The significance of Kettle’s Yard House, and Jim Ede’s collection of works and Objects viewed in his constructed Domestic Space. Using my own personal, specific, relationship to Kettle’s Yard House and it’s role in my own early experience of art as a student, as something different from any notion of Site Specific. Of my using Autobiography as the subject, in relation to a kind of Interior, Domestic space. DC: There was an interesting lecture that Badiou gave on the theme of Philosophy as Biography. He took Nietzsche’s proposition that a philosophy is always the biography of the philosopher and read nine stories in turn from his private life in an attempt to demonstrate that a Biography of the philosopher is a piece of Philosophy. AH: That’s sort of it. The Brancusi on top of the piano, the act of placing that there – we get a sense of the person, the biography of the act, even though the interest in the placement, the reflection of the Head in the wood of the Piano lid, is something in itself. But these things are equally important, I don’t want to reduce everything to a sense of the author, or suggest that we need an Author’s Biography to make sense of a work. But it’s the inseparability of the making of the work from the work itself, and the multiplicity of situations that have occurred for you to make that thing that way that day. I like these photos here (points to one of the books on the floor) of David Smith sitting out looking over his sculptures at Bolton Landing. I’m more interested in these photos of him looking at the sculptures than I would be in going to see a sculpture like that in the landscape. In this photo he and the work seem inseparable. This isn’t always the case. I also love the Smithson film of him walking round Spiral Jetty, but driving all the way from California to see it, as a thing in the Landscape,
made it even more interesting than I could have imagined, better as an object than as a Film of an object. I know lots of other artists have focused in on this idea, but I only want it to be one element…I’d like to get to the point where I’d feel comfortable putting a Studio shot into an exhibition alongside sculptures, but I still also want to have the Eyes in Space. DC: So the Domestic is an Ambivalent space. On the one hand it has a relation with Bourgeois Subjectivity insofar as it’s a place where you put your books on the Shelf, you reflect, Create your own self, Create an Individual, make an interior space – but at the same time it’s also a space in which you make things that are in Commercial Circulation your own, and that’s the whole point of a collector as Walter Benjamin puts it in Unpacking My Library, the History that is part of the object becomes part of your own. The metaphor of interior space is going to be unavoidable unless you link it to the Performative Aspects, it needs to be part of the discourse… it needs to be really, really tight, but disjunctive, and subtly paradoxical, like Lacan at his best. It’s been fun hearing you talk, it’s been a while since I heard you Monologuing, but in that time you’ve done a lot of talking about your work and now you’ve begun to construct a performance of Andy talking about his artwork. It’s fun hearing stuff you’ve said before, even though I’ve not heard it before, and comparing it to stuff I used to hear before when you were just thinking on the fly. The Starbucks spiel was great. It’s like a good comedian, going over the same routine, it seems improvised…. AH: I’d like to be as good as Daniel Kitson…. DC: Become a mechanical automaton. This is the way you can try and bring it together. Don’t look for a discursive framework outside of the 33