ART&RESEARCH

Susannah Thompson: So Elizabeth Price opened the way for you to experiment, take those methods further and develop your own work?

Joanne Tatham: She certainly did in terms of the PhD. In terms of actual approaches I was using in the writing I was going back and looking at the things I’d written to that date, which wasn’t much at that point. This was before Slapsticks was written and before a lot of these texts we’ve been talking about that I’ve written for other artists. I think what was unusual about the Leeds University situation was that the guidelines were so skimpy. But because of what Elizabeth Price had done before me I felt like I was on quite solid ground about deviating - probably completely - from what was originally intended when these guidelines were written. I tried to reinterpret the guidelines as creatively as possible and I did pass, with minor corrections.

ST: In your PhD text you justified or backed up your style and your unconventional approach by referring explicitly to the guidelines throughout the text. You interpreted the guidelines in such a specific way that you allowed no room or gap for the University to come back and say that you haven’t adhered to the guidelines or procedures.

JT: Yes, I was trying hard to do that and for me that’s interesting because it goes back to ideas about how as an artist you have to work within the context you’re given and that was just a very site-specific piece of work in a way. I wasn’t trying to deal with it in a po-faced way, I was just trying to deal with it using absurd strategies to open things up rather than narrow it down to the point of absolute coherent sense. That’s the problem with something that’s incredibly restrictive –for creative PhDs to be so restrictive is obviously very detrimental to the creative work actually being produced, so I think there has to be that kind of understanding that practice-based PhDs are creative practice and that they won’t necessarily follow the same formats as other PhDs but that it’s still possible for them to be rigorous in the same way that rigorous practices and rigorous art works exist outside of that context, in the wider discourse or discursive space in the context of contemporary art. Not that everyone believes that [laughs].

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ST: You’ve said that one of the texts you are most satisfied with is the text that you wrote for Alan Michael. It reads as a kind of monologue which might be peppered with palare (but it isn’t), yet it does have a real vernacular feel in terms of its use of language. It’s comedic in its tone and seems very much like vaudeville or a music hall Master of Ceremonies or a fleapit theatre host or tramp as you were saying earlier. It’s also very similar in tone and form to the titles you use for some of your art work, such as Oh We Will, We Will, Will We [Studio Voltaire, 2005], That is the way, it is, it is, that is [Sutton Lane, 2004] and Think Thingamajig Think [2003]. Can you tell us something how the text relates to Michael’s work – the shoe paintings for instance - and what your literary sources might have been in this case?

JT: Yes, I suppose the key aspect was how my writing related to Alan’s work. It’s a piece of writing that attempts to reflect the way that Alan’s paintings seem to have a kind of form to them. They’re paintings and they depict particular things – like a painting of a shoe or some trousers. It’s work of this or that and yet, in terms of the way I interpret his work, there always seems to be such a great distance between the form and what it’s actually showing. There seems to be this incredible disconnection between what he’s doing as an artist and what he’s actually showing you as an artist. In other words he’s setting up a series of complex red herrings - which is a phrase I use to talk about our own work – that seems inadequate in a way. He uses certain idioms, in a manner similar to us, except that Alan does it through a much more pared-down vocabulary - using one form rather than lots of different things. He tackles similar things in terms of his own authorship and I think he’s got a very curious and distanced authorship in relation to his own work. We know these are "Alan Michael" paintings, but I hope that viewers don’t confuse exactly what the paintings are performing in terms of who’s actually produced them. The painting isn’t communicating anything to us about what Alan is interested in or what Alan is doing in that kind of direct way, but there’s a very, very indirect communication. I wanted to do a piece of writing that existed as an analogy of that - that could be read in the same way as these paintings. I wanted a visual hook or device. Something like The Mirror & The Masque - which is a visual essay that Tom and I did before - is a similar example of how that might work - you can go from a sculpture which is a profile of a head to a cartoon which is illustrating kind of the economic situation of Poland in 1972 but you can encompass this vast range of ideas or positions and you’ve got to find a visual link which seems – which obviously is – connected but it’s kind of irrelevant as well. In order to set up a relationship between my writing and his painting I had to have that focal point, that hook. The shoe allowed me to create this narrative which in itself – because it’s written in words – is a dead-end joke, it’s a shaggy dog story - it’s a red herring shaggy dog story. Those seem the most appropriate terms to be using. I thought it was very important that it was as long a piece of writing that I could possibly spin out to keep the viewer – or the reader – with me as long as I could but give away as little as possible stylistically and formally. It was entertaining trying to say, ‘hang on a minute, stay with me a bit longer, something might happen’ but actually delivering nothing at all. That seemed like the perfect format - like a really happy sort of narrative of what I was trying to do with the form. It had a certain precedent, through the things that you mentioned there in the question and more specific sources – I mentioned the Beckett earlier. I was going back to Waiting for Godot A-level study – it still registers somewhere.

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