and then it would go back out into the world imme-
of walking in a rally, or even the same with eating
diately. But in reality it’s a much slower cycle. Goya’s
together. It’s doing something with a whole lot of
Disasters of War (1810-1820) was a very formative
people. In the case of a march, it’s to do with this
artwork for me as it feels like the video footage of
very simple action of walking, which we constantly
contemporary conflict in Egypt, but in reality it
do without thinking, but through this we make
was published thirty years after the events that the
walking into something that has meaning. Regard-
etchings depict.
less if it’s for or against anything, it’s an act that interrupts the way a street normally is. When all of
Similar to Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818).
Yeah, there are all these kinds of delays in art mak-
these people just decide to walk down together, it suddenly looks like a magical and marvellous thing.
ing which are both a continual source of frustration
Again, it’s your ideas of reappropriation and chal-
in the sense that one desires a direct form of contact
lenging of fixed meanings.
with events as they unfold, but also I think it’s a part of the potency of it, because it means that it’s on a
That very basic idea of the world seeming less fixed
different temporal register, and that’s part of how it
in its forms and also the resignation about the state
unsettles our relationships to the past and the future.
of the world being unsettled is something I like about that participatory structure, where lots of
Many of your works have an interactive element,
people do something together.
whether they are posted on a wall, hanging off an aeroplane or fixed to a fireplace. What do you see as the role of the audience when viewing these works?
I guess it’s partly because the work is often interested with those collective meanings, and so it’s a way to embed that interest in collective meanings, identities or histories within the actual form of the work that literally gets disseminated out into the world. You probably would have noticed that I’ve got a recurrent or chronically repetitive interest in the ‘stack’, which is partly because, for me, the stack is a form of potential dissemination. You have one item in the museum, and then it goes over all these different spaces outside the museum. The way the work has, within its life, the idea of a collective identity or transformation, is important. This relates to my childhood experiences of being taken by my mother to Palm Sunday Peace Rallies, and the phenomenon
Before I start sounding too much like a hopeless utopian, I should say that the work always involves both participation and a kind of imposition, so it’s never totally straightforward. People participate but they have to do something. So there’s a mix of being involved but also having something upon them, which centres around this question of desiring something else but also always being incumbent. You don’t ever dream from a tabula rasa, you imagine the world with all of this ‘stuff’ already on your shoulders. So this idea that forgetting is not as simple as Yoko Ono kissing and making up, is important as well. It’s never a straight-out utopian thing. I think art has to have something of the structure of the world within itself. Maybe that’s just an excuse for being a control freak! But there is always an imposition as well as an invitation. XXX Ormond Papers
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