Conrad Atkinson

from Audio Arts Volume 3, Number 3, 1977

Transcript

This contribution by Conrad Atkinson formed part of a two-day conference on Art & Politics which took place in London in April 1977. The overall theme of the conference was the relationship between politics and art expressed in five concepts, which themselves formed the topics of the conference sessions: patronage, art and government, political art, sexual politics and the nature of the avant garde. In this context Atkinson spoke about the political nature of his own art.

Conrad Atkinson: One of my earliest recollections of involvement in art of any kind was in my former village in the North of England. It was a mining village and its official designation was a distressed area. In the evenings, once a week, neighbours would come into our front room to make hooky mats. I don’t know if you know what they are but they’re kind of rag mats. We all sat round a large wooden frame about 5 foot by 5 foot over which was stretched a piece of Hessian that was usually washed potato sacks, because we were into re-cycling very early in Cumberland. Everyone brought old clothes and rags and these were cut into strips and sorted into colours and they were then pushed through the sacking. I can remember wanting to do the design for one of these and I was given the opportunity and I vaguely remember drawing a kind of large square and little squares and zig zags and things and round the border there’s a dark strip, that’s for practical purposes. Squares were in that year. I was reminded of this recently when I went to Chugwell to organise an exhibition there. Chugwell is also a mining village and Chugwell declared itself a Soviet in 1926 and it’s a place that has street still called Lenin Terrace and Marx Avenue and Engels Street and Kier Hardy Avenue. I met an old lady there who told me that her friend made a special hooky mat for her husband’s birthday in the 1920’s. She made a design of a very large red hammer and sickle on a black background and on the day of his birthday she finished it. She put it down in the front kitchen to surprise him when he came in from the pit. When he saw it, he was delighted with the mat but he said, ‘it’s sacrilege to walk on it’ and so he said ‘we’re not walking on that woman, hang it on the wall’. So it was hung on the wall and there’s a nice kind of parallel there and I don’t want to kind of pretend it’s a lesson from the anecdote, but the difference between the first activity with the collective kinds of decisions that were being made, and with the social and practical significance and the second, where a symbol of a political ideology changes the use and the nature of the object, making it important in different terms. It seems to me to illuminate some of the areas of interest to the current plan of the debate.

The difference between the two seems to me significant in the light of my subsequent experiences as an artist i.e. a person who is isolated in order that he become a specialist producer for our society of ‘art’ in inverted commas. I think that much of the current debate about art and politics shows confusion and a blurring of the twin and possibly conflicting ideas of the artist as craftsman on the one hand, and the artist as intellectual on the other. To condense it even more, think of the artist as specialist. The artist as craftsman has an implication in current society of the unthinking production of luxury goods subject, presumably, to the same vagaries of market and economy as any other worker, and who would of necessity, need to organise to protect his conditions and to promote his area of skill collectively.