July 5, 2005
Wooster Collective
Interview by Liberation Iannillo
Photos by Evan Sung
Wooster Collective is a web site that celebrates and documents street art from around the world. Wooster Collective provides a venue for artists to share inspiration and connect with one another. Wooster Collective is Marc and Sara Schiller.
The Schillers founded the Wooster Collective web site in 2001. Walking their hyperactive Weimaraner, Hudson, throughout the streets of SoHo, they started noticing the artwork put up on buildings and city walls by vigilante artists who thought their message was equally as important as the ad space Calvin Klein would pay to overexpose Travis Fimmel’s hot ass.
Like most people in New York City who lived though 9-11, Marc and Sara looked at their surroundings with fresh eyes. They had a new appreciation for the city and noticed things that most people took for granted. Instead of packing up their bags and leaving the city they loved, they decided to celebrate it, to share it, with New Yorkers and with the rest of the world.
Once a year they offer a walking tour in which they lead groups of up to 150 people throughout the city, telling them the stories behind the stickers on street signs and the wheat pasted posters on buildings. All of this public art, a combination of sarcasm, intellect, guerilla warfare and good ol’ fashion stoner ‘I have nothing better to do with my time, dude’ motivation, is just as important to this city as any might-be-built stadium or eccentric down and outer. The people on the tour vary from stringy, twenty-something, skate rats to the elderly women dying to know who Neck Face is. Sometimes the artists who create the work pointed out on the tour are anonymously part of the group, watching the reactions of people admiring their work.
For our photo shoot we walk down to the candy factory, a building at the end of Wooster Street which has become the Ground Zero for street art. As we get to our locale, we see two teenagers sitting on the steps of the building. “They’re our Wooster groupies” Sara says affectionately. Sara has met them earlier while taking Hudson for a walk. While we do our photo shoot for this story they tell us they are from New Jersey and that their relatives are in town to see a play so they split from their parents so they could “look for graffiti.” As we do our photo shoot Sara and Marc take turns fielding questions about the candy factory and the artwork on it from people passing by who range from young kids to Jersey gangster molls. It’s a perfect example how street art interests so many different types of people.
Aside from their taking full advantage of the Blogging technology Wooster Collective has quickly adapted to the likes of podcasting. For those in need of catching up, podcasting is the equivalent of pirate radio for the MP3 generation. Homemade broadcasts that can be downloaded to your MP3 player so you can listen to your favorite show whenever you want to. Marc and Sara have jumped right in to the podcasting arena with an approach Warhol would be proud of. Sometimes they’re genius, sometimes they’re rough around the edges, but they are always a rare glimpse into a world most are not privileged to. On a recent Podcast, Sara follows artist Daruis Jones. She interviews him while walking through his studio as he plans a new street installation. At times you can’t understand what is being said as he works the industrial tools in his workshop, but most people will never have a glance into in artist’s workshop or an insight to his motivation.
Continuing on with their technological and social endeavors they have started a new project that offers the artwork of street and graffiti artists that can be downloaded to your cell phone. Proceeds go to the Keep A Child Alive foundation. With all the work they put into the Wooster Collective site and its projects, you start to wonder where they find the time.
Liberation: You guys have been working on the Wooster Collective site for over three years now and you obviously put a tremendous amount of time and effort into it. The sincerity you have for the project really comes through. Where does this drive come from?
Marc: It’s hard to describe. We wake up in the morning and I check my email and I literally have over 200 emails from around the world filled with art from cities ranging from Philadelphia to Marrakech. These emails are filled with so much sincerity, passion, respect and love and it’s the greatest rush to wake up every morning and not know what’s going to be in your inbox but know that it’s going to be art. How many people in the world have that? We get it and we try to give back to other people the inspiration we’ve read the morning before. It’s a beautiful loop and we don’t need or want anything more than that. We are aware that most people don’t have creativity or inspiration in their life and we are getting it from hundreds of people everyday and then mirroring it back. That is the one and only goal of the Wooster site.
Liberation: One of the great things about the Wooster Collective site is that it allows artists to connect with each other. I think that is a huge resource you are providing; are you aware of how important that is?
Marc: The best thing that can happen for us is to hear about artists getting hooked up with other artists to collaborate or a gallery to show their work or a magazine to feature them. For us, what is really exciting is hearing the stories of how the Wooster site has helped people make those connections.
Sara: The site itself emerged at a time when the street art community was ready to go online and start interacting with one another, looking globally for inspiration and camaraderie. Many of the people we’ve met are really amazing and the internet has allowed them to connect with each other.
Liberation: I think that this is one of those occasions where the Internet is working for people.
Marc: It’s a little bit of a double edged sword because street art is supposed to be discovered, it’s supposed to be found, it’s supposed to be unnoticed at first. You come upon it and you are blown away by the sheer, unexpected nature of it and the web makes it very easy to experience street art in a way but it’s not supposed to be discovered by the Internet. Then again when you figure 100,000 people a day are coming to the Wooster site and so many of those people live in cities where there is no street art , it’s doing a great service because so much of the art is ephemeral and it was only up there for a day or two. The good outweighs the bad, hopefully it will force people to either go out on the street and put stuff up or discover other people’s stuff. Sara and I know it’s doing that so it’s definitely a good thing but it’s not perfect for the Internet because street art is not supposed to be discovered this way.
Liberation: Exactly. It’s funny you say that because I started doing some stuff out on the streets a few weeks ago and it quickly showed up on someone’s Fickr account and then on a Blog. It’s weird because I only did a few of these but the Internet totally distorts the proportion of the project.
Marc: Let’s talk about that because I think that’s really interesting. A guy like Banksy, who has a world wide audience, he’s got his cred and the truth is how many people are really going to see a Banksy piece on the street? If you’re not in London you’re not going to really see one. All of sudden the Wooster site, the Banksy site, and the Internet are exposing him to millions and millions of people around the world. That’s a good thing all in all but at the same time Banksy’s pieces are certainly best when you see them on the street.
The other thing that could be a negative is that it is so easy to put up a sticker or create a piece of street art and email it to the Wooster site or put it up on Flikr, and for some, they’re expecting fame.
Sara: Automatic entry into this community.
Marc: And what can happen is that it can create a lot of problems too.
Liberation: I’m sure. I think that after a while the people that are doing it once for the fame will drop off whereas the people who continue working and allowing themselves to grow as artists will rise to the top. The crap will just work its way out.
Marc: I think so too. That’s what we love about the Wooster site is that it inspires artists to go out and do more art and to get out on the streets and to think through their work. That’s the best part of it. It’s inspiring for us too, the great thing about Wooster Collective is that it’s not us inspiring other people, it is artists inspiring other artists.
Liberation: Yeah, but you are also providing the platform to do so, so don’t sell yourself short.
Marc: No, we understand. But for us that’s why it’s called a collective. We are very honest on the web site. It is Marc and Sara, and friends that get involved in projects. But to be honest with you the Wooster site is not about ego, it’s not about us. We just want to have fun and be challenged by it. We’re not looking to it for people to give us props and I’m not trying to be altruistic or bullshitty about it, it’s just not us.
Sara: I think that’s where the podcasts emerged from. Marc really wanted to try podcasting and we went out we started exploring it, not caring at all if anyone liked it or disliked it. We love interesting conversations and we love talking to people so we said let’s start recording and see if other people like our podcasts.
Liberation: What I like the most about them is the whole D.I.Y. aspect. When I listened to your podcasts they reminded me of the first time I heard Sonic Youth. I thought it was very experimental, done in one take, if it was good, it was good, if it wasn’t, it wasn’t, but it was what it was.
Marc: Exactly!
Liberation: I was listening to the Podcast that Sara did with Darius Jones out in Brooklyn. You can hear trains in the background, you can hear traffic, and ideally it’s not the perfect sound quality. But it’s a slice of life, of that time period at that very moment, and that’s what makes it perfect.
Sara: It’s so real. I wish you could have seen it. We were walking down the street and we go into his dark studio in the middle of a really old building with lots of history. There is nothing manufactured about that experience, it’s completely real.
Liberation: Tell me about the Wooster Mobile project, how did you guys get involved with the cell phone wallpapers?
Marc: I am very friendly with a guy named Mark Ghuneim and he has a company called Wired Set. We were talking one day and I said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if people could download art from the artists that wasn’t crappy clip art?” We decided we would try it so Mark built this platform for us and we went to our friends who are artists then put it up online.
Liberation: How is it going so far?
Marc: It’s an experiment and it’s going very well. All things are relative. Is it a business for us or the artists? No. But the whole Wooster site isn’t a business so if people enjoy it, it’s worth it for us.
Sara: There are hundreds of people downloading the images from all over the world. It’s not necessarily an artist’s next paycheck but there’s definitely a movement behind it.
Liberation: The proceeds of the project go to the Keep A Child Alive program. How did you guys hook up with them?
Marc: I know them very well. I spoke to Sara about the fact that we don’t need the things on the Wooster site to make money for ourselves. The idea of us making money off of the wallpapers just didn’t sit well with me. So I asked Sara if we could donate our proceeds to a charity and I had been working with Keep A Child Alive and I saw that the money was going directly to the cause. So Sara and I made the decision to donate the money to them.
Sara: It fits in the Wooster site well because it’s inspiring. It’s about keeping kids alive and to me that’s a natural extension of the Wooster site. There all of these orphans… it can get a little depressing, but there are a lot of kids out there who have AIDS. They can live, they just need drugs.
Liberation: It’s terrible. I was watching a news program and they were interviewing Brad Pitt about the work he is doing over in Africa. It blows your mind to think that the six dollars we would spend on a sandwich can feed a small village in Africa!
Marc: Right! And that’s exactly the Keep A Child Alive issue, they’re making it very simple. It’s not a copy edited line created for an ad. A dollar a day will keep a child alive in Africa so for $365 a year, someone will live another year and for us that’s just a very simple thing. I like the cause, I like the people, and I like the impact that it has on people’s lives. If we are going to do Wooster Mobile, we might as well have the money go to things we like.
Liberation: Definitely! When did you guys start doing the walking tours?
Marc: We started them about three years ago when we met Swoon. We had a salon at our house and she came over and she was part of a group that was putting together a small arts festival called the Psy-Geo-Conflux Festival that Christina Ray does. Christina asked us if we would do it for that festival and we did and Sara and I decided we would do it every year in the summer.
Liberation: I did the tour this year and I loved the diversity of the crowd which ranged from people like me to middle aged women who wanted to know more about the street art they have been seeing.
Marc: That’s the way it was the first year.
Sara: The first year we literally had grandmothers, investment bankers, and kids. It was really the grandmothers who inspired us because some were long time New Yorkers and they’d never seen street art so to be able to show someone street art for the first time was really a rewarding experience!
Marc: We live in SoHo so we are in the middle of a ton of street art and people will come over or we’ll go for a walk or somebody will ask us to show them some things. Every time we show people a piece of street art and we go another block and show them another piece, by the sixth block every single person we’ve ever met has been hooked! These are people who are anti-graffiti or they don’t like vandalism, they’re very staunch in a certain way. I haven’t met one person who wasn’t hooked once you tapped them into what is going on.
Liberation: It’s funny how once someone is exposed to something or gets to listen to someone’s point of view, they will take a second look at something that they once dismissed as vandalism.
Marc: Exactly!
Liberation: What other projects do you have going on right now? I know you are doing something with Shepard Fairey as part of the Wooster Collective Special Edition books.
Marc: Yes, that’s part of a series we decided to do, just another project. We love art books as much as we love art so Sara and I decided to reach out to some of the artists that created books that Sara and I really like and work with them to create a special edition of that book. Shepard’s book is the second of the series and there will be a lot of artists involved after Shepard. The first one was a book by Bast, it was great and we sold out in the first week. We have planned it to be about one a month.
Liberation: Where do you see Wooster Collective going in the next couple of years?
Marc: I have no idea. Literally we take it day by day and that’s not a line. Wooster is not business, there’s no business plan, and we don’t make any money from it. Sara and I both have other jobs and we have things that we do to make money. The Wooster site is purely a labor of love. Everything we do to bring in money has a partner. So if we sell books like Shepard’s book or Bast’s book the artists are making money. Every time we make a dollar we buy art with it. We just decide in the morning that we have a project that we want to do and in the afternoon we do it. We don’t have any real agenda.
On The Web | www.woostercollective.com
Photos: Evan Sung
Posted by Trigger Magazine at July 5, 2005 7:08 PM Permalink
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