An interview with Mark Wallinger

Interviewed shortly after the opening of his retrospective at Tate Liverpool, titled Credo, Mark Wallinger talks about the past 15 years of his creative work. Interview by Jean Wainwright.

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 19 Numbers 3 & 4, 2001

Transcript

Interviewed shortly after the opening of his retrospective at Tate Liverpool, titled Credo, Mark Wallinger talks about the past 15 years of his creative work, which has included painting, photography, video and drawing and recently, Echo Homo, a publicly sited sculpture for the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. Given the diversity of the visual languages the artists employs, the conversation explores the consistency with regard to the issues and themes raised in his work. These include: religion, ideology, class and language. He speaks about works including the video piece titled,

Jean Wainwright: I’m here with Mark Wallinger at his Delphina studio space in London to talk about his retrospective Credo, currently on at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool. Could we begin by talking about religion and class, specifically your video piece Threshold to the Kingdom?

Mark Wallinger: Yeah, I suppose the genesis for that piece was through some earlier video works in which I sought to articulate some fairly mundane locations, for their spiritual potential. It just struck me that the passage from air site to land site and the rigmarole that the State puts one through, particularly Passport Control and Customs, were a kind of secular equivalent of the confessional and absolution and we shot it, without permission, at City Airport. I went down there for a kind of recci and saw these wonderful smoked glass double doors that opened automatically as people arrived, making a rather a theatrical entrance to the official terra firma of the State. I thought if we shot this very symmetrically and used slow motion people’s gestures would assume a kind of gravitas and become almost like Renaissance paintings. The little garden on the left could perhaps be seen as St. Peter and this could be his threshold to the Kingdom of Heaven. Obviously using Le Miserere helps; even the words seem to suit this appeal to a merciful God. These people arrive, tired and disoriented and one catches them at that first point, trying to find their bearings.

JW: I would like you talk specifically about the religious aspect of your work, linking together some of your video pieces, such as Hymn, Prometheus and Angel.

MW: Angel was the first in what became a trilogy that I call Speaking in Tongues. I became fascinated with the opening of John’s gospel, with the sound and authority of the language as much as anything; ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the word was God’. It’s the central kind of logos of faith and the word is the word made flesh i.e. Jesus Christ, but at the same time one could see the word as language, that then deconstructs the very faith that that text is supposed to affirm. At that point one realises that language stands in the same relation to the objects of the world, as the scriptures do to faith. Thinking about those ‘Satanic Verses’, notions of reading the Lord’s Prayer backwards or the encoded references on American Heavy Metal I thought, ‘well what would happen if I tried to learn this thing, phonetically, backwards and then reversing the whole film so that I would be speaking in, probably rather stilted way, but hopefully understandable and everything else would be happening fluently, but backwards. I quite liked this notion of the viewer trying to unpick how the film was made, but being brought up short realising that language is just a series of noises that we all agree upon.

JW: You play with the concepts of misunderstanding. I would like to talk about a little bit here then about one of your latest works Cave.

MW: I’ve been known for using sport in the past. The British genius has been being able to invent a number of games that have retained their hold on a large part of the world. Sport also seems to be in common with the causes of the best of art that is forever sustaining and different within a closed set of rules, and that interested me too. So with Cave I think what appealed to me was the boxing ring; it’s a perfectly square arena in which probably the purest form of sport occurs, in the case of the knockout. The result is undeniable and is clear-cut, but at the same time it has a kind of incidental beauty. William Morris said that ‘beauty is a by-product’ and I think that’s what grips people about most sport, is to see people do things that are absolutely beautiful.

JW: You take quite a metaphysical view of it and also you refrain from doing the climax because there isn’t the knockout. Perhaps we could just talk about that?

MW: What I set out to do was set up a full structure that could replay the boxing match, so there’s a camera shooting from the middle of each side of the ring that is then replayed against four walls turning the ring inside out so that the viewer is in the ring. I’ve slowed the action and the sound down to a quarter speed so that the sound is the actual ambient sound of every moment there. Slow motion is accepted, as an almost clichéd part of sports coverage, but not perhaps to this degree. We make 24 frames a second and the persistence of vision persuades us, during a film, that these are real moving images. But one’s working with thousands of times that information to relate sound back accurately so the actual experience of that work in terms of sound is almost more real than the images that are flickering on the walls. I called it Cave obviously to kind of reference the notion of Plato’s cave and it plays a bit with the fact that just through the formal arrangement of the video projectors, one is blinded by real light at certain points, trying to look at the various sides of the ring.

JW: I’d like to talk about Prometheus in relationship to myth and shadows and also about the double meanings in your work.

MW: Well I think I’d like to start just talking about the video because I think it can exist independently of the installation and as part of the Speaking in Tongues trilogy. In the video I’m strapped into an electric chair and I’m singing Ariel’s song from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, ‘Full fathom five their father lies’, that I had to learn in counter tenor, because it was presumably a counter tenor or castrato who would have sung it at the time. The pitch is actually lower; the visuals are in real time. There are two myths of Prometheus; one that he stole fire from the Gods and was punished by being chained to a rock and having his liver eaten out every day, and also that he created man out of clay. Within Ariel’s song was a rather beautiful expression of the endless capacity for metamorphosis, rebirth and creativity. The whole thing was inspired by a visit to Shelley’s tomb in Rome, in which part of Ariel’s song is on his epitaph, ‘Nothing of him doth remain but doth a sea change into something rich and strange’. I think what set me thinking about that was how curious it was to use an expression like ‘sea change’, which may have been coined by Shakespeare but has become metaphorical for Shelley, who literally drowns. Obviously Mary Shelley wrote the modern Prometheus, Frankenstein and Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound, so there was this fascination with, almost creativity itself. Shelley is documented as experimenting with electricity and I thought about Prometheus and his kind of blasphemy against the Gods. I thought that when Man plays God it is to destroy life as much as create it. It is a sort of allegory of creativity and the sort of temerity or arrogance that that might require and what kind of authorities one might be offending.

JW: But also at the end of it you then do something ...

MW: The sort of purgatory of Prometheus chained to the rock. I hope the work is self-reflective upon the nature of the medium, so in an edit suite you’re playing with time really and so at the end of the song it’s as if I’m being rewound to the start, which means that I let out this unearthly scream as if I’m taking a large jolt of electricity, and then it starts again. So it is a perfect purgatorial link that will go on and on forever if you let it.

JW: Critics often find it quite difficult to categorise your work simply because you do use a variety of media. There is a remarkable consistency in what you’re dealing with and a kind of moral commentary that you’re obviously very aware of. Then you also take it to lots of different limits; and I’m thinking here of your slide piece, The Four Corners of the World which, in a way, marks a kind of outer boundary of your work.

MW: What we’ve been speaking about, hopefully, is a little parable of what might be taken to be, the advantage of being open to different media. Ever since making the painting Benediction I’ve been looking round for the possibility of doing more painting, because I do enjoy doing something that feels more like nine to five job sometimes, when you go home and feel you’ve done a good day’s work. I did have this notion to make some round paintings of a globe of the world. I found this cheap little globe in Stanfords and I thought the dimensions of the round canvas are my Vitruvian dimensions, like Vitruvian man. Anyway I stretched out four of these things and got a photographer friend to photograph the globe against a black background and then, when I’d projected this globe onto the canvas, it was a bit of a eureka moment really and I realised that I’d saved myself about a year’s work, because suddenly this flat canvas was absolutely persuasively round and also seemed to have a glow that came from within it, rather than projected onto it. I think some people that are perhaps more routed in following one particular medium would have carried on drawing the thing out, but I thought, ‘well, that’ll be the piece’.

JW: These themes though of class, religion, history you’ve dealt with extensively in past work. A Real Work Of Art, the work you did with race horse paintings, and the Ascot piece that you did with the kind of co-ordination of the whole ride past of the Queen and Prince Philip.

MW: It’s enjoying it for its sureality, I mean people who misread my work or read it as being top heavy with subject matter are missing the point a bit. Getting back to what I was saying about the language of video being about time. Being well placed as being a bit of a racing nerd, I knew that the Royal family paraded down the course at each the four days of Royal Ascot and I also knew that the BBC covered it with such consistency, swapping to different camera angles at the same point each day. I thought, ‘Well, what if we take the point where the National Anthem strikes up as they reach the grandstand, as a sort of edit point and edit the four things as if they’re happening simultaneously’. At that point something happens formally that is rather compelling and beautiful and could only come about by having a society so deferential to this mad institution. When you see Prince Philip doff his hat at the same point every time they become like marionettes and you think ‘well who’s running who here?’

JW: And the dialogue about the clothes, quite marvellous.

MW: This barmy sycophantic chatter; I do find that one very satisfying for lots of reasons. I was approached to be in a show, the title of which was Pledge Allegiance to a Flag? And I was a little bit doubtful about whether I should do it or not to begin within, because I had used the Union flag in a number of previous works. Then it suddenly struck me that the complimentary colours of the Union flag, the red and the blue are the green and the orange of the Irish Tricolour. I was giving a talk to the assistants and the workers in the gallery at Liverpool and someone asked me which work might serve to express best what I was trying to do, and I thought the most succinct work was Oxymoron in that it said something about the politics of the situation in Northern Ireland, and oxymoron, being a figure of speech that seeks to unite two mutually exclusive terms, was a title I liked, even had the memories of Thatcher’s oxygen of publicity. At the same time I hate dreary work that tells me it’s going to be about politics that I have to read off a wall, that everything for me has to be at first and primarily visually arresting.

JW: Another work which I hadn’t seen before are paintings you made which are like children’s first primers, where you put letters together into two phrases, ‘Do you think I’m stupid or what?’, and the other one ‘What do you hope to get out of me?’ So much of your work is about the language of how we communicate.

MW: They do serve a sort of pivotal role, but they were at the same time a kind of valediction to painting, I call them Question Paintings and they’re all questions in which there is an object and a subject. The questions are of the slightly kind of irritable end of relationship type. So the first one was called Do I Have to Spell it Out For You, and the rest of them kind of follow that lead. There are some sneakily inserted bits of autobiography in my work, which are buried, low down. But I mean what was nice was to give myself a rubric in which I had to use 25 squares, five colours, no two squares were the same colour on each other, so they punctuate the show and the catalogue so, How Much Do You Think I’m Worth? It’s quite a nice thing for a painting to say. What Do You Hope To Get Out of Me, Why Do I Do These Things For You etc. etc.

JW: Also, as you say, there’s a beginning and a closing of something.

MW: Exactly, Exactly.

JW: Your work is so much about questioning various aspects of bigger issues of life, where do you go?

MW: Well I did decide pretty early on that I wasn’t interested in signature style. I think painting is now either an indulgence or a craft and painters are a bit like potters were before. I stopped painting really because I felt that the whole history of Western painting and then through Modernism is a kind of trajectory that one can read essentially formally as well as many other ways, but there was a way in which every version of the language exhausted itself somewhere in the sixties, and that it’s impossible to make unironic paintings. It’s impossible to come to that thing fresh without, at the very least, unconsciously pastiching something that someone originally had struggled to find a new way of saying, and so there are limits to how arch one can be before it becomes painful.

JW: There’s so much religion in your work; does this come from perhaps a religious upbringing or is it just something that you find intellectually interesting?

MW: Both my parents are atheists; they are good liberal people so they did send me along to Sunday school because they didn’t want to deny me that kind of experience. I got bored with just colouring in pictures without really learning about what all this meant. I should say that I wrote my dissertation at College on James Joyce’s Ulysses so a lot of my concerns are Joycean, but without the baggage of being dyed in the wool Catholic trying to find a way through art. But I think his notion of epiphany is something that I can’t shake loose from and I kind of identify that as well with Freud’s notions of over-determination; always trying to find points at which a nexus of ideas, both spiritual and more down to earth and political meet, so that the possibility for transcendence is always undercut by so and so. Again, it’s a bit like sport, religion is something that has become a kind of non-u subject and yet the majority of all our laws and our customs are based on Christian values and Christianity is predicating a belief in the supernatural. You don’t have to go very far from the House of Commons to that notion, and the Head of The Church is the Queen. It’s like ‘Ooh yes, but we don’t see those things anymore’, but they’re there everywhere still.