metropolis m

‘What I’m interested in is being quite deliberate and ugly in the way that I’m using materials. Using the brain matter, for instance, is quite clumsy and direct. These things would be considered within the art world as ready-mades, but I think that we can also see that basically we’ve developed away from the familiar definition of ready-made. We have objects in the world that we can actually reapply a use to. There’s something subversive and problematic here, which comes from a more apocalyptic and dystopian-minded horizon, though that’s less interesting to me than the idea that the reasons why these objects specifically exist might change by actually misusing them.

For instance, for the Art Institute of Chicago, I was very interested in using the jet engines from an old Boeing ‘Looking Glass’ long-range surveillance aircraft; a very specific surveillance aircraft, which flew around the world hundreds of times and continuously surveyed a specific period in American history. The plane was a symbol and a very necessary object for a certain sense of liberalism in America to survive. So, for me to put them in the context of the Art Institute of Chicago was to suggest that these objects on the roof (the jet engines) allowed for the existence of the objects underneath – the art objects – that had been made during the period that these surveillance aircraft engines had been active. You could have Rothko making his paintings simply because these aircraft were in the sky over northern Europe, the Balkans, etc., gathering information.

A further key to the work is the inclusion of antidepressants in the engine mechanism. This is where the idea of objective re-use perhaps becomes complex, where the pharma-substance is at the forefront of material development. A substance that can artificially reset our sense of reality is enclosed within the mechanical object of ‘reality gathering’ that is the plane. Two fragmentary episodes, fused.’

‘Well, the impenetrability of the work itself is something which is also very useful, but you can’t just suggest that something has come from the planet Mars and say that its impenetrability and its oblique strategy are actually going to satisfy anybody’s needs. You need to have some kind of projection into what you think the work is going to become after the event. You want to pre-empt the present, but also the future of the work itself, and I think that’s the important thing; that what an artist should actually try to achieve is to pre-empt a future for the artwork to exist in. So, you can’t decide that your only dialogue is with –as you describe it – this very dense population of discussion and theorising and the professionalization of that discussion. That context is so solid, and you wonder if an artwork can survive within that kind of environment. How can the artwork proceed? How does it have a life when the focus of language consistently erodes the present-at-handness of the work? When the language fades but the object remains?

‘The art world tends to be rather professionalised in the way that it arranges for the artist to either visit the commercial gallery or to go the museum space and to activate the space with whatever it is that they do. There is an inevitability to that, which is obviously something that you have to break free of. You have to not feel that you’re part of an arena that’s already been established as a place of activity. Perhaps is a limit that can be transgressed. I think it’s healthy and useful to move away from that, simply because you don’t want to feel that you’re just performing. You don’t want to become a certain professionalised individual who just goes from museum to museum. You want to transcend that. So that’s part of it. A certain resistance to having to deal with the movement of museums.

If you want to be part of the real world, if you want to have the work exist within some kind of real environment, then you want it in front of people and not mediated to some degree. Obviously, it’s always going to be mediated because that’s the nature of the system, but I think you want to try and tear down as many of those kinds of separating systems as possible, to put your ideas directly into the mind of the viewer.

Yes, you have to go into the environment somehow, and so Seizure was very interesting in terms of that being very direct towards the public. And the use of materials and the way that it was built were also very direct. The crystallisation is real. It’s a process of reality. It’s not a synthetic process and it’s not an aesthetic simulation. There were no structures that the viewer wasn’t going to be part of somehow, and I think that’s very rare. The Art Institute of Chicago was very similar. In a way, it was a very public space on top of a museum, which was supposed to be related to the parkland via a bridge designed by Renzo Piano, and it had a sense of being very much in a space between the free space of Chicago and the private space of the individual art museum. So, in a way, it activated that separation somehow.’

‘I was very interested in the ritualistic nature of certain artworks and in imposing ritual into environments. The government Home Office wanted to commission a piece of work for its new building, and I suggested a ritual for the building, rather than any object. The ritual came from an earlier piece, which was a sheet of silver that had been anointed with amyl nitrate for a collector. For the Home Office I proposed installing a large piece of silver, to be cleaned everyday by somebody. So there was this obsessive compulsiveness in a brand-new building, but with an arcane, ritualistic kind of imposition onto it. I thought that that would complete the building somehow, and I think that they thought that was of course mad and they didn’t want to go down that route. That piece ended up in Jesus College in Cambridge. There they clean the sheet of silver, which is right by the door to the chapel, every day.’

‘Well, interestingly enough, because it’s Jesus College, they have rituals for everything. So, in a way, I just introduced a new one! It wasn’t so unusual. Those works, which were very much about a rather secular ritual towards an object, are basically a ritualistic version of obsessive-compulsive disorder somehow, and they led towards the prayer idea for Trafalgar Square.’

‘Well, not wanting to sound kind of high-minded, but some of this comes out of reading Being and Time and actually enjoying Heidegger. The usefulness of Heidegger these days is in the task of developing refined technologies towards self-cognitive computers, future AI. We need to find techniques and systems which allow for the clean retention of memory; but then also the correct interpretation of experience is very important. We have to fundamentally understand ‘the being of being’, so that we can understand ‘experience’ and then support that through systems of technology. So, Heidegger is very important. It became apparent that I was very interested in the brain matter of these works, because they were carriers of extremely sophisticated structure and memory development. Even if it was bovine or animalistic, it was very important to suggest that these things operate within the system as waste material, they are subject to decay.’

‘Well, eroticism is going to be the only ‘-ism’ that survives, perhaps. Yes, for sure, I’m very interested in the sense of eroticism within the object’s future use, especially in the newer work that I’m currently considering. The new work describes sexual acts between two males – sculptural forms of male copulation, with the ‘other’ made of transparent membrane. A sculpting on the membrane of reality is perhaps the fantasy, under arousal.

Making an artwork is a form of behaviour. It’s a behavioural incident rather than something that you can delegate to someone else. These sculptures are building on the kind of position you might find in Jacob Epstein in taking a primitivist form, but without pretending to want to go back to a simulated primitivism, where everything was sunshine and wonderfulness before civilisation and complications came. Basically, we carry the primitive with us, and I’m saying that maybe it’s a negative position to take rather than a positive. I think these sculptures with their primitive nature are probably the truer future objects that I can make currently.

In a way, I’m trying to really just not have an aesthetic, but when I do have an aesthetic, because it’s a by-product of thought, and thought is continuous; I want to pre-empt some kind of future for the object and try to understand what that object would look like. So, in a way, I’m trying to look for a way of surviving as an artist, as somebody who makes work, by being completely inconsistent. When I see an artist who looks like they’re going to make one type of work and it’s very obvious, then I have no interest in them. I think that there has to be a certain investigation and that it’s an investigation of self through your own life. The movement towards politics in art at the moment is a desire to be completely pinpointed within the position of ‘the now’, because ‘in the now’ is all you can offer.’

‘If you think about my work as just being systems, then this is the subject somehow. But all systems can’t just be systems alone. They have to have some kind of activity or substance to them. So, I think that the substance of these potentially ritualistic systems that I’m trying to portray are the by-products of certain thought processes – some kind of substance is reintroduced into the visual sphere, but fundamentally changed by an internal challenge of values. The substance retains some familiarity in order to be acceptable on first instance, but delivers a subversion after that.

Here’s a simple description of a productive practice: An object is designed within a certain system of codes that imposes and reinforces these dominant, identified codes. You find your behaviour is in accordance to the objects. We’re surrounded by codified practices consistently imposed on us by dominant objects. We’re under a narrow coercion from the objects that we design for ourselves. Of course, this question is strikingly obvious: Are we a balanced society? Can we retool our objects, perhaps? What would that involve, and is it possible to transgress the continuous production of next-generation objects, to insert transgressive stimulus, the cross of semen and the light bulb, for example? To retool, simply to ask: Do we live in a society where we make objects towards the darker side of our psyche? Is it useful to continue this procedure even further, with more necessity and speed?

To consider your earlier question: It’s very difficult to translate authoritarian procedures through a visual culture or visual language. Sure, we can provide the image of political action: the artist’s portrait with bolt cutters under her coat, the display of lock-picking devices. These images obviously end close to their conception, as a fetish within the image of insurrection; no true action has taken place, no possibility of change, only the wish to do something with the hollow ring of… What exactly?

It’s worth considering seriously an activity based in a real procedure, a claiming of space by a group of people – for want of a better expression, to ritualise a public space with a specific activity activated by the artist and the group. I designed one activity in particular; although it became another dead proposal, I’ll persevere. The original focus was both here in London and in New York, but on reflection I widened the geographical scope to be just anywhere. I introduce ritualistic practices of mass erasure; I lecture; and in conclusion I bring up the procedure: the painting-over of street names, simply to blank them out. The suggestion is to disorient the environment by a simple painted erasure of a road sign, to repeat this indefinitely, to erase the city itself. Of course, this is a symbolic behaviour, a criminal act of mannered vandalism. That’s the energy of the activity, to some degree. Any action against another human being invokes certain types of energy; that’s the condition of such a work. It is an egalitarian activity that includes the whole, the excluded, in an option to create. The aesthetic regime – a mode of equivalence, the loss of a hierarchy of meaning in art and literature –encourages the lesser need of a personal technique. Within this ritual, the individual claims the same intensity of feeling as within the isolated creation of an individualist artwork. This enhanced indifference lets us fully consider the temporary – a subject that engages me most, perhaps. The devaluation of the artwork, the devaluation in the position of the artist as a nominator of knowledge and as a poetic translator, designates a symptom of a disease that is only the very beginning of a future crisis. But we can engage in this symptom with confidence; we need to confidently participate in acts of uncertainty, to gather fragments of the present and construct objects of uncertainty. We can encourage the construction of objects and rituals in the intersection of power and strategic function.’