ART&RESEARCH

MW: Yeah it was nice that actually, because it was a sudden real, palpable participation.

SB: Yes - in my experience, of a quite unconventional kind.

BS: I think it was not only important that it was during the silent film that the conversation happened, it was also in relation to these images: it’s very much about the relationship between the respective animal specimens and these two people handling them in different ways. Because it was black and white and in slow motion, it worked in a meditative, possibly reflective way on the audience which encouraged them to enter into that space of discussion between themselves. This was a very, very great opportunity because that’s in a sense something we didn’t have the opportunity to observe in the show in Tramway because this film was amongst other elements in the installation.

One and Three Bears: nanoq and Joseph Kosuth

BS: I also think it’s quite interesting in terms of the methods we apply to the practice in relation to art history and I keep coming back to a very early piece by Joseph Kosuth called One and Three Chairs. I remember the first time I saw it, it had a huge, impact on me. I thought, this is art in a nutshell, it’s everything art ever has to be. When you think about our practice today, it has a lot of these components in it, but it’s also very different: spatially, over time and over locations; but still, there is t the meaning, it’s the image and it’s the definition.

MW: … And the object.

BS: Yes.

MW: In relation to the photographs, that was very much that dynamic, because it was always the photograph with the provenance, and so you have the image in the environment and the text and they can’t replace each other: in three very different ways they constitute a whole.

BS: A dialogue, yes.

RB: The Kosuth reference is quite interesting, because I remember seeing reproductions of that work and thinking it was a very dry, academic piece of conceptual art and I’d moved towards not liking it from initially liking it. But when you referred to it again in relationship to nanoq and this approach of displacement, which maybe brings up the question of overcoming the sense of re-presenting the real in some naïve fashion. Because it’s not a kidnapped polar bear from the museum on its own, it’s the kidnapped polar bear and the photograph, and not only the photograph, it’s the photograph alongside it’s provenance and the textual history narrating that. For Kosuth I think it’s about form and meaning and the structure of how we cannot access reality, whereas I think in the nanoq piece - although I have to confess this is coming at it through the documentation of the book, and the role that the book plays in all this is another aspect of it - there’s something more critically engaged because perhaps the stakes are suddenly shifted in relationship to the animal and the question then of what it reflects back on the understanding of what it is to be human. I don’t think that power is evoked through the chair with Kosuth.

BS: I do get what you’re saying and I think that is very true, but I don’t think we can just take something like a chair for granted. I mean if you look, for example, at the definition of a chair in a dictionary from English, Icelandic, French, German you’ll have different definitions of a chair; some have got backs, some have got arms, etc. And if you go in different cultures, a chair can become something completely different. So I don’t think it’s just a chair, a clearly defined object and maybe more so now.

SB: I was interested when you raised that example as well and one of the things it made me think about is that I’m interested that you, Ross, used the word dry in relation to it, because that was also the word that I had in mind. That although I wouldn’t in any sense choose to label the kind of work that you two are doing as conceptual art, it does interest me the way in which some people in recent years have looked at some work from the 1990s onwards as a further phase of conceptual art and it seems one of the key differences from those classic works of the late 60s early 70s is that it isn’t so dry and, I don’t think it’s a particularly useful label to put on something like Damien Hirst, but I mean sometimes that has happened and the actual materials that he’s working with, whether it’s the shark or anything else, aren’t dry in the way that a chair kind of is. I suppose what I’m trying to say is, what happens if we take that level of scrutiny and genuine curiosity that always characterised a lot of the most interesting conceptual art and apply it to issues that appear to more obviously - or more explicitly - matter in the world?

MW: I think Kosuth was establishing a baseline in a sense and as much investigative definition as anything.  And in that sense, the academic feel or you know the dryness is absolutely appropriate and strategic in essence. And through the very different reference or mobilisation of perhaps some of that triangulation, which is absolutely integral in relation to nanoq, it’s not about establishing the definition. By using a number of different kinds of methods of representation, but insisting and privileging none of them, something happens as a consequence of those three things sparking in the imagination of the viewer.

SB: Two things come to me there, one is that a key difference between your work and Kosuth’s position back then is of course that he’s the person who quite explicitly comes out and says ‘why should art need an audience, any more than science needs an audience, or mathematics needs an audience?’ And the whole success of your work, in a way, is about engaging an audience and getting people to actually think about issues, not just an audience in the sense of looking at the work but actually taking those ideas away and seeing what happens as a result. But there was a second thing, and I was interested Mark in what you were saying about these different aspects to the work and you’re not privileging any of them over the other, I think one of the difficulties that I have, and it’s my difficulty rather than your difficulty, with the nanoq project is that I can never quite get over thinking that, in the end, the installation at Spike Island was the real centre of that project because the bears were actually there. It wasn’t the various interesting photographic projects and juxtapositions in natural history collections and so on, it wasn’t the book which holds the whole thing together. Those are interesting in their own way but there was something with the presence of the bears at the Spike Island, their actual presence, that for me absolutely is the centre of that project. And yet I think I’m trying to cling on to something there that you, more interestingly, have let go of.

Continued ->