Richard Wentworth

Interview by William Furlong

In this interview, Wentworth talks about the genesis of his work False Ceiling which developed out of the artist's visits to various street markets in Berlin.

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 14 Number 4, 1995

Transcript

This interview took place in the Lisson Gallery in 1995.

William Furlong: We are standing underneath False Ceiling, which consists of hundreds of books suspended just above head height. Many ideas come to mind about so many books representing so much knowledge above one’s head, but perhaps you could start by talking about the concerns of this particular piece.

Richard Wentworth: I spent a lot of time in markets, one in particular in Berlin where you would find Russian army fatigues mixed up with American army fatigues, and amongst all of this would be boxes and boxes of china and books, and the books would be socialist manuals, out-of-date technical West German books, all the stuff that has apparently lost its meaning, but is waiting for others – like myself – to revalue them. Perhaps the central irony is that you simultaneously know that those books belonged to somebody, they may even reveal that because they may say something inside. There is a sense that someone laboured to make this thing, that it has fallen and this is its last chance to be reclaimed. A year ago if you had talked to me, it would never have occurred to me that I could turn that into any form of work, but something about the collision of the abstractness of a book, hybridised with its physicality, meant that when the opportunity came about to make this show, it seemed the moment to fly by the seat of one’s pants and see if I could pull all of these sentiments together into a single piece of work.
It is probably true to say that there is an element of something verging on spitefulness, because I think there are architectural propositions in the gallery which are unsustainable, they are part of a kind of English crisis arriving at Modernism very late. I have never felt very happy with this space. A lot of people think it is a rather marvellous because it’s the kind of icon of the later 20th-century gallery space, but we all know that it’s a conversion, it’s the absolute typical English predicament of the 19th century struggling to be the 20th century. So I wanted to do something that was a little bit like the inverse of the fitted carpet; I wanted to do something that would haul this space together but in an utterly provisional and slightly irresponsible way. The books have a centre of gravity, and I suppose in that there is an oblique reference to gravitas, but as hard as you try to find a centre of gravity, I don’t think there is one here that will sit straight, but of course my work usually involves an element of failure. Just trying to hang them up, you know, the books won’t correspond, but that in turn gives you something else because then they feel almost alive. There is a sort of sensuality that is much more powerful than I could ever have anticipated, which is contradictory and even quite humorous. Probably the thing I am most pleased about is the kind of cruise-missile view of landscape that is now very popular in computer graphics, where you move very quickly across a surface. In fact it’s an experience that you never have, even doing a lot of flying. What I like about the experience of walking under it is that it is somehow a kind of truth in precisely the way that this computer graphic model never is. You have to tip your head back, and I even wonder if that doesn’t affect us neurologically, there is something quite different about that space above oneself, and you immediately feel how rooted you are. There is always this feeling that you are in a sort of inverse landscape, but that is only true when you are underneath it because, as it happens, in this space there is a possibility of getting up above it.

WF: Shall we walk up to where the books move from being a ceiling to where one looks down on that ceiling?

RW: The sensation is a little bit like you have fallen overboard and you’ve got to swim up through a lot of flotsam.

WF: Here we are with the books actually below head height. Here there is another kind of metaphor at work, the idea of plotting one’s way through possibilities in relation to knowledge, and one can’t help but settle on some of the titles.

RW: You accept that you’re making a jump into the arbitrary, but you sort of know that the arbitrary will pay you if you can go on with it. I don’t want to control what it is that anyone sees and what order they see it in; I think it is like what it is to arrive in a city and arbitrarily try and comprehend the city and over a period of time. You develop patterns within it, you eventually end up living somewhere, you have favourite areas, so there is an enormous potential here which is up for grabs. I have seen some people in here give it a lot of time, trying to collate it, just as there are guide books that will do that for you for the city. Then there are people whose view of the world is altogether more serendipitous, who accept that it’s all out of control anyway and you’re not going to conquer the town in couple of days with your Rough Guide under the arm, much better to see what it offers if you turn left when the instinct tells you to turn left and see how this develops. I have to admit I am more of the second persuasion.

WF: I can see factors that this work shares with other works you’ve made, but one distinct difference is that you have used the entire space in a very particular way.

RW: I have to admit that I have a kind of loathing of categories that we labour under. I’ve implored the gallery never to describe this as an installation. I know this is an installation, but that always seems to me a term that anaesthetises the work; it is as silly as saying, ‘It’s a bronze.’ I mean, a lot of sculpture is made of bronze and some of it is good and some of it is bad, but it is not necessarily very helpful to put this typology in front of the work.

WF: There is something that you said a while ago, and I quote: ’I live in a ready-made landscape and I want to put it to work.’ Do you think it is as relevant now as when you wrote it?

RW: We are no longer in a position to even believe in terms like ‘nature’. It is not an accident that the card for this show has a sign in a quite evidently manufactured bit of real estate, and it says, ‘NATURAL AREA PLEASE STAY OUT’. The thing is a gigantic oxymoron, and I could get terribly upset about that, but in another way I’ve come to see the agency of the city as absolutely full of possibilities. I think a lot of my procedures are to do with being troubled about finding a fixed point. There is a way in which it is important to me that there is a hole through the middle of each book. It was very difficult to do and it doesn’t feel right to do that, but in another sense the hole the middle of the book is no different to the hole if you had an earring, and in fact all these books are still readable.

WF: They give me a sense of butterflies in a case – they’ve been fixed in time, so their function is both expressed and denied.

RW: Yes, I think that’s very good. I mean there is a slightly taxidermic feeling, but also there is that colonial attempt to kind of capture experience. Probably the great cliché for the end of the 20th century is the holiday photographs sometimes even taken to the printer while you are still on holiday. People want to see they were on the beach the day before yesterday, knowing always this is inadequate, so I think there is something about the fact that in order to offer the books you simultaneously kind of kill them, but I have never seen books like this before, as if there was an accident on the motorway of a lorry carrying second-hand books. It is the kind of thing I have taken pictures of in the past, but you know that this was done deliberately, you can’t doubt fifteen hundred holes in the ceiling with its own hook and a cable that is the right length and all this adds up to a kind of enormity of purpose, but all of that is somehow pulling against the meaning that you want from them so, to go back to your analogy, I of course prefer the butterfly in world.

WF: One could argue that a work of modernism becomes classical in its own time. I think you make reference to Claes Oldenberg, Beuys and Duchamp, where that sense of classicism is challenged.

RW: There are connections to early Oldenberg, which I think has an extraordinary kind of pathetic sexuality which I think is quite what it feels like to be a man, and I think it is a sort of comedy to be one and you don’t have any choice. Beuys I’ve always found rather overbearing, though there is respect there, and I think Duchamp is like accepting your grand parentage. It is like they made an enormous space in which you were allowed to be 50, 60 years later.