Dan Witz

Born 1957 in Chicago, Illinois. Lives in New york.
Since the 80’s, Dan Witz is famous for his well known participation in the Street Art Movement, he looks for night scenes, and depicts a wild and fascinating world. On the first hand, his oil paintings with very fine lines draw a very quite picture of the suburbs through the absence of soul. On the other hand, he shows bunches of people or animals, dishumanized, alienated, insane, as if they were raised as batteries. Between presence and absence, his paintings always deal with the identity of human beings in modern societies.

DAN WITZ's text

I started doing street art when I moved to New York City in the late 1970's. I've put up some kind of anonymous non-permissional outdoor work every summer since. The intention behind my projects has been varied -- aesthetic, socio-political, and personal -- but the motivation has always been to get out of the studio and have fun while making work that's direct and uncompromised.

My early influences were a mixture of punk rebellion, culture jamming and the scary urban blight of New York in the early eighties. As a painter, technically, I've always been fascinated by old master techniques of simulating reality. And lately, I've become very interested in the possibilities of digital imaging and visual sampling techniques.

In New York City, with the rise in real estate prices and the consequent lowering of tolerance for street art, my installation strategies have had to evolve. I used to spend hours on one piece, standing there painting with tiny brushes. But starting in the 1990's, with the police cracking down and graffiti becoming a felony, I had to work in less trafficked areas or get on and off location faster. So I started using stickers I made at home, integrating them into the wall with an airbrush. These days, the time I spend on site could be less than 60 seconds. I work from my motorcycle, out of a portable studio in the saddlebags. Before anyone can figure out what's happened, I'm usually already gone.

DAN WITZ'interview

Can you please introduce yourself biefly?
I'm a painter. I've always lived and worked in New York City. In the 80's I was also a musician and involved in the downtown art-punk scene. I live in Brooklyn now and split my activities between making gallery paintings and street art.

What made you take your art to the streets?
Youthful rebellion. Frustration with how art had been ghetto-ized into an exclusive"art world". Also I really hate being cooped up inside in a studio, I like to be outside.

You also exhibit your canvas in galleries. Is there much of a connection between these two worlds?
Honestly, I'm not sure. I do know that artists these days are often perceived as a "brand", which I guess means I am as well, and I am aware of some kind of crossover Dan Witz brand name recognition, but I'm not sure how reliable a connection it is. I don't socialize much. Exhibiting street art in galleries is always a bit of an uncomfortable fit for me. The work feels tamed, housebroken, or like its striving for the approval it always (falsely, hypocritically) denied it wanted. I do it though. Cheerfully. Probably because like most artists I have a terror of isolation: it's a pervasive cliche many artists suffer from-being abandoned to die alone forgotten and earless in some unfashionable garret.

What was the inspiration or idea behind the WTC shrines?
At the time I was thinking a lot about art objects' possible usefulness in the real world. For me paintings often have functioned as secular shrines--as visual catalysts or instigators to reverie. The week before September 11th I was actually up in the Bronx at a housing project photographing the shrine neighbors left at the doorstep of a murdered 9 year old girl (balloons, flowers, stuffed animals, photographs). I wasn't sure what I wanted to do exactly, it was just my way of jamming on a possible idea--sketching. Then the planes hit and the city parks filled with thousands of spontaneously conceived votive offerings. Again, I went to photograph them, not knowing what I actually wanted, just to feel them. I use a large format camera, the old style with the hood and long bellows. Every time I put the hood on and focussed the ground glass, I got an eerie unmistakeable inkling about all those candles--about all those extinguished souls. So I started painting light. And still am actually.

Who or what are the important sources of inspiration for your work?
Mostly musicians actually. Iconoclasts. Bob Dylan. The Clash. Brian Eno. I finally saw the documentary on Andy Goldsworthy, "Rivers and Tides," which really made me want to get to work. Gordon Matta-Clark was important to me when I was just getting started. Now, here in New York, there's a sub-culture of Wooster Collective street artists, Faile, Swoon, The Flowerguy, Skewville, Darius and Downey, that are intensely original and keep me thinking ahead.

Are you working on any new projects at the moment?
Yes. A few. Right now I'm putting up a new anti-war character, "The Man of Sorrows", a tiny ghost figure haunting street signs, a trickster/martyr to our guilty consciences. It's a collaboration between myself and the Butoh Performer Ian Caskey.

A lot of your art seems to be fun or have a sense of humor.
As I've said, a lot of my early education came from the rebellion in rock and roll. For me, nothing fails more miserably than rock and roll, or street art, when it takes itself too seriously.