ART&RESEARCH


A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods

Volume 1. No. 1. Winter 2006/07
ISSN 1752-6388

Real Life Research: Ross Sinclair interviewed by Ross Birrell

Ross Birrell: I had a question to do with the authenticity of painting and the reference to the brushstroke which came up in our previous discussions in Cove Park, but which was also referred to in the CCA conference: Painting as a New Medium. It was to do with the use of the word ‘Show’ in the title of the exhibition: Real Life Painting Show. Why not stop at Real Life Painting, why have Real Life Painting Show? To me, the inclusion of the word ‘show’ seems to introduce a distance from the notion of authenticity, from risking the brushstroke and introduces a performative mode.

Ross Sinclair: I don’t know if I would have used the term the authenticity of the brushstroke but maybe we could get into that in a minute, but with the title, I think it seems clear to me that once I had hit on the title being Real Life Painting Show that helped define what it was – what it could be. For example the press people made an innocent mistake in an advert which ended up reading - Real Life Painting and when I saw that I did think, no that’s not what it is. I think for me, the idea of this show is so essential to it, which I suppose it is, effectively, the polar opposite of any kind of flirtations with modernism in that sense, because for me with this, as with everything else I do, it does absolutely need the show. It’s just not the same with the door shut and the lights off. … I mean, it just felt so right for a start, Real Life Painting Show, Real Life Painting…. Real Life Painting sounds so arrogant and self-aggrandising, somehow, like this is Real Life painting, and all other painters missed the point. This is it now, you know? I mean, it’s really not that. It’s a Real Life Painting Show, yeah, it’s kind of temporary, it’s in the moment, it’s about now. Essentially it’s about doing a painting show perhaps now, you know, in May 2006. What does a painting show mean now, compared to, you know, what a painting show might have looked like in the sixteenth century, or 1950s or sixty-five, or whatever. But I think essentially, for me, what that underlines is still the idea of audience and dialogue. That’s the really strong desire for me, that it’s about the idea of like, one brushstroke, could one brushstroke save the world? And all the kind of things that go with that, that make up that sort of gesture, the individual, the transference of the human hand. But it only is worth anything, I think, if someone else is looking and a dialogue takes place, however slight or abstracted or after the fact or in someone’s memory or imagination. The significant thing is the impetus to say, I’m still alive, I’m still here, you know, this is only me, but this is this really simple mark which is a kind of pre-language, signing your name with a cross, or something, you know? And I think its important as an artist you are conscious of setting up the conversation. The work is constructed to test the premis Admittedly, within an extremely self-conscious articulation and I don’t know if that’s a long way of saying it, but for me, the show is still the moment of debate. It wouldn’t be Real Life Painting Show in a crate in a storeroom somewhere. It would be in some sort if hiatus then, but it’s here and now, in the show and what that means at the moment.

RB: That possibly makes it like an event. Not necessarily a performance event but a performative relation to the element of dialogue or even open-endedness which you mentioned. But where are those points of entry for the audience in something which looks like a very complete, sealed exhibition in a very traditional sense; you walk into the gallery, the paintings are on the wall, which are finished in the studio being brought into the gallery, so the studio is the site of production, the gallery is the site of exposition? It seems that’s the kind of relationship in my mind as well, with the repetition of the production, or the serial production works and then you’re getting a different sizes… this is the large scale, then the smaller version. So it has a very close relationship to commodity production and painting is seen at the centre of the market place in the fine art tradition. Tom Lawson - who was at the conference you organized at the CCA - obviously talked about the camouflage of painting as a critique of the market place in the 1980s and 90s, and that’s something that came out of the idea of painting being a kind of strategic place to be, as a critique of the marketplace whilst aping the marketplace. And I wondered if that was also feeding in to the context of the painting in this case, this event - it’s a show, a strategic moment rather than lasting for all time. Is it because painting and the market place here is still a site of antagonism, is it something you see in your question ‘can a brushstroke save the world?’ Well save the world form what? A brushstroke against what? There seems to be a kind of interesting ambiguity here; echoing traditions of painting echoing the production of commodities for a market but at the same time referencing this recent history of Tom Lawson and the antagonism with the market and saying that there is something resistant in the brushstrokes still.

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RS: Well, there’s a lot of points there. I think, in a sense, its about wanting to explore this medium which is in more straightforward a dialogue with an audience, it’s the one medium a ‘public’ most expect to see in an art gallery, so perhaps for me, for whom the formal aspect is usually much more sculptural and complicated and busy, this takes away a couple of those barriers and makes it much more straightforward sort of relationship. And I really wanted to explore this medium, this relationship – this love affair I’d never been part of. So with this work I try and make that ‘way in’ as straightforward as possible which I suppose in a sense, is the opposite of what I usually seem to do, which is to make the space of viewing, or reception - that moment of consumption – something other that which the viewer might expect. I will try and build that into the work in terms of their expectations of what might happen in an art gallery or some other space. And yet here the whole structure of the project, the show… ninety percent of it is all exactly the same on each different piece. – The difference, of course is the colour definition, yellow, black, brown, blue, yellow, green, pink, black, white, grey, what have you. What could this mean…Red Real Life, Green Real Life? Do they have a life outside of the structure? – I think they could. So, this system is just a sort of armature that the colours and the mark-making sit on top of, and as you pointed out, you know, we have basically small, medium and large, so it hopefully can test that response to the colour, to the mark-making on a kind of small scale, where it does look very market-oriented, let’s say, and through to the large ones, which I specifically made to have a very physical human scale, you can stand in front of them, you can stand right next to them and they basically completely fill your field of vision and you can still just about smell the oil paint and it’s quite physiological, phenomenological, even, this sort of physicality of them and you know, the cyan, magenta, yellow, black one, you know, it’s twenty-five feet long, it must weigh 200kg. It’s quite a substantial object in a sense, and that’s partly also the fact that they’re all on 18mm MDF and not on canvas. I wanted them to remain quite brutal, sort of ugly objects in themselves, although the surface was very carefully contrived, very seductive, beautiful, but only perhaps a mm or two in depth.. So yeah, I mean, the structure is the same in all of them. There’s no interest, there’s no distraction, you know, other than the colour, the texture, the application, the scale. So, in a sense, in terms of a set of research questions, let’s say, it boils those down to quite a tangible… quite a quantifiable straightforward equation. What do these specific constituent parts amount to ? What does it mean when you see them repeated again and again, in different tones, in a different scale ? How does it make you feel – are you seduced, repelled, bored? How do you respond to it as a totality? What does it make you think about? How did colour relations work with each other on this small scale, on a medium scale, on a big scale? How does it affect your perception of the work there? Can meaning be constructed in relation to the scale? Or, how does the response differ on the different scale? For example to the small ones you feel you could hold in your hand, and to the big ones that are these big lumps of wood that weigh fifty-five kilos each, and would probably kill you if they fell off the wall.
So, I suppose it goes back to the kind of over-arching questions for me, about the whole project which were to try to identify very particular and quite small details within my practice that I had been working with for twenty years, let’s say, but never really paying enough attention to them. So, over those years, you know, many, many works were made that dealt with colour and text and letters but I felt I was never giving myself enough time to think about the decisions I was making. For example in these early t-shirt pieces that I started making around ‘93, which, incidentally, I called t-shirt paintings… when you look at all these together, for example at the Fruitmarket in ‘94 they’re not so different, really, you know, in form from these paintings. Sort of squares of coloured t-shirt with three lines of text on them, I mean, not dissimilar at all in many ways to these different colours together, different text, so in a sense, there are various antecedents in the work.
Anyway over the years, particularly as the Real Life project developed I was working through bigger scale installations or you know, came across moments where I forced to make decisions about colours and what went next to each other, and why things felt different if they’re blue, or red, or yellow, or green. I mean, it’s very basic, of course, but you know, with this project I wanted to, take these tiny details and amplify them. I guess with a fairly open-ended ambition to see how they would resonate in a very clean ‘white cube’ space like this.

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