Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.10.2008, Page 8

8 | REYKJAVÍK GRAPEVINE | ISSUE 16—2008
INTERvIEW BY DeSIRee AnDRewS — pHoTo BY gAS
Your film focuses on both graffiti tags—the
basic writing of an artist’s name—and full on
graffiti art including wall murals and stencils.
During the q&A at the screening of your film
you said that before you started filming you,
like most people, didn’t like tags and that your
were more drawn to graffiti art. has that opin-
ion changed?
Now I actually prefer a really good tag to a, quote-
unquote, beautiful piece that people have spent
days on. It depends, because I think that a tag,
when it’s done really well, has immediacy and
energy, and also artistry to it. And, it’s not saying
that the wall murals don’t have artistry as well, but
I think that sometimes on the legal walls it’s almost
like they spend too much time and the energy is
taken away from it. It’s almost too much like mural
art and it isn’t really street art anymore, even though
it’s on the street. There is a certain energy that is
caused by the immediacy of doing something in
the moment. In any art form, as you delve into it,
you develop a certain taste and the ability to see
things that maybe people who aren’t familiar with
the art form can’t see. And that’s why I think there’s
an appreciation, and sure there are ugly tags, but to
appreciate a really nice tag, you have to have a little
bit of experience with that before you can see it.
And you came to that conclusion while mak-
ing the film?
In the beginning of the film we weren’t even going
to deal with tags. But, we realised that that was our
ignorance or naivety and that they really can’t be
separated.
You film covers several cities around the
world starting in New York. There seemed to
be a lot more tags in New York and lA as op-
posed to the more vibrant artistic pieces in
other cities like Amsterdam and Paris. Do you
think there’s a reason for this?
[It’s] probably what we showed. I mean you can
find pretty much all forms of graffiti in all cities.
But, we looked for differences and we tried to find
what was special to that city. To just find Wild Style
over and over again, it’s kind of boring. To be per-
fectly honest, I’m a little bored with Wild Style and I
appreciate people who are pushing the boundaries
of form and taking it to a different level; they see
what’s been done before and go “wow how am I go-
ing to do something different?” If anything, some-
times I think graffiti writers are a little lazy.
Can you define Wild Style?
Wild style is actually a crew that Tracy168 ran in the
70s, and it was for him, how he lived, as he says in
[our] film. And, that name got applied to the New
York style of graffiti because of the film called Wild
Style, and because of that, everything in the New
York style became Wild Style—basically big letters
with arrows intertwined where you couldn’t really
read it very well.
You have said that a lot of graffiti writers were
apprehensive to be in your film because there
are so many “bad graffiti films” and they
didn’t want to be involved in that. What makes
a graffiti film bad and why do you think there
are so many of them?
I wouldn’t say they are bad; they just serve a spe-
cific purpose. People can watch endless amounts
of graffiti just like pornography; you can watch end-
less amounts of sex with bad production value but
there’s no context to the films. And I think people
are reticent to be in movies because they’re not
sure what you are going to do with what they say.
They are trusting you with their work and what is
about. A lot of time that has been betrayed by peo-
ple. People have taken things out of context.
What is the mission of your movie?
I think the mission of our movie is several fold,
one to show the richness of the movement—that
it’s not any one thing, that it’s actually a multitude
of things. And, if there is any one point, it’s to get
people to look at public space differently than how
they have thought of it. That, to me, is most success-
ful when, after seeing the movie, people come up
to me and say “wow I look at the landscape of the
city totally differently after seeing your movie” –
that is the greatest compliment.
There is a so-called “war on graffiti” here in
Reykjavik. There is strict enforcement against
tagging and mural writing alike. After at-
tending the panel with the Central City Di-
rector who came out against graffiti, do you
think Reykjavik can strike a balance between
the people who want it and the people who
don’t?
I think so. Very few cities wouldn’t even have a
[Government official] come out and talk to anyone.
Most cities are just against graffiti and “fuck you
guys.” So, the fact that there was someone there
trying to do something was a good first step. To be
honest the issue with Reykjavik is it’s such a small
town that if you keep the centre clean you’re basi-
cally keeping everything clean. In large cities you
have areas that are artisan places where if you have
places covered in graffiti it’s more tolerated. Here,
it’s doesn’t seem like that exist—that I’ve seen.
I know you’ve only been here for three days
but can you give your impressions of Reykja-
vik as far as the graffiti scene goes and what
you think the future might hold?
I have no idea. It seems pretty varied. I always like
it when people push the boundaries and explore
different mediums. There is a recent issue of Over-
spray, an international graffiti magazine, and they
have so many different kinds of graffiti that you can
do like there’s knitting graffiti, people who knit on
street posts, there’s people who do metal sculptures
and illegally place them. There’s so many different
forms of graffiti besides ink and spray paint espe-
cially when there’s a crackdown. Be creative, do
something else—find a way to do work. And, the
other thing that’s interesting is that there’s very little
stickering here. I mean maybe those are expensive
to make but I didn’t see any stickers here and they
are easy to put up and hard to get off.
BoMBiNG ThE CiTY
Director Jon Reiss talks graffiti
THeRe’S So MAnY DIffeRenT foRMS
of gRAffITI BeSIDeS InK AnD SpRAY
pAInT eSpecIALLY wHen THeRe’S
A cRAcKDown. Be cReATIve, Do
SoMeTHIng eLSe—fInD A wAY To
Do woRK.
The graffiti film Bomb It! pre-
miered in Iceland at the Reykjavik
film festival. Los Angeles director
Jon Reiss attended the first screen-
ing and took part in a Q&A after-
wards. He also sat on a panel with
a few of Reykjavik’s artists, activ-
ists and the Central City Director,
Jakob Frímann Magnússon, to
discuss the issue of graffiti in the
city. After the panel, Grapevine
sat down with Jon to learn a little
more about his film and the graf-
fiti scene in general.
ARTIClE
Disney movie buffs will cheekily remember that
Iceland played the villainous top-ranked team in
the Junior Goodwill Games against Emilio Estevez’s
Mighty Ducks. Their slick-moussed coach, Wolf
“The Dentist” Stansson, and his burly, mini-dynamo
Icelander youth hockey team were so convincingly
good that many audiences may have been fooled
into thinking that hockey is second nature to the
youth of the nation.
However, despite the portrayal of Iceland as
Vikings on Ice, the country’s soggy, windy weather
conditions over the decades have made for a poor
environment to maintain outdoor ice rinks. The
first successful Icelandic hockey team had to exist
on another continent during the 1920s: the mostly-
Icelandic comprised Winnipeg Falcons, which rep-
resented Canada in its first Olympic hockey games.
Since then, climate and lack of proper facilities have
made it difficult for Iceland to maintain a strong
hockey tradition. Fortunately, for Icelandic hockey
fans, all of that could be changing quickly.
Starting their national competitive league in
1991, Iceland has crosschecked their way to a formi-
dable position in the global standings. The Interna-
tional Ice Hockey Federation promoted the team up
to Division II after a solid performance in the 2007
Men's World Ice Hockey Championships. The IIHF
now (as of 2008) ranks Iceland 38th in the world, a
power play goal of an accomplishment.
Viðar Garðarsson, president of Ice Hockey Ice-
land, attests to the rise of the sport with the growing
availability of indoor ice venues and noted that sev-
eral hockey games were televised on Icelandic tele-
vision last year. “It’s been only a little over 10 years
since getting the first indoor rink,” Garðarsson says.
“Iceland now has three indoor ice rinks.”
Despite this initial success, Garðarsson feels
that hockey can continue to grow in the nation, with
the evidence of enthusiastic youth becoming dedi-
cated rink rats, and is calling for further construction
of new indoor rinks. “We still need more facilities. At
the present time, at many rinks, there’s a lot of compe-
tition for ice time between open skate (times where
rinks are open to the public) and figure skating.”
Garðarsson notes that success always starts at
a junior level and bringing hockey to the youth of Ice-
land has helped the growth of the sport. “It’s amaz-
ing to see a player who started practicing young and
now are talented when they’re 18, 19 or 20. It seems
that hockey is very suitable for Icelanders,” Garðars-
son says. “You need to be quick and strong, perfect
sport for Icelandic boys and girls.”
Blades of Glory
BY JAMeS cRugnALe
Despite its lack of “ice,” Ice-
land is fast becoming an inter-
national hockey powerhouse