BILL CULBERT
Blue Cloud, Green Waterfall
December 2023–11 February 2024
of your life was a false dichotomy, and that everything comes from lived experience. Thereby, light and a concern with it was bound up with the way it falls on objects, in the full sun of Provence and his determined moving there almost from the start of his moving to Europe.
What do you think drew Culbert to Europe?
I think he was drawn by seeing all that French work in books and catalogues and realising it was a way for him to carry through a belief in working.
When I say ‘manifold’, I am referring to Culbert’s broad use of media for observing and capturing light. He began his career as a painter in the 1950s—making abstract and figurative compositions, including selfportraits—before commencing his better-known and prolific work with photography, sculpture, installation, drawing, and holography. Do you think painting continued to inform Culbert’s practice? What do you think his subsequent multi-media approach demonstrates about his work?
His paintings are pivotal to the whole progress of the work, from the early portraits done in New Zealand, through the almost home-made cubism of the middle period, to the later abstraction, and the light objects and assemblies. It’s time to do a large painting exhibition, to show the origins of his domesticity, which continues right through the gathering of parts for the later works and their functioning, the inclination to abstraction, the pure modernism after he saw Duchamp. He had travelled, by working, his passage to New York and on to the UK by merchant ship and took time off in New York to go to Philadelphia and see Etants Donnés and The Large Glass. ‘Space Age!’ as he often used to say. Then he became the ‘bricoleur’ of all the parts of his oeuvre. Painting as a concern later became just observation, but he always knew what was useful to him, even though that was not centrally what he did any longer. What connects it all is the ease and facility of that open line in his drawing, the notebooks, the worksheets, the timetables, to-do lists, the shopping lists, all done with a Parker 51 pen and ink.
What did he mean by ‘Space Age’?
I think it was just an off-the-cuff remark on Bill’s part, but it connected all the cartoon modernism he saw all around him in France, the extended use of poured concrete to make strange shapes and buildings, the legacy of the Citroen car, all of that.
Culbert kept notebooks throughout his career in which he would sketch and notate ideas, potential works, observations and references. Some of his earliest references are to Duchamp, Cezanne and Malevich. Of Cezanne’s work, he has written, ‘Cezanne painted seriously not subject matter but space and light, and through th[is] the objects became part of th[e] space.’ There are some obvious connections to Culbert’s work when recalling these artists, but what do you make of these lineages?
Those artists were paramount, and I think only supplanted, moved aside and beyond when Bill found Duchamp as a model for a way of working. He changed the picture plane from illusion to the manipulation of actual objects in the world.
It seems interesting to me that one of modern painting’s responses to photography was a sustained focus on the capture of changing light. In 1975, Culbert took 10 photographs of a single window over the course of a day. The suite, 10 Photographs Taken Between Sunrise and Moonrise one One Day in Winter, documents shifting light and its effects on the view through the window, making an overt connection between light and vision.
Bill was quite aware of the serial nature of modernist work, as a device for emphasis and changing sequence. But we must not forget that there are elegant family photographs, equivalent to the drawn and painted portraits of the painting years. I think the photograph also gave him the idea of being able to do editions of a work, as many of them are. He was also always aware of the irony of using visual apparatus, like the portrait of him photographed by his son Clay, in which he is holding a double-barrelled brick like binoculars to his eyes. [Referring to Long view (Coagnes, France), 1992].
Among his numerous subjects, Culbert photographed lamps, globes, shadows, refractions, daylight, moonlight, twilight, sunrise, and more. These photographs map and make overt mutuality and immersions— light emanating instruments simultaneously have light cast upon them; light outside the camera enters its aperture and subsequently generates an image using and depicting light. Emanuele Coccia makes a similar observation through the analogy of a fish moving through water, which can simultaneously be read as water moving through a fish.
I feel your Coccia notion is too spiritually leading—a metaphysic. It does however feel somewhat parallel to the way pinhole cameras make images, and the early light machines and objects that use such mechanisms, the black sphere projecting the filaments of the bulb inside it onto wherever they fall.
To my knowledge, Culbert didn’t produce any cyanotypes or solarised prints, which seem a natural extension of what you’re speaking about.
Perhaps. Even the hologram was stretching it a bit, and I think he only used it as a process because it became practically available for him and was offered a residency in New York.
Thinking further on the relationship between light and photography, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Félix González–Torres come to mind. Both, like Culbert, were concerned with recording intangible experiences such as temporality and memory. There’s a tenderness or even melancholy in their connections between light and photography—light comes to represent the energy of a certain person, place or time, as well as the mechanism for reconnection. Culbert’s works seem to have this postcard-like quality, too.
I’m not sure Bill was concerned about ‘recording’ in the way you suggest, but was concerned with making, building. The photograph for him was not necessarily a memory of a time or place but a construct that could only be that way. The photograph was an adjunct to the constructed work, somewhere between the process of the drawing and the installed object.
was represented not by its diminishment in perspective as a line-up but by the different linear volumes they held when placed next to each other!
Provence and the dump at Sault were very important places for Culbert. Why?
I think we’ve dealt with Provence and the constant light. The dump at Sault was one of his favourite picking-grounds, a source of much discarded material and objects that led him to make new pieces or, if not quite so elevated a reason, then to find a new lamp for the house or a pipe to take water away from the terrace.
Culbert is a New Zealand artist but lived and exhibited internationally. Do you think his practice had any regional specificities to speak of?
I think the work is from where it was made—New Zealand, Provence, London. It used materials from that place and was a collaboration with it. And occasionally with someone he met there.
Do you think that’s why Culbert collaborated often with artist Hone Papita Raukura (Ralph) Hōtere?
I think Ralph Hotere was for Bill a special case of collaboration, and confirmed the notion of the original place he came from, something elemental and beyond choice and decision.
What do you think Culbert would be working on now?
That’s a difficult one. The work proceeded from daily living, so there was always a dialogue with that—the new wine, the new corkscrew, the old lampshade diaphragm rediscovered in the storage place.
What does Culbert’s work continue to teach us about the world?
All of the above: the nowness of daily life, the constancy of responses to objects encountered with different light and thinking, within an extending lineage of pieces of his unique approach to making things.
JAMES GATT: When did you first meet Bill Culbert? What was it that drew you together?
SIMON CUTTS: I met Bill at Nottingham School of Art in 1969, where I’d been let in the back door as an older student. There was no course to speak of, which I look back on very affectionately—those heady days of conceptualism—and so I invented a kind-of cartoon-constructivism as a counter to the situation, a material possibility. Bill gently told me why it was all wrong, and I heeded his advice! You were allowed to learn from your mistakes in those times. Later, in 1975 when I had started Coracle Press (a publisher and gallery in London) we hooked up again over his pieces, which began a long-term relationship with Bill which continues still.
What, in Culbert’s opinion, was wrong with your approach? And which of his pieces did you reconnect over?
Bill realised I was merely using a ploy to provoke the situation by making some very material and systems-based work—a mannerism too far, which he disavowed me of. At the same time I was encouraged by him to continue with the physical poems I was also making, extensions of the texts on paper and in small books. I guess we reconnected over one particular piece that Bill submitted to The South Bank Show, a group show of artists who worked in the south of London. It was what I think is called Untitled, an 8-foot fluorescent tube going through the middle of Aalto’s small bent plywood stool. Culbert remains well known and regarded for his manifold addresses of light throughout his 60-year career. What is it about light that you think he found so interesting?
One thing I learned from Bill was that the separation of different parts
A distinguishing factor of Culbert’s work is the constant capture or integration of the quotidian—windows, cars, lamps, wine glasses, tables, chairs, bottles, vessels, landscapes, interiors. These objects provide specific conditions for registering the activity of light but also suggest a link with light’s ubiquity. I’m thinking here about Edmund Husserl’s idea of ‘lebenswelt’ (lifeworld) which refers to the collective experience of things in the world. Why do you think Culbert continually pursued these relationships?
If you take my idea about domesticity, it all falls into place, and all those objects and built situations, elements of function, are placed within it.
The inherent relationship between light and photography is a significant facet of Culbert’s practice, too, both physically and figuratively. He often exhibited fluorescent lights with photographs and maintained an extensive photographic practice alongside his development of light sculptures and installations. What is specific to Culbert’s nexus of these mediums?
I’m going to take exception to the constant use of ‘practice’ in critical dialogue about artists. It’s everywhere and presupposes a false seriousness about what artists do. Apart from that, it makes for an over-professionalism and the idea of an artist’s ‘career’, when probably they are just leading and living their lives in response to what they encounter. There may be congruities in these responses over a lifetime, and these might well make up an ‘oeuvre’.
Contradictory to that diatribe, I think Bill was very ‘professional’ about photography, using a big, heavy camera and mostly having the negatives printed at the same photo-lab.
Interesting. Do you think for Culbert that photography functioned somewhere between two- and three-dimensionality?
Notionally, but not in any formal way, or dwelt on, or pursued in that way.
Despite the exponential increase in the number of photographs taken and shared nowadays, it could be argued that people absorb far less of what they see. I think Culbert was adept at absorbing light. Do you think he saw the camera as a useful appendage for this?
I think we’ve said something about the ‘professionalism’ of Bill’s photography. Most of photography is completely meaningless and is just something to do with a smart phone in a loose moment.
The exhibition this interview accompanies borrows its title from two Culbert poems, ‘Blue Cloud’ and ‘Green Waterfall’, written just weeks apart in August 1996. Culbert would have been 61 at the time of writing. They indicate the significance of the landscape in his practice, but more specifically the illusions of perspective and the visible light spectrum— we know, for instance, that blue light wavelengths scatter more than red, giving the impression of a blue sky. How did Culbert grapple with these illusions in his work?
I would be reluctant to call them poems, more like ‘heaps of language’ as I think Robert Smithson mentioned. Carl Andre also called his early listings of words ‘poems’, but think they are just another material that he organised in stacks and placements. In Bill’s case they do indicate something more from the notebooks, referencing his concerns at the time. The landscape was all around him in Provence. More arcane settings like the dump at Sault and other such places became his foraging ground for materials. The illusion of perspective was his quibble with the whole of art history. He thought that a row of wine glasses
This interview was published on the occasion of Bill Culbert: Blue Cloud, Green Waterfall at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery (9 December 2023 –11 February 2024), a posthumous exhibition charting Culbert’s unwavering and multimedia address of light between 1975 and 2012.
Simon Cutts was born in Derbyshire, England in 1944 and currently lives in Ireland with Erica Van Horn. He is a poet, artist, and editor, who has developed Coracle Press over the last fifty years in its many publication forms. Cutts is an eminent figure in the field of artist books in the UK having worked on publications with significant artists since the mid-1960s. His own concern is with the book and its mechanisms as a manifestation of the poem itself.
Bill Culbert was born in Port Chalmers in 1935 and died at his home in Croagnes, France in 2019. He lived and worked in New Zealand until 1957, when he received a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London, UK. From an acclaimed painting practice in the early 1960s, Culbert went on to develop his characteristic photographic and electrical light works, which remained central to his practice thereafter. From 1961, Culbert lived and worked between Croagnes and London, returning to New Zealand regularly. He exhibited internationally and produced notable public commissions, several in collaboration with his friend and fellow artist Ralph Hotere. In 2013, he represented New Zealand at the 55th Biennale di Venezia and was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts by the University of Canterbury.
Cover image: Bill Culbert, Bulb moving from black to light at speed 1992.
Courtesy Bill and Pip Culbert Trust and Fox Jensen McCrory Gallery.
ON BILL CULBERT: AN INTERVIEW WITH SIMON CUTTS
James Gatt, October 2023