Skip to main content
Read page text
page 4
Art training is an incredibly good training for life, especially for what we are facing. I’m interested in this kind of experimentation, for artwork to act as a proxy for a kind of inquiry into living. To deprivilege the idea that we’re solely ‘making art’ and instead attempt to access a way of being. of the welfare state and the legacies of empire, with class and to some extent whiteness, in that these factors play into who is or isn’t able to afford the fully articulated fantasy of the completist nuclear family, which is a bad model for care. When you put all your eggs into that particular basket the impact can be devastating, because you are radically unsupported within that model, you’re put into a vulnerable situation of childbirth and the postpartum period. This is the entropic rite at the heart of our species’ survival and it has been stripped of every resource. It is part of the pathological situation in Britain under this venal, damaged and dehumanised ruling class. No wonder there’s trouble. I’ve often wondered about the psycho-spiritual inheritance of the Enclosures Act of 1773, that every ‘Englishman’s home is his castle’. Private property is at the heart of Britishness, including our psycho-libidinal life. I mean, mine too – right? People say it’s all falling to shit over here, but I say it’s just changing, and transitions are messy. There is also a lot of grief involved, and because there’s no place for this grief, it turns to hatred and rage. When you say there is no place for the grief, do you see art as a place to do something with those feelings? Yes, but it’s not enough. I mean culture at the moment in the UK is deeply politically impotent. The Turner Prize is pretty much the only contemporary art event that the public actually gives a shit about, and what newspapers will report on. I mean, obviously we have our whole calendar, we have our ‘Venice’, our ‘Art Basel’ and all this, you know, but no one gives a damn in the ordinary world, and why should they? I also became pretty parochial at some point in that regard – I forgot that the art world is not really part of the real world, even if it reflects our shared economic reality in a distorted kind of way. I then went through a real midlife crisis where I honestly thought I was going to die. I had such a long circuitous route to finally becoming an artist and it was everything I thought I was, and then I suddenly didn’t want to do it any more, or least not in the same way. I suddenly couldn’t unsee a lot of stuff about relations between art and capital. So I started diversifying my life, my social circle, my hobbies. I mean, I started having hobbies! Shit I was doing just for fun, not as part of ‘the work’, nor extractable for Instagram or anything else. I started clocking off. I took back my one short life. One through-line in your work is who has the right to life, one that brings to mind Achille Mbembe’s writing on necropolitics. For years I’ve had this feeling that when you wrap the works up after a gallery show, it’s like preparing them for the morgue. I feel as if I’m covering their faces and putting them on ice. The way in which the value of an artwork is speculatively connected to whether an artist is alive or nearing death lends a zombie-like feeling to the whole gig; it is anathema to life, and I love everything about living. I don’t care about this death shit, which is capital. And that, unfortunately, is what artworks continually become. 2 Reliquary ( for and after Félix González-Torres, in loving memory), 2022 Art Monthly no. 479, September 2024 Epistemologies, 2018–23
page 5
Some of your previous work has altered the physical elements of protest into often votive, even erotic arrangements, such as the ‘Deeds’ series, which includes hammers and bells dressed in ribbons and fabric. Could you say something about how these works came about? The museum is a mausoleum. So I was riffing on these kinds of ideas. How everything has to show up already DOA or the space will kill it. To actually think about what a frame is – what is its function? It locks something in a box. It’s a killing mechanism, like everything else in the museum, whose aesthetics arrive through the history of the church and the colonial treasure trove. So you have the relics of dead saints and the stolen trophies of coloniality, but ripped out of context. Which is to say, ‘killed’ – all their power neutered and placed in a glass case, like pinned butterflies. For the ‘Deeds’ series I found these wood frames second-hand and then upholstered them in a way I describe as ‘badly resourced local history museum’ aesthetics. So, the work is also a speculative and alternative folk history. I’m completely disinterested in the British left-wing miserablist position, which I find privileged and apathetic and politically useless at a time like this. I really value the Black feminist abolitionist call to arms: that you have to be able to imagine it to make it real. I sometimes try to imagine not just a different future but a different past, one that has been there all along, maybe, in a different timeline, a story that we didn’t learn in school. So, with these works I’m trying to imagine backwards as well as forwards, into the past that might have become, or might yet become, some kind of alternative present. Your exhibition at Eastbourne contained, among other references, a sense of the rift between where revelry has ended and where riot and violent protest has unfolded. The work leaves a moment for closer inspection, not least as a set of disordering allegories of Britishness. Could say something about the staging of this work? The work reflects a messy situation which is at once speculative and present. It’s funny that the more conservative critics found it depressing, because I thought it was kind of joyful. Rioting and protesting can really be very joyful – like, ‘we’re really fucking doing it!’ I started thinking of the show as a way to perhaps imagine what a total general strike might look and feel like. It’s a simple punchline: the crowd control barriers that can’t be controlled are proxies for the people who put them there: the cops with their kettling tactics, the agents of the state. Imagine if these people one day said to each other ‘fuck standing in line, let’s dance the conga!’ and just refused to work and carry out that work of the state. Epic! Messy! Joyful! You know what I mean? There is a recurring use in your work of furniture that has been bent or misshapen, as if it has come under pressure from what might be considered the abstract powers of state. But then something more vital happens: it is as if something has been earthed by your making, something transgressive, personal and defiant. These forms are often ascribed certain identity positions, how do you respond to that? There is a persistent reading of vulnerability in my work, but what in a living experience is not vulnerable? I have this vaguely animist worldview in that I see my works as having their own life, or being extensions of life – I dream into them. All bodies are asymmetrical, all sexuality is strange – right? The reading of my work or somebody’s work under these markers of quote-unquote ‘identity’ is annoying. Look, man, my body is not the only body that has its asymmetries. My body is certainly not the only body in pain. I’m not the only person who has some gender stuff going on. And not only am I not the only one, I am embodying the majority here. It’s not the 1%; it’s the 99%. The exceptionalist othering of this stuff is a nice flex and a good gig for some, but since I don’t believe that cis-gendered, able-bodied or the heterosexual exist, I don’t want to comply with that narrative. Also because it’s just more Barnum & Bailey, you know, freak show vibes for the punters who erroneously imagine that they themselves are somehow not freaks. The way that my work is discussed implies that those things are real and I’m so fucking tired of it, man. By some measure, by seeming to be in contradistinction to something, you’re only reaffirming its centre? I’ve allowed my work to be discussed like this for years, this whole ‘precariousness and vulnerability of bodies’ stuff. Now I’m thinking, what was going on there? Maybe I’m changing as well. You asked why I think ideas of identity are played out, but I want to reiterate that when it comes to (what is known in right-wing circles as) ‘identity politics’ – and if we’re picking sides, then I’m an identitarian on the front line and I’ll be moving into the fray for the kids who want to fly those flags. But I really don’t want any fucking flag, not for me, even though I understand that they have been necessary or important at different times. Again, I really have to be careful about how I speak about that in public, because this is actually the line, you know: the political ‘right’ and ‘left’ are breaking down, like everything else. So, you have this kind of new right, which believes itself to be the new left but which is made up of reactionaries who gather around this complete fantasy of ‘the woke elite’. Which is just so fucking stupid. As far as those people are concerned, I’m certainly one of the ‘woke elite’, but I’m also here to say that there is no such thing, and that it’s a transparently paranoid, obviously libidinised fantasy. I sometimes try to imagine not just a different future but a different past, one that has been there all along, maybe, in a different timeline, a story that we didn’t learn in school. So, with these works I’m trying to imagine backwards as well as forwards, into the past that might have become, or might yet become, some kind of alternative present. Art Monthly no. 479, September 2024 3

Page Text

View plaintext

Art training is an incredibly good training for life, especially for what we are facing. I’m interested in this kind of experimentation, for artwork to act as a proxy for a kind of inquiry into living. To deprivilege the idea that we’re solely ‘making art’ and instead attempt to access a way of being.

of the welfare state and the legacies of empire, with class and to some extent whiteness, in that these factors play into who is or isn’t able to afford the fully articulated fantasy of the completist nuclear family, which is a bad model for care. When you put all your eggs into that particular basket the impact can be devastating, because you are radically unsupported within that model, you’re put into a vulnerable situation of childbirth and the postpartum period. This is the entropic rite at the heart of our species’ survival and it has been stripped of every resource. It is part of the pathological situation in Britain under this venal, damaged and dehumanised ruling class. No wonder there’s trouble.

I’ve often wondered about the psycho-spiritual inheritance of the Enclosures Act of 1773, that every ‘Englishman’s home is his castle’. Private property is at the heart of Britishness, including our psycho-libidinal life. I mean, mine too – right? People say it’s all falling to shit over here, but I say it’s just changing, and transitions are messy. There is also a lot of grief involved, and because there’s no place for this grief, it turns to hatred and rage.

When you say there is no place for the grief, do you see art as a place to do something with those feelings? Yes, but it’s not enough. I mean culture at the moment in the UK is deeply politically impotent. The Turner Prize is pretty much the only contemporary art event that the public actually gives a shit about, and what newspapers will report on. I mean, obviously we have our whole calendar, we have our ‘Venice’, our ‘Art Basel’ and all this, you know, but no one gives a damn in the ordinary world, and why should they?

I also became pretty parochial at some point in that regard – I forgot that the art world is not really part of the real world, even if it reflects our shared economic reality in a distorted kind of way. I then went through a real midlife crisis where I honestly thought I was going to die. I had such a long circuitous route to finally becoming an artist and it was everything I thought I was, and then I suddenly didn’t want to do it any more, or least not in the same way. I suddenly couldn’t unsee a lot of stuff about relations between art and capital. So I started diversifying my life, my social circle, my hobbies. I mean, I started having hobbies! Shit I was doing just for fun, not as part of ‘the work’, nor extractable for Instagram or anything else. I started clocking off. I took back my one short life. One through-line in your work is who has the right to life, one that brings to mind Achille Mbembe’s writing on necropolitics. For years I’ve had this feeling that when you wrap the works up after a gallery show, it’s like preparing them for the morgue. I feel as if I’m covering their faces and putting them on ice. The way in which the value of an artwork is speculatively connected to whether an artist is alive or nearing death lends a zombie-like feeling to the whole gig; it is anathema to life, and I love everything about living. I don’t care about this death shit, which is capital. And that, unfortunately, is what artworks continually become.

2

Reliquary ( for and after Félix González-Torres,

in loving memory), 2022

Art Monthly no. 479, September 2024

Epistemologies, 2018–23

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content