 Interview with Swoon - Page 1
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 Swoon woodcut print and "papercut," Mercer Street near Broome Street in Soho. "Grandfather" on the right was Swoon's first Papercut. November 27, 2003 |
| I met Swoon at a coffee shop on Seventh Avenue in Park
Slope, Brooklyn. She got the fancy coffee, it was green tea for me. I
used my video camera to record the audio for the interview, keeping the
lens cap on. I started by showing her some prints of my photos.
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"That’s a woodblock print (above). See I was just printing last night (shows the black ink staining around and under her nails) I do a full size piece of plywood, 4 by 8. I carve it either with an exacto to get the fine details or with a Dremmel. The Dremmel because my hand and my whole wrist is getting really tired from all the carving. I’ve been carving for years. Between the paper, the wood and the linoleum." (Links to linoleum and woodcut printing techniques, and Dremel Tools) Could you talk a bit about the printing
process. I'm imagining you walking around on top of the plywood to
make the impression. What sort of ink? Water or oil based.
"I use a huge roller, and etching
ink (it's oil based but I just clean it up with olive oil) and spread
a sheet of paper on top then step on it a hundred times like mashing
grapes or doing the twist. Depending on the paper type wetting it
first can be useful for better saturation, contrary to what you would
think with oil based ink." "My brother is visiting and he looked
into my studio today and said wow, you must be a very strong person
mentally, and I said why, and he said because if I had to deal with
that mess you've got in there (meaning a four foot stack of prints
and then some) I would just break down and lose my mind. So that's
what my house |
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| Friends and Family - Main Street in DUMBO. June 15, 2003.
After being clued to their location by this article
in the Village Voice, these delicate paper cut-outs are what first
attracted me to Swoon's work. Click
the image to see full size. Click
here for earlier photo of the same wall on the toyshop collective website.
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Are they portraits? "They are all portraits... This one is my grandfather. That was the first of these I ever did." |
 Grandfather In making these, Swoon cuts several layers of paper at once, creating what I would call a very limited 'print run. |
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You call this paper cutting, carving?
"Because it’s with a knife, cutting out, the physical process is like carving." "This and this. (The woodcut prints and the paper cutouts) Start out looking really similar. I start out with a big messy charcoal drawing. And then with the prints I stay a lot closer to the original drawing. And with the cutouts I pare it down. Instead of keeping the line of the mouth I would just cut out a little bit of it. So it’s like the same drawing but rendered really differently.""It’s almost like the rules of the medium
are what dictates with this. With the cutouts I try to simplify it because
it has to stay within the paper, with the prints I keep it scribbly,
because I can. Because the cutouts have to stay
in one piece, you have all these different physical visual rules that
you have to obey. Whereas with prints you can kind of do whatever you
want. Sometime limitation are good." |
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I ask about her pasting technique. "All I really do is cut a piece of paper, and then
I roll it from the top down. And then I just roll it back out. I just
have it as a very fragile, like shaking around, all cut-up piece of
paper. And I use wallpaper paste, as you can see that’s why this
stuff comes down so easily, because wallpaper paste is meant for indoors.
I kind of like that, I like it that this stuff decays. I really love
brick, and I wouldn’t ultimately want to destroy it. I only like
to work with it temporarily." |
 Main Street, November 17 - painted brown. |
| "I see that they painted that wall brown, and it looks horrible. Everything is gone the whole thing is brown. And to me that is so much worse vandalism than anything else that was done to that wall. Because it’s brick, I mean look at all the colors and textures, and all of the sense that you get of that building. Now they’ve just painted that whole building brown. It looks really horrible. It’s kind of deadening, you know." |
 The Fulton Ferry building on Main Street from the Manhattan Bridge. 11/17/03 |
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| "I try to create something that has a kind of a life cycle. It goes up, and has this whole blossoming and decay." |
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Front Street, DUMBO. 11/27/03
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Dunham Place, Williamsburg 11/26/03
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| "You know why I made this one actually, it was right
about the time there was a man who was ticketed
for illegal use of milk crate, for sitting on a milk crate on the
street. I was that is so fucking ridiculous. You should be able to use
the streets as public spaces. I feel like it’s the thing of not encouraging
community on the streets. I was just kind of tweaking a little. Oh ‘illegal
use of milk crate’ huh! I’ll make some guys sitting the streets
on milk crates! This is just a photograph of a guy on Seventh Avenue.
He was sitting on a milk crate. I thought it was kind of appropriate for
the time.
And that’s the whole idea with my new series. I’m going out and looking at what people are actually doing as they are hanging out on the street. So all of it is actual street scenes. To take pictures and make drawings, to look and see what people are doing when they are hanging out on the street. To make a portrait of the city." |
 Houston Street, Lower East Side July 6, 2003 |
| Tell me about the Toyshop
Collective.
"That is a group of friends who do lots of like open public projects. We started because a friend of mine named Sal Randolph threw an event called the Free Biennial, which was a month long series of project, kind of parallel to the Whitney Biennial, except that no money was being exchanged and they were all taking place in open space.
I threw a street party we had pirate radio broadcast off of a rooftop, all sorts of different stuff was happening. It was so much work. And there were so many people involved, that I was like, you know it seems to be the same people getting involved in all these projects that are happening, so why not say we’re a collective and form a cohesive idea and do stuff.
Over the Summer we did a series of street parties. We started out with a giant junk band, where we made hundreds of instrument out of garbage we would find. And we made a marching band. We went off to the Lower East Side, playing and making such a total ruckus. This was May 19th. It was a Friday nigh. People were pouring out of the bars., yelling “What are you doing.” And we’d yell back “It’s the marching band, come join us.” And there was actually a couple of people who just left their posts, came out and grabbed instruments."
I think I heard you guys go by my apartment.
"We circled the neighborhood, and ended up with a police escort of five cars and three paddy wagons. We tried to go to the East River Park. And they were sort of going to let us, but then somebody lit up (it was contained) but it was a bonfire. And they were like “oh no!” (Laughs) It was really fun, it was really great.
Then we did Pirates on the Staten Island Ferry (photos). It was somewhere between kind of a joke. Like “Take this boat to Staten Island!” and a way of creating outrageous festivities in unexpected spaces. We had some people who were riding the ferry who came to dance with us. And then we went to the park and had a good time."
I talk about Lovesphere and how hard it is to keep a collective effort going.
"I’ve been out town four or five months out of the year. It’s really hard to keep focus, and people are in and out, and people don’t want to keep doing the same thing. We’ve only been existing for a year, so we’ve had one really strong year and we’re still going.
We did a bicycle tour of street art. These are really only political in the sense that drawing a picture of a guy sitting on a milk crate is political. It’s the politics of every day use of spaces, and every day city life, and street life. We did a project last week, in the park, where we rolled out a giant sheet of paper. And kids came and drew, and then we turned them into billboards. That was trying to include kids from the community." (photos)
You mean you took what they drew and put them over billboards?
"Yeah, pasted them up. It looked beautiful, they’re just joyful. They’re wonderful to walk by."
You pasted during the day?
"Yeah."
Just went up and did it.
"Yeah. We tend to do things that we think are positive. We’re not trying to be destructive or even edgy or anything. We’re just trying to do things that we think should happen. If it’s something we think should be happening then we’re going to do it. So here we are on a Sunday afternoon pasting up. People love it. People were walking by and like “ Oh that’s beautiful.” It’s a thing about not sneaking around, not trying to make something illegal. Because you want to be open about your activities. You are just trying to create a discourse about what happens in the city. Whose walls these are? Who participates in these things."
Whose walls? Our walls!
(Laughs) "Exactly! The thing with the kids is that we weren’t just creating our own drawings. We were trying to involve other people in the project."
Any other things you’ve done with billboards?
"A few years ago there were a few projects of getting artists making paintings, and then they would go out and put them up on billboards. The thing with the kids was an extension of that." |
 Wythe and South 2nd Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 11/2/03 |
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"Recently I’ve been doing more of the wheat-paste on the walls, the portraits and stuff. With those I’m trying to create a feeling of a person standing on the street. So it’s more important to be on ground level." |
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