super colossal

8/2/2019 Super Colossal

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SUPER

COLO


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SSALs t r e e t a r t

In a Paris suburb in October 2005, two teenagers of African descent were run-ning away from the police and tried to hide inside a power substation. Theywere electrocuted instantly. The violence that broke out in protest of policeharassment soon spread to neighboring communities and eventually to hous-

ing projects across the whole of France. When the media came to document theevents in Clichy-sous-Bois, they were met with an additional, unexpected kind ofconfrontation: behind one of the countless cars in ames was a black-and-white


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photograph that was pasted onto theside of an apartment building sometime before and took up its entirewidth. From its center, surroundedby a groupof boys strik-ing aggres-sive poses,a black manseveral timeslarger thanlife staredout, pointing with what appeared atrst to be a shotgun. On closer in-spection, it was a video camera. Getout, he seemed to be saying, wererecording this too, and well tell thestory the way we see it.In the bottom right-hand corner ofthe poster was a label, too sophis-

ticated to be a grafti artists tagbut something along those lines: aJapanese-like calligraphic symbolconcocted from the letters J andR above a Web address. Sud-denly, amid all the fear and long-bred loathing, questions were beingasked about this strange work of art.How did it come to be there? Whowas, as one newspaper asked, thiskamikaze image-maker, JR?More than ve years have passed;

he has pasted similar portraits allover the world, and the public stilldoesnt know the artists full name.He insists on JR his real initials.He used to refer to himself as a pho-tograffeur, which puts him some-where between aphotographer anda grafti artist. HisM.O. is to show upin a shantytown in

Kenya or a favelain Brazil, a placewhere some eventhas been noted inthe media and cap-tured his attention,and turn it insideout, photographingthe residents, thenwrapping theirbuildings with the

results, on a scale so vast that youcan see their eyes from the sky. Of-ten he has worked at night, and assoon as hes done, he disappears;

so when the installation becomesfront-page news, there is no one leftto explain it but the people whosevoices had not been previouslyheard. As a woman from Kibera, aneighborhood in Nairobi, puts it inWomen Are Heroes, a documen-tary recently released in France that

JR made about his work: Photoscant change the environment. But ifpeople see me there, theyll ask me:Who are you? Where do you comefrom? And then Im proud.I rst met JR one afternoon late lastNovember in his studio in Paris. Thenearest Metro station is named af-ter Alexandre Dumas, and theressomething Three Musketeers-ishabout the team inside too: JR; oneright-hand man, Emile Abinal; and

the other, their philosopher andguru, Marco Berrebi, were windingdown from a poster-pasting trip toShanghai and preparing for a pressconference about the positive after-effects of their portraits in the Middle

East. They never really had peoplein the studio before, and there wassome cleaning up to do for onething, a yellow Kawasaki motor-

cycle was parkedright in the middleof it. Hanging on afar wall, hidden be-tween large-scalephotographs oJRs installationswas a small tro-

phy cabinet containing two batteredbroom brushes, a squeegee and abox of powdered glue. We kneedown and pray in front of that everyday, JR said.We sat in a corner to talk about theTED Prize, which he won a monthearlier. Every year since 2005, the

New York-based TED organizationhas awarded $100,000 to prominentgures like Bono and Bill Clinton

and Jamie Oliver who are expectedto use the money to fulll one wish

to change the world. Now 28 yearsold, JR is the prizes youngest win-ner.I dont even know how they knewmy work, he said, still ush from thenews. What I love about the TED isthat its not, Hey, take this check andenjoy. Its, Do something with thisand well help you. I think thats themost beautiful prize Ive ever heardof. Until JR announces his plansthis week at the TED conferencethe contours of his next project are

secret, but its likelyto resemble his ear-lier actions, as hecalls them; only this

time, he says, it wil

be bigger.The specics of hisactions are as vari-ous as the settingsin which they takeplace. When JR andhis team show upthey dont know iit will happen youhave to go there andwrite the story as

What they hope for, much more thancash, is culture. They appreciate the

idea of conveying a different imageof themselves to the world.

JR Self Portrait


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you go, he says. In Brazil, he hadpictures up in less than a month; in

Kenya, he had to take the photos,return to Paris to have them print-ed, then return to Kenya to pastethem up. Pasting can take between8 and 12 days and involve a crewof as many as 10 friends who haveworked with JR for years.Sometimes he has permission;

sometimes hedoesnt. In 2009the mayor ofthe fourth Ar-rondissement inParis authorizedJR to take overthe le Saint-Louis some-thing that hadnt

been done sinceChristo wrappedthe Pont-Neuf 25years earlier but permissionwas all he had.He nanced the

action himself. A hundred or so vol-unteers, drawn to the site by word ofmouth or friendship or happenstanceas they walked by, helped by pass-ing strips of paper from scaffoldingledge to ledge, cutting out and past-ing 2,500 feet of posters on the wallsleading down to the Seine.

The Middle East was the siteof his biggest illegal exhibi-tion in 2007. At four Israeliand four Palestinian sites,

JR pasted pairs of portraits, of Is-raelis and Palestinians who heldthe same jobs. The locals held im-promptu discussions about why

their presumed enemies were deco-rating their walls; a bespoke-travelagent was inspired by JR to createtours that took in both sides. Partof the work is the conversation thatfollows, JR told me.A sort of conversation was prompt-ed by his work in Kenya, too, wherepeople take their roof portraits withthem when they move. In Kenya,when we nished doing the rst

roofs, JR told me, a neighbor said:Why stop there? Why are you doingthat roof and not mine? He smiledas he considered the ne-art an-swer. You cant say, Thats what thegraphic work dictates. You have tosay, Ill come back. And so theresa social continuation of the artisticproject. If you saw JRs portraits ofghetto kids from Clichy pasted onto

walls in the posher neighborhoodsof Paris in the mid-2000s, you wouldhave been forgiven for thinking theywere somehow connected to Nike.(Indeed, the scale and the idiomof his images still share so muchwith the world of publicity that theyprompt the question: Whats beingadvertised?) So it is perhaps inevi-table that he should have been ap-proached by some major brands. Hehas turned them down every time,whether the offer was to nance hiswork or to donate money to his sub-

jects or to collaborate on a pair ofsneakers.

Its something to think about, hesaid when we spoke at the studio.Im not averse to working withbrands, but it has to make as muchsense for the people as it does forme as an artist and for the brand,and I havent found that equationyet. So I prefer to take small steps.Ill give you an example, he wenton. A sporting-goods company in-quired about building a soccer eld

in the Providencia, the oldest favelain Brazil. And they were going todo a whole big thing, bringing in thenational team to play with the kidsand staging tournaments there. thought: O.K., they already havea soccer pitch. Its not the mosbeautiful soccer pitch in the worldbut they have one. And the idea obringing in the big sports stars -

even journalistshave to come into the favela inarmored cars

they could walkup there, butheir jobs dictatethat they needan armored ca so imagine

the athletesarriving accom-panied by awhole army osecurity, whilethree poor kidsin T-shirts are

trying to play soccer on their prettynew pitch. . . . I just thought, Insteadof doing some good, were going tocreate a monster. So in the end said, Actually, no. His resistance to such things haspresented the people at TED witha challenge were trying to workthrough together, in the words ofAmy Novogratz, the prize director.The TED community comprisessome of the wealthiest names inSilicon Valley and Hollywood andelsewhere, and its renowned con-ferences are sponsored by the likesof Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, Le

vis and Rolex. But because JR hasinsisted that there be no corporatebacking, Novogratz is planning toask people to step up anonymouslyor as individuals. She adds, Itsexciting but frustrating. They areworking on what Novogratz calls thepreproduction of his wish. She alsopredicts that it will go on for sometime, noting, It takes a lot longerthan a year to change the world.


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JRs style is a little bit Belmondo, alittle bit Buddy Holly the glass-es are Perspex and he speaksin the enthusiastic slang of a hip,young Parisian. Ctait ouf! is howhe often describes some exciting orexceptional event the punched-in-the-gut exhalation of that lastword standing in for anything moreprecise. Nickel, short for nickel-chrome, is applied liberally to meangreat.I grew up in the suburbs, JR says,a calm suburb, without tension,with working-class and middle-classpeople mixed together. He wontsay where or say anything about hisparents. His request for anonymityis quite specic: he explains thatwhen posing for photographs, he

wears shades; though many peopleknow his real name, including thosehe has photographed (and the po-lice in countries where he has beenarrested), they tend to refrain fromdivulging it because he wouldnt beable to work as freely as he does ifit were made public. When it is sug-gested that keeping his full name se-cret might be just a way to enhancehis mystique, he says, Ive neverconsidered anonymity to be an ef-fect or a question of style. Initially itwas just a way of avoiding the neshe incurred as a grafti artist. Now,

he claims, a personality cult wouldgo against what he is trying to do,to reveal to the world the faces ofthe unfamous. In other words, as heputs it, Look at what Im showingyou and not at who I am.Nevertheless, some biographicalinformation will still trickle out. He

was never very focused at school,he says, and after being expelled at16, he moved to Paris to live with hiscousins. I was, he says, a turbu-lent child.If you ask him why he does what hedoes, hell tell you that he has neverreally asked himself that question. Ithink it comes from several things,he says. Firstly a real curiosity aboutthe world. When I was little, I didnt

really travel from the suburbs toParis was already a journey. I hada foreigners eye on the city, and Istill enjoy that point of view. Thentheres the fact that one of the thingsthat touches me most is injustice.Im of mixed origins North Africa,Eastern Europe, Spain and thisgeneration today, were all a little bit

from everywhere. My parents wereborn abroad. I was born in France,but I feel comfortable everywhere I dont see the borders.Soon after he moved to Paris, hefound a camera on the metro. It had

a strong ash. He used it to docu-ment graftiartists in thesubway; then

he wouldprint thoseimages, copythem andreturn to the site where they weretaken in order to paste the picture.He would spray a red frame around

it and write expo2rue (street ex-hibition). Emile Abinal, then an arstudent at the Louvre, discoveredhim this way; he was enthralled bythe mise-en-abme of the graft

work. JR went back to school, stud-ied economics, took a photographyclass and earned a diploma. Theparadox is that I got my baccalaureate for the very things that got meinto trouble with the law, he sayswith a smile. And even now, whatgets you arrested in some countriesgets you an exhibition in others.Street art has a fairly long history obeing gobbled up by the establish-ment. If Basquiat begat Banksy, theinvisible British grafti artist, then its

fair to ask what comes next. Anyonewho saw Banksys documentary

Exit Through the Gift Shop, whichreceived an Academy Award nomination this year, will automaticallythink theres a potential EmperorsNew Clothes aspect to this art. Andits possible that no one worriesabout suspicions of charlatanismmore than JR.In January, I met him one night ashe got off a train from the South ofFrance, where Women Are Heroeshad just been shown to an entire vil-lage. He moved down the platformas if on little springs and barelybroke stride when I joined him at theend. As we walked from the Garede Lyon to his apartment, he ex-pressed anxiety about the prices ohis work. Through Steve LazaridesBanksys former gallerist in LondonJR sells individual works largeimages pasted onto wood or cor-rugated metal panels for around

$50,000 to $70,000. This is how henances his ac-tions, and hewas planning tomake a few newpieces to sell tothose who wouldlike to contrib-

ute to his TED project, because hewanted people to get something fotheir money as opposed to giving to

The world wouldbe a better place ifit had more people

like JR in it


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charity. Im not a humanitarian, hesaid.A week earlier, however, a workof his sold at an auction of streetart at Bonhams in London for fourtimes what the collector paid for it18 months before. This is some-thing JR strives to avoid. I wantto sell to people who buy the workbecause they want to be part of thebroader project, he claimed, andnot because they want to sell thework on. He considers Banksysprecipitous rise to be a cautionarytale. He worries about an attendantfall and just wants the prices of hiswork to be steady. I watch the mar-ket quite closely, because I dontwant to gamble with it, he said. Imhappy to take other risks to put

up posters where its illegal, to scalevery tall buildings, but. . . . When Iasked what he thought might be sorisky about making a lot of money,he replied: I dont know. Its just agut feeling.Steve Lazarides told me: JR doesntwant his work to be about the mon-ey. He works on a different set ofmorals. But once its in the publicarena, theres very little you cando. Lazarides refused to be drawninto comparisons between JR andBanksy (There are not a great dealof similarities, he said), but he said,The world would be a better place ifit had more people like JR in it.Such high-mindedness does not re-solve one tricky question, however.The more valuable his work be-comes, the more stark the contrastbetween the world in which its madeand the world in which its sold. How

long can he go on without paying hissubjects?I think paying people takes away

its entire meaning, JR replied whenI put the matter to him. It wouldtake away the soul of the project.People wouldnt do it for the samereasons.But if he were rich, wouldnt he feelmore guilt?He laughed. Just by virtue of being

white in these places, youre rich!he said. Whether your father is thedirector-general of Renault or runsa corner shop in the sticks, to themits all the same: youre foreign, soyoure rich. Theyre not going topore over your bank statements.What they hope for, much morethan cash, is culture. They appreci-

ate the idea of conveying a differentimage of themselves to the world.When we returned to the subjectof the TED wish, he said he hadto put a great deal of thought intoit, because it came to him at a very

young age. One wish, he said,if you could sum things up in onewish, what would it be? Somethingthat symbolizes a single desire to-day. What is it I want to defend?And? I asked. What is it?He took the question rhetorically.Well, exactly, he replied.One evening, as I was running alongbehind JR, wondering how his littleside-to-side bounce could take him

so far, so fast, he offered a mentatour of clandestine Paris, from hisdays as a guerrilla graffeur. Thereminiscence gave a sense of theway in which he can slip in any-where, as well as a glimpse of thekind of panoramic gaze he takes forgranted. To change the way yousee things, he told me, is alreadyto change things themselves.Once he had two special keys. Oneled underground, to hidden tunnelsand abandoned metro stations. Hedoesnt remember exactly how toget to them now, and even whenhe had the key, he had to try everylocked door, Wonderland-like, untihe found one that opened, but heremembers the marvel of that worldand its beauty. He has thrown away

that key it was too dangerous athing to have on your person, espe-cially if you had a tendency to gearrested.But he still has a second key, whathe calls the key of the mailboxman, which opens up a way to theroofs. I love the rooftops of Paris,he said, still advancing at greaspeed with his slight jog, and Ivebeen on most of them. He lookedup we were on a large boulevardin the 11th Arrondissement andexplained that he used to leave histag on the apartment buildings heclimbed. Then he showed me howto open the door to one.Shall we go up? I asked.He shrugged. Sure.He took the wooden stairs two at atime, knocked on the door at the topto make sure no one was in, scaledthe door frame in his squeaky sneak-

ers and pulled at a panel in the ceil-ing. It came down, padlock and allscattering plaster all over the oor

JR shook his head: Usually theresa ladder. We stared at the unreachable attic space for a while then ti-died the plaster into polite little pilesand went back down to the streetThis line of work gets trickier everyday, he said.

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