Keith Coventry

Interview by William Furlong

from Audio Arts Volume 14, Number 4, 1995

Transcript

William Furlong: I’m in Karsten Schubert Gallery speaking to Keith Coventry in his exhibition of ‘White Abstracts’. Keith, we are in front of White Abstract (Two Boys in Henry’s Holy Shade); perhaps you could describe the visual appearance of this work.

Keith Coventry: The painting is constructed from a number of materials, and the frame I consider to be part of the painting, as is the fillet, or mount, which is covered in linen. The actual painting is made entirely of white paint – two different types and various oil-painting mediums. At first glance it appears to be a white textured surface, but on closer examination you can see images emerging out of the whiteness.

WF: The way you work seems to be somewhere between an impasto relief effect and an intaglio effect.

KW: The texture is what gives the painting its form. The idea was related to the way that the Russian Constructivists used white paint almost as a sculptor’s material; they were perhaps the first group of artists to think of paint in this way.

WF: Can we talk about the various issues raised by the paintings, one of which is the various narratives that refer to art history – I’m thinking of Reinhardt, of Malevich and so on, as you are clearly quoting from their work – but there is a tension in relation to the subject matter, which is to do with British myths and cultural icons.

KW: I think the man on the street has always found the white-on-white painting to be an aggravating sort of art object, because there’s basically nothing there, so I took that as an idea of modernity. But also there’s a kind of nostalgia for the white on white, as it isn’t an avant-garde thing any more, it is something that’s a part of art history. That collides with what’s actually depicted, which is the traditional institutions of British society. Add to that the traditional materials used in the framing – the mixing and the sanding down of the gesso and the waxing of the frames – and it is a mish-mash of a layman’s idea of modernity and these traditional aspects of British society.

WF: In fact there is an interesting relationship between the two. You are dealing with images of colour, of spectacle, but they are trapped within an art-historically framed white panel.

KW: Well, ‘spectacle’ was a word that I considered when I was making these paintings, because it seemed that in current art practice spectacle is something that people try to construct, so that their work becomes simply subject matter, something to look at, something spectacular. I thought if I took these things that are about spectacle in British society – Trooping the Colour, Ascot – but then painted them in this very quiet, art-historical-based way, there would be this nice inversion of that.

WF: Is the work a critique of underlying cultural values in the latter part of the 20th century in Britain? I mean, you are exploring myths such as the ravens at the Tower of London and the Royal Family and so on, but somehow they have been drained of substance in your paintings.

KW: What I admire about these institutions is that they are survivors in a century that has been so fast-changing. I mean the whole history of art in the 20th century has been a mad-race modernism, and it is only now that people are going back over the modernist lineage and finding new areas to explore. These institutions have been around for so long that I feel that they deserve a certain respect, but at the same time they have to be part of something that is real, otherwise they become like a kind of theme-park tradition.

WF: The images seem to be quintessentially English – the architecture, the Life Guard, members of the Royal Family. How do you select them?

KW: They tend to be very colourful institutions or figures, and there is a kind of irony in that a lot of the images come from the Sun newspaper, or else from the picture postcards that tourists buy, so they are images of England constructed for overseas consumption.

WF: You’ve got the treatment that you arrived at through various modernist works, you’ve got the framed panel, you’ve got the glass – there is quite a sense of distance between the image and its meanings and the perception.

KW: They are institutions or events that are distancing in that they tend to be elitist, and they are places that a normal member of the public cannot get access to: things we’re aware of but have never actually experienced.

WF: Another image is of Norman Reid showing the Queen around the Tate, and there is a sort of a narrative there that is quite interesting.

KW: All the ideas behind the rest of the pictures is encapsulated in this one. Norman Reed was the director who actually got the modern art out of the basement of the Tate Gallery and put it on the walls, so he stopped it from being a mere extension of the National Gallery. Here he is in 1979 trying to explain modern art to the Queen. Well, she is an art collector, but it seems in this picture that he hasn’t captured her interest, that she is looking elsewhere. It’s a difficult lesson and one that she is not really prepared to take on board.

WF: Is that sort of cultural analysis part of what interests you, because a lot of them are to do with the process of how an image becomes folklore, how it’s consumed, if you like, how imagery becomes culturally elevated to symbol.

KW: I’m interested really in looking at aspects of art history and grafting on to them some kind of social issue, so that the two seem to make a comment upon each other. I’ve looked at the Russian Constructivists – Malevich and so on – and how they tried to create a world that was pure through their work, but they actually failed at doing that. They set up a kind of revolution in terms of ideas about mass housing, and that led on to the sort of social problems that we have now through the construction of those schemes.

WF: You mentioned Malevich and the kinds of spiritual issues that he was exploring; Robert Ryman is presumably another reference point here?

KW: I think Ryman’s work is considered to be about emptiness or neutrality, and here I am taking the form of his paintings, the texture, the mark-making, but the joke is now that I’m investing it with the subject matter that is held as our culture.

WF: The other tendency here presumably is Ad Reinhardt, who eliminated more and more in his work until the painting almost ceased to exist. There was another component in the works which brings it back to Expressionism, which is that one is really conscious of the hand-made mark.

KW: That’s right, all the gestures are entirely meaningless, they are so arbitrary, they come together to construct the image on the canvas, but the play of impasto and texture is done in a purely distanced way where there is actually no feeling for the paint. It’s like a kind of textured painting by numbers, where the marks are there to fill in the gaps between the forms.

WF: In Andrew Wilson’s introduction to the catalogue for your exhibition he says, ’His use of the white monochrome painting in the service of figuration reflects not so much an issue of abstraction or representation but more specifically on an issue of meaning that is held captive by tradition.’

KW: All the aspects of the painting – the frame, the mount, the surface, have all got particular readings, and putting them together is almost like an equation. It is an interrogation of modernism and how it could be used in the service of these traditional aspects that I am depicting. The use of white paint in a way describes the fact that they are losing their presence, that colour is being drained out of them and we are getting something that visually is not very rich or even, it seems, worthwhile, because its function is to provide colour, spectacle, which I suppose it is doing, but in a salubrious kind of way.