Kurt Mueller is a second-year MFA student at UT. We met a few times this spring to talk about his work, and conducted the following interview in May.

Amanda Douberley: When I first visited your studio, we looked at a few projects whose proper place was the city rather than the gallery. The “work” was not so much an object you had created for display, as an insertion of something into the urban environment that people might notice and engage.

Kurt Mueller: My desire to intervene stemmed from a rejection of the gallery space. I was interested in triggering aesthetic experiences that were not already pre-coded by their site. I guess you could say I wanted the picture without the frame, though I eventually ran into a problem with how to re-present this work. What I think the gallery does is to focus or cluster those aesthetic events that continuously occur around you; it makes them more certain, clearer, and perhaps more meaningful. The stereogram tag makes this relationship between inside and out more concrete. The gallery version hopefully functions as a trigger, a suggestion, which is reinforced as you encounter it outside. Conversely, the gallery version imbues the outside tags with the authority and endurance of “Art”, but importantly without removing them from their active (transitory) play in the everyday world.

AD: So with the stereogram you strike a balance between the gallery and the street. This is possible because the thing you create is a sign, which is appropriated through reading rather than touch. Your tag will be read differently inside and out of the gallery, but the mode of interaction remains essentially the same. Typically, the movement of everyday objects into the gallery functions in a fundamentally different way because a urinal in the gallery, to use one famous example, loses its use value and takes on the values of art. It becomes sculpture. I’m curious about why you chose to make a stereogram, since they’re generally seen as a diversion or game. Is this play element important to you?

KM: There is a bit of humor there, in the novelty of the stereogram, but I like its potential for subversion. Hopefully, the game is seductive enough so I can have your attention. The message, “Remember Yourself”, is a mantra, a teaching of G.I. Gurdjieff, as explained in P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous. Later in the book, Ouspensky, a pupil of Gurdjieff, describes his own theory of memory. Our strongest recollections, he explains, are formed when we become aware of ourselves within a particular moment of experience. Instead of just watching a movie, let’s say, and remembering what happened, we sense, watch even, ourselves watching the movie. It is self-reflexive, a doubling effect. The result is a remembering of the self. I can’t remember, but the stereogram format may have come after the message. I was interested in a double-focused manner of looking; not only looking at something, but also being very aware that you were engaged in this act, this looking, which is precisely what a stereogram does. The suggestion to “Remember Yourself” hopefully ensures this doubling, or now, tripling.

AD: The message is also an inversion of most tags, which seem to say “remember me.” The fact that your message is coded, however, lines up almost perfectly with other tagging conventions, since they are written in a script that is barely comprehensible to the uninitiated. Still, I wonder why you’ve chosen graffiti as the mode of dissemination for your work. You could just as easily use a paste-up poster rather than paint, and get a permit for postering. The biggest change would be in the legal status of your action, from illicit to permissible behavior.

KM: I am not sure if the legality matters or not; permission would not necessarily change the way the work is read. However, making it into a poster would. It would read as an advertisement, and therefore appear more self-conscious and less trustworthy. You would probably say that I am appropriating the authenticity of the graffiti tag, the sincerity of its expressionistic impulse. Yes, that honesty is something I am interested in, and I think it comes through the commitment of attaching the work directly to a surface. That is another big difference: the poster is added on to a space, whereas the graffiti mark becomes part of it. The insertion is deeper, and the messaging arguably more effective.

AD: Legality does matter here because part of the honesty you’re after is tied to a notion of graffiti as a subaltern practice relative to the authorities, or whatever you want to call “them.” A tag is an unauthorized use of private property that can turn any surface into a public platform for expression or speech. Have you considered the political implications of graffiti in relation to this project?

KM: I think of this piece as a humble gesture, unlikely to be noticed and even less likely read. I do not imagine it screaming (“I’m here”, like a tag) nor preaching (“Do this”, like an advertisement). Likewise, the political implications seem limited. It is not critical of a government or “the system” but rather a general state of human affairs. And, yes, I am appealing to a trust built into the history of the medium. Traditionally, a graf- fiti tag cannot be purchased nor condoned and likewise represents a high degree of autonomy; it does not exert nor regard any authority except that of the individual. So the politics of freedom are there, and perhaps necessary, as they tie into the responsible independence espoused by the appropriated Gurdjieff message.