ART&RESEARCH


A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods

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

Simon Starling interviewed by Ross Birrell (continued)

SS: I tend to have a very clear sense in my head about the manifestation of the work before it happens. There seems to be only one way it can be. For Katkeenhaus, for example, I had a very clear picture of, you know, a Volvo engine and a cactus in a space, and the Volvo engine heating the cactus, and it’s about getting to that point down the road, but you have to have the very strong idea in your head before you can embark on the journey. But its not always a picture generated from a great amount of knowledge, it tends to be speculative to some degree, a leap of faith if you like. Then the research and planning begins. That’s when the project starts to take on its own life. I never set out to have a research-based practice it just happened and it worries me a little how formalised that kind of thinking has become within institutions.

RB: I like the idea of a ‘leap’ into research, like Klein’s Leap into the void – not knowing where it’s going to go but trusting that the journey itself will be worth it, like knowing an instrument well enough in advance to allow you to improvise, or knowing how to react when luck happens.

SS: Yeah. Like carrying around with you a rucksack of experience and knowledge, also a nose for things that you develop over the years. I think it’s as much that as research.

RB: Like connoisseurship?

SS: Yeah, you can smell it, kinda thing.

RB: It also doesn’t really seem to need to make any sense.

SS: But you have to hold onto that, I think, that lack of sense somehow.

RB: When you showed the slide of the installation of Blue Boat Black in Leipzig, the text on the wall with the names of the different fish which you had caught, had, to me, certain echoes of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work. And although he foregrounds the political in very iconic ways which doesn’t necessarily chime to the same degree with your practice, Finlay still seems to be significant here, not only in terms of the mock-heroic and the ludic dimension already discussed but in terms of the relationship of a kind of poetic and political quality to the work.

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SS: Yeah, also a concern with a sense of place or something - the projection of history onto landscape and landscape onto history. No, I think that’s absolutely right. I mean, maybe the obsession with movement and travel and journeys in the work is all about trying to establish a better understanding of a still situation, a static situation, a place, to respond to that. I mean, one of the things I didn’t talk about yesterday was that for some reason I keep coming back to these few square miles of Scotland around Cove Park. Of course it’s related to a social and economic structure that exists here, to a particular cocktail of things. In many ways it’s like the Tabernas Desert in Spain – a cocktail of growth and destruction, technology and nature, poetry and politics.

RB: And it’s not just the topographical, the geographical, but also it’s just what builds up there, what sediments.

SS: They become almost like allegorical places or something, I don’t know. I think perhaps in the case of both Cove and the Tabernas, there’s a sense of premonition or something in those places, that they’re almost a projection into the future. That I find very interesting. This struggle in the Tabernas Desert to stop the desert growing which is happening for climate change reasons and for bad land use reasons, the construction of this multi-million euro solar research place to try and make salt water into fresh water to irrigate the land, then the bizarre mock-Hollywood, mock-Texas Leone thing. It’s sort of tourism mixed with real, hardcore agricultural economics and ecology, and for me it’s a really heady mix, and I suppose that the attempt is to try and sort of distil some of that into work’s like Kakteenhaus and Autoxylopyrocycloboros.

END.