Leo Fitzmaurice: temporary art interventions

4 Apr 2007 Category: Events & Exhibitions, Features, Worldwide

Leo Fitzmaurice: temporary art interventions

Leo Fitzmaurice's "Craterform" made out of the well-known UK shopping catalogue of Argos, which sells just about everything - but the best thing in the store, this massive catalog, is free! Leo thought about all the Argos employees who worked for months to produce this glossy selling tool, and foiled their intentions with "Craterform". He explains: "Something like the Argos catalogue with 2 000 colour pages of complex design is a dark star."

From 2005 to 2006, artist Leo Fitzmaurice became a Detourist: while traveling to Berlin, London, Shanghai, Stavanger, Zurich and back to his own city Liverpool, he made around half-a-dozen temporary artworks by rearranging found materials such as catalogues, flyers, or cardboards in their own environment creating some unexpected new meanings. By placing those rearranged objects in public spaces, and sidewalks he made art in the form of small, temporary interventions. PingMag wanted to find out more about Leo’s theory behind his objets trouvés and met him at Berlin’s General Public gallery…

Written by Leslie Kuo

After an exhibition at London’s Mot International, now galleries in each of the remaining five cities (General Public, The Royal Standard, Island 6, Rogaland Kunstsenter, K3) are presenting all that’s left of Leo’s ephemeral project that initially happened out on the streets: a stack of free posters documenting the interventions. It’s a full-circle gesture for Leo, who works mainly with designed and printed advertising and packaging, recontextualizing the material with a wide range of techniques.

Leo’s early experiments with printed material were inspired by leftover flyers: expensive in design time and printing costs - but completely worthless after the event. What can they communicate besides the original text - and their image-message? In “Boxed Grouping with Blue White and Green Bands” (left) Leo reduced these flyers to a series of spines, creating a spectrum. In the “Flyer work” series of floor arrangements he transforms the original message - though still partly visible - to large-scale color patterns.

In order to condense and reduce how the pieces really work, Leo keeps experimenting further - with each technique and each material. “Blue (Wedge Form)” tries to sum up what is so interesting about the flyer techniques: the arrangement blocks any hope of making out any text or images of the flyers completely, but points out other aspects of their color and form.

The How-To

In Leo’s studio- and gallery works “design-bending” can be as simple as setting a tight stacked ream of folded 4/4 brochures on its side on the floor, so that the top face of the stack curves gently towards the ground.

Other works look more complex and representational: rows of commercial packaging, with each printed word carefully cut away, becoming villages of oddly Modernist cardboard houses: boxy, with peculiarly arranged rectangular windows. Again the original designer’s message is blocked so that new images and forms can emerge.

Next, Leo collected printed packages and cut out every single piece of text. One might think that packaging design is distinctive enough to remain recognizable from color and shape alone… Leo found that when the text is replaced with open rectangles new meanings can emerge: buildings, windows, doors, and structures. Leo names these pieces very simply based on their color patterns: “White on Green (Structures).”

With Detourist, Leo’s collaboration with curator Marie-Anne Quay took this investigation of common visual materials into common space combining printed materials and packaging found on site with other common urban media.

Leo, when and how did you first start working with pre-designed printed materials?

I gradually slipped into it. I was trained as a painter but was always refiguring objects on the side… and I found myself exploring a certain period of sculpture: the early work of Tony Cragg, Bill Woodrow and Wentworth. It is only in the last, say, eight years that I have focussed on predesigned printed material and probably on the last five when I started to realize its potential.

The “Cylinder” series: catalogs are also a favorite material of Leo. To him, a multi-page document multiples the enigma of a flyer’s invested time and energy, since every page had to be designed, developed, printed and distributed! Here he blocks the viewer from reading anything but the colorful patterns on the edges indexing hints for inaccessible information.

How do you feel about the actual design of your materials used - positive, negative, or non-judgmental?

Most of the material I stated working with was truly irritating. But it is funny, once you start to work with this material you realize and admire its qualities both as a physical object and the level of design. Something like the Argos catalogue [look at the title image above] with 2 000 colored pages of complex design is a dark star to me.

Installation detail: in the “Floorwork” installations of the “Structures” series, Leo builds micro-cities out of his interrupted packaging.

So if you make a judgement on what material to use, what flyers or magazines to pick to transform - on what criteria is it based?

I make a judgement on it’s availability primarily. It is the material that is around us most and most in our faces. I try not to search for stuff. I feel that the material chooses me.

The material I deal with is often short lived, loaded with a multiplicity of trivial meanings that have to be made important using various design strategies. My tactic is to disable these strategies and use the material for my own purposes. The energy of this advertising material [is like] a huge meteorite heading towards a planet. It is targeted towards one aim, but only a small amount of force is necessary to send it into a different orbit, keeping the energy of the material but redirecting it in some way.

For “Detourist”, Leo rearranged found materials in their own environment. In Shanghai (left), he installed old french-fries cartons like surveillance cameras, visualizing McDonald’s “you can’t escape us” aspect. Also, he returned one of his studio techniques (creating hypnotic patterns with flyers) to the use as a window shield (right).

Have you thought about what the original designer of those materials you use would think about your remix? Or the client? It could basically be anything from a critique to a compliment, or just seen as confusing…

I guess the designer would probably quite like it. There does not seems to be much freedom in some of these designs despite their levels of sophistication.

“Detourist” in Berlin: These easy-to-miss interventions in Berlin reward the person who takes time to look twice. A shopping bag from discounter Lidl gets re-designed and placed in front of a garbage container. On the right a very unusual pizza box…

However, I am sure the client would not like it – they may feel it mocked them. But having said this - powerful companies like Tesco in England buy works that mess with their brand. I guess it is about power and the cultural clout. Tesco was an iconic brand when I was a kid… Tesco was Lidl then. I remember there was this punk rocker who had the Tesco logo painted on the back of his leather jacket. I was so jealous…

A Liverpool “Detourist” intervention nicknamed “rabbits”: it’s quite nice to imagine Leo scrambling around in a flurry of inspiration, finding a comfy seat on these steps for each of the plastic garbage bunny bags…

“Detourist” obviously was a way for Leo to work in a much more spontaneous way: simply by wandering, looking, and finding, he used materials and sites he might not have otherwise approached. In Zurich (left), he brought bottlecaps and sidewalk cracks together. In some cases, he adapted his existing techniques to incorporate on-site structures, as in Liverpool (right).

You’ve said you are interested in public spaces and that they are “disappearing”. Do you mean it as physically disappearing or rather being overwhelmed by visual, commercial intrusions?

In England many public spaces are disappearing to developers – as parks and football fields being sold – but this isn’t really what I mean. I guess that as we spend more time in front of a screen or with our heads in magazines and listening to MP3 players, we spend less time when and where we actually are.

I realized after reading Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life that one thing I am doing (and we all do in some way) is to consume public space and by consuming it in some way we make it our own thus privatizing it to some extent. But instead we spend our time consuming other stuff…

“Detourist” in Liverpool: it looks almost like it was originally designed that way. But why would someone have posted a poster with no words? With a marker, Leo has hand-colored almost the whole poster black, except for these bubbles, blocking any comprehension of the design underneath…

To describe this positive thing you do, and hope others will do, with public space, you’ve used verbs that are often used critically to describe corporations and consumer culture, e.g. privatize, or consume. Is this conscious – are you trying to reclaim the words or reclaim the activities?

I think I am more interested in reclaiming the activities in some way – it is more fun.

More subtleties! “Arrangement in Bin (Spectrum)” was an outdoor experiment preceding “Detourist”. Actually it is just a bunch of tightly folded crisp packets stuck into a crack in this trash bin!

What do you want to do with public space through your work? How do you wish for your interventions to affect passers-by?

I would like people to become more aware of the potential around them and encourage ways we can consume material and space that is not prescribed.

I want to make something my own in some way but also for this to become a dialogue with other people. I would like people to think of A to B as a destination. The side of the road or a car park is a public space. I like to feel my feet on surfaces – I like to stop where people are normally going. I want to create space for myself - and others.

Thank you Leo Fitzmaurice for your fine as well as ironic “Detourist” remixing works!

23 Comments

  1. brilliant as always pingmag

    truly inspiring

    Posted by: George Ananda on April 4th, 2007 at 8:01 pm

  2. nice stuff!!

    Posted by: Mannikko on April 4th, 2007 at 9:24 pm

  3. Pretty!

    Goede Webwinkels

    Posted by: Goede Webwinkels on April 4th, 2007 at 10:26 pm

  4. Very Nice indeed!

    Freelance Ontwerper

    Posted by: Freelance Ontwerper on April 4th, 2007 at 10:28 pm

  5. great =) thanx =)

    Posted by: Julia Lyao on April 4th, 2007 at 10:30 pm

  6. Neat stuff!

    Posted by: hans-peter on April 5th, 2007 at 8:07 am

  7. Very observant, love it.

    Posted by: Alexander on April 5th, 2007 at 8:23 am

  8. [...] PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things” » Archive » Leo Fitzmauric… “he made around half-a-dozen temporary artworks by rearranging found materials such as catalogues, flyers, or cardboards in their own environment creating some unexpected new meanings.” (tags: art artists) [...]

    Posted by: mobmash blog » Blog Archive » links for 2007-04-05 on April 5th, 2007 at 9:29 am

  9. The urban Andy Goldworthy…

    Posted by: archinaut on April 5th, 2007 at 1:59 pm

  10. GoldSworthy, I mean

    Posted by: archinaut on April 5th, 2007 at 1:59 pm

  11. So Cool!

    Posted by: Men o dee on April 5th, 2007 at 5:17 pm

  12. [...] pingmag [...]

    Posted by: temporary art interventions at myninjaplease on April 5th, 2007 at 11:20 pm

  13. Nice. His early material reminds me of mexican artwork, carpets, and blankets ;) Keep up the good work pingmag!

    Posted by: Josefo on April 6th, 2007 at 1:56 am

  14. i love stuff like this. it is great to play with perception by reordering everyday things and breaking the code of meaning the objects carry. good work!

    Posted by: howsthatsound on April 6th, 2007 at 2:11 am

  15. Congratulations pingmag on your consistently awesome articles! I’m glad I’ve subscribed and check up on you often! not always interested in the articles but the ones on street artists have always been thought provoking. I love the way Fitzmaurice plays with the urban environment and items of everyday life. I wonder about the term “detourist” is it based on “detournement” but switched around with the word “tourist”?

    Posted by: natalie on April 6th, 2007 at 9:27 am

  16. [...] Leslie Kuo posted an interview with artist Leo Fitzmaurice that is really interesting. They get into a revealing discussion on the [...]

    Posted by: Autoterrorist » Leo Fitzmaurice on public space on April 6th, 2007 at 10:03 am

  17. [...] By Yaz @ 02:50 [ be ] A way to recycle, the temporary art interventions of Leo Fitzmaurice, via PingMag: [...]

    Posted by: neo-nomad - detourist on April 6th, 2007 at 10:07 am

  18. [...] Bilder und ein spannendes Interview via PingMag: “”I guess that as we spend more time in front of a screen or with our heads in [...]

    Posted by: rebel:art » Blog Archive » Leo Fitzmaurice: Remix & Recycling on April 11th, 2007 at 4:07 pm

  19. Neat, but can u still call it temporary when you capture it on film?

    Posted by: tk on May 5th, 2007 at 8:13 am

  20. Beautiful Design, recommended

    Posted by: Airgle on November 19th, 2007 at 9:12 am

  21. Being in the catalog business, I find this very, very cool. Also reminds me of Mexican art.

    Posted by: Air Purifiers on July 16th, 2008 at 2:14 am

  22. [...] *** Imagem daqui. [...]

    Posted by: OESQUEMA/Conector » Arquivo » Segundo prognóstico de 2009: oesquema on January 9th, 2009 at 7:03 pm

  23. [...] art from PingMag By Victor Bernhardtz PingMag, a sleeping Tokyo-based magazine about design, posted a long and very interesting piece about the art of Leo Fitzmaurice in April 2007. I was enlightened by a friend only this weekend, [...]

    Posted by: Reposting trashy art from PingMag « everydaytrash on August 3rd, 2009 at 12:47 pm

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