Gary Hume

From the Venice Biennale 1999

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 18 Numbers 3 & 4, 1999

Transcript

Venice Biennale 1999 This is the seventh Venice Biennale that Audio Arts ahs attended in order to make ‘on the spot’ recordings during the opening days. Throughout this period there is a concentration of artists, curators, critics and commentators from all over the world. In addition to the unrehearsed, live interviews made during the first three days of the Biennale, Audio Arts in association with Wimbledon School of Art and supported by the British Council, also held an international conference in the British Pavilion. Under the Directorship of Harold Szeemann, the 1999 Biennale saw an extension of its locations beyond the Castello Gardens into the historic spaces of the Artiglierie, the Tese and the covered shipyard area of the Gaggiandre. This combination of spaces, including the large docks of the Arsenale and the Corderi, were extended by more than thirty venues to house exhibitions of countries that do not have their own national pavilions. This Biennale was also characterised by the increased representation of Asian artists and Szeemann’s desire for it to be seen as a whole, ‘Aperto overALL’, rather than the previous tradition of separating the young and up-and-coming artists of the Aperto section from the older and most established artists in the National Pavilions. The recorded conversations, both on this issue and on the conference tape in addition to examining artists’ practice, it interrogated and supported the concept of the Biennale as a model, whilst accepting a growing positive tension between the ‘blockbuster’ National Pavilion displays and the often quieter ‘off-centre’ interventions.

William Furlong: Gary you’re the artist in this 1999 Biennale, the last one before the millennium, let’s talk about the pieces that you have here. Were they made for this particular Biennale and for this particular space?

Gary Hume: The first one wasn’t and then once the first one was made and I had a model made of the Pavilion I thought it would be very nice if I had a few more of these, so I proceeded to make some more.

WF: So they are related to the physical spaces of the Pavilion?

GH: Well it’s just a fluke really because the first one was something else entirely and then when I had the model made and I was making small maquettes of all the paintings and sticking them on the wall I saw that it was a scale I really liked. So I thought well why don’t I paint some more.

WF: And the title of them is ‘Water Painting’ 1999 and they’re calligraphic drawings of the nude female. Do these paintings have a subject matter?

GH: One model is my wife and the other models are Zoë, Marie and Georgy. The subject matter, if there is a subject matter, is a nude woman.

WF: They’re gloss paint on aluminium. You’re using a kind of visual language of drawing, but it still remains very flat.

GH: Because they were all painted in the negative, so the line isn’t actually painted, all the space around the line is painted. So it’s a negative painting.

WF: So what is the procedure?

GH: Do photos, drawings, projections, tracing and filling in.

WF: How do you decide on the subject matter?

GH: It’s a bit like having a palette; you have a palette for a certain amount of time and you are always using the same colours and then something happens, and your palette has changed dramatically and you’re using a totally different one. Things to paint are like that. You keep seeing things that you recognise, things that are possible, and often they just gently lead on from one to another. At other times things just crop up all of a sudden and you want to paint it; that’s my painting and I want it.

WF: Do they proceed from drawings, from maquettes, or do they happen initially on the actual surface?

GH: No, they almost always start as photographs. Then as drawings or tracings and then as projections and then as tracings from the projection and then as colouring in and, very rarely, different uses of paint, actually going from the one thing to sort of like boil it down to its actual essence, to distil it, it’s not a load of filters, masks.

WF: What I was comparing it to I suppose is the hand gesture, you know the physical act, because it also links to this idea of the flat colour, the gloss paint which what the whole world is painted with, whereas the History of Art is based on oil paint that comes out of a tube. You choose not to use that.

GH: Yes, I didn’t want to use it at first because I was painting doors, and doors are painted in gloss and it was that whole truth to materials period and so it just seemed like an appropriate thing to do. Then I started to love the material and see that I could actually paint paintings with it. I could do the same painting in oil but it just wouldn’t be the same. It would look dead because oil paint is pigment suspended in oil but gloss paint isn’t really like that, it’s more like a liquid that’s sets, rather than a pigment that dries, so it’s got a very different feel to it. Mentally it has a very different attitude.

WF: To what extent is it important that you don’t work with that sort of baggage of painting?

GH: It doesn’t matter at all now, but when I started doing it I wouldn’t even call myself a painter. I had to change my name to a picture maker to allow myself to make paintings, because there was too much fear.

WF: You avoid that by using gloss paint, a material that is used on objects that surround us in the real world.

GH: I don’t think people notice that it’s gloss paint. They notice that it’s shiny but they don’t think ‘ah, that’s just like I’ve done my door frame’. But once it’s been made into a picture they don’t see the paint they see it as a material that has been transformed, hopefully, into something extraordinary.

WF: Do the titles come after or before?

GH: Always after. Well during and after, while they’re being made. That’s because it’s a very scary painting and it’s the same painting as Begging For It but the other way up. It’s very scary; it’s a ballerina falling, or Lucifer.

WF: So now we’re looking at some other paintings; Cave and Pauline. They’re almost literal portraits, semi-nude but you’ve chosen to flatten certain sections out and again, the space around the forms seem to have been given more attention than the form itself. In Pauline the face doesn’t have any features on it.

GH: She does, but they’re underneath.

WF: They’re quite concealed.

GH: This is the idea that you can’t get anywhere near anything without looking at it. You’ve got your first glance of you and then the closer and closer I get to you the more I know what you look like and what you’re like and how you make your expression, by your personality. So that’s the painting.

WF: How do they evolve? This one Pauline has a flower-like motif around the figure to the left. How did that arrive on the surface?

GH: That’s a snowflake and the snow flake went in there because previously the background had been bright blue, as I’d put her on the beach and she was too hot, and so I needed to take her off the beach. So I gave her the yellow but then the yellow made me laugh because it got her to the temperature I wanted and made her Munch, and I’d always wanted her hair to be like autumn, and then I needed winter.

WF: When you say Munch, that’s the background behind the Munch ‘Scream’ painting?

GH: Yes, that and Madonna.

WF: That’s slightly unusual because you’re leaving the sort of hand mark.

GH: That’s because Munch makes me laugh so it was to have that expression. It still affected me but it made me laugh.

WF: I’m curious about Birdsong, which is a vertical, with a slightly organic pattern. What is the relationship between that and birdsong?

GH: I don’t really know apart from the fact that I was just trying to paint the sound of a bird singing. From my studio I had a lot of birdsong and I like it and I also have audiotapes of the sounds of nature. I like them a lot and I wanted to try and make a painting that was like a song; I wanted to try and get that bit you can’t hear. You know when you sing, I can’t sing, but I can sometimes feel that tiny sound, that perfect little bit of silence, that maybe a singer hears. The nothing that that’s the note they want. So it’s my clumsy way of trying paint that.

WF: We’re now looking at Kate and I think I read somewhere that this is an image of super model Kate Moss, and you also painted Tony Blackburn. Why the celebrities?

GH: Kate, because well I just fancy her and she’s incredibly beautiful. She’s much younger than me but I feel like I’ve known her all my life. So how did that happen? I just wanted to paint a Venus basically.

WF: Her face is obliterated back to the aluminium; it has a brushed aluminium texture.

GH: Yes, that’s because there was a lot of screaming because she kept being the photographers ‘her’, rather than mine. So to make her into mine I had to do it did feel a bit horrible at the time, it was a bit violent but it wasn’t meant to be violent. It was supposed to just be a mark. It was just an attempt to make her mine really.

WF: So you denied her her beauty by which she is sort of consumed by the world so that she stays somehow away from the world, and stays with you I guess?

GH: Yes. I don’t travel in those ways when I look at my own paintings. Those thoughts will be there but they don’t guide me, the paintings tell me what to do.

WF: And the little orange bit at the top is referencing the Madonna I suppose, the halo?

GH: Exactly. And there’s Venus rising from her shell, but that’s only a bit of sugar paper, poor thing.

WF: Why have you chosen aluminium?

GH: Because it’s inert, light, strong and beautiful.

WF: You can always bring it back to the metal state if you want to, like in Kate.

GH: Yes. That’s not bringing it back to the metal state, it’s avoiding painting it, because you have to prime it all with an acid to start with otherwise the paint will fall off.

WF: Rather than paint straight on with gloss.

GH: Yes, so all of these bits have all been worked on previously, before being coloured, whereas these bits won’t have been.

WF: Do you re-work paintings, or do you get it right first time?

GH: Different paintings have different histories.

WF: Now we’re looking at Widow. What is the origin of this one?

GH: Some plant paintings I was doing, and this was just a very difficult painting; it took me a long time; that’s why it’s so different really. I didn’t like it for ages and ages.

WF: To what extent are you aesthetically placing one colour against another in the way that art has done for a long time?

GH: I pick up my colour and I hold it next to the next colour.

WF: So it’s a carefully considered choice. I have a question about Blackbird?

GH: It comes from a 1911 book of common British birds. A very cheap ornithological book about birds with not terribly good water colours of birds, but it was moving because half of them aren’t common any more. The First and Second World Wars hadn’t begun and the there were these drawings of birds.

WF: It’s a bird about to sing?

GH: I think she might be singing, or he might be singing, or just about, yes just that moment, between notes.

WF: The sources you use are sources that you just find around you I presume?

GH: I found a tapestry; I can’t remember who the tapestry’s by but it’s called ‘The Unicorn and le Dame’ or some such thing and it’s just outside Paris. I haven’t seen it yet. It’s very beautiful, and I fell in love with it straight away and saw paintings in it, and so just started making paintings.

WF: Right, and how directly are they related to the source?

GH: Well that rabbit is about five foot high and the real rabbit is about three inches high; the real one looks like a rabbit and mine resembles a rabbit.

WF: In many of the works you’re actually retrieving imagery from sources that are normally not dealt with. They are sources that entertain people or instruct children or are on publicity materials, but you remove them and bring them back, in terms of imagery that can be dealt with, white fluffy rabbits and so on.

GH: Well pathos is in the recognition of innocence isn’t it? So the innocent things are often the things that hurt most.

WF: Talk about Cerith. Is this an individual that you know?

GH: Yes, a friend of mine Cerith Gwinn Evans. It’s just a portrait of him, because I like him a lot. He scares me because he’s brilliant and so I’m always embarrassed when I’m with him. He always comes into my field of vision and amuses and is brilliant and I’m always scared, but I love him a lot.

WF: What did you use, a photograph?

GH: No, just a drawing. It doesn’t really look like him. It would be no good if he robbed a bank or anything.

WF: Not an Identikit that you could use, is it? Francis is clearly an image of Francis Bacon. Why Francis Bacon?

GH: Just because he’s God and you don’t paint the face of God.

WF: You really rate him as a very important artist?

GH: Yes. I think he had more sense of humour in his paintings. I can’t take them as seriously as everybody else. It was just good to paint him. He’s got a good face to paint and it was funny. He was really livid because I took his shirt off; he was so pissed off.

WF: Did you paint this when he was still alive then?

GH: No, he was dead already. So he came down into the studio and was kicking about, really angry, shouting at me.

WF: That world that you construct is a very real world by the sound of it. You’re not being ironic?

GH: No, not a bit ironic at all, no.

WF: Funny Girl is an image referencing Peter Cook. Why Peter Cook?

GH: Because when he died I was surprisingly upset and I had no idea I would be upset so I bought a paper and cut his obituary photograph out and did a painting of him. But I was embarrassed because I was so upset, so I didn’t call it Peter Cook.

WF: You called it Funny Girl. To what extent is humour part of your work?

GH: I don’t know, he says very unhumorously.

WF: There’s a series of almost abstract inscribed patterns which start off with ‘Scared’ and then there’s a series called Nest. They seem to be to do with calligraphic mark making.

GH: These are just loads and loads of drawings of birds on top of each other, until they form a nest.

WF: So the bird’s form becomes lost in the nest that it creates. And then, on the next page, we have a bird on a branch which comes back to that ornithological illustration I imagine?

GH: Yes, from the same book. WF: Messiah, which is clearly a child; tell me about the title?

GH: It’s a portrait of Jesus. I made it after I came back from the Ukraine where I looked at a lot of Byzantium art and I liked it a lot. I wanted to make a Byzantium picture of Jesus. But when I do my after paintings, they’re after the event, I tried to make Jesus a poor white English boy and I gave him the Byzantium shimmer of aluminium.

WF: The halo effect?

GH: I mean it’s Jesus now. It’s not the old Jesus; it’s a picture of Jesus. I don’t even think that Jesus is the Son of God but it is a picture of Jesus; the horrible little kid over the road, Jason.

WF: Now we’re looking at Polar Bear and Snowman. This snowman image was based on an event you actually carried out isn’t it, with two blocks of snow?

GH: I made snowmen and dyed them and photographed them. But this painting is really a Renaissance painting of the rear of a snowman looking out over a very rich European culture.

WF: When you say Renaissance painting, how do you mean?

GH: Ah well when I did it I tried to choose colours that I felt were totally Renaissance, there were only four of them so you won’t forget, and they don’t mix.

WF: Are you able to make paintings that are purely formal, to do with abstract shapes?

GH: No, they’re all pictures. Everything’s a picture, picture things. Even if there were a picture of a white wall it would still be a picture. I always like that phrase ‘picture this’. You know ‘picture this’ and then someone tells you something you can’t picture at all.

WF: And here we have Garden Painting how did this one come to be?

GH: It comes from the same tapestry ‘The Unicorn and the Dam’ and I need to give myself reasons to paint, to stop the fear. These are just things in my fake garden, my pretend garden, my mind garden.

WF: Poor Thing and Lady Parker; what occurs to me is how many sources you use. You talked about Byzantine painting and you talked about a tapestry. Lady Parker after Holbein, is that an image from a Holbein painting?

GH: It’s a little Holbein drawing; a tiny chalk drawing, very beautiful, exquisite, and I just loved it.

WF: In terms of the vocabulary, talking about the work is not so easy because it is very much work that comes into being just by being made. You’re not, I presume, going to the studio with a formula that you can apply to a painting? It seems to me to insulate itself away from art theory and art criticism.

GH: Yes, well I don’t know who cares about that.

WF: Exactly. It’s just really finding a way of talking about it, which I find interesting, which is why I do this. It is a conversation between two artists at the end of the day. You just make the work, you’re not concerned about where it’s going, where it comes from and what has to be done to move it forward. It seems to me that every day in the studio is a new day for you, and you just make the work and that’s it.

GH: Yes I just work to fight the fear, basically.

WF: Fear of what?

GH: Not being able to make anything.

WF: Was there a point at which you were questioning it, after the ‘Door’ series?

GH: That was very difficult, because I didn’t have an idea, and I work basically upon an idea, and they were perfect. So when I started making things that weren’t perfect then it was very upsetting, Since then there’ve been times where I have to make up things, like I have to make up my garden, because I don’t know what to paint. Or I have to paint birds and I don’t even know why I’m painting birds. What the fuck’s painting birds? You know, to see if I can just make birds, do something.

WF: Is it in the making of the object that has a power, a sense of its own existence, that makes it worthwhile, when you say you don’t have a reason to do it?

GH: It makes me worthwhile, that’s the scary bit.