Keith Tyson

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 23 Number 3, 2004

Transcript

Keith Tyson was interviewed at London’s Haunch of Venison Gallery at the end of 2004 during his exhibition titled ‘Geno/Pheno Paintings’; his first solo show of new work in the UK since winning the Turner Prize in 2002.

Helen Sumpter: I'm with the artist Keith Tyson at London’s Haunch of Venison Gallery, where his exhibition of new work, Geno/Pheno Paintings, is currently on show. Can I ask you, to talk about the Geno/Pheno series? , Basically they're a series of painted diptychs.

Keith Tyson: They’ve got a left-hand and a right-hand panel, and very simply, the left-hand panel is a generator and the right-hand panel is a result, and that simple premiss. It allows me to discuss all sorts of questions that I find interesting, such as how does something come into being, what are the starting conditions of something, and also, this idea of descriptive and prescriptive texts that surround a work. The generators can be very simple, such as an equation, and that produces a certain result on the right-hand side, as an abstract pattern; or they could be quite complicated, to do with making lists of potential titles of works, and breeding those together to form one out of a billion possible results. Traditionally, an artist would say this is a ‘master-work’ but this could have been many other things and still been equally as valid. I'm trying to show some of the potential, and the serendipity, in the process, and allow the viewer to see those avenues as much as the actual result, to deal with what's there, and also what isn’t there.

HS: Some of them are more difficult to work out. Is that an element that interests you, the viewer finding it quite hard to see what the connections are, or how they relate?

KT: Yes, I'm less interested in the kind of game of ‘What does this mean?’ because ultimately there's a nonsense in the work, which is that you won't be able to gain anything by understanding the origin, and therefore he painted this painting’. But that’s not true, you know. My children say, ‘Why are we going to school?’ ‘Because you need to learn how to use language’, ‘Why?’ ‘Because we all use it and… eventually you'll get down to ontological issues, what's the meaning of life? if you keep asking ‘Why?’ So the left-hand panel gives you very little more information. It's a system, and what you work out as you see the show, is that the show ‘isn’t’, and then by that detachment, you work out what it is.

HS: There's one other work in the show, which is Primordial Soup Paintings. Can you talk about how that works?

KT: Yes. I put it in the show because, again, it was about a kind of generative methodology. It starts off with a big ‘primordial soup’; I’ve done the imagery without any concern for composition, or aesthetic value or significance. It's just about putting ‘stuff’ out there, without any kind of idea. Then I make two random selections from that, which will form the background for two further paintings, and they, in turn, become the background for two further paintings, and so on, until you end up with fifteen paintings. I call them ‘homeopathic dilutions’, because the end paintings are not present in the original source, and yet somehow there's an echo preserved in that process. I'm asking questions about the inevitability of these paintings’ existence. One thing that really fascinates me is the idea of the specificity of things. The universe is vast, but it's actually incredibly specific. If you look at the vast potential of what it might have been, and if you want to eradicate the idea of a decision, then you have to say that everything that could exist does exist, in a kind of specificity bubble of infinite potential. I used to be terrified by that idea, and now I find quite liberating. So I'm trying to offer some of that expansiveness back to the viewer, instead of illustrating maybe my own idiosyncratic ego. When I see the work as a whole, I feel that the exhibition reflects more accurately the state of nature than if I tried to illustrate the state of nature. I actually try and use the methodology, the serendipity, the things that I see out there that are generative forces and bring them all together to embrace that complexity.

HS: And you've got another show that’s currently on in Zurich, which focuses on another thread that runs through all your work, and that’s about gambling and chance. And these are called History Paintings.

KT: History painting traditionally is usually a scene of conflict between a victor and a loser, and it's painted from one position or the other. These are very minimal works. I guess you could say that they're just red or black stripes that form forty-nine stripes in a row. So they're like a big kind of modernist abstract painting, but the system that’s been used to generate them is the spin of a roulette wheel. If it's red, it's a red stripe, if it's black, it's black, if it's zero, it's green. And you're left with these kind of very minimal works, and yet they're titled St Petersburg 1905, Baden Baden 1942, Paris 1796 - and these are all places that have famous casinos, and also places where huge kind of political and social upheaval was going on. So it invites the viewer to look for their own humanity in this history painting, and all they're seeing back is the cold mathematics, the law of chance – ‘outrageous fortune’. In roulette, you're on red and red comes up it's a great victory and if you happen to be on black, then it's a loss. And it's trying to kind of get rid of that subjective idea of history and show an objective ‘fact’. Also, it's extraordinary where there are casinos in the world; they're in India and the Himalayas and usually in places of extreme poverty. So I wanted to just marry those things together. It's not a mimetic representation of history, it's a sort of affirmation of humanity. It's not a simple conceptual artwork about chance, it's all of them. You can't have a reductionist approach to understanding why things come into being. That’s what I m trying to reflect. I find it a quite depressing show, but that’s a kind of counterpoint to this, what seems a very ‘carnivalesque’ show. It's just two sides of the same coin really.

HS: I've read that you have gambled quite a lot, do you still?

KT: It's a bit like somebody who's an academic studying pornography or something, and pretending that it's purely about the greater view of it, but I was a gambling addict. But still, I am fascinated by that ‘arrow of time’ thing, that before the event you don't know what’s it's going to be, and afterwards of course the result’s there. That seems to me like an essential part of the experience of life, our absent knowledge of what's to come?

HS: Can you talk a bit about faith?

KT: Yeah I guess my practice originally, like most artists, comes out of a cathartic need. I existed, and I didn’t know why, and I wanted to create things and didn’t have a reason. The whole thing was very traumatic. It has been very cathartic over the years that I have been working on all these things, but hopefully, I made the transition from doing ‘catharsis’ to ‘contribution’. I think you have to have faith, full stop. To be a nihilist requires the same amount of faith as it does to be a New-Age Zen Buddhist. It seems to me that we have a choice, as human beings we can believe that we have no investment, no energy, no ability to change anything, to be a nihilist, or we can believe. It's all about choice. And it's a choice of which kind of a system or description serves you and your peers the best.

HS: Could I ask you about the actual value that you place on works?

KT: Yes, again, I see things as more complex than they first appear. Money is a bit like electricity; it doesn’t do anything ‘til it moves! So I thought, ‘well, it's going to pass through people, it might as well pass through me’. The increase in the value of the work has made me wealthier than I could have imagined, in material terms, but the wealth I see is much more to do with my ability to make things, or to connect with things. I don't believe I'm a philosopher or a scientist. I’m not particularly erudite or well educated; I'm an auto-didact fascinated with ‘things’. However, something does seem very apparent to me, it’s the invisible things that last, not the relics. The rules that are abstract are the things that make the universe. Yet paradoxically, I've become wealthy through people acquiring the relics, but they're ‘windows’, they're signposts, all art is. That’s the very exciting part about work for me, because it seems to be so much married to the way we live our lives. Big boys sticking things on the wall for loads of money, and I understand the ‘loads of money’ bit, but that’s not really where the value is. I really believe we all own everything. An interesting question I’m asked a lot is, ‘How do you come up with so many ideas?’ I always say, ‘It's not that I come up with lots of ideas the universe is abundant with ideas, more than you could possibly ever do. The hardest bit is detaching yourself from the first idea you have. If you're willing to give it away, you'll find you get ten more, because you create a vacuum to accept more and you’ll find that you're just scratching the surface of this mountain of amazing ideas. I know I make it sound happier than it could be but that’s how it is.

HS: Do the more experiments that you work on increase your enthusiasm to discover more?

KT: Yes. I’m not attached to experimentation. The truth is, I don't care. I really don't care if my career collapses and everyone says, ‘Well, he was rubbish’ because every moment I've been true to what I believe. Experimentation is just what I love doing. I don't know what my work’s about most of the time, but that doesn’t make it less interesting than if I did.