Jim Lambie

Jim Lambie is famous for making tight grids of tape on gallery floors, the mys­te­ri­ous Soul Sticks and being in The Boy Hair­dressers. We talked to him in advance of a solo show at Inver­li­eth House. Just for a change this is a fin­ished piece, orig­i­nally pub­lished in The List, rather than a Q & A.

‘If you want to know what’s going in the new show,’ says Jim Lambie, by way of a greet­ing, ‘I haven’t got a clue.’ This is not the most aus­pi­cious open­ing gambit in a con­ver­sa­tion about, well, what’s going in the new show. It’s not a sur­prise, though. Lambie makes work that looks as if he’s rushed into the gallery and promptly rushed out again, leav­ing a trail of work in his wake. Whether it’s a floor pasted over with stripes of luridly coloured insu­la­tion tape, or a Tech­nics 1210 turntable doused in gritty globs of glit­ter, Lambie puts stuff in gal­leries that oozes fevered on-​the-​spot cre­ation. This is not a studio-​bound artist who labours over pre­cise con­fig­u­ra­tions, tweak­ing objects into place to sate that con­cep­tual monkey on his back.

‘If the work isn’t made entirely in the space, it’s put together in the space,’ Lambie con­firms, ‘Take the last thing I did, in Miami. The con­cep­tual basis for the piece was there in my head, and the con­cep­tual base in terms of the mate­ri­als I wanted to use was there, but then for the art part of it I had to run about for two days gath­er­ing mate­ri­als up and work out the best way to put those mate­ri­als together. There’s always a lot of run­ning around. For this last piece, I had the idea to do floor sculp­tures, but when I got to the gallery there were three large drains on the floor, and they were just going to inter­fere with the work and inter­rupt it, so I ended up doing a black duct tape cross-​hatching across the floor. That was some­thing gen­er­ated there, out of neces­sity. You need to deal with this, you need to deal with that. For me, rightly or wrongly, work­ing like that puts an energy in the work that it wouldn’t have if I had the piece sit­ting in a studio for six months.’

This is, though, the only point on which Lambie con­curs with the usual inter­pre­ta­tion of what he does, and he seems to delight in swat­ting away con­ven­tional read­ings of his work. Take music. Lambie was in The Boy Hair­dressers, a Glas­gow group that tend to be branded leg­endary, or at least sem­i­nal, by a cer­tain breed of fanzine-​writer. He’s a work­ing disc jockey, as well as an artist. More than that, his work is lit­tered with allu­sions to mat­ters musi­cal. Many pieces share their titles with pop hits, the 12 inch record is a recur­ring prop, the spirit of Larry Levan hovers behind those disco-​fied turnta­bles and the abstract floor sculp­tures call to mind the cover of Blondie’s Par­al­lel Lines or the dance floor of some sub­ter­ranean nitespot.

For Lambie, these seem­ingly cen­tral con­cerns are, at best, tan­gen­tial to his work. ‘It’s ref­er­enced by other people,’ he admits, ‘and I can’t really deny that it’s there, but… I make sculp­ture. I always start the work from a sculp­tural point of view. I’m trying to make new sculp­ture. I’m trying to con­tex­tu­alise sculp­ture. It’s always sculp­ture. Music might bleed into the work, as some­thing that I like and because I use the stuff that’s round about me, stuff that’s lying around, like the records. I use them as pure mate­r­ial, but then the read­ings are there for every­body, the signs are there for every­body. My point is that it never starts from there — I wouldn’t know where to start describ­ing music through sculp­ture, or through paint­ing, or through any­thing that I do.’

What, then, is behind the music in Lambie’s work? The answer seems simple enough on the sur­face: space. ‘I work from an idea, and turn it into material,’ Lambie explains, ‘As opposed to other con­cep­tual artists who try to get away from objects, i’m trying to get into them. I create myself a prob­lem and try to find a solu­tion that i’m happy with. Things like, ‘How do you make a corner piece?’ or ‘If I take this apart, what does that do?’ Just ques­tion after ques­tion about space. It’s more about a need than a want, about the neces­sity of a sit­u­a­tion. I deal with a floor, instead of saying ‘I want a floor.’ If I did that I’d end up with some solid gold floor thing with big metal rivets in it that didn’t respond to the con­text, that was just some­thing that I con­jured up. I used to make really tight con­cep­tual work, where every­thing is handed to you, and it’s all theory-​driven. I wasn’t enjoy­ing making that work. I was paralysing myself with too much theory, so I started to make stuff, and then think about it once it was made. I think start­ing with a simple prob­lem, then work­ing through that is enough to be get­ting on with.’

Lambie even denies any strong the­matic ties between his pieces, though such links appear obvi­ous to the viewer. ‘I never think about that,’ he says, ‘I’m always just work­ing on that ques­tion that’s come to me through the piece I’m work­ing on at that time. I want to stay like that. If I start to under­stand what I’m doing too much, then it becomes too know­ing, too cal­cu­lated. I want an inter­est­ing life. I want to be making dif­fer­ent stuff. I don’t want to be iden­ti­fied as that guy who does that one thing.’

This isn’t con­trari­ness for it’s own sake. For all Lambie’s insis­tance that he is, above all, a sculp­tor con­cerned with space, and his reluc­tance to accept responses that latch on to what is, for him, an almost coin­ci­den­tal immer­sion in music, he ends up by demol­ish­ing any oppo­si­tion between artist and viewer. ‘People are free to bring to that piece and take from that piece what­ever they want to. The work is a start­ing point for other people, not an end result for me. People will thread any­thing through these pieces, and that can sur­prise me, and sur­prise them. It’s more a gen­er­a­tive thing than any­thing to do with putting hard edges on my ideas. I’m into flow and change, and making work that allows other people to feel that same thing. There’s just too many fuck­ing edges, you know?’

Posted at 2pm on 03/01/03 by Jack Mottram to the art, interviews category.
Permalink · Add to del.icio.us