Interview: Mr Bingo
When you’re told to fuck off in a personalised piece of Hate Mail, complete with offensive illustration, anger, hurt, confusion and perhaps even an uncontrollable sob or two would be the recipient’s expected knee-jerk reactions. For fans of Mr Bingo, though, the emotional response evoked by such a delivery is quite the reverse.
London-based artist, illustrator and speaker Mr Bingo is the creator of Hate Mail – an on-demand trolling service that allows his fans, or simply “silly people that like that kind of stuff”, to pay for the privilege of having their very own abusive postcard drop onto the doormat; with a series of vehement follow-up tweets thrown in for bad measure. With lashings of irony, sarcasm and mirth served up in equal proportion to the obscenities, the project’s reception led to the launch of a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a “pretentious art book without the pretentious price tag” i.e. Hate Mail: The Definitive Collection – 156 postcards-worth of foul-penned funniosities.
The campaign had over 3,500 backers and over AUD$220,000 raised through rewards including “a signed book plus a different fucking print”, a one off pornographic drawing on an envelope of Queen Elizabeth II and the ability to have Mr Bingo himself visit your home to “do the washing up”.
Visiting Australia for the first time, Mr Bingo popped into fluoro’s Melbourne HQ. Read in on the conversation.
fluoro. Now, I know who you are and so do our readers, but I’d like you to tell us in your words who you are.
Mr Bingo. Jesus this is like therapy! “Who are you?” is such a big question though. I guess I would describe myself as an artist, who used to be an illustrator, who creates irreverent and humorous work.
f. What keeps you motivated to keep creating that work?
MB. Entertaining people, that’s the main thing. Wanting to make stuff that gets a reaction. I guess most art is to provoke most art is to provoke some kind of reaction right? If it doesn’t provoke anything then it’s a bit pointless.
f. Do you ever get tired of it?
MB. Not really no. I kind of feel like I need it. I think most people crave attention, but a lot of people don’t admit it.
f. What’s the greatest project you’ve worked on?
MB. It’s probably the rap video. No! The best project I’ve ever done was the Kickstarter – this is gonna sound like I’m really showing off now! Basically it involves music and rapping and performing and acting and entertaining and writing – like an amalgamation of everything I can do in one place.
f. Would you do something like that again?
MB. Yeah definitely. I’d do it slightly differently because it was really, really hard.
f. What was challenging about it?
MB. The challenge was to deliver 3,752 rewards to strangers and only 1,500 of those things were just a book being sent from a factory where I did nothing. All the others involved me physically doing something and it lasted from maybe like five minutes per person to spending a whole day with them or going out on a date in the evening or going to their house washing up.
f. Did you say washing up?
MB. Yeah, there was a reward on Kickstarter called ‘Mr Bingo does the washing up’ and it was another one of those where I wrote it because I thought it sounded funny. Then it comes to three months later and you have to deliver it and you think ‘fuck in 25 minutes time I’ve got to knock on a stranger’s door and then go into their house for the evening’. They all had me round for dinner. They all turned it into a bigger thing. It was nice.
Then what happened with the Kickstarter is, I had a bit of a breakdown one evening because I’d been getting shitfaced on the train all day and then it was one where it turned into a much bigger thing. When I went home, I was just sitting on my sofa and it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t seen any of my friends or family for a couple of months and all I was doing was getting up in the morning as early as I could and working all day on delivering this stuff and the only people the only interactions I was having with other humans were my fans. Like it sounds great cos everyone’s got an ego and it is nice to hang out people who are fans. And it was kind of like ‘who am I? What am I doing? I don’t understand where I am anymore’. But then I got over all that and now I look back and I’m really glad that I did it all. It’s been amazing.
f. So, your ideas, each one is unique, where does that come from? Do you have a crazy like little festival in there?
MB. I always feel like I want more ideas, I don’t feel like I’ve got enough! Well maybe what happens is I had so many different ideas with the Kickstarter because it was like 20 small projects all combined in one. A lot of them it would have been fine to say ‘I’m going to do this for a month’, but instead each one was allocated five days to deliver the whole thing. So I think I did so much that I needed to do nothing for a bit. That’s why it was nice to go away in the motorhome.
f. So you didn’t draw anything that whole time?
MB. I did a couple of drawings. Even the drawings I did I remember when I was doing them it was because I wanted to put something on social media instead of really doing it for myself which is a bit of a weird thing.
f. Was it just to keep that routine that you had?
MB. I felt like I had to show people something. I feel like I have a lot of responsibility to strangers, even though probably no one cares as much as I think they do. I think it’s a problem with modern life. I absolutely love Twitter and Instagram and all the attention I get, but it also takes over my life.
f. How has the internet influenced or changed illustration?
MB. I think it was something that was a bit more earnest. It was before the internet, so it wasn’t really about trying to become famous, but then the internet allowed everyone to try and become famous.
f. What’s this internet pull that you have? When it first came around where you just blown away by it?
MB. Not straight away, no. I’m a really late adopter to everything, but when I realised the power of the internet was with social media, I joined Twitter – in 2009 which was late. I thought it was stupid when it first started. My friend who’s a really early adopter told me it was microblogging and I said ‘what’s that?’ and he said ‘friends can follow you and it’s a bit like Facebook feed, but it’s just smaller snap shots and I can tell them what I’m up to with my day’. And I said ‘but no one gives a fuck what you’re doing with your day’, but he was totally right. People do care what you’re doing with your day in minute detail.
f. What’s in store for the next year?
MB. Absolutely nothing. Oh I’m going to do a talk in South Africa and in the Philippines but talking can’t be your life; if you keep doing talks and no work you just become retired. You become an old speaker and then you’ve got nothing new to speak about cos you’re just like ‘well I did this thing with postcards’ and everyone’s like ‘yeah we know about that, got anything new?’
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For Mr Bingo, there’s rather a fiend in that detail; in every mischievous pen stroke and satirical turn of phrase that has made Hate Mail into one of his best-loved projects.
In the spirit of the festival season Mr Bingo says “Fuck chocolate. A group of naked people slowly revealing themselves over the duration of a month is so much better”. Twenty-four people, clothes printed with a rub removable opaque gold ink, is Mr Bingo’s idea of an Advent Calendar.
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