Michael Archer Interview
Chelsea School of Art, London
1st September 1994
Programming Note: I interviewed local art critic Michael Archer as part of my work in developing my second year thesis on the theme of a contemporary three graces. Michael was teaching at Chelsea Art School at the time, and I had simply contacted him through their switchboard and asked if I could spend some time with him after class one evening. As you’ll see, Michael disagreed with me on most of what I put in front of him, which was a fantastic experience as I hadn’t really had much of that before then at Kingston, and it was incredibly helpful in making me understand what it took to have more rigor behind an idea.
Matthew Shadbolt: OK, if I just explain a bit about what I'm doing, I realize that you've written quite a lot on Gallaccio, Lucas and Sam Taylor-Wood, so I'd be interested in your opinions on their works. What I'm actually doing is I'm taking the Three Graces as a starting point, and I've researched who they were and what they represented, and I'm then using that to try to re-analyze the contemporary works. There seems to be a definite link between the Three Graces and those three artists. They represented flowers, mirth, and splendor. There’s an obvious relationship with the three artists there. How do you approach something like that, where you have something from the past being used to re-evaluate the present, how do you approach say, Sam Taylor-Wood, how do you go about looking at it?
Michael Archer: I don't know, I think I just look at it. I don't ever do it that way round I don't think, I mean if there are things historically that seem relevant or amusing to throw in then I'll do it. but I don't usually find that construction first and then lay it over the top.
M.S.: Yeah, I thought it was quite interesting in that piece that you wrote on Sam Taylor-Wood in Art Monthly, that you say that she's using ideas about disguises and betrayal and things like that, and those themselves have a lot of art historical references. When you look at Sam TaylorWood's work, do you look for a lineage, or do you just look at it and try to concoct an anecdote or something.
M.A.: I wrote that piece because I liked the camouflage images, and they were in a group show, and I didn't really want to write about the whole show, but I liked her images. So my solution was to suggest to Art Monthly that I wrote something just about her. And they said alright do it, and then I had to talk about other works of hers, both work that I'd seen already, and other stuff, stuff that I subsequently saw or that we discussed, because I'd seen her work right from when she'd graduated, over the years. The thing that I talk about or at least I think I remember talking about, because I don't remember in any great detail what I write about, whatI remember of that piece is that I stressed her idea of responsibility, of the artist as someone who is responsible, for whatever they say, or whatever images or opinions or representations they come up with, and that was obviously something which had been evident in her work all along. Something which I felt she'd been struggling with or you know, attempting to deal with, which only in recent works had started to come out in a more direct way.
M.S.: What do you think it is about the work that is concerned with responsibility? Do you think it's because she sometimes uses herself?
M.A.: No because she doesn't always use herself. I think that it's... she seems to me that she's always been quite concerned with just what it is she's doing, who she is and what it is she's doing, and to some extent, questioning the fact that, it's her role, in a sense rather than her as an individual, that is the important functioning thing.
M.S.: Her role as an artist?
M.A.: Her role as an artist. In one sense it could be anybody but it's just 'The Artist' doing something there. To a certain extent that's also been tied up with issues of gender, I think probably in the Hans Namuth spoof paintings. Her invisibility in that is obviously questioning her role as a woman artist, and her deliberate use of Sam I think, is part of that as well.
M.A.: I don't think I’ve ever asked her about that, but I can take it that way, that she's happy to be androgynous, in her name.
M.S.: Yeah, that's really Interesting, to work with Issues of gender, and then to use your own name in the same way.
M.A.: I think it's a happy accident, but I think she's quite happy to go along with that, but I mean she doesn't always use herself, but she's quite clear about ways in which she's being provocative, and ways in which she's... what's the best way to say this... she's quite clear about the degree to which her being provocative is only part of her activity as an artist, it's never a kind of be all and end all, although, the public perception of the role of an artist is that that's what they do, which is why I make that comment in relation to the pissing piece, you know, the idea that that's what all artists do, they just piss on the public, she's saying well that's what you think I'm doing, but I'm not you know, and the point about the use of the Latin verb, the particular Latin verb, is not to piss, it's to go to take a piss, there's something much more intentional about that, it's directed, like she knows where she's going to in order to do this, she's chosen a site. it's reflective, rather than it being well you just kind of do something, and people make whatever they want out of it in the same way that the Swastika piece that she did on a T-shirt, and in one sense it might seem a bloody ludicrous thing to do, to walk down Brick Lane with a Swastika on your chest, and again it's that whole thing of provocation, but of course it's not. because it's the other way round, and it's not the Swastika it's the Jewish symbol, the Sanscrit good luck symbol, the other way round kind of thing, so ...
M.S.: It's like playing on the audience’s… what it thinks it knows, and she almost proves their ignorance in a way.
M.A.: Yes, I mean when she did that, and stuck up the photograph, you know, not only was it, it was vandalized by both sides. Like the Urdu was scratched out by the BNP, her eyes were scratched out because she was you know, going around, and the SNP rang up and stuck up things all over it because they thought it was a BNP thing. So like, all sides were kind of misreading what it was she was doing.
M.S.: Do you think that that's quite an important part of it all, the way in which her work is misread?
M.A.: I don't think she's ever, I don't think that's the intention that it's misread.
M.S.: No, that's not what I mean, going back to what you were saying about provocation, and ignorance, and provoking a response of misreading it, I mean that sort of seems to run through a lot of what she does. How important do you think that is? I think it's a really interesting idea to work with.
M.A.: Yes I think there's consciousness that it is going to be misread, and I don't know that it's necessarily the intention to turn round and laugh at somebody and say ‘Ha Ha’. I think I'd probably relate it more to other aspects of her work, like the inevitability of a misreading, so like in the way that she uses camouflage all the time. Which is on the one hand a camouflage, it's a hiding of something, but it's also a fairly transparent reference to a certain kind of art, a certain type of painting. Abstract Expressionism. This again comes back to gender, and the certain types of association that we have with that, and the notion of expressivity, of art as being something about externalizing something which is inside your individual self, and that expressivity which is almost entirely a male preserve. And her questioning of that, would be, to what extent is that simply an externalization of something inside you, or conversely to what extent is that reading of meaning in any kind of gesture that an artist makes necessarily a misreading of some sort. And to what extent is she as a female artist, able to operate in that situation?
M.S.: In dealing with things like that, it’s one thing to just deal with it anyway, and then there’s the other thing if you’re a female artist, having to deal with the history of it as well. Almost like an extra weight, not a cross to bear but… baggage. I think that the way in which she deals with that is interesting, but in looking at her work, the work of a female artist, I don't read her work as particularly anti-male, or ‘Feminist’, the people in the images seem quite strong, quite arrogant, I'm thinking of ‘Slut’ and ‘Fuck Suck Spank Wank’, there's a real sort of arrogance there. That seems to go against the ‘baggage’ if you like, she has her point in history, and she has all this baggage to carry through being a female artist, and then she comes out with this sort of, not a ‘Fuck you’ image but there's a definite defiance there. Yet I don't think it's anti-male, and that's what I find interesting, that it goes against art history, but it's not anti-male. Which is quite curious.
M.A.: I think it’s always turned slightly, there is arrogance in it I think, and I think there’s a real level of enjoyment in it, like dropping your trousers for the camera. It's not something that she's pained to do, I mean she's happy to do it. But then like, the t-shirt is from a gay activist group, so there is already a turning, we go from the straightforward heterosexual kind of ‘come on’ pose, and there is always that I think.
M.S.: What did you make of that piece because to me there seems to be so many different elements in it, that it's really hard to try to tie them all together. Like you have all these sort of disparate elements to it, like the cabbage, you have all the other elements and sort of relate to each other, about disguises, homosexuality in art history, and then you have the cabbage! I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the cabbage.
M.S: It's just there. She just said that she wanted something else in the picture so she thought she'd put it in. Well that's what she said to me anyway, there just needed to be something else in the picture and the cabbage was around, so she just bunged it on the top there.
M.S.: Brilliant! I was trying to work out some deep and meaningful concept of its significance to the picture, and it's just there!
M.A.: But then the arrogance there is deferred onto the bouncers in those pictures, again it's her arrogance I think, and the same thing that she's borrowing from those staged studio shots of Jackson Pollock in the other pieces. You know, it's just the boots that you end up seeing. Surrounded by this big blur of activity.
M.S.: I'd like to ask you, these three that I'm dealing with, how would you look at Sam Taylor-Wood's work in relation to the others? I mean, through what we're been talking about there seems to be elements of that in their work as well. Particularly Sarah Lucas when we're talking about an arrogance…
M.A.: Sure, yeah.
M.S.: Provocation, and you know, having just the boots left. There’s a strong aesthetic link I think, and then Gallaccio with the way that she reassess art history, through making things that don’t last, I’m thinking of her piece that she had at the ICA 'Red on Green', you know, where you're re talking about something like aRothko painting, something like that, how closely do you think they’re linked?
M.A: Well... they were all at Goldsmiths at one time or another, which I guess would link them...
M.S.: Do you think that’s important?
M.A.: Well, only in so far as it was important for all the other people who were there too, in that it's just, it provides a certain kind of supportive framework in which to do something. It doesn't mean to say that any of them are making work that theoretically or aesthetically requires the presence of anyone else's in order to make sense, but they're just mates, well, they're not all mates, but they all kind of know each other, and they're just peers. They're working together in that sense, and they all talk amongst one another, on that level I think it is important. It’s useful for all of them. I don't know that I see a great deal of connections between their individual works, so much... I think that arrogance is something that you can see across Sarah's and Sam's...
M.S.: But there seems to me to be lots of cross referencing, particularly through what could be described as a lineage, if you look at an ‘ancestor’ if you like, I was thinking it might be someone like Helen Chadrick, where you have elements in her work, that are apparent in all the younger artist's works. like Helen Chadwick as the kingpin...
M.A: I have to say I would be absolutely astounded if any of them said that Helen Chadwick was important as an influence.
M.S.: I'm not quoting her as an influence, I’m saying that she’s a sort of predecessor, do you see what I mean?
M.A.: Only in a strict chronological sense, and even then I'm not so sure, Anya used chocolate before Helen did...
M.S.: But that's what I’m saying, if you try and look back, there's the common tie of geometrical volumes of things, and also the flowers, which I know are used in a completely different way, Vanitas type construction, it all seems to link but in a way really difficult to create any historical background.
M.A.: I wouldn't think of that as being a particularly useful lineage to construct, I mean Helen's work I would situate much more within first generation feminist preoccupations, even though she's making it now. I think that where she was formed, artistically, was in that period of the early seventies, I mean that's when she was at college, and when those debates were going on, I think that's where her work is. I think that these other three have a very different relationship to that kind of 'Feminist Thinking'. I mean certainly Anya would say that she doesn't want to be thought of in those terms, she’s aware of it all of course, they all are, but I don't think they would want to see themselves as following in that train in quite that way.
M.S.: OK, what do you think their relationships are to feminism?
M.A.: Well, in the way that for Sam, in the way that we've talked already, it's made more complex and mobile, the issue of gender is much more mobile, in her work. The sense of it being constructed, and one being able to kind of incorporate elements of both masculinity and femininity in whatever identity one has for oneself, I think is very clearly there in her work, I mean that's played around with in those camouflage shots again where she's paired those boys up together. I think that's quite ‘nice’ the way that she's done that, she's really playing with that.
M.S.: They're quite androgynous...
M.A.: Yeah, but the, are couples, you know, they're paired up, and for Anya she would specifically say although she's aware of those debates they are not ones that she wants to take part in. Although in terms of the way she works, I think that's very important for her. The fact that it's not the kind of art that's done on the end of a telephone, although in some ways it seems to involve large quantities of materials and a great deal of repetitive work. Like you have 10,000 roses, you pull the heads off all of them. It's her that does it all. It's important that it's her that does it all, or it's her that spreads the cotton waste or whatever, she does it. You might end up with something that seems kind of monumental in scale, but the sense of the process of making it, of the engagement, the relationship between her and the materials is very intimate within that. It's in that that I would have thought that one gets the expression that this relates to some kind of legacy of Feminism.
M.S.: Do you mean the repetitive nature of it all, kind of like a chore, a quality of routine…
M.A.: Yeah, I think the routine is important, and I think that the fact that something large is built from an enormously large number of small actions is important. I also think the risk is important. and again it's a subversion of that whole vocabulary of risk taking that you would associate with. in her case Rothko, in Sam's Pollock, but certainly with Abstract Expressionism. Like you don't know where it's going to go. She is also using that. There's also certain amounts of trust required on the part of the viewer. You know in the end that it's just going to dissolve or whatever, disappear, rot, something. Exactly how that's going to happen you don’t quite know. And neither does she really.,
M.S.: It's sort of like the unpredictability of it, and this is definitely a Sarah Kent thing to say, but it’s like the unpredictable ‘is’ the feminine, like in the way that nature, plantlife is feminine, and then this imposed masculine culture, to give it a kind of regular, formal, geometric quality. That seems particularly apparent in Anya's work. A structuring of something chaotic.
M.A: That kind of distinction is much too simplistic. I don't think you could say female nature and male culture, I agree that she probably would say that, but it's that thing again, which was a starting point in the seventies, but it really is, you know, it's much more fractured than that. I think that the kinds of connections that Anya would make between her work and that period, are not specifically to feminist works, but much more to do with work by men.
M.S: Performance?
M.A: Not necessarily performance, I think more things like Arte Povera, she's really quite conscious of that, sort of work by Kounellis for example. I mean she made that piece with lots of cactuses, called'Die Hard', and then she did that thing in Prato with all of that cotton waste, she was aware on those occasions that Kounellis had used those materials.
M.S: In the same piece weren't they?
M.A.: No, oh the same Kounellis piece, yes they were, but the idea of going to Italy and making that piece there, was kind of quite interesting for her. So I think that the connections to that period is not straightforwardly to Feminist work or Feminist thinking.
M.S.: Do you think their work has a much closer link to New York in the 1950’s, I’ thinking about what we’ve been saying about Abstract Expressionism.
M.A.: No, I mean I think that the... in so far as they would link back to the late sixties and early seventies, then it is a more general linking back to the ideas. Early conceptualism or whatever. The way in which conceptualism was reappraising the significance of AbstractExpressionism, at that time. Questioning painting itself. The relevance of painting, a painting was dead or whatever, and they're playing with all of those signs, but not in any kind of theoretically prescriptive way I don't think. Or that's how it seems to me anyway.
M.S.: We're talking about a kind of Feminist ‘approach’ to making art, but it seems to me to be quite unclear as to actually what Feminism is, do you have any idea what it actually is? Because it seems the more theoretical information I read, I mean I’ve just finished reading Camille Paglia, the more I read the less I understand it. What do you think Feminism is?
M.A.: I don't know that it's any one thing really. I think the people who were involved would never say that there was 'A Feminist Way' of doing something, there were different Feminisms and there was, it was more the case that one was applying it to a kind of Feminist inspired critique. Applying it to some kind of dominant practice. I mean there are various things, that it seemed to do, one was to question the primacy of the economic. I think, upon which the basis of culture rested, to stress the significance of desire, an individual's desire. The way in which that always unnecessarily breaks through any kind of economic structuring that you've got. It was also attempting to find some kind of relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis. Kind of the mind and the society, and that in various ways was doomed but it was very interesting in the process.
M.A.: But mainly I suppose it was just part of a larger questioning of assumptions, about where you are standing when you speak, when you make any kind of actions, and this goes back to what you what you were saying earlier on, in relation to Sam's work, it's not simply a case of doing something, it's always a case of having to say, on what basis you are doing it, ‘while’ you're doing it.
M.S.: A constant questioning while making. You can’t just do it, although it seems that »ay a lot of the time. I mean when Sarah Lucas pastes up her Sunday Sport blow ups, it looks as if she's Just gone out and done it, or she's stuck some razor blades in some of her old boots. I think it's quite interesting the way that that works, it seems slapdash and haphazard, but invariably never is, always very considered. ButI'm not sure if that's just the way that the work is read. or if it is actually like that, I'm not too sure about that, if it is actually slapdash, which I suspect it might be, or if she wants us to think it's like that, I mean obviously we come to it with our own set of stuff, and I'm not sure if they play on that.
M.A.: I think she's quite happy for people to be unsure about that.
M.S.: Do you think she exploits it?
M.A.: Yeah. I think so. I mean the fact that she uses the kinds of materials that she does, is an invitation to take it on that primary level, that all she's doing is swearing or using swear words or whatever, but then you can take it on another level, you can say that she is, she's looking at language, the ways of representing, not only representing, but fragmenting the body as you represent it. And that dealing with it in that way. That's obviously a much more, even though it seems that there’s much more manipulation of that material, the fact that you are dealing with it on that level is a much more subtle thing.
M.S.: It's obviously linked with the idea of ‘body’, and is concerned with that, but it's particularly women’s bodies. I’m thinking of when she displayed the huge fat woman and the very dwarf like small woman. These images of women, they're pasted up on huge canvases, which is another reference to art history, the painted image you know, so it's the women in art history thing again you know, but it doesn't quite all tie in for some reason.
M.A.: I think it would be pretty depressing if you could tie it all in really but yes, there are almost those, the early sequences of the photos, with the fruit and stuff, that were laid across a piece of two by one which was then laid across two bicycle wheels of an upturned bicycle, on the one hand it's Duchamp, and on the other hand it's another representation of the female, as bicycle. So there s always more I think, than oh just that's what she's talking about.
M.S.: OK then, to turn that around, what do you think she's talking about? In that review of that show at City Racing, you say that she's turning the tabloid press to her own ends, what do you think her own ends are? Ultimately, what are her aims?
M.A.: I don't think it's that straightforward, it’s not that confrontational. but there are enormously confrontational aspects of her work, but there's never being on one side and being on the other side, which is what you would take a straightforward critique of the tabloid press to be, and that's where I think a lot of people would have difficulty with her work. because they could only take it as, her swearing at them or whatever, I mean in a sense what she is doing is just that, because you can't be holier than thou about the presence of tabloid papers in our culture, they're part of the way in which we represent the world to ourselves. You know, she's not saying, something as simplistic as ‘I hate The Sun’ or ‘I hate the Daily Sport’ or whatever, she's saying look there's this stuff here, what's it saying? How is it saying it?
M.S.: Just by the simple action of pasting it up.
M.A.: Yeah
M.S.: So you don’t think there's, that being specific’s an issue?
M.A.: No I don't think so, I really don't think so.
M.S.: Do you think that's important?
M.A.: No I don't. I mean there is a constant challenge I think, in her work, and it is so easy to take it just as being trivial really. I mean the piece she just had at D'Offay's, I don't think I've heard a good word about it from anybody, since it was put up you know, just a stupid idea, and it is just a stupid idea, I think that there is as I say, also this understanding of the fact that there are certain means which we have at our disposal, to say anything, and that we have no other means. Those are the means that we have. Like the Spanner jigsaw piece, like you've got four blocks or something, you make a Daily Mirror or News of the World front page out of it. And you've got such limited material at your disposal, and it seems so debased somehow, and you know, that's where you have to find the poetry because if you can't find it there then you're not going to find it. That's all you've got...
M.S.: I don't think there's anything wrong with stupid ideas, I like stupid ideas, the piece at D'Offay’s. it's obviously ‘Lager drinking's for wankers’ or something like that, very simplistic, but I mean that in itself, that stupid idea, is an interesting one. Not solely because of its stupidity either. I mean, I've never had that question put to me with a piece of work ever before, so therefore it*s an interesting piece of work, if it's doing something new, do you know what I mean? Also it's the way in which she does it, kind of like a storyboard. It shows the development of a process. The way that the bloke is photographed, in quite a grungy kind of way, and that's something that I find interesting in her work also.
M.A.: Yes, it’s not Jeff Koons. Definitely not.
M.S.: Yes, but in saying that, when you see it in the Saatchi gallery. then it almost is Jeff Koons, do you see what I mean? Put in that environment...
M.A.: Yes, your reference to the grungy aspect of the work, it's not in this wonderfully dressed set, it's just some guy sitting somewhere with no clothes on and a can of lager. It's not ‘Made in Heaven’ in that sense.But in a way there is almost something kind of liturgical about her work, the pages she did in ‘Technique Anglaise’, the lists of names for parts of the body, without wanting to seem blasphemous, it's just like the ninety-nine names of god or something, like you're intoning how many different things you can call a cunt, it's quite holy.
M.S.: What, you mean like a ten commandments?
M.A.: No, I mean that I think there's something very reverent about the human mind trying to name bits of themselves in so many different ways.
M.S.: But don't you think that's about overcoming a taboo? I'm not sure, but when we're talking about her work being grungy, with the later works, the works of this year, they've been put in this pristine environment, it almost has to battle with the architecture, I'm thinking of the White Cube, or the Saatchi. It's something very different to City Racing, where the place is almost falling apart, this makes her work difficult to look at, because obviously the context is going to change one's reading of the work. how do you think that particular change in environment affects the work?The newspaper blow-ups, when you see them in City Racing and then at the Saatchi.
M.A.: I didn’t see the Saatchi show, I only saw them at City Racing. I’m not sure that it would be possible to dismiss it more as a throwaway thing. You have to feel, as the idle art observer, that the institution lent some substance to the work, whereas at City Racing you might think that it’s a mistake, but I'm not sure that that's the case really I think. I couldn’t really say much about that.
M.S.: There seems to be a weight that comes with an institution.
M.A.: Well, there always is, but it can be interpreted in different ways. I mean people who are predisposed against that institution...
M.S.: Are we going to get locked in now?
M.A.: Yes, maybe we ought to stop...
(Interview cassette ends)
