Culture by force

Graffiti artist Jack TML is not sure how he feels about being tacitly accepted by the establishment

By BEN GOLDMAN
’Of course it’s vandalism,’ says Jack TML about his work.521 (photo credit: BEN GOLDMAN)
’Of course it’s vandalism,’ says Jack TML about his work.521
(photo credit: BEN GOLDMAN)
Jack TML is everywhere. He’s on your way to work, you pass him on the light rail, he’s around the corner from your favorite restaurant. He might even be outside your apartment. Sometimes he’s small, just a squiggle of his name, and sometimes he’s big, covering the facade of an entire building.
But once you see him, you’ll never miss him again.
Jack “The MeaningLess” TML is one of Jerusalem’s most notorious and prolific graffiti artists, bringing culture by force to a city more typically dominated by religion and politics – two areas that Jack himself avoids at all costs. “I don’t care about [politics],” he says. “There’s a stigma of graffiti that it should say something political, but I find it boring.”
Instead, he channels his vision into surreal, emotional works of street art, often portraying bleak characters that blend realism with a cartoon-like aesthetic. Though there is an identifiable style and consistency to his work, particularly in his attention to texture and detail, it’s difficult if not impossible to tease out messages from it, and the result is dream-like art that reflects a brooding soul being communicated through a spray can.
This esoteric quality comes across even in Jack’s demeanor. When I arrive at our designated meeting spot outside a crowded cafe in the Mahaneh Yehuda market, I spot him easily enough – he’s the wildhaired guy with tattered jeans and enormous headphones, a worn black backpack at his feet, which contains his “tools.” When I ask about him, he tells me that he’s 25 years old, originally from a small town in the North, and that he served in a computer programming unit in the IDF before taking up graffiti full-time.
However, after recounting a brief biography, he admits that many details of his story could be a lie.
“I can tell the press anything that I want,” he says.
He refuses to reveal his identity for obvious reasons, and though he’s not exactly in disguise, he does make me promise to obscure his face in any photo.
DESPITE HIS secrecy, Jack was easy enough to find.
He makes his presence known on the Internet through a Flickr account, a Facebook page, and a listing for his crew, TML, on Fatcap, an international social networking and resources site for graffiti artists. His online presence lends the impression that Jack is serious about his graffiti, and doesn’t mind if people know it. His Facebook page is liked by over 500 fans, and his Flickr contains nearly 200 photos. After messaging him through Facebook, he agrees to meet up and take me on a walking tour of his art around the capital.
We don’t have to go far to find his work.
He shows me a piece he’s done on a crumbling wall in a winding alley in one of Jerusalem’s oldest neighborhoods, Nahlaot. Within a few minutes’ walk, we discover several more. Though he says that it’s hard to know what’s remained and what’s been “buffed,” an industry term referring to when a city paints over graffiti, we have no difficulty discovering at least a dozen pieces around the Nahlaot area alone – not including his signature, which is seemingly everywhere.
When I ask him how many pieces he’s done in his career so far, he stops to consider this and says, “That’s like asking how many beers you have had.
It’s too many to count.” Every time he leaves his apartment, Jack says, he takes his bag of spray cans with him. “I’m always prepared.”
Jack’s pieces range from elaborate color works that can take several days to complete, to quick sketches that he can finish in less than five minutes. But all of his work is remarkably stylized, and his attention to texture and detail is unmistakable. Even the simplest of his black-and-white works contain layers of paint that provide depth, texture, realism and a signature style that reflects an appreciation for aesthetics. In a world where urban graffiti art wavers perilously between artistic expression and undiluted vandalism, Jack’s work comes across as the former – though he also considers his work to be vandalism.
“Of course it’s vandalism,” he says. “That’s the basis of street art.”
On one stop, while inspecting a piece he painted on the folding metallic security blinds of a printing shop, the storeowner comes out to greet us. The smiling man notices me taking pictures of the piece, which shows an Israeli soldier with the letters TML stamped over his mouth, and poses in front of it, as if it were part of his own private collection. “It’s art, you know? To me it doesn’t mean much, but to other people it does.”
The shop owner says the piece was painted one night after a band of graffiti artists conducted an “operation” on the neighborhood. Though he doesn’t mind, he says that not all of the other neighborhood residents were as happy.
To Jack, this is the sign of a job well done. He says that without this element of controversy, even criminality, there would be nothing to distinguish his art from the countless works of public art that are found in any major city. “If there are [no] people who don’t like what you do, then what is the point? If it’s only for me, I can just do it in the studio.”
This, he says, is one of the reasons he prefers to work in Jerusalem, rather than Tel Aviv. “In Tel Aviv, you can paint what you want and everyone loves the graffiti. But [in Jerusalem], you can still make people angry.” Among his most virulent opponents, Jack says, is the Jerusalem haredi community. “They have a lot of problems with my work. I do a lot of bodies and women and stuff, and most of the time they will color it over in just a few hours.”