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28/2/2005

Graham Hudson

VTO, London

Solo exhibition

Graham Hudson Interview with Armen Avanessian 2004/05

AA - The work you are showing at VTO seems quite different to the pieces in your last show, including the drawings here. Does the work in this show develop as a further investigation, or a conceptual break?

GH - Its part of an ongoing investigation, but that’s one that includes making breaks in style and content as much as possible. At one point I’d planned this to be a show of drawings, two years ago the whole thing could of been performance.

AA - So what could be described as the common content and theme of your work? I’m interested in questioning familiar perceptions, playing with mundane and over familiar signs. Things that now mean nothing, it’s their signified meaning that again becomes interesting.

AA - One of the ongoing themes seems to be history, historical changes?

GH - Perhaps our attitudes to, and mythologies of, history. I think it often ends up being about the pathos of the spent English man, still gazing up looking for the Messerschmitt.

AA - In terms of style there’s a consistent use of repetition, but the use of materials is too varied to place in any context?

GH - There's a repetition. Piling up, data, stuff, the excess. The medical terms in ‘Crucifixion’, the geometric phraseology in ‘Union Jack’. The shots of alive lost objects in the video ‘New York Stories’, the discarded furniture that makes up the ‘Challenger Tank’, and the patterns in the heraldry... I think the work is always about information, that’s the raw material.

AA - Would you agree on understanding information’ as the universe of mediatic discourses in which we’re living, whether we like it or not?

GH - That's nice; it sounds less like Fox TV. I think of information’ in a McLuhan sense of understanding media.

AA - Mcluhan said: ‘The medium is the message’. That’s not quite the same as ‘Information is the message’, this would mean you’re giving a different answer to the questions of your work each time you use a different material?

GH - Whether it’s the image of the ‘Crucifixion’ or a ‘Challenger Tank’, it’s signified meaning arrives to us in the same formula. It’s this information that I’m working with.

AA - The artworks are now information themselves. And every material also transports its own (sub) meanings, which change the meanings of the artistic practices and models you are using. I mean editing a digital film on your Power-book is not the same as making a bricolage with rubbish found on Hoxton streets?

GH - But in the end what I’m making is always art. Which is better than always making advertising.

AA - What does discarded furniture say about our society, art historical traditions, and your attitude to dealing with these issues?

GH - History is cheap.

AA - To return to my questioning about the variety of subjects and styles you use. Can you comment on the link between discarded furniture and the ‘Challenger Tank’, veneered MDF and the Heraldry, trashy colours and ‘Crucifixion’?

GH - The materials chosen critique the original message. The heraldry with its veneered MDF and proud bucket, replaces something that was perhaps once considered ‘real’. The materials on these heraldic-shields suggest a prozac-Orwell society of celeb-dom, a place where advertising has awards. They’re coats of arms for individuals more than families; Thatcher’s no such thing as society. The sensuous arc of the bucket with its million-year half-life, they look pleasing at first, but up close? It’s where the materials meet, that’s the rub. In ‘Union Jack’, the universal image of a nation, its flag, our ‘Union Jack’ is recast as the geometric formula that makes up its lines and sections. A construction that represents a history of conflicts and compromises. But a Nation isn’t a geographic fact, it’s a mental construction, like God. But the crucifixion of the Carpenter/Political extremist Jesus of Nazareth is a historical fact. Also he was killed using steel and wood, any art/image that features these materials to consider this event, will be reductive to a visual A, B, C. So I didn’t consider these when recasting the image. The video ‘New York Stories’ set out to look for manifestations of terrorism on the streets, amongst the everyday rhythms of the city. I was trying to take the highly constructed media diatribe of ‘terror’ in New York, and see if I could see it on the streets ‘unconstructed’. I was looking for potential suspicion, the everyday gone slightly awry. So to come back to the question, I think the construction of the work is consistent.

AA - Regarding the heraldry and the recurring bucket motif: Your buckets are a mass-produced cheap material, but at the same time they look like something stable, robust, familiar, almost like ‘good old plastic buckets’. Would you agree?

GH - Formally they’re great, Anish Kapoor would be chuffed with those shinny curves, as objects I like how they are defined by their task; what’s in it, A sort of object-adjective.


AA - Is this a connection with personal memories, a private history?

GH - They blur the lines between our mediated-national sense of history (Queen & Country, Christian morality, and war-valour) and personal histories: A life spent on cheap floor-tiles, and absorbing advertising masqueraded as content. If you ever use a bucket, you probably can’t afford, or want, to own one of mine. These are about today’s history: Lakeside-leisure, aesthetic solstice in design, low taxes and Gastro-pubs. The familiarity of appropriation is paramount, there’s too much crap in the world already, the mystery of the art object is just about making it seductive for capital. These buckets represent history, carry information, they shine for conflict and scrub the collective conscious.

AA - Are they supposed to look twenty years out of date, as if to speak to our unconscious collective imagination?

GH - Not intentionally. Most of them were bought on Bethnal Green Road, which I guess still looks twenty years out of date.

AA - What I find interesting about your way of working is that on the one hand you seem to celebrate spontaneity, taking and transforming incidental material, and on the other hand there is a great investment of work in a thing that you eventually delete and decompose. So there is an element of site-specific intervention together with its opposite, a somehow very classical attitude of the artist/author with his own personal handwriting and style.

GH - Trying to triumph your style is a modernist attitude. I admire Kubrick’s oeuvre. He could do any genre, and that became his style. A kind of human-Las Vegas.

AA - To briefly track back, what do you mean by ‘history is cheap’?

GH - Well, The truth is expensive.

AA - I would say there is more differences than repetitions. What I liked about your ‘New York Stories’ Video is first of all the rhythm of it, the breaking of rhythms, the way you play sometimes sound against image, or image against cutting. So in Deleuzian terms, you manage to ‘show’ or make visible how there are always differences evolving/appearing out of what one might think of as repetitions.

GH - An artwork needs rhythm like music. In video work I make it one of the primary features, in the other works the rhythm is less apparent, maybe it appears as repetition, but conceptually it’s the same thing.

AA - We’ve previously discussed ‘art’ as an inherently Bourgeois activity, in both buying, making etc. So when considering such a decadent Western thing as ‘art-making’: What’s the decadent-Bourgeois point? How do try to change/avoid/be conscious of it?

GH – It’s not about changing it, but being aware of it. Not accepting a passive role. We’re all Bourgeois now anyway.

AA - At times I find your work at quite hysterical, but where do we begin with this? In what way are you ironic, or doing parody?

GH – I’m interested in the idea of truth. Irony and parody expose hypocrisy, and so are one very simple step away from the truth.

AA - Are you serious, or a joker?

GH - The two work best hand in hand, every work is as much of a serious joke as it can possibly be.

AA - About ‘information’, you say you use it as a raw material, but at the same time it’s your intervention with this raw material that makes it’s intrinsic meaning visible again.

GH - I'm trying to represent the original thing, but now it’s been manually-thought-about, had references and ideas built into it with screws, glues and editing.

AA - To return to the heraldry: The buckets have perhaps become an emblem for the amount of past one can fabricate and hang in one's sitting room. How is this connected to the increasing interest and need in personal-history-hysteria genealogical TV shows. (“who do you think you are?!) Would you think that is a specific English development, or a wider phenomena?

GH - It's a sign of the times. People wonder are we really just about dreaming of a new sofa? Was there a time when life had a purpose? I think it’s a phenomenon for all countries that America helped’ after WW2.

AA - The buckets with their reference to the past could be understood as the inversion of the avant-garde paradigm of creating the new/modern without reference.

GH - That changed with Duchamp, he was post-modern. Most people still aren’t. Maybe that’s why he quit’ as a young man, like George Best.

AA - Talking about quitting, goals and ends. How do you see your works in the field of art? As interventions, change of perception, focusing, taking the piss etc?

GH - I love art as the idea of intervention. Not digging holes in commuters paths, but tweaks that offer you the chance to rethink. It doesn’t preach, or demand expertise, it tugs at what you know. Maybe yesterday someone helped you with your luggage on the tube? Maybe it was the Mayor making the city nicer, or maybe a gestural intervention. Thinking about perception is a positive experience. The Matrix’ should always be celebrated for getting people into Kant and kids discussing illusions and constructions. The truth is in flux. Taking the piss? Well parody is a great mirror, but it can be reductive, art is at its best when it’s polemically rich.

AA - What would be the climactic/most powerful achievement that you could imagine an artwork of yours to effect?

GH - World peace.

PV: Tuesday 1 March 2005 6 - 10pm

VTO
96 Teesdale St.
London
Open: Friday to Sunday 12 - 6pm or by appointment

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