Interview Concerning Research Led Practice

Tim: If painting is not dead, where then is its life?  Perhaps painting was buried alive under its own weightiness? The painter’s marks are now clawings on the insides of coffin walls.

Phil: In his book Confronting Images, Georges Didi-Hubermann hints towards the notion that we can only say something true about someone if they are dead (and therefore will not do something to prove us wrong). Maybe this is why people try to pronounce painting as dead. I actually think it’s much more banal than that. Whenever something shocking and new comes along (I’ve heard it in reference to photography, Damien Hirst’s cows, and the internet), we don’t seem to know how to respond apart from by stupidly stating the obvious, “it’s different from painting!” and somehow jumping to the conclusion “painting must then be dead!” It’s a matter of what we think we know, and painting fits very neatly into our definitions. But as far as I’m concerned, painting will carry on ‘living’ for as long as painters still paint. Is that too circular an argument?

Tim: Whilst verging on the banal, might there be a sense that painters have carried the baton for art this far and handed it over to other ways and means of expression, (such as film or installation)? In doing so are painters in the cooling angst of smouldering ashes or are they still carrying the fire?

Phil: That’s a nice way of looking at it. Or maybe painting has survived this far, but has been evolving. Evolution takes place over a long period, not all at once. Maybe painting is like homo-erectus being slowly forced out after having evolved into other forms.
Then again, painting is one of the oldest things. It’s made it this far, despite being permanently technologically outdated. Maybe your fire metaphor is more insightful than it first seems. Fire was one of the first things to define humans, but it’s still something we use today.  Sure, we have ovens and candles to better control the fire, but a flame is still the same as it’s ever been.

Tim: Between creation and interpretation lies a wide canyon with alligators in the bottom. In your refusal to reveal whether your paintings are made to imply significance worthy of attention, or just casually depicting the throwaway, are you constructing a precarious rope-bridge to span this gap?

Phil: Precarious is certainly the right word, but I think your alligator canyon is a bit strong. The worst outcome inhabiting the gap is embarrassment. Maybe the paintings are precarious bridges, but ones which neither artist nor viewer can cross. Actually, though, I think it’s better to think of the works as the gap itself – there is no bridge.

Tim: Where do you feel your art is made or happening? Is it in the studio or in the viewer’s perception/mind? If it is the latter, the viewer carries conceptual luggage from image to image. Is each painting a terminal where this baggage can be dispensed or collected?

Phil: Yes that’s a tricky one. Well, my paintings are definitely made in the studio, but the art…? I like your idea of the luggage carousel, if the viewer is not already carrying baggage they can pick it up from my paintings, but if they already have some then they have to somehow fit the new baggage around what they already have.

Tim: Sculpture could be described as giving life to lifeless things, yet this is only a proposition, if it were realised, it would be a little like Frankenstein. In painting’s revelatory death, what ghosts still hang in the art galleries revealing previously unknown secrets?

Phil: I’ve been thinking lately about how painting is unique amongst art mediums, as it is useless as anything other than painting. For example, a photograph is not necessarily art, it could equally be documentary or nostalgia. Or, the marble used to make a sculpture could just as easily be used as a kitchen work surface. How, as a sculptor, do you go about making that jump from the ‘equipment’ to ‘work’, and how do you make it stay there?

Tim: This issue has been confronted in my work, using junk and found materials this is to be expected. My material is therefore in flux, which I find enjoyable and surprising. But for me what seems to be prominent and growing in importance is the articulation of those materials. Duchamp’s readymade Bottle-rack is an object of the world that I think strives to escape it, finding the poetry in prose. If it is a question of functionality, objects and machines can function aesthetically, however this is their only purpose.

Tim: A negotiation between the exalted position and the ordinary would tease out the idea of bathos. Is this the string of sausages of which you can throw the drooling dogs of criticality?

Phil: On the contrary, I think that understanding bathos is criticality -  it’s just the sort of criticality that’s not kidding itself. It’s about sitting comfortably with the tension between the sublime and the everyday, even the abject, admitting that they inevitably coexist.

Tim: Below is a diagram that I think may apply to my own practice. I wonder if it might or might not apply to yours?



Phil: I like your diagram, but I think it’s too simplistic. We are too easily disposed to forcing everything into dichotomies or dualisms – ‘either it’s this or it must be this’. In fact, I believe, subjectivity and objectivity are too distinct to be linked in such a way. Objectivity, by definition, is unchangeable; it is the unmoveable object. Subjectivity, on the other hand, never stops moving, and can never quite be grasped or defined. Maybe a better image would be that of an atom, objectivity as the unmovable nucleus, subjectivity (or subjective interpretations) as the particles flying round it. Some of these particles may be way out there, but they tend to be the ones you don’t pay any attention to.

Tim: I would agree this is a massive simplification and does not recognize the viewer’s own respective inclinations that they bring to the unmoveable object. However this diagram was meant to represent the possibility of the artist investing in the subjective minds of the audience whilst intentionally leaving the artwork more open so as to allow for this. Perhaps it’s inappropriately titled.   

Phil: Yes, I think the scales metaphor isn’t quite right, for reasons I have mentioned about the distinct natures of objectivity and subjectivity. I understand your rationale behind ‘investing in subjectivity’, but it’s all very slippery. When you present an art object to your audience and step away, its objectivity is fixed – it is what it is, no more, no less. How do you propose to encourage subjectivity? Maybe stand behind the viewer and whisper “go on… it must mean something else…” repeatedly?

Tim: Subjectivity with its numerous possibilities might resemble on its flip side the numerous choices the artist has made to make the object. But these artist’s choices are one-way streets that the viewer cannot access, however, they still linger, though they are irrelevant – and so scales would be always imbalanced in favour of subjectivity. The monochrome, the readymade, are conceptual heavyweights yet aesthetic/visual lightweights – (This can be considered unhealthy thinking, rather they are apparently lacking in the ‘investment/consideration’ of that visual aesthetic). Surely these art forms in their objective selves are like well planted seeds and only a showering of subjective minds would activate them in growing something much more dynamic. I propose then, to encourage subjectivity, in stripping down the object, visually, to allow for more conceptual readings and possibilities rather than have them eliminated by using a particular range of materials or hanging in a particular way. Perhaps the subjective mind is something to be cultivated? What do you think absolute nonsense? Part of the 86%?

Phil: What do you mean when you talk about ‘the void’? Is non-existence conceivable in the mind of someone who exists? And how can it ever be possible to express non-existence through art (which, I hope we can agree, is something that inherently exists)?

Tim: My associations with the void or the vacuum were made to highlight what I feel is a human inability to comprehend such things as opposed to discussing those things in themselves. The fact that they are impalpable concepts is what interested me. Inevitably in discussing non-existence or absence something has to be present if it is a sculpture or just its concept. My kinetic sound sculpture titled The Horror of the Vacuum was an attempt to make a total presence and I hoped it would describe something invertible of that situation, alluding actually to a total absence. Sadly this wasn’t the case.  

Phil: Don’t be dejected about that, its failure to express what you set out to probably makes it a success, in terms of the ineffability of such concepts.

Tim: I hope to fail better next time.

Phil: Sculpture is necessarily about space – space is finite, and if a sculpture occupies a space, my body cannot simultaneously occupy the same space. Painting occupies no space. Is this too simple a distinction between the two?

Tim: It does explain some of my reasoning for ‘moving into sculpture’ some years ago. And you’re right of course as a viewer you cannot inhabit the same position as the sculpture itself. This would be physically impossible, so I imagine that space to have a sort of objective personality (I sometimes imagine the object sat thinking, and it would be thinking about marble or gravity or an essence of itself)- whilst the viewer is outside activating these thoughts in the continually changing subjective space. There is also a definite relation between sculpture and the viewer’s body in the engagement. This is of course the same in a lot of paintings, Rothko perhaps. I enjoy the idea of rivalling bodies of sculpture with the viewer’s human form. Painting may inhabit an actual space but I more often see it as proposed spaces or actual surfaces, but sculpture, I feel has a better vocabulary in which to deal with space.

Phil: You can always close your eyes if you don’t want to engage with a painting. But if you literally can’t move because of a sculpture, that’s a different story. Yes, body-rivalry is a good way of putting it.

Phil: Your work plays with the idea that an artist is some sort of shaman, who can contact planes that are inaccessible to non-artists. Does anyone still actually believe this?

Tim: There will still be some genuine shamans out there. I’d rather not see this as a question of belief or not, for me it’s rather a positioning into which I could reside as not an artist but an instrument of the otherworldly, a vessel through which creativity flows.

Phil: So creativity is some supernatural force pre-existing the artist?

Tim: Have you ever done something and thought, “How did I do that”? It’s like the force from Starwars.

Phil: Is ‘art-about-art’ acceptable? Is it even possible to make art that’s not about art? I find it quite hard to take that sort of art seriously, and I feel awful for being like that.

Tim: I see art as a working machine for thinking as Duchamp did. Objects that prompt thought and discussion are always exciting. However in those pieces that are aimed back towards art and its discourses, there can be an effect happening like stepping into a hall of mirrors reflecting circumstances backwards and forwards. It becomes easy to lose yourself in this activity. Perhaps a little like sinking into poetry?

Phil:Every painting in the world can be described in words. I might need a few more than a thousand, but I could describe everything in the picture, and every conceivable response or interpretation. If this is true, would you gladly gouge out your eyes and never look at a painting again?

Tim: No. I think maybe there’s something about the mode of description that falls short of communicating something. Description seems to be a literal slow-dance that will never encounter something of a core, human, essence. You could describe your feelings but I would receive them cold.