Sometimes Dan Witz paints fires. Sometimes he paints humming birds. Sometimes the Grim Reaper. By turning the city into a personal canvas he has probably broken the law. He invites us to look but never demands. Instead he paints. And waits. He will catch your eye if you can still see beyond deadlines and the Barney’s sample sale.

He has flourished on the outside. He is comfortable on the inside. He has rebelled, repulsed, enchanted, angered, bemused, confused, kicked, smacked and courted. He has seen the acrid underbelly of urban life at its fetid best/worst. He has lived amongst urban decay, mass hysteria and plagues blacker than pitch. The only thing he has probably not done is brunch in Chelsea. Only hardened demons and retail buyers can handle that kind of heat.

MSG: You went to Cooper Union, what was your experience there like?

DW: Back then, the good art student was the rebellious art student, the one that didn’t fit in. I was actually a painter when I went there and I ended up in punk bands which was the traditional kind of trajectory for rebellious art students. It’s a good school, I did learn a lot. The only people I have ever heard of who have done anything from that school are people like me who basically didn’t belong, they didn’t fit in and were sort of marginalized. I don’t really have a great feeling about the place.

MSG: I have spoken to other artists who went to Cooper and they did not feel that they were encouraged to be artists by their teachers. They were basically told, “You can’t make any money as artists so don’t even try. We will cash your tuition check but don’t expect any support from us in pursuing your art.”

DW: Well, there is no tuition…

MSG: Right, I am generalizing while using the Cooper environment as an example but really my question is did you find that to be the prevalent academic attitude at the time?

DW: There was no conversation about career or preparation or anything. It was all about art. I guess it has changed a lot but I don’t remember any career stuff at all. It was the beginning of opportunism in the East Village but basically nobody expected to have a chance to do anything. To have a show in a gallery in the late 70’s, early 80’s you had to be in your 40’s, white, and a man. That’s why we all made bands and created performance art. That’s why I started doing street art. I did street art when I was at Cooper Union. I knew my stuff was never going to be in a gallery anyway.

MSG: When you are using the street, or the city as your canvas, what speaks to you? What says, “I am your canvas!” Is there any sort of processor does it just grab you?

DW: Well it depends on what I am thinking. For instance when I was doing the Hoodies, (referring to his grim reaper-esque hooded figures that found their way to countless, unexpected East Village locales,) it was all about the Lower East Side, all about where I lived. This was about 1994, 1995. AIDS was peaking, drug addiction was peaking. It was all abandoned buildings, everyone was sick. It was very dangerous. It was very bleak. So I put up a grim reaper warning figure. Interestingly, now it has no resonance. It has become a “brand” of mine.

MSG: What is it about a particular area or space that grabs your attention? Is it politically motivated?

DW: Sometimes it is about real estate. I did a piece in 1979 where I painted humming birds all around SoHo but not actually in SoHo because that is where all the rich white artists were but they weren’t letting me in! Then in 2002 I did another series of the humming birds. That’s when I was getting a kick out of the Lower East Side so I put them around my neighborhood as a sort of farewell. It was kind of political but still kind of a real estate – kind of a personal / political statement. Every few years I come up with something else.

MSG: Does the architecture or the economic condition of a particular area come into play with what you are doing?

DW: Totally. I am attracted to certain surfaces. I like certain graffiti, certain colors. For what I am doing now, I am looking for color. I spent a lot of time monochroming over the winter so now I am looking for bright colors. It can be something as simple as that. I cruise around, I get on the motorcycle and I look for colors I like.

MSG: Is there anyplace that you absolutely would not alter or paint or do something?

DW: Yeah. I am not really interested in “clean” places or “rich” places. I don’t really want to fuck up people’s houses. I have a house now! If someone wrote graffiti on my garage, I’d be pissed! I did a piece last year where I stapled a balloon on to someone’s house and made a clown nose…

MSG: I know. I saw it! I love it!

DW: Yeah, a very popular piece but I was thinking, what if some fucker did that to me! Would I leave it up? Would I want my house made into a clown nose house? I probably would have left it up because that is just me but I understand that people may not want that for their house. So I am looking for the in-between spaces, the spaces that are pretty much benignly neglected. It won’t bother too many but people will pass by and will see. It’s a common thing in our everyday lives, every block pretty much has a place like that.

MSG: Do you try to improve the space? The clown nose for example. Is part of the impetus to try to improve it esthetically?

DW: No.

MSG: That doesn’t play into it at all?

DW: That (the clown nose house) is to just get people to stop.

MSG: Mission accomplished!

DW: Even the little tiny things that I do, the little tiny humming birds or the little sticker things that I do, is just to make people stop and look! You think people’s eyes are open but people walk along in a trance! A lot of art is made to just keep people from walking around with their eyes closed and their minds closed. If they see some weird little thing on a wall maybe they will start looking around a little more astutely and maybe things like George Bush won’t happen. That sounds like a really big leap but artists think that way.

MSG: I happen to agree with it! What does the humming bird mean?

DW: It is a tag, a personal symbol. An animal I happen to identify with. They are fun to paint. They hover!

MSG: Some of them look so real!

DW: I learned from kids at Cooper Union how to paint very realistically. It’s kind of a parlor trick. It’s not really useful as an aesthetic strategy except, especially, on the street. The illusion makes people stop. Trompe L’oiel – to fool the eye – used to be a sort of lower caste of art trickery. I think it has great uses. It is almost kind of a low brow technique. People who see my art often aren’t “art smart” so they need an entry, a way to stop and then think about the political, economic etc.

MSG: How would you describe yourself as an artist?

DW: There is an interesting thing about me, maybe what you are looking for. I do the street and the gallery thing. I have a split and the two make a whole. One by themselves wouldn’t be enough. I am really interested in traditional white, elitist power structure art stuff. I love museums. I love old art. If I could be anything I would just make paintings and put them in gold frames but I don’t really think that is particularly nourishing enough. My opening last night at the DFN Gallery was amazing, it was huge, thousands of people. A lot of good stuff, a lot of money, did very well. But I know if I didn’t do street art that would have been a problematic experience to me. I wouldn’t feel like my life was really worth enough. I do street art which is kind of a marginalized, dangerous, stressful…

MSG: Illegal…

DW: That’s one of the good things about it. Possibly useless. I don’t think I would get enough out of that either because I have to get a job.

MSG: How do you think the attitudes have changed in regards to street art? What was once looked at as defacement has now become not only a very viable art form but in some cases a very expensive one! How did that happen? Was it because there was so much of it that people were forced to look at it and acknowledge the validity of the art form?

DW: I have been in it for so long and I have really seen what was just an isolated few people become this international movement. It definitely started with the Internet. Websites that people go to like the Wooster Collective have influenced so many people. There are probably about 1,500 people a day from all over the world that come to my site from the Wooster Collective. And then on my site they link to other sites. So, it’s the Internet, it’s these cheap stickers we can make now, the digital stuff on our computers. Also the marginalization of art where it has become this kind of corporate, Chelsea, insider, kind of boring, closed elitist thing. Now there are these kids, like art students, who grew up on skateboards and tattoos and graffiti and are not interested in the sort of boring “art gallery” artist. They are like, “fuck that shit! Let’s make some art and go out on the street and do it!” I think also, especially in the George Bush era, there is a polarization, a disenfranchisement…voices that feel like they are not being heard. And this is a way of speaking out. The last thing I get peeved about is that street art has gotten so big that it has got to go out of fashion. There is no doubt about it…

MSG: The pendulum has to swing both ways.

DW: Yeah. I feel like we are right in the middle of it right now and it seems like, “How could this not last forever?” But fashions change.

MSG: What do you hope people get from your work?

DW: I think artists make art for themselves and then they are sort of curious how it affects other people. But I really don’t have an agenda for other people. I don’t think when I start with an agenda for other people it works. I have tried that. I have tried to make art to be a “successful artist” and I totally failed. I tried to make political message art… doesn’t work. It comes out of some kind of poetic… I’m not really sure what it is in my brain but I know it is right so I go out and do it. Then I find out what it is.

MSG: Do you enjoy the gallery side of your life?

DW: Totally! Especially the DFN Gallery. They are very nice people, not pretentious, none of that fake smile stuff. I didn’t used to like that stuff. It’s very unfair, it’s very unjust. It used to bother me but now I just accept that and I work within that. At Cooper Union I was trained in the abstract expressionist… fuck up, burn bright and burn out. The kind of Basquiat world. That’s where I came up. Galleries were all about buttoning your top button and shaking hands and fake smiling, saying you like stuff you don’t. I am totally at ease with it now. I am lucky beyond words.

MSG: Is that the result of maturity? What is it that changed your mind?

DW: I had to crash and burn and almost give it all up. I kind of left the scene for a while and pretty much just made street art and then came back slowly with painting. It happens to a lot of artists. They hit a peak maybe in their early thirties and then there is a fork in the road. I see a lot of my friends who are successful, this is what I am facing now. People expect me to paint those bodega paintings, but I can’t, I am done. But my friends have mortgages and kids in college, they are going to paint more bodega paintings. I used to think that is wrong but now I understand why people do that. I think if you look at art history, they all did that. They paid their bills, they would’ve painted money if they could. I used to think that was like the death of art. But I am not painting any more bodegas!

MSG: Who are the artists that influenced you?

DW: That’s a huge question. From the 15th century on! Modern people who have influenced me? I was thinking about this show I saw when I was first at Cooper Union and was very impressionable. There was a little pocket there when I was just an open mind for about a year. I saw three or four things, kind of random, that really influenced me. I saw Cindy Sherman which blew my mind. Donald Lipski, a sculptor, kind of an oddball. He did a piece on the wall of all these things he found. He wove matchbooks together and paper clips and rubber bands… it was called Gathering Dust. It was a wall full of these odd little, exotic sculptures he made from stuff he found on the ground and that just blew my mind. And then Charles Simmons this guy you hardly hear about any more. He was this street artist in like the early ‘70s who would build these little civilizations out of little bricks! He would build these little pueblo villages on a broken down wall on Rivington Street! He was in the Whitney and he became a big deal teacher. All this stuff just kind of blew my mind open and I started thinking about street art.

MSG: If there was any other place in the world you could live where would it be?

DW: I don’t think that way. I like it here. I wouldn’t mind having a house somewhere near water. I am interested in nature and I mean to get to it at some point, but right now the urban thing just has so much more going on.

MSG: Do you know where you would like to be in ten years?

DW: No. I get asked that sometimes. But if you had asked me that question ten years ago and I answered you, I would have been so wrong! I definitely would not have been into street art any more! The closest I could get to that is I think I would like to be working bigger. I figure you get older, you get bigger. You get a bigger studio or maybe more money because it is kind of expensive to make big paintings. Maybe like ten years from now I will have a big studio and I can make big paintings.

MSG: Fair enough!

On The Web | www.danwitzstreetart.com