Lily van der Stokker

Interview by Liam Gillick

from Audio Arts Volume 14, Number 2, 1994

Transcript

Liam Gillick: In Southampton talking to Lily van der Stokker.

Lily van der Stokker: I make a lot of magic marker drawings and, and then the wall paintings are just enlargements of the magic marker drawing. The thick lines are just in the real work. they are like ball point lines, but here they are a centimetre wide Like yesterday, for the television the first question was: ‘Why are your shapes so bubbly and round?’ I said: ‘Well why don’t you ask Daniel Bürren why his stripes are so straight?’

LG: But would you say that there was a sense in which you were kind of challenging a sort of orthodoxy?

LvdS: Yeah I know. This is really forms and paint and it’s very classical in a way, I don’t do anything new and if people tell me that this work looks very modern then I’m always very surprised because one of my big problems is that I can’t be modern; or I can’t make anything modern. I have a very, how do you say, double relationship to modernity. And, so on the one hand I try to, to give it some sort of modern feeling and maybe the only modern thing is the fluorescent paint. If people say that they think they have seen this work somewhere before, well that’s what I think which is fine. Actually in ‘Wonderful,’ which you see over there, I have tried to express the word wonderful and I tried to do it in sort of gold/yellow also in blue and green but in the end I just come to a very standard colour scheme, colours that you just buy in the store; a very simple fluorescent colour set for children. It’s is interesting that something that looks wonderful is very standard.

LG: Does it have some kind of irony in it?

LvdS: Well the more that I talk about it I’m beginning to doubt it. But I think a lot of people see a certain irony there, which relate to the flowers and maybe that it looks like the sixties. But I think that the irony in the work is maybe a bit more hidden and has to do with ugliness and aesthetics and not to do with the childhood, that’s exactly not the irony that I use.

LG: Do you feel that the work is directly related to this kind of feminist thinking?

LvdS: No, I always end up in the interviews and just talking endlessly about feminism, but, yes, I think the work is definitely related to that. It’s girlish. And people have asked me this from the beginning, even when I didn’t see it. Since I am a woman feminine imagery is part of my life and my history. If this is very shocking material then it’s immensely interesting as to why this is. I think that would also be interesting to call certain works of art ‘masculine’. I would really like to see that because I think that works of art can be very sex specific and if people are going to acknowledge that my work, which celebrates the feminine, whatever that could be, then it wouldn’t be a hostile thing any more if they acknowledged the difference.