SWOON UNION
text by Swoon Union and an interview with Caledonia Curry
 |
»we scour the city for the ways that we are spoken to, and we speak back« |
Swoon Union is a group of artists living in New York City, working with the city as muse and medium. We are attempting to, by example, create a participatory model for citizens to take an active part in the physical and social structures of the environment we live in.
Concept: In our cities we have privat space, that space which is owned exclusively by an individual or a company; public space such as city streets, sidewalks or parks where the general populous is allowed to enter without pretext: and then we have a kind of a third space which usually rests on the surface of privately owned places, on the walls of buildings, the insides of subway cars, the side of a city bus, which can be considered the mental space of a city. Physically adjacent to private property as this space is, it is often sold by private owners to private companies who purchase the privilige to address the city's 8 million inhabitants. Through direct interaction with these types of spaces, whose definition can be expanded to include television and radio waves, as well as the designated uses of the street and streets and sidewalks, we are trying to shift focus away from the few, the advertiser, the car owner, the FCC, and see these spaces reconceptualized by active citizens who are participants, rather than subjects in their own environment.
The first of our projects addressed the increasing number of street level billboards that were going up in residential and commercial areas of Brooklyn. In a single morning we covered all of the billboards on a given stretch of an avenue with images of all kinds; from the political, to the beautiful, to the absurd. What seemed to surprise passers by the most were that the images had no target audience or clear message. Expanding this concept we regularly make use of the ad spaces in the subways, on the phone booths and bus shelters. We infiltrate newspaper boxes; we scour the city for the ways that we are spoken to, and we speak back.
Our most recent project was a street party that included a pirate radio broadcast. People brought hand held radios to create a decentralized sound system. A live band plugged into the electrical supply of a light post. People leaned out of their windows, came down from their houses, and play ensued.
Public interaction becomes a point of interest. A birthday party in a subway station causes surprise when strangers come forward bearing gifts, cookies, a drawing, some stickers. Weeks after the billboard projects, when the ads are snugly back in their places, we see those spaces newly reappropriated. By whom we don't know, but there begins to be a feeling of a dialogue. Play in the face of urban alienation. If cities are theoretically the psychic manifestations of the people who inhabit them, we want to make it literally and physically so. We want to command more control of the landscape, and leave it less up to the aesthetics of commerce. And we are just getting started.
finger: Who is Swoon Union and since when does that group excist and how many people participate and is it a constant group? And in what respect do you consider your activities as art Ð or is that not important to you at all?
Swoon Union is about 15 to 20 people, most of whom have background as artists and are people who are trying to create their own space in New York city and in the new york art world, both of which can be daunting and alienating if you allow yourself to be formed by them in a passive way without trying to search out new structures of your own for living and interacting. So in that way we consider our activities art no matter what it is that we are doing, if I am organizing to get a radio broadcast off of a rooftop so that people can bring radios and create an atmosphere and enjoy the free use of our radio waves, I think of it the same way as when I am making a paper cut out to poster onto a wall. Part of our objective is to break down the barriers between the specific spaces that you go to, to experience art, and the ability to create things and enjoy the creations of others in the more functional parts of your daily life, like walking down the street, or riding the subway to work.
Do you have any longterm contact with people, who are »confronted« with what you do?
As far as how our work affects the people who are faced with it in a daily way, we have had a few experiences when doing projects where the responses have been amazingly positive, painting a mural in a run down section of town one day, nearly every person that passed by thanked us for bringing some color to their block, when doing the billboard projects people have passed by and thanked us for giving them something else to look at or for covering up a specific add, on the other hand one day some kids asked us not to cover up a billboard for their favorite rapper so we let that one be. People have said that it becomes like an easter egg hunt, when riding the train to find the cars that have art work instead of ads, there is no fixed location for these, and you never know how long they will run for. As for work on the street, everyone agrees that for better or for worse once you start to pay attention, it changes the way you look at the city, it gives people a new, often transcient set of landmarks with wich to guide themselves, and allows you in a concrete way to see the manifestation of a certain kind of vitality in the city. Once you start listening the walls don't shut up. I have been called a vandal, told that we have no respect for private property and threatened with a felony charge and a five hundred dollar fine if we were to get caught in the process of changing a billboard, because as I said before, in the minds of many it's only vandalism if you don't pay for it. The advertising agencies can infect your mental space with whatever they want and that's ok as long as they are paying for the right to do so. We do not consider ourselves a political group but when you do the kind of work that we have been doing, you discover pretty quickly that you are working in direct opposition to american capitalism, and that has a politics all it's own. The street party happened only once so far, and we did that as a part of the »free biennial«, an event in New York that you may have heard about because of »free manifesta« which happened few months later in Frankfurt and which we also participated in, but on a much smaller scale, and which is how we became introduced to »evolutionäre zellen«.
I was really excited when reading the »evolutionäre zellen« materials because it was immediately clear to me, that even if we had not articulated it to ourselves this kind of a cell for specific and small scale social change, along the lines of creating a more participatory urban environment was exactly what we were trying to do. As a group we have been evolving for about two years in a pretty informal way, someone comes up with project and calls on their friends to participate. It is only recently that we have formalized our connection into one group with one name.