ART&RESEARCH

SS: Yeah, yeah.

RB: Whereas in artistic research if luck comes, you trust it. You have to. That’s what makes the work kind of sing out in a way, those moments, and it becomes almost allegorical in a sense, that maybe the kind of slapstick moment is an allegory for fallibility. That brings up the comedic element to the work. Although there are certain artistic references in the work for Cove Park, like Bas Jan Ader’s In Search of the Miraculous, there also seems to be an amplification of that ACME kind of comic value that underpins a lot of your work.

SS: Perhaps in this project it’s at its most explicit, because the act in itself is so much like early Tom and Jerry or Mickey Mouse - it foregrounds those really violent early cartoons. It’s exactly that moment when Tom saws off the branch of the tree that he’s standing on. I guess I was trying to find some sort of space between the madness of the naval base but also that of the peace camp - their crazy canoe trips into the path of nuclear submarines to try to disrupt things and also just keep things in the press. I guess what I felt when I came here, particularly the first time with the students and visited the peace camp and Faslane, was that the rhetoric of both of these organisations seemed completely hollow or empty. I’m trying to, I don’t know, find some ground in the middle of all that that makes sense to me. Of course, the action on the water is something that has a relationship to political protest in a way, but it’s kind of… yeah. Perhaps it’s a sort of dramatisation of that or something. I don’t know exactly. I’m a big supporter of the peace camp but my work has to operate differently.

RB: It strikes me that, with the auto-destructive process involved in this work, there are some affinities with the work of Gustav Metzger. The immediate context here, geographically, is Coulport, the nuclear base, and for Metzger it was definitely the nuclear bomb to the extent that he went on the Aldermaston March, was on the Committee of 100 with Bertrand Russell, the origins of CND and the auto-destructive nylon painting, to watch it disintegrate was a comment upon the auto-destruction of Mutually-Assured Destruction policy.

SS: Yeah, yeah. No, that’s really interesting, that idea of a theatre of destruction, a catharsis if you like. [Ship’s horn sounds in background] They’re listening [laughs]. I was also thinking about Luddite protest, you know, that idea of destroying the technology that you perceive as taking away your livelihood, your job, and I suppose that notion is somehow… you know, there or thereabouts in a lot of the work, a kind of controlled aggression towards technology, in a way. I think that has a strong connection with Metzger too perhaps. If steamboats hadn’t been invented there would certainly be no nuclear submarines – its like a Luddite aggression against the submarines forefather. A Trident submarine is a steam-powered vessel too. I was thinking about this also in relation to Bas Jan Ader. His frame of reference was also rather un-contemporary in a way. It was almost sort of nostalgic or something, all those nods to the Casper David Friedrich and the like. I’ve always tried to find ways to use, you know, very outmoded, outdated kinds of technologies and conversations and ideas and try to give them some new life in relation to a contemporary understanding. Bas Jan Ader was also the fall guy too, riding his bike into and canal, trying to cross the Atlantic in a ridiculously small boat. The title of this project too, with its nod to alchemy, suggests an out-moded philosophy. To me alchemy is particularly interesting when understood in terms of process and not product. It’s not really about attaining gold from base metals but rather the mental space that that process allows – that utopia, if you like. Process over product, that’s the key.

RB: In that respect, in the way that Thomas More’s Utopia might be regarded as a political allegory, your experiments with alternative forms of technology become allegories, chemical and alchemical processes, which seem to comment upon contemporary debates around renewable energy supplies and sustainability, though never addressing politics directly, but politics - maybe a utopian politics - is somehow always there, latent within the poetry of the work.

SS: Yeah, it’s a sort of subtext, I guess. It’s funny how the work starts to collide with politics in quite surprising ways. I mean, suddenly, you know… in a way, since I started this project here, you know, again there’s this kind of big debate about both the future of the Trident fleet and nuclear energy in general and what role that has in trying to deal with global warming or all these kind of things and suddenly this project has a kind of new resonance in a way. It’s about trying to find a kind of space between a sort of poetic notion and a political one, and for those two poles, if you like, to always be in dialogue. Perhaps it’s the conceptual versus the existential or what have you. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few years is this idea of a post-conceptual practice and how it’s possible to take some of the very clear, hard-won models from conceptual work, you know, from the sixties, seventies, perhaps, and to try to re-deploy them in a way, to give them a new life. I mean in a way I suppose the overwhelming sense of a lot of that work for me, while fantastically important historically, is that it became rather too self-referential, monastic in a way. But to me there’s so much fruitful material there to re-use in investigations of a slightly more outward-looking nature and perhaps a little bit more politicised, if you like -and not only the politics of art production either.

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