Malcolm Morley

from Audio Arts Volume 7, Number 3, 1985

Transcript

Malcolm Morley: This very nice Scottish chap came up to me at the opening; he was a painter, and an admirer of my painting. He told me quite frankly but there was a sound in his voice when he said ‘all these changes’, and I said that I felt that there was a moral judgement in the way you diphthong the vowel in ‘changes’. He paused for a moment, enough to think about that and he said ‘yes, I hadn’t thought of it’, but there’s an automatic value judgement about ‘you changed, you betrayed us’. The idea of change in itself as a form is very alarming and frightening in terms of people. In culture we’re taught to identify, and you de-identify at great peril. A lot of people, I suppose, flip out, you know as an option. So it’s a powerless sort of a journey but nevertheless to recognise the peril, in that sense, opens up the possibility of a higher ecstasy, because in a way there is a greater desire in our being, which is to be ecstatic, to be euphoric and there’s a drive in us that needs that. We try to find it in religion, art and drugs. After doing a picture you feel that you’ve passed through something. There’s a very definite feeling of that, you couldn’t say specifically what, but even doing the show here in England, I feel very liberated from a terrible ‘know that you know’ feeling I’ve had here for twenty years. This real knot right here; a feeling of alienation from my Country and that’s a polymorphic thing because one’s Country is one’s womb. It’s a mother earth and life you know and the knot in my own personal life becomes a sort of parallel to the general condition facing us all. Very often I contrast figures by Indians and primitives, against modern civilised soldiers that use advanced methods. There’s a constant visual metaphor between the primitive, direct and spontaneous, against the general organised delaying, delay, delay. The root of civilisation is based on delaying. When the civilised gentleman is hungry he doesn’t just eat, he drinks two martinis first. When he’s feeling erotic there’s a lot of foreplay and maybe the whole endplay is the foreplay, he never gets to the end. Whereas when the primitive is hungry, he eats you know so the erotic he just ‘pttt’ you know, and he’s very uncivilised and it’s no fun, they say. The alienation and the price to pay is enormous; this so called civilising process is enormous. The reduction of the whole, the reduction of the individual is subservient to the whole and is something, that in some political systems, in communist countries, the individual is subservient to the whole. In America the individual is higher than the whole, in a sense. The whole is the sum total of all those individuals, being more than themselves, not less than themselves. All of those things, are feelings I’ve had personally, so there’s a riddle in those pictures that, apart from the delivery of the riddle, is in the form of painting as a plastic reality and that I’m developing a painterly temperament of pleasure through modulation. There’s a lot of modulating in these paintings, do you agree? In a way I feel the whole of the art world’s New York’s trip portrayed the basic tenet of Cézanne, when he said ‘I’ll never give up modulating for flatness’, like Gauguin; he would never do that because he considered flatness to be decorative, which is absolutely beautifully put.