube inscribed with C215 in the lower left portion of this image. C215 is the performance name for an internationally known Parisian street artist named Christian Guémy. A Google image search will illustrate how this prolific artist concentrates on expressive and gorgeous portraits of different social types. This portrait of a young woman is layered over the existing substrate, which provides texture and atmosphere. After C215’s image is laid down, others have added to – annotated – the image almost as if commenting in the margins of a text. The woman’s face is scratched, partly defaced, and a variety of markings add layers of rich, ambiguous possibility, something the viewer can puzzle over — what we do with real people!
The title of the image is my invention; and I identify all these images with the city name and the date they were taken.
For me, much of the interest lies in “reading” these layered images to see if there are resonances, visual puns, or happy coincidences. For example, I asked my Cuban friend how he understood the Spanish slang “Sato”:
Well, the word SATO has two meanings: one refers to dogs that do not have a breed, and the other can be applied to a man who is always complimenting women or trying to flirt with them. …The word can also be applied to a woman, in this case SATA, when she is easy to have a date with, or also that kind of woman who is always complimenting men or smiling when you say something nice to her ears.
I am always discovering new “readings” of older images, and this contributes to the ethnographic dimension of the project: excavating the marks of a particular time and culture. (Tomb raiding?) In this case, the identity of the woman is a collective creation (and she harbors many secrets). Selecting and framing the image adds another layer of signification and is, really, my main artistic contribution. I try to keep the whole 2D surface well-lit and in focus, and to capture the texture of the substrate, or ground of the image – always of interest, always a repository of material history.
C215 Annotated, Barcelona, 2016
PORTER:
You’re an authority on street art and a great appreciator of it, Marshall. But there are those who oppose it. Here’s Alex Cameron in Spiked:
Street art is an individual act that speaks of a chronic lack of consideration for anyone else. Its creators think they know best. They decide what, when and where. The people who live there, and must live with it, don’t have a say. There is no ‘demand’ for street art from ordinary people, and there is no consensual or participatory impulse on the part of the artist. It is only one person’s view of what should be and what is good for ordinary people. It is the act of an entitled, middle-class narcissist.
Please comment.
Soules:
Cameron is certainly correct that graffiti can be unsightly, ugly, and contribute to visual clutter. He is also correct that it is considered to be vandalism in many municipalities around the globe, as determined by municipal bylaws. In the UK, graffiti is identified as anti-social behaviour along with drunkenness in public, and messy properties. (As part of my SSHRC research grant in 2007, I surveyed anti-graffiti bylaws, mainly in Canada but in other jurisdictions as well.)
As visual clutter and a crime against private property, graffiti and fly postering are often associated. However, an important court challenge by a musician in Peterborough, Ontario determined that a ban on fly postering undermined Charter Rights to free expression, and municipalities must provide at least some public spaces for postering. Of course, examples of “illegal” fly postering and graffiti are legion, so there’s no point to contest that graffiti and street art are often identified as crimes against property – the laws make it so.
The moral / ethical side of Cameron’s complaint is misleading both in perspective and in fact. As readers of his column point out, he over-generalizes how street artists are “entitled, middle-class narcissists” by definition. Many street writers are poor, disadvantaged people who have no realistic access to public expression. Cameron is also incorrect to identify graffiti and street art as the same thing: an anonymous tagger with a marker or spray can cruising the streets is not the same kind of artist / writer as a commissioned artist using a scissor lift to paint a five-story mural.
To balance opposing perspectives on the question of private property and decorum, here’s what I suggest people do with Cameron’s complaint: replace every mention of street art or graffiti with “advertising” or “commercial signage”: “Advertising is an individual act [legally corporations are individuals, after all] that speaks of a chronic lack of consideration for anyone else. Its creators think they know best. They decide what, when and where. The people who live there, and must live with it, don’t have a say.” Does it matter that they have had to pay for their lack of consideration? Does a poor person purchase billboard space?
Advertisers brand public space without our permission, often with little concern about offending our artistic sensibilities. Like some street art, ads can be extremely artistic, thought-provoking, and tasteful, but we can all call up examples of ugly, tasteless, inconsiderate and exploitative advertising.
Let’s assume, then, that there are at least some similarities between street art, tagging (branding) and advertising. What do they communicate? Commerce and spending are the generalized messages of advertising, and these messages are competing in a crowded marketplace for our attention. Most street art does not try to sell a commercial product or service, though it may promote values and ideas. Street art communicates that non-commercial messages also have a place in our cultures.
Antenna Head, Havana, 2016
There’s a class war going on. Elites have greater resources to communicate their values through the global media membrane. Poor, disadvantaged, and socially rebellious people are not given the same opportunities to communicate their messages unless they opportunistically take advantage of the means and openings available to them. Obviously, making use of inexpensive paints, markers, posters, stencils and blank urban walls is an option people around the globe have opted for.
PORTER:
I’m struck by how prominent the human face or the human figure is in the wall art you photograph. Take the beautiful image of Piaf you have in The Charge in the Global Membrane, for instance.
I might have guessed that something like Cy Twombly’s markings would be more typical of street art than the human figure or face. Yet, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Piaf’s Eyes, Paris 2016
Soules:
I love Cy Twombly’s work and am always looking for spontaneous versions of it in the streets. The images we selected for The Charge in the Global Membrane feature faces prominently because we wanted to show affect and emotion to enhance the text: not only what is happening in the media sphere but how people are reacting to it, how they feel about this confusing excess of messages competing for space. There is a kind of emotional contagion (empathy) at work here.
It was interesting that the publisher, Dale Winslow, didn’t want to include these two images for the book as being too heavy on the message side of the equation. (I’m guessing here since she didn’t fully explain her choices to me.) If so, I see her point, and trust her curation for this book, though I have a soft spot for images of people who are being written over, added to, scratched out of existence because that’s what many people are feeling is happening to them.
PORTER:
I hear you. The Edmonton mural of Greta Thunberg being recently defaced is an example of someone trying to scratch her out of existence. I digress.
How much art education does a street artist tend to have? Would a street artist in Barcelona know Tapies’ work or that of Miro?
Soules:
I don’t know how to answer this question with much confidence, but I’ll give it a try. Many street artists are obviously self-taught but maybe more of them have formal training, know their art history, are highly referential, and have excellent technique. Increasingly, street artists are showing in prestigious galleries and traditionally trained artists are finding commissions for street murals. In Christchurch, NZ, I discovered how the city’s main art gallery was actively promoting art in the streets.
The literature on street art mentions how many artists / writers have journals where they practice their tags, pieces and murals. Style is an important marker for street artists as documented in the early documentaries Style Wars and Bomb It!
In my experience, popular culture is the most significant source of influence (cartoons, movies, advertising) but I’ve seen many examples of street art riffing on recognized art from antiquity to the present day. Whether a street artist in Barcelona is conversant with the work of Tapies or Miró is an unknown, it’s quite possible they are. The talent one sees with careful looking can be stunning.
PORTER:
I like to remember that Jean-Michel Basquiat started in the street and ended up in the galleries. Is that a step forward or a step back?
Soules:
Basquiat certainly started in the streets and ended up in the galleries! Like Keith Haring, Basquiat had the support of influential celebrities like Andy Warhol, but they are terrific pop artists with stunning referential range: they encode – signify on – important cultural and political issues. If you know how to read their images, they are filled with insight and news. So, it is great they are shown in the galleries in my opinion – a step forward. Does Dada belong in the galleries?
There’s a lot of controversy on this question. Reputation (street cred) is earned by artistic performance in the street, in the subways and railyards, in dangerous locations, places difficult to access, humorous places. And, most importantly perhaps, is not done for commercial gain except for commissioned murals. So, the controversy cuts from both directions: street artists are forfeiting their subversive credentials by selling their work in galleries; and artists who appropriate the style without bothering with the streets are posers, inauthentic, doing it for the cash.
I don’t have a judgment about either option. There is abysmal art in the streets and no way should it be inflicted on the public in galleries. And I have purchased art by people who made their reputations in the street and then evolved to selling versions of their work in galleries (Miss.Tic in Paris; Jacob Yikes in Christchurch).
But I’m also a photographer who creates a version of the original and exhibits these images in galleries and publications. Is this theft? Appropriation? Hypocrisy?! Probably all of these and more! Let’s allow the people who know and love art to express their enthusiasm. The artists will do their thing, for their own reasons.
PORTER:
Barcelona and Havana seem to be bursting with street art. Thoughts on why that seems to be the case? And why isn’t Toronto, say, rich in street art?
Soules:
In my experience, street art flourishes in cities where there is some degree of political or cultural tension: Barcelona and Havana, Paris and Berlin, Christchurch, Vancouver and Toronto to name a few hot spots. People have something to say about the state-of-affairs that is not being said in the state-sponsored media.
The street art in Barcelona differs from street art in Havana. For one thing, it is more ubiquitous, generally more layered and complex, and more political. The Havana street art scene is an emerging phenomenon, increasingly offering a counterpoint to state propaganda which is ubiquitous. However, as you’ve seen, there are some terrific street artists in Havana such as Julier, and international artists like OsGemeos (Brazil) and JR (France) have enhanced Havana’s walls.
Street artists in Havana must be more oblique in their messaging since the state is always ready to hassle dissidents. That said, Cuba has a long tradition of social murals — as long as they don’t rock the socialist boat — and there are many examples from one end of the country to the other, including humorous murals and billboards satirizing US leaders and their ruinous policies towards Cuba.
The political climate in Barcelona and Havana may be unique but in both cities the political (under)currents have a profound effect on the tenor and resonance of the images.
Toronto is not without its political currents. It is a city rich in street art, especially along King and Queen Streets West, in the alleys, in the Kensington Market area, along Bathurst and Spadina — all over. I have hundreds of interesting examples, mostly from Toronto’s city centre. Toronto has some excellent artists and, like Vancouver, they are supported by an active community of writers and bombers.
PORTER:
Please comment on this Cuban image.
Capoeira in the City, Havana, 2016
Soules:
I took this image with a suite of others in a similar style painted up on construction hoardings along the Paseo del Prado between El Capitolio and the Malecon. I’ve seen other pieces by Lustig in Havana, but I haven’t been able to find out more about him. The image depicts a campesino practicing a Brazilian martial arts form called capoeira. The image suggests that self-defense gives a person a community and a connection to the city; his grounded stance is the basis of strength. One needs discipline and skills to survive in the city – in this case, clearly Havana – but any city. I love the powerful gestural expression and the way the buildings are arrayed around the person’s body.
Here’s a more recent photo of this same image (by another photographer).
Street art can be transitory; all the more reason to document superb examples of it.
Photo by Lustig (Tom Levold)
PORTER:
In a strange sort of way Havana reminds me of Venice. Venice is forever sinking and Havana is forever decaying—paint fading, walls crumbling, etc. And yet there is enormous power in the “decaying” images, of Julier’s images, for instance. How much does the US embargo affect the availability of paints (colour choice) and tools for painting? Is spray painting used at all?
Soules:
The US blockade has a huge influence on all aspects of Cuban life, including the availability of paint and selection of paint colours. I have seen spray paint used in pieces, but it is more common to see art painted with a brush.
The US blockade of Cuba – in place since the early 1960s – is a tragic piece of foreign policy causing immeasurable suffering for the Cuban people and the on-going deterioration of the country’s infrastructure. The blockade is a major theme of state propaganda, and its effects are often portrayed in the street art indirectly. “Devouring the Dead” by Julier could be seen as an image reflecting the psychic cannibalism fostered by the blockade: feeding on oneself and others just to survive.
I completely agree with you that the atmosphere of decay seen in Venice and Havana adds poignancy to images found in both cities.
PORTER:
Is wall art by its nature ephemeral – here today, gone tomorrow? Do your photographs rescue wall art from ephemerality? Does photography preserve street images in much the same way that Andy Goldsworthy’s photographs preserve his built-for-destruction compositions? If I fly to Havana tomorrow morning, am I likely to see the Julier images you photographed a few years ago?
Soules:
Ephemerality is one of the abiding characteristics of street art. It can be painted over, defaced, erased, scratched out at a moment’s notice. There’s a famous Banksy piece of a city worker removing ancient cave art with a power washer! And you are correct: photographing street art is an effort to conserve notable examples and perhaps help memorialize the messages – the news — from the street. Here’s a recent example:
The internet, being a vast repository of global street art has helped foster and propagate the evolution of street art from the early style wars to its current status as social conscience.
If you fly to Havana tomorrow, you might see some intact pieces of Julier’s work, especially since he’s kind of a rock star of the form…but there is no guarantee. I’ve photographed pieces that survived between 2008 and 2016 (“Place to Rest / Waiting for You” is an example) but you’ve seen the fate of “Capoeira in the City” above.
PORTER:
May I quote Thomas Merton who was, as you know, a visual artist as well as a poet and monk? In a letter to his friend Jim Forest in 1966 he describes his drawings: “Here is a collection of shapes, powers, flying beasts, cave animals, bloodstains, angelic mistakes, etc …” And in his essay “Signatures: Notes on the Author’s Drawings” from Raids on the Unspeakable, he writes:
In a world cluttered and programmed with an infinity of practical signs and consequential digits referring to business, law, government and war, one who makes such nondescript marks as these is conscious of a special vocation to be inconsequent, to be outside the sequence and to remain firmly alien to the program.
Do you see any resonance here with what you see in street art?
Soules:
Merton’s quote resonates deeply for me, especially his idea of “angelic mistakes”: that art encourages us to slip through the mesh of conscious awareness into the mysterium. I might quibble with his use of “inconsequent” but that’s part of the charm of photographing street art. Most people apparently think it is inconsequential, “outside the sequence” and “alien to the program” when, in fact, it often speaks truth under another guise. I really like the idea that street art is a series of raids on the unspeakable. And I couldn’t agree more with Merton’s observation that our world is “cluttered and programmed with an infinity of practical signs and consequential digits referring to business, law, government and war…” Street art offers a respite from these prerogatives.
PORTER:
I want to end with something very specific. What kind of camera do you use for your street-art photography?
Soules:
In the 80s and 90s, I was shooting with an analogue Canon FTB SLR and a 50 mm lens. In the early 2000s, I started to experiment with digital cameras (Canon G1, Canon Rebel SLR). Now, I travel with my Canon G12 (highly portable, inconspicuous, nice 6.1 – 30.5 mm zoom lens) and larger Canon EOS 7D Mark II, with its two lenses (17-85 mm and 70-300 mm). For shooting street art, a wide-angle lens is useful for getting up close to the image and capturing a wide panorama. Photographing large 2D images is like photographing buildings: parallax introduces distortion that can often be remedied by the transform / skew function in Photoshop.
PORTER:
Thank you, Marshall, for educating me in the world of art outside the galleries and museums. When I walk the downtown streets of Hamilton now, I’ll have my head up to see another “text” of the city, unofficial, one that provides a valuable presentation of words and images, scratches and marks, of what it’s like now to be alive in my urban environment.
Soules:
John, you’ve given me an opportunity to reflect on something I love and share that enthusiasm with you and your readers. It’s been my pleasure, and an honour.