John Hilliard

Interview by Michael Archer

from Audio Arts Volume 7, Number 3, 1985

Transcript

Michael Archer: John, we’re standing in the main gallery at the I.C.A. with your recent works around the walls. Could you just tell me what processes are involved in producing the images?

John Hilliard: Well it’s not a conventional photographic print process, in that the material itself is not photographically sensitised. Part of the point of doing them like this because you can contemplate a size which simply would not be permitted with the existing photographic papers. In this case the surface is absolutely matt and very flat so that your awareness of the surface itself is very pronounced. There are a number of other things, one is in the colour, because the inks which comprise the image are much more stable than photographic dyes. Also the medium that’s been used which is quite distinct from the conventional address of the photo, which is traditionally like a little window on the world. With these pictures you’re required to look, not into but at. I also wanted a confrontational positioning of the spectator, comparable to that of experiencing something like a large billboard or even to the cinema screen.

MA: Another reference that could be made would be to contemporary painting. Now I know in the catalogue you seem to play that kind of reference down.

JH: Well first of all I would say that there is a relationship to be made and I wouldn’t deny it. In fact in so far as the association with painting might have been made, it was intended maybe, even in a negative way, as the presentation of an alternative mode of image production. The choice of a fabric to print onto is the logical choice and I think it’s really a question of attempting to show that we can produce static, visual images that do, by their very nature, continue the tradition of paint on canvas without losing many of the properties that that easel-painting has acquired over a long period of time, but taking into account all the changes in image production that has taken place over the last 150 years.

MA: Could we then go on and talk about some of the things we have here?

JH: It’s a strategy of image production which most of the works in this exhibition have used, which revolves around the production of a negative image. Both of those actually refer to, not just something which has highly photographic associations and which seems to be very much part and parcel of the depictive language of photography; blurring of course, we think of very much within this relation as with the negative. Of course each has their physiological counterpart in actual optical experience. If you move your head swiftly in front of something or move something swiftly in front of your eyes, you do register the experience of blur. If you are exposed to a bright flash of light reflected from an object which is rapidly removed, you experience what we call the after image, which is a negative image in terms of colour, which provides the sense of complimentary colour experience. These aspects of seeing and of representation are things that do have their counterpart in the world of first-hand perception but nevertheless these two things, particularly blur and negativity, are things we associate very particularly with the medium of photography. So there is a kind of equivalence between part of the experience of seeing itself and the photographic rendition. The work that you’re talking about, which is called ‘Tempo’, is like all the works in this exhibition, which are, in effect, two views of the same moment but there is also, in juxtaposing them side by side, as I’ve done, a new picture, which is the confluence of the two, which is, strictly speaking an impossible picture but one which gives a larger view of this single event than either are capable of doing individually. The idea is that, in isolation, each of these two images have a quite different set of associations. The girl, who is actually putting on the stockings and getting dressed in a domestic interior, seemingly alone, is not an extraordinary event. The man in the rocking chair seemingly fairly old, wearing pyjamas, a dressing gown, with a blanket over his knees, has connotations of age, resting, dozing or possibly of sickness or recuperation; the intended connotations are quite distinct. It’s only when you see them together that there’s suddenly injected a sexual component. The implication of a relationship between the old man and the young girl, which is particularly wrenching in that it transgresses something of a taboo involving sexuality between people so separated by age. I think my primary concerns are about what artists can do, what kind of images they can construct in relation to reality? What kind of media they can use to do this job? What kind of accommodation can be made for this kind of work? They are quite fundamental concerns and the specific images chosen are secondary issues; if that makes sense. For example this work called ‘exchange’ which is seemingly about an exchange of the gaze between a woman driving rapidly past a male pedestrian, so that there’s not just an exchange of glances there’s even an exchange of normal roles according to a certain stereotyping of objectification. The woman driving a powerful car which would normally be the position of the male figure, according to a certain stereotypical placing. She’s also behind the window of the car, whereas the male is much more passively located. This kind of subject is very fore grounded, but for me what is even more basic is the subject of representation itself, insofar as it deals with a kind of voyeurism. And insofar as it deliberately uses this moving flat sheet of glass, as a surface allowing these two different images to be construed, it’s very important to me that the flatness of that surface is in parallel, quite literally in this case, with the flat sheet of the plane of the photographic surface.

MA: Right. Shall we just go down to the small gallery at the end and see the work down there? In some ways these are similar to the larger works we’ve just seen. They’re much closer to the kinds of imagery, certainly in terms of look and formal qualities, that you’re commenting upon.

JH: Yes well I think probably – we were talking before about glossiness and I was saying you can use this term both literally and figuratively as in this case so that any reference to glossy magazine images is made much more explicit here so that the danger as it were, of mistaking the intended critique as merely and endorsement, is much greater. There is, I would admit, an ambivalence about this work because it’s not just that it seeks to perform a rather suspicious critique in relation to its media, but, at the same time, it’s a declaration of respect or love of celebration of these media. I may well be suspicious of the ethics of, let’s say Benson & Hedges advertisements, but at the same time I have enormous respect for the creativity, the invention, the imagery that results. I think my purpose is to try and identify and deal with a number of different kinds of elements that relate to the use of this medium in particular. I think if you’re trying to do that then it wouldn’t be possible to take one of these particular subjects and foreground it, and you know I’ve had particular problems with allowing myself to address a subject like the objectification of women in pictures. Of course the bottom line of the argument is, that in order to discuss this subject the only way to avoid its pitfalls is not to be using comparable images. At that point I would have an argument, but nevertheless I do acknowledge it as being a problem, to the extent that I’ve tried insofar as I’ve continued to incorporate that kind of objectification as subject, to do it in a way that avoids that misconstruction and the way that particular subject is dealt with in the images on fabric, I think doesn’t draw criticism in the same way, perhaps because they do diverge considerably from the sources they refer to. Perhaps also, because I’ve rethought the way that, from my own standpoint, I could legitimately be using images of that kind and I think that the way they’ve been selected is rather different, and I think the way I talked about the use of the man and the woman in this piece, ‘Exchange’, is a very good example of that.