ART&RESEARCH

JT: There are varying degrees of involvement. It’s curious. It seems to depend on exactly what it is you’re doing because people working in different sectors have different expectations of their level of involvement. They have different ideas about the extent to which the work is collaborative or whether we’re just paying them to do a job. When we get work made by a cabinet maker who does a lot of work in the industry it’s like we’re using his approach. Whatever you tell him to do there’s always a certain aesthetic to it because of his processes and materials, the people he works with and how he gets things finished. We also work with an illustrator and he gets a credit because he seems closer to the production of what we do – there’s a creative input. There are varying levels of collaboration and varying levels of us using what other people do and incorporating it into our practice. It’s a complex issue – authorship and how something functions within a collaborative authorship. So the writing is part of that. We have worked with Will Bradley several times over the years and I think there was a kind of fluid collaboration but he does work with other artists as well. He has his own authorship over his writing. Sometimes he’s not been too bothered about that so we’ve always been quite keen to grant him that separate status. He said that he didn’t really write the last piece he wrote for us - that it had already written itself. He’d written through the work we’d done anyway.

ST: I’d like to come back to that later in relation to the work you’ve done with [Glasgow-based artist and writer] Fiona [Jardine] but in the meantime would you say that you have role models, precursors or influences in terms of visual artists who simultaneously use creative writing? There are obviously lots of artist-writers throughout the history of art, but I am thinking of figures such as Robert Smithson, whose creative writing is an integral part of his visual art practice, rather than a parallel to it, and whose work, like yours, exists in many different forms. I’m not suggesting that you are directly influenced by these figures but are there particular artists you feel you have something in common with in this respect?

JT: I think that artists such as Robert Smithson are important models and myself and Tom have an awful lot of admiration for them as practitioners. I think that how he writes is very different to how we write… but I think there’s something about the breadth or integrity, for want of a better word, of the practice of Robert Smithson that you can’t help but aspire to. The work of an artist like Dan Graham is not specifically what I do and at a certain point it’s not what I would wish to do but there’s a sense that as an artist, as a practitioner you can engage beyond the production of the work that gets shown and engage in a wider discourse and there’s something about writing and even something such as this interview which is contributing to the discourse around practice. That’s part of the activity of a practitioner that both myself and Tom really believe in, in a sandal-wearing kind of way.

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ST: Your art work has often been described as a grammar or a vocabulary of images and it certainly seems to function as a text, a language or the development of a narrative. I think its true to say that the self-referential nature of your visual art work encourages the viewer to attempt to ‘read’ it and there are recurring semantic concerns or semiotic enquiries played out through the work (most obviously in word-sculptures like HK or The Blacks). In contrast - with the exception of Thou Art That - your writing, as a body of work, doesn’t appear to function in the same way. It doesn’t appear to be linked, there are few connections and it is much more fragmentary in style and form. In other words, what I’m trying to say is that there is less of an impulse to try to make sense of the connections between your various literary texts. Can you expand on the reasons for this and say something about how you see the development of your writing as different from the inter-connectedness of your visual art work?

JT: Yeah. I think at the beginning I was trying to outline two possible frameworks through which to see the work. Thou Art That definitely shifts back to within the visual art work as you call it. At the beginning I was trying to sift out writing that appeared under my name alone as being something that which is not part of the practice. But there are works that are part of the practice Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan and the pieces of writing are part of a particular project. For instance, in the PhD at Leeds University I undertook a very particular kind of enquiry. So much of what we’ve spoken about up to now has been about writing in the sense of being jointly authored rather than singly authored and I suppose the kind of project I undertook with the PhD was about finding ways of writing about art rather than using art in the form of words to consider some of the issues I was talking about before. Each one is a sort of test in a way just done as best as it can. I suppose its part of what you do as a practitioner in a broader sense, part of a contribution to a discursive space in which other people’s art and other people’s work gets written about. You contribute to that conversation and to thinking about how artists write and function as researchers and educators.

ST: Can you say some more about your PhD? Can you say some more about how you dealt with the text-based part of your PhD submission? Having read it, it differs very much from a standard or typical academic text. Did you experience any opposition to submitting something that might not have fit with the models of university submissions or guidelines?

JT: [Laughs] Yes. I think what was particularly interesting was that in a sense there’s a certain clarity about the kind of framework which existed when I sat my PhD. I was aware of other practice-based PhDs but the issues being discussed now around different methodological approaches, which are more sociological in their basis or social sciences in their approach, are different to the discussion that I was aware of at the time. In 1999, when I applied, the debate was much more about the theory/practice dichotomy – that was my main concern was trying to negotiate how, as a practitioner, to write something without justifying something through a whole raft of theory that was being discussed and taught at Leeds University at that time. What was interesting was that there had only been two completed PhDs since the programme had been running. Elizabeth Price, who completed her PhD just before I began mine, was interesting for me in that she really wanted to unravel the format that was expected so she wrote a description of a work being made. I was quite interested by that – that you could do something very belligerent. Because Elizabeth Price had set a kind of precedent I realized that I could mess around with this a little bit more. So rather than using what we might call a logical, rational, interpretative play – it’s a traditional conceptual art strategy in a way, to actually negotiate a space between writing and art. I thought I could mess around with that by trying to bring in some fictional spaces as well by trying to describe the art work and by creating a narrative that was fragmented. It was an attempt to describe a process over a long period of time and look to the social spaces around something, so it was very heavily influenced by what Elizabeth Price had done, but was more specifically focused on how fiction could work as an account of art.

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