Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.10.2012, Qupperneq 18

18 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 16 — 2012TECHNOLOGY
Anyone Can Be The One UK artist Tracey Moberly talks
activist art and offers a tip on how to save NASA
The YAIC Conference will take place at Harpa November 4–6. Check it
out! http://youareincontrol.is/
Read more about Tracey Moberly: http://www.sanderswood.com/
Follow her on Twitter: @TraceyTM
Her visit this November has nothing to
do with NASA or the Foundry, but ev-
erything to do with the state of the arts
and creative communities. As a speaker
at this year’s You Are In Control (YAIC)
conference, Tracey will discuss her re-
cent text message based memoir, as well
as “the interaction of environment, pop-
ulation expansion and personality with
the continued development of digital
communication and querying the place
of the creative within this process.”
TEXT ME UP
Tracey has saved every single text mes-
sage she has received since her first in
1999, which she got while eating lunch
with colleagues from Manchester Met-
ropolitan University. “I was due to meet
a friend and he texted me saying that he
couldn’t make it because he was going
to a funeral,” Tracey says. “None of us
could work out what this little envelope
symbol was.”
At the time, Tracey was experiencing
a difficult break-up, and as further texts
continued to stream in that week she
said she found herself being cheered up
the words of encouragement filling her
inbox. “You never get nasty texts, or at
least I don’t. People are far more likely
to say nasty things down a phone line,”
Tracey says. “People just don’t seem to
text aggression.”
She decided to preserve the texts for
posterity and her own viewing pleasure,
on scraps of paper. The scraps became
books, then journals, then, as technol-
ogy caught up with
her project, digitally
downloaded data.
The collection has
inspired a number
of projects includ-
ing five rounds of
exhibitions around
England, a live instal-
lation at Tate Modern
and her 2011 memoir
‘Text-Me-Up!’
In her memoir the texts serve to
ground the events of her life. The first
section contains randomly selected
texts. The second, more strictly auto-
biographical section makes sense of a
series of specific texts chosen to open
and close each chapter. In the final sec-
tion Tracey uses conversations, similar
to the kind that appear on iPhone text
conversations.
ART VS TECHNOLOGY
Tracey earned her bachelor’s degree in
fine arts, but it’s been years since she’s
actually touched paint to a canvas. Ex-
panding technologies and new apps
have transformed the way she approach-
es and creates art. “I started using Ins-
tagram,” Tracey says, for instance. “So
I’m taking a photo and putting that on
the social network site and then basi-
cally turning it into a painting, so I
don’t need to make a painting of that
anymore.”
Tracey believes the new technologies
available to artists will increase artistic
output. “I wouldn’t say
it influences what
constitutes art, but
I think working
within an artis-
tic framework
and using new
technologies, spe-
cifically a mobile
phone, as your tool,
really complements
art,” Tracey says. “You can
really progress with it and take
things further.”
While Tracey’s artistic output is now
primarily through technology, she still
believes in the value handcrafts. In
March 2007 she unofficially opened
London Fashion Week with a collection
of 80 lingerie pieces that she hand wove.
The project combined the digital medi-
um of television with the more hands on
project of creating clothing.
“Using those skills with new digital
technology creates other things,” Tracey
says. “So you’re not just relying on tech-
nology, you’re using other methods as
well. That’s creating a different type of
art.”
Her unofficial fashion week collec-
tion also included another important
aspect of Tracey’s work: her activist ten-
dencies. The project was in conjunction
with the program ‘F*** Off, I’m a Hairy
Woman,’ and dealt with issues of body
image among women. As befitted the
theme, she chose human hair to com-
plete the project.
“The whole program was a social/po-
litical thing on women and how young
girls have started to think that getting
waxed is really normal.”
ACTIVISM ART
One of Tracey’s earliest acts of activism
art occurred in 1995, when she took on
an offensive advertising campaign in
Manchester.
“I was driving in the car with my
two children who were really little at the
time and my one son in the back goes
‘Mummy, Mummy, what’s the summer
of 69?’ And I’m thinking it must be the
summer of love,” Tracey says. “Then I
saw Beaver Espana. You can’t turn the
channel off like you can a TV. You have
to look at these billboard posters.”
Club 18-30 offers vacation packages
for young adults, many travelling alone
for the first time. Their ads at the time
featured a series of humorous sexual in-
nuendos. The company received several
complaints from local residents in Man-
chester, and especially bothered Tracey,
who noted the lack of safe sex warnings.
At the time, the UK government was
heavily promoting safe sex in the face
of the AIDS epidemic and the advertise-
ments seemed irresponsible for leaving
out that message, she says.
So Tracey, along with two other
friends, decided to fix this glaring over-
sight. They woke up early one morn-
ing and tagged all of the Club 18-30
billboards in Manchester with safe sex
messages, and helped end the campaign
altogether.
“Everybody’s got a right to express
what they think is wrong or what they
think is right,” Tracey says. “I think if
a person takes a stand and does some-
thing then things will happen. It just
takes one person to start people up, and
I think that anyone can be that one per-
son.”
All of Tracey’s artwork is grounded
in social and political issues. Her vari-
ous projects have addressed domestic vi-
olence, Hepatitis C, gun control and hu-
man trafficking. In 2007 she and Mark
Thomas (“the UK’s Michael Moore”)
responded to a UK law banning protest-
ing near the Parliament building by
founding McDemos, a for-hire protest
company. For five Euros the company
would stage a protest for the client and
send them a photo.
Not all the protests have been suc-
cessful. The Foundry is still closed
and the building owners have kept the
building locked tight. There was, how-
ever, one small victory. The walls of
the Foundry contained eight original
Banksy drawings, collectively worth
millions of euros and when a company
partnered with the Reuben Brothers
showed interest in the artwork, Tracey
painted over each and every one.
“I must have been the only person
desecrating Banksy two years ago,” Trac-
ey says. “I literally gouged them out of
the walls. I gouged millions of pounds
out of the walls.”
As for Reykjavík locals hoping to
save NASA, she thinks the opposite
might work. If Banksy’s artwork was
valuable to the Reuben Brothers’ part-
ners, then similar artists might make
NASA valuable enough to save. “If those
artists were invited to paint all over the
building, then the building would be
worth more,” Tracey says. “Or you could
get a collection of artists from around
the world... that would be great.”
- ARIT JOHN
Though she’s never been to Iceland, artist Tracey Moberly can relate to the residents of
Reykjavík.
In 1999, Tracey co-opened the Foundry in an old two-story bank building in Shoreditch,
London. It served as a bar, art gallery, performance space and underground political
meeting place for the East End until the building owners, the extremely wealthy Reuben
Brothers (worth seven billion euros) decided to turn the bar into a hotel. To anyone who
remembers concerts in NASA or fears the tall shadow of a new hotel on Austurvöllur
square, the story is familiar.
“
I must have been the only
person desecrating Banksy two
years ago. I literally gouged them
out of the walls. I gouged millions
of pounds out of the walls .
„
INTER
VIEW