HOW ART CAN TURN THE WORLD INSIDE OUT
Bibliography
Art Explora Magazine. Retrospective JR: Chronicles.
Dawes, O. (2021). Les Misérables: Poverty, Projects, and Police Violence. Fourth Floor. Available at: https://www.fourthfloor.uk/culture/1t6wwjgigngykjhsxylhc03l3dosz6.
Holt, D. (2010). Cultural Strategy Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
JR, On the Chronicles of Clichy Montfermeil. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oQl2rmSANk.
Observer (2005). The Week Paris Burned. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/06/france.focus.
Pulham, S. (2005). Inflammatory Language. Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2005/nov/08/inflammatoryla.
From the 2005 Paris riots to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, the mainstream media narrative is the hegemonic power, silencing dialogue and debate and distorting the truth such that the issues at hand are never resolved. The French artist JR recognises this obstacle and has tried to overcome it by reaching out to ordinary people and capturing them in ridiculous fashion to reveal the ludicrous nature of the hegemonic discourse and provoking much needed conversation. For JR, art cannot change the world, but it can provoke debate in such a way that the generated ideas can.
To do so, he travels the world and meets local people, gains their trust, and documents their lives through close up photography; JR then pastes these shots on the walls of the community, as a means of intervening in urban architecture. It is for this reason that JR, whose identity is unconfirmed, is a self-proclaimed photograffeur: a combination of the French words for photographer and graffiti artist.
JR’s projects have spanned the whole world from the French banlieues, to Israel-Palestine, Liberia, Cambodia, and the favelas of Brazil. However, JR is not the only artist, and all his projects involve the consent and participation of the local communities which he shoots, integrating them as active agents in the artistic process, to tag, destroy, and edit the photos as they please.
Expo 2 Rue
Born to Eastern-European and Tunisian parents in the Parisian projects, JR started his graffiti career around the turn of the millennium to reclaim the city that appeared so alien to him. Crawling through metro tunnels or climbing the roofs of Paris, JR began by tagging his name throughout the city as a means of asserting himself and reclaiming his existence.
“From the beginning, when I started carving my name everywhere, it was a really simple way to say, “I’m here, I exist.” I think you feel a need for this when you grow up on the outside in the suburbs, when you’re looking for your place in the world, when you don’t really know where you are because your parents may not have been born here or maybe for other reasons.” (Art Explora).
It was during this period that JR discovered a camera on the metro, and he used it to begin documenting the art created by himself and his graffiti crew: he wanted to capture the process and use that as his art. He found, however, that most people ignored the pasted-up photos, as they mistook them for advertising. JR therefore began to spray paint large frames around the prints, entitling them ‘EXPO 2 RUE’ (French for sidewalk gallery).
“When I started to document these adventures with my camera, and then put the photographs up on the street, I saw people stop to look at them. These same people who hadn’t seen the graffiti were captivated by the medium of photography.” (Art Explora).
It was when JR saw people in suits with briefcases stopping to admire his photos that he realised the striking contrast between the taggers and the business elites who stopped and stared. This was when JR realised that he could reach far more people through the medium of photography, and by pasting them to the Parisian walls he could catch the attention of those previously ignorant to the world of street art and graffiti.
“It’s as if there were two parallel worlds, two worlds that don’t overlap because people are not attentive enough, they don’t look at what’s happening around them, they’re not paying attention.” (Art Explora).
Portraits of a Generation
It was during this time that JR met the French director Ladj Ly, also from the Parisian projects. His 2019 work Les Misérables documented the nature of life in Paris’ banlieues and the relationship between the local communities and the police. However, in 2004-2006, Ladj and JR collaborated on a project named Portrait of a Generation where JR photographed the banlieusards, the inhabitants of the projects, close up and pasted their photos all over the banlieue. JR’s technique was for the banlieusards to pose in ridiculous ways to create caricatures of themselves to combat the establishment narrative which presented them as racailles (meaning riff-raff/scum).
It was during this period that the 2005 Paris riots occurred, following the death of two boys from the projects who were electrocuted in a power station when fleeing a Police stop and search: a regular abuse of power in the Paris projects where locals, predominantly of North African descent, are regularly terrorised by the police and forced to undergo identity checks and are held at police stations for hours.
During the riots, the media travelled to the banlieues, when the rioting occurred, and took photos from afar of those they saw as creating the violence.
“From my side, I saw the young kids we photographed, who were bringing me enormous telephoto lenses that they had stolen off the journalists who’d come to photograph them from a distance. It made me realise the distortion that existed between the reality and the media outlook. The people who lived there felt like they were being watched like animals.” (Art Explora).
This notion of being observed like animals evokes Kassovitz’s (1995) film La Haine, also set in the projects, when one of the protagonists Hubert proclaims, “This is not Thoiry!”, a dehumanising reference to the drive through Safari Zoo outside of Paris.
During the riots JR was contacted by an agency who wanted him to take photos of the youths in the projects, to capture the violence close-up.
“Ladj and I refused to work with him, instead suggesting that he publish our first photos, the ones from before the riots; it was a provocation. And that’s when I finally realised that I was an artist, not a photojournalist. I’ve never looked back.” (Art Explora).
These events fuelled JR’s drive for his project Portraits of a Generation, where he captured the residents of Les Bosquets (in Montfermeil) on a close up 28mm camera to deform their faces like the media deforms the youth of the projects.
“When I was pasting up the portraits of these young people I included their names, ages, and building number, as opposed to the media, which only showed masked faces, fuelling the fear. We pasted their portraits up in Les Bosquets, but also around Paris. All the information was included so that anyone looking at them could find the people portrayed and talk to them if they wanted.” (Art Explora)
This laid the foundations for JR’s future work, provoking conversation and discussion and challenging the hegemonic narrative of the mainstream media and establishment.
“These images were pasted up in super visible spots that are often used for advertisements, but our images weren’t selling anything and we used black and white to stand out.” (Art Explora).
In many ways, JR’s response to the 2005 riots is reminiscent of a strategy created by the Situationists known as détournement, later known as culture jamming, which “turned the expressions of the capitalist system against itself, reclaiming individual autonomy and creativity from the passive “spectacle” that the system produces” (Holt, 2010: 252).
Clichy-Montfermeil Chronicles
JR continued this work in his 2017 Clichy-Montfermeil Chronicles. Inspired by the murals of the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, JR wanted to document how people are complex characters, and cannot be reduced to good-bad binaries. He therefore wanted to allow the residents of Clichy-Montfermeil to decide how they are seen, whether they are hairdressers, manual workers, the mayor, or in a gang.
For JR, this mural depicted the tension in the banlieue and acted as a visceral representation of the 2005 riots and their legacy. When the then President of France, François Hollande, saw the mural he was so taken by it that he waited beyond his private visit to meet those involved.
According to JR, Hollande proclaimed that the [mural] ‘is now part of our history…’, which as JR explains, made him feel accepted and a part of the state in a way that he had not before as a second-generation immigrant. (JR on The Chronicles of Clichy Montfermeil).
“[It] reconnected the people with the mayor and their country just by seeing the representation of themselves in the mural.” (JR on The Chronicles of Clichy Montfermeil)
The mural therefore served its purpose, it created dialogue and provoked conversation between unlikely people, the President of France and the inhabitants of the projects; an incredible feat considering it was the same French established which had labelled the banlieusards as “racailles”.
Face 2 Face
Following JR’s endeavours in the Paris banlieue, he thought that if the mainstream media could caricature and distort the realities of life in the Parisian projects, he suspected the media could do the same in Israel-Palestine.
“We didn’t have a specific project in mind; we just wanted to take portraits and ask questions to the people living there. The idea came about during a discussion with a taxi driver who asked us why we were there. He was surprised that we wanted to go to both sides of the wall; for him, the people on the other side were crazy. Each one looked at the other as a monster. That’s how we came up with the idea of photographing people on both sides of the wall, in the same professions, making faces.” (Art Explora)
Once photographed, the images were pasted up throughout different neighbourhoods of Israel-Palestine, on people’s houses, and even on both sides of the Wall which surrounds the West Bank; at the time, the project was the largest illegal gallery in the world.
What struck JR was how sure each side was that the other would not be willing to participate, and the fact that nobody could confidently point out which photo was of an Israeli or of a Palestinian.
For JR, this was the essence of his project. To put both sides, the Israelis and the Palestinians, face to face, to provoke conversation and attempt to break down barriers which he saw as obstructing the peace process. Ultimately humanising what has become a very dehumanised conflict.
“Even more than the walls that exist everywhere—in prisons, between Israel and Palestine, on the Mexican border—I realised that the biggest walls are those that exist within ourselves. We are afraid to go to a certain place, we fear the other” (Art Explora).
Just as in Paris, JR filmed all of his exploits, and created a documentary film Faces which was shown on TV in the Middle East to much success.
“And that’s when I understood the power of the documentary in combination with my projects. We hadn’t originally planned to do this documentary at all.” (Art Explora).
This project, Face 2 Face, revealed to JR how the power of his art is not the pasting of images on walls, it is the whole process, the interactions with the people photographed and the conversations that followed.
“When I pasted this project, I hadn’t yet defined or formulated the overall idea. It took shape when I saw people interacting and saw the impact it has on them, what they think about it, its power. These are their lives; it speaks to them directly.” (Art Explora).
JR therefore remains anonymous and is famed for his hat and sunglasses look; his art is more than just his photography and his pasting of images to walls. JR’s art is an interactive process that encompasses whole communities and provokes dialogue, lasting far beyond his visits. He does not profess that his work has any meaning, indeed it is the absence of any real essence to his work which allows the participants to freely create and lead the projects as they see fit. Their participation alone gives the work meaning and each spectator is free to craft their own interpretation and meaning.
Inside Out
To fuel this ethos, JR launched his project Inside Out, whereby he wants people from all over the world to take a stand for a cause they care about whilst simultaneously participating in a global art project. By contacting the project, participants will be sent their submitted photographs anywhere in the world and will be taught how to paste them up: literally creating the largest art gallery in the world for any space that one can claim can become an exhibition. Thus far, over 400,000 people from 138 countries have participated in the project, allowing JR’s ethos and art to surpass the individual, and become a medium available to all.
JR’s work demonstrates the power of art to turn the world inside out. As JR explains, art itself cannot change the world, but it can provoke conversations and challenge people’s presuppositions, often informed by the dominant media narrative.
This article cannot do justice to the wealth and breadth of JR’s projects, which literally span the globe, but for more information, visit his website or the Saatchi Gallery, where there is the largest solo exhibition to date of JR’s work running until 3rd October 2021.
By Owen Dawes