Dialogue in Dirt: An interview with São Paolo street artist Alexandre Orion

It's been two decades since Alexandre Orion first took up graffiti in São Paolo. Today, he is one of a small handful of street artists embracing a non-damaging sustainable art form most commonly known as “reverse graffiti.” Orion considers himself less of an artist and more of an activist, using his project, Ossario, to stimulate the dialogue on the effects of pollution on the human population. His compositions are not done with paint, but rather by wiping away soot to create relief images; as well as by reusing collected soot to paint on other surfaces. His main tools are rags and water. 

Since Ossario broke ground, Orion has used the walls of a busy metropolitan tunnel in his hometown with a series of striking, ghostly skulls that peer out into the darkness at passing drivers. Since then he has expanded his intervention pieces to some other the world's most populous cities, including Mexico City and Rio de Janiero, where a spine painted from soot stands 28 meters high on an industrial exhaust pipe. 

What is your process and what are your tools?

My process is completely free and my tools are whatever enables me to conceive an idea. Ideas have to come before style or technique. I have done a series using reverse graffiti as technique, but my work is always a combination of processes. What I am interested in is not the aesthetics of my works, but how they might set off processes in people's minds.

What methods do you use to create your images?

Just rags and my fingers. My skulls are hand drawn, one by one. The first intervention I got recorded on video was 300 meters long with over 3,500 skulls by the time the city came along to wipe it off.

"Making an intervention that has a social impact is hard, because it depends solely on artistic creation, on the idea and the force a work exerts over the place where it is produced."

How do you collect soot to be reused for paint?

I washed out rags used during the selective cleaning interventions, then waited for decanting and evaporating until only the soot was left, which I made into paint that looks like watercolor, but much more rustic.

Is Miley making art?

Art and sex are fairly familiar bedfellows, so much so that the line between the two tends to get quite blurry at times. So much so that sometimes it's hard to even tell whether some things are artistically provocative or blatantly exploitative. 

As I write these words the eyes of the world are focused on two women, each artists in their own right. Miley Cyrus stole the show at the MTV Video Music Awards, landed a ridiculous cover on Rolling Stone and is ostensibly the next in a line of crash-and-burn young female pop stars. Sinead O'Connor will forever hold a place in pop culture history for going against the status quo and checking out of the sex-and-money ruse of the music industry, among other things. Today, as that issue of Rolling Stone with Cyrus on the cover, looking all kinds of trashy and licking her shoulder, is flying off the news stands, O'Connor's website has broken under the weight of traffic pouring in to read her open letter to the young pop star.

Cyrus noted O'Connor as an inspiration, and even goes so far to assert that her debased performance in her latest music video for "Wrecking Ball" borrows from O'Connor's "Nothing Compares."

O'Connor appeals that Little Miss Montana has musical talent that will shine without the self-exploitation, but no one is pretending that racy performances aren't part of the pop star game, least of all Cyrus herself. While Miley may be calling the shots, some would dispute her motives. 

When is a creative work art and when is it entertainment? No doubt they can be in one the same, but is this always the case? Certainly some art is made to evoke strong reactions--Miley's performance at the VMA's included. There is something to be said for ruffling feathers, but could her racy performance be a legitimate act of pushing the envelope, or challenging the staus quo?

Miley seems to think so. "No one is talking about the man behind the ass," Cyrus tells Rolling Stone reporter Josh Ellis. "Obviously there's a double standard." The flood of complaints to the FCC following her performance only serve to confirm her argument, in which Miley is characterized as "slut," "whore," and "hooker."

Was it tasteful? Well, no, but that's hardly the overarching objective of art. Likewise embracing the lost art of open letters, Amanda Palmer suggests that art has a higher purpose than entertainment, and all the attention that Miley and her tongue have gotten since the VMA's speak to a social issue. 

"It's a Chinese finger trap that reflects the basic problems of our women-times: we're either scolded for looking sexy or we're scolded for not playing the game," she writes in her letter addressing O'Connor.

Does art bear the burden of social responsibility?

After the VMAs, Pharrell told Cyrus: “You are not a train wreck. You’re the train pulling everyone else along.” Miley surely didn't invent twerking, but she sure did bring the party to the public eye. O'Connor might abhor Cyrus' behavior while Palmer champions it, but it is Miley that is fueling their feelings. Twerk on, Miley. 

We are all artists

Even if you don't call yourself one.