Response to JR from “TED Talks” and “The 99 percent”

In the 99 percent JR shares thoughts about the hardest parts of bringing his project to other countries, and that the hardest part is not being there, but deciding to go. “But sometimes there’s no sign, and you need to push yourself and go into those places.” He explains how when you don’t have a plan, its so easy to wait for a sign to tell you what to do, but when the plan is to respond you just have to go for it. When I think about his main question “can art change the world?” I think he answered it himself, that anything possible if the world is your canvas.

From what I’ve seen in the TED talks segment featuring JR, and Ariston Anderson’s “JR on Art, Experimentation, and Keeping Your Freedom” on the 99 percent; I am very careful to recognize that photos are JR’s medium. I am careful to say that they are his medium rather than calling him a photographer because even though he does take photographs, I found that who takes the photos is not most important, but that they are taken. The art lies in the process of getting the images up, of smoothing them up against the wall, composing them, and then leaving soon after. In the same way that Jackson Polluck’s paintings are all about the process and life of the paint, JR and his friends create art that is all about the process of posting the images and the daily lives of people.

JR’s attitude is the most selfless I have ever seen in an artist. His lifestyle and image make it so clear that the work is its not about him, not once did he take all of the credit for his group’s work. The life of his work relies heavily on the people surrounding it. People from Palestine, Nigeria, Brazil, and India, just to name a few. The images that JR posts are all images of faces in any combination on a very large scale, they tell the rest of the world that the people exist. In Nigeria JR and his friends made a point of printing their posters on vinyl. This way they were able to fix leaky rooftops for families who needed them. While in Nigeria in addition being practical they were playful in their art making. They made a full arrangement of faces so that when the train passed behind a set of houses there were fully composed faces. The train held the eyes and the roof held the smile so the expression changed as the train moved. JR is what I consider to be the ultimate public artist. Even when he began the sidewalk gallery when he was younger, framing graffiti in the streets of Paris, bringing a considerably bourgeois aspect of western culture to the streets for all to access.