Writer, poet, photographer, art critic, curator… which pursuit have you found most satisfying? I do whatever seems most relevant to me at the time. The important writers in the English tradition, particularly the poets, divide into two tribes. The professionals – Dryden, Pope, Tennyson, Browning – and those who led complex lives and wrote poems with the left
hand: Donne, Marvell, Herbert, the scapegrace Earl of Rochester. I’m quite a good administrator and organiser, so I don’t mind devoting part of my time to that, especially if it benefits other creative personalities. However, I have a resistance to bureaucratic structures and the pressures of received opinion, so I prefer to do that kind of thing independently.
Back Chat Mike Whitton
Edward Lucie-Smith What drew you in to being involved with the Bermondsey Project Space? In a rather typical way for me – I was asked to curate the annual Bow Arts Trust show in 2010. A warehouse space had just become available in Bermondsey – one administered by Crisis, the big national charity for the homeless. I got on well with the people who ran it – so they asked me if I’d like to continue my involvement. In curating Polemically Small you have taken a stand against what you have called ‘the outmoded rhetoric of size’. What have you got against ‘big art’? ‘Big art’ is almost inevitably public art funded by the state. It often doesn’t have enough to say, in relation to its overweening size. ‘Small art’ requires a different kind of contemplation: you can focus on what it is trying to say to you, buy it, live with it in an ordinary domestic space. Last year, with a group of colleagues, I did a Polemically Small show for the Torrance Art Museum in South Los Angeles. It featured work by 88 young British artists, all on paper less than A3+ and unframed; probably the biggest show of contemporary British art, in terms of numbers of artists, ever presented in California. The total transportation cost was around $600. The British Council flirted with the idea
56
RWA magazine Autumn 2012
but in the end refused to help. I’m afraid my reaction was ‘F*** you, baby – we can do it on our own!’ And we did. Of the artists, writers and poets you have met, who would you say was the most extraordinary? I like some famous artists and writers when I meet them – or sometimes not. When they are already very celebrated, it is pretty certainly too late to form a real personal connection. You can admire what someone does, but not like them at all personally. I often pity the very famous for being seemingly trapped by their own celebrity. Those artists, quite a number nowadays, who set out to be shamans, quasi-religious figures, don’t have my respect. To put it bluntly, I think they are solipsistic frauds. Given the easy availability of pornography on the Internet, what is the role of erotic art in the modern world? The erotic impulse is fundamental to art. It’s not going to go away. The Internet is not going to make any difference. No doubt Stone Age puritans complained about the easy availability of pictures of people screwing that were to be found on the walls of their caves. What exhibition have you recently visited that you have found particularly impressive? I thought the Leonardo show
born 1933 demonstrated that he was a classic non-deliverer where paintings were concerned – nothing, except perhaps for the two big altarpieces, was completely carried through. I didn’t like the Hockney show at the RA – I thought the big landscapes crude and garish – ‘colourful’, yes, but not in the right way. If you want a real colourist, look at Bonnard. I quite liked the Freud show at the NPG – but there was a curious lack of real empathy with his subjects. He seemed most at home with people whose physical appearance was slightly weird, like the performance artist Leigh Bowery or Big Sue the Benefit Supervisor. The Hirst show at Tate Modern demonstrated that Hirst is a man of very few ideas – after the first room, it was the same things over and over: spot paintings, things in glazed cabinets, dead animals in tanks of formaldehyde. Some of the ideas weren’t even original to him. I own a little table made around 1900, with a top that has a pattern of butterfly wings under glass. Hang that top on the wall and you could easily mistake it for a Hirst. To my surprise I did admire the Hirst paintings recently shown at White Cube in Bermondsey – the ones that all the posh reviewers denounced so violently. They showed that he had made an intelligent study of early Cubism, and also of aspects of Cézanne (who was
berated in his own time for being crude and clumsy). I also very much liked the show we gave to the late Dave Pearson at the Bermondsey Project – the ambitious multi-panel ‘Byzantium’ paintings most of all. Not all good art has to be small. I feel that Pearson was a genuine, slightly eccentric genius, on a level with, but not at all like, Spencer. What major change would you like to see in the world of contemporary art? We need a revolution of some sort. The avant-garde has been kidnapped by officialdom. Too many circuses, and not enough bread. The condescending populism of the current regime means that I’d love to see a few tumbrils making their way to a guillotine set up in front of Tate Modern. Tracey Emin as MarieAntoinette? If you could meet any great artist from the past, who would that be, and why? Caravaggio – violent, probably smelly, tough to communicate with because of my very limited Italian. Essentially he set out to change the existing way of seeing the world. What’s not to like?
Polemically Small: Orleans House, Richmond upon Thames, until 23 September