JUSTIN BUA
interview by Adriana Sparkuhl
Where does your distorted style of the character come from? Is it evocative of music, how it makes you feel or move?
Music has an influence on my work and my work is very musical just by virtue of the fact that drawing is a very rhythmic thing. Everyone draws at a different pan of syncopation and rhythm but my work is really about the depiction of urban culture the way I that I perceive it, to accentuate things that are often times overlooked. It’s stylized because the culture is highly stylized; the way people dress, the way people
speak, and you know, just the nature of how intensely cool hip hop can be. The renditions are very cool, and very exaggerated, and can also be very distorted because I grew up with a distorted view of the world. I think anyone who grew up in New York has a very bizarre distortion, a “filter on their lens” in terms of how they see the universe. It’s not as crazy and violent out there, as maybe it is in my neighborhood, my neck of the woods.
Distortion is also a way to captivate the viewer to make things a little bit more awe inspiring and the exaggeration can really bring the eye to where you want to focus it. So I think a lot of my exaggeration is used as a compositional tool, it’s used as an emphatic tool to define certain things that are key elements.
Do you think there’s a way for graffiti to ever become a more acceptable form of art?
No. Any time you do some thing like that it’s going to be perceived as irreverent and subversive. So, whatever justification you use, whether you talk about the institutionalized cooption of public space, taking back what is rightfully yours, in terms of interaction with public space, that’s kind of what brings a unique aesthetic to the city because you are interacting with it as opposed to the homogenization of public space where your just kind of making it very bland.
I think anytime you interact with a space, it is going to be frowned upon because that space is a competitive space where people want to do something with it for capitalistic reasons. So anytime you then mark that space, even if it is beautiful, you’re going to have too many people who oppose it. Besides there are too many people who are inherently sheep, right?
It’s the same thing with veganism, people eat meat because where do you get your protein? Meat is on the pyramid, it’s in the five food groups, its’ on the pyramid on the back of the milk truck. The dairy industry and the beef industry pay for all the ads. They have the “Got Milk?” campaigns, “you need to drink milk to survive.” Everyone’s onto that and it’s the same reason that people put out the anti-graffiti things. Because it’s money, and money moves mountains and that’s what our culture is based on. There’s too much negative information about graffiti for it to be acceptable. There’s too much money spent on anti-graffiti campaigns for it to be acceptable. We have a machine that’s thwarting a philosophical realit
