The Art Magazine June 2020 | Page 93

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Hello Andrew and welcome to NotRandomArt. The current issue is revolving around the problem of communication and identity. Is there any particular way you would describe your identity as an artist but also as a human being in dynamically changing, unstable times? In particular, does your cultural substratum/identity form your aesthetics?

Hello, and thank you for having me! We certainly do live in changing and unstable times, but I think all of human history has been that way – nothing is ever static. As Heraclitus said, more or less, the only constant is change itself. Identity itself is a massively complex and complicated issue to discuss, partly because so many of us, myself included, have a sentimental attachment to the idea of identity as something set and unchanging – an eternal statement of fact. I view identity as something more akin to a series of shifting questions and responses, something fluid and mutable. There may be a certain core component that remains relatively constant, but in general I believe that identity changes –we are never exactly the same person in all different situations or with all people. I’m an artist, but I’m also a teacher, a husband and the bloke who likes having the crack with his mates over a pint – and all identities are equally true and valid. I’m an artist, but that’s not all I am, and even my understanding of what being an ‘artist’ is and entails isn’t fixed. For me, any identity is formed through the communication of ideas and emotions in response to specific situations, rather than as an unchanging thing; that it is what we do in different situations which defines us, rather than a more nebulous and static concept of ‘who we are’. Hence why I tend not to use the human figure very much in my work (and if I do it is usually distorted or disguised in some way) – I tend to focus on the traces of our actions and what these can say about us.

Now, whether my understanding of identity has been formed in response to unstable times, I don’t really know, but I am fairly sure that my own identity has been formed, at least partly, in response to having lived in many places (and through some… let’s call them interesting times in them), to being an outsider and immigrant most of my life – which I am certain has had an influence on my artistic approach. Culturally I’m British, but the experience of living in different places creates an interesting uncertainty and tension between where I’m from, where I’ve been and where I am at that time. Each place I have lived in has, in a sense, left its mark on me, through things I have seen and experienced.

Additionally, a lot of things I enjoy or appreciate would generally be considered ‘outside’ the mainstream, from music and literature especially, and I tend to look at things, even things I am an active participant in, from the perspective of an ‘embedded outsider’. One of the central conditions of the world today, I believe, is doubt, and art provides me with a way of working through it and trying to understand the questions the world is, and probably always has been, posing of humanity.

Would you like to tell us something about your artistic as well as life background? What inspired you to be in this artistic point in your life when you are now?

I would say that probably the most dominant factor in my being at this artistic point in my life has been my traveling and experience of life in various places.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve travelled around a lot. My parents left Britain in search of work and, as a result, I lived in South Africa and France for a time. Once I hit my own economic crisis (being a starving artist not being as romantic as it seems in the movies), I became a professional immigrant too – working and living in Thailand, Oman and now Shanghai as a teacher in International schools. My family are old-school left wing and a lot of those political views, and a fair amount of righteous anger were instilled in me from a fairly young age and still come through, I think, in my work, as does my early exposure, via my father, to writers like Kafka, Camus, Sartre and the whole 50’s and 60’s Beatnik existentialism. I’ve been engaged in some form of image-making since I was a child, making my own comic books, illustrations for stories, or even album covers once I got into music. I started a Fine Art course at university, but didn't react very well to the structure of it. I switched my majors instead to Literature and Art History, so much of what I have learned about art, and my practice of it, has been self-taught and through a long process of trial and error. There was a period in my late teens and early 20’s when I was more focused on writing, but even then the work I was doing (mostly short stories and poetry) was very visual, quite abstracted and impressionist with a strong conceptual bent. I got back into painting, mostly in response to some personal issues I was dealing with, in my mid-twenties. Incidentally, I do still use language as part of my practice, whether as quotes (from my own work or others’), in creating compositional elements that look like language, or through titles.

As my main source of income has been teaching for over a decade now, my artistic production has had to take a back seat to this, but over the past couple of years I’ve been trying to switch my focus back to my art, which has been rewarding but difficult. It does feel like things are starting to happen a bit now, with things like this interview being a big part of the process of development, as well as inspiring me to keep developing

olted by the Thought of Known Places… Sweeney Astray” by Joan Jonas was one of the first performance installations that really made a huge impact on me. I was living in Paris during this time, in the early 90s, with a lot of influences from different cultures. It became the starting point of my own work. Joan Jonas practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures. Jonas continues to find new layers of meanings in themes and questions of gender and identity that have fueled her art for over thirty years. She is a great inspiration still today.

It is impossible to avoid the topic of body consciousness, embodied emotions and the image of body and personal identity that we see in your practice. What is the function of the identity appearing in your artworks – is it a canvas used to present your ideas or rather the subject of the art? What inspired you to use this as a theme in your practice?

I have been developing my visual imagery since I began studying art and film - from conceptual thinking, composition, using light and colour in different ways, through all the different techniques I've utilised over the years in my work and in my collaborations with stage artists such as dancers, musicians and actors. My approach is always developing through exploring these things. Visual imagery in essence is your way of experiencing what you see and transforming it. This is my world that I want to share and express through my art. The body consciousness, embodied emotions and the image of body and personal identity is part of this visual imagery, the emotional essence in my practice. Always present and always developing in different themes and projects.

Marina Abramovic stated: You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of

which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'Can you relate anyhow to these words?

de-identify myself, by losing my roots, my culture, I would be very happy. Unfortunately the human being does'nt choose the place where he is born. He grows up in a society that automatically identifies, through education, culture, family... More than ever I think it's more important to go on a way of self-knowledge with the aim to meet “the other”.. This other without which we can not exist. It's the same for the artist. It is more important for me to be focused on my practice than to try to define it according to esthetic criteria of identification. It's probably the reason i like to remember the painter Matisse who said or wrote that an artist must never be prisoner of himself, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation.

Would you like to tell us something about your background? Could you talk a little about experiences that has influence the way you currently relate yourself to your artworks?

All my way is influenced by encounterings.

It began by the meeting with my professor of literature at school. More than giving French or Literature classes, she brought us to discover texts, movies, plays, visual artworks and to think about on what we saw or read.. Thanks to her that I met Pierre Vincke, a theatredirector who was worjink in the tradition of Grotowski ... Both of them have led me to go to theater school. In this school I had meetings. Meetings with artists but also and especially human beings that made me discover. I always need o discover rather than to master a practice. It's probably the reason my encounter with Monica Klingler and Boris Nieslony was decisive for me and led me on the path of Performance Art which is a form still difficult to define. Each performance artist has a different definition of what it is...

Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about race and ethnic identity in visual culture?

No I don't have a specific artwork that has influenced my artistic practise but many.

I'm influenced by some philsophers as well as poets or musicians or dancers or visual artists but also by some places or landscapes or atmospheres ... For some years, I was used for example to go to India where I was used to follow some traditionnal muscians or to learn bharatanatyam and practice vipassana meditation... Of course this experience has impacted my art work.... This brought me to think and work differently... My experience in India brought me to discover traditionnal strong art and paradoxally to the way of Performance Art. But there I see one common point: to make no separation between art and life and to be here and now, without projection on the future.

It's difficult for me to speak about race and ethnic identity. But I can say that today we miss more and more this notion of “to be here and now” which is more present in some cultures ... By practising Performance Art, it's my way to be connected to this way of thinking. And even in this field actually it's more and more difficult. The society and the art world brings us more and more to plan in advance, to define our work, more than to do. Just to do. To do what we deeply need.

And of course, my encountering with Black Market International and later the notion of Open Source or Open session via PAErsche have also a big impact on my work. When we go on that, each of us perform by sharing time and space but without trying to convince each other on some common way. This is for me a wonderfull way how we can meet each other, regardless of our origin, our race or our “identity”...

Many of your works carry an autobiographical message. Since you transform your experiences into your artwork, we are curious, what is the role of memory in your artistic productions? We are particularly interested if you try to achieve a faithful translation of your previous experiences or if you rather use memory as starting point to create.

My memory is clearly a starting point to create. I don't have any autobiographical message. I use my personnal experience ( what I feel , what I see, what I learn, what I ear...) to work. It's a motor or a material. I'm not able to paint, so I can't do something with red or white or yellow or black colors. All I have is life, a body alive. And I need to do something with that...

My sensation about life sometimes is too intense then I need to transform this intensity in some action. Some artistic action... If people can take something from this action this is great... but I don't want to give them “a specific message” or to control the translation of my experience.