B-boy barn bombers

>> In '99, NYC's Barnstormers brought urban art to rural Cameron, North Carolina--changing perspectives on both sides. Now they're bringing it to Montreal

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Real estate proprietors will likely take issue with this, but I'm prepared to argue that graffiti, or at least what it has evolved into under the auspices of the hip hop nation, is about the highest form of art out there. Not only is profit not the motivating factor, this art is created on the run, at risk of legal repercussions. It's an almost revolutionary reclamation of public eyespace, wherein the Man's dead grey walls are taken back by the People and made into something explosively colourful, beautiful and honest.

What happens, however, when the rules change? When the proverbial Man not only gives his blessing but supplies the paint and cooks lunch for the artist too? In the city, this is all too often a frustrating compromise, at least as far as Skwerm, effective founder of NYC's urban art collective Barnstormers, is concerned.

"I see a lot of commissioned walls that seem too self-centred, geared toward pleasing the crowd. That can be wack. There is this dynamic that takes away from the heart of it. The element of surprise--there's something great about some new thing popping up unsanctioned. Just the pure balls of the artist are sometimes more impressive to me than the art itself. You know, hanging over the edge of rooftops and stuff."

Maybe the key is to take things even further. In the case of the Barnstormers, they took the techniques and the often arcane language of this supremely urban artform--the Star Wars droids, the Cheech Wizard lizards, the labyrinthine geometry of the wild-style hypercalligraphy--deep into rural North Carolina, back in '99. What resulted threw both the locals and the city kids for a loop.

Cameron calling

Skwerm himself is originally from Cameron, North Carolina, the tiny hamlet whose barns, shacks and occasional 18-wheeler now flaunt the Barnstormers' spectacular designs. "It's in the mountains, in the middle of the state. It's basically an agricultural, tobacco-farming town. There's about 280 people inside the city limits. There's a store down at the bottom of the hill, there are no stoplights, there are seven churches and--what else is there to say? It's a small town."

Having left Cameron in '87 for the big-city bustle of, uh, Winston-Salem, before settling in NYC in '89, Skwerm had rarely returned to his hometown--"Until this idea came around. I didn't have any direct blood relations in Cameron anymore, so I went maybe once or twice, just to show girlfriends where I grew up. It wasn't a place that I went to that often, but it kept calling me to come back. This project was the way to do it.

"The idea came, I guess, from asking myself what I wanted to continue to do as an artist, where I wanted to go in the future with my work. That involved taking a look at my own history, what I had been doing in my very early development. That would have been experimenting with aerosol on surfaces--they happened to be barns, when I was 12 or 13. I wanted to go back and just see those barns, see what I'd been doing.

Initially, Skwerm had no great vision of Cameron transformed. "I rented a car and took a friend who was in from Japan down. We'd only gone down to explore and take pictures, but we started painting on that trip. We met the owner of one of the barns and he seemed really enthusiastic that I come back. He said, right on the spot, that I could have his barn, any of these barns we wanted. He brought us light and we started painting.

"I guess it was a month or two later, it started to pick up momentum. I was e-mailing my old public-school librarian, who we'd also met on that first trip. She was just all gung-ho about it, rallying people to get behind it. It was in the paper down there, and folks just came out of the woodwork--people who knew me as a boy and even those who didn't but were just taken with the idea. When I took 20 artists down on the second trip, we drove all night and were fried when we arrived around 11 in the morning. There were all these people in the parking lot, some of whom I hadn't seen in a decade. They had paint and food--people had cooked lunch for us. It blew me away, but it really blew the city kids away."

The other side of the South

Fellow Barnstormer Ro-Starr, from suburban D.C. by way of NYC, will back that up. "I'd never really spent time, you know, south South. I thought it would be interesting to see what the reaction was, because I didn't know if people were ready to see this kind of work or what they're thinking, their ideas about art--especially in rural towns. I wasn't sure what to expect."

"If your only knowledge of the South," says Skwerm, "comes from the news, from movies or Dukes of Hazzard, it skews your perspective. A lot of times, what you're left with is the unfortunate, ignorant side of the South--which still exists. I'm talking about the racism and everything that goes along with the South's history. They think about that and feel it wouldn't be safe, especially for folks of colour. It was good, I think, for them to see the love amidst all that. It widened their view of what it is."

Once again, Ro-Starr concurs. "People were super nice, supportive in every way, making us food every day. It wasn't what I was used to in New York, and I think that was everyone's reaction. We're too used to rude people, attitude and not really talking to anybody. There, there was a sense of goodness, just straight-up good people. In New York, they can be kinda shady. So on that level, it was amazing. Everyone felt very free."

"Even for people who were really helpful and supportive from the beginning," says Skwerm, "it's not necessarily their bag of art. They were into the idea of something happening in their town, whether they liked the art or not. Suddenly, they had this point of dialogue, something for people to talk about. Whatever their reaction was to the art, it was a good thing, because people were down at the store, debating over their coffee in the morning."

Some locals did get their backs up about the project. "There were a couple of people who wanted to pass around a petition against it. One woman even said she was going to burn down one of the shacks because she thought she saw the devil in one of the paintings. It was just her imagination, of course."

Raising the roof

The thing about the Barnstormers' bombing run in Cameron is that it didn't just change the way they and the locals saw each other--it changed the way they saw the landscape itself. "People in that area," says Skwerm, "their lives in one way or another are wrapped up in the history of those barns. They symbolize their lives. Their parents and grandparents were involved in building those barns or putting tobacco in them. It's so woven into their spirit that some would probably just like to see them age naturally.

"To be honest, I love old wood. It was sometimes hard to go over it. On the other hand, they're not much use anymore because the small farmers got hit pretty hard. A lot of the farmers, in the last couple of decades, have gone on to other things. I'd say 70 per cent of the barns we painted were just shells. They were empty or storing old farm equipment. The roofs were blown off, the wood was falling apart. We were actually putting them back together, putting the roofs on. The people there were also doing that for us even before we got there. I think that movement, outside of the art, made people glad that someone was focusing on the barns--even if we'd just been painting them white, they'd have been psyched."

It also affected the way the Barnstormers saw their own artform--"In some way for the worse. As an artist, I don't think I could ever match the intensity and adrenaline that comes from ducking in shadows and listening for cars coming around the corner. Your senses are so heightened, and that somehow helps your work have a certain heightened sensibility. You lose that, but on the other hand you gain something from having time, materials and some sort of love and direct relationship with the community you're doing it for. It becomes for the community, whereas before you did it for yourself. You were dealing with this thing of self vs. society, and that kinda flips over."

Since then, the Barnstormers have continued to make yearly pilgrimages to Cameron--to paint, sure, but just as much to soak up good karma. At the same time, they've initiated more urban-oriented projects. For NYC's Downtown Arts 2000 festival, they created a 20-minute time-lapse film of a large floorspace painted and repainted, shot from overhead. It's called Watching Paint Dry, and yeah, you can actually see the paint dry to a matte finish. They've also interacted with other, similar-minded art crews like Montreal's own Heavyweight, known for their live painting installations at club nights here and abroad. With their family spirit and multidisciplinary talent pools, couched in but not restricted to the hip hop graffiti sensibility, the two crews have a lot in common.

They'll face off at the SAT [Societé des arts technologique] this Friday, and it sounds like everyone's a winner in this scenario. "We're going to do one big piece," says Ro-Starr, "all of us together, and it'll be cut up into 36 pieces which will be sold individually. Originally, I though it would be a hip-hop-style battle, each crew with their own canvas on opposite sides. But that's another thing. We probably could do that--it doesn't take us that long to paint. But we're not trying to take each other out, to paint against each other. We just want to represent ourselves."

Barnstormers, Heavyweight and DJ Rich Medina are at SAT [305 Ste-Catherine W.] on Friday, Dec. 14, 8pm, $10