Angela Bulloch

Interview by Liam Gillick

from Audio Arts Volume 14, Number 2, 1994

Transcript

Wall works are inextricably linked to a recent tradition of transgressive and challenging art. They have been used in arguments for portability, adaptability, and as a challenge to the commodity status of the art object. Yet the significance of bringing together a group of artists who work in this way cannot be located within a single or even tightly bracketed set of concerns. Wall works embody an awareness of architecture, a desire to travel light; they decorate and deconstruct the sites for art – the gallery museum and public space. Wall paintings and drawing can be executed by workers, assistants or art collectors under instruction form the artists. They can be used to display the written the written word and to undermine language. The decision to work on the wall can be an irresponsible reaction to an apparently settles art world. There is potential for elegance and the possibility to operate discreetly – a near invisibility through sensitive response to the gallery space.

This show brings together people from a time when using the wall was a direct challenge to the hegemony of mute art objects and places their activity in a new context. Conversely it also allows us to reassess current activity in the light of earlier conceptual approaches – exposing the debt that many owe to those who made the initial moves away from the canvas and onto the wall.

Styles are varied, personal marking and subtle interventions act as a corollary to refined graphic, relational sensibility, all using a basic formal language that has been refined and debated yet rarely presented across generations in this way. The wall work has performed an important fiction though its availability to call into question the fixed nature of most art activity. It remains a way of working that, despite everything, is resistant to marketing and allows artists to produce work on a large scale without needing to raise large sums of production money. It encourages situations where artists meet during the actual process of making the work rather than turning up to install something that already exists. It offers the opportunity to work directly and employ a lightness of touch that allows for the revelation of effects that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Liam Gillick: In Leeds City Arts Gallery talking to Angela Bulloch.

Angela Bulloch: Well, the piece exists as a machine, a title and some mud which has been put onto the wall using the machine. The machine’s on the floor and the mud’s on the wall. And then there’s a title, which is ‘Mud Slinging’ which has been put in reserve on the wall, so it’s just the wall showing through a kind of splatter of mud. The thing that I used to make the wall painting is a large vat of mud. There’s also a pressure pot and a compressor and various bits of garden hose. When I’ve installed this piece before it was all in the round and that piece included a sprinkler, but this piece doesn’t have it because it’s just two long straight lines.

LG: But do you consider these things to be wall drawings in a kind of historical sense?

AB: It’s not simply a wall drawing. It’s really a structure, it’s different elements which all add up to even questioning or highlighting the other elements which it’s involved in.

LG: The thing that seems to single out this work and the other one which is a drawing machine triggered by sitting on a bench, is this idea of action.

AB: It’s different from a wall painting in the sense that it fetishises the viewer because it actually allows the viewer to have an affect on the situation. From the first wall-drawing machine I made, I just called it a drawing machine. All the machines draw on the wall but the first one I did was called ‘Blue Horizons’ that was in 1990 which was interactive with a viewer in the sense that if you were too close to the machine it would affect the drawing being made. This one is different from that. The machine, when it’s working, draws vertical lines continuously and just edges across at the top, so you get a double vertical line which moves along the top, a little bit horizontally and that’s the drawing, which is in process for the length of the exhibition. However, when you sit on the bench, which is placed just directly in front of the machine, the drawing is changed. The very act of looking at it affects the drawing being made.

LG: How do you feel about the way these function in the context to the rest of the work?

AB: well it highlights the things that are interesting about the work once you step over the basic semantic of the exhibition, which isn’t necessarily so interesting. It’s just a bit like an excuse. You have to focus on something like, you know, the interaction of the viewer, the cause and effect, the structure of the thing. The very idea that you even made a structural element and the fact that most other things in the show are formally flat and directly on the wall, highlights the whole structure of what I’m actually making.