How to Be a Better Human - How to unite people through art (with JR)

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

Art can move us in deep, meaningful ways. A beautiful song, a good book, or a great film can change our perspectives and attitudes toward ideas, and sometimes people. Where does that magic come from��and how can we channel it when we’re creating? JR is an artist famed for his enormous black and white portraits that tell stories and adorn surfaces from the Louvre to the favelas of Brazil. His ambitious projects, like a recent massive mural outside a supermax prison in California or the boy who peers curiously over the wall at the Mexico–United States border, put a deeply human face to things we might have only read in the news while also highlighting and celebrating the connections between us humans. In this episode, JR talks about the importance of joy in his art-making process, speaks to the value of community and curiosity, and shares how his unique working style developed over the years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today on the show, we're talking to one of the most famous street artists in the world, JR. JR's got this iconic look where he's always wearing dark glasses and a hat, so no one knows exactly what he looks like. He's got this real aura of mystery around him. And even if you've never seen a photo of JR, even if you've never heard his name, you've almost certainly seen JR's work. Whether it's a giant photograph of a baby that appears to be peering over the border wall between Mexico and the United States, or the cover of Time magazine where 100 people in Lviv, Ukraine are holding up JR's enormous canvas print of a young girl smiling and playing. That was an act of artistic resistance that could

be seen for miles by drone and airplane. In JR's work, he takes photos of humans who are too often seen as powerless or invisible, and he makes their images monumental and iconic. The sheer scale of his art forces us to consider the stories of the people in the pictures. We look into their eyes, and we're pushed to reconsider our own perspectives. So today on the podcast, we're gonna be talking about how we can all use art to connect to others, to see the world differently, and to take action.

Here's a clip from JR's most recent TED Talk where he discusses his newest art project, which took place at a Supermax prison in California. We arrived there, and of course, you know, it's not that easy. You get there, it's like fences, electric fences, walls, and you add more walls and more people that check your IDs. And my God, I get all the way to the yard, and it looked like some army guy with like bulletproof jackets

and heavily armed who say, all right, this is going to be very simple. There's some people waiting for you in the gymnasium. We got us some inmates. You cannot approach them. You cannot touch them. You can sit at the chair that we designated for you, and we're going to surround the area of the gymnasium. That sounds fun. I enter the room, and we do this thing in France. I don't know if you have that, but you shake people's hand, you know. So I started shaking people's hand. Hello, how are you? My name is Gia. What's your name? And go around the table. And then I sat and I spoke with them. A lot of them have been there since they were teenagers, some of them even from the age of 13. And I've never seen anything like it. And so I told them

about my art and about the idea. And they asked me a question. They said, but what is the purpose of your art? I was like, well, you know, that's a good question. I don't know if I can answer before, you know, trying a project. We'll be right back with JR after this. All right, we are back with today's guest, JR. My name is JR, and I'm an artist from France. All right, we are back with today's guest, JR. My name is JR and I'm an artist from France. I say that I'm an artist until I find a real job, but I do paper and glue. I paste giant images on buildings and cities around the world.

Can you tell me a little bit about your upbringing and how that helped you to develop empathy and maybe a willingness to understand different perspectives? Yeah, I guess, you know, I grew up in the projects outside Paris, and I've never knew anything about art. Let's put it this way. There were no artists in my family. Photography was a rich sport. There was no digital at the time. I'm 39 now. And so I guess when I found graffiti, which was a form to express myself and to leave a mark on society to say, I'm here, I exist.

Then when later I found a camera in the subway and I started photographing my friends who were doing graffitis to kind of tell those incredible stories that we would have going in subways, in tunnels, on rooftops. I just printed them on black and white photocopies, like Xerox photocopies, and pasted them in the street.

I didn't realize that this would be called art, you know, or street art, or however people wanted to call it. I had no idea what I was jumping into. I really jumped into this in a really naive way. And I'm glad that I had no idea about galleries and museums. I just thought this museum was like for artists who died, you know died a long time ago.

So it's really just a kid not really realizing what that world was. And then suddenly digital arrived and low-cost flights arrived. And then the world was all open to me. And then that's what I ended up doing all my life. Well, the people that you grew up with and started doing graffiti with, there were other artists in that group too, like Laj Lee, who is a very successful film director now. What do you think it was about your particular crew of friends that led you to have this artistic success? I think, you know, none of

us were known or anything like that. It's just that we followed each other for the last two decades. So, of course, in the group, you know, by pushing each other, by being an inspiration to each other, you know, a lot of us then ended up in different form of art succeeding. And so that's, I think, is the key and the power and the luck that I had that I was always surrounded by friends and people that would push me, that would open my perspective so that I didn't get stuck. And sometimes when you're alone doing your art in your own corner, you don't have that chance to actually be challenged.

And a lot of the artists that I actually admired, I realized they always had like this group, this tight group of like pushing each other and really trying to get the best of each other. I always think that that's one of the biggest things that people misunderstand about art is they think it's just this one solitary genius working alone and not understanding that it actually is part of a community of people who push and inspire and challenge and all of the pieces that make art social as well as individual. Part of what would push me and keep me going is to do it with others. So when I developed my practice in a way that I would always have to engage other people and groups and communities around the world to do it. And I really create my projects depending on that.

I create projects that are so complicated to put together that I could never do them by myself. So in your 2011 TED Talk, you said, what we see changes who we are. How does that idea inform the work that you do? I realized I haven't traveled that much when I was a kid. And so I wanted to see the world. So by going in places that I've sometimes here in the media, seen in the media, I would just go and see by myself and not as a journalist, just as the citizen who just want to understand

and really ask naive questions. And I developed a lot of my practice around that, just going to see and talk to people in a very simple way and asking them to explain to me what is the context and telling them that I know nothing about it except what I've heard on TV. And that was an amazing way for me and still today to approach a lot of context and go around the world and try to understand. And then we share those images and then other people would then write me and say, wow, I had no idea about this.

I was just in Mauritania last week in the furthest refugee camp in the world. It's like at the end of the desert. So you have to drive 36 hours through the desert to get there. Most of the people wrote me and said, we had no idea there were like 80,000 refugees right there. You know, we just don't know. We hear about the one in Ukraine right now, but we forget that there are also lots of refugees around the world.

I want to talk to you more about that, because it seems like when you choose subjects for your art, you're almost always choosing people who are seen in a very limited way in the media. And there's obviously an irony in that you're creating two-dimensional images, but it seems like what you're trying to do is actually create a more three-dimensional image and more nuanced representations than what most people normally would see. I never paste famous people. It's always people you've never heard about and just people I meet around the world that had incredible story like all of us, but that never get to be on the front line of the news. And I don't even do a casting. It's just a randomness of like this incredible people

that I've met around the world. And then I enlarge them so big that I have to involve sometimes hundreds of people to paste that image or sometimes hundreds of people to carry that image, like physically, like a giant top

that you have to be two, 300 people to carry through the city. What's interesting is that there's few layers to this. There's the process, which for me is the art. The process of it, of installing and enlarging that image, is the actual art.

And then the more you involve those people that sometimes come because it's just fun to paste or it's cool to carry that image, then realize the message that's behind it. Sometimes, really, honestly, the people realize it when they're in the process of the action. Sometimes they just came because it was fun

and then they realize, oh my God, I didn't know that we were raising that issue today. That's amazing. I had no idea. And then you have that image traveling through social media, through people, through museums,

through galleries, through books, you know, in any way possible. And that creates another change of reaction. So really, it's a walk in that's always alive. It's always moving. I never know when a project ends. How do you approach a community or an individual and get permission from them to make art involving them? I imagine that most of these people, they might not be familiar with you and your work. So how do you actually get that trust and make it so that they understand what you're doing? I'll tell you the secret.

It's very simple. I just say hello. I just say bonjour. And then we shake hands. And then, of course, like anyone that you meet in the streets of New York or in the street of Mauritania, or in the sand of Mauritania, should I say, people want to know who you are, what you do.

And that's the same. So it's really always start like that. They ask me, what are you doing here? And I say, people want to know who you are, what you do. And that's the same. So it's really always start like that. They ask me, what are you doing here? And I say, oh, I'm from France. And then after that, they say, but what are you really doing here? And then I say, well, I'm an artist. What do you do? Then I show some images and then I explain what I came here to do.

And then a conversation starts. The fact that I come with an idea that might not be the final idea. It's just that when I come there, that's the idea I have. And then they get involved and they gave some input. And often the idea really changed because of that. And I love that. I love the process of exchanging and knowing that a bigger part of the unknown in the project is there.

So there's always more risk of failure than success in every one of my projects. When I create a project, I know it's interesting when it's just more risk that it failed and it succeed. Then I know I'm into something that no one I've ever tapped into. And so I really always keep that in mind in the way I work. But another part of the process is to not have brands or sponsorship, to not have logos on your work. Can you talk about that piece of your values when it comes to work? Yeah, to me, finance is a big part of it. I think it's just there's so many hidden message into everything we see every day. It's hidden commercial. It's like subliminal. Everyone's trying to sell something or brand artists to everything. And I try to

keep the art as the most purest form, the same way you go to the Louvre and you see the Joconde. And you know that, you know, that's it. He painted that image, maybe with a lot of subliminal image from the time, but there was no like brand. He's not trying to sell you anything and just really get it in your attention in the painting. That's what I'm trying to do with my work. And so for that, I make sure that the financing of it doesn't interfere with the message so that it's not powered by any brand. It's not a project on the people up there to then try to sell you this or that. It's really just that story and that person. And that's it. So that's why I've never made collaboration with brands in any way. And so I self-financed it with sales of my artwork. So I always sell

a couple artworks per project and that pays for the next one. And I've always been into that journey. I had great mentors like Christo, who also did that for years, and Jean-Claude, and they were financing all their projects so that they could say, well, you know, that you like or you don't like the projects. We don't ask the government for money. We don't ask the people for money. We actually use our own money through the sales of our works. So this way they were totally free.

And I feel that same freedom today. I wonder, is your kind of personal image and the presentation of yourself part of that? Because you have a very distinctive style, right? The hat and the glasses, people don't see your eyes. Is that part of the idea of letting it be about the work and not messages about you and brands? Or is that just, it's easier to have a distinctive style? No, it started because what I did in the street for all those years, and still today in lots of places, not everywhere, is illegal. So you have to pay fines for it. And then I remember one day I had to do an interview and some guys from Holland were there with their cameras. And I said, look, we can't film you for one day with this on your head. And so I went to the supermarket and I just bought a hat

and glasses. And I said, well, now feel me like this one. I'll take them off. No one will know it's me. And it worked. And I kept on doing it until today. So it gave me that freedom that when I did the project at the border of Mexico and US, instead of that giant kid overlooking the wall, basically when I would cross the border, the border patrol would not recognize me because I would take off my hat and glasses. And then as soon as I put them on, then people would recognize me. Hmm.

So I have a question about your project, Tehachapi the Yard. You did this project in a supermax prison in California. And this is one of the projects that you talk about a lot in your most recent TED Talk. How did this project come about? And also, how were you able to get the prisoners inside to be able to tell their own stories? And I guess, how did that process get them outside of the borders of the prison, even

though they couldn't physically leave? Exactly. In a maximum security prison, in the middle of the desert, I know no one would come and see this art piece because you can't enter this prison. I knew also that it's such a rough climate there that the image would not stay that long. And I needed concrete and concrete, you only find it in the maximum security prison. And then I would have to find a way to capture it so that the image could travel, but that their story would travel also. So that's how it came about, how to create an image that involved everybody. So the guards, some victims by some of those gangs from those prisons, and also some of

the guards, so inmates, victims, and guards into the same image. And that's like about 50 people into the image. And then you can only see it from one point, that point being from the sky. So we sent a drone. And so to kind of get that perspective. To get their story, to answer your question, I told them, look, we're going to create that image that's going to be visually very impacting,

but your story needs to travel through it. As much as that story, as that image travels, I need you to embed into the visual your story. And how to do that is not through an interview. It's really through you going into one room and recording your story and explaining a guy like me, who's French, who don't know how you grew up,

who don't know the different neighborhoods in Los Angeles. And you have to explain me, like if I'm a child and you're trying to explain me what you went through, because a lot of those guys actually that I selected were minor or ended up in a tree strike. There was a lot of like things that got them to those long sentences that not necessarily were murder. And then I told them, tell your whole story. And they did. And they recorded their audios sometime for like 30, 40 minutes, which they never had a possibility like that to do before.

And then we created an app, which is totally free. It's called JR Murals. And you just go on it and you click on any single face and you can hear what they have to say. And that went a really long way. That really like crossed every walls, even inside the prison, like the guards and not the inmates, because they can't have access to phone,

but like the guards, the wardens and their families, their kids and stuff got to hear it. And that changed a lot of things within their own space. And then also people at the other side of the planet who suddenly get to hear about them. In a way, one of the things that you've done is taken this building, which obscures all of the humanity inside of it, right?

It's this big concrete block. And instead, now we're forced to look and see, oh, these are human faces inside of here and those people are inside of it, right? It's this big concrete block. And instead, now we're forced to look and see, oh, these are human faces inside of here. And those people are inside of here. Exactly. And that's what my work is always about is putting faces on walls to kind of humanize any places and prison is maybe the hardest place to humanize. But anywhere around the world, you realize that people have lack of dignity and photography is such an amazing way to do it. And yet I'm not a photographer. Photography is just a small part of my process.

I spend more time mixing the glue than actually taking the photo. It's the pasting, the process. And that process within the prison was also fascinating because we pasted all together. And that different gangs, different race, different ethnicities,

the guards started to come in pasting and they don't have normally the rights to get so close from them. And that's where the wall really fall. And those walls are not visible. You can't touch them. But yet those are the walls, the most important walls that actually fell during that project. Okay, we're going to take a quick break right now. But when we get back, we're going to talk about how the impact of JR's art reaches beyond the images that he creates. We are back with the artist JR. In addition to creating large scale art pieces, JR has worked on projects like a free film and art school and a social kitchen dedicated to reducing food waste and serving communities in need. So, JR, with that in mind,

I'd like to ask you the same question that you posed in one of your TED Talks. Can art change the world? I feel like that's something you think very deeply about. It's a huge question. Can art change the world? But actually, over the years, I find a way to actually deconstruct it. Each one of us live in their own world. So your world is not my world. And yet we all live on the same world. But yet we're all, depending on where we grew up, our frame of reference, we still live in our own world, in our own bubble.

It's really a question of perspective. Perspective is what, and we live it really right now as people don't want to over see any other perspective. They want to just stay in their perspective and believe that that's the truth. This is the moment more than ever that we need to remind people that the world is interesting and not because it's just black and white. That's where I walk in. I walk in all those shades of gray and I always make sure in my art that I even confront my own perspective. And so I constantly push myself into places where I don't know anything, into worlds that I've never heard about. As long as there is fear into walking into

that world, I know that's the right place to go. Are there instances where people have reached out to you and said that your work has helped change their perspective about something in their lives? Oh, a thousand times. A thousand times I've been approached. And it goes from a simple story of one inmate who tells me, look, I could never talk to my daughter. She's 14 years old. She didn't want to come and visit me in prison. And now she heard my story on the app and she visits me every week. And he said, my problem is I could never have 40 minutes with her to actually explain her what I went through. So she never heard it.

And she just thought I was a criminal, I was in prison and that's it. And now that she heard me and she saw the humanity in me, she comes and visits me all the time. The wilder of the prison or the guards say, I've never saw them as human. I saw them as animals. And now because of the art project,

I saw their humanity and how they think. And a lot of those guys that had life sentence because of the project, three years later, one third of them got freed because the guards and the warden signed on the paper for their board, meaning that those guys had really changed. And they saw it, they witnessed it, and they vouched for them. And that would never happen without the excuse of the art to just reveal that. They already had changed, but it's just that there was no way in the system that they could prove that. In 2007, you did a project called Face to Face,

which was murals with side-by-side portraits of Palestinians and Israelis. I wonder, do you see any parallels between the work that you did on that border wall between Israel and Palestine and the border wall in the southern U.S. and Mexico border? And then also all these other projects that you've done, including the walls of a prison. Is there a through line through all of these? Those walls separate people anywhere in the world.

And so that's that's the I think the between those worlds. They happen in very different contexts, but they're still worlds to divide people. It's just the most physical way of, like, separating people, literally. And so, to me, they appear very, like, the one in Mexico, I've just installed a giant kid at one place and it represented the whole debate there and humanity of, like, just kids who, this kid was kid was like one year and a half when I installed him on the wall.

So as a kid, you don't see walls. It's just that his house was right behind that wall. He don't realize the implication of it. In Israel and Palestine, I've done it on the wall, but I actually installed the portraits of Israeli and Palestinian

doing the same job. So two taxi drivers, two teachers, two students, two hairdressers, and people couldn't recognize who is who. They would always see the two taxi drivers, the two hairdressers,

and they were like, but why are you placing those two people? And I would say, well, because one is Israeli and one is Palestinian. And people couldn't recognize. They were like, oh, I would know how to recognize my brother. That's the Palestinian.

I was like, actually wrong. That's the Israeli, but I give you another chance. And we did this all over the region. Well, I'm curious to ask about that because there are sometimes in your work, in real life, there's obviously certain power dynamics where a certain person has more control and more power

and is more oppressed versus less oppressed. And sometimes people have objected to the implied messages of that in your art. The idea that when you put two people side by side and one is in a lot more power than the other, that it makes it look like the only difference is that we just need to see that we're all the same, whereas there are actual systems of power and oppression that are in place, right? So it's not just about seeing each other as people. It's also we need to change some of the underlying systems of oppression, I guess I would say.

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, in all my work, I've always kept my work. I'm an artist, so I raise questions. I don't really bring answers. I don't think that's my place. I think activism is a much stronger form to actually bring answers or say this is how it should be done or how it could be done. As an artist, when I put people side by side in Israel and Palestine,

I actually did it so that people, you know, would play with them. And I thought that they would actually be destroyed the next day. And like 10 years, 15 years later, they're still there for most of them, which is kind of crazy. You would think so. You'd say, I'll bet that they'll destroy the other one side and stuff. And they didn't. And the idea is to raise questions,

but not to kind of bring a message that everyone's the same and equal. It's much more intricate than that. But people were like, who do you think you are to that we wouldn't deserve having out? They were like, of course we deserve out the same way anyone else in the world deserves it. And I was, you know, of course, very naive. And it just proved me around the world and how people want to use R to show that they exist, they're there and that sometimes they're misrepresented. I've opened a project in 2011 at TED, actually, which is called Inside Out. And people can send me their photos and I will print it in a giant size and ship it back to them wherever they are in the world for free. For people who aren't familiar with Inside Out, can you just give them a quick overview of what that is? Yeah, Inside Out now it's around 500,000 posters sent around the world in 140 countries and people pasting hundreds of people of their community into walls, into the floors, into buildings, in each of those places, raising a different issue. But really, when you look at all of it, it's just people. But yet,

those posters are on the wall because it goes beyond my work. It becomes a people's project. So, you know, that I continue it or not, I don't own it anymore. It's really in their hands. And you would think it would only happen in poor country or in conflict areas. And actually, no. Everywhere in the world, people wanted to actually express themselves and raise issues and show that they exist. Even in a small village in Switzerland, very calm village, the people installed their photos from an elderly house to show that they still exist, but they've been forgotten within their own village, you know. And I love that. It shows you that we all have this need of existing, of leaving a mark, of leaving a trace in our own way, but we all have.

Thinking about that, that we all have this need of leaving a mark and leaving a trace and how art can fill that. How can people who are listening right now make art in small but meaningful ways in their own daily lives? I think you have to see art as a process. So it's just an excuse to interact with other people. So let's say if you decided to then make your whole hallway of the building that everyone share into a color, whatever blue for just five days, you find a way that every wall, everything is going to be blue and then you can remove it

if it's in paper or whatever it is. You would have to ring at every door. You would have to explain that to every single person. Then you realize that that neighbor you never talked to is actually much more interesting than you thought.

Then you realize one will block you, but then some others will have some ideas. That whole journey of just making your whole hallway blue will become an incredible journey. And that's what you'll remember of it. Even if the photos are not that interesting, that's what you actually will stay with.

I love the idea of thinking about that as art because that feels so much more accessible. Sometimes people get stuck on the end product of I have to be Picasso. I have to have this perfect painting that's in a museum at the end. And it seems like so much of your career and your success has been rejecting that 100%.

Yeah, because I realized that the strongest part in art is that to me, I mean, you know, in the art of creating with communities and stuff, is that process that just allows and creates so much interaction between people. And I just make sure that this can happen with or without me. And that's why I often engage communities at the other side of the planet without being there, because it'd have to work

without me. If not, then it would become such a smaller concept. And it can happen with or without my art also. That's what I'm trying to say here. One thing that I'm really struck by in your work, and I think is very powerful to me, is how you balance practical needs with artistic and expressive ones. I'm thinking about the fact that some of your projects have not only been art and visual, but they've also replaced roofs that leak on homes or created a restaurant to feed the hungry. How do you balance that question of fixing people's immediate basic needs with their artistic and expressive ones? So it's a very important question. I always, at first I go and do art and I'm always really honest.

I'm like, I don't know if that's going to change anything, but let's see. And so we're always going on a journey where it's total unknown and it doesn't matter if it doesn't work. So I love that because also it moves out all the pressure. But then after that, I, you know,

I think there's more to do. And so in some places, yes, I've created restaurants, some others I've created school and some others I've created awareness around an issue. But that comes in a second time.

And then it becomes how to create more social impact into the place where we've done art. So anything is just creating more, more way of showing that art actually have an impact. And so we went from cannot change the world to cannot change the world. And that was in Ukraine.

I realized after going there that, okay, I could just stop there and I created a lot of awareness and it made it a cover of Time Magazine. I could actually continue. And because of all the people I've met and all the network I have, I could actually deliver trucks every week to Ukraine. And that's what I'm doing now since the beginning of the war. For yourself, for me, for everyone who's listening, how can we use art to become better

humans? Well, I think whether the answer is into art or anything else is into the process, is into doing around your community about what's around you before changing the world, change the world around yourself. So that means in the few people that lives around you, that's your inner world. And then this is where you start. And I realized that after traveling the world and someone told me that at the beginning, say, well, the hardest thing is often the people around you. And it's true, but that's where you can see the actual impact of it and say, oh, wow, okay, I did that,

and that actually impacted my community. And so I would start from there. Well, JR, thank you so much for being on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. That is our show for today. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks to our guest, JR.

You can find more from him at jr-art.net. On the TED side, our show is brought to you by audio artists Sammy Case and Anna Phelan. From Transmitter Media, Greta Cohn, Farida Granj, and Leila Das are all wearing dark glasses to stay incognito. and Leila Doss are all wearing dark glasses to stay incognito. And from PRX, Jocelyn Gonzalez and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve have worked on this episode fully inside out and face-to-face. I am your host, Chris Duffy,

and we will be back with more next week. In the meantime, share this episode with someone who you think would love it. And thanks again for listening.