Bill Woodrow

In conversation with Michael Archer and William Furlong

from Audio Arts Volume 8, Number 4 , 1988

Transcript

William Furlong: We’re back at the Orangerie now, Bill, we’ve just been in what generally do you think about Documenta 8 and your place within it?

Bill Woodrow: I’m still trying to figure out exactly what my place is in it. I’m a little clearer about the concept of the whole show now than I was when I first came, but I am still not clear exactly what it is by any means.

WF: How do you feel about the juxtaposition with design pieces, or designed interiors?

BW: That’s one of the things I’m still coming to terms with. It’s not something that initially bothers me, because on one level I don’t mind what is next to my own work, which is basically what the question is about. I don’t mind unless it’s something that really intrudes physically upon it. In the case of the design things, I think it’s an interesting idea. I don’t know whether it has come off. I’m still formulating that one.

WF: When you were invited to participate in this Documenta, were you aware that they had developed an argument about the idea of a social role and placement of art and design?

BW: No, not really. I was invited and asked to make a large work for the Documenta, a large room-sized installation. I was asked if it would be like another work that I had made, in the concept of it taking up the whole space and the kinds of things it used. I thought it was a bit strange to be asked to do something like another work. I decided I wasn’t going to do that, but that I’d still be in the show, so I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it’. But I did come back to look at the space in February and decided that I would make one large work. I had no idea what it would be, or anything at that point, and I didn’t know what the work would really be until I started making it, a month and a half ago. Going back to the previous question of the whole concept of the show, I didn’t have any notion of that when making the work. I made the sculpture in the same way I make anything else, purely for myself, just within the restrictions of knowing or hoping that I would get the space that I knew about.

WF: Perhaps we could finish by talking about the work which I believe is called The Lure of Civilisation.

BW: The whole sculpture is made from approximately thirteen copper hot-water cylinders. This sheet material of the cylinder, the base and the tops make the bowls, which are like oil lamps on the ground. The three harps are in a ‘state of decay’; the whole sculpture has this air of decay – the microphone isn’t connected up, the harps aren’t playing music, they have a few strings, the crocodile is dead, just limply arched over the middle harp, and the bundle of wheat in a way lies between the two, because it’s something that we could use as a produce, in the sense that it’s cut, and again it’s dead, but it has some optimism about it, because it can be made into something else. And generally the whole atmosphere, when I was making the work, turned into a monumental or shrine-like concept.

WF: Yes, I got the archaeological, tomb-like sense.

BW: Yes, with all these little lamps that are lighting up … in a way I can’t be more eloquent than that, because I didn’t have a set idea of what the work was about before I actually started out on the thing. The initial idea was to make a harp, and that turned into three harps because I liked the first one very much and I wanted this repetitive motif; and then there’s the decaying aspect which came in, and the whole work developed from that.

Michael Archer: There are some themes in it in terms of the imagery and the ideas that seem to be fairly consistent with the kinds of things you’ve treated over the years. The idea of the microphone on the stand as a metaphor for mass communication has been there throughout the 1980s, and also the idea of music as being some kind of medium employed in that form of communication.

BW: Just in terms of the images that are used, I think they’re like the microphone for communication and power, and the animal for natural systems, and then the wheat as food, and the harps are quite interesting for me because although they are a contemporary instrument, they have a very strong image of history for me. Obviously I know where images of harps come from, right back to Greek mythology, but they’re not specific, they just have this very strong image of time in them, which I like very much, and the lamps seem to fit with that.