ART&RESEARCH

RB: The role of mediation seems to be crucial in underpinning that politics.

SS: Absolutely, yeah. If you take a work like Robert Barry’s Inert Gas releases, for example, these dematerialised gestures in and around LA in March 1969, what that work does in a very clear way is shift the ground from making/performing to mediating. The slightness or insignificance of the gesture lay this relationship open in a very powerful way. That is in itself a political statement, particularly viewed I relationship to a post ’68 awareness of the power of the media.

RB: In your talk yesterday at Cove Park, you mentioned that the mediation of Autoxylopyrocycloboros is an integral and crucial component of the work .

SS: Yes, absolutely.

RB: How will it be mediated? How will it be experienced?

SS: It’s evolving, I think, and I’m trying to let it, as much as possible make itself, in a way. I always feel that with the best work it feels as if it could only be that way – that’s the goal. It has such a clear structure as a performance, if you like, as an action, that I thought it would be nice to build a little bit of space into how it manifests itself in the end and to document and record everything, but then to try and take a step back from that and see how that can be… sort of re-worked, re-presented. So I just feel, I think in a way it’s a little bit off the point, but I feel more and more that there’s, as you say in this kind of culture of spectacle that is sort of engulfing everything, I mean, the art world as much as anything else but, that it’s quite nice to build this kind of sense of distance and mediation into the way you present the work, so you don’t become a kind of clown in a way. And I think it’s been a frustration to people at times in the way that I work, that they feel like they’re not getting everything, they’re not getting the real thing or that somehow what they get is the remains, the kind of mediated remains of something, and… you really felt that, actually, around the kind of discussion around the Turner Prize show. There was a sort of frustration there and a suspicion of work that perhaps uses, you know, a text to give it shape. The Turner Prize, has made me much more resolute in that respect, to really try and develop that side of the work. It’s a little bit of a response to the market as well at the moment, that… it’s quite nice to play a little bit with the sense of what is the art work, where is it, where does it exist? Is it in the action on the water or is it in the documentation of that, and to keep that question as live as possible.

RB: I mean, there’s kind of an obvious parallel in my mind to some of the strategies of Gordon Mark Clark. I mean, just the multiplicity of approaches and then of the remnants, the remains, the designs, the drawings, whatever. But also your interest of his interest in kind of ‘anarchitecture’, kind of anarchic approach to deconstructing architecture, and then the piece that you were referring to that was in the Turner Prize was the piece that was done for Basel first of all, which was this kind of mobile architecture. And the will to remain mobile within the practice itself seems also to be parallel.

SS: And in a way I think perhaps, you know, Matta Clark’s probably suffered a little from dying so young, in a way. I think what’s happened to his work is that it has become, to some degree… I mean, you see gallery shows of his work now and they’re always awful kind of compromised things. You know, you feel that probably now you feel the greatest sense of connection with him in the films that he made. Certainly, he’s one role model in a way, but also of course someone like Robert Smithson, who also worked with this notion of mediation in a very, very complex way. I mean, I can’t begin to touch that, but you know, things like the Spiral Jetty and the movie about the Spiral Jetty. The Spiral Jetty being this almost unattainable, invisible thing that’s as much about anecdote as it is about anything else, and then this film which creates this fantastic, complex, galaxy of ideas around that very tough gesture. That’s was really something.

RB: There’s a proximity with Smithson here, but there’s also an important development and difference. The circularity of the oroboros is different from the spiral, and whereas the spiral might be funny because you end up nowhere and you kind of see yourself going nowhere, the circularity here is not just in the circular motion of the boat, travelling in a circle around Loch Long, but it also introduces a relationship between origin and return in that the boat was originally from the bottom of a lake, Lake Windermere.

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