Simon Patterson

Interview by Liam Gillick

from Audio Arts Volume 14, Number 2, 1994

Transcript

Liam Gillick: Simon, do you feel that working on the wall like this is central to what you’re doing at the moment?

Simon Patterson: I think it’s part of a broader strategy. I think I’ve been known for doing wall drawings, or lately anyway.

LG: Could you talk a little bit about what you did in Southampton, using the plan of the side of the ship?

SP: The piece is made for Gray Art Gallery in New York. It’s part of NYU and I like the idea of trying to make a piece that seemed quite didactic for that space. I also liked the idea of sending the instructions for the drawings on a fax; I didn’t go there to make the work, sign writers made the work; turning the decks into strata of geological time, so, on the legend at the bottom on the left you’d have, in French, the smoking deck and next to that, in English, you would have, the various periods which you reckon from geological time like Jurassic or Quaternary or Cambrian etcetera. Then you would have examples, on each of those decks, of some animal or single cell life. Running through the middle were vertical timelines of the Venetian School of Painting. So there were different time periods using the ship, using the different structures for representing history and overlaying them, which is a fairly straightforward thing to do.

LG: Would you say the work’s getting more complicated?

SP: You know, my interests are fairly varied and probably in this instance, in the case of naming things, almost anybody could do it. The choices are my own and it might be the structure that is important or, in the case of say, (the piece of the...the insertion I had a JP233 is csso-blue?) the structure is quite random and deliberately so; it’s an explosion of things. With this, it’s a self-contained thing that operates on the wall. It’s like a big transfer and within it various things are overlaid. The structures are almost more important than the content.

LG: Was the idea something that you had flying around in your mind that it might be possible to make this kind of big art, without having to fabricate large objects?

SP: I think in a way wall drawings do release you a bit from the problems of scale, in the way that you have with painting. I remember when I used to paint and take a 35mm slide, look at it and think; that looks like a nine by six canvas; it’s about the way that photography unifies it. It looks as it should, you know, a foot by eight inches.

LG: Was there ever a point where you thought of working on canvas rather than on the wall?

SP: Not really but I think it has to be appropriate to be on the wall. For example, if I wanted to do something like the piece ‘The Monkey Business,’ if I had thought well let’s do some painting, I need some money I’ll knock out some paintings. There’s no way I could have done it that size. It would look stupid. As soon as you put something on canvas you have to have a really good reason for doing it. You know, they become like the old academy paintings, the sort of nineteenth century paintings, huge canvases, but there was no real reason for it. I think that as soon as you make it into an object you have to think much more carefully.