Artcrime
Growing up in Buffalo, Ian De Beer liked to go where he was not supposed to be. He sneaked up to the forbidden fourth floor of his high school, where the janitors would hang out. He smoked cigarettes on the roof of the city’s abandoned hockey arena. He pitched a tent on the roof of a building when he was sixteen and lived there for three months. There was something thrilling about exploring buildings that were off-limits; places where no one else could go. Shortly thereafter, De Beer began writing graffiti with an older friend who wrote ATAK. De Beer wrote HERT.
The two artists began painting together constantly. ATAK acted as an early mentor to De Beer, at one point telling him that he should “take a break” from his partying friends who ATAK saw as a negative influence. That sort of advice had not come often for De Beer, and he took it. “Painting with ATAK made me a very dedicated and passionate person,” he told me.
Half of the city of Buffalo is being given back to nature after a half century of neglect. The population of the east side has crashed so significantly that it is not unusual to see a house sitting alone facing the street before an acre of grass. Nearby, century-old factories with collapsed roofs sit silent, their floors full of blown-in snow. Dilapidated wood frame houses are tagged with brightly colored Xs and street numbers and messages reading “gas shut-off.” Broad vacant avenues to nowhere connect Downtown Buffalo to its underserved neighborhoods to the east. You can drive for blocks on Gennesee Street without seeing a store that hasn’t been boarded up.
Working within that vast canvas, HERT and ATAK became artists. Their names started appearing everywhere together, often sprayed in the same colors like superheroes in matching clothing. They painted everything from big block letters on the industrial water towers atop abandoned factories to wildly colorful, angular murals on old train tunnels. Their work could surround the top storey of the city’s concrete grain elevators, or it could be as tiny as a tag on the rim of a city garbage can, scribbled with a whiteout pen. Many of these tags remain, nearly a decade later.
Buffalo is a great town; at least it was for me as a white kid living in the part of town that the local Newspaper covered. The people are the kind underdog sort and there’s a pretty good punk scene and there’s some legit Burmese food thanks to the city’s refugee resettlement program. Cool summers too, thanks to the breeze off Lake Erie. And the winters are very cool. Cold even.
But, like anywhere, you still grow up praying for the day when you get to leave.
De Beer left Buffalo when he turned nineteen. He moved to Pittsburgh to be near friends in the graffiti scene. ATAK moved east to the coast. De Beer and his girlfriend found an apartment they loved, and De Beer began writing compulsively around the city of Pittsburgh. “For about an eight month period,” De Beer wrote, “I was painting graffiti in excess…perhaps to the point where I was painting the most out of anyone in the city.”
At the time, Pittsburgh was the worst place in the country to start writing graffiti. In late 2006, the Pittsburgh Police formed a Graffiti Task Force. Created in response to a graffiti crisis in the city that was costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage annually, the graffiti task force was staffed with three full-time detectives.
They made quick work of arresting Daniel Montano, their most-wanted graffiti writer. Montano wrote MF ONE, and he was sentenced to two-and-a-half to five years in prison for his graffiti. It is the harshest punishment for graffiti in the United States.
Montano’s story was especially sad, because he was one of those graffiti artists that even the cops called a “real artist.” He turned himself in just days before the opening of his first commissioned installation at the Mattress Factory, a prominent contemporary art museum in Pittsburgh.
Montano served one year before being released. He went on to violate his parole by stealing a polo shirt from a discount clothing store. Eventually, Montano served five years in prison. He overdosed in 2017. The local paper wrote a glowing obituary.
De Beer was the squad’s second target. In 2008, detectives came to De Beer’s Mount Washington apartment with a search warrant. They found 500 cans of spray paint, 300 pictures of De Beer posing with his work, his personal sketchbooks, and videos of De Beer writing his tag.
“They had to roll in three police vehicles,” De Beer said, smiling “to pull away all the paint. I’m on the porch in handcuffs, my girlfriend is in tears, and my paint is all over the lawn.” Once they had everything loaded up in their cars, they let him go.
De Beer pled guilty in June of 2010 to one felony and seventy-two misdemeanor counts of criminal mischief, as well as a misdemeanor charge for “Possessing an Instrument of a Crime.” That last charge, usually refers to guns but in this case referred to paint. De Beer was sentenced in September 2010 to one to three years in prison and five years probation, to be served consecutively.
De Beer was twenty-three when he was sentenced to Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh. He spent most of his time reading. At first he read the bestsellers that were easy to find, but didn’t know where to go from there. He started asking friends on the outside to send him their three favorite books. He liked reading the heavy stuff—Ray Carver, Steinbeck—“To see what they’re up against,” he said. Steinbeck was great, but De Beer said he never wanted to read The Grapes of Wrath again. “How could you read that,” he asked me, “and still love your country, or humanity?”
After ten-and-a-half months in prison, De Beer was paroled to a halfway house in Erie, Pennsylvania. He worked as a hotel doorman. He described the halfway house in an essay for the magazine Mass Appeal as “a jail you’re allowed to leave, to go to work.” Inmates sleep on metal beds and attend compulsory substance abuse meetings, regardless of whether they have struggled with addiction. De Beer spent four months in Erie before he was released to live with his mother in North Buffalo in the fall of 2011.
De Beer was assigned a parole officer named Paul Murphy, nwho has since retired. Parole allows inmates to complete their sentences outside of the prison system. As such, a variety of restrictions are placed on parolees to keep them out of jail. Some of the restrictions on De Beer were typical—he had to live with a blood relative and follow a 9pm curfew, he couldn’t leave the county, and he was periodically urine tested for drugs.
But Murphy added a restriction of his own. De Beer was prohibited from possessing markers, paint, or any other art-making materials for the duration of his parole.
According to a spokesperson for the New York State Parole Board who asked that her name be withheld because she was not authorized to comment on De Beer’s case, it is common for a parole officer to add and or remove special provisions during the course of a participant’s parole “depending on how a parole officer feels.” Parole officers are able to “make up their own provisions,” she said, “without oversight from a judge or prosecutor.” This gives the parole officer power to inflict additional restrictions on a parolee outside of the judicial system. In this case, De Beer served twelve months in jail before being stripped of his artistic freedom. He will be on parole until he pays $57,000 in restitution to the state of Pennsylvania.
For the year that De Beer was out on parole, he was getting his life back together. He was enrolled as an undergraduate at Buffalo State College, and he was working full time at a hotel.
But during a surprise visit in February 2013, over a year after De Beer left the halfway house, his parole officer caught him working on a painting in the basement of his mother’s house. De Beer was sent to county jail for three months for violating a law that applied only to him. He was let go from his job at the hotel and was forced to withdraw from his classes. That withdrawal will prevent him from applying for financial aid in the future, taking college off the table.
Just months after he was released from prison for the second time, still barred from possessing art supplies, De Beer was planning his most ambitious art project. What he needed was a venue, and he found one through Mark Goldman.
Goldman is a successful restaurateur and author of the book City on the Edge, about Buffalo's century of decline and dysfunction.
“He came to me and asked if I wanted to hire him to paint,” Goldman said. “I thought, ‘great!’” Goldman didn’t know who he was. “Frankly” he said, “I didn’t care.”
Goldman and De Beer met in person to discuss the deal. After they agreed on some sketches, Goldman arranged for De Beer to paint a mural inspired by the Buffalo-born comic artist Spain Rodriguez. The venue was the concrete wall of Holly Farms, a bodega on an adjacent corner from the restaurant. This would be De Beer’s first commissioned, legal work.
So he had a legal venue for the first time, and one of the largest canvases he had ever painted. In addition, this wasn’t a loading dock behind the Rite Aid—this was prime real estate, the main drag, in the middle of the city’s most popular bar and restaurant district.
And there was really only one hurdle now, which is that De Beer couldn’t paint it.
He couldn’t even handle the materials. So, to get around that, he hired a small army of artists—most of them graffiti writers—to paint his work for him.
“I assembled a team of artists,” De Beer said, “each with a valuable skill-set. I developed an operation in which we could work together to execute the mural.” Among those writers was ATAK, who traveled to Buffalo to help, as well as a local tagger who went by BCUZ, who had recently been sentenced to a thousand hours of community service for his graffiti. That’s six months, forty hours a week.
So, on one night in September of 2014, De Beer set up a digital projector to beam an image of his drawing at the wall of the bodega. The artists, dressed in white jumpsuits, their faces masked by respirators, sprayed the lines and shades of De Beer’s first legal piece of public art. De Beer sat off to the side observing and occasionally stepping in to give direction. “My presence wasn’t very necessary,” he said.
The Spain Rodriguez piece is based on a drunken brawl that occurred decades ago outside the bar across the street. It’s an unusual, engaging mural, and it seems to pop in a way reminiscent of De Beer’s work as HERT. It’s black on white with blips of yellows and reds to accentuate the action. There are motorcycles and women, and shapes and text shooting through from left to right. It’s really a chaotic scene. In the upper left is Rodriguez’ own tongue-in-cheek restriction to viewers: “For Adult Intellectuals Only.”
The mural reflects the neighborhood of Allentown. It is home to an assortment of folks—bikers, yuppies, hippies, hipsters—all of whom can be found at the Old Pink at last call. It’s the kind of dive bar frat boys read about in magazines.
When the mural was covered in The Buffalo News it was an absolute free-for-all of pro- and anti-graffiti rhetoric. This was the first time De Beer’s name had appeared in the paper since news of his arrest three years earlier. There seemed to be two polarized viewpoints; the “who let him out of jail” folks and the “if you don’t like it, move to the suburbs” folks. Many other commenters were in a gray area—they supported legal street art, but questioned painting in an historic district. Others questioned the logic of rewarding a convicted graffiti felon with a high-traffic blank wall.
This is emblematic of the tricky response graffiti has elicited from the public ever since it first started showing up in subway cars in the late 1960s. No one wants to be on the wrong side of art history, but no one wants a misspelled word the size of a Hyundai on his garage door, either.
Back in 2014 I was walking down a well-to-do street in Buffalo and found Ian De Beer writing “HERT” two stories high on the side of a building.
It was a photograph of De Beer by the artist Max Collins blown up to about the height of a streetlight, then glued to the exposed vinyl siding of a two-storey building with wheatpaste. In the photo, De Beer’s right arm is curled at a right angle, and his hand has just written “HERT” at the top corner with a black marker.
There’s no mask or bandana covering his face, and he looks like a friendly, if slightly serious kid. He’s wearing a baseball cap with a brown brim, and a very playful jacket influenced by the art of Keith Haring. This was the first time I got to see him as a real person, as opposed to a face I had come up with in my mind. The person writing graffiti was a regular guy.
The mural was Collins’ idea. He sees himself as a “kind of clean, well-to-do kid,” (his words) who uses his reputation as leverage to create huge public murals. He does promotional work for non-profit groups and art events. He has photographed the staff writers of the Buffalo News and printed them on newsprint. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be embraced by people in Buffalo,” he said, “and I thought it would be interesting to use the same kind of formula to present someone like Ian.”
For years the community hated De Beer. He would go around at night ruining property, like an untrained dog. And yet someone had made him a monument, a monument that was left unscathed in the months that came. It was hard not to see that a change had taken place in Buffalo, that there was a tolerance for what De Beer had to offer.
“I am trying my best,” De Beer said, “to produce work that does not require any of the materials I am restricted from using, and to have that work be good. It's unfortunate,” he continued, “that I can’t work with the materials that I’m skilled in using, but in another sense it pushes me to overcome this obstacle…I’ve always worked best in challenging conditions. After all, I am from Buffalo! I try to observe people who have endured hard times and adopt some of their methods of coping into my own practices. Living life” he said, “is a continuous work in progress.”
© Peter Scheck 2018
Growing up in Buffalo, Ian De Beer liked to go where he was not supposed to be. He sneaked up to the forbidden fourth floor of his high school, where the janitors would hang out. He smoked cigarettes on the roof of the city’s abandoned hockey arena. He pitched a tent on the roof of a building when he was sixteen and lived there for three months. There was something thrilling about exploring buildings that were off-limits; places where no one else could go. Shortly thereafter, De Beer began writing graffiti with an older friend who wrote ATAK. De Beer wrote HERT.
The two artists began painting together constantly. ATAK acted as an early mentor to De Beer, at one point telling him that he should “take a break” from his partying friends who ATAK saw as a negative influence. That sort of advice had not come often for De Beer, and he took it. “Painting with ATAK made me a very dedicated and passionate person,” he told me.
Half of the city of Buffalo is being given back to nature after a half century of neglect. The population of the east side has crashed so significantly that it is not unusual to see a house sitting alone facing the street before an acre of grass. Nearby, century-old factories with collapsed roofs sit silent, their floors full of blown-in snow. Dilapidated wood frame houses are tagged with brightly colored Xs and street numbers and messages reading “gas shut-off.” Broad vacant avenues to nowhere connect Downtown Buffalo to its underserved neighborhoods to the east. You can drive for blocks on Gennesee Street without seeing a store that hasn’t been boarded up.
Working within that vast canvas, HERT and ATAK became artists. Their names started appearing everywhere together, often sprayed in the same colors like superheroes in matching clothing. They painted everything from big block letters on the industrial water towers atop abandoned factories to wildly colorful, angular murals on old train tunnels. Their work could surround the top storey of the city’s concrete grain elevators, or it could be as tiny as a tag on the rim of a city garbage can, scribbled with a whiteout pen. Many of these tags remain, nearly a decade later.
Buffalo is a great town; at least it was for me as a white kid living in the part of town that the local Newspaper covered. The people are the kind underdog sort and there’s a pretty good punk scene and there’s some legit Burmese food thanks to the city’s refugee resettlement program. Cool summers too, thanks to the breeze off Lake Erie. And the winters are very cool. Cold even.
But, like anywhere, you still grow up praying for the day when you get to leave.
De Beer left Buffalo when he turned nineteen. He moved to Pittsburgh to be near friends in the graffiti scene. ATAK moved east to the coast. De Beer and his girlfriend found an apartment they loved, and De Beer began writing compulsively around the city of Pittsburgh. “For about an eight month period,” De Beer wrote, “I was painting graffiti in excess…perhaps to the point where I was painting the most out of anyone in the city.”
At the time, Pittsburgh was the worst place in the country to start writing graffiti. In late 2006, the Pittsburgh Police formed a Graffiti Task Force. Created in response to a graffiti crisis in the city that was costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage annually, the graffiti task force was staffed with three full-time detectives.
They made quick work of arresting Daniel Montano, their most-wanted graffiti writer. Montano wrote MF ONE, and he was sentenced to two-and-a-half to five years in prison for his graffiti. It is the harshest punishment for graffiti in the United States.
Montano’s story was especially sad, because he was one of those graffiti artists that even the cops called a “real artist.” He turned himself in just days before the opening of his first commissioned installation at the Mattress Factory, a prominent contemporary art museum in Pittsburgh.
Montano served one year before being released. He went on to violate his parole by stealing a polo shirt from a discount clothing store. Eventually, Montano served five years in prison. He overdosed in 2017. The local paper wrote a glowing obituary.
De Beer was the squad’s second target. In 2008, detectives came to De Beer’s Mount Washington apartment with a search warrant. They found 500 cans of spray paint, 300 pictures of De Beer posing with his work, his personal sketchbooks, and videos of De Beer writing his tag.
“They had to roll in three police vehicles,” De Beer said, smiling “to pull away all the paint. I’m on the porch in handcuffs, my girlfriend is in tears, and my paint is all over the lawn.” Once they had everything loaded up in their cars, they let him go.
De Beer pled guilty in June of 2010 to one felony and seventy-two misdemeanor counts of criminal mischief, as well as a misdemeanor charge for “Possessing an Instrument of a Crime.” That last charge, usually refers to guns but in this case referred to paint. De Beer was sentenced in September 2010 to one to three years in prison and five years probation, to be served consecutively.
De Beer was twenty-three when he was sentenced to Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh. He spent most of his time reading. At first he read the bestsellers that were easy to find, but didn’t know where to go from there. He started asking friends on the outside to send him their three favorite books. He liked reading the heavy stuff—Ray Carver, Steinbeck—“To see what they’re up against,” he said. Steinbeck was great, but De Beer said he never wanted to read The Grapes of Wrath again. “How could you read that,” he asked me, “and still love your country, or humanity?”
After ten-and-a-half months in prison, De Beer was paroled to a halfway house in Erie, Pennsylvania. He worked as a hotel doorman. He described the halfway house in an essay for the magazine Mass Appeal as “a jail you’re allowed to leave, to go to work.” Inmates sleep on metal beds and attend compulsory substance abuse meetings, regardless of whether they have struggled with addiction. De Beer spent four months in Erie before he was released to live with his mother in North Buffalo in the fall of 2011.
De Beer was assigned a parole officer named Paul Murphy, nwho has since retired. Parole allows inmates to complete their sentences outside of the prison system. As such, a variety of restrictions are placed on parolees to keep them out of jail. Some of the restrictions on De Beer were typical—he had to live with a blood relative and follow a 9pm curfew, he couldn’t leave the county, and he was periodically urine tested for drugs.
But Murphy added a restriction of his own. De Beer was prohibited from possessing markers, paint, or any other art-making materials for the duration of his parole.
According to a spokesperson for the New York State Parole Board who asked that her name be withheld because she was not authorized to comment on De Beer’s case, it is common for a parole officer to add and or remove special provisions during the course of a participant’s parole “depending on how a parole officer feels.” Parole officers are able to “make up their own provisions,” she said, “without oversight from a judge or prosecutor.” This gives the parole officer power to inflict additional restrictions on a parolee outside of the judicial system. In this case, De Beer served twelve months in jail before being stripped of his artistic freedom. He will be on parole until he pays $57,000 in restitution to the state of Pennsylvania.
For the year that De Beer was out on parole, he was getting his life back together. He was enrolled as an undergraduate at Buffalo State College, and he was working full time at a hotel.
But during a surprise visit in February 2013, over a year after De Beer left the halfway house, his parole officer caught him working on a painting in the basement of his mother’s house. De Beer was sent to county jail for three months for violating a law that applied only to him. He was let go from his job at the hotel and was forced to withdraw from his classes. That withdrawal will prevent him from applying for financial aid in the future, taking college off the table.
Just months after he was released from prison for the second time, still barred from possessing art supplies, De Beer was planning his most ambitious art project. What he needed was a venue, and he found one through Mark Goldman.
Goldman is a successful restaurateur and author of the book City on the Edge, about Buffalo's century of decline and dysfunction.
“He came to me and asked if I wanted to hire him to paint,” Goldman said. “I thought, ‘great!’” Goldman didn’t know who he was. “Frankly” he said, “I didn’t care.”
Goldman and De Beer met in person to discuss the deal. After they agreed on some sketches, Goldman arranged for De Beer to paint a mural inspired by the Buffalo-born comic artist Spain Rodriguez. The venue was the concrete wall of Holly Farms, a bodega on an adjacent corner from the restaurant. This would be De Beer’s first commissioned, legal work.
So he had a legal venue for the first time, and one of the largest canvases he had ever painted. In addition, this wasn’t a loading dock behind the Rite Aid—this was prime real estate, the main drag, in the middle of the city’s most popular bar and restaurant district.
And there was really only one hurdle now, which is that De Beer couldn’t paint it.
He couldn’t even handle the materials. So, to get around that, he hired a small army of artists—most of them graffiti writers—to paint his work for him.
“I assembled a team of artists,” De Beer said, “each with a valuable skill-set. I developed an operation in which we could work together to execute the mural.” Among those writers was ATAK, who traveled to Buffalo to help, as well as a local tagger who went by BCUZ, who had recently been sentenced to a thousand hours of community service for his graffiti. That’s six months, forty hours a week.
So, on one night in September of 2014, De Beer set up a digital projector to beam an image of his drawing at the wall of the bodega. The artists, dressed in white jumpsuits, their faces masked by respirators, sprayed the lines and shades of De Beer’s first legal piece of public art. De Beer sat off to the side observing and occasionally stepping in to give direction. “My presence wasn’t very necessary,” he said.
The Spain Rodriguez piece is based on a drunken brawl that occurred decades ago outside the bar across the street. It’s an unusual, engaging mural, and it seems to pop in a way reminiscent of De Beer’s work as HERT. It’s black on white with blips of yellows and reds to accentuate the action. There are motorcycles and women, and shapes and text shooting through from left to right. It’s really a chaotic scene. In the upper left is Rodriguez’ own tongue-in-cheek restriction to viewers: “For Adult Intellectuals Only.”
The mural reflects the neighborhood of Allentown. It is home to an assortment of folks—bikers, yuppies, hippies, hipsters—all of whom can be found at the Old Pink at last call. It’s the kind of dive bar frat boys read about in magazines.
When the mural was covered in The Buffalo News it was an absolute free-for-all of pro- and anti-graffiti rhetoric. This was the first time De Beer’s name had appeared in the paper since news of his arrest three years earlier. There seemed to be two polarized viewpoints; the “who let him out of jail” folks and the “if you don’t like it, move to the suburbs” folks. Many other commenters were in a gray area—they supported legal street art, but questioned painting in an historic district. Others questioned the logic of rewarding a convicted graffiti felon with a high-traffic blank wall.
This is emblematic of the tricky response graffiti has elicited from the public ever since it first started showing up in subway cars in the late 1960s. No one wants to be on the wrong side of art history, but no one wants a misspelled word the size of a Hyundai on his garage door, either.
Back in 2014 I was walking down a well-to-do street in Buffalo and found Ian De Beer writing “HERT” two stories high on the side of a building.
It was a photograph of De Beer by the artist Max Collins blown up to about the height of a streetlight, then glued to the exposed vinyl siding of a two-storey building with wheatpaste. In the photo, De Beer’s right arm is curled at a right angle, and his hand has just written “HERT” at the top corner with a black marker.
There’s no mask or bandana covering his face, and he looks like a friendly, if slightly serious kid. He’s wearing a baseball cap with a brown brim, and a very playful jacket influenced by the art of Keith Haring. This was the first time I got to see him as a real person, as opposed to a face I had come up with in my mind. The person writing graffiti was a regular guy.
The mural was Collins’ idea. He sees himself as a “kind of clean, well-to-do kid,” (his words) who uses his reputation as leverage to create huge public murals. He does promotional work for non-profit groups and art events. He has photographed the staff writers of the Buffalo News and printed them on newsprint. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be embraced by people in Buffalo,” he said, “and I thought it would be interesting to use the same kind of formula to present someone like Ian.”
For years the community hated De Beer. He would go around at night ruining property, like an untrained dog. And yet someone had made him a monument, a monument that was left unscathed in the months that came. It was hard not to see that a change had taken place in Buffalo, that there was a tolerance for what De Beer had to offer.
“I am trying my best,” De Beer said, “to produce work that does not require any of the materials I am restricted from using, and to have that work be good. It's unfortunate,” he continued, “that I can’t work with the materials that I’m skilled in using, but in another sense it pushes me to overcome this obstacle…I’ve always worked best in challenging conditions. After all, I am from Buffalo! I try to observe people who have endured hard times and adopt some of their methods of coping into my own practices. Living life” he said, “is a continuous work in progress.”
© Peter Scheck 2018
Narrated by Peter Scheck.
Narrated by Peter Scheck.
POST RECITAL
TALK
TN: Peter Scheck, thanks for joining us on The Strange Recital.
PS: I'm happy to be here. Thanks.
BR: Your use of a succinct journalistic style imbues your story with a gritty realism. It’s very effective. Did the subject matter lead you to that approach? Can you tell us a little more about that?
PS: Approach? I mean, this is just the way that I write. I mean that's just the way that it came out. I was trying to tell the story as honestly as I could, to keep it as true to what really happened.
TN: Fiction delivered as journalism. Is it a social commentary?
PS: I suppose you could read it that way but it's a commentary of a subject that is very real. The way that I have always seen fiction was that it was... it has to be true to what the writer believes. I mean in a sense all fiction is true, right? In that the person who wrote it really believes it. I suppose that's what you mean?
BR: You describe a dystopian society that punishes its artists. Is that your vision of the future? A place where self expression is a crime?
PS: I think that art is always changing and what we accept as art is always changing, throughout history and I think it continues today. And what Ian De Beer has been dealing with is he came out of a graffiti scene that was really started from nowhere. I mean started from train cars in New York and graduated into what today is a million dollar industry, where you have someone like Banksy selling his works for seven figures and you also have folks like Ian De Beer who, you know, spends a great deal of time in jail, and this other guy Danny Montano, who... his time in jail sets him so far down the wrong path that he, you know, has to end his life. Yeah... to the question “dystopian”-- yes it's very dystopian, very upsetting.
TN: It has the flavour of Orwell - a contemporary Orwell in which Ian De Beer is like Orwell's Winston Smith - which is why we decided to call this story “artcrime”, as a nod to “newspeak”. It’s unusual that you gave us this story without a title and told us to name it ourselves. Most authors wouldn’t even consider such an idea. What’s going on here? Is it a cryptic marketing strategy?
BR: Or is it that you’ve managed to divest your creations of your own ego?
PS: Well I could never divest anything that I create from my own ego. But I find titling a story to be difficult because you're trying to catch someone. It's like you're trying to... all of what you've written... and distill it into something succinct. And also in the journalism world you never title your own stories. Someone is always titling it for you. Especially now in the age of Twitter. There's always some witty office intern who writes a little headline for your Twitter piece and wildly misinterprets the story.
TN: This may seem like a question from the depths of nowhere, but tell me -- the name of your protagonist Ian De Beer brings to mind a diamond, at least to me. Was this a conscious choice? Were you introducing a layer of allegory or symbolism to the story? A hidden detail, where the artist is represented as a diamond? A diamond that grows upon fungus perhaps.
PS: Er... I mean you'd have to ask Ian's mother.
TN: His mother?
PS: It had very little to... I didn't name him. Is that... I'm sorry, am I... are you misunderstanding? This is a person. This is... I'm writing a story about a person named Ian De Beer.
BR: Well consciously or not, you’ve tapped into a vein here. That deep and ancient spring of myth. You know it’s a tale told so many times the world over, of a sacrificed god or hero. There’s usually some kind of resurrection involved. In your story Ian De Beer is resurrected by having others carry out the physical aspects of his creations.
TN: I think that’s more a case of Odyssean trickery. If you’re talking of myth, I detect a hint of Orpheus here. Prison is the underworld and De Beer’s desire to paint is his love Eurydice. When he turns to look back at her, ie. when he decides to paint a canvas in his mother’s basement, she is lost forever and he goes back to prison. Of course, you’ve woven all of this into a modern urban setting.
PS: That is very beautiful. I wish that I had written that in my story. But I think there is... there's certainly some redemption to Ian's story. I wrote this piece a few years ago and since then I know that Ian is showing his work publicly in Buffalo at this point. I think he's still on probation but I think the conditions of his parole have changed, so that he can legally make artwork now. I think he's found sort of a new lease on life and he's back living in Buffalo. And yeah, so I think the story probably has a decent ending for him.
TN: Wait a minute Peter. Hang on. Are you trying to tell us that this is a true story?
PS: Oh yeah. Absolutely. This is a hundred percent true. Painstakingly researched.
TN: Oh come on...
PS: This is the last story of this kind that I wrote. You know it took six months for me to write this story, that this slightly abridged piece came out of. All I had done to that point, for years, was write journalism... was write kind of like these very formal stories like this one, and I didn't write another one after this. I wrote other kinds of things but this story I found so difficult to write because the protagonist is so divisive, that the people who read the story couldn't figure out who to side with. And that may be my fault as the author of the piece. What I'm trying to say is that it... this story really turned people off and I found that powerful in its own way, and telling.
TN: So you're sticking with this line that it's a true story, huh?
PS: Yeah.
TN: You're very convincing, I'll give you that. And I must say I admire your intransigence. It reminds me of a guy I spoke to once. He was smoking a cigarette and he said he didn’t smoke. I said “Wait a minute, you’re smoking right now.” He looked me in the eye, cigarette in hand, and said “No I’m not.” Just like you, he wouldn’t back down from his position. There was nowhere left to go. A game without rules is hard to play.
PS: Yeah.
TN: Well actually I just told you a lie. I’ve never had that conversation. It was imaginary. But you know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t.
PS: Er, I've...
BR: ...Well authors often introduce real incidents from their lives into their stories. I do it myself. But those elements of reality don’t make the overall work true -- whatever true means. I mean I have a difficult relationship with the idea of truth. But the point is, fiction can have components of reality but it's still fiction. I imagine that you're familiar with Buffalo because you lived there while going to college, or something like that. Those details of reality help the reader or listener to suspend disbelief and then they are ready to accept that someone can go to jail for painting a picture, which of course is preposterous.
PS: (laughs) How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
TN: Peter Scheck, thanks for joining us on The Strange Recital.
PS: I'm happy to be here. Thanks.
BR: Your use of a succinct journalistic style imbues your story with a gritty realism. It’s very effective. Did the subject matter lead you to that approach? Can you tell us a little more about that?
PS: Approach? I mean, this is just the way that I write. I mean that's just the way that it came out. I was trying to tell the story as honestly as I could, to keep it as true to what really happened.
TN: Fiction delivered as journalism. Is it a social commentary?
PS: I suppose you could read it that way but it's a commentary of a subject that is very real. The way that I have always seen fiction was that it was... it has to be true to what the writer believes. I mean in a sense all fiction is true, right? In that the person who wrote it really believes it. I suppose that's what you mean?
BR: You describe a dystopian society that punishes its artists. Is that your vision of the future? A place where self expression is a crime?
PS: I think that art is always changing and what we accept as art is always changing, throughout history and I think it continues today. And what Ian De Beer has been dealing with is he came out of a graffiti scene that was really started from nowhere. I mean started from train cars in New York and graduated into what today is a million dollar industry, where you have someone like Banksy selling his works for seven figures and you also have folks like Ian De Beer who, you know, spends a great deal of time in jail, and this other guy Danny Montano, who... his time in jail sets him so far down the wrong path that he, you know, has to end his life. Yeah... to the question “dystopian”-- yes it's very dystopian, very upsetting.
TN: It has the flavour of Orwell - a contemporary Orwell in which Ian De Beer is like Orwell's Winston Smith - which is why we decided to call this story “artcrime”, as a nod to “newspeak”. It’s unusual that you gave us this story without a title and told us to name it ourselves. Most authors wouldn’t even consider such an idea. What’s going on here? Is it a cryptic marketing strategy?
BR: Or is it that you’ve managed to divest your creations of your own ego?
PS: Well I could never divest anything that I create from my own ego. But I find titling a story to be difficult because you're trying to catch someone. It's like you're trying to... all of what you've written... and distill it into something succinct. And also in the journalism world you never title your own stories. Someone is always titling it for you. Especially now in the age of Twitter. There's always some witty office intern who writes a little headline for your Twitter piece and wildly misinterprets the story.
TN: This may seem like a question from the depths of nowhere, but tell me -- the name of your protagonist Ian De Beer brings to mind a diamond, at least to me. Was this a conscious choice? Were you introducing a layer of allegory or symbolism to the story? A hidden detail, where the artist is represented as a diamond? A diamond that grows upon fungus perhaps.
PS: Er... I mean you'd have to ask Ian's mother.
TN: His mother?
PS: It had very little to... I didn't name him. Is that... I'm sorry, am I... are you misunderstanding? This is a person. This is... I'm writing a story about a person named Ian De Beer.
BR: Well consciously or not, you’ve tapped into a vein here. That deep and ancient spring of myth. You know it’s a tale told so many times the world over, of a sacrificed god or hero. There’s usually some kind of resurrection involved. In your story Ian De Beer is resurrected by having others carry out the physical aspects of his creations.
TN: I think that’s more a case of Odyssean trickery. If you’re talking of myth, I detect a hint of Orpheus here. Prison is the underworld and De Beer’s desire to paint is his love Eurydice. When he turns to look back at her, ie. when he decides to paint a canvas in his mother’s basement, she is lost forever and he goes back to prison. Of course, you’ve woven all of this into a modern urban setting.
PS: That is very beautiful. I wish that I had written that in my story. But I think there is... there's certainly some redemption to Ian's story. I wrote this piece a few years ago and since then I know that Ian is showing his work publicly in Buffalo at this point. I think he's still on probation but I think the conditions of his parole have changed, so that he can legally make artwork now. I think he's found sort of a new lease on life and he's back living in Buffalo. And yeah, so I think the story probably has a decent ending for him.
TN: Wait a minute Peter. Hang on. Are you trying to tell us that this is a true story?
PS: Oh yeah. Absolutely. This is a hundred percent true. Painstakingly researched.
TN: Oh come on...
PS: This is the last story of this kind that I wrote. You know it took six months for me to write this story, that this slightly abridged piece came out of. All I had done to that point, for years, was write journalism... was write kind of like these very formal stories like this one, and I didn't write another one after this. I wrote other kinds of things but this story I found so difficult to write because the protagonist is so divisive, that the people who read the story couldn't figure out who to side with. And that may be my fault as the author of the piece. What I'm trying to say is that it... this story really turned people off and I found that powerful in its own way, and telling.
TN: So you're sticking with this line that it's a true story, huh?
PS: Yeah.
TN: You're very convincing, I'll give you that. And I must say I admire your intransigence. It reminds me of a guy I spoke to once. He was smoking a cigarette and he said he didn’t smoke. I said “Wait a minute, you’re smoking right now.” He looked me in the eye, cigarette in hand, and said “No I’m not.” Just like you, he wouldn’t back down from his position. There was nowhere left to go. A game without rules is hard to play.
PS: Yeah.
TN: Well actually I just told you a lie. I’ve never had that conversation. It was imaginary. But you know what I mean. Or maybe you don’t.
PS: Er, I've...
BR: ...Well authors often introduce real incidents from their lives into their stories. I do it myself. But those elements of reality don’t make the overall work true -- whatever true means. I mean I have a difficult relationship with the idea of truth. But the point is, fiction can have components of reality but it's still fiction. I imagine that you're familiar with Buffalo because you lived there while going to college, or something like that. Those details of reality help the reader or listener to suspend disbelief and then they are ready to accept that someone can go to jail for painting a picture, which of course is preposterous.
PS: (laughs) How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
