ART&RESEARCH

BS: Here’s my question for you… In order for it to be a good work of art, does it have to be a good painting? Or can it be good work without having to be good painting?

RS: It’s a good question. I think in terms of the painting part of that, perhaps I can’t answer that. For the other part of it, I think it can have a certain,… it can do quite a lot of the things I hoped it would do, but as to the other part, the good painting part, that’s more difficult, I don’t really have an answer for that yet maybe.

TL: I want to actually get back to three questions ago or something, but continue answering off all of them. Because I think that the majority of art students as they come into art school do think of painting as being their primary activity, I mean there’s always gonna be some who have a three-dimensional imagination, but the majority of them think of painting. And then what happens at art school is that their eyes are opened to this history, certainly since the 60s, of a visual culture and an art practice that puts a great deal of pressure on that idea of painting as central and, you know, they kind of see a history develop of all these sort of gestural activities aimed at reframing the argument, pointing to different possibilities, opening up the field, all that kind of stuff. And of course, that gets much more interesting so you begin making other kinds of art work. Once you’re doing that, then I think it’s possible to make fairly sort of abrupt, non-complex paintings as gestural statement in terms of its larger argument about what art is. And those paintings can be good enough to make the point, so that would be ‘good paintings’. And that’s sufficient as long as you’re interested in having that argument about the broader field of art, but then what I find is that after a time, you’re no longer interested in that gestural statement and you develop a more coherent and complex body of work or see someone do that. Then the danger oddly enough is something that you [DB] pointed to where you become too craft-oriented or something and lose touch with the live wire that animated it so I mean it’s a tremendously complicated thing. I’m in a bit of jet-lag fog, I think it was in The Guardian or The Independent review two days ago, about Werner Herzog shooting a film [Rescue Dawn, 2006] on the Thai border and he’s been financed by Hollywood who have provided him with a full on Hollywood staff and he and his small cadre of film-makers, who he has always worked with, are at war with this huge group of Hollywood specialists. He’s doing a fictional version of a film he’s already made – a documentary - and he just wanted to keep the truth and kind of ‘in-the-moment’ really and the Hollywood guys well just can’t deal with the fact that he’s not willing to have big explosions and frame it that way, and so it was a real example of that tension between high craft and idea.

DB: Which is also a tension which animates the whole idea of modern art...

TL: Yeah.

DB: … Academic skills and sort of virtuoso technique to no obvious end at all other than to show off its own virtuosity. I mean that’s Manet and everything. And, in a way, somehow, in some strange form I think it is still with us.

BS: When you bring up the Hollywood thing it also brings up the economic aspects as well, and, you know, what you might have to kind of trade in to get certain kinds of means, you know, at your disposal. And that maybe is a way for me to segue to something that I wanted to ask about is a generalisation that we haven’t talked about and I was wondering whether it had come up and in this whole question about what the relation of the market is to painting or painting is to the art market. I mean can we sort of generalise and say that there is kind of two there’s two economic structures, more or less, in the art world that are complimentary but are semi-distinguished, there is a market economic structure and the institutional structure; if you make installations you’re working for the institutional economical structure, and if you make paintings you’re working for the market economic structure - if you have any economic structure at all, which most artist don’t, then you have a teaching job. What do we think about that I guess is what I want to know? Does it mean anything?

TL: Well it does mean something and also its complex and contradictory because those two structures tend to have different meanings.

BS: But they always meet eventually.

TL: They meet but in some ways it can be difficult. I mean certain bodies of work get misunderstood because they’re thought to belong to one system when in fact they are the other somehow, or not seen as part of something it is.

JC: It is complicated but I was thinking when Ross was showing work from Real Life, the market stall piece, I was thinking about this question which has run through the day to an extent, about the studio and the gallery and the museum, and the way in which certainly I suppose, traditionally, historically the museum has tended to encourage a particular form of contemplation-relationship with the work which is somehow at times transcendent, whatever, but is always I guess fighting against those other kinds of experiences everyday. I’m thinking about an essay by Homi Bhaba where he makes the distinction between aura and the agora of the market place, the work having to negotiate those two incommensurable pulls upon it.

Question: Can I ask a question? I would like to make a comment, I would like to congratulate David on acknowledging the contribution of women in the field and making direct reference to two of them, so thank you. And what I’m about to say circles back to the argument of mastery and whether having mastery maybe means of perhaps a quite limited practice I guess and that’s also in reference that he said this morning about the constrains of the studio and what’s implied by working in the studio. Without being too general little girls you know how to sit down and be good and that’s partly by their nature and partly by their nurture and boys have and some girls have a tendency to learn better kinesthetically through their cognitive set-up, also hormonally, and through their socialisation as well. Some boys and girls though, aren’t that good at sitting still and they need to move and be better prepared with tactile things and they learn with their body and they interpret and understand the world by their lived experience, rather than what’s said through a book or by a teacher. Now, these people are a little bit different because they’re in the minority, or they’re not in the majority, and these days it’s been problematized through to A.D.D.. But that sort of artist, that sort of person may grow up to be an artist and they may not be able to settle into a small studio space or to a studio practice and may be better making interactive or civic art that invites people through their lived experience to understand and to learn and to grow up and in that way one might change the world, not through a single brush stroke, but through someone else’s single brush stroke when the have been inviting to participate in the art making experience, or though they might not understand religious experience but understand they might understand the lived experience of spirituality through singing a song. And yeah sure, I mean I think of my work on the walls an they might be taken seriously but, and I can paint but I’m not sure whether that’s the only way to be accepted and the only way to be running with the big boys, cos we’re a long time dead, I guess. And I don’t know if you need to be a master painter to have mastery of art practice.

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