ARTIST
D*FACE In the increasingly competitive crossover of street & gallery art there are a host of names currently upsetting conventions and adding their voices to the ‘sell-out’ debate. Vanessa Austin Locke met D*Face aka. Dean Stockton, to discuss his role as one of the leading conspirators in the street art takeover and attempts to accept that meaning is in the eye of the beholder.
“I would like to nick more stuff from Tesco…” Climbing up through what feels like a dark, disused warehouse that’s been empty for years, one can’t help but wonder what kind of artist’s garret we’ll arrive in. But when the door to the studio opens it’s all bright neon colours, skateboards, big white walls, three busy people and music. D*Face has been at the Brewery for five years and this is home. He’s currently working on a collection for a show in LA this April, it will be his first solo show there and he’s excited because, he says, folks in LA are easy to wind up. He already has a reputation out there thanks to the furore he created during a previous Oscar week when he stuck two giant skeletons (closely resembling the famous award figurine) outside Mel’s Diner and in Runyon Canyon, managing to piss off pretty much everyone in Hollywood. When we meet he’s nearing the end of the project that will round-up a body of work spanning the last six years. He explains that ideas for his shows often spring from a title or from a piece from a previous show that he fixates on and develops further. This time it’s a 1950s pin-up girl who’ll be appearing in the new collection dressed as a wicked witch. A large workbench in the centre of the studio is divided into sections, each dedicated to a different piece, all still at a conceptual stage. There’s a text piece which reads “Going Nowhere Fast”, a reference, he explains, to all those who told him he’d never make anything of himself. Further on, a pile of skulls and bones - death is a recurring theme and for this show he has turned lepidopterist. Boxes of beautifully preserved butterflies, procured from various antique dealers and taxidermists, have had their poor, pinioned bodies replaced with spray-can caps and skulls, in another box various beetles are nearing a similar fate. Further round the table is a collection of books, which have been sliced up, mismatched and put back together, a library of Frankensteined tomes. Many of them reference dogs, which have, of course, become synonymous with the D*Face brand. Brand? Hmmm. We’ll get to that bit later. But for now, literature. It’s reminiscent of that childhood game in which someone would draw the head, turn the paper down, someone else would draw the body, the legs etc until when the wrapped paper was unraveled at the end, an unnatural freak of a drawing would appear. When asked what the message is, I’m initially told that there isn’t one…but then he expands: “There’s something quite nice about chopping them up. Burning books. I like that idea. I like the destruction element of it. It’s almost like blasphemy chopping up a book.”
It’s a common assumption that a street artist’s motivation is to effect change, but in this case you’d be wrong. D*Face makes art to alleviate boredom. “I stumbled into it. It’s self-indulgent. It’s self-entertaining. It’s still the same now.” He grew up in South London, a kid with little direction or interest in scholastic achievement, he failed all his exams and spent his teenage years getting stoned and skateboarding. He had vague ideas about doing a photography degree but when faced with the standard other students had been achieving while he’d been hanging out in car parks, he re-thought that idea in the direction of an animation course. His mother told him he’d never get in and even when he did she didn’t believe him. The course finally connected all the things he was into, from skateboard graphics, to the subculture around Thrasher magazine and so on. He discovered there was a name for what he’d been doing organically all along. It wasn’t straight into the studio after that, or even straight onto the streets. He had to do his time in The Machine – one of those ‘creative’ design jobs. It was here that he began to sketch what has now become known as D*Dog. Bored out of his mind in an office in front of a computer, he’d doodle, then throw them out until a colleague asked if he could keep them. This tiny endorsement must have stuck somewhere in his brain because he bought some laminate and began making stickers. Then he began sticking a few up on his route home. Then a few more. And it went from there. Before he knew it Shepard Fairey (a fellow street stenciller) was asking him to stick his stuff up while he was at it, and art developed as an addiction. He made himself a website, back in the days when websites were in their infancy. “I saw it as a vprimitive TV. If I’ve got my own window into the world I can show people what I’m doing.” He goes on to suggest that street art was the first art form that used the internet to empower itself where it had been previously reliant on galleries and curators. Fast forward ten years and you get the internationally recognised artist we see before us today. Does he regret the years spent stoned in car parks? “I don’t know. It’s good to get stoned and take acid and freak out a little bit because it’s had an influence on me. It gives you different perspectives on the world.” As for his mother, is she proud of him now? “She doesn’t get it. It’s not something that’s tangible in her world. She says ‘he’s sort of an artist’ but because I don’t do oil paintings I’m not really an artist.”
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photo: Darryl Stoodly
Street art of course, is subject to frequent and brutal mutilation. How does it feel to have your work vandalized? D*Face shrugs. “It’s part of it.” He says, but then he expands. “When you put work in the street you lose control of it, it’s no longer yours. And that can be beautiful. The sun hits it, the rain hits it, the snow, the ice, the paint flakes away, someone else comes and puts something over it… that peels off… You start getting this beautiful ephemeral thing that’s having a life of its own.”
It’s an impressive rise from such a faulty start and we doff our collective cap to that. So what about the work? And the message? In a world full of people trying to justify their actions and their art he comes across as refreshingly open about its meaning; D*Face makes art because that’s what D*Face does. He hasn’t spent the years at Goldsmiths being filled with fine art theory so whatever he comes up with is pretty much organic. “I don’t really know where it comes from but it serves me really well.” This is instinctive art and there’s no intended message. “I’m using the imagery that I see in my life’s journey. It’s my interest first. People put their own meaning over things. If you put one familiar face into the images people start to look for more and they project their own journey into these pieces, which were my journeys.” When pushed to describe his artist’s process he gets out his blackberry and shows us his notes. A modern moodboard, it would seem, exists in many portholes. A clipping, a note, a jpeg, a message from a friend, a song on youtube…
We have to ask that while it’s all very well taking a pop at the advertising giants for invading our eyes and consciousness, aren’t artists like D*Face doing the same thing, just on the flipside? Hasn’t D*Dog become a recognised brand? “I’m not advertising a product.” No? “Nor do I see it as advertising. If I went around putting my name or a big logo on everything then it would be a different argument.” Art has a tradition of contradiction and perhaps this is the key contradiction of street art…. “I’m just asking people to look at their environment differently. I’ve never been anti-advertising. All I’ve said is ‘be aware of the role it’s playing in your life.’ I like Nike shoes, I like Coca Cola. Just be wary of what you’re buying into… I would like to nick more stuff from Tesco though.”
Re-using the stuff we see everyday and turning it into something new, is another theme in D’s work especially ephemeral, found objects. “I’m trying to offer people a subversive intermission from what’s going on around them. Just a little break. I’m not trying to insight a riot.” A statement which seems at odds with some of his work, a punked Queen Liz, a defaced Statue of Liberty, a comic book textual piece screaming…‘RIOT!’
On the subject of religion, D seems surprisingly disinterested in spite of the fact that religious iconography is infused in his work. The most interesting example of this being similar to the peace sign, a wooden cross carved with brand logos. The obvious commentary to this would be that the artist is comparing religious diligence to brand consumption and its subliminal presence and influence in our lives, presenting religion as a commodity to be bought and sold. He may have a point but it’s an interesting double bluff that D has little interest in presenting ‘meaning’ and is more interested in what meaning the individual projects onto the work. Street art is highly dependant on audience participation (as is all art of course to some extent) and this interactive question about religion’s place in our lives is most intriguing if we don’t notice it because it shows us how infused in our subconscious these images are.
And branding? He tells a story about a friend who was serving in Iraq and sent him pictures of Pizza Hut and Subway trailers, selling their wares to soldiers on the front line. This inspired a huge peace sign made up of brand logos on a hoarding next to a well-known advertising agency. As he was working he received an email from the company (they knew who he was and where to find him) telling him that they were going to paint over it. D pointed out that it wasn’t their hoarding and by doing so they’d be guilty of vandalism too and that as a ‘creative’ agency they should be supporting public art, not censoring it.They painted over it. Their actions, however, drew much more attention to it than would have been drawn had they left it alone to be painted over and blended into the cityscape.
So is D signposting the ‘brand’ of religion as a warning or merely strengthening its presence in our world. A triple bluff? Religion has undoubtedly seeped into his work. Who’s in control here? The artist or his subject? Does he choose them or do they choose him? Looking
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I’m still busy being last year’s D*Face, not this year’s Banksy...”
photo: Ian Cox
again, with the analytical eye that we all employ it becomes apparent that D’s work deals with three of the biggest themes that religion also tackles. Death, rebellion and the search for meaning. Do those themes exist because D put them there, we put them there or neither. Perhaps they’re just there, in everything, whether you search for them or not. At some point during the interview I have to wonder whether it’s more conspicuous not to mention the giant graffiti’d elephant in the room? Ok, let’s do it; ‘Is Banksy responsible for the current overexposure of street art?’ “Someone had to be the reference point of the art form” D quite rightly points out, but when asked how many times he’s been accused of actually being Banksy he rolls weary eyes, “Too many times. I knew him. I don’t know him any more.” In fact B contacted D regarding a collaboration inspired by his pound notes with D*Dog on. “It was meant to be a collaboration but my name was removed from pretty much everything on there.” But he’s very philosophical about it, being a successful artist in his own right must take the edge off what is essentially, a compliment. “I’m not the first person to re-work banknotes. I know that, he knows that. It’s cool. And I’m not the only person he’s had an idea from.” Of course, all artists get their ideas from somewhere and what’s tricky about being in the spotlight is that people will always be able to trace your source. The example D gives is Damien Hirst’s skull, pointing out that Hirst was not the first person to decorate a skull in sparkles. The only point at which the B word pisses D off is when he’s referred to as ‘the new Banksy’. “Well I’m still busy being last year’s D*Face, not this year’s Banksy.”
So where’s the future of street art, now that the first generation are all nicely tucked up in galleries? Does D*Face still paint on the streets? “I do but less. I like to work with the dynamic of a gallery space. It’s a luxury. But you only go to a gallery to see art. Work on the street reaches people that might never go into a gallery. Or someone who goes to galleries but would never go to see your work.” And what about the sellout question? In selling work that, by its origin and location, (and arguably in its content) speaks of anarchy and rebellion, for thousands of pounds is he compromising? Or maybe it’s just clever. I mean, the money would only be walking away with the fatcats if the artist’s didn’t get it, right? As a possible compromise D speaks of Finders Keepers parties, where a collective of artists would give their art away. In a bar, on the tube, wherever, they’d pitch up with drinks and music, lay out the art and then at a certain time people could just grab it. He’s toying with the idea of doing something similar in the future, but for now at least he’s off to LA. Vanessa Austin Locke D*Face’s solo show will open on April 9th at the Corey Helford Gallery, in Culver City, LA. www.coreyhelfordgallery.com D*Face is a partner in StolenSpace gallery: www.stolenspace.com
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