24 January–1 March 2008

David Osbaldeston interviewed by Andrew Hunt

This interview took place in mid-December 2007, during preparations for the exhibition ‘Another Shadow Fight’ at International Project Space, Birmingham.

A.H. When we last met, you mentioned Terry Eagleton’s point about the appropriation of the avantgarde, the fact that art that refers to various historical models can render radicalism traditional. It is very common for artists to appropriate models of practice in their work, and the theorist Peter Osborne mentioned recently that this is rife in the US, where references to 1960s conceptualism, for example, are used because they can guarantee a high level of success for young artists. With so many contemporary artists referencing ghosts of the past, are we simply dealing with the signs of art rather than art itself? You say that your project aims to go beyond this situation by utilising diverse characters such as Wyndham Lewis, Sydney Nolan, Ned Kelly and Herbert Bayer – can you tell me how?

D.O. Yes. What’s interesting about Eagleton’s assertion concerning the progression of the avantgarde, is that it was simply founded upon a tradition, and that this tradition was of course the recurrent pattern of dissent, breakage, or change necessary for its fractured forward development as a means to articulate the immediacy of the present. It struck me how this presents an interesting contradiction upon which to explore how we read change as something located within the present that is validated through the eyes of the past. The fact that traditionalism and dissent could be seen as two sides of the same coin is an interesting proposition.

The Oedipal nature of consumption and production that usually illustrates this discussion seems to present a different way of dealing with the same question. Except that there are more instances of children duplicating the achievements of their parents instead of committing patricide as is illustrated by your observation of Osborne’s. The adoption of Sydney Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings along with Herbert Bayer, and Wyndham Lewis is to make explicit the nostalgic impulse for what we now perceive Modernism to stand for. It’s simply a case of employing their signage through extrapolation on my part. The relationships between the disparate forms of subject matter are presented as information in the usual way that Post-Modernists do, in order to provide references that add up to the reading of a work, and this is perhaps a useful way of making this process explicit. The question for me in assembling the work is whether or not it is in fact original, which of course it isn’t, in the sense that it’s quasi-appropriated through a series of handmade processes. That sounds quite crass on the face of it, but by dealing explicitly with the pluralistic methodology of what we might term Post-Modernism, it may offer ways of negotiating how to make an art that avoids the trap of simply illustrating an idea through information in a nostalgic sense, when the motivations that initially triggered its inception are redundant and obsolete. I don’t know if it’s me, but it seems like retrospection is currently everywhere. And this returns me back to the beginning: I’m not a historian, but the development of the European avant-garde in all of its ‘isms’ was always underwritten by what immediately preceded it, the dynamic of this runs counter to the misheld assumption that change grew out of a desire to break with the past instead. The idea that change is driven by this traditional impulse seems strangely absurd but nevertheless compelling.

A.H. When I wrote about your 2006 installation Your Answer is Mine at Matt’s Gallery for frieze in late 2006 – a show that presented a massive billboard sized etching that contained a set of hyper-reflexive texts on contemporary art genres – my only criticism was that the statements within it were almost too polite. With reference to your current project and the dilemmas you mention, you have previously indicated that your practice has become more nihilistic, and that you are interested in Wyndham Lewis’ fragmentary writing, specifically texts like ‘The Melodrama of Modernity’, which appears in Blast, and his book The Wild Body, in which he speaks of laughter as ‘the emotion of tragic delight’. In reference to this appropriation of Lewis, and also Ned Kelly – who you see as the ultimate outsider (his suit of armour is represented within this booklet) – do you think that your work has moved on and become more heated or political on some sense?

D.O. It was an interesting comment to make on the face of it. When I was making the piece at Matt’s I had in mind a series of more passive semi-fictional observations rather than criticisms as such. Yet, through the etching process it struck me how the possibility of making physical these things that exist in the subjective ‘ether’ could be made more absurd through a ‘wall of production’ to see if anything unfolded within this sea of conjecture, speculation and information. At about the same time I was reading a lot about the role of the reader and maybe through Your Answer is Mine’s long production and constant re-editing, the text made me carefully consider the variability of this, and it mellowed me. Aggression, anger, bitterness, frustration, and blind faith are all great tools, but they’re even better when channelled in the right direction: to identify and argue. To do this incessantly though makes things a bit pointless – it becomes a parody of itself. The question is: when or how negation can become constructive, and in what circumstances? For the intention behind a work to be antagonistic or hopelessly frustrated all the time will not necessarily mean that the viewer believes its intention; it’s almost like a mannerist gesture of protest, but that’s how history works and I guess it plays tricks on you – it stays more real in the mind than in reality. Like a Throbbing Gristle gig or a Joy Division film in 2007, it’s even more pointless by being dislocated from its context and maybe this could be an analogy for what I’m aiming to do with the project for IPS. It’s a basic question really. What happens when stuff that is associated with ‘change’ as an agency for difference is resourced and reproduced under circumstances where everything is divorced from the urgency of the context of its origination? At the risk of sounding too obvious the key thing for me is always suggestion rather than description and maybe it’s part of the problem in making work in this way. But in answer to your question there’s a hope that the work itself will to some extent be a physical expression of humour. By alluding to ‘things’ there’s a possibility that a reading between the lines can take place, the interstices so to speak. Then again it could equally fail, but hopefully in a good way, an open way that leaves the viewer with some sense of uncertainty, which might be useful.

Following on from that, I’m glad you used that word ‘genre’, and this is something quite central to the way I approach the work; it means that there are categories, norms and conventions that allude to something recognisable. This can be based around a process like a bunch of woodcuts, an etching, or a fanzine, or it can also be through a subject like writing or criticism, private view cards, photocopying, or Modernism even. Through replication, imitation, or extrapolation, things can happen and slippages are encountered. Maybe it’s important somehow to test the validity of the authority of genre, style, category, and aesthetics. Through satire, nihilism, redundancy, or by any means necessary. As for the last part of your question, perhaps it’s become more heated. As for political – well it seems that the possibility for producing work that escapes the shadow of the marketplace is becoming increasingly difficult under circumstances where the counter-culture has become integral to it, and that’s just a general cultural observation. At the moment I honestly don’t know because the works are still in production at this late stage. It’s certainly become more complex technically. Reading Lewis though isn’t easy; for me what’s successful about his polemic upon culture is its humorous railing against the prevailing orthodoxy of Modernism, and how it also remains a significant part of it. He used writing in an angular, almost obtuse way that is in part uniquely appropriate to English wit. As for Kelly, well he’s the cipher, the romantic and mythological outsider, there’s a theory put forward in Peter Carey’s novel that his ‘primitive’ medieval armour is actually based upon the first Modern iron-clad battleship from the American civil war, the SS Monitor. It’s like an inversion of Cubism’s plundering of ethnology. I don’t know why, but that’s amusing in some way to me, how things get so easily misread.

A.H. There’s a tradition in this country of accepting counter-cultural movements to death, so this considered approach is sensible for a number of reasons. One can say that an essential element to your position, as well as the artists’ group Freee, who produced the last exhibition at IPS, is a concern for ideas around the philistine, which is also a very British characteristic and obsession. The way that this manifests itself in your work is precisely within your hyper-reflective ruminations on lofty discourse, or your ‘sea of conjecture, speculation and information’ that renders this information ‘absurd’ in a Victorian-style hand-written font. As well as having bite this act could be seen as being highly underwritten by local issues of class, modesty and failure; a deliberate form of ‘wrongness’ as a reaction to ‘clever’ forms of discourse. Perhaps this is also another way in which your work relates to Lewis – as an equivalent British version of various European tendencies, which refers to international debates in a nihilistic way. My main question would be to ask if you think that there would be a way out of the pitfalls of this form of British philistinism in your work? Also, have you ever considered the possibility of using non- Modernist or pre-Modernist cultural reference points in your work, as non-art, anti-art elements to push things forward? How do you think that this would prove different to the references that you currently use?

D.O. It’s a good question. The other day I was working in the studio and began to think about Bob Roberts, you know, the Tim Robbins film from the early 90s. He plays the eponymous guitar-strumming hard-line Republican running for senate who fantastically re-projects all the images and means of the cult of 60s protest, but is utterly antithetical to Bob Dylan’s political values. It makes an acute observation about the relationship between time, culture, and politics. I am interested in how these things become aestheticised and turned into a kind of style. The thing about this is that style is potentially presented as more meaningful than its message. I’m interested in things when they become drained of their meaning; punk and dada aesthetics to me are worn visual languages, which doesn’t mean to say they can’t be used, and in part, perhaps they inhabit the territory you are describing in the question about philistinism? Philistinism as an aesthetic is a local issue that’s maybe somehow peculiar to the British sensibility, but then again I think the British are more aligned to literary concerns than visual ones – being raised a Catholic, my dad reckoned it’s a reformation thing, all that mistrust and iconoclasm that ultimately manifests itself in the ‘Bungle Wins Turner Prize’ headlines we’ve all come to know and expect from our national press. As I say, I’m quite interested in how the avant-garde, and forms of counter-cultural dissent, have become aestheticised – or a better term might be anaesthetised. That the discussion is in a gallery for starters makes an immediate difference, which negates the function of the work to some extent, and Michael Corris has made some points about this. That this is the last place where a work of social signifi cance should be located. But in my mind that’s exactly how this stuff differs to what Dave, Mel and Andy [Freee] are doing, or for that matter what Victor Burgin did in the 70s. It’s work that is located in the public sphere, and what we see is the documentation not the work. I guess I’m interested in asking questions between art and how it functions in relation to how it’s received. The right form of wrongness to me is a necessary way to attempt to deal with what can be done with the legacies of the past in order to articulate the present. This is the premise of the show ‘Another
Shadow Fight’. Is it good enough? Is it even art? I don’t know. It might look like art, it might even look like contemporary art, but I really don’t know if it will be. And to be frank I don’t mind if it isn’t, it doesn’t change the fact that to me it needs to be done. It’s interesting when you start to think about Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, which is actually a good case in point. It’s essentially a reconstruction of truth. The work aestheticises a moment of modern British history and utilises and deploys contemporary documentary techniques and filmic devices, but it’s also within a fantastic vein of historical artworks that stretch back to the Bayeux Tapestry, which describe significant events. And these events are open to artistic subjectivity. It’d be great to see whether its meaning changes once the actual events slip from living memory. And this returns me back to the point. The piece of work really isn’t about Modernism – yes it uses Modernism as a subject along with British isolationism to some extent, but it’s really attempting to question the return of the past and the failure of certain cultural discourses that use the regurgitation and recycling of the past as an aesthetic. I hope this answers your question. Some critics reckon my interest is in the relationship between the Enlightenment and Conceptual Art; Lawrence Weiner meets Jonathon Swift. Without drifting back into Peter Osborne territory, I’ll take that. To quote the tragic Bob Roberts ‘The times are a changing back’.

A.H. Is your work optimistic? It’s obviously nihilistic, so can you tell me where you stand on this tension between class, negation, affirmation and immanence, in terms of reinvesting the value of your work (or even de-anaesthetising and reanimating it) within the context of the gallery? Can you also tell me about the language and text-based nature of your work and your use of text as image?

D.O. There’s perhaps more than one way to tackle this question. Firstly my feeling is that any redundancy or nihilism within the work is actually an expression of optimism – at the very least it suggests that something needs to be done in order for something else to take place. If anything it’s a contrived sense of urgency and the gallery is a good stage for this to happen, an amplifier. The works of Asger Jorn or Sherrie Levine question the author in relationship to the viewer, and examine the exchange between culture and the context of its production. Of course the subtext of all of this is that I’m subscribing to a romanticised idea of the avant-garde. The work formally, ethically, and intellectually describes a process of self-consumption that aims to mirror the context of art production at the start of the 21st Century within the spectacle of globally advanced capitalism; a place where production and consumption are de facto methods of currency for ‘exchange’. Secondly, to expand upon the problem you identify through the use of caricature in terms of class. Well,
it’s a vehicle, as I say, and there’s a massive element of ironic discourse taking place in bourgeois values that are conveyed through the use of text as image, and this is what I’m driving at, the symptomatic use of ‘style’ and the disseminative processes of drawing and printmaking are central tools to understand how this operates.

Following on from that, any re-employment of obsolete textual references is aimed to present a disturbance of authoritative forms through an aesthetic, the ‘decorative’, ‘the tasteful’, the ‘high falutin’ language, which in itself is a form of misplaced and bogus authority that’s connected to all kinds of perceptions of ‘ownership’ and context. Nostalgia is a conservative impulse and it’s this that is being critiqued through the shattered lens of the 20th Century and beyond. Someone once wrote that I take language as a material and push it over the edge of a cliff. I think it’s a fair observation – it’s destructive. But this is also why I use drawing, which is always at the beginning and end of most of my processes; through replicating mechanisation, it makes the hand of the artist visible, which in turn aims to undermine any faith in the authority of the printed word that we may have left, and that is counter-balanced through the ‘tradition of dissent’. To a large degree this is also tied into observations upon social history, which are massively class-based from the Chartists onwards. This isn’t about aestheticising protest, radicalism, or putting anything into practice, in my view it’s too redundant for that. To employ the signs and languages of Modernism through the values of the Enlightenment is a means to an end. A kind of ‘radical obsolescence’ as my friends would put it. Thirdly, perhaps the most important thing we haven’t touched upon is the process involved in the works’ production. What’s included in the gallery space is a set of posters; woodcuts of collages that were initially sketched out as drawings. Thesis and antithesis if you like. If there is any dialectical process taking place, I’d prefer it to take place here. Again, obsolete forms of imagery are employed in the work, and this is echoed through a necessary labyrinthine, and to some extent tortuous production process that is counter-productive and unnecessary. To me it makes the unnecessary nature of art necessary as a counterpoint to the ‘readymade’ culture in which we inhabit, and this to my mind again is about articulating currency. Duchamp must be really wetting himself – no wonder he chose a urinal, he’d need it. As we touched on before, I’m quite interested in how things are signified, and also how there’s a sense of uncertainty or slippage in what the viewer sees: there’s a sense of a previous usage that’s married to the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of the work but it’s ultimately an illustration of it.

Finally, the outcome of this process means that images are ultimately made from other images, and this raises the issue of the exchange of artists’ labour and skill, which is invested in return for the end product that sits dumb in whatever space it’s been produced for. In this sense, I’d subscribe to Marshal McLuhan’s assertion (who incidentally was a friend and collaborator with Wyndham Lewis in later life) that the process makes a significant contribution to the way the work is read by the viewer; and to a large extent ‘the medium is the message’.

A.H. Can you tell me a little more about how the characters of Lewis, Nolan, Kelly and Bayer link to the way in which your exhibition will be installed within International Project Space?

D.O. The kiosk by Bayer is the central thing really. It’ll be a fragmented but recognisable temporary structure and held together as an assemblage by posters such as those that depict Ned Kelly’s armour. As a self-taught artist, Nolan’s series of Kelly paintings are deemed ‘iconic’ through the presentation of the beginnings of post-colonial identity and like Lewis he was an outsider who settled in the UK, and I think he yearned to be part of a European discourse. All of a sudden we’re back to what happens when artists are witnesses or articulators of historical events or moments. Bayer’s kiosk is the commercial ‘heart’ of the matter, which is formally a bit like the romanticised suit of armour, the shelter from the sturm and drang. An obsolete form of Modernism that’s filled with the pathos of failure.

A.H. Can you also tell me about the reason for the title of your exhibition ‘Another Shadow Fight’?

D.O. In a very simple sense I was thinking along the lines of a shadow as a metaphor. From the marriage of the reproduced elements of the Modernist subject matter, to the way that the work has actually being made as an installation – the mirroring that takes place through the combined processes of making this structure that’s held together with hand-printed images and drawing. The whole thing is a fiction. There’s also a big hint about the form of appropriation as a gesture, and like a Russian Doll, I’m interested in the way the work might inhabit existing structures. I wanted to choose a title that gave the suggestion it is part of a pattern, or an idea that’s familiar but unfamiliar at the same time. It’s a reworking of pre-existing forms, which aren’t necessarily about personal subjectivity but are aimed at a certain discourse that I’m interested in: the system of art and its relationship to the world. Also, much of the subject matter I’m working with has some relationship to conflict, and without sounding didactic it seems quite a relevant thing to work with.

A.H. Can you tell me about your plans for the future, together with other projects that you are working on?

D.O. I’m going to work on another collaboration with Robin Klassnik at Matt’s Gallery in London, which is a set of twelve preview cards for solo exhibitions, one from each month of the year reproduced as drypoint etchings in an edition of one. 2007 was a good year for exhibitions, there have been so many of them, and so many cards: I’m etching the backs of them as faithfully as my hands will let me. I really need to put the project to bed and do it properly – it’s been haunting me for years.