Photo courtesy of Oscar Brahim
Oscar Brahim is a taxi driver from Villa Urquiza. Ten years ago he ended up in a collage workshop, after a friend asked him for help designing a comic book. He’d always painted, but he fell in love with the cut and paste art. On one of his taxi rides, he came across a small advert in the street and decided to magnify his collaging skills. “I started to play.”
Armed with a paper cutter, collage cut-outs, and plenty of glue, Brahim would take down entire posters, take them home, and change them. Sometimes he did collage, sometimes he would paint on them, sometimes draw, adding something, taking something away. The results were fascinating, sometimes beautiful, often comical, always provocative. Maverick vandalism became artistic vision.
He was approached by a journalist when he’d been doctoring adverts for about a year, and was asked if he’d like to put some of his work in a small magazine. The editor of the magazine then introduced him to his brother-in-law, who happened to be a film maker. Sergio Morkin followed Brahim and his family around with a camera for nearly three years and in 2001 produced the documentary ‘Oscar’.
Following the documentary, which screened at Malba for three months, Brahim’s popularity soared. Everyone knew about him, but no-one knew who he was.
He remembers one night sitting outside the museum waiting for the film to finish. He’d left doctored pictures of Saddam Hussein on the day he got captured scattered on the ground outside the auditorium. He watched people walk outside and get extremely excited by the ‘gifts’ that had been left for them.
He sat in his taxi and waited for a passenger. A young woman got in, and Brahim struck up a conversation about what she had been doing and why they were so many people pouring out of the Malba at this time of night. She began to rave about the film, and rave about Oscar himself. Brahim feigned ignorance and fascination with this ‘neighbourhood philosopher and antiglobalisation prophet’, as the media dubbed him. Just as the woman was about to pay the fare, Brahim turned around to show her his face. She started crying. The very same woman gave him an exhibition at the Palais de Glace, his first ever indoor exhibition.
His art has been hailed in the media as ‘urban intervention’. He painted a group of penises on an advert for a church, and made collages in which the camels of Camel cigarettes appeared to fornicate amongst themselves.
Photo courtesy of Oscar Brahim
He went through a phase of painting the eyes of the candidates shut on all the campaign posters in the run up to the presidential elections, or putting price tags on them (Special Offer! $4.50).
Clearly he must have some political agenda, then, if he modifies political propaganda? Apparently not. According to Brahim, the candidates are products, and they sell themselves like any other merchandise. Brahim has the same disdain for their adverts as he does for corporate advertising: “Why do I need to see an advert for Diet Coke everywhere I go? I already drink Diet Coke, I don’t need any more encouragement!”
Brahim’s arty playfulness was never restricted to billboards. On the back of the driver’s seat in his cab, where would normally hang his official ID card, there is a small polaroid photo of Brahim asleep. Next to it are the words ‘Right now I am driving your destiny’. He chuckles as he tells me about putting up a sign in his taxi that read ‘The bathroom is for the exclusive use of the clientele’. “The number of people who actually thought I had a special toilet in the taxi!”
The more anecdotes Brahim recounts to me, the more I realise that he’s basically a 43-year-old man with the mischievous mind of a young boy. He likes to exaggerate, he tells me, ‘to maintain the mystery, to stretch things a bit’. I ask if he’s exaggerating now. “Oh no, of course not!” he says, with a twinkle in his eye. He adores pranks; he gets a kick out of confusing people and making them think.
Photo courtesy of Oscar Brahim
“The problem is that people accept publicity as something natural, it doesn’t even occur to them to react against adverts. It would brilliant if everyone reacted, if everyone put themselves to painting street adverts however they felt like.”
Clearly Brahim has a lot of friends and a lot of fans, but what about the people he’s bound to infuriate – the businesses, the advertisers whose work he modifies? To begin with, it wasn’t a problem: “I was one man, not a group, and I was subtle, I kept a low profile.” Policemen would walk past him as he cut down posters and not say anything – clearly thinking he was just a random maverick or perhaps just a bit loony and best left to himself.
He also fell into cahoots with the billboard posters – they would give him the old adverts as they put new ones up. He learnt the cycle of the adverts so he would know when a certain billboard was being replaced. Of course, there were repercussions. In 2001 he was involved in a stand-off with the advertising agency Agulla & Bacetti which actually ended with their offering Brahim a job. He declined.
Brahim continues to be against any kind of publicity, including his own. Sporadic newspaper coverage seems to cheer him, and he’s an avid talker, but he won’t make himself a website, just a small flickr account with pictures of his work. He prefers people to find him, rather than go seeking adoration himself.
Photo courtesy of Oscar Brahim
Yet still the offers kept coming. The Di Tella Art Institute gave him a whole building to play with – he covered the National Building for Santiation with a poster of the phrase ‘We are the result of what we think’. So much for working alone: “I needed help with that one, obviously. I needed a crane!”
All very well, but what did it mean? I ask somewhat earnestly. He laughs again. “In itself [the art] has no meaning. But you can give it meaning simply by looking at it.” The peculiar thing about Brahim is that when he claims none of his work has any real meaning behind it – he has no political agenda, no cross to bear, no grudges – you believe him. The captions underneath the photos of his work on his flickr website are all the same: ‘What you see has no meaning’.
Brahim is that rare thing: an artist totally free from pretension. He’s given talks at UBA, he’s been to Barcelona to run workshops, he’s been courted by the art business – last year he was approached by a dealer who said simply “People want to buy your work. Welcome to the art market.” And yet Brahim still wants to keep a low profile. He loves the air of mystery that he has developed. Not many people even know what he looks like. “There is something mystical that I have and I want to exploit it. But I do like the idea of someone having a piece of my art in their home.”
Photo courtesy of Oscar Brahim
And what about taxi driving then? Now that he’s in the art business, surely he’s thought about leaving behind the 12-hour days of driving around the city? No, he says: “The taxi is an interesting environment…I get to see 25 different movies a day – from the life of the common labourer to the life of the high-flying businessman.” But it’s a tiring job, isn’t it? Doesn’t he want to dedicate more time to his real passion, art? He laughs, “it doesn’t tire me. It thrills me.”
He can’t deny that taxi-driving isn’t exactly a bank-rolling business. As documented in Morkin’s film, Brahim and his family have had financial troubles; during the crisis they were even evicted from their apartment. He once drove for 24 hours straight in order to raise some more money. “Funnily enough I felt so free when I did that – like I could do whatever I wanted.”
What do his children think about his art? “They know they have an unconventional father. The boys used to come with me when they were younger, but my daughter, no, she was embarrassed.” And his wife? “It was difficult. I had to tell her over and over again that what I was doing was not just a hobby, it was a job. It was catharsis. I had to do it to stop myself driving into a brick wall. But yes, there were arguments.”
Brahim actually stopped doctoring adverts about two years ago – he says he began to get bored, and wanted to develop his work. “Each piece of work led me to make something more conceptual, each piece motivated the next one.”
His more recent projects have involved the use of words rather than images. Across the bridge of the San Martín flyover that goes over Av Córdoba in Palermo, he has posted a single phrase in white block letters on a black background. At the moment it says, in Spanish: ‘Do you want to be right or be happy?’
Photo courtesy of Oscar Brahim
It is a sign seen by hundreds of thousands that drive under the bridge every day. Many do not give it a second thought. But it is a way for Brahim to subtly penetrate the lives of everyday porteños, giving them something to ponder.
The sign is beginning to fall off, which annoys him, as he’s trying to find time to replace it. “I need someone to help me put a new one up…” he looks at me pointedly. I pause. “When were you thinking of sorting that out?” I ask, not really sure and yet entirely certain where this is headed. “Oh, whenever, if I drive past and it’s really looking bad I’ll stop and sort it out there and then.” He promises to keep me posted.
Oscar Brahim seems to have a persona as layered as the collages he creates: the simple taxi driver from Villa Urquiza, who still starts work at 7am everyday; the artist, whose work has made extraordinary waves in the art world and still continues to do so; and the enigma that is created by combining the two. When I ask him about the future, he shrugs. “We have too many expectations for the future. It gives us headaches. The future is today…I want to carry on being a mystery.”
I receive a text message from him the morning after our interview: ‘We are the result of what we think’. I have no idea what he means. But I think I get it.
To see more of Oscar Brahim’s work , please visit www.flickr.com/brhm
