Interview: Stephen Powers

Stephen Powers: Sleep and repeat @ V1 Gallery

Dumb ass questions and dumb ass answers?!

Sounds good to me.

Can you begin by talking about the concept for this show and about the idea of this everyday repetition?

What I’m really into is drawing from life and making paintings that really reflect the human experience. I’m trying to split the difference between the personal and the universal. The ideal thing is something that is personal and that resonates universally. And it is an interesting challenge to see if I can get the artwork to come across in a place like Copenhagen. And at the same time I am looking for something that is like the visual equivalent of the blues. I am really jealous of the music and of the reach that music has that visual art can’t possibly hope to compete with. So I try to make paintings that are more about who we are and where we are in the hopes that it reaches people. And maybe they can steal some ideas and put them in T-shirts or whatever, so it really gets around and circulates.

But for the moment I’m just trying to connect the way music connects with people.

Stephen Powers: Posted Note, 61 x 61 cm. Enamel on metal		Stephen Powers: Posted Note, 61 x 61 cm. Enamel on metal

How do you do that visually? How do you implement that sort of direct communication that I understand you believe music has?

Whenever I am communicating it is really just a matter of doodling on a bar napkin until I get a synthesis of word and picture that do more together than they could do by themselves. And I think the first step is to have some bad times – have some bad feelings and then get a little distance to the bad feelings so that you can get some perspective on them – It works pretty good with good feelings too, but bad feelings seem to be a well spring of inspiration for the creative process. So I start by having a bad day, and then all things flow from that.

And becomes The Blues...

Once you get away from it and you kind of put it in perspective, then you have a chance at making it The Blues.

Stephen Powers: Enamel on metal signs, each 61 x 61 cm. Enamel on metal

I have to confess that I don't really know anything about graffiti. Could you talk a little about your background in graffiti?

I wrote on walls for a long time. I still like to think about doing it from time to time, but my motivation is not there, you know. I’m all grown up now, but I still have a great affinity for the form and I think that when done correctly, it is the ultimate human expression...after music.

Music first and then graffiti...

Sure. Art is somewhere in third or fourth place.

I never thought graffiti could be art and I still don’t think so. Graffiti exists as graffiti, and it is great like that without artistic pretentions trying to be art. Soccer hooligan graffiti, communist or anti communist graffiti, hip-hop name-graffiti are all the same to me. They all represent this primal urge to say something. Not necessarily to impact peoples’ lives in a beautiful way, but as an attempt to solve visually the problems that consume an artist... So I made a conscious decision to stop writing graffiti and start making art. It wasn’t necessarily ”I’m going to turn this into something else”. I’m not a fool. I know smarter, more talented people than me who have tried to turn graffiti into art, and I am certainly not up to that task. So I just make art. I love graffiti sometimes, but art is a whole different discipline – for better or for worse – probably for worse.

Stephen Powers: Service raincoats, small - medium - large - x large. Edition of 150, all individually customised

There must be a huge performative difference between the two different ways of working – between the graffiti and the art.

I miss those, as you call it, performative aspects of doing graffiti sometimes. And I do try to incorporate it in my work. I have a lot of discipline and a lot of the work ethic that I got from graffiti caries over. It is not like I invented this whole new persona. I have a whole list of tools that I learned in graffiti, that I use everyday in the art world, but I still want to stress that doing what I do now is a different thing.

So, I did some research and I was thinking that maybe you could contextualize this exhibition by talking about the project you did in Coney Island.

Most of what you see here was conceived and done in Coney Island. Coney Island is a really dirty, wonderful, broken down place at the bottom of Brooklyn. The one place in New York, that attracts a lot of families with not a lot of money. You could go to 42nd street, but you’d need money to play there, but you can go to Coney with a family of four and spend the day for 30 dollars. This really beautiful neighborhood had a tremendous amount of really beautiful signage that was being replaced by not so good signage, so I went down there with 40 different artists and repainted something like 80 or 100 signs and in the course of four years I learned how to paint signs. So, the work that you see here is the cumulative total of all the work that I made in Coney. Actually the city government of NY contacted the people of the Tivoli gardens in the hopes that they would come and build an amusement park there, which I think will be the best thing ever.

Stephen Powers: Irreconcilable Differences + No Place Like Misplaced, 2007. 81,5 x 41 cm. Enamel on metal

But there already is an amusement park in Coney, right?

Yes, it is still running, The cyclone will be there, the big roller coaster, Nathan’s Hot Dogs will be there, Coney Island USA, which is a freak show kind of museum will be there – and the beach of course. So it will live on. A developer came in at one point and bought up 100 million. Dollars worth of property and wanted to make some really bad changes, but hopefully that guy got stopped.

Another project that you present here is the raincoat project...

The rain coats, yes. I like clothes. I like wearing clothes. There are people in Canal Street that wear these pieces of sign vinyl advertising ”Gold Jewelry Watches – we pay top $” – and they are really uncomfortable, so I wanted to make these guys snazzy raincoats, you know. Rain coats for the touts on Canal Street, and then expanding from there I wanted to make raincoats for other people. Custom make them with my own vinyl appliqués on them. They have a really beautiful look to them and something innocent about them – but also something really slick and smart...

I kind of screwed up by only having men’s sizes – and trust me, it is not for most men. Most men can’t handle the audacity of the yellow rain coat, however women can. And the tallest and smartest dressed women I have seen in my short time on this planet come from around here. So, rock stars, tall Scandinavian men and women with flare are an ideal demographic. Another problem is that in NY, you could only wear it three weeks out of the year, but here in Scandinavia – Perfect.

Stephen Powers: Sleep and repeat @ V1 Gallery

How do you decide on the coats?

Each one is unique – assigned directly to the person wearing it. I hope to incorporate some of the elements from my artwork out onto the jacket that reverberate with the people wearing the jacket. There is room for collaboration, and that is nice. It puts art in such a nice spot – your back. I made 150, and that will be it. Right now, if I gave one to you, it would be you, David Byrne, maybe 8 or 10 other people having them. They are for rock stars in general...

Hmm... Another question about clothes... I read somewhere that you have done collaborations with Nike and Calvin Klein. What is your approach when working with corporate companies?

I got super fortunate. When I worked with Calvin Klein I worked with the best graphic designer – what’s his name...he did the CK-One campaign...I’m sorry, it is the hash. It is not the hash; it is the old age and the hash. Well, I had two pages of drawings. The firs tone was of a CK-One bottle with a dog sniffing another dog’s ass and you flipped the bottle over and it said, ”You smell nice!” And that was the high point of my creativity. The 14 drawings I did after that one were more depraved and more sad. It was a victory for both Calvin Klein and me. Nike was the same thing. They just let me do what I wanted and then when I gave them something really crazy they tried to pull me back half-heartedly and then let me do it anyway.

It’s been a struggle ever since. This was all in 2002. After that the gates were shut – nobody wanted to do it anymore. People were scared because it took attention away from the product and put it on the artist. So nothing since. I’m open to do thing, but only on the terms of ”Let’s make art, let’s make something that stands scrutiny.” You’d scrutinize and criticize me for working with these companies, but at the end of the day, I’m really proud of the products that I did. In spite of the fact that they were products, they all transgressed the commercial into something a little more spiritual and good.

But still the companies would do it to gain some street cred or something?

Yeah, but that is stupid. If a company is looking for me for street cred, they have come to the wrong place. I was never credible as a graffiti writer. I was credible as an interesting artistic person that wrote graffiti and brought in all these new and different ideas to it. So if they were looking for street cred, they came to the wrong place. •