ART&RESEARCH


A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods

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

Ross Sinclair interviewed by Ross Birrell (continued)

Anyway, in the ‘Painting as a new medium’ symposium, we held while the show was on you remember I drew an analogy with works that I’ve made like Dead Chuch/Real Life which addresses faith and the idea of ones relationship to the church and organised religion through the process of remembering and learning and singing religious songs within a sculptural construct contrived for the work and in a sense, this painting project is similar to that. In the former I start from a position of having no faith and trying to address how one may acquire some and perhaps here with Real Life Painting Show my starting point is a dearth of experience or understanding of painterly notions of the sublime, let’s say. Rather than painting just being with me I wanted to go towards painting to understand it, to interrogate it, , to ask some questions – to try to know it - initially for simply find out for myself, … having painted quite a lot over the years in various projects and works, but really just as a basic tool.
The idea of painting as a conceptual tool was something that Francis and I were batting about, I think it was perhaps one of the sub-titles of the symposium, but I suppose that was partly my premise to go to the idea of painting, fully cognizant of these questions - the history, what it might mean, how it wasn’t simply enough to be painting and you know, to lift the brush and that that brushstroke… I think can mean quite different things, depending on the context, depending on the framing of it, which again, I suppose, underpins further this idea… explains to some extent this idea of the show, it’s a painting show but it’s in a very particular context, it’s a Real Life Painting Show. In a sense, I could argue that it sort of packs into all these simple images a compact history of things that I’ve made in the twelve year history of this Real Life project. For me, it’s all in there, in the foundations of the construction of this project, which is I guess paradoxical with the modernistic sheen of them, but I suppose just thinking aloud, that’s really part of the research question for me is, do they work individually on their own as groups, and how much can I expect my whole body of work to be… is that assimilated within these or does it stand apart from it?

RB: If I can return to Bois, in Painting as Model he not only refers to Damisch and to the indispensability of painting, but to painting as a site of antagonism. And there was an element to the Real Life project which I always saw as an act of defiance of to spectacular relations, spectacular society - which is I why I referred back to Tom Lawson’s essay ‘Last Exit: Painting’ in relation to the camouflage of painting as a critique of consumer capitalism - an act of defiance of its position at the heart of the market place. These were obviously antagonisms based in the art world of 1980s/90s New York when something else may have been at stake. But although there may be this challenge, do you situate or see these works more in relation to your other works on Faith, Utopianism or Democracy, with the mention of the challenge of the sublime. It seems to be a slightly different question than attacking painting as a cultural commodity. It seems to be a different site of investment, more cultural than economic. For example, although there is a tension between the vinyl text and the paint, the machine and the hand, I’m not sure I get the same sense of antagonism, I mean we’re not confronted with the tattooed figure with their back to us, the rebuff of ‘Real Life’ is elsewhere.

RS: No, I think this is a very particular project for me I mean, that currency of painting is so entrenched I felt I wanted to utilise it perhaps to address that spectacular relationship in some sense. though not simply to criticise. Yes maybe it is more like some of my other projects when I try to take on a particular idea of an institution and try to deal with it in my own terms, in order to set up a relationship with a broader audience. I guess painting is also an institution just as clearly defined as some of the others I’ve been interested in. Though in a sense they couldn’t really be any dumber or have really only one level - less content but I suppose my challenge in that, perhaps of myself, is the question - can they collectively build on the Real Life project which I have been working on for more than a decade, can they embody that, can they advance that in some sense, take up the baton and run with it?

RB: On one level, you could see them as a process of reduction in order to negate that access to the sublime, which you would expect from a language of pure colour, paintings which are intended to invite the sublime. These seem to invite the sublime and negate it in a double-handed gesture. But on another level, there does seem to be a totality addressed in the sense of the scale of the show, having them all in a series of ‘all creatures great and small’. Does this sense of totality have something at stake – the project of painting?

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RS: Yeah, maybe it’s a sort on Noah’s Ark of colour, there’s two of everything and they can all go into the ark of culture when the flood happens. We can unpack them afterwards and again repopulate the world with colour after the apocalypse. That’s it. Thank you.
Yeah, I mean, to be honest I mean I had a lot ideas about it and a lot of impulses in the development of the show but I certainly didn’t have an over-arching, conceptual agenda in terms of a fixed outcome that would be simply tested with a sort of formula versus a pre-expected solution somehow, that could then be held up against the sort of ABC conceptualism, I suppose, or ABC of painting almost. But it is much more fundamental than that, really. I wanted Blue Real Life, Yellow Real Life, Green Real Life on this sort of scale and I certainly did want to have my cake and eat it, you know? I wanted to test this… What are these colours? What do they make you feel? You know, what emotions do they conspire with you in producing? But also, I mean, as a sort of abstracted conceptual premise, Blue Real Life, I wanted to look at that and kind of imagine what that was, what that felt like? And maybe ultimately, you know, it’s too ambitious for that, it’s wanting to do that, and do the sort of technical exercise and do the scale and do everything, and maybe that’s somehow possible.

RB: There are two things, which are related in my mind but which are not resolved, to do with the context of research, the context in which we are discussing the work, and that is the relationship between play on the one hand and research on the other. Although there are obviously research questions to discuss, I also see a lot of playful elements in the show which are either foregrounded or creep in which don’t necessarily address the same kind of questions you’ve talked about. There are gaps in the show. In the CCA conference, you talked about one of the inspirations as not necessarily Albers but your daughter being an inspiration, your daughter playing with colour, that kind of return to the simplicity of just playing with colour or material and then just allowing that conceptual baggage or framework to fall away.

RS: Yeah, definitely...

RB: And also the smaller works become far more playful and they really start to become small jokes, in-jokes and references.

RS: Yeah, I think this thing with the kids and colour, I mean, it is very refreshing to see that sort of pre-cognitive response to colour and form and art generally, and you know it’s not to do with any kind of external validation… anything anyone thinks is valid or worthwhile, or good or interesting, it’s just a pure kind of joy of colour. Making a mess You know, that’s definitely something I was interested in as well in terms of my own practice and where it is twenty years down the line from a beginning, it’s like having dealt with a lot of, sometimes with a very small ‘p’, politicised questions of various investigation of subjects or institutions, structures, whatever. The constant questioning of what is art for? How can art be of value? To whom, by whom, for whom? And I don’t mean in a sort of funding framework where you’ve got to kind of fight your corner, in a kind of honest me and you talking about it, you know, really, having a sort of interest in things political, and as we both do, dealing from time to time in the work with things with a bigger ‘p’ or a smaller ‘p’, or sometimes no ‘p’ for political, but having done that for ten, twenty years, with still a kind of idealistic, youthful feeling that art can in some sense have the possibility to change the world as stupid as that sounds in the current climate. Maybe that gets back to the idea of the brushstroke saving the world again?
I suppose, and maybe it’s a bit of a mid-life crisis as well, turning forty, but it’s sort of taking stock in a sense, formally, in the work and looking at these details that I sort of felt sometimes got missed out, but also feeling that after like, you know, twenty years of working, and making dozens of projects, hundreds of works over that time and all that time desperate for this sort of dialogue with an audience, always thinking about the audience, the context, what could be… what were people thinking about? What kind of space was it? How could I change that relationship? How could that plug into what was in the world? How could art have some meaningful engagement in that sort of context? In very practical terms, of course, knowing, understanding full well that one’s own contribution to the world and culture probably has made an extremely small, invisible, dent in the kind of global carapace of capitalism, let’s say, to use a term that’s not really discussed any more as a catch all of all things bad. I’m a big boy and I know I’ve done it enough and spoken to enough of the ‘audience’ to know that I think there’s a real value in just this voice, this presence in the world, this affirmation of one voice having

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