Interview Josh MacPhee

Interview réalisée avec Josh MacPhee (échange e-mail commencé le mercredi 29 aoüt 2012 et terminé le lundi 26 août 2013) Alex Chevalier (AC) : Hi Josh, Can you introduce yourself ? how did you arrived where you are now ?

Josh MacPhee (JMP) : My name is Josh MacPhee and I work as a poster and book designer, as well as a printmaker, writer, and archivist of social movement culture. Most of what I do circles back around to concerns of history and the cultural production by people organizing for social transformation.

AC : I know you are at the origin of an art printing cooperative, Justseeds, right ? What is the aim of this cooperative ? How does it work ?

JMP : Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative is a group of 24 printmakers in 15 different cities across Mexico, U.S., and Canada who have banded together to support each other and centrally distribute our artwork. We have a website which acts as an online gallery and store, as well as a very active blog which discusses the intersection of art and politics. While each individual artist involved in engaged in any number of political art projects and engagements, together we largely focus on promoting each others work and doing collaborative projects, often with social justice organizations and activist groups, such as our recent portfolio projects with the Iraq Veterans Against the War and CultureStrike.

AC : In 2009 you published Paper Politics : Socially Engaged Printmaking Today (PM Press), this book show us some political posters we used to see in different demonstrations. Those posters are from your personal archive, right ? How did you collected them ? And why ? Did you make some exhibitions with those posters ?

JMP : The Paper Politics book accompanied a traveling exhibition collecting handmade political prints from roughly 2000-2008, or the George Bush years in the United States. This was a time when a large number of artists, and print artists in particular, were politicized through the neo-conservative attacks on people both at home and abroad, especially the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. The exhibition travelled to over a dozen community centers, galleries, college campuses, and pop-up art spaces across the US and Canada. It was a powerful collection of artists expression against war, economic exploitation, racism, gender inequality, and dozens of other social issues, and every where it went it provoked discussion and engagement.

AC : « As long as mass media is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy few, small-scale printmaking will be a mechanism for people to communicate directly to each. » I really appreciate the way you’re explaining this. I’m totally agree with you about the role played by handmade printings face to the mass media image production. Plus, and I think it’s an important fact to keep in mind, printing is part of the History of the using of art as a weapon, see the mexican or the russian, now everywhere, even in Palestine as you started to explain... Printings are still a « mechanism for people to communicate directly to each. » JMP : This is true, printing CAN BE a mechanism for people to communicate with each other, but it isn’t always and doesn’t HAVE to be. We can’t simply fetishize the nature of printing as somehow «radical,» we need to maintain vigilance in always trying to make sure the way we are printing, or communicating, is reaching the audiences we desire to speak to, and opening up opportunities for further communication and dialogue.

AC : Up to you, are printings still playing an important role in the social contestation, in 2012 ?

JMP : I believe printmaking can still play a role in social contestation. Right now I am actually in Palestine, and posters and stencils on the walls are actively used as tools to communicate ideas which might not otherwise be available to people on the street. As long as mass media is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy few, small-scale printmaking will be a mechanism for people to communicate directly to each.

AC : « Right now I am actually in Palestine », that might looks stupid as a question, but how did it come to your mind that you wanted to go to Palestine ? Did you go there with some special plans?

JMP : I went on the trip with a group of 16 librarians and archivists, calling ourselves « Librarians and Archivists to Palestine. » We met in solidarity with dozens of Palestinian librarians and archivists and information workers across 1948-borders Israel and in the Occupied West Bank. We visited university libraries, municipal libraries, personal archives and collections, prisoner’s archives, community media centers, and activist groups. Our hope is to build a network of international librarians and archivists who can publicize Israel’s attacks on Palestinian history, knowledge production, and knowledge preservation.

AC : You’re living in New York City now, did you take a part of the Occupy Wall Street events ? If yes how ?

JMP : Yes! I designed and printed many posters in support of the movement, spent significant time in Zuccotti Park, and I helped start the group Occuprint, which initially produced a newspaper of posters with the Occupied Wall Street Journal, then created a website to archive and share hundreds of Occupy posters from around the world (Occuprint.org).

AC : What do you think about those events ?

JMP : I think it is too early to tell what will come out of the energy of Occupy Wall Street. Although the initial forms and struggles have largely been defeated, movements have funny ways of reforming and rebirthing when you least expect it.

AC : In an interview, Sam Durant, a californian artist, said that the artist as an intellectual person has to not being neutral, he has to take a part. As an artist, what is for you your place in this society ? Your role ?

JMP : Right now under neo-liberal capitalism it appears as if the primary role of the artist, at least in the U.S., is to (a) model precarious living situations which can be exported to other populations (no steady employment, no social safety net, etc.), and (b) produce artwork for sale in an out-of-control art market which largely seems to be a money-laundering scheme for the ultra-rich. I agree that it is important for artists to push back against these definitions of who and what we can be. But in order to do that I believe artists need to be better organized, and learn how to act in groups which can wield much more power than we can as individuals. The power of «art» might be in the ability of gestures to create difficult incites into our present social conditions, but the power of «artists» is something completely different, and demands an ability to transcend our alienated individuality and work as social units.

AC : As an activist, what is the place that art takes in the social fight ?

JMP : Art can have many roles: communicating information clearly and efficiently, asking difficult questions, raising money for movements, creating symbols for people to rally around. All of these different purposes sometimes work together, and sometimes are antagonist to each other. That is part of what keeps things interesting.

AC : What are you working on now ? Any plans ?

JMP : My primary project right now is the Interference Archive (Interferencearchive.org), an allvolunteer run public archive of the culture produced by social movements. We are based in Brooklyn, NY, and house tens of thousands of posters, prints, books, pamphlets, newspapers, buttons, record albums, t-shirts, banners, flyers, and videos produced by people around the world organizing to improve their lives. This material is available for people to use for research, inspiration, and learning our collective history.

AC : About the Interference Archive, you said it was an all volunteer project, but how do you do to pay the rent of your local and all the material you need to make some public interventions, movie projections,…

JMP : We primarily pay the rent at Interference Archive through a system of sustainers, people who value what the archive does and are willing to material support us to keep the doors open. Over 100 people pay a small amount each month, from $10 to $50, and that pays most of our expenses.

In addition, we regularly give tours and presentations to school and university groups, which often pay a small honorarium in return. These two activities so far have allowed us to open the archive as well as expand and grow. Increasingly people are also donating materials: posters, flyers, buttons, stickers, banners, and publications produced by social movements and political activists.

AC : When I was reading again what you wrote about the artist and his place in the actual society, I thought about a concept I like. In 1996 Roberto Martinez, a french artist, created a neologism called ‘‘Allotopie’’ (in English it might be something like allotopia I guess, but I’m not sure about the fact that this word is used abroad, because even in France it’s quite unknown). « Allotopie » is created from «allo» and «topos», greek words which mean «other» and «place». As he defined this concept means a questioning of the usual political art places, the meeting between artistic practice and reality, which will create a shift of these places. (hope it’s quite clear…).

JMP : It sounds like this is an attempt to build on, or create a variation on, the concept of Utopia (or «No Place»), right? So instead of Utopia being an impossibility, literally no place, it becomes something else, an «other place». I like that idea, it implies that Utopia might exist right beside us, in a parallel realm, and all we need to do is jump tracks, shift our thinking or doing, and we can reach it, or build it…

AC : About the « allotopie »... We can effectively say that it’s a materialization of the Utopian concept through art. In some words, it’s a possible answer of the following question « How to reconquer a part of the public space ? »