ART&RESEARCH


A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods

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

Joanne Tatham interviewed by Susannah Thompson (Cont.)


The Slapstick Mystics with Sticks, 2004

Susannah Thompson: Yes, even the way it was typeset lends itself to being read in that way – the fact that there were no paragraphs encourages you to read it as this long rambling piece. Do you think there’s a difference between how you regard art and literature as cultural practices, in general and in relation to your own practice? A lot of your visual art works seems to question or parody the art world and it can seem very cynical or ironic but your writing, or at least some it, seems much more romantic or earnest in its tone, in particular the poems within ‘Form and Verse’ in Stop Stop. Do you think there’s a split or difference in your approach as a practitioner or visual artist? For instance would you say that you have a more emotional or romantic approach to writing and a more intellectual or rational approach to making art? Is there a division for you?

Joanne Tatham: I suppose I don’t feel that there is a division. Maybe it’s just a matter of interpretation but, for me, there doesn’t seem to be an awful lot of difference between those activities - making objects that exist out there as sculptures, pictures or paintings and making things that exist as printed texts or perhaps even spoken text. You mentioned that you saw the visual work as being somehow ironic but I don’t feel like that about it - in the past people have responded to the written work more in that way. Both the writing and the other things allow for a fine-tuned ambiguity that fluctuates between both those positions - they could be seen as being a pastiche or being cynical. It’s about trying to break down the idea about what exactly happens as the work is being made. When you talk about it being romantic or emotional it suggests a kind of directness but making something - especially working within the collaboration with Tom - doesn’t seem to genuinely reflect the processes that we actually engage in to get something made. I spoke before about the idea of writing something and it existing more as a performance and I think we try to make a lot of the work together almost as if it were almost a performance, performing a set of attitudes rather than expressing a set of attitudes directly. There’s no sense of a direct or immediate position coming through, it’s a much more self-conscious decision about adopting a subject position. That is one of the reasons we wanted to work together – we wanted to try to articulate something about the limitations of a single subject position and how that could feed into the interpretation of an art work.

ST: You’ve mentioned this to an extent when you were speaking about some of your earlier work with Tom around the time of your MFA in which you were doing something that appeared to be very overblown and romantic. In some respects it could be - it could be very earnest - but on the other hand it depends on the viewer as to how they interpret the work rather than having one fixed position that you’re trying to project.

JT: Yes, it’s interesting – I’m going back over 10 years since we first showed that work and it was curious in the first couple of years of our practice that there was a perception that we were specifically involved in certain areas of content or concerns such as nature, the mystical or the magical and actually we picked these particular areas because they were the most potent. They were the most appropriate conduits through which we could negotiate some of these really problematic things about romantic beliefs, about making art, about authorship, about the processes though which art gets made and how it’s subsequently interpreted. In HK it was very different. It was great to be doing something that was ‘about’ drugs as opposed to being about mystical beings or something.

ST: Can you give us any examples of that kind of work? Do you mean works like The Dwarf?

JT: We did a piece called The Dwarf; we did a piece called Magus and these were all quite overblown pieces with sound, music, lights. For us they were genre pieces, found genre pieces but I think they were often taken as being much more direct and I think the works we’ve done since then, in the last five years, often still draws on those things. The pyramids with hay round the mouth and strange patterns would be one example we’ve also tried to pull back a bit so that they also had a kind of coolness about them. We were trying to play it both ways and I think we did it more successfully perhaps than we had in the late 90s. I don’t feel that that’s something we’ve done quite as precisely in the writing in the collaborative practice as we have done in certain other forms.

ST: On that note, can we come back to the poems you did for ‘Form and Verse’? To me they read as though they were almost Bronte-esque. They’re romantic; they seemed to have references to animism, nature, allusions to the green and pagan ritual. Can you tell me more about how this work came about, and about the juxtaposition of image and text within the work?

JT: The poems were like a sequel or a kind of performances. We made the ceramics in the photographs first. They’d been made as a piece of work which was at the Showroom, a work called Resurrection with three forms. Often, as you’re making art you have to make work for the situations in which you can show it. In this case the situation was a book, Bent Aura, and so we went back to that performance and revisited it. We revisited the attitudes we were trying to enact - in that case making ceramics - and tried to get into the same mental space as someone who had made those ceramics would do if they were going to write a poem. But we did also try quite hard to avoid any specific clichés and that was one of the earlier pieces where we did write together and we wrote half the poems each. We were feeding off each other all the time as we were writing. We tried very hard in terms of the amount of involvement and care in the language of the poems to move beyond something that would be seen just as a pastiche. Hopefully it worked as more than a pastiche – it was written with more conviction than that. There’s a naivety to it and some of the thematic areas that you mentioned are ridiculously romantic in a way.

ST: They do seem to be very sincere. I think that really comes across.

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JT: We really tried to write it like that and we re-photographed the ceramics as well and tried to photograph them in a way that seemed in keeping with those things. It’s always about trying to find a subject-position, one which was not ours but which was slightly to the side of ours. It wasn’t like we tried to write a profile of this kind of person but we did have a discussion of trying to work out what they would do. It wasn’t a pastiche of sixth form poetry but it had a hint of all that. Sometimes when people look at these works it’s possible to pick up on the most immediate reference point in terms of what the person behind the work might have done, but we’ve always hoped that it would be a little bit more complex to pull apart than that. One of the things about working over a period of time is that each of these narratives or performances contributes to the whole practice. I don’t mean in terms of finding a type or a style - it’s not as crass as that. It’s trying to make three dimensional characters that are behind the production of both the written work and the objects or images.

ST: It certainly didn’t seem that the images were illustrating the text in that work, it appeared to be much more interwoven. Coming back to the subject of pastiche, it’s hard for me to tell sometimes, in both the visual art and the writing, whether you’re presenting a parody, a pastiche or elements of both in terms of how your work relates to the machinations of the art world or various literary or cultural sources. Could you expand on this a little bit, in terms of how you might have presented a deliberate parody or pastiche rather than that simply being the way the work has been read?

JT: I think we’re concerned with trying to construct a framework that is recognisable in the sense that it can act as a system through which a viewer can start trying to unpick what on earth it is we’re trying to do. By returning to works and going back over them again what we’re doing is partly about trying to make more recognisable what it was we were doing the first time, so that the performance continues from one work to another. I think there’s something fascinating about the way in which you can leave something for a period of time and undermine or rework or rewrite the performance that went into the production of something. Anything that is fixed or seems to present one possibility of interpretation becomes something you have to go back and question …

ST: So in some respects you’re being quite generous towards the viewer by offering these points of access?

JT: Yes, I started off by saying that I was trying to construct a framework that opened the work up but as I’ve been talking I seem to have talked myself out of that and I’ve suggested that what we’ve been doing has also been about trying to confuse the viewer even further. I should add that I’m thinking about work and ideas that span ten years.

ST: As I’ve been thinking about your work and this interview I’ve been thinking about the fact that there is often a distinction in the way we understand the differences between language and literature. Clearly, they are two separate disciplines (one more scientific, one more akin to art) even though they are inter-related. Your work seems to encompass both simultaneously. My recourse as a writer is to go to literature to illuminate art I find difficult, which is interesting in terms of what you were saying about titles and how titles work in relation to art works. In trying to understand work that, like yours, functions in complex ways in terms of semantics and semiotics and fixed or fluid meanings, I was reading a quote by Ezra Pound which brought things together for me a little. In it, Pound is expounding his (flawed) theory on the difference between ‘Imagism’ and ‘Symbolism’ in poetry and he writes: ‘The symbolists dealt in ‘association’, that is, in a sort of allusion almost allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status of a word; they made it a form of metronomy. One can be grossly ‘symbolic’ for example, by using the term ‘cross’ to mean ‘trial’. The symbolist’s symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2 and 7. The imagists images have variable significance like the signs a, b, and x in algebra… the author must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics…’1 Do you find the definition of the Imagists approach fitting in relation to your creative writing, and in terms of your visual art work? For example, while appearing to be presenting an allegorical work in Slapstick Mystics, it seems that you are, in fact, presenting an anti-allegory and all of your works seem to have ‘variable significance’.

JT: Yes, that definition by Ezra Pound is really interesting, but I feel I don’t have the background or context to that quote. You mention that you thought Pound’s theory was flawed. Can I ask you why you thought it was a flawed theory?

ST: Well, it was literally as I was reading it that it didn’t quite make sense in terms of how Pound applied the theory to Symbolist and Imagist poetry. It made more sense to me when I was thinking about how the definition could be applied to contemporary art.

JT: Ok. For me, thinking about how one should go to art and expect to interpret it does seem to have a really nice resonance in a way but it’s curious - the fear is that there’s a stubborn desire to interpret art in a symbolic manner. I feel like, at the risk of sounding pompous, as an artist I am trying to deal explicitly with the structures for interpretation and systems of meaning that we have and expect to use when we go to an artwork. I feel I’m on very shaky ground when it comes to this because I don’t know what qualifies anyone ever to have any kind of feeling about anything but it always seemed to me that some of the ways we’re meant to interpret an art work are limited and tend not to take on board the really great art works from the last century that made those big moves. There seems to have been a failure, somewhere along the line, to keep applying that sort of shift from a rational or symbolic system in trying to explain or unearth meaning in something. There’s something about this idea of Imagists that seems more kind of open-ended. I guess it only works in opposition to what it’s not – the Imagists are defined by not being Symbolists – it seems that it needs further clarification, doesn’t it? In some of the pieces that use both language and literature within them it seems quite close to some of the intentions we had in terms of doing work which was not allowing you to look at it in certain ways. I get a bit confused when thinking about Slapstick Mystics. When you say “you appear to present an anti-allegorical work” I know exactly what you mean, because we are in fact presenting an anti-allegory. Can you say some more about that?

1. Peter Jones (ed.), Imagist Poetry, Penguin, 1972, p.21.

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