Richard Deacon

In conversation with William Furlong

from Audio Arts Volume 12, Numbers 2 + 3, 1992

Transcript

William Furlong: Richard, we are now in a park just outside the central galleries of Documenta IX, standing by your piece. There are children playing on it and there are people sitting on the aluminium boundary; do you mind, or are you happy about the public involvement with your work?

Richard Deacon: I have mixed emotions. I anticipated a certain amount of user use or viewer use of the work, and when you make something of this height you have got to accept that people will sit on it, particularly in such a popular area as a park. I had anticipated that, but I don’t particularly like watching it, because it makes me uncomfortable. I always worry that I am going to see someone do some damage.

WF: Did you choose the particular location in this park?

RD: Yes, I chose a site that was viewable from above, and as you come down the steps it is a very visible position, although it wasn’t obvious as such until I put the work here and it was a clearly visible place from almost all over the park. I chose a relationship between the trees, and when I first came here without the pavilions the trees were very particular, very individual and very precise in their relationship of one to the other, and I wanted to try to make a work that was as individual and as precise in its relationship to the other things around.

WF: Could you talk about how the piece relates to the two trees, as they seem to have been important features in how you formulated the work.

RD: It was to do with the characteristic of individuality in the trees and the very interesting formal relationship they had and wanting to work in between them as against somewhere else, and this is the lowest point of the park as well. The model was a means of trying to work out some of the scale of things, and I think I probably intended to make a higher work when I first started. I realised afterwards that I didn’t want to make a work in the park that was taller than a person. It is intended not to dominate, and this partly accounts for the kind of use it gets. It is set at such a low level that it is very easy to climb on or to sit on.

WF: That is in fact the next kind of comment. There are people sitting on – and I don’t know whether you would describe it like this – an elliptical aluminium wall that is thick enough to sit on and the height that is appropriate to sit on within which is a pod-shaped fabricated object. How did the two elements arise. Is it easy to talk about that?

RD: The title of the work is Bikini, and the obvious answer to the question as to why it is called that is because it has two parts and it also has a ring around it like an atoll and the interior has a kind of full sexuality to it. The word bikini entered the language for two reasons almost simultaneously. The first explosion on the Bikini atoll was four days before the two-piece swimsuit was introduced in 1946, and the designer used the word bikini in reference to the Bikini atoll. So there is a whole set of interesting relationships between the organic and the inorganic and the destructive and the procreative and the trivial and the deadly serious which are a kind of sub-text to the work. In some ways you could almost describe the foundations of post-1945 Western democracy as being based on that duality of motif – a certain kind of freedom of lifestyle coupled with an awesome threat. That kind of darkness isn’t particularly present in the work, although the connotations of seed within the central section and even some of the connotations of shape do have that kind of side to them.

WF: Do you have anything to say about the context of Documenta? You are actually away from the ‘politics of placement’ within the very specific spaces; you are out here in the park.

RD: I chose to be out in the park because I didn’t want to get involved in the politics of space in the interior, and I was also invited to consider making a work for outside, which very few artists were. At the last Documenta a large number of artists made work for outside spaces, so I gained a lot from the fact that there aren’t many, and the work actually does have its surroundings and the relationship to place remains fairly clear. So I think that from my point of view those art political questions don’t actually apply. I have the site that I wanted in a clean situation, and if the work succeeds or fails it is my business rather than being able to say it was messed up by having to make compromises at the last minute.

I have never done a Documenta before, and the quality of carnival that it has is slightly surprising to me. It is more exuberant than I would have thought. In general terms, I think that there are two things that go on in these situations. One is that there is a certain amount of politics, as you mentioned, and the other is that in fact the people who probably get the most out of Documenta are the people who don’t go to many shows, because it provides an opportunity for them to see a large collection of work at one time and engage with it in a way almost no other situation provides. Even in a big show that is in one location, people don’t party around in quite the same way and live with the art, which you have to do if you want to see Documenta. You have to give up quite a considerable amount of time and you have to put some leg work into it; you do see work in a variety of different situations, and the sequence in which you see work is going to colour what you think, whereas for someone who has seen a lot of exhibitions, a lot of the time they may think, well, he didn’t do so well, she didn’t do so well, she did very well, and those were badly shown. Those concerns tend to be foregrounded. Probably an art audience is not the best audience for Documenta. A corollary for that would be to ask the question whether for an art audience, given that you know the work, whether you can construct a discourse around it and form some idea of what the Documenta – which cuts through the strata of art world activity at one point – means. That seems to be much more difficult to come up with.

WF: So arising out of that, do you think there is a particular or specific agenda that this Documenta will be remembered by?

RD: It is too soon to say that or to give a summary of that. There does seem to be a more deliberate attempt to let work impose upon other works, and to view that as a positive rather than a negative confrontation, and to encourage that, so that those little blue hands with their plastic bottles – which are a kind of crass example of that – are permitted to proliferate throughout the Fredericianum Neue Documenta and the Halle. But there are other occasions where you can see that there is a deliberate kind of confrontation: one of the most sex-explicit works is juxtaposed next to some of the most worked, abstract paintings, and those kinds of confrontation must be deliberate rather than just accidental.