Part of my desire to do something like a public mural is so that I can go back and graffiti it. I want a more complicated relationship.

It comes from a love of crime iction and TV. I’d read some really great writing about the relationship in crime iction between the criminal and the victim and the writer and the reader, and the way those forms can mirror each other around control or can be about revealing and manipulation. In her 2012 book The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm discusses the responsibility of a journalist, which, if you work with cultural material as I do as an artist, has the same kind of re lexive responsibility. It’s all about how you juxtapose things or present them. The way you can tease out narratives is also how documentary ilms are made. I guess I’m always trying to make these connections between a form like oil painting and other forms, whether that’s fashion or writing iction.

When I was working with the ilmmaker Richard Kern, I found that even pornography is guided by rules and formulas. It’s like taking something apart to see how it works and iguring out why fashion works or doesn’t work in a museum. It’s all an experiment to see what it is about painting and what can be learnt about it by comparing and contrasting with other forms which share some kind of DNA. Do you have a strong sense of responsibility when you use other forms? Absolutely. Maybe it’s partly out of a guilty conscience from when I was younger and would just snatch everything like a little racoon and just didn’t even think about it. Luckily, with everything that I was interested in appropriating, I had a sort of innate sense that you always had to punch up. Calling a show something like ‘Brian Eno’ is different from someone like Michael Krebber taking the words of his students and using them in his paintings. There’s a power relation there that, like satire, you have to take from above. It’s the opposite dynamic of unthinkingly taking someone else’s work for the purposes of your own.

I just respect design and other forms like applied art and folk culture. I even have a problem with taking a fashion mannequin and sticking things to it. That is an interesting object in itself, which is not ours to just play with. I’m always very choosy about what I take. Because I’m taking all the time, I’m always re-channelling other aesthetics and movements, but I would hope that how it is chosen and framed is done in an interesting and personal way. And that is why writing about the process is so important to me. Related to this, I’d like to ask you about your selfportrait from 2013, Quodlibet XXVI (Self Portrait), because it’s also about a power relation. It is a quodlibet in which you have painted a printout of an email you sent to curators about a male artist who wanted to use pornographic photographs of you taken by Kern in a show at the ICA called ‘Cosey Complex’. I called it a self-portrait because if there was anything that would constitute a self-portrait it would be something like this, and I just love the idea of the angry email being an art form.

I’d heard from Richard that he had been contacted by an artist who knew that I’d modelled for him and had been in so porn magazines, and he wanted to show these magazine as part of his own work at the ICA. He’s written to Richard, who then wrote to me saying, ‘what do you reckon?’ I just wrote directly to the curators and said, this artist thinks that they’ve discovered some interesting connection between me, Richard and Cosey and her work, which is nothing new.

I think it’s because as soon as there is a naked woman involved it’s considered sort of raw material, as if it’s not mediated or intelligently thought out. Somehow, it’s like my actions to model for Richard must have been naive because there’s no way that I could have that kind of agency, or that Richard and I could have constructed something together, which is about porn’s logic of availability and fake naivety. So I wrote to the curators and just said, this is not

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Lucy McKenzie, Olga Korbut, 1998

Art Monthly no. 442, December 2020 – January 2021