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Some Thoughts by Way of an Introduction to my Work
 

by Simon Vaughan Winter (07 Oct 2003)


I will begin at the beginning. I make and paint the things I do out of a compulsion to do so. I always have, as far back into my memory as I can reach. Obviously, at some fundamental level in my make-up I need to do so. It is an instinct that can be suppressed, but not for long; not without psychological suffering and aimless replacement activity.

I make them for me, not anyone else. The process of other people seeing them is quite separate from the impetus to originate. Stranded as the sole inhabitant of a desert island I would be making what I call art on the beach – and not in anticipation of a boat-load of art-lovers appearing over the horizon one day.

That said, the process of showing the work is important. It seems to complete a circle. I do not have a message to get across; the work is not propagandist or didactic at all. But the possibility of communicating with the viewer really matters.

I think of it as analogous to the physical process of osmosis. The meaning, or my expression of my experience – which is embedded within the work – seeps (or leaks, or trickles, or flows) through the membrane – which is the act of viewing – to reach the viewer. I try to make the membrane as “leaky” as possible. I don’t want to make enigmas, impenetrable pieces. I want to connect.

The themes in the work are mostly the universal ones. These are after all the only really important ones. Life and death; love and fear; lust and sexuality; mortality and decay; beauty and ugliness. How we, as humans, here and now, strive to make some sort of sense of the world around us. How we project meaning onto and into the things that surround us. How objects can become symbols, how inert things can come to represent, and then transmit, emotions, feelings and sensations.

I have an iconography of objects and images that have significance for me. We all do. Some of mine are universal (perhaps fundamentally human), others are culturally-specific but widely shared, others are more intimately personal to me.

I realise that those objects and images which are the most personal, those embodying associations and meanings I invest in things as a result of my own unique experience, are the most problematic for the viewer. But even these, I hope, are not so obscure, so bizarre, so tangential, as to prevent some of their meaning leaking through to the willing viewer. Willingness on the part of the viewer being essential.

This approach places me firmly in the Romantic tradition, Fenella Crichton, in an essay for the “British Sculpture in the Twentieth Century” exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, 1981, (discussing the work of Michael Sandle and Carl Plackman, among others) wrote: “Baudelaire’s famous non-definition (that) ‘Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject-matter, nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling’ paradoxically remains the best definition of that kind of art which depends upon the expression of an artist’s personal truth. In the early nineteenth century a sense of emotional authenticity became for the first time the most important criterion for evaluating art… what these (artists) have in common… is that their personal experience of the world is brought to bear directly on the meaning of their work. It is a conscious decision and, unlike many artists whose search for originality is centred on the invention of new forms, these artists use forms which above all have a degree of personal meaning. This means that their work relates directly to their personalities, ensuring that there is always an important dimension which is private…”

When I was very young, I used to make “worlds”, in plasticine, in the empty St.Julien tins that contained the tobacco that my father smoked in his pipe. These “worlds” had enormous significance for me. Soon the plasticine became augmented by found objects; trophies gleaned from the back-garden, the gutters, the pavements, the railway embankments, the waste-sites. I saw these “worlds” as utterly self-contained entities. They were of this world, obviously, but somehow rather more parallel to it than an integral part of it. A quickly snapped-on lid, when anyone approached, could seal them off, and emphasize their separateness.

I used to think about the tin “worlds” a lot. Deciding what object needed to be found that would be just right to complete a tin, or what sort of “world” needed to be constructed to house a particularly numinous find. When life got unpleasant it would be to the tins that I would withdraw – and life seemed to be unpleasant too often for this little boy, as the late-1950’s turned into the early-1960’s.

I recognise that much of what I’m doing today is not so very different to what I was doing in those tobacco tins. Indeed there are times today, when I am struggling, that I wish that my current work had the completeness and the surety of many of those tobacco tin “worlds”.

Ideally a piece of work is finished when anything extra included would be superfluous, but any element removed would impair the internal logic of the work. This concept of an “internal logic” to each piece or painting is central to my activity as an artist. I spend as much time working to achieve this optimal balance as I do on any other aspects of my work – which is why some pieces can take a very long time to complete. Frequently a work will need to be set aside and just looked at, and thought about, before it becomes clear what more, or less, it needs to be declared complete.

Frank Auerbach, in an interview with Catherine Lampert (published in the catalogue of his 1978 Arts Council Exhibition) said: “What I’m not hoping to do is paint another picture because there are enough pictures in the world. I’m hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing.” This is a succinctly expressed summation of my ambition.

Perhaps the artist whose work has had the greatest impact on me is Joseph Cornell. This is not the place to write an appreciation of his work, but his impact on my activity (since I first reviewed the exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, which was the London showing of the 1980/81 retrospective mounted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York) has been immense. I remain stunned at how Cornell could make one small length of whitewashed dowelling represent the whole of architecture; how he taught me something of what the image of an owl meant to him, and how I find that it overlaps with some of what it means to me, although I am also fascinated by the territory that does not overlap.

Like Cornell, I am at risk of being pigeon-holed as a Surrealist. Juxtapose the unfamiliar, use ready-made (and mass-produced) objects, employ visual puns – and to have the Surrealist label slapped on your work is almost inevitable. I am not particularly interested in my dreams, coming to terms with the world awake is far more complex and interesting; I find coincidence intriguing rather than significant; and automatism as an idea is almost the opposite of what I wish to do.

Being labelled as a latter-day Surrealist used to irk me intensely. It was partly to face up to this that I made two works based on Rene Magritte’s The Red Model, 1935. The first using the cast feet of my son, Hugo, Following in Magritte’s Footsteps, No.1, and the second, No.2, using my own. These works helped me to resolve some of the issues I had with my relationship to the vast Surrealist legacy. Dawn Ade’s superb essay on the relationship between Joseph Cornell and Surrealism in the 1980 Museum of Modern Art catalogue, reflects my ideas with scholarship and elegance beyond me. In many ways I feel more affinity to some of the founders of Dada. Aspects of the work of Jean Arp, Francis Picabia and Kurt Schwitters have deeply influenced my activity.

I like the concept (and appearance) of reliquaries, of vitrines, of cabinet de curiosities. I like terrarariums, dioramas, Victorian compositions under bell-jars and the idea of the kunstkammer.

I like small objects. I collect things; small, portable things. I preserve my precious objects as carefully and with as much respect as any curator protects his collection. An object that goes into a piece may have been selected and saved, kept and treasured for years before finding its place in a work. Using a precious object is always a wrench – I have to yield it up and lose its potential for use in another piece. A large work, such as Pale Piece, involves a great deal of sacrifice.

I am attracted to the flotsam and jetsom of our lives; for the things most people don’t bother with or regard as rubbish. Kynaston McShine wrote that for Cornell, “a necklace from Woolworths could have as much value as one from Fabergé”. I’m with Cornell on that one. It seems to me to be the beginning of a more profound value-system than the one we are generally forced to live our lives by.

I have no problems using objects that were intended to be toys. Baudelaire believed that childhood experience is somehow primary. The objects of childhood, whether designed as toys or simply assumed for play, are not substitutes for reality, they are real. In games, the child’s imagination is wholly convinced by the reality it has made for itself.

To achieve such conviction for my work is one of the (most difficult) tasks I set for myself. It is an aspect of the “internal logic” I seek to achieve in each piece or painting. And I will pay as much attention to a child’s reaction to a piece of work as I do to that of any art-world operator.

Humour is important too. Humour can often be the instinctive human response to the darkest things and deepest fears. I often find that viewers smile as an initial response to (some) of my work - and then they seem to feel the need to apologise for it, as if a smile was an inappropriate reaction to such a “serious activity” as looking at art. I welcome the smiles. They are often the first sign of real engagement with the work. Humour and tragedy are twins: it is a truism (as well as a cliché) to point out that some of the most profound feelings and experiences are often most aptly expressed via the medium of humour.

I am also fascinated by the natural world. I find that I favour the often over-looked to the flashy and showy. My plants are fungi, algae, liverworts, mosses, moulds and lichens, seaweeds and sponges. I have empathy with the inhabitants of dark, damp undergrowth, with those surviving on rotting wood or decomposing leaf-mould, with those that struggle between the gaps in concrete or find a hold on poisoned waste-land, those that cling to existence on wind-swept moorland or stony slopes of scree, those who survive the ever-changing environment between the low-tide mark and the debris-strewn high tide-line. Marginal habitats.

When images threaten to resonate out of control, when objects pile-up in chaos and meanings spiral into entropic babble – when I lose control – things are sometimes only containable by using those formats and contrivances which borrow from the orderliness of the curator, the systemisation of the taxonomist, and the museological devices of natural historians and archivists.

Back into childhood again… Upstairs, into the entomology department of the Natural History Museum, in South Kensington. Vast rooms, huge arched windows. Always deserted. A little boy who collects beetles is almost lost among the row after row of mahogany cabinets fitted with brass furniture. He slides open shallow glass-topped drawer after drawer of pinned specimens. Hundreds of thousands of them, probably millions. Collected from almost every place on earth: the deepest rainforests to the polar ice-caps; from mountain peaks to baking salt-pan deserts. With intrepid Victorian coleopterists original identification labels, in spidery indian-ink copperplate, attached to each pin. Hour upon hour I spent alone, in dusty shafts of sunlight, sliding drawers in and out; awed by the sheer diversity. Beetles are by far the most successful creatures on earth. There are probably two million separate species, maybe many more. Compare that to four thousand species of mammals.

The entomology department is very different today. The cabinets have gone from public view, withdrawn to the closed part of the Museum where more than 99% of its collection is held. You get to “insects” through the “Darwin Experience”, and find that it is a couple of rooms filled with clever big plastic models and audio-visual displays. Educational, perhaps; inspirational – no. You cannot discover for yourself something which is thrust at you with smart gadgetry and slick presentational tricks.

I don’t want my art to thrust itself at you. I am happy for it to be quiet. Initially a touch obscure perhaps. Even a little mysterious, inviting discovery and slowly revealing more of itself the longer it is engaged with.

When approaching a work of art (other than the merely decorative or purely pictorial) the most frequently asked questions, “what does it mean?”, “what is it about?”, “what it for?” are also the most completely irrelevant. A work of art’s raison d’être is totally explained by the fact of its existence. This is a belief that I hold so strongly that after ten years as an arts journalist and critic I had to face the fact that “explaining” art is, ultimately, a useless activity.

During those years I had to read so many “artist’s statements” that I learnt to treat them with gravest suspicion. My toes would curl in anticipation of the seemingly obligatory, “My work explores . . .” so I am resigned to the likelihood that my own artist’s statement is probably doomed to failure. With that caveat in mind, it can be quite interesting to learn what an artist has to say about his own work. It can provide a context. Perhaps evidence of meaningful intellegence employed or seriousness of purpose might emerge.

The real answers to the “what is it?” questions above can only be found in a direct encounter with the work. A piece that I may have had in mind for years, which includes precious objects I may have garnered for as long and which can take weeks, or months, to make, needs to be engaged with for longer than the few moments those who ask the “what is it?” questions are generally willing to give it.

Making art is an act of arrogance. I have already said that I make the things I do for myself, and although communication (with a viewer – in the act of viewing) can complete a work, it is not necessary to my activity as an artist. I have to recognise the fact that some of the attraction in making art lies in the fact that I have complete, utter and total dominion over the pieces that I produce. Within my art I am the Creator.

Other men make things and do things, but if the roof leaks or the pipes burst or the walls fall down they are called to account. The standards they work to are not their own, they are given. Artists set their own standards; their conceit lies in indulging in an activity wherein they need to satisfy performance-targets they set for themselves. Artists achieve self-respect when they stand up for themselves, when they trust to their faculties and their passions. Artists present a non-negotiable statement.

Ah, but this over-wheening arrogance and seemingly boundless freedom is, ultimately, illusory. The pay-off is that to enjoy it I also have to turn myself inside out. I have to expose my deepest emotional and psychological sensitivities to the public gaze. The more vulnerable I make myself the more successful in my aims I am.

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