Brad Downey’s work over the past decade has consistently pitted itself against the sanctioned and the predictable. In 2005, when I was working at the ICA in London, Downey and I collaborated on a minibus tour of unsanctioned public art that took passengers around the streets of London to witness live graffiti, street art, a censored historic façade, and an artist reading a novel in a lounger that occupied a parking bay on a very busy street. The context for this provocative event – during which we took the precaution of inviting a lawyer and a local planning officer – was the increasing prevalence of commissioned public art backed by a burgeoning curatorial industry, generous funding, and regeneration tsars.

Artists often benefit from the prestige of media-friendly, big-budget public art commissions, and the challenge to work outside the usual gallery limitations. Public sculpture provides work for foundries, model makers, and structural engineers. But the necessary length of the consultation and production process – the planning laws and red tape, the health and safety testing – means that they end up closer to the category of monument than art. In short, public art often needs to play it very safe and appeal to its local audience, while being grand enough to warrant funding and wider media attention.
Downey’s spontaneous sculptures, on the other hand, only last as long as the public or officials care to allow (from 10 seconds, in the case of a cheekily placed plastic bottle that adds a phallus to an otherwise sexless Antony Gormley figure in Stavanger, Norway, to a few days. Some may still be in existence as I write). Sometimes the nature of Downey’s materials determines the duration of the piece, like shaving foam on a bollard in Bollard Cover (Chess), Vienna, 2010, or Stone Cover (Meat Street), Berlin, 2011, in which square-shaped salami is camouflaged against cobbled street paving until it is all too quickly sniffed out and gobbled up by a passing dog. Unlike conventional public art, his studio is not tucked away out of view but is on the street, and his materials are the found objects and detritus which the urban environment so plentifully provides: traffic cones, street signs, bollards, shopping carts. Production mingles with the countless road-works being carried out on in the urban environment, highly visible but ignored by most.
Nonetheless, Downey’s work isn’t strictly categorized within the marketing-friendly term ‘street art’, which presumes a separation from contemporary art and its history. Rather, it is full of witty, sometimes acerbic references to art-historical figures and movements, from Dada to land art to minimalism, pushing the experiments of 20th-century modernist sculpture into the anarchy and chaos of 21st-century globalized cities such as Berlin, London, and Dubai. Many of Downey’s sculptures share the one-thing-after-another serial logic of minimalism, while his use of bricks and paving stones nod to Carl Andre, all the while eschewing the rarefied institutional context this work relied on for validation and a sense of presence. A column of conical ashtrays, another of trash cans, pay homage to Brancusi’s elegant monument, Endless Column, 1938, while a set of works based on a pile of disused cable tubes (Tube Lift, Amsterdam, 2008) shares instead the deadpan sentiment of Robert Smithson’s famous road trip through suburban East Coast America (A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, 1967), in which he ironically designates various industrial paraphernalia as monuments.

There’s an ironic macho element to Downey’s work that takes its cue from the modernist figure of the hyper-masculine sculptor, such as when he turns broken concrete benches into a stark, constructivist sculpture. Following Duchamp, Downey sexes up the most banal street furniture, as with the cheeky appendage of a bollard attached at right angles to a tree trunk in Bollard Tie (Dick), Stavanger, 2009, or performs bathetic castrations, as in the case of the drooping Bollard Bend (Limping), Seoul, 2010. Buildings and street furniture are anthropomorphized further in unexpected ways in Downey’s universe. Bollard Tie (Healing), Vienna, 2010, for example, encourages sympathy for the humble bollard, as just one example of all the damaged street objects that sit waiting helplessly for repair or removal. One broken bollard is even given wooden splints as if it were a human limb. In a particularly extreme case, Booth Pry (Dead), London, 2005, a phone box lies horizontal on the ground – a symbol not just of nihilist vandalism but of a whole sphere of public life that the mobile phone has rendered near obsolete.

Romance and serendipity are two more unusual tropes for a contemporary artist, particularly one working in the public realm. After all, as we have noted, public art is supposed to be universally accessible, not left to chance or based on private sentiment. In Tarp Cut (Ladder-Stick-Up), Aberdeen, 2007, Downey cuts a giant heart from the gauzy material used to conceal scaffolding, in a process that mixes the legacies of Gordon Matta-Clark with Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The scissor work is done from inside the gauze so that, from the outside, it might look like a spontaneous act of love from the building itself.

Humor is also a key element for Downey, who often uses it as bait to catch the attention of the unsuspecting passer-by. He has the knack of creating apparently magical situations, as with Bike Hang II (Perfect Throw III), Essen, 2010, in which a bicycle dangles over the axis of a double-headed streetlight as if in a giant fairground game. We are all familiar with the phenomena of the single sneaker mysteriously hooked over an overhead power cable, but a bicycle? In another series, Downey places helium balloons inside anti-terrorist rubbish bins (clear bags, skeleton framework, almost like a basketball hoop) in Paris, so that the now inverted rubbish bags float upwards – much to the delight of local kids, who then of course steal the balloons (mini Downeys in the making).
One might even conjecture that there is some nostalgia in Downey’s work for the fun and freedom of childhood that is perhaps compromised in today’s more cautious and less child-friendly society. For Chalk Mark (Hopscotch), Berlin, 2010, Downey chalked the well-known kids’ hopping and jumping game onto a subway platform, precisely calculated so that the ‘number 10’ box led to the open doors of the oncoming train, and even continued inside the carriage. As a gesture, it appeared willfully naive juxtaposed against the gritted stoicism and stress of commuting.

Downey himself does a lot of travelling these days, so that the geography of his works has become as important a context as their duration. Clues as to their locations (linguistic or design) are not always immediately obvious from the documentary photography, which is often tightly cropped to the sculptures and the situations that arise from them. Yet, occasionally, the work cannot help but reveal the historical or political subconscious of the city, as with the column of precariously stacked bricks in Berlin that inevitably succumb to gravity and topple over to leave a neat trail of rubble. Downey’s collapsed monument is particularly provocative in a city that has been trying to brick over its historical scars since the fall of the Wall.

Other works have taken on an archaeological dimension, with Downey appearing to uncover mysterious phenomena lurking beneath the streets, such as the fairytale-like sandcastle in Pavement Pry Sand Stack (Castles Beneath Cities), Amsterdam, 2008, or the graffiti that the authorities had neatly tiled over, but which Downey reveals as if a Roman mosaic, in the ironically titled Tile Pry (Gentrification), Amsterdam, 2008. Latent traces of fascism resurface in a recent piece in Portugal, in which an ornate spiral-design paving tile is subtly altered to resemble a Swastika – a gesture that no doubt would have strong resonance for a country in which memories of dictatorship (until 1974) are still raw.
Some might call Downey’s sculptures illegal – which strictly speaking many are – but this risks fetishizing the illicit for its own sake. The fame and high auction prices commanded by certain street artists in the past couple of years are surely linked to this desire for the frisson of the underground and the risky to pep up an ailing art market. Yet, for a society obsessed with keeping its citizens under surveillance, it is incredible how much Downey and his collaborators are able to get away with under people’s noses. Indeed, you notice that Downey has become more fearless in public over the years. Where once he took on the persona of a security guard or wore the high-visibility jacket of the anonymous worker, now installation shots show the undisguised artist casually moving street sculpture or re-arranging some road markings.

Downey’s work has always carried a strong note of defiance against the bureaucracy and paranoia that governs public space. The documentary photograph for Camera Burn (CCTV Sacrifice), Berlin, 2008, shows gasoline flames engulfing a totemic CCTV camera, a brief symbolic victory against the increasing encroachment on civil liberties and personal freedoms. In Window Smash (Just Taking the Building To Its Logical Conclusion), Berlin, 2008, Downey speeds up the process of one deserted building’s descent into a modern ruin, smashing the remaining few windows, so that all are now shattered. It is a nihilistic gesture, sure, but only against the inevitable. Architectural euthanasia or necrophilia, depending on which way you look at it.

These few violent works are not gratuitous but important reminders of the tension that always lies behind Downey’s working method and the stakes his work carries in a tightly regulated urban realm, even when he appears to wear this tension lightly. Downey made one of his most audacious and graphically striking works in 2007 when, in a moment of postmodern existentialism, he managed to switch off the first letter of a neon SHELL sign above a gas station in his home town of Atlanta. Modern urban life can be HELL, but for this artist, the freedom and spontaneity it allows, even in small pockets, and the huge range of unloved and discarded materials available, continue to provide an endless source of curiosity and potential for a new, as yet uncodified form of public art.

A didactic play for a artist, an event agency, a department store, dozens of press officers and journalists – and a global brand.

The performance of US artist Brad Downey will probably go down in the history of French fashion empire Lacoste as the worst public relations catastrophe it has experienced. Perhaps it will one day be cited in the handbooks of future public relations consultants – as a cautionary tale. On the other hand, for Downey himself it has once again been another high-profile publicity stunt. A specific feature of a successful art campaign is that it works in the same way as Jiu-Jitsu – the Japanese martial art in which the opponent’s force is transformed and directed back at him.

But let's start at the beginning: Lacoste wanted to celebrate its 75th birthday in Berlin and invited eleven artists to design the display windows of Europe’s biggest consumer temple, the Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe). “From Wednesday, May 28 through July 12, 2008, the entire atrium will be designed in the style of the brand. In addition, original works of art created especially for the occasion will be displayed in the eleven display windows facing Tauentzienstrasse”, it said in the press release at the time.

Brad Downey was invited as well, and delivered his original work prior to the official opening: He used a fire-extinguisher to spray the 100 meter long store front with Lacoste-green paint (incidentally, in another fine point of the performance, the paint was washable children’s finger paint). So far so good, or, as another artist friend commented: “If you’re going to employ a vandal, you’re going to get a vandal”. What happened next can be best retold using the newspaper headlines: The tabloid Bild (“KaDeWe Green Over Night”) and the Berliner Zeitung (“Paint Attack on KaDeWe”) were the first to report on the green “smearings” on the store windows – they suspected that radical leftwing anti-consumerists or Tibet activists (because at the time dresses by Chinese designer Vera Wang on display in the windows) were behind the incident. KaDeWe called the police, the first blogs revealed the true perpetrator and the press picked up the scent as well: “Attack on KaDeWe Artist's Prank?” (Tagesspiegel) and “Lacoste behind KaDeWe Paint Attack?” (Welt). Brad Downey then gave a press conference, confessed that he was responsible for the performance, dedicated it to Till Eulenspiegel (“Don’t worry about that shit, René”) and declared: “I’ve been straightforward to everyone. This was not a radical action! They paid me for what I wrote before, and this is exactly what they’ve got. The only thing I didn’t tell them is that it was going to be their building. But if they pay me for vandalism, why shouldn’t it be their building?”

For the Berlin Backjumps exhibition, Downey has realized a multimedia installation on the performance and has called it “In Soliloquy with Madson Jones”. Madson Jones was the pseudonym used by American pop art legends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns when they carried out commercial projects, especially display window designs. For the first time, Downey has collected every newspaper article, letter, contract, sketch, photo and video – and the entanglement of art, commerce and consumerism is exposed through this complete transparency. The documents offer a thrilling and instructive view behind the scenes of public relations agencies and denounce the selling-out of creative ideas. The contract made between Downey and an event agency is shown, as well as Downey’s concept (“Something outside will turn green”), the ideas handed in by other artists along with photos of the display windows they realized, letters to KaDeWe by the event agency (“It seems important to take up a strategically intelligent position”) and a statement by the responsible curator, Willem Stratmann: “When I was asked to invite Brad Downey, I was against it. Of course Brad is a good artist, only he can’t be bought and thus is not the right person for an art project with a commercial background.”

The effects and consequences that followed are known: Petra Fladenhofer, spokesperson for KaDeWe, reacted hysterically: “We have no understanding whatsoever for this”. And instead of being pleased with the media attention they could never have gained in this dimension with the planned display window designs, Lacoste and KaDeWe excluded Downey from the exhibition. This, of course, only triggered a boomerang effect. “Art Performance: The Crocodile Has Locked Its Jaws” the newspaper Taz titled shortly afterwards and wrote: “Just as the 75th birthday of the brand arrives, its terribly well-behaved image could topple. If this happens, the pink polo shirt will stand for Porky Pig, the squealing spoilsport who is as pedantic as he is humorless. And all this because Lacoste invited the wrong friends to its birthday party.” The art magazine “Art” commented succinctly: “Perhaps they are still a bit wet behind the ears when it comes to guerilla marketing.”

Ein Lehrstück für einen Künstler, eine Event-Agentur, ein Kaufhaus, Dutzende PR-Sprecher und Journalisten – und eine globale Marke.

Die Aktion des US-Künstlers Brad Downey wird wahrscheinlich als größter PR-Gau in die Geschichte des französischen Modeimperiums Lacoste eingehen, und vielleicht irgendwann einmal sogar in den Handbüchern künftiger PR-Berater zitiert werden – als abschreckendes Beispiel. Für Downey selbst war es dagegen mal wieder ein medienwirksamer Publicity-Stunt. Aber eine gelungene Kunstaktion funktioniert eben auch wie Jiu-Jitsu – der japanische Kampfsport, bei dem man die Kraft des Gegeners umwandelt und auf diesen zurückführt.

Aber von vorne: Lacoste wollte sein 75. Markenjubiläum in Berlin feiern und lud elf Künstler ein, die Schaufenster des größten Konsumtempels Europas, dem Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe), zu gestalten. „Mittwoch, dem 28. Mai, bis Samstag, dem 12. Juli 2008, wird der gesamte Lichthof ganz im Sinne der Marke gestaltet. Außerdem werden in den elf Schaufenstern zur Tauentzienstraße originelle und speziell angefertigte Kunstwerke ausgestellt“, hieß es damals in der Pressemeldung.

Auch Brad Downey wurde eingeladen und lieferte sein originelles Kunstwerk bereits vor der offiziellen Vernissage: Er sprühte auf die 100 Meter lange KaDeWe-Schaufensterfront mit einem Feuerlöscher Lacoste-grüne Farbe (die übrigens, auch das eine schöne Pointe, eine auswaschbare Fingermalfarbe für Kinder war). Bisher alles einleuchtend, denn wie auch ein Künstlerfreund kommentiere: „If you`re going to employ a vandal, you´re going to get a vandal“. Was danach folgte, lässt sich am Besten, anhand der Überschriften aus den Tageszeitungen nacherzählen: Als erstes meldeten die „Bild“-Zeitung („KaDeWe über Nacht grün“) und die „Berliner Zeitung“ („Farbanschlag aufs KaDeWe“) die grünen „Schmierereien“ an den Schaufenstern – und vermuteten linksradikale Konsumbekämpfer oder Tibet-Aktivisten (weil gerade Kleider der chinesischen Designerin Vera Wang im Schaufenster ausgestellt wurden) hinter der Aktion. Das KaDeWe schaltete die Polizei ein, erste Blogs gaben den wahren Urheber bekannt und auch die Presse nahm die Witterung auf: „War Attacke aufs KaDeWe ein Künstlergag?“ (Tagesspiegel) und „Steckt Lacoste hinter dem KaDeWe-Farbanschlag?“ (Welt). Daraufhin gab Downey eine Pressekonferenz, bekannte sich zu dieser Performance, widmete diese Till Eulenspiegel („Don´t worry about that shit, Réne“) und gestand: „Ich war zu allen ehrlich. Das war keine radikale Aktion! Sie haben mich für das bezahlt, was ich beschrieben habe, und genau das haben sie bekommen. Nur dass es ihr Gebäude sein würde, habe ich nicht gesagt. Aber wenn sie mich für Vandalismus bezahlen, warum sollte es nicht ihr eigenes Gebäude sein?" 

Für die Berliner Backjumps-Ausstellung hat Downey jetzt eine Multimedia-Installation über diese Aktion realisiert und sie „In Soliloguy With Madson Jones“ genannt, weil Madson Jones das Pseudonym war, dass die amerikanischen Pop-Art-Legenden Robert Rauschenberg und Jasper Johns benutzen, wenn sie kommerzielle Arbeiten realisierten, insbesondere Schaufensterdekorationen. Downey hat zum ersten Mal alle Zeitungsartikel, Briefe, Verträge, Skizzen, Fotografien und Videos zusammengetragen – und entlarvt durch diese komplette Transparenz die Verstrickungen zwischen Kunst, Kommerz und Konsum. Die Dokumente bieten einen spannenden und lehrreichen Blick hinter die Kulissen der PR-Agenturen und prangern anschaulich den Ausverkauf künstlerischer Ideen an. Man sieht den Vertrag, den er mit der Eventagentur abgeschlossen hat, Downeys Konzept („Something outside will turn green“), die eingereichten Ideen der anderen Künstler und Fotografien ihrer realisierten Schaufenster, Briefe der Eventagentur an das KaDeWe („Es scheint wichtig, sich nun strategisch klug zu positionieren“) und das Statement des verantwortlichen Kurators Willem Stratmann: „Als ich gebeten wurde Brad Downey einzuladen, war ich dagegen. Natürlich ist Brad ein guter Künstler, nur lässt er sich eben nicht kaufen und ist somit nicht der richtige für ein Kunstprojekt mit kommerziellen Hintergrund.“

Die weiteren Folgen und Konsequenzen der Aktion sind bekannt: Petra Fladenhofer, die Sprecherin des KaDeWe, reagierte hysterisch: „Da hört bei uns jedes Verständnis auf“. Und anstatt, dass sich Lacoste und KaDeWe über die mediale Aufmerksamkeit freuten, die sie in diesem Maße niemals mit der geplanten Schaufensterdeko-Ausstellung erreicht hätten, schlossen sie Downey von der Ausstellung aus. Und genau dies war dann natürlich dann der Boomerang-Effekt. „Kunstaktion: Das Krokodil hat sich verbissen“ titelte kurz darauf die „Taz“ und schrieb: „Just zum 75. Geburtstag der Marke könnte dieses kreuzbrave Image kippen. Dann steht das rosa Polo für Schweinchen Dick, das quäkende Spielverderber-Schweinchen, das so pedantisch wie humorlos ist. Und das nur, weil Lacoste sich zum Geburtstag die falschen Freunde eingeladen hat.“ Und das Kunstmagazin „Art“ kommentierte lapidar: „Wahrscheinlich ist man dort in Sachen Guerilla-Marketing einfach noch etwas grün hinter den Ohren.“

Most well-known for his anarchic transformations of street-furniture, Brad Downey is in fact one of the most highly versatile proponents of Independent Public Art, an artist who has created a wide body of work as comical as it is contentious, bitingly critical and humorous in equal measure. What links all of Downey’s projects however is a concern with the customs and conventions of the urban environment, the norms which have become so embedded that they are perceived as exactly that, as proper or suitable rather than prohibitive or invasive: It is hence the “lack of discourse around rules in general” which is important for Downey, the general failure to “question our surroundings and reality” that becomes the starting point for his work. Whether he is confiscating CCTV cameras or filling phone boxes full of balloons then, building sculptures from car-tires or impaling bicycles (as if by magic) half-way up telephone polls, Downey aims to take existing objects and “give them a different function and purpose”, changing their “composition or orientation”, shifting their meaning. He aims to problematize the nature of the contemporary public sphere, to problematize its mores and morals, inciting the viewer of his works to thus reevaluate them alongside him.

Born in 1980 in Louisville, Kentucky, Downey was a member of a United States Marine Corps family and thus travelled widely across his country of birth as a youth, never settling in one place for long. Moving to New York City in 1998 to study at Pratt University however, he was struck by the vitality and vibrancy of the graffiti in the city, the way you were “immediately punched in the face” by its energy, its effervescence. Whilst he had never previously been particularly interested in any form of illicit art then, Downey now found himself deeply drawn to it, and, having just started a degree in film, he decided to amalgamate this burgeoning interest with his more formal studies. The resulting film, entitled Public Discourse (which although a student project became a minor success, screened in over 70 locations including the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival), included work by artists such as Swoon, Obey, Revs, Nato, and Desa (the so-called “Million Dollar Vandal), yet it was the inclusion of the graffiti artist Verbs which changed the course of Downey’s developing career, turning him from a documenter of artistic practice to an artistic practitioner himself, from an objective observer to an active participant. Initially assisting Verbs (real name Leon Reid IV but perhaps more famously known as Darius Jones) on his projects then, Downey soon started to develop concepts and ideas himself which they then put into practice collaboratively, working together constantly from around 1999 to 2005. Known as Darius and Downey, the partnership was incredibly fruitful, mixing a “fine-art sensibility with a “get-over” sensibility” in order to reach out further than the graffiti community alone. First developing a new style of large-scale roller graffiti such as their infamous Honk if You Love Graffiti, Clone Jesus, and To: You, From: Darius and Downey (known as The Gift), the pair soon started to utilize the omnipresent “signs, poles, benches, and surveillance cameras” present within every modern city in the world, modifying Leon IV’s existing street-sculptural works to encompass the artefacts already situated within the street.
Moving to London to continue their studies, Downey at the Slade School of Art, Leon IV at Central Saint Martins, their installations grew ever more daring and unique, comprising intertwined or divided Belisha Beacons (The Kiss and The Break Up), tube sign modifications (Your Arse), and converted street lamps (The Tree). Yet with Leon IV’s return to Brooklyn in 2005 and his decision to halt his illegal installations, Downey moved from London to Berlin (a city where he still resides), a move which can be seen to have had a strong effect on his production. Sharing a studio with the artist Akim (for more see pp.114-118), and influenced by artists like Akay (see pp. 124-128) and Adams, Berlin felt like a place still open for exploration, a city in which Downey could “still do weird things without anyone noticing”, in which he could progress his projects free from the need of any perceived success. Yet the shift to Berlin also led to the shift away from street-furniture, Downey instead taking a more interrogative viewpoint on the practices of Independent Public Art itself.

In his 2009 film Don’t worry about that shit, René, Downey documented the uproar surrounding his commission to paint for the luxury department store KaDeWe in 2008 on the celebration of their 75th anniversary. Having been convinced to participate by an event agency, Downey was asked, alongside eleven other street-artists, to reinterpret the Lacoste crocodile emblem, a reinterpretation which was later to be sold off at an auction. Submitting a proposal merely stating “something outside will turn green”, a proposal which to his total surprise was accepted by the company, Downey proceeded to utilize a fire-extinguisher to spray bright green paint along the entire shop-front. Whilst the act led to the proprietors reporting him to the police for vandalism, Downey’s action can be seen as a dual form of critique, a critique at the complicit commodification of Independent Public Art by ostensible “urban” artists, as well as of the commandeering of this form for purely pecuniary purposes by the companies themselves. Similar to his I’m Loving It mural (an exact replica of a McDonalds advert) at the Leuphana University as part of the ARTotale project (essentially a re-branding exercise for the university), Downey was reacting both against the usage of urban art to add mystique to brands (whether companies or universities), and the logo-centric activates of many “so-called street-artists”, their failure to react to the localities of place.

In contrast, Downey’s project Searching for Something Concrete, completed in cooperation with professional art restorer Magdalena Recova, set about recovering the hidden layers of graffiti within a small section of a Wall of Fame in Vienna. Working for two days, and using a variety of mechanical and chemical processes, Downey rediscovered a past history of graffiti from over fifteen years of practice, the hidden palimpsest laying beneath the superficial. Not only a process of active historicity however, Downey was attempting to “unlock the illusion of two dimensional space”, to reinforce the fact that underneath so many layers of grey we can find not only history but art, a dense deposit of one of the truly hidden archives of the city. Working as a mirror image of his more recent project Buff the Fucks, in which Downey set about a process of reverse buffing – entirely covering a derelict factory in the Alcântara district of Lisbon, everything apart from the graffiti of course, with the classic grey, graffiti destroying paint, including the building itself, its windows, doors, barriers, paving stones, and dirt – Downey can be seen to have been attempting to invert the traditional order of things, treating graffiti, the lowest of the arts, akin to the highest, subjecting it to the processes of repair and renewal normally associated with the museum based work. Highlighting some of the more archaic and faded inscriptions within the Alcântara work such as the word Solidariedade Solidarity (most likely from the revolutionary period of the 1970s), Downey was investing value back into this supposed ‘vandalism’, not by forming something new however, but simply by emphasizing “a particular existing narrative or moment”, by enhancing and enriching what was already there. Like his multitude of other works he has undertaken within his oeuvre then, these projects show Downey’s commitment to change the very idea of the public sphere, to change the way we understand the visual and material culture we are surrounded by. They all follow the intensely playful, mischievous intent he has shaped from his very earliest work, his non-institutional Institutional Critique, his mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, the ridiculous mocking the nature of urban regulations, the sublime elevating its latent potentialities.

The value of cities is measurable with the number of places they reserve for improvisation.
Siegfried Kracauer

An excerpt from a conversation between Chiara Santini and Brad Downey

CS: Giorgio Agamben in his Enfance et histoire talks about the lack of experience in everyday life in contemporary society. You can have a very busy day, you can go to work, take the subway, read the news, meet people, watch television, go to bed, have a lot of facts in your day and have no experiences. Everything is there by accumulation, so one doesn’t notice. Would you say that your interventions join in this parade of meaningless events, or that they truly impact on the daily life of the average person?

BD: I hope my work could have the potential to inspire people to change something. This is my job, to show others that it is at least possible to change a city and participate in questioning objects.

CS: How do you think people perceive your interventions?

BD: Construction workers come across my work very often, and it’s not a moment of artistry for them. It’s only an accident that needs to be repaired. They are so used to seeing things in disarray that any small changes I make are not significant to them. They see things functionally and how they fit together in a prescribed way, and I do the same thing but use de-construction and re-arrangement to find new potential for materials.
I also think that a construction worker’s accident can be much more beautiful than a conventional sculpture. I am there with them in a way, and actively participating, looking at what they’re doing, for example, the way that they place the pavement stones; the way that they can remove a bollard; the way that the city is physically shifted around.
For example, among the general public, someone who works at a flower shop will look at potted plants in a different way than others and might notice any changes to them in their city. My piece, Pot Flip, in which I flipped over a potted plant, I imagine could have a negative impact on a florist, but seeing it could be part of a very funny day for another passer-by. Or maybe the guy who made the pots is happy to again see the bottom of the pot, because he doesn’t see it very often and he is pleased with how well the bottom was made. It just depends on point of view. But I think that for another person who never looks at pots or at plants, for him, it’s just invisible.

CS: Is the intention of your work always the same, both for works which appear destructive or appear creative?

BD: Yes. For me, building or breaking is the same.

CS: Do you consider yourself an artist?

BD: I used to work in a studio making large sculptures, which I then installed outside illegally. Often, when I was placing them outside, people asked what I was doing, and if I replied, “Art,” then most said, “Ah, OK,” and I could see they would stop thinking about the work. It seems to me that people who are not familiar with the art world would assume that they wouldn’t be able to understand it. So I instead started answering people by saying: “This is something that I have to do.” With this answer, I could see that people were beginning to think to themselves: “Why does he have to do this?” To them, it must be strange to see someone working outdoors in the city who is clearly not being paid.

CS: Do you ever need the help of other people, or use tools or machines? And if you do, do you feel that this alters your work?

BD: Sometimes I call in outside help, although I feel that may pollute the spontaneity. But if I happen to be with somebody already, it is more immediate. The more important issue for me is to get away from thinking that to make sculpture, it is necessary to have tools. Traditional sculpture has always been material-intensive. The important thing for me is to figure out how to work with physical forces such as gravity and the materials that are already at the site.
And sometimes when I use tools, the results are unexpected, and they can alter the work. For example, in the piece Pavement Squash, I had originally planned to make a wall painting, and had hired an industrial lift. The ground underneath the lift was squashed in by its weight. And this became the artwork for me. So in this way, the tool that I was using led to an accidental and spontaneous work, one different from the artwork I had intended. But still a spontaneous sculpture. And the wall was never painted, because the lift was too heavy for the ground underneath.

CS: But you had been planning another work – to paint a wall?

BD: Just because I didn’t plan to make that work doesn’t mean that I was not meant to make it.

CS: So you work with what you encounter?

BD: Yes, it’s just like re-arranging objects which represent certain things, and I’m changing their definition. Composing what is already at the site, rather than bringing things in or taking things away. I think this work for me is really about re-organizing the information which is there.

CS: What if you do something and nobody sees it?

BD: I don’t think that this is important. I feel that if I do something in the here and now physically, this will touch people directly, whether they see it or not. I don’t know why, but I think all physical materials are communicating with each other in other ways. Ways that are not just tangible, or visible or audible.

CS: Is it because it takes a space? As a material it occupies a certain amount of it? A quantity of presence?

BD: Maybe.

TB: What you do is sometimes hard to recognize as a work of art. I am referring specifically to your spontaneous interventions in the city. Does this fact matter to you?

BD: It isn’t important for me that people view my interventions as “works of art.” It is important for me that the public reconsiders how it defines my work. People are more comfortable referring to the photograph or video that I take to capture my interventions as the artwork, because this is something that they can own. But for me doing the intervention is the real joy.

TB: In the book, you have included, next to the photos of the work, the length of time that the piece lasted in the location. This time seems to be quite significant for you. Would you say this is when the sculpture is “alive?”

BD: Time is very important for me. I think time and sculpture are related, especially with this body of work that I call “Spontaneous Sculptures.” For some of my works, I use video rather than photography. There is a reason for this, which is that I would consider the entire time that passes while making the work to be the sculpture. The sculpture is the time when the physical objects are being manipulated; the situation left after is not the work, and I don’t consider this action a performance. And this time that has passed, which is the sculpture, is also captured in a video.
Other works are captured with photography. For example, in Paving Slab Pry Stack (House of Cards III), the sculpture is the slabs of pavement made into something else. When the “house” is built, this is an artwork that people can view. But since these sculptures are later removed or destroyed or fall over, I need to document them in a photograph.
There is a third aspect of time, in addition to the time elapsed in a video or the instant seen in a photo. And that aspect is that once I work with the materials, they become artistically “charged,” so that they are, in a way, always part of a sculpture, for as long as they exist. Again, to use the example of House of Cards III, the paving slabs were pulled out of the ground, and, presumably, when the city repairs it, they put those exact same stones back in that same spot that I took them from. So actually, the time the sculpture exists, or is being created, is still running. You can still go and see the sculpture, but just reformed back into the city. It’s been transformed twice and finally it becomes invisible again, or as visible as it ever was.
I think this is a good way to develop sculpture. Many people could possibly interact with the fabric of the city, and then the city could be much more flexible and dynamic. But so far nobody has picked up where I have left off. It has always been that I make a work from the materials of the city and another person puts them back to where they came from. But the putting back is still somehow a third form for the sculpture. Even if it looks the same as it did in its original state.

TB: This reminds me of my daughter. In the morning everything is clean in my house and then she awakes and does her thing: takes things and builds something, combines stuff and throws this and that away. And then in the evening when she’s asleep, it’s my job to put everything back in its place. And every day it’s the same. I feel like the construction worker who has to tidy up your playground. Does your work spring from a childlike energy?

BD: Yeah, I am just trying to have fun. Walking around and keeping an open mind. I think children are best at this.

TB: Do you ever attempt to put a theoretical framework around your practice?

BD: No, I just go around looking for funny things. It depends on my mood. Sometimes I am pissed off, sometimes happy, sometimes sad.

TB: When I look at the photos of the Spontaneous Sculptures, I also thought that your work relates to collage in the way you work with alteration. For example, with Booth Pry (Dead), there is a telephone box that appears to have fallen over. One can see the gap in the pavement that has been left by the telephone booth. For me, this reminds me of collage, especially the process of separation. I see in your work many simple altering gestures. Like my daughter, you just take something and move it slightly, and then it’s something different.

BD: Negative space is very important for me. It is at least as important as the positive space. A big challenge is how to rearrange the information that’s already there to find new possibilities. Like I said before with House of Cards III the slabs that it was built from came out of the pavement, and they leave a shape which is another sculptural form, a negative space which adds another layer to the work. And this negative space was as carefully composed as the positive space of the house. In fact, I meant to reference both the shape of stealth bomber and a sculpture by Carl Andre titled Eighth Reversed Steel Corner.

TB: What about responsibility? Are you concerned about your work being a hazard?

BD: I always try as much as possible to make sure the sculptures are safe to be around. No one has ever been hurt by my work. At least I have not heard of anyone being injured since I started making outdoor works in 1998. I make sure that my works are not placed, for example, where somebody would ride their bike at night or where somebody could trip on them. I would never want my work to harm anyone.

TB: You moved to Berlin four years ago and you told me then that you planned to move to my neighborhood. I walk around often and I expected to see works of yours to appear in this area. When I passed street signs that were altered, or road surfaces that had been changed, I thought to myself: “Maybe this could be an artwork by Brad Downey?” I often thought it was, but I never asked you. But I felt pleased anyway that things were changing in my neighborhood, and that you were out there every day changing things and taking care of things.

BD: Do you have any examples?

TB: One day I was eating some food and sitting on a concrete bollard looking at the street. I noticed a part of the road where cars are not allowed to park, with diagonal lines painted on the ground to mark it off. I could see some black tar had been put down and covered only some sections of the yellow lines. To me it looked like an artistic composition. I thought to myself that this is not just a coincidence, and that it must be a work of yours. But now when I look at works in the book, I see that this composition in tar could have been an inspiration or a starting point for works such as Tape Peel (Broken Bike Lane). When I see something that I think is a work of yours, how can I be sure it is by you and not by a construction worker or a child playing? Or is this important?

BD: It’s not very important to me that you would be certain these situations are my artwork. What is more important is that, through having previously seen my work, people in the city are opened up to visually engaging with transitory moments in their city. I enjoy this aspect because my body of work becomes both extended and less defined. I want to extend the breadth of possibilities in my work to a place where the viewer is creating artworks on their own by imagining that something they come across was made by me. The possibility of these things being my work makes new artworks. There are many pictures and conversations about random things that happened in numerous cities which people think are my work, although they aren’t. I am glad to see this, not because I can get undeserved credit for artworks, but because knowledge of my artwork has given people a new way of seeing artistic potential in their surroundings. I like that someone could be standing somewhere in a city, looking at a pile of stones, and thinking: “Maybe that’s Brad Downey’s work?”

TB: So that brings up the issue of authorship. It seems it is not important to you?

BD: Maybe that is what working in many different cities has taught me. But that’s more about losing some faith in permanence or in leaving a legacy. Now the more I work outside, the more I realize that it’s naïve to believe that you can make something permanent, and that this monument will carry your name forever.

TB: What is your threshold for something to be a work? How do you judge its quality, or whether it is good enough for you?

BD: It’s just a feeling. For example, after going grocery shopping, I often lock two shopping carts together using a coin-operated lock and chain mechanism. They look to me like two lovers locked together. Even though it was quite nice to see two shopping carts linked together, it never felt like something I needed to photograph. It was just something that was funny for me to leave at the grocery store each time. Maybe nobody ever noticed it. But as I do my shopping or as I go through my day I try to leave little things behind.
Then, in 2008, when I was in Amsterdam, I found a drawbridge with a chain hanging from it. At this moment I knew what my earlier “shopping cart lovers” were destined for, and that became the piece Cart Connect & Hang (Abelard and Heloise).

TB: When I looked at the photos in this book, I don’t get the feeling that you were trying to take the perfect picture. It doesn’t seem like you put a lot of energy into capturing the form itself; it’s more like capturing the mood.

BD: Sometimes they’re even out of focus. It’s most important to capture it. That’s it. Get it and move on.

Brad Downey on his ties to the graffiti tradition, skateboarding as a post-situationist concept and the negative currency of street art in art-market terms.

Thomas Mießgang: Brad Downey, you have gained fame and a certain notoriety for doing all different kinds of interventions in public spaces—worldwide, one might say. But basically, you started out as a student at London’s Slade School of Fine Art and later at the Pratt Institute in New York City. The first artistic statement, that gave you visibility is therefore a rather traditional format: Public Discourse (released 2003), a documentary movie, where you depicted working methods and lifestyles of graffiti writers in the late 90s, like Swoon, Ellen Harvey, JJ Veronis, Shepard Fairey, Bob Dombrowski and Darius Jones.

Brad Downey: I had four years of film school and this is what I did at the end. I was seventeen years old when I started filming the movie and I had a circle of friends—maybe five or six people—that I thought were really interesting. They were working outside and I just started documenting what they were doing. At the end I had, like, 200 hours of footage and, with the help of Quenell Jones and Tim Hansberry, I just cut together 40 minutes.

TM: This was showing these people in action?

BD: Yeah, people in action, interviewing them. Kind of these early ideas developing into, like, adults I would say. There are a few older people there, but most of them were between 17 and 22. And, I was very young, I didn’t know anything about making a film. Just pointing a camera at my friends and filming.

TM: But the movie was very successful: It was shown at many festivals.

BD: At the time, from what I know, it was the first movie dealing with street art. I mean, I don’t really stand next to this term. Most artists don’t like to be put into a certain box. But, there was a certain form of producing art outside that has been documented in Public Discourse. Before this, you had a few films like Style Wars (1983) and some shorter movies, which focused on somebody like Blek le Rat. But you didn’t have a feature-length film showing the diversity of the whole artistic movement. A lot of these people became quite well known afterwards. Like Shepard Fairey, who now does the propaganda for the Obama-Administration.

TM: How do the kids in your movie relate to the initial graffiti movement that happened in the late 70s, early 80s in New York City?

BD: I would say there is this wave that hit back in the late 90s. It’s the feeling to go outside and work. You can call it street art, Fluxus, interventionist, land art—whatever. You have this same feeling happening over and over again, when you are surrounded by an institutionalized art setting, when you have universities, museum and galleries that are structured by money. All these things are very similar and follow the same impulse. American graffiti is something very specific. The feeling comes out of being bored with these spaces and being bored with this kind of setting which is been overused and fully exploited.

TM: In the time between these two strong movements there was not much happening, regarding artistic work in public spaces?

BD: There were a few important steps just before graffiti came back in the late 90s. There was a guy called Revs––for me he is one of the most important graffiti writers. If you want to relate it to street art: He wrote one page of his diary in every single tunnel in the New York subway system––this was in the early 90s. If you want to consider the hype that came along with graffiti right from the beginning: It all started already in the 70s, where they tried to package the graffiti into the gallery. Out of that came Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, and Lady Pink. Some of these people actually shifted their work to inside spaces very easily and very successfully. Then you had a break, because I don’t think, that you can sustain that energy the whole time. Then, in the 90s, comes Barry McGee, skateboard people like Ed Templeton and his Alleged Gallery. Around 2005, you had the era, which I was a part of, like Swoon, Darius and Downey, Banksy, etc. Europeans start to come more into focus. The newer artists are likely to deal with these old cities in Europe as compared to the cities with less history in the States.

TM: There is a book out, called The Adventures of Darius and Downey. Can you tell us, what this partnership was about?

BD: We met in Brooklyn. Darius Jones, a black guy from Ohio, was a graffiti writer called Verbs. He was tagging and he started working with signs a little bit, putting graffiti letters on signs. I, at the time, was actually painting on canvas and making some animations. I decided I would start filming him and then he asked me if I wanted to work with him. And it worked out really well. I wasn’t making a name or something, I had no graffiti name. I was just thinking of how to transport messages and aesthetic. He knew a lot about how to get away with all of this stuff. We worked together for six years, he changed from Verbs to Darius Jones and after four years we became this Darius and Downey.

TM: But what you did was not just graffiti, but also assembling and changing objects in the street like light poles, trying to subvert the traditional order of things.

BD: That was something we developed together with welding. Taking these objects, changing them, and then putting them back. In every city you can find these poles knocked over or construction sites full of these things. We wanted to make it as big as we could do it and we worked together as a team, which is really unusual for graffiti. Furthermore we wanted to make it really positive and happy. Though it was big and illegal, people would still laugh and say: “That’s nice.” It’s hard to be angry at a giant heart, even if it’s painted illegally. Afterward we did the same with the street furniture: We made them falling in love or we made them having kids.

TM: Were there any collectors who wanted to buy some of this stuff?

BD: The stuff outside? I wouldn’t do that. I mean, I would not deconstruct the works in order to make some money. A bit you see this with Banksy, for example. They are ripping out walls just to get his work, and then they replace the wall . . . maybe this is the most interesting part of his work. This is the thing that I always liked about graffiti: When you talk about the art market and selling . . . a lot of these things are intended for selling now. And graffiti immediately starts as a negative value, because it already costs a certain amount to clean it. So, if you make a piece of graffiti and you want to connect this to the art market, then you have already made negative currency on that piece. I think that that’s an interesting concept. Especially when you want to bring it back to somebody like Duchamp. If I write Brad Downey on a building, then I validate that building as my artwork; but I validate it as my artwork by making it into negative currency.

TM: At the beginning, as Darius and Downey, you both used working clothes—was it to hide your intentions and to appear as regular construction workers?

BD: With this construction vest, we had 100 % Getover-Rate––that’s the slang: Getover means, you get away with it. But after Darius and I split and I started these other works of my own, I thought about changing my working method and my attitude. I don’t necessarily feel what I am doing is wrong and I am not afraid to explain myself afterwards but, by wearing the vest, I admitted that I knew that I was doing something wrong––if you know what I mean. So, if I take away the vest, then it’s just a regular guy doing something. And I think that that’s more interesting for the viewers and for the potential inspiration. I’m not a terrorist or something. I’m just a guy who really wants to do something.

TM: I always thought of the first wave of graffiti art as being more politicized than later efforts. A lot of the artists came from ethnic minorities—African-American, Latin—and used their art to fight for recognition and visibility. Is this true or just made up?

BD: I think that the way that they package the history of graffiti is somewhat different from the reality of the situation. For sure, there is a lot of graffiti, which is coming from hip hop and break dancing; but at the same time, parallel, you have people from the punk movement. Maybe there were Latinos, Blacks and Whites—but this was the typical New York mix of people. If you want to look at Basquiat—it’s not coming straight from there. Break dancing is for sure coming from there and hip-hop music is coming for sure from there. I think graffiti was the well-rounded packaging that they needed to finish that. I don’t necessarily think that this was true. It was developing just out of the fact that all these trains were fucked up and then everybody tried to make them look better. I think that didn’t take a guy from the Bronx, because all the trains were fucked up anyway.

TM: So people were just looking for opportunities to inscribe their individual art on the visible surface of the city: Take whatever there is and try to make it different.

BD: It is kind of a sort of existentialism around this time. I have been told many times, that these early graffiti writers were thinking of this existentialist concepts, where they had to destroy the letter in order to make something beautiful. They have to destroy the train, also the letter and also the language and use these words like a sculpture or like physical objects to communicate aesthetics.

TM: There is a certain political undertone which wants to communicate that by putting tags on walls in the street you can “détourner,” divert the official sense of architecture or traffic signs which is put upon people by authorities. Many people know Jean Baudrillard’s (1929-2007) seminal essay Kool Killer, or The Insurrection of Signs (1975, Engl. 1993), which talks a lot about the empty signs that help to structure urban life and movement in a different way than it was supposed to be. This implies some sort of rebellious attitude: Don’t accept how the administration wants people to use the city!

BD: Our work did not have this explicit political urgency. It was 100 % intuitive. I mean, I come from skateboarding. The funny thing about skateboarding is: You can have a quite complicated conversation about architecture with a skateboarder and they don’t recognize that you are talking about architecture. They are very clued into some very small details which are happening in between moments, which are dictating movement around space. It’ something which seems very simple but just by saying that a bench is not something for sitting on, it’s for expressing yourself, you change the meaning. All of a sudden, it becomes a ballet attacking architecture. This taught me a lot as a younger person. I learned a lot of things by riding around the city and thinking this way. I’m still doing it now, just walking around and imagining how I can make it into art rather than a trick. But it’s still a kind of magic trick. It’s like showing somebody something, but there is also hiding a lot of the time. I think, the people know that you are showing them something and also know that you are trying to hide something from them. Just like a magician. So it’s a kind of a trick or a practical joke.

TM: If you compare the urban surfaces of cities in the States and in Europe, do you see or feel a difference, which is significant?

BD: Coming from the States and living in Europe now for almost ten years I start to really feel the heaviness of architecture and written words and the state. Just the physical burden of all these objects. What you say about changing these things—of course, when you add a word to an object it becomes something totally different. The thing I get really weighed down by in Europe is this collaboration between the state, architecture and the written word, which is this kind of historical and visual burden. Everything is fixed. A lot of the things that I try to work on now is how to shift meaning for objects which already have this pure definition. How can you free the stones from their fixed meaning?

TM: The weight of history?

BD: Very much so. And they want it to be like that. It is important that it stays like that. Here, in Vienna, you can even see the layer from the Romans dug up and preserved. You can look at the city underneath the city to show you that their city is greater in direct juxtaposition. This is very hard to deal with as an artist, if you want to make something new. Especially in this space in between work and home––if you want to call that public space.

TM: I think in Europe there are more layers or history to be put upon than in the US. It is a simple matter of longevity and endurance and this gives a wholly different experience of an urban landscape.

BD: Yeah, if you want to just talk about western history. But you had this nomadic history, which goes way back. Of course, there is history there, but it wasn’t a history that focused on making this permanent legacy. It was something that was much more visceral and much more autonomous.

TM: Talking about nomadism: You come from a family, which has strong ties to the military, basically the Marine Corps. Therefore you had to travel a lot as a child and the nomadic lifestyle should be part of your genetic matrix.

BD: Definitely. I was born in Kentucky and lived there for less than a year. And then, I moved to Virginia; Washington D.C.; Pensacola, Florida; Oceanside, California; San Diego; Atlanta, Georgia; Columbus, Ohio; and so on. Then I moved to New York for seven years, afterwards to London for four and a half years. Now, I live in Berlin. Last year I was home 42 days, something like that. So the traveling lifestyle is very much part of me.

TM: Does this give you a different perspective on a topic like public space? So many cityscapes, so many urban surfaces, as part of your personal experience.

BD: All cites have some basic supplies: You need light; you need to cross the street safely. They all have a basic number of items. But, the way the people are able to use the city is based on the way the city is designed; this changes from city to city I would say, particularly in Europe. I hope to push my work in a direction that shifts some of these permanent concepts. My early stuff was about adding lots of things, afterwards I was subtracting. Now I am more interested in reorganizing, like taking the information that is already there and reorganizing it to make new meaning. E.g., pulling the stones out of the streets, making a house out of cards––something like this. It is not necessary to make something new. It’s more about how do you shift the things that are already there and make a new meaning from this.

TM: Like semantic changes? When you remove the S from Shell, it becomes Hell. You did this work once. Another was putting a fake McDonalds sign someplace where it was not supposed to be.

BD: I have only worked this way twice. I have accidentally bombed into advertising in my work but in this case a university invited me to make a painting, a mural. Actually, I am not a painter necessarily, but they invited 20 street artists, or “cool” artists. Once I researched further, I found out that they had renamed their school and they wanted to develop this Ivy League school in a small town in Germany. And, one of the first steps towards developing this was rebranding the school with this kind of cool introduction. So, they invited all of these artists to make some sort of freshman week for all the new students, a really cool experience. I just told them I would work spontaneously. In the middle of the university campus, I just wanted to paint any logo as big as I could––so that turned out to be McDonalds. But, it was just to comment on the other artists and to make a comment on this university. I don’t think it was really about advertising; it was more a critique of my circle of peers, or colleagues. Legally, you are not allowed to put a big McDonalds advertising in a university campus like that, so this was also funny.

TM: What happened next?

BD: All of the people I spoke to––all the organizers and people who invited me––never spoke to me again. I didn’t get any comment on it. A collector told me that there was a big correspondence: They wanted to erase it; everybody hated it. But then, in the end, the director was saying: No, we can’t do that.

TM: So, part of your work has always been happening in more or less illegal territory. Did you ever get in trouble with police or authorities?

BD: Yeah, I have been arrested twelve times, I think, for any number of things. For putting up posters, writing my name, whatever. Sometimes not even art related. As far as I remember they called it “civil disobedience.” But fortunately, I never had to go to prison. I sat in a jail for 48 hours. Prison is something different, where you are convicted and have to sit somewhere for long periods of time. I hope this never happens.

TM: Last question: What about the work that you produced for Street and Studio? A phone booth decked out with concrete. What is the attraction of the phone booth?

BD: It’s not just the phone booth. It’s just one of these many things that are in every city. The phone booths are actually disappearing because everybody got cell phones. I am surprised that here they have quite a few. In cities like New York, you still see them but none of them work. And, in Amsterdam you can’t find a public phone to save your life. The one thing I like about the phone booth is that it’s public and private simultaneously. So, you have this very strange attitude, which goes along with this space. Once I filled a phone booth with balloons and if somebody wants to use it he has to destroy the balloons and a magical moment. The piece here is kind of a joke on some of these “sculpture giants” from art history like Bruce Nauman or Rachel Whiteread doing this kind of negative-space casts. But, this is like kind of a dumb version of that, because I leave the mould. So, it does in the end come out to look like a random sculpture which has a funny punch line. You see this block on the floor and the punch line is visible: Filling this kind of space, which is public and private, filling it with artistic content built out of heavy material.

This interview took place on March 24, 2010, in Brad Downey’s artist studio during his artist-in-residence program at quartier21, Vienna.