An expert from an interview with Artist Thomas Dambo and Currents Contributing Writer Denise Stoughton

DENISE:

“Everything you’re doing speaks to my heart. At your artist talk held at the Bainbridge Museum of Art, you signed your book [Trail of a Thousand Trolls] for me.”

DAMBO

“I remember that. I saw you there.”

DENISE

“What struck me is your signature, it’s a graffiti tag. I grew up in New York during the graffiti, hip-hop, skateboarding subculture when it was thriving. I want to ask about your use of storytelling modalities: graffiti, rap, folklore, art, poetry and iconography. Has the use of these visual storytelling modalities been conscious on your part as you’ve phase through these various genres?”

DAMBO

“Like, I think when I was a rapper, I was just a rapper and a didn’t really think too much about rap as poetry, you know? I thought of it more like, yo rap is rap! Then I wrote a poem for one of my sculptures. I wrote 16 bars like I would write a rap song and that was pretty easy. I had always been writing in Danish, I wrote the poem in English and people thought it was really nice and started tearing up and I thought, they never did that with any of my rap songs! So, I thought it made good sense to use poetry. Having made nine albums, I wrote a lot of songs and liked the puzzle of figuring out how to say something in the best way by moving words around or making it rhyme.”

DENISE:

“Yeah, words have a different impact depending on their order and usage.”

DAMBO:

“I really like words and the puzzle of figuring them out, you know? And it’s something you can entertain yourself with, like when I can’t sleep.”

DENISE:

“Yeah, it’s a good way to get thoughts out. But also, you know, graffiti art is a way to tell stories. Usually, this kind of art happens in urban areas where people have a lot on their minds. When you were doing graffiti and street art, what was your frame of mind?”

DAMBO:

“I was never like the best graffiti painter because I’ve never been super good at drawing. My hands are not too steady and I’m also really impatient. I was trying always to innovate how you can paint it, you know and then think like always trying to break the box of what it could be, you know. Instead of just filling in the letters and filling in the background like so I will always do stuff like that and I understood from an early point on that that that was one of the unique things about my mind was that I was able to break the little borders that many other people maybe think that you can’t step outside of them. So that was kind of like my approach to graffiti was to try and not be the best by having the most perfect handwriting or the most perfect characters, but more like, how could I create attention about what I did from original ideas.”

DENISE:

“And what were some of the ideas that you put up?”

DAMBO:

“For example, I remember at a festival where like I made (improvised) markers and painted with mud. All the graffiti writers are at this big festival. There’s like 120,000 people at the festival, so maybe 500 graffiti writers who would illegally paint on all the bars and stuff like that, just to communicate with the other graffiti writers. And that was an issue because the festival would cut your bracelet off and kick you out for graffiti writing if you got caught. But it’s so fun to run around and be drunk and meet the other graffiti writers and then go listen to the hip hop concert. I bought masking tape and just used the masking tape to write my tag. So that enabled me to stand in the middle of the day and do my tag because nobody would see the masking tape as being graffiti.”

DENISE:

“Right!”

DAMBO:

“And so then all the graffiti writers were like f*** that’s so smart and people would instantly started copying, you know. I was like, I can come up with these ideas, other people copy my ideas and I can actually design my way around it. The next year I’m like, why do I need to buy masking tape? I’m just going to use mud. I then just took the mud and then I put the mud in a plastic bottle and cut the bottom off and then I put a sock inside it and it I made like a huuuuge marker, then I could write with mud on these big black walls, you know? (laughing) And then that year my tag was super famous because people were like, there’s the dude who is like f***ing tagging the whole festival with mud, you know.”

DENISE:

“And you can’t get in trouble for that!”

DAMBO:

“You can’t get in trouble for it because you take it right off the ground and probably a little bit of pee in it too because that in Denmark people pee all over the place, you know? So those were some of the things that I would do and then that would like gradually then start to move more and more into street art because I thought street art was nice. I could just see there’s this new thing coming – street art, artists like The London Police and Space Invader using tiles and this guy called Arrow who was cutting arrows out of wood, painting them and throwing them up in the electrical cords so they would hang up there and of course that’s like the banshee and the Shepard Fairey, all these people were doing all these different things. And I was like, oh, it’s like this art form is so new so people are not like it’s not like you’re the best at painting this type of this style of rococo on a canvas it’s like everything is a style I guess all these styles are getting born, you know. And I was like which style should I have? Like what should I do? And then that’s when I then started to be like I can build things in wood. I like to dumpster diving and recycle. There’s nobody who does street art sculptures and that’s an obvious thing that somebody would be able to do and get a lot of success with. And then that’s when I started to experiment with that. And then that’s when I did like start doing thousands of bird houses because I was like, I can do birdhouses. No one is going to be mad at me for putting a birdhouse up on their house, right? Nobody will call the police, only except that one guy, except for one guy. Yeah, there’s always that. There’s always that one guy, but so, so that worked really good. And then. Yeah. And then the bird houses then have, like, morphed into become discovered.”

DENISE:

“Yeah, and this might just be a random thought. Usually, mine are. But I was thinking about the childlike quality of the trolls, their language and their alphabet as well as the bird houses, they’re very simplistic. And being a New Yorker during a certain time, I thought about Keith Haring and his radiant babies, dancing people and little dogs – there was a childlike exuberance and quality to them that drew you in in a certain way. Haring was also a social activist with a message. Have you ever thought about those types of comparisons or been inspired by other street artists?”

DAMBO:

“Yeah, I know about Keith and know about his work but I’m not an art expert and I never really liked to go to museums as a child but I always liked sculptures you could climb on and stuff like that. I don’t know much about art history.”

DENISE:

“Keith used to go into the subways, just tagging things in the subway, you know, on blank billboards that didn’t have a poster on them yet. New Yorkers really responded to that, in the same way people responded to your stuff.”

DAMBO:

“And that’s kind of like the thing about graffiti is that graffiti communicates in a specific language to a specific audience. So graffiti is not really for everybody, right. It’s more for the other graffiti writers because most people can’t read what the tag says, you know? So I think that’s really what the difference is that graffiti communicates to other graffiti writers where street art tries to communicate to everybody.”

DENISE:

“Like a secret language – you have to be in it, to know the context.”

DAMBO:

“Yeah, and I think that’s what it is for Keith Haring. He’s communicating to everybody; he’s not just communicating in his tag to other graffiti writers. Most street artists are like that and I think that’s also the simple language of my art is something everybody can understand. It’s not like some pokey little finger with a cocktail glass in a really expensive white gallery. You know, like it’s for everybody and it’s out in the world where everybody can go and visit it for free and everybody can go and understand it.”

DENISE:

“So, I have two more questions and they’re both painless. I feel like there’s also a sense of, I don’t know if performance is the right word in this troll creating. Is it as important as the work itself?”

DAMBO:

“Like the performance would probably be what you mean with all the volunteers like Tom who is helping with the seashells and the necklace and all of that.”

DENISE:

“Yeah, the whole act of creating in public with the public.”

DAMBO:

“Like, in many ways I’m like curating what we’re building, right? Like, OK, Tom, you can have the responsibility of this. He seems like he would be able to do that and he has that energy that flows in that direction and let’s give it to him and let him run with it. So, then I go over and I find the necklace centerpiece and I lay a couple of things out and drill one hole and then he [Tom] kind of like gets what it is and then he gets to do it, you know. So that’s the way I’ve been able to make all these big projects. Yeah, because there’s a lot of people, you know. And now it’s come to a point where I have three teams that can build trolls and then I conduct my teams and then they conduct the volunteers and that’s how we make that many. And that’s also the graffiti mentality that you have to make many and you have to be up in all the different cities and all the countries and all of that, you know. So that’s and that’s why I’m pounding, this is number 121, right, and I’m gonna make one in each state of the United States before 2027!”

DENISE:

“It’s like you carried that rapper mentality with you throughout this process.”

DAMBO:

“Totally, totally that. And it’s also the rapper mentality of like a rapper will, I read a book about it, he said like an opera singer will never mention their name. A rapper will say he’s the best rapper 10 times within the first five seconds of a song.”

DENISE:

“Yeah, a lot of bravado.”

DAMBO:

“Yeah, and a lot of marketing on yourself. So I think that that’s what rap taught me not to hide in my basement with my art, but to really get it out there. So that’s benefited me super, super much, you know. I think I would never have had this success without it. I think it’s really powerful to first have a career as a rapper or as anything else and then be able to learn everything, all the pitfalls from there and then bring that into another career.”

DENISE:

“Yeah, so true. I like that analogy, I get that. Being in New York City in the 80’s, there was a lot of self-promotion. You know, artists, rappers, skateboarders, hip-hop artists, DJ’s, everybody – it was blatant but not offensive. It was aspirational, everybody did it.”

DAMBO:

“Yeah, Yeah. I love those days.”

DENISE:

“I know, me too. Just be bold, get up there, do your thing, don’t worry about anything else.”

DAMBO:

“Yeah, that’s so nice. Actually, one of my guys, Julian grew up in New York with that crew from the Kid’s movies. He was skateboarding with some of those guys, Julian Dylan Lynch.”

DENISE:

“Those were the days.”

DAMBO:

“We watched all those movies back in Denmark and everyone was like that’s pretty cool, like, yeah and we didn’t even know that the f***ing movie was about HIV and stuff like that. Those are just cool kids, a cool scene.”

DENISE:

“Yeah, I relate. Get it done or go home.”

DAMBO:

“Yeah, you got to build your brand and my brand is the world’s leading recycle artist, that’s what I’ve given myself. You have to believe in it and you have to do it and I think the world needs a leading recycle artist.”

DENISE:

“I think you’re there! And I think the world does need a recycle artist. Clearly, we do.”

DAMBO:

“I’d love to be that picture for the kids to look up to that that can be cool, yeah, because I think it’s an important thing to make cool.”