The Art of Conversation About Art
Interviews, whether with the famous or not, are commonplace in mass media, both on the airwaves and in print. The wide-spread use of the in-depth interview as a journalistic device dates from the mid-Nineteenth Century. Published in book form is something that makes an appearance in the second half of the Twentieth Century.
This essay is an examination of three examples of books involving conversations with visual artists and a look at how they differ.
Critic and curator David Sylvester’s book of interviews with the painter Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: Interviewed by David Sylvester, first published 1975 (followed by subsequent editions containing additional interviews) is now considered a classic example of the form. The author’s long friendship with Bacon allows for the relaxed nature of the interviews with the artist, who was often aggressive and wilfully obtuse with others. The questions, and their answers, focus mainly on Bacon’s methods, motivations and influences. For those interested in gaining insight into the art practice and mindset of one the most important figurative painters of the Twentieth Century, and by extension something of creative process in general, Sylvester’s book is required reading.
These interviews also serve as something of antidote to the plethora of recent biographies that tend to focus on the more lurid aspects of the artist’s life. As with Vincent Van Gogh, there is a proclivity to construct a narrative about Bacon that makes him out to be some sort of tragic figure in the grip of a mania. With both artists there is a popular misconception that they were able to produce works of great existential truth because of their outsider status and, assumed, precarious mental health. The truth these interviews reveal (as the letters to his brother does with Van Gogh) is that Bacon had a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of art history and his place within it; and his means of expression, the technical aspects of the craft of painting, were a matter of considered choices.
What needs to be kept in mind when reading these interviews, recorded on dates ranging from 1962 to 1974, is that when they were first published, in 1975, Bacon’s work was considered radical. This was not for any technical or formal reasons; Bacon produced oil paintings in an Expressionist manner, with figures depicted in a relatively shallow pictural space. It was, in fact, that he was producing these figurative paintings at a time when Minimalism and Conceptional Art were the dominant movements academically, curatorially, critically and commercially. Painting, representational or otherwise, had been declared dead. It wasn’t until the 1980s and the rise of Post-Modernism, that ‘art world’ allowed figurative painting to be taken seriously, albeit predominately from an ironic critical position.
The other radical feature of Bacon’s work was its, at times explicit, homo-erotic imagery. Although homosexuality in England and Wales was, to some extent, decriminalized in 1967, in 1975 it was still illegal elsewhere in the UK and in many other places in the world. In the mid 1970’s depictions of homosexuality, especially, as in Bacon’s work, ones with sado-masochistic overtones, remained shocking and upsetting to the general public.
It is important to note, that Sylvester in his Preface owns up to the amount of editing that took place. Beyond the abridging necessary to deal with what were many hours of recorded interviews; in order to make the text readable, there was a great deal of chopping, changing, and condensing of answers given on different dates. While not generally advertised, this is, in fact, standard journalistic practice. The practice is necessary because, with rare exceptions, a verbatim transcription of off-the -cuff remarks would make for a difficult and awkward read.
One assumes, given the continued friendship with Sylvester, that Bacon had no objection to this; and, as a result of this editing, or in spite of it, the interviews have an intimate conversational quality to them.
That said, one can still sense the adversarial dynamic inherent in the interviewer-interviewee paradigm at work. At times Sylvester will look to lead Bacon in a certain direction and sometimes the artist goes willingly and at other times, insists on moving off in another direction. There is, beneath the bonhomie, an implicit sense of an interrogation.
The illustrations contained in the 1975 edition in my possession, are in black and white and of pretty poor quality. The available 2016 edition looks to have much improved reproductions, and in colour.
Carrying on from Sylvester’s seminal book, the published artist interview has become more common. This is especially so with the publications that accompany exhibitions. Its popularity could be due, in part, to enabling the feeling of an intimate connection with the artist. This is something often missing in the more formal essays and biographies that are the usual fare in show catalogues. We feel better able to understand the artist’s work if we have of sense of them as a person. These interviews also serve as means for the artist to explain not only their means and methods, but, also, the motivations underling their work. It is a rare visual artist who can produce a coherent essay on the subject of their own work. The interviewer, usually a critic or historian, is someone practiced and skilled at this and can elicit from their interviewee a more cogent philosophy than might otherwise be possible.
A recent example of this catalogue feature is contained in Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch. The Loneliness of the Soul, which was published to accompany the exhibition, titled the same, currently at the Royal Academy in London and traveling to the Munch Museum, Oslo, tentatively, autumn 2021. The interview; which is sandwiched between essays by the show’s Norwegian co-curator, Kari J. Brandtzæg, and Dutch historian, Rudi Fuchs, is conducted by the RA’s curator, Edith Devaney. As might be expected, the interview focuses mainly on the importance Munch’s persona and art holds for Emin and looks back over her career in relation to that. That Devaney gives Emin, someone not shy about expressing strong, and sometimes rather prickly, opinions, a lot of easy questions is to be expected. The answers do serve to illuminate the importance of the artist’s discovery of the artwork of Munch and Egon Schiele in her teenage years, and how the former artist continues to inspire her. This, in retrospect, is not all surprising, as the romance implicit in the expressionism these artists embodied, as well as the often transgressive nature of their imagery, is something that resonates with the adolescent psyche.
Emin continues into her maturity as an ‘expressionist’ artist, something that marks her out from the other YBAs (Young British Artists) she is often lumped in with. The general practice that generation of British artists who came to prominence in the 1990s was along Conceptional and Installation Art lines, art works which made big statements and were presented with a cool ironic posture that spoke more of art school cleverness than anything strongly felt. This art, in itself, was often just a rehash of numerous revolutionary art movements of the 1960s and 70s.
That Tracey Emin was never very comfortable operating within the prevailing YBA aesthetic of time certainly comes across in the interview. Looking back, her contributions, such as 1995’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 to 1995 and My Bed of 1998, show a marked contrast in the ‘heat’ their confessional nature and degree of personal exposure, to the ‘cool’, at a remove quality of her peer’s efforts. And is perhaps a reason her career, as opposed to a number of theirs, continues to be of interest.
What comes across in illustrations contained in this catalogue is the affinity Emin’s drawings share with Munch’s. This is discussed by Devaney and Emin. What is, to my mind, equally of interest is the ways in which they diverge. Unsurprisingly, given the nature of the enterprise, this is not really addressed in their discussion. This is where an interrogative ‘interview’, instead of the congenial ‘conversation’ we get, would have, perhaps, provided a deeper insight in artist’s work.
Shaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now, 2020, by Antony Gormley and Martin Gayford; like the Devaney/Emin section in the Munch-Emin show catalogue, is presented as a ‘conversation with’ as opposed to an interview.
As having the artist, Sir Antony Gormley, and the art critic, Martin Gayford, listed as co-authors, would be indicative of; this book is the record of discussions between co-equals rather than the eliciting of answers to a series of questions.
Gayford has past form for this sort of enterprise, having published previously; with artist David Hockney, A Bigger Message and A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen, in 2011 and 2016 respectively, and in 2014, Rendez-Vous with Art, with the former director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Phillipe De Montebello.
In reading Shaping the World, as with Gayford’s previous efforts, there is the feeling of privileged eavesdropping on the conversation between two, very knowledgeable, friends.
Like Francis Bacon: Interviewed by David Sylvester, Shaping the World has been heavily edited. This is noted (in very small print) in the Acknowledgments located at back of the book. One doesn’t need to have spotted the confession located there to pick up on the after-the- fact additions. They can be found by opening the book to any page, almost, at random. For instance, on pages 138-139 the following two sentences ‘spoken’ by Martin Gayford in reference to The Makapansgat Pebble, c. 2,500,00 BCE.
Many such fragments of curiously shaped rock were owned, and presumably valued, by early humans. These were termed ‘pierres figures’ (‘figured stones’) by the 19th-century French archaeologist Jacques Boucher de Crevecoeur de Perthes who first noticed them; they seem to have been collected deliberately because they have been moved from their original geological location.
The first sentence, complete with its adverbial clause, is plausible as spoken English. The second, not so much. This is not to say that Martin Gayford, as an extremely knowledgeable art expert, wouldn’t necessarily have that little nugget of relevant information tucked away in his ‘memory bank’. It’s just how likely in a free-flowing conversation is he to trot it out in a 39-word sentence, with a semi-colon, and include the, rather awkward, long name of the French archaeologist?
All this added researched erudition, once noticed, does rather interfere with the illusion that the reader is listening in on a conversation.
And that it is a conversation, as opposed to an interview, is evident in how often the authors concur in their observations. It is rare to find either of them questioning the other’s take on something.
Assumptions made about the meaning and context of all sorts of artworks are made with little or no acknowledgement by either author, of possible alternative readings. This is especially true concerning prehistoric artifacts; it’s no surprise that Yuval Noah Harari’s contentious 2014 history, Sapiens, gets a plug here.
Gaylord, to his credit, does occasionally take, in the gentlest way possible, Gormley to task.
This following example occurs on page 29, where Gormley makes, in what is close to a rant on his part, a rather retrograde argument about the superiority of sculpture over painting. Gayford responds thus,
I’m amazed-and amused- to discover the ancient dispute between sculpture and painting is still alive in the21st century! … It’s good to hear it’s still carrying on.
Personally, I’m not sure who, besides Gormley, is “still carrying on” with this.
Which, this supposed conflict between the two disciplines, brings up something that must be noted about this book. It’s subtitle, Sculpture from Prehistory to Now, suggests that it has ambitions to be considered in some regard as a textbook on art history, as in a survey of sculpture through time.
It is always illuminating to consider what gets left out of a survey. In the case of Shaping the World, and pertinent to the issue of painting vs sculpture, important artists, such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, who’s merging of painting and sculpture in the 1950s and 60s was ground breaking, are mentioned only in passing, with no illustration or relevant comment. Other contemporary artists, of renown equal to or greater than Gormley’s, such as Anselm Kiefer and Yayoi Kusama, who’s work moves from two to three dimensions with consummate ease, get no mention at all.
Ancient China gets plenty of attention but important contemporary art being produced there now;as, for instance, the work of Ai Weiwei, there is nothing.
Whole art movements are elided over. For example, Pop Art. Jeff Koons gets a mention, but only in reference to a similar surface treatment as used by Anish Kapoor. There is no sign of artists like Claes Oldenberg, Ed Kienholz, Marisol and Red Grooms. Perhaps the humour implicit in their work make them seem a bit to frivolous for serious-minded Gayford and Gormley.
Minimalist artists, however, do get a fair bit of attention. Minimalism is an aesthetic that the authors struggle with. It’s ‘less, and even less, is more’ reductivism, its ‘end of history’ theorising, doesn’t fit neatly with their thesis. That thesis being, that the representation of the human form is the defining characteristic that links all art across the millennia and continents. Where the that form is absent, the object is either something that stands in for the human metaphorically or operates as a theatrical stage through which the human form moves.
To illustrate the problem they have with Minimalism, on page 99, there is a fairly lengthy discussion about the late Dan Flavin. Which, rather tellingly, gets a number of things wrong.
For instance, there is a confusing of neon and fluorescent light. I’ll spare the reader the technicalities but, take my word here, there are important differences between the two as regards Flavin’s work.
Then, to the point, there is the particular work they have chosen to focus on, Untitled 1997, an installation in a Milan church, is a late piece by the artist. It bears little relation his important and defining work of the 1960s. The 1997 work is a somewhat banal, even hackneyed, bit of theatrical lighting that serves only to emphasise the architectural detail of the church’s interior. It lacks the rigour; the tension between means and effect, between the concrete and illusionary, that his earlier work possesses.
It does, however, fit nicely with their thesis.
And they do similar takes on the work of, amongst others, Donald Judd, Richard Serra and Walter De Maria.
As stated previously, Shaping the World is presented both as the recorded conversations between Martin Gayford and Antony Gormley and as a survey of the art of sculpture.
Regarding the latter, the authors have chosen to eschew the usual linear historical format for the, currently fashionable, option of organising by theme. This allows them to range freely over time and space, and find novel connections between otherwise disparate artworks. And, as noted, this also allows them avoid art and artists that might not suit their purpose, as well as glossing over numerous cultural, political and technological considerations that might also prove awkward.
Given the criticisms expressed above, is Shaping the World worth a read?
The fact that it moved me to find fault is, at least, one reason to say, yes, it is.
This is what is meant by calling something ‘thought provoking’. And if what is being provoked is argument, all the better. It requires thinking through, and research, to explain and defend why you hold another’s position as wrong. One learns more in doing this.
While the ‘conversation’ between Gormley and Gayford would have benefited from having some of that ‘arguing’, they are pleasant enough company. And, barring rare occasions (i.e. neon-fluorescent), knowledgeable guides.
We also, between Gormley’s take on other works of art and discussion with Gayford about his own output, gain some insight into an important contemporary artist’s own practice.
It is, in its own way, quite an exhilarating roller-coaster ride through art history time and space.
The book is copiously illustrated. The quality of the reproductions is adequate, about what one would expect in an artbook at this price.
Interviews with Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact (3rd edition)
2016 Thames & Hudson 9780500292532
Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch. The Loneliness of the Soul
2020 Royal Academy of Arts - Munch 9788293560616
Shaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now
2020 Thames and Hudson 9780500022672