A friend of mine had a dream six years ago before I was doing any street
work that I was a graffiti writer named Swoon. I was working for a while
before I ever decided to have a name. I kind of liked the idea of connecting
the different ways of working, so doing this plus doing the billboard
postering, different kinds of postering, I connected them with the name
to show the connections between the different ways of working. So I remembered
that dream, and used it. (laughs)

I like that your name is not often a prominent element.

The name is much bigger in my earlier stuff. I was more interested in
it as a graphic element at the time. But in the later stuff they are actually
signed, but a lot of time they wear away. I sign them in a big way, in
a really visually obvious way if I want to use the name as part of the
design. Otherwise, if I feel like signing them, I just sign them in pencil.
It depends on how I feel dealing with it that day.

“I’ve done a few events that included music, but I myself am
not a musician. Even if I was making tons of instruments, and organizing
a semi-chaotic musical event, I don’t consider myself a musician.
My energy is divided between something like community organizing, and
the physical visual work.

The Indivisible
Cities project was an exchange that I organized. I had people sending
people different stuff. So that a guy from Brazil would send a package
here, and I would hand it off to a friend and they would put the piece
up and send something to Brazil. That is somebody who wanted to participate
in the project would take the piece do whatever it required, and then
they would send the person in Brazil a piece of artwork of their own,
and the person in Brazil would do something with that. (photos)
That’s sort of organizing a community or a social structure. It’s
either organizing a community that exists for an hour, or a community
that exists for months and months, that and the physical work are the
two different places my artistic energy goes.”

It’s funny when I was working on this series (early smaller pieces)
I had never even paid a single bit of attention to comic books. And people
were saying that to me a lot “Oh are you making a comic book,”
and it never even occurred to me to even think that way. At this point
I had been studying classical painting for five years, and all of a sudden
I flipped out and started drawing this stuff. So when I went against my
education and started doing that, it was a funny break, but it is clearly
a continuation of my education too. For me it was just a stepping stone
in a thought process.

I don’t even really like this work (the early paste-up pieces).
In fact nobody likes it. Even when you don’t quite know what you
are doing you have to keep doing, then you will hit on something. Sometimes
you will spend six months making really ugly things but you would never
have gotten to the good stuff if you hadn’t gone ahead and made the
ugly stuff.

Interview and photos: Michael Natale.
©2003