I’m not surprised: it’s a profile of Mr. Rainford Hugh Perry, AKA Lee “Scratch” Perry, AKA Pipecock Jackson, AKA The Upsetter.

Since I’ve given up trying to bypass the Black Ark obeah, here’s a few quotes plucked from the interview:

Perry on Reggae:

When you see a rainbow in the sky I tell you that is truly the sign of the Ark of the Covenant. I bring the Ark out of Egypt, down to 5 Cardiff Crescent, Washington Gardens. No-one in Kingston, Jamaica, noticed it was out of Egypt, so I give them reggae music, the treasure of King Tut. The dreadlocks around me, them poor people, so them make poor reggae. When I was a dread, I was an actor, a dead-dread. Now I am alive as a doctor, and I represent God, and God is not a Rasta. If I returned to reggae, I would be totally stupid, it would be goin’ against the signs—all the tapes I had were taken by some thieves. All Bob Marley, all Upsetter. I cannot return to that Ark and that reggae.

Perry on Duke Reid, and becoming The Upsetter:

I go to Kingston to do it with Duke Reid and all of them, but I have a song and a style they did not like. And then Coxsone Dodd have a good spirit and him want a good friend around, so him havin’ me around for a good friend in the business. But soon I could take no more of him either, and decided to make People Funny Boy, because people funny, you know? It was then I expose myself as The Upsetter. The Upsetter was my first name after I got called ‘Scratch’ at dances for my style. It means to upset all thief, all liar, all pimp, all user and all abuser and let them feel shame. The Upsetter represents the word Excalibur - blazin’ fire!

Perry on the purity of machines:

I returned to music through machines. The difference is that the machines are clean, and the machines are not corrupted. What I create here cannot hurt people, but you can bring an impure musician to play in your studio and create your own doom. My brain represent the bass, an’ if an evil man is playing on my brain, it’ll cause me trouble as he’s trying to chip away at my brain. And if an evil drummer is playing my beat with an evil thought, I think he can hurt my brain by playing a dreadful drum. But the machine cannot play a dreadful drum, and the machine cannot play a dreadful bass.

Perry on his intended audience:

The music I am playing now is strictly for the children. It is a magical technological cartoon pop music to cheer them up, to heal their brain from boring reggae. God give me a chance to recreate the children brain. The children must not be bored, or they will become criminals.

Perry on the IMF:

I am the head of the IMF now also. I am the future children’s billionaire. Look at my name, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. The L is for the English pound, the S is for the dollars, the P is for the permit out of Egypt. I am the International Monetary Fund master. I have known this a long time now.

Perry on Rastafarianism:

The colours of rain don’t belong to the Rasta, they belong to the rain. Put some water in a glass right now!¹ Hold it up against the wall: it form and show you a rainbow. You will see no dread in there. Hold it up against the wall! You see red, gold and green? You sure as hell don’t see a Rasta in there, surely not!

Perry on his divine origins:

My music represent God. And there is only one house on this earth that represent God, and that is my house. The house of Neptune, the true an’ living god. Merlin, the magic master, he give me the music sword named Excalibur. I am an extra-terrestrial, not from another planet but from heaven. My real name is Rainford Hugh Perry. And in the beginning there was the word ‘rain’. The word ‘rain’ take unto himself flesh and blood and become a living soul. I am a living soul. My name is R-A-I-N-ford. Do you understand?

I’m pretty sure that I still have the MiniDisc on which this interview was recorded—it also includes Perry singing Sun Is Shining (a song he wrote for Bob Marley, or claims to have done)—and if I can find it, I’ll post MP3s of the quotes above.

Also, it should be noted that Perry is nowhere near as crazy as he sounds—when not ‘on’, he’s basically the same as your Grandad. Only really, really stoned and wearing a hat covered in mirrors.

1. At this point, Perry refused to speak until I went to kitchen, filled a glass of water, held it up to the light, and verified that it didn’t contain a Rasta.↩

(Click to view full-size)

1. Prose, poetry, sculpture, gardening - do you see these as different, discrete disciplines, or do you see your work as a whole that happens to be expressed in different media?

Working in different mediums has never been a problem, that is to say, a question, to me, so I have no answer to your question.

2. Little Sparta - from the garden’s name on, Little Sparta seems to be rich with allusion and reference - is it a garden in a traditional sense, or a large scultpure, a space to exhibit, a sort of literary work, a little utopia? What were your aims when planning and creating Little Sparta?

Little Sparta is a garden in the traditional sense. It is perhaps not like other modern gardens, but I think that other times would have had no difficulty with it. It is emphatically not a ‘sculpture garden’ as might be thought. My aim was always to make a garden but I was not influenced by the example of other gardens round about (as it were) but of gardens as traditionally understood. I was genuinely surprised when people found difficulty in accepting it as a garden rather than as a literary work or whatever.

3. Following on from 1 and 2, the show at Inverlieth House seems to blend different types of artistic practice too - what prompted the idea of having a show made of sentences? Is the show to be seen as a companion piece to the garden, or a reflection on it? Has the setting of Inverlieth House had a bearing on the work?

Inverleith House seemed a perfect setting for an exhibition of sentences. I admit that an exhibition of sentences is perhaps unusual but just becuase a thing is unusual doesn’t mean it is wrong. The sentences had their origin in my gardening and the reader/viewer must make his or her own mind up as to whether an exhibition of sentences is reasonable or not.

The interview also marks the end of Switchspace, an organisation founded in 1999 by Sorcha and fellow Glasgow School of Art graduate Marianne Greated to explore alternative spaces for exhibiting art.

So, we might as well start at the beginning - what prompted you and Marianne to set up Switchspace?

We were in our fourth year, and were thinking about setting up a studio and gallery complex, to solve some of the logistical problems we were facing, and that our peer group was having too. That proved very difficult, whether it was in terms of getting a space to use from the City Council or arranging funding for the project. Then, around that time, we were given a talk by Cathy Wilkes, as part of our professional practice course, and she spoke about how she converted her flat for a period and did six shows in it, and that just really struck a chord with us. We were both keen to get something up and running instantly, and we liked that DIY attitude of being resourceful and being in full control of starting up and running a project. That was the main reason we set it up. Originally we just had a couple of shows confirmed, and we just set it up like that to see what the response would be, to see if people thought that what we were doing was a relevant thing, to see if people would support it. It really grew and developed from there, because we had such a lot of interest, and such a lot of people supporting us and wanting to show in that unusual space.

It was in your own flat initially?

Yes. We converted my front room, and showed artists there. It was quite intense actually, we were showing one or two artists each month, and ended up showing 15 artists in the flat over 15 months. It was very intense, but amazing for me personally - it altered my whole career development. I came out of art school and had my own studio and was making my own work, but working in such close proximity with other artists - some of them were practically living with me - was such an intense working experience, and I felt really privileged to have all this going on right in my front room. As a result of that, I really got the bug for working with people, and for sort of supporting artists in that way. So for me it really had an impact on what I wanted to do.

And when did things shift up a gear from being in your front room to being in other locations around the city?

From the beginning, we had the idea for there never to be a fixed gallery space. Obviously it was great to start things out in my flat, and during that time it gave us a chance to move the organisation on and develop, but after 15 shows in the flat, we began to feel that it had become a fixed space, and to live up to our name we needed to move things on. We were looking at various options, and we felt that because we’d had such an intense period of exhibiting, that we needed a bit of time getting ourselves kind of constituted, trying to fundraise in some sort of way, because it has been a self-funded project, up until last year, really. So we took a bit of time out to do that, and were approached by Fab Flats, a property agency who’d seen a feature on us in Artists’ Newsletter. They saw that and approached us, and we brokered a deal with them whereby, in exchange for labour clearing out spaces for them, we’d get to use the spaces on a temporary basis to show artists’ work. That’s been the main programme, since 2001, but during that time we also took over the basement space in Offshore Café, focussing more on current students and recent graduates, and we’ve always done one-off projects alongside everything, like setting up The Chateau, or using the Project Rooms, or being involved in RAW, or the Art Fair. So we’ve always been interested in not being completely fixed to one programme, but I guess the project we’ve been running with Fab Flats is the one that’s been closest to the aims of what Switchspace is about - moving around between different communities, and also the education programme we’ve been running alongside the shows, bringing people from the local community and engage them with the work.

So, as well as the idea of using alternative spaces, I guess a big part of Switchspace is the idea of seeing how the artists you worked with responded to those spaces, as opposed to showing in a straight gallery, so to speak?

Yeah, totally. As a result of that it wasn’t about our curatorial vision, it was much more open, a way to offer a range of artists the opportunity to show work in unusual contexts, and as a result for their work to… well, what we wanted them to do was experiment with it, to really push their practice, so that the experience would ultimately be really beneficial to their work at that time, or in terms of their future development. As a result of that, there wasn’t really the pressure to do something really final and really fixes, it was more about using the opportunity to push their practice. So, yeah, that’s really what we wanted to achieve from it all, really.

Obviously there’s tons and tons to choose from, but can you think of a particular artist or artists who really took to those ideas, who really had their practice nudged along in a particular direction?

That’s hard. I mean, I hope that all of them enjoyed the experience, and gained something from it. One show that was really important to us, in all sorts of ways, was Ian Balloch’s show. He was the first artist to show as part of the Fab Flats partnership, and he really did enter into the spirit of coming into this large space, and using a lot of found objects and materials that were left within that space. Also, one of my dreams has always been to work with Cathy and I think the way she works really lends itself to being shown in an alternative or unusual situation, and recently she’s been showing a lot internationally, in more institutional or white cube spaces, so I think this show has come at a really good time for her, to show in the shop unit we’re using.

And it’s a nice neat circle, having her as your last artist when she inspired you in the first place…

Oh yeah, absolutely. We really felt that it’s very important that there’s fixed artist-run spaces like Transmission or whatever, but it’s also really exciting to have a sort of cyclical or regenerating aspect to artist-run activity here. Obviously Transmission have that in place naturally thanks to their committee structure, but for us it’s something we’ve been involved in now for five years, and we felt that since already in that time there were other artist-run spaces starting to come through, and approaching us for advice - places like Mary Mary, who I really feel are the next generation in terms of what we’ve been doing. So, it feels natural for us to wind things up while the project still feels relevant, and while we’ve been able to achieve as much as we’d hoped to. It just seems to have happened at a nice time, and also matched up with the two of us now being busy with our own things. And, yeah, that cyclical thing with Cathy showing as our last artist after she inspired us is a nice way to finish things off.

So to finish up, what’s Cathy up to in the space?

Well, the way Cathy works, she has a very personal response and method of working, and she’s developed that in response to the space. There’s sculptural works, and also paintings - it’s quite an intimate installation.

Tevet makes impossibly complex, impossibly large installations, that take years to complete. Using thousands of everyday objects, or objects that look like everyday objects, he re-contextualises and combines them in a way that doesn’t so much follow the guides laid down by past movements in art history - Modernism, Minimalism, perhaps Constructivism - as muck about with them. Without having seen it in the flesh, I can’t be sure, but I suspect his work nowadays is mostly about the way we look at art, something touched on in the following conversation.

Here are two images taken from Tevet’s Untitled 95-96 to whet the appetite, and so you can get a better idea of the new work he talks about here:

Could you tell me a bit about the delay getting your work out of Israel?

There was a strike! The government is a right wing government, and they tried to change the strutcure of the ports, which was the strongest union – until now. There is a certain authority which unifies all the ports in Israel, and that made the union very strong. So they tried to privatise – they’re very good students of your Margaret Thatcher! – and when they made the new rule in the Parliament, the Knesset, at that very moment there was a strike, which is still going on.

That must be frustrating.

Yes, my work was held less than twenty-four hours before it had to leave the port.

Oh no!

Just my luck.

So – is it pretty frustrating?

Well, it is not what one will expect. It is frustrating, but it might be interesting actually.

That’s what I was about to ask – are you taking it as a challenge? Will it change the work?

No, no. The way I work is in a studio, in the very classical manner of a studio artist. It is not an installation that can vary in dimensions, or something. I sometimes say the work is a satellite that I launch from my studio that lands in some other place.

So it’s completely realised before the installation?

Yes, it’s realised again with the exact structure and placings. On the millimetre, as they say.

Right.

If you look at pictures of my work, you can see how complicated it is, so there is no room for variations. Because every single element is so much dependent on another, if you move something, it is like… it’s like an orchestration in a way: if you change one tone, everything goes wrong.

So what will you be showing in DCA when the show opens?

It depends how quickly we open the crates! The first stage of the installment is tracing a very large, detailed floor-plan, which I am copying from a map I have with me. This by itself is a few days work. So when people come, they will be able to see a very large drawing on the floor, which shows the placement, the marks and signs for every single object that is to be placed. So, yes, people will see an abstract drawing with a lot of letters and numbers and information that will allow us to store it later. And I hope that we’ll be able to put at least 20-30% of the installation in, but it’s all one piece, so there will only be sections there.

So how do you feel about showing it like that?

It isn’t really showing it, it’s more like letting people have a glimpse, like a work in progress. It might be interesting in a way. It’s not the optimal situation, I would prefer to have it ready, first so as to be nice to them and second so as to be nice to the work. If someone will bother to come again and see the complete work, then it’s quite amazing to see how all this comes together… I guess on Saturday, it will be quite messy. There will be perhaps a thousand objects spread around, waiting to come to a certain place.

Talking more specifically about the piece – you’ve been developing it for a long time…

From the very early nineties, I’ve been pushing my work, or starting a new stage, a new chapter. In ‘91 there was a very big career retrospective, titled Painting Lessons, though it showed sculptures. There were sculptures that showed complexity, that were made of many many objects, that were very colourful. But since ‘92 or so, I took a few decisions. One was to push this interest in complexity and multiplicity to a certain edge, so the works in the last ten years or so really grew, and got bigger and bigger, until they became more like room installations. They fill the entire room. You’re with me?

Yes, yes.

Right. Each work will be bigger than yourself, and there was a challenge to make big works without making monumental work. There was an interest from the 80s to make work that it is impossible for the viewer to get a hold of.

Because they can’t appreciate the whole?

Yes, yes. You are coming from the art I guess? You are an art person?

Er, yes – I write about art a lot, but I’m not an artist.

Good good – I’m sorry, I didn’t know what kind of journalist you are! So, the main ambition was criticising or attacking the ideas of Donald Judd and his friends, the idea that you see something and you right away know everything about it. And also, the job of memory or perception. What I tried to do from the early 80s, well, I remember saying in an interview then that I would like to do scupture that will beat the camera, that there will be no way to represent them, or even to tell in language what is going there. But at the same time, it is not about chaos or a mess. It is about playing with a tradition, the minimalist or modernist tradition, with a rational object, with images that recall certain objects that we associate with a certain tradition or discipline. What I want to do is play with that, to turn it upside down. I do this by using boxes, or cubes, or very simple forms, but inserting into that not only complexity but also little stories, a narrative – but never with the idea that a work is about, I dunno, a certain story, my biography or something. It’s all about throwing hints, and pulling back – something like that. You assume that there is a certain order, and you look and it’s all collapsing, and there is a proposal for something else.

So there are little clues for people to work around?

Yes, you are having a clue in a certain area that a certain event is happening, or a certain psychological mood, or a little something that alludes to a specific moment in art history, and, by the way, my own history – there is a lot of quotation from earlier work, a retrospective look. If you look even at the internet site, you can see that even in the 80s the same elements appear again and again. So the problem is building a certain vocabulary that is kind of limited, then seeing how much wealth there is in it, or whether I am capable of surprising myself playing with the same stupid cubes!

Right…

Now, the point is this when you ask about this specific work: the work grew and grew, which has a lot to do with working in Tel Aviv, not New York or London where every second week you must produce something. I took the advantage of working behind the mountains, where no one cares what I am doing, and closed the studio door so I could spend time – and money by the way! The idea is of working in a counter-productive manner, not playing the game of the system. I remember once making a work and saying, ‘I want that piece to be so complex and so big that no one can take it to his collection.’ Of course, it was sold! So – this very specific piece was developed in this line. I started in 1998, in a space that was not so big, and my intuition was that I wanted to push this kind of business into a new horizontality. I was interested in the point of walking and looking, so you are not standing in one place to see a picture or sculpture. You really have to wander, and while you are wandering, you have an adventure. The more I worked on the piece, the more I became interested in this situation. It is almost like when you read a book, or listen to a concert – there is a question of the narrative of the piece, the way one piece links to another. Now, the way I work, I really felt that it was bigger, so I had the opportunity to move to another studio, which was bigger, and I really thought I would just add another few pieces here and there, and that would be it. But it so happened that I spent another five years at that studio, and luckily that studio is an old basketball room from a school. Luckily it wasn’t a football room, or I would have been working for another twenty years! It really bought many interesting questions – working with all these little elements, how big can it be, without becoming a mess, or a storage? So it was really intriguing. This new scale of the basketball studio really intoduced bigger elements into the piece. In the end, the piece kind of stopped in the studio with about sixty centimetres between the piece and the wall. You are really pressed into this labyrinth, as if you are in the labyrinth, but there is not one section in the whole work where you can enter the work. So there is this interesting effect of being drawn in, but staying outside. I worked a lot at creating very tempting views. There are these units that are chest level

Those tall table-like structures?

Yes, there is an element that is kind of a partition, the side of which is about one metre and thirty centimetres. They create a situation that is like a wall that you want to see behind – like an obstacle for the body of the viewer and of the mind, for your ability to see. The whole thing is very dense, there is a lot happening behind these walls of furnitures and architectural structures in a way. It is really about… when you look at this, you are missing something, and if you move a little you will see, but there is again always something that is preventing you from seeing. So it is only your imagination that will allow you to get inside. This was the studio situation, but in Dundee there is more space, because the room is bigger.

But they still won’t be able to get to the heart of it?

No, no. I think what is happening is that there so many intimate, and hand-made objects that they call you to look at them. They are not the kind of things you want to look at from ten metres away. From the distance it’s just a pile of…

Wood?!

Yes! There is a kind of relationship between the viewer position, the viewer position in a way – the work moves you from this side to that side, you try to push yourself a little backward or forward. It is like choreographing the viewers movement.

You’re like a conductor?

Not in that way. The work just stands there. The piece doesn’t care about the viewer, but the viewer has to work. In many ways it looks like a cemetary in a way, rather than a garden or whatever.

I was going to ask whether, with these architectural aspects to the work, you were making some sort of alternative city, or alternative world? Even that there is some kind of Utopian aspect to the work?

People are often using this metaphor of Tel Aviv, or wherever. They call Tel Aviv the White City, or the city likes to call itself that. Tel Aviv is full of Bauhas buildings that are white, or off-white now. I don’t work with this in mind, actually. I said something at the beginning of the interview that the work tries to deny any possesion of meaning, or image, or some kind of simple descriptive something, so that you could see the piece and say, ‘Ah, that’s about architecture.’ This happens because I am using very simple objects – cubes, partitions, a table that is like a drawing of a building. The tables even came from some sort of joke on the cube. In Israel we say [something in Hebrew] – it means ‘turning up twice’ or something like that. This piece, because of the scale, one could say it is Manhattan, or one could say it is Tel Aviv, and there is this feeling that you are walking in a city, because of the vistas that are open, like streets. But actually everything is built from interior stuff, from simple things from the home. So if it is an outdoor landscape, the whole tone and touch, the imagery is made from inside things. I mean, if you see two beds beside each other, this is not an outdoor architecture thing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are many boats in my work – there is an image of a boat that is turned upside down and becomes an iron. There is a lot going on to do with water, for example, as if the whole structure is sunk in some strange place. So there is a table, but there are boats floating under the table legs. Maybe if one started to read the piece and say, ‘This stands for that, and this for that,’ you will maybe find meaning. Just as I say – this table is upside down, or this boat is attached to a vertical wall, perhaps this means the ground has unfolded. It is very complex, not just in terms of there being many many things, but in terms of trying to find meaning. The point is that whatever you try to stamp on it in terms of meaning, you will fail.

Or however close you come to understanding, there is something else in the way denying that understanding?

Right, right. I wrote a little statement for the catalogue at the Venice Biennale, a few sentences that describe this in a little poetic way, the manner that I start work. It said that there is no plan or program for what I am going to do, and that is why I spend so much time. I may think at the beginning that I want to do this and that, but every time I add someting there is a surprise, I am pushed in a new direction, given new options to continue. It is as if there is a virus, or a cancer, something that destroys any logic. Part of what will make you interested in understanding is that despite this, there is a very clear feeling that there is an order, that there is a certain logic. This is why I am not going to change the work – every time when I come [to a gallery], I place it as it is, in fact it can be placed without me there. So, anyway, in this little statement for the Biennale ends with the idea that the more you look at a piece… I love this metaphor that you assume it is something… I mean sculpturally, theoretically, if you think of someone like Richard Serra, it is about making you find a place in the world, but in my case I am interested in the idea that you stand on the ground and the carpet is being pulled from underneath your foot. Or as if you are on a running belt, like they have at airports, where the ground is always escaping from you. Another reason why I am working for so long is that I am like a dog running after his tail!

So the way you work – letting new things suggest themselves and that kind of thing – almost works in the same way as the viewer experiencing the work?

I’m sorry, you speak so quickly – are you Scottish or Irish?

Sorry – I’m English, but I’ve lived in Scotland so long my accent has gone funny!

A whole new accent? Okay!

Yes. What I was saying was is there a similarity between the way you make a piece and the way someone viewing it has to work when they are viewing it, or interacting it? Like a mirroring?

Oh, that is certainly true.

So that’s something you aim for?

Well, I won’t ask anyone to stand with it for seven years! Not really that, but when I am doing it I am the viewer. I play until I am pleased with a certain section, the way I respond to it. You know, when it takes so long to do a piece, by the time I am on the fifth or sixth year, I forgot what I started with. So it is really about whether it works for me or not. So if I am excited about something, I would love the viewer to have a similar experience. A good viewer is someone who has really got it. I know I miss many many people – on many levels it is so different from the way people are used to seeing art today, you know they run in and see things like they see things in a mall. It’s about begginng for attention! Listen, you can’t get in dialogue with the world if you are always running. The time is really important. I know many people will just say, ‘Eh, what’s this?’ and then they are not there, but there are a few people who will really get intrigued. I won’t say that these people will have my experience of the work, but if they come out with certain things that excite them, then I am happy.

Right, that should be plenty of stuff for me to work with. Unless there’s anything else you really wanted to highlight about the piece?

Well, we spoke about time, we spoke about complexity, we even spoke about the strike at the port! I think that is all, but I think what might be good is if you have a look on the internet site [tevet.org], there are some texts, and an interview. Look at those, and look at the images, and you will know everything of me.

Okay, thanks very much, and I’ll see you at the opening.

Thank you. Bye bye.

Bye.

(My apologies for the simple nature of questions - I never quite know how to handle interviewing people via email, without the to-and-fro of a live conversation.)

Motifs and themes - domestic and familiar objects are often the subject of your work. Why? What prompts you to transform or investigate this subject matter?

The familiar and the unfamiliar both have fascinations.

In the bigger world, some objects may appear domestic. In fact, they’re my own things I use everyday, for example Table and Chairs is directly based on the table I’ve had forever and the plates are what I eat off of everyday.

A good example of the unfamiliar would be the beards. I don’t have a beard, and in fact I don’t know many people who do. Something interesting developed while working on them. They’re essentially costumes. They’re an attempt at the unfamiliar. In fact, they’re fake beards that ended up not even necessarily being male.

Also, the motifs and themes change from day to day, but over longer periods of time it becomes clear they inevitably always repeat. For example, the chapel turned into the oilcan. It’s still a chapel actually - a chapel of oil.

Scale - much of your work plays with scale, calling to mind Alice In Wonderland, and fairytales. How did this aspect of your practice develop? What makes it a continuing source of inspiration/working method?

The artist’s point of view - from the small world - could be viewed as a large gesture publically. The practice is creating something both large and small.

Publically, Table and Chairs is perceived as a big object, where it actually originated from a small detail-a corner bracket supporting the table leg. Instead of crawling underneath and photographing an actual table in order to see it, why not shrink yourself and take a normal snapshot?

Also, by changing their environment (size of the room), Table and Chairs is capable of being small - in a large depot, for instance - or large, in a residential room, like the one at Inverleith House.

In the end, none of this really matters because Table and Chairs isn’t such a big scale issue anyway. It’s only three times the actual size. A better example is Keyhole which is probably one of my smallest sculptures, but it’s fifty times bigger than an actual keyhole. I don’t even know how much the teardrop might be blown up in scale.

Balance - broadly speaking, your work seems to find a balance between the conceptual and the visual/physical. Is this something you aim for? Is there a conflict between the formal aspects of your work and their conceptual basis?

There is a balancing act - perhaps that’s true. There’s a huge conflict between what an object ends up being and the idea which started it.

Things duplicate and replicate.

For example, photographing under the table branched off and turned into several objects.

Also, in my sketchbooks one subject directly or indirectly on different levels unfolds. Architecture, male, female, oxygen-there’s all kinds of subjects in there.

In fact, a person could become unbalanced if it weren’t for sketchbooks.

A shift in practice - it seems as if your recent work is, again broadly speaking, more representational than earlier work, and tends to return to/revise/refine various themes. Is this indeed the case, and if so, what prompted the shift?

People my age grew up with abstraction. Many of us worked our way out of it, where abstract artists had worked their way out of the representational. Sometimes I think maybe we should work our way back - maybe we were better off.

Also, project after project, the capability of representing the real naturally improves, while over 25 years the same forms and themes inevitably persist.

At the same time, I don’t aspire unconditionally to representational work.

More information: Robert Therrien, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Minimalist Fantasia - a profile by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Robert Therrien - a profile at The Broad Art Foundation.

First off, why write about a Columbine-style school shooting?

Hmmm. [long pause] I talked about this last night with a writer named Matt Thorne. And we were talking about how you know when a book is ready to be written, and we both sort of came up of the notion of what it must be like to be pregnant. You just go oh, that’s the book. On one level you can plan things out but on another, it just comes out of nowhere.

You have to let it take its own course.

Yeah, but at the same time I don’t want it to sound precious and mystical and all’ooooh,’ which I think it may be a little bit, but sometimes it’s just ‘Ok, ooh, that’s it, better run with it.’

I suppose anything, any activity that is done in solitary and is then made available to the outside world is like that to an extent, in that it sounds a bit mystical.

I think so. I try not to be superstitious about it, but there is something superstitious about it as well. It’s also, I mean we’re talking about writing now, it’s a trance that you put yourself into for however long it takes to write the book. And while you’re in that trance, everything else sort of takes on an unreal quality, and then it’s over and it’s like’Oh! I’m not pregnant any more,’ you know?

You’ve given birth, as it were.

Haha! It’s strange, I’m sure it must be a little like that for women, having kids.

Something that isn’t necessarily in all your books, but in some of them, certainly, is the idea of there coming at some point A Change, and after that everything’s different. For example in Girlfriend In A Coma, it’s the coma, and then the end of the world, in Hey, Nostradamus! it’s the high school shooting, in Microserfs it’s the uprooting from Seattle to California’ is that a fair assessment, or am I reading too much into things?

Och, no, I don’t think so at all. I was talking about this with someone downstairs a few minutes ago, the notion that fiction - I personally wouldn’t want to read a book unless at the end of it, or within it, there’s the possibility of change or transformation within myself. And so I think okay, with any book I write, I would hope that someone entering it would come out a different person at the end, and I guess quite literally in the book, that’s what happens to the characters, so it’s a conscious decision.

A lot of the time, it seems to be focusing on not the aftermath, as such, but what happens after the change, how people do change.

I’m interested in growing up, hearing a story and they all lived happily ever after. I’m always interested in what happened after; who developed a drinking problem, and so and so began to cheat, and so and so got caught drunk driving, the everydayness of life that accrues after a certain transformation. So on one level you have people who have very average lives, which are suddenly changed for them, and within the sort of happily ever after, it’s like, well, here’s the nitty gritty.

A reminder that happiness is always transitory?

Well, what’s the expression? That happiness is the only emotion that you can make go away immediately simply by being aware of it. So yes, happiness is definitely transitory.

You said as well about the everydayness of things. Do you know about American Splendour?

No, last night, I saw something about it, what is it?

It’s about this guy from Cleveland who turned his life into a comic, drawn by Robert Crumb. Anyway, the reason for this tangent: his stuff is about the small things, and a reminder that the high-gloss happiness you see everywhere else in pop culture isn’t the way things are. There seemed to be a link there, between his stuff and yours.

Funny you should mention R Crumb. There was a documentary made about him, maybe about 10 years ago, and I went to go and see it with a number of friends, and coming out of the theatre it was a bit spooky, because no-one would talk to me, because the Crumb family was so close to my own family that no-one wanted to be the one to acknowledge that fact.

Did they know that you knew that they saw this?

It’s one of those situations where, you, it’s a hard thing to talk about:’your family’s that nuts,’ we talked about it and obviously it was fine. I think with the Crumb family, though I’m not quite sure about the American Splendour movie, he had this scientifically generic middle class family, which had weirdness visited upon it. I think the case with the Crumbs was just a DNA that just wanted to do something quite odd. It’s’ I’m interested in average situations which become un-average.

That ties in with the idea that, with everything that looks average, there’s weirdness under the surface. It comes back to the original conception of the gothic, almost. Harold Pinter once said he wanted to write about the weasel under the cocktail cabinet’

Hahaha! [loud, loud laugh]. It’s not nasty but it’s quite often interesting. Today at lunch in the restaurant, there was this thing going on, this guy was talking to this woman and she ran out in tears, she came back and gave him a lecture, and they were dressed for work, obviously having some sort of affair. And once they were over, they walked to the lobby and brushed their hair down: and it was’back to normal’

All these little insights?

Yeah, there’s always something going on, for better for worse. Sometimes it’s very funny, and then you meet people’ I know a lot of people, I’m gregarious in a certain way, and the two men in my life who I thought had it all together’a good job, beautiful wife, kids, good family, plenty of money, all that’hanged themselves. And so I’m always suspicious of when things are too good. And I miss them, [I think] how could they do that? Come back to life for a minute just to tell me what you were thinking.

That’s the hard thing: not just the fact of what happened, but that you’re never going to know why.

It’s not that you know why, it’s just’what’s this front you’re putting on?’ It’s not just them, it’s everyone else that knew them. Like,’Harvey, you’re the perfect person, and if it’s bad for you then what are we supposed to think?’ So anyhow’ that was a few years ago and I’ve seen more weirdness, so I’m used to it now, but not used to it at the same time. I’d just rather have them back, actually.

Something else: after Generation X, did you feel pressure to’be Douglas Coupland’?

I’ve never, hehe, never really known what it was I was supposed to be. I think if I was living in Manhattan or something I would have had lots of people telling me. But I’ve lived, and continue to live, in Vancouver, which is fortunately I think removed enough from the world that you can still basically live a’ a life without expectations. You have to remember that, when I wrote that book, which was published in March 1991, I had no expectations for it.

It wasn’t going to be a book, originally, was it?

That’s true. Of all my books. I had no hopes for it whatsoever, and I just do what I’m going to do, and I think, you take what we were just speaking about, and you stretch it out, broaden it and clarify it’ What I found over the years is that since 1991 we’ve been through massive cultural, social, technological changes, and the only thing that protects me or you or anyone, the only thing that can protect you in all this is figuring out what it is that you like to do, and then sticking with it. Because once you start to do what people expect you to do, or what your parents think you should do, or whoever in your life thinks you should do, you’re sunk. And that applies to my life. Microserfs, [which] I was writing it in 93, 94, even my editor in New York was like,’Microwhat? Software? What’s software? Seattle? Doug, don’t expect a big advance on this one.’ But it was interesting, I saw a few people there, I thought it was fascinating, I wrote it, it came out the same month as Windows’95, and everyone thought I had pre-engineered this huge coup, and it was’Good God, no,’ it was just interesting. People expect me to be something, I just write about what I find interesting.

Happy coincidence of Windows’95 and the book, arriving at the same time?

Well, unhappy coincidence for the planet. All your readers should switch to Mac right away!

I’m with you on that; I’m a devoted Mac user. Anyway, soemthing like Microserfs, concerned with the way technology affects personal relationships, culture in general, that’s a big thing for you, isn’t it? Assimilation of information, and interaction with each other?

Oh yeah, I think the interesting thing about technology and change is that it’s going to visit itself upon you no matter how hard you try and run from it. I look at things like’ What have we had? Fax machines are almost over. Mobile phones, the internet’ Ask yourself, how many people do you know who have met and gotten married, or met and gotten together, through the internet? How much money did you spend shopping on the internet last year? When was the last time you wrote an actual pen and paper letter? The changes are very subtle, but over time they accumulate and all of a sudden you realise that you can’t go home anymore. There’s, South Park, that cartoon in the States, there’s this one episode where this guy Steve was frozen for 2 years and then brought back to life by the other characters, and he couldn’t cope with all the changes that had happened in the last 2 years.

Did you read about that guy who woke after 19 years?

I did. every time someone wakes up from a coma, my email inbox is flooded.

Somebody’s woken up! Email Doug!

Yeah, basically.

You write non-fiction and do sculpture and so on, as well as writing fiction. Does it all come naturally? Is it a case of thinking, well, I think this idea that I want to explore is suited to this particular medium?

I think’ Hmmm. Okay. I was raised without being raised, really.’Here’s a hot meal, there’s your school, and have a nice life,’ which sounds quite strange but it was quite liberating. It meant I could do what I wanted, and it trains you to be introspective and think about things maybe more than you might otherwise, and so now I have this theory that everything’s an art supply. What I do know is that there are certain feelings you can create within yourself and within someone engaging with what you’ve done that you can only get from looking at an art object, that you can’t get from words, and vice versa. And I don’t make that many distinctions in my head, I don’t see them as being very different from each other. I enetered writing with words quite literally being arts supplies as objects, through Jenny Holzer and text art, and then the text art becamse longform fiction, so in my head, I think of the new book, or the new novel, as being an art exhibition, and it’s different from the books that came before it. Hopefully I’m bringing something from the prior books but I’ve done something new in this, and then will go on and continue to produce something new. Which is the opposite of what I think my publisher wants.’Can you please have every book more like the one before?’ Because that way it’s easier for them.

People find the familiar a lot easier to deal with; when things start changing that’s when they start freaking out a bit.

Well, Leon, I’m lucky. I think at this point in my career that the one thing people do expect is change. And my God, what’ eight novels, sometimes I just feel like a robot or something. Actually that’s not fair, I love every word of every book, but once you do get that track record of continual change or evolution, people take sort of comfort in the routine of change.

Paul Auster once said something, whilst being taken to task about coincidences in his books, to the effect that there are coincidences in his books because that’s what real life is like. Full of coincidences.

I think everyone gets two coincidences a day, that’s like the universal soup pot: here are your two daily coincidences, your ration. And once you get them it’s like’oh good, I’ve had my day,’ and if you don’t get a coincidence during the day it’s like’ooh! where’s my coincidence? I want my coincidence.’ And then it’s almost strange that we don’t get more coincidences’ you think of all the billions, quadrillions, umpteen zillions of things that could happen, and all we get is two? That’s almost’ unfair. On the other hand life is wonderful, life is marvellous, every second’s a coincidence, I’m quite aware of that, probably because I’m aware that, [I made] the decisions in my life to do what I did, probably to forego what might have been. I was a smarty pants, I had options, I could have gone the scientific route, where I was working in a laboratory somewhere in a parallel universe, or alternatively, I’m living down on main street, I’m using dirty needles, and life is basically over. I’m grateful for what’s happened, and I’m very aware of what could happen as well, and coincidence has played a large part in my life.

Is a belief in coincidences not necessarily the opposite of, but [pause] sorry, I’ll rephrase that.

Coincidence is only a symptom.

Okay: is an acceptance of the fact of coincidences an acknowledgement that you’re not in control of everything?

Well, that’s an interesting way of putting it, I never thought of that.

You know the way people like to plan their lives down to the last minute detail. To the last second, and will not brook any change in that plan whatsoever.

Ooh, then they’re setting themselves up for a big unhappiness.

Exactly. I don’t know whether you could say accepting coincidence is even the acceptance of a power in the world that is not you, or some sort of higher power, I don’t know if you could extrapolate that far, but I think it might work along similar lines.

Hmm. [long pause].’.Hmm’. [longer pause] we can edit out the silences, right?

It’s not for broadcast, it’s for print, so it doesn’t matter.

Oh, right, sorry, of course. Good, I can make all sorts of scary noises now. We were talking about coincidences, and you can certainly ask anyone who knows me, I’m no control freak. Um, it almost gets back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, if there’s some higher order and it’s messing with us, the only thing that can protect you is following your instincts, your likes and dislikes, and again, looking at all the people in life’ not because they made it, but the people who seem content are the people who decided,’I like working with wood, therefore I’m not going to try and be a millionaire, I’m going to work with wood.’ You know,’I get this,”I’m going to get involved in agriculture,’ whatever. And, I think, science will someday determine a test, like a litmus paper, [to determine] whether or not you’re happy, and I think those people would score happy. My phone just made a little noise, I don’t know what it’s about. Just between you and me, Mal Maison’s going downhill. I was here the week it opened, and now it’s just exhausted.

It’s been a while since I’ve there. Maybe it’s sliding.

Yeah. Maybe I just got the bum room or something, sometimes it happens. But it’s not just the phone; the toilet doesn’t flush, you know? But I’m only here for one night, I’m not going to get too upset about it.

So, tell me about this exhibition, and the reasons behind doing things this way.

One of the things about us is that working with Mark and Joan, and with this exhibition marking forty years of an exhibiting career, we’ve been very aware of the ups and downs that Mark and Joan have had in their career. We’ve had a number of big successful shows: representing Britain at the Venice Biennale—that was a huge honour—to our show at the Hayward, which I think set a record for attendance for living British artists. But we’ve also been aware that we’ve been very good at disappearing between shows, and that’s partly because we’re not represented by a gallery, so we’ve not had a D’Offay or a Lisson behind us, promoting us, and so we don’t have those shows between times which kind of fill the gaps as it were. And we’re not part of any international dealer network, you know, [that thing where] you’re in Edinburgh this month and you’re in New York next month. We’re kind of, much more independent, [it’s probably] more of a typical experience for most artists, which is you have a show and then you don’t have a show for quite a while.

Is one of the other reasons just the sheer time and effort it takes to make each piece?

There’s a bit of that. It varies, how long it takes, and we work on 3 or 4 at the same time. And some can take months, others take years, partly [because] we might hit a technical problem. There’s enthusiasm as well, there’s other things crop up that we get excited about, different projects, or somebody says they’ll pay for something a bit sooner, you know, so therefore you finish [that piece] a bit quicker. We’re very aware of real life, and how it actually affects what we do, and that’s true for all artists. That whole discussion about separating the life of the artist from the work, I think that’s almost impossible to do. That’s, people like to separate, [people] argue for separating the life of the artist from the work when the artist has been a complete shit, or has fascist tendencies, or whatever.

When people want to separate those two strands, it’s all about the lone tortured genius, who, by virtue of his great talent, is allowed to be a total shit. It’s not just visual art; it’s literature and music as well. You know, it’s okay for Bob Dylan to be a bastard because, well, he’s Bob Dylan.

Yeah, which is completely wrong. We almost feel that we’ve suffered, because we come across as this nice-guy family that work together, and are not complete shits, so we don’t fit that stereotype. I think the commercial galleries find it easier to sell something [if they can] make it fit certain stereotypes, and that maybe some rich collectors feel that they’re unrecognised geniuses themselves, that they’re recognising… they’ve made it by being a bastard, in international finance or whatever. I mean that’s one of the really sad things about a large aspect of the art world, is that the people at the top end, who collect, are rich, they’ve got the power to buy more work, so they get more influence, and by and large they’ve probably made that money by being pretty unscrupulous. So, partly, like politics, what makes art so fascinating is that there are so many different facets and angles to it. It’s not something that we get involved in, and one of those aspects is that there are people who see it as buying stocks and shares.

Art as investment.

Yeah, and almost, by working as a family, we’re outisde that, because they want, they quite like it if it’s the single artist. They might die, to put it horribly brutally, and then the rarity or value goes up. It’s a bit awkward if there’s 4 of you, and Georgia or I might suddenly have kids, and then it might go on, and the rarity value will [plummet]. Oh, that’s probably not the sort of thing that I’m supposed to say, ha ha.

In terms of working as a family, was there ever any question of you and Georgia doing something else? Or was it always going to be this way?

I’d love to be able to say, ‘Listen it was all our ideas and Mark and Joan joined us, the bastards.’ Um, no, whether it was… whether we were indoctrinated at an early age, like little seagulls… What was that great experiment, the first thing they saw when they were born, they tried focusing on that as their mother and father? Maybe at a very early age we just focused in on these pictures, in a deeply uncritical way. I’m being flippant, I shouldn’t say that… Once you’ve been working at something for 10 years, and it’s very exciting, and enjoyable and everything, and that’s what you do, and that was the state we were in by the time we were 18… By the time it became a question of whether we were going to go to art school, we’d already spent 10 years training and mixing colours and making sculptures and working with fibreglass, you know? The idea that we were going to stop doing that and go and spend three years going to artschool was just… nonexistent. And it’s gone on and on and on, and now we’ve got a 20, 30 year career, whatever it is, I’m now 42, so I’ve been doing this for…

35 years…

Yeah, and at what point does one say well actually you should have gone and done something else? This is what we do, you know? And when I’m saying about how life comes in and interferes with, affects [the art] we’re very aware of that every day. Things happen, we might have an argument, we might ruin a picture as a result of an argument, if you’re in a bad mood, or you might make something much better, or a gallery might go bust, or it might turn out that certain curators we don’t get on with so we don’t get certain opportunities, the opportunities that maybe other artists might have, but then we do get other opportunities. And that’s our lives. We’ve got our own show space, project space, in Spitalfields, where I live, kind of like an artist run space, but I’ve not got into showing other people’s work, because we kind of need it all the time. But we’re beginning to see that, having established that, if you have a project space you have to work on projects. So things like the new grass study, that’s something that Georgia and I have worked on, it’s a Boyle Family thing, and we’ve just done a random sound study thing in London, where we got people to—and this was going back to our roots in a way—throw darts at the back of a map, not knowing what it was. It was a big white sheet of paper, and they signed the back of it, and they had to draw something out of a hat, and it was a piece of paper with a time on it, every minute in 24hrs, on the bits of paper. And they then wrote the time on their dart selection, and we’ve been going to each place at that time, and recording one minute of sound, and we’re doing a cd of just random sounds. And that’s fitting in with our thing, the idea that somehow I’m going to go off and be an abstract painter, it’s not on, I mean obviously some artists have had that conversion, I mean maybe I will, [at the] same time I can’t predict the future but I don’t think that it’s going to happen, we’ve always got our various ideas and projects, and wouldn’t it be great to go off and do another World Series site, and they take a lot of organisation. We haven’t got any sponsorship, [and] there’s so many things in Scotland and Britain… How are you going to cobble it together, and obviuosly we always think that the grass is greener on the other side, and one imagines that American artists just have money thrown at them, in Germany all these kunsthallers…

Doesn’t the lack of sponsorship give you far more autonomy?

It does, yes, I mean that’s our thing, the independent spirit that comes out of both Mark and Joan; Mark, had a fiercely independent thing coming out of Glasgow, and Joan also has a very strong independent streak, and both of them left the churches that they were brought up in; Mark the catholic and Joan the protestant. Both left Scotland, maybe to get away from famiies, the small minded thing going on in the 50s, [maybe they] wanted to get away to a place where maybe things were more open minded, and not be told what to think. And there’s always been this independence, which is maybe why we’ve not joined any of the big galleries, [because] we’ve not wanted to be represented by one, we represent ourselves and be independent. It means you don’t have the benefits of the regular, monthly cheque, but you can go and work on the projects you want to work on.

And when it comes to, not method as such, Mark always said that it should be random, no style, but isn’t that in itself a style? No matter what you do, you can never be truly random.

We freely admit to, let’s get this exactly right, we don’t think we’ve achieved what we set out to [achieve]. Yes, you can still identify that it’s a Boyle, and to that extent there is a style, but I think it’s a pretty good attempt at cuttting ourselves out of the work, of trying to present reality just as it is. Um, in the future, people might look at these pieces, if we’re lucky enough that people are looking at them, [and] say how did anybody ever think that this looks like reality at all? It’s obviously just fibreglass and resin, just like we might look at Dutch still life paintings and think of course it’s a painting, it’s a really good painting, but it’s just a painting, it’s not that people thought it was an equivalent of reality.

But aren’t Boyle Family works the ultimate in unreality? They’re meticulous reconstructions of land, which, maybe they don’t “pretend” to be real, but they’re presented as a document of a physical area?

Well that is one of the things that I find addictive about our work. I am still um, hooked on it, after all these years, because of questions like that, and you can look at it from both sides. There is the real in there; at the same time, one and the same time, they’re a representation of reality and a presentation of that reality. There is almost always real material in the piece, as it was on the site, or as near as we can get it to be. Whether it’s just the real stones, or dust, or a layer of sane from the beach, what we aim for is the patina, the surface, and that we then try and, we’ve got various techniques that we use, but the principal behind them all is to try and preserve the patina.

Then the resin gets painted from behind.

Yes, and we use resin and fibreglass to make it look solid and hold the shape. But for us, definitely we want to present that reality, rather than doing some kind of Disney-esque kind of, um, version of it. We’re not interested in the theme park kind of thing, because that is actually the opposite of what we’re doing, because they’re providing a fake perfect reality, even if they’re trying to do… There was a kind of home interiors style you saw in magazines a few years ago where there was distressed interiors, so you would have half the plaster missing, that kind of distressed look, but that’s more sort of set dressing, and the BBC did a fake Boyle once, and they kind of had the idea, but it was fake: doing something that looks like a Boyle, and here we’re into another level of reality. An advertising agency did the same thing, they did a campaign for Marlboro, someone had been to the Hayward show or something, and they did the whole darts on the map, they did a whole thing about “somewhere in Marlboro country” [where] you’d see a photograph with a billboard advertising it, there would be a road with a car on it, and then the next shot was zooming in on the dashboard of the car, and there was the pack of Marlboro. But all those things, they’re set dressing, to match what people think reality is like, so that yes, in a gutter you’d have a fag packet or a cigarette butt. Whereas our idea is ‘No, let’s not do what we think it should look like,’ which is kind of what some painters do… It’s the crucial difference really, good artists want to actually see what the world looks like, even if they go off and do abstract painting, they actually still go and look at the world, and say that this is… they usually look at politics in the same way. And the not so good artists assume they know. We’re trying to take ourselves out of the work. Ultimately it’s something that’s unreal, because it’s fibreglass and resin, but it’s still an attempt to try and present reality.

But can you ever really take yourselves out of the work?

We can’t, ever. But I think it’s worth trying to. We all know that our own experiences are our own experiences, but you can try and be aware of the fact that these are your own experiences, rather than thinking that you know universal truths because you know absolutely for sure that you are right. Which ties in with that study they’ve just done in America, this research paper on the mentality of neoconservatives, on Bush and the Republicans, saying that they had a mental approach that was insecure, and they wanted definites and absolutes, they beileve in absolutes.

Because that’s easier, isn’t it?

Yes, it’s easier, you can shy away from shades of grey, and that’s the problem when you’ve got not much of an awareness of other people, which is why they’re not particularly sympathetic to the poor, the less priveliged, and they feel that they can go round telling us how to lead our lives. And again, that was the thing that Mark and Joan were getting away from all that time ago, people telling us how to lead our lives.

Something else: a lot of Boyle family stuff takes a six foot square of somewhere, and forces you to look at it in the way that you wouldn’t normally look at a random bit of ground. It strikes me that there’s something democratic about that: here’s a presentation of a random bit of the world. Look at this in as much detail as you would any other piece of art.

Well, we, just like we don’t want to be preached to and told what to do, we’re not preaching or telling anyone else what to do, so we wouldn’t for a minute say that everybody’s got to stop, the world’s flashing by too quickly, go and look at the world intensely, and suddenly great truths will be revealed to you. What we think is that over thousands of years, for perfectly good and right reasons, the human brain has developed so that we’re constantly filtering the good from the bad, the relevant from the irrelevant, in our lives, because there is just so much sensory information coming to us: sound, sight, smell, touch, etcetera, that we would… Our brains, which are pretty amazing things, would be totally overblown, if we were really having that total level of concentration. And we have to do that. That’s what makes us rational developed beings, because we’ve got this capacity, otherwise we’d just be wobbling jellies, or bunches of plasma, just going ”wooaaaaahhh.” It’s good for us to try and concentrate on selective things, to try and get a more focused attention span, because you don’t want to go through life having it be a nice MTV experience, right? And then maybe get to 70 years old and say what the fuck was that all about? Who was it said that the unobserved life is not worth living? And so we’ve combined this with a physical need to actually make something. It’s not our style to go out and draw a line on the ground, which one artist from New York [who] was influenced by our ideas was doing, in the early 70s. That is a bit cute for us; we’re very much influenced by Kurt Schwitters, getting physical and making something. There’s a slight thing about being slightly depressed, and you get to lift your spirits a bit by actually doing something, and feeling like you’re making a contribution, the brain endorphins are getting released. We get a great physical thing out of making a three dimensional something, out of making a 3-D something that hangs on the wall. We get a buzz out of looking at them, and if we’re lucky enough to get asked to put on an exhibition… We’d probably get a bit of a kick if other people came and think they’re worth looking at, it’s nice to think that maybe we’ve made some little contribution to something. Maybe somebody will get inspired to go and do something. But those filters are really important. Yeah, if all of us in our own different ways sometimes get to lift the filters and you get to see something, imagine, to get some kind of sensory thing where you’re totally concentrating on one thing. And unfortunately it usually happens in, the clearest examples are in times of great danger, like car accidents.

Where time slows down…

Exactly, time slows down, the kid runs off the pavement and on to the street and you’re slamming on the brakes, time slows down and suddenly you’re no longer having that inner dialogue of am I going to get to the train on time, what am I having for dinner tonight, it would be really nice to see that show, or the dj on the radio’s an arsehole, etcetera. It’s all totally focused on that one thing. And that’s pretty amazing, and I think when you find something that you’re really into doing, your writing for example, you could be writing and trying to get it right, and you know that sometimes you’re going through the motions, and other times you’re on song, you feel the words are just there, and other times you’re maybe working at it, and you can feel it coming together. And I think everybody’s got to find that thing in life.

I think the times things like that happen most often is with live music; you know, you get that physical reaction to things, you can tell that somehow they’re all connecting with each other, in an almost telepathic sort of way.

Music has a great ability to do that, there have been all sorts of ideas and theories as to why that might be, such as when we’re in the womb we can hear, that’s the first sense that develops, and you can make connections with the outside world and certainly you get that frisson. For us as visual artists, it’s great doing small shows, you plan it out over two years to try and get a bit of a frisson, and you have to work with curators; with a big institution like this [the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art], there’s the conservation department and the hanging team and the press dept. and then there’s the health and safety people who want the barriers. And then of course when most people come and see it there’s a lot of other people, and so on. I hope that some people get the chance to come round, and maybe they’ll get a few surprises and think wow, that’s not bad, they’ll get a certain level of excitement. We certainly have it, putting the show on, and we aim to try and get each room a little different in a way that’s still relevant to the work.

Mark and Joan did a lot of projection work for the Soft Machine, and at UFO, just as the club was becoming the hub around which the psychedelic scene was coalescing; it struck me as a nice coincidence that there was this nuclear family at the heart of the 60s counterculture.

Mark and Joan said that a lot of what our ideas are of the 60s are the spin that’s been put on it since, so when you’re actually there, at UFO or wherever, or just prior to that, a lot of people who were cutting edge or whatever were still [wearing] twinset and pearls. That was what it was like; the whole counterculture thing came slightly later, in ’68. Yes there were communes and so on, but the vast majority of people were getting in and out of relationships and having kids and doing what people have always been doing; it just so happened that they had long hair. And I’m sure you have friends from university who were kind of, who might have been considered drop outs or whatever, but who are in loving relationships. Mark and Joan were great in that they didn’t want to exclude us from their lives, and that was the big difference; the idea that you get on and you didn’t have to have your teeth out when you were 21, you didn’t have to go into a profession, you could be self employed, be something you’re not. So many people like Mark and Joan just didn’t want to be told what to do, and suddenly they were in a majority. And so they didn’t exclude us from their life and work, and we got increasingly involved, and not being excluded meant that we were aware of the problems that they were facing as well as the good times, and it was warts and all.

So it wasn’t an idyllic ‘60s hippy childhood then?

No, because we would be aware that they were completely stony broke, and that there wasn’t the money to get the resin to finish the picture, and that we had to do deals, maybe let things go for cheaper than we wanted to, in order to survive, or just to pay the rent, or we’d have to sell the house when we didn’t want to sell the house, because the overdraft was too big. But yeah, at the heart of that was a nuclear family. But an extended nuclear family, because there were also people like the Soft Machine, hanging around, other artists. I think the experience of doing Requiem For An Unknown Citizen—which was Mark and Joan’s big, whole thing… It was going to be done in Berlin, an exhibition of pieces, projection pieces and stuff for the Soft Machine, and then there was Requiem… which involved filming people in random situations and having a theatre group acting out what they were doing. It was almost a total art, the Dutch were playing total football, they were trying to make total art, and it was going to be a huge thing. They had a nightmare with promoters and curators and it all fell apart. Eventually they put it on in Rotterdam, and the whole mental and physical energy of doing that burnt Mark and Joan out a bit. They had an amazing kind of 5 or 6 years, since doing the first projection pieces, and being on fire as it were. In ’71, having done that and having a group of 20 actors and people they picked up off the street, living together and rehearsing in Oslo, and taking the whole thing to Berlin… To do all of that without any sponsorship or government money, and have it all go wrong in Berlin before getting it together in Rotterdam, they realised that they couldn’t do it physically, and after that the larger collaborations ended, and it came down to Boyle Family, the four of us, five including my brother. That was the only thing that funded anything: selling the pictures, so that was the point that it became a nuclear family. Maybe if they didn’t have such an independent streak and they’d been able to get involved with raising funds and so on, maybe we could have continued at that level, some kind of Peter Brook thing combining art and theatre, but knowing friends who have gone down the road of getting by on grants and so on, you end up spending so much time filling in forms and using so much mental energy and anger when you don’t get the grant, that I think it’s better we stayed independent. Maybe we could have got more of the World Series made, maybe we wouldn’t have done. I think maybe we’d have done more regular exhibitions, but that’s our story.

from Tidal Series, 1969

Addison Crescent Study, from the London Series, 1969

So, what’s going in the show?

I’m putting in six new pieces of work, essentially images that I took in Costa Rica when I was on holiday—not that it’s particularly important where they are from—and they’re all organic, naturey, jungle rain forest, sort of dense canopies of foliage. They’re quite complicated layers of twines and vines. That’s not a very good description, sorry. Essentially they’re very organic, unlike say the stuff that’s on at The Modern Institute, which is harder and more urban.

Presumably that’s in response to Inverleith House being in the middle of a Botanic Garden?

Well, it sort of is and it sort of isn’t. Originally the idea for the show was going to be that upstairs there were going to be these 17th and 18th Century drawings from the Fitzwilliam collection in Cambridge, they were floral still life s, a whole mixture of stuff. I said that I’d do a whole suite of pieces in response to the drawings. For one reason or another, it was decided that the drawings weren’t going to be there, and I said, ‘Oh well that’s a bit weird, because I was going to make stuff in response to those drawings.’ At that time I was working on some other stuff, for a show in New York, so I went off on my trip and when I was there I realised I could still work with roughly the same idea, so it does fit, but it’s not an attempt to make a show that fits the Botanic Gardens.

Right.

The show I did in New York was a bit darker, denser, using more floral William Morris type patterns, so in a way this feels like a carrying on of ideas I was working on anyway.

So you don’t normally work in response to the space you’re showing in?

No, I don’t really. Although there is a part of me that thought that the stuff I did for The Modern Institute fit quite nicely with how I think of The Modern Institute. It would be too corny, too straightforward to make a show about nature and flora in the Botanic Gardens. I think the show will be a lot darker, a lot more sinister than I imagine the Gardens looking in early June. And I don’t think you could possibly ever outdo the Botanic Gardens! It’s such a fantastic place.

To talk more generally, how did you light upon the doily method, if I can call it that?

It’s such a long time ago now, I never thought I’d be making these paper doily things for as long as I have. I’d sort of taken a year out, and decided not to show anywhere, just to take some time in the studio working on some little things, and one of the things I was interested in doing—this is in ‘94 or ‘95—was trying to find a way of working that was invested with a lot of effort and activity, but was essentially a kind of useless, highly decorative act. I was trying all sorts of things, doing little drawings on sheets of rubbishy cardboard, making things out of odds and ends I had lying around. I sprayed through some things, and one of the things was a doily, and it fell on the floor, and after a while I found it, and looked at it and thought, ‘This is what I’m looking for, that’s what a doily is: a useless and decorative beautiful object.’ It’s only purpose is to live underneath a cake and on top of a plate. Beautifully decorative and totally useless.

So I started cutting things out of paper, a bit like those childlike snowflake things. I was trying to get back to some sort of innocent way of making art, reworking the ideas of why I wanted to be doing that sort of thing anyway. This was four, five years after leaving college, and you have to sift through a lot of the nonsense you’ve been fed, that you want to get rid of. I was just making them without ever thinking that I’d show them to anybody, they were a means to an end, to get to somewhere else. Then someone came by the studio and saw them, and said that I should put them in a show. The response I got was so extreme at the time—it seems a bit silly now—a lot of people really hated the idea that I would make a doily, they were really offended by that. There was all this talk of ‘Oh, you mean paper-cuts, you don’t really mean doilies’ and I thought, ‘Well, no actually, I do mean doilies’ partly because the response annoyed me so much. And it just went from there, and every time I think I won’t do any more, I come up with a new way of working with them. They were quite direct and crude to start with, and always had this fluorescent paper thing going on, which was very direct, sort of saying, ‘You can’t possibly ignore this piece of fluorescent piece of paper in front of you.’ In a way, they’ve become more and more about the surface, about layers, about decoration. They’ve gradually got more and more complex, and I’ve got more into three dimensions, hanging them like Christmas decorations, or making things that slot together. What was a simple way of working to start with in the end can produce quite an elaborate piece. The other thing about working this way is that you never really know what you’re going to get until you open it up at the end. I used to fold the paper into four, and literally didn’t know what I’d get. Now I do four layers to make a different… illusion. There’s something quite naive and wonderful about that that I still like.

And of course they’re quite sophisticated at the same time, in terms of their complexity…

Yeah, in terms of physical cutting they’ve got a lot more sophisticated, and obviously I’m a lot better at cutting now than I was seven or eight years ago. In terms of the ideas of them, it’s become quite strange. In some ways they’re caught between painting and sculpture. A lot of people regard them as some sort of comment about painting, but I think that’s mainly because they hang on a wall in a painting like fashion, and they become about the surface. On the other hand, if anyone asks me what I do, I tend to say that I’m more of a sculptor really. They’re not really two dimensional, they have, albeit a very small one, a third dimension. They do have a sort of presence that is more than a flat thing.

You just pre-empted my next question. I did wonder about that – they’re very, very flat, but are obviously sculptural, and the way you make them is recognisably an act of sculpture…

They hang on the wall, and even though they are very flat, they sag and tighten depending what’s going on around them in terms of temperature and humidity. I’m looking at some hanging in the studio now, and if they’re made up of three or four layers of paper, they can end up three or four inches deep. That’s something other than a flat surface, there is something sculptural there. Not that I’m really bothered about where they fit in. You know, they’re sort of like drawing as well.

Yeah, they sort of look kind of a bit like line drawings from a distance. Sorry I’m being a bit vague here…

No, no, they do. But the thing about cutting with a knife is that it’s a very definite act. If you’re drawing with a pencil, you can make a mistake and rub it out, but with a knife you’ve got such a definite mark-making activity. Obviously I can and do make mistakes, but they’re worked into the piece, I’ve never had to throw anything away. You can’t go back on yourself, you have to make certain decisions, and that makes them look very graphic, very like line drawings. They always end up looking more fragile than that, though.

When it comes to the subject matter, how does that relate to the process of making? Are you limited by it, or does it suggest certain subject matter?

I don’t seem to be limited by it. At first they were almost like doodles, I was just taking my scalpel for a walk, and they kind of lent themselves to making these thorny tangles, and they looked like that for a while, and there was something quite twee and amusing about doing such dainty floral work. The I tried to rework certain ideas, and for a while there were lots of riot scenes or anarchy symbols or barbed wire, in a way because of the delicate and useless properties of the work, it lends itself to making a comment on what I though of those ways of being and working. I suppose in a way, my very initial ideas about finding something delicate and useless as a way of working were in response to questions about whether you could find any way of working that wasn’t a decorative art object any more. Now, I go in and out of that, sometimes they appear to look more hard in their imagery, or sometimes things that appear to be decorative and organic natural s end up having a much more sinister feel them than if I’d done anarchy signs and terrorists, do you see what I mean?

So there’s a built in opposition between this fragile thing depicting a non-fragile thing…

Yeah, that’s my kind of intention, to see how that would work. Obviously you don’t really know until things are finished and on the wall, but that is in there. It becomes… With this show, I don’t really expect them to be lifelike renditions of a jungle or a tree. I’ve chosen specific things I was drawn to, whether it’s an odd root structure, or a view into the rain forest with this multi-layered, panoramic canopy. One of them is this four foot by five foot, really intense curled up leaf from some strange plant, which will look like an abstract blob, but with these strange filigrees that reference nature.

What have you got coming up after Inverleith house?

I’ve been doing shows back to back since October last year, so Inverleith is the last one for a while. I’ve got a bit of a break, other than funny little projects and commissions.

And you’re sticking with the doilies for the time being?

Yeah, yeah I am. I’ve still got a lot of things I’d like to make. And I’ve just done a book, Sadie [Coles] and I have just done a book, with an essay by Will Bradley who used to be with The Modern Institute, so it’s been a bit of a bonkers year already, so I’m looking forward to a break.

Cool. That should be plenty of stuff – it’s only a short preview I’m writing, so I won’t take up any more of your time.

Sure. I’m just trying to think if there’s anything else to say.

They’re terrible these things – it’s hard to know what to talk about without seeing the work up in the gallery.

I know, I know. One thing is that Mint Poisoner is an anagram of my name.

Yeah.

I’ve been using anagrams for the past few shows.

Uh-huh. Was it Snip Riot Omen at The Modern Institute?

Yeah, and the show in New York was Premonition, which is quite a nice one, getting a whole word from my name, and kind of funny for my first New York show. If they fit, I like to use them. I don’t know if it’s worth mentioning.

I will I think – Mint Poisoner has a really nice ring to it.

Yes, it does. I do quite like that one.

I think I should start by asking about the permanent work you’re doing for the show at the CCA. It sounds interesting…

There’s a few things like that coming up that I’m doing. It’s something that I thought of right at the beginning of the process, as something it would be quite nice to do. It’s going to be very low key, hidden away in a corner on the top level of the CCA. It’s going to be quite a simple thing. It relates to various things I’ve been looking at over the last couple of years, not least the big wall painting I did at the ICA last year. It’s essentially taking decorative, or apparently decorative, facade treatments from buildings and turning them… specifically ones designed by Berthold Lebetkin, who’s best known for the Penguin Pool at London Zoo. For example, the one that I used at the ICA, I was interested in the way it was a hybrid , originally coming from decorative designs that he remembered from his childhood in Russia, Caucasian rugs and things like that, so you had that cultural and historical dimension there, and that was then translated through his interest in architecture as a tool of social renewal, and invested with a lot of ideas of contemporary art at the time, then manifests itself as this quite striking facade treatment on a building. At the time it was criticised as being too frivolous, and is now the sort of thing that is criticised for being banal, in terms of architecture, but actually has this rich history behind it. So I’m looking at these kind of s and turning them back into abstracts, taking into account that history, but kind of hiding it and turning it into something quite delicate again. Oh God, sorry – I just had to write a thing about it just then, for more money, so my head is full of shite about it!

I’m not sure yet which specific building I’m going to work with, and there are other people I’m looking at, people like Irwin Goldfinger as well, stuff that Victor Passmore did at a New Town called Peterlee in the North East of England. The form that they’re going to take uses these interesting sort of lightwells up in the top space in the CCA, and I’ve taken a bit of a Le Corbusier cue from this building called La Tourette, which is a monastery he built, and there are these little chapels there that are lit with natural light, but diffused down these tubes, so you get this very nice diffused natural light in these small spaces, and he painted colour inside the tubes. So, that was where the initial idea came from. It’s going to be quite unusual in that space which is so monochromatic, there are going to be these intense spots of bright colour, with more detailed areas worked up in the manner I’ve been talking about.

Given that your work is so informed by architecture, is it interesting to be having a more direct impact on a building, rather than putting work in a gallery?

Yeah. It’s funny, the works are never really site-specific, to use that hoary old term. Obviously whatever you do, whether it’s in a gallery space or a public work or whatever, you have to take account of your surroundings. But you’re right, this is interesting for me, because it’s a response to something I came across in that building. It’s not actually a building I like that much, so whatever good little bits I find in it, it’s nice to work with them.

So you’re highlighting the places in the CCA you’ve responded to?

Yeah. The other side of the coin is a piece for the temporary exhibition — I was just up in Maryhill watching it being constructed — which is going to be in CCA1, the foyer space. This piece is a response to that space. What I’m doing is building this sort of massive sculptural wall thing right the way through the middle of the space, and that was a response to my feelings about that space, an attempt to activate it in some way, and also to provide something to prevent the CCA looking like an empty shop window from the street. That’s something that Belinda Goody did really well with her project a couple of months ago.

As for the rest of the show, is it mostly new work or…?

It’s all new.

Goodness me!

Yeah, I’m feeling pretty wiped out at the moment. I’m not sure what the final count is going to be. I’m going in there to install on Monday, and I’m doing three wall paintings in there, and somewhere between twenty and thirty works going in there as well, all from the past year.

Right. Is there anything in there that will surprise people? Any new strands coming through?

Well, there’s a watercolour painting in there!

That’s certainly new!

That’s kind of a fun thing. It’s funny, I think the new strands will come out once this show is up. Things are changing quite a lot, when it comes to the work, because I’ve had an intensive period of doing things, and not had as much time as I would like to actually keep pushing things forward. Not that I feel like I’m treading water, but it feels like this is going to be a cut off point for things that i feel i’ve dealt with and I can then move off in a couple of new directions.

In terms of what’s happening with the rest of the show, CCA2 is going to be really shut down and dark and museumy. I’ve lowered the ceiling further, so it’s going to be quite claustrophobic. In there I’m showing works relating to the Glasgow architects Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, who are best known for the seminary down at Cardross. It’s the jewel in the crown of Scottish Modernism, allegedly, and it’s now completely derelict. They were working between the mid-50s and the mid-70s, and I’ve been working with their archive at the Mackintosh School of Art, and the situation with them is that they mainly built churches and schools, for the Catholic Church, and loads and loads of their buildings have been demolished, or unsympathetically altered, or left to rot. It’s quite an incredible situation, in that they’re Scotland’s most innovative architects, of their time, and now their buildings have been brutalised. In a way, I’m presenting quite straight-up s that I work with a lot, these things that fall between the drawing board and reality, so I’m re-presenting, as it were, s of these buildings that are no longer there, or are derelict.

Then in CCA3, I’m doing a big chaotic abstract wall painting that stretches all the way around the space, with lots of other stuff dotted around it. I don’t know if you saw that CMYK show at Tramway last year?

Yep.

It’s kind of like the piece I had in that, these big sort of assemblage things. These big awkward slightly lumpen things. That kind of treatment, but using the whole space. The work relates to two different sites, one of which still exists, one which doesn’t, one being the Festival of Britain site on the South Bank, from the 1951 festival, and the other being this incredible place in Silesia in Poland, which is a park of recreation and culture that’s still there but semi-derelict. Both are sort of odd utopian propaganda exercises, and what I’m doing is sort of jamming the two together to make a hybrid festival park, a sort of manifestation of culture through architecture… that sort of idea.

This is your biggest show to date, yeah? How is it dealing with a big solo thing like this. You’ve said how much work it is, but… how do you feel about it?

It’s weird, because it’s in my home city. I’ve done solo things , but they’ve been smaller, projecty things. It sort of fluctuates between sort of vague confidence and blind terror. Because I’ve been trying to get so many individual pieces of work done, it’s been a bit of a headlong rush and I don’t have anything of a life. I feel quite weird now, just being in the house. It is exciting, and it’s definitely the show I’ve been most nervous about — I don’t normally get nervous about these things — it’s going to be a bit weird. I don’t know how people are going to take it. The CCA is a bit of a contentious place, and my decision to do this show wasn’t taken lightly. I really want to do something good there. There’s a lot of pressure is what I’m trying to say.

Isn’t pressure sort of semi-permanent after the Beck’s thing? Did that lump quite a lot of pressure on you?

I don’t know. There are nice things cropping up now. I was talking to Roddy Buchannan about this, and said that nothing will change at first, and that I’d get a flood of annoying trivial things immediately, but then in a year or so things will start happening that make you think, ‘Oh, this is because of the Becks.’ That’s starting to happen, and in a really nice way. It’s less exhibition orientated, less people trying to get you into group shows. There are a couple of things like that coming up. There’s a piece from the Becks show, a small perspex painting of a primary school designed by Dennis Lasden, and they’ve asked me to work out a permanent piece of work to be made along with the education department of that school. That’s a really incredible thing for me, to have been working with a building that I was intrigued by, then a year later I’m being asked to make a thing there. This is really the way I’d like things to go. As you were saying earlier, relating directly to a building is definitely interesting.

The main thing like that that you’ve done was the Royston Road thing?

Yeah, that was a really strange thing, because it came to me early on. I think that led on to other public things. Now things are getting more interesting, because there’s more of an overlap with my usual studio-based practice.

It kind of strikes me, looking at what you do from the outside, that this is a sort of natural direction for you to be taking, given the nature of your studio work.

Absolutely. If these projects come off, I’ll be really lucky. If you make work like mine, it’s very hard to translate that beyond gallery spaces. I’ll be pinching myself when these things are up and running.

The Believer is your first film as a director; did this pose any difficulties for you, and did it change the way you look not only at film (in general) but the way you look at your films?

The two chief difficulties were, first, the shift from the privacy of writing to the publicness of directing. I was used to making things up in the solitude of my office with no one around to judge the product until it was carefully shaped and no one to make me self-conscious about the inherent grandiosity of the enterprise. Directing, I was compelled to do all of this in front of a crew of 40 or more, and much of the time I simply couldn’t do it. I felt somewhat comfortable with the actors, much less with the camera, lights, etc. Second, though [cinematographer] Jim Denault and I had story-boarded every shot (not that we necessarily shot them), in retrospect I hadn’t thought things through enough. I wasn’t clear enough to myself about what I wanted “directorially.” Has this changed the way I look at my films? Well, in one sense, despite feeling unqualified as a director, a number of the more extreme ideas I had seemed to work, particularly the thought that I could get away with a great deal of dialogue about fairly abstract matters and that I could over-pack the film with contradictory emotions. In this sense, the fact that “The Believer” works in some way has given me more confidence in my ideas and trust in the emotional spectrum I’m going for. But I’ve also realized how little I actually thought my film as film. I don’t mean even in the profound way that someone like Antonioni or Chantal Akerman “thinks” in film, but in the simple, craftsman sense of how one visualizes a story. I used to think that because I saw s when I wrote that I’d visualized the thing; now I see that that is almost unrelated to what making a film entails. And, like most people who do this, I’ve come to see the value, the necessity, really, of simplicity — and, of course, how difficult simplicity is.

What kind of opposition did you encounter when the film was being made? Were you surprised by the reaction of some (in particular the Simon Weisenthal Center) who said that The Believer was anti-semitic?

In making the film I had almost no opposition whatsoever. I put up a substantial portion of the budget myself, and Peter Hoffman, who found the rest, and Susan Hoffman and Chris Roberts, who produced the film, made suggestions that were invariably intelligent. Jim Denault, who shot the film, would rarely comment on any script matters, but when he did, that, too, was invaluable. So people only helped me, no one got in my way. In terms of the reaction, when we went to Sundance, we had no idea what audiences would think. When they seemed to like it, we thought that all our problems were solved, that everyone would see our “good intentions” and that, therefore, there was no danger in showing the film to the Wiesenthal people — who had somehow heard about it and asked to see it. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how politically conservative they were, that Rabbi Marvin Hier had attended the Republican convention the previous summer and so forth. If I had, I wouldn’t have shown it to them. I would have contacted the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, as we subsequently did after the Wiesenthal screening. The ADL approved of the film — they want to show it to a youth leadership group — but by then the damage had been done. Every time I’ve shown it (only in festivals so far) there are people who talk about the possibility that it will be misunderstood or misused by “certain groups,” but I haven’t met anyone who actually misunderstood it in that way.

In an interview in The Face, Ryan Gosling said that The Believer was “about loving something so much that it makes you weak, and hating that”. Is he right?

“The Believer” exists on its own, so anyone’s opinions of what it’s “about” have as much credibility as mine. That said, I agree with Ryan, though perhaps I’d rephrase it a little: that we always hate the things we love, that we hate them because we love them, because we need them and are vulnerable to them, because we lose ourselves in them and have to push them away to assert our identities, and so on…

Judaism comes across as a pretty forbidding religion; at one point, Daniel says something along the lines that it’s a religion of action, or of doing, rather than a religion of belief, and at another point, when he and Carla are talking, Daniel says that there’s the Torah, the word of God, and that’s it; it’s “nothingness without end”. To which Carla says God might as well not exist. It seems to be an odd conception of religion, to have a nonexistent God (forgive me if I’m talking nonsense; I’m not particulary knowledgeable when it comes to Judaism), and one at odds with the standard belief now—especially amongst Christians, though maybe less so in Islam and Judaism—that religion should be a comfort, rather than something to be feared/respected/held in awe. What’s your take on Daniel’s interpretation? He seems pretty extreme.

First, Judaism, like any religion, is different things to different people. In the film, I try to talk about what it is to me, a vaguely observant, vaguely knowledgeable Jew. The idea that Judaism is “a religion of practice, not of belief,” is fairly common among observant Jews. In fact, Jews (in my experience) don’t talk much about God, who He (She? It?) is, what He is, whether He is. I recall hearing two converts from Christianity saying that the great appeal of Judaism was that as Christians, when their faith wavered, they felt lost; as Jews, when it wavered, they lit candles, said prayers, observed the mitzvot (commandments that make up the religious law) and faith returned. My own thinking about his has been influenced a great deal by the contemporary Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz who stresses that Judaism is “submission to the yoke of Torah,” which is to say, keeping of the commandments as laid out in the Torah, regardless of what one feels or hopes to gain personally. I find this very pleasing and convincing and extrapolate from it to the notion that Judaism works perfectly well without God; one celebrates the holidays, keeps the Sabbath, observers the dietary laws and so on. One doesn’t need to believe. Now why would one accept the yoke of Torah if it weren’t handed down by God? Well, perhaps, as Carla says in the film, “because God commands it whether he exists or not.” Or one might do it to maintain an ancient tradition and one’s own connection to that tradition. Or one might, as the philosopher Emanuel Levinas has done, simply declare that the law is God. For me, at least, a faith that doesn’t require faith, is both beautiful and useful.

For most of the film, Daniel is trying to reject Judaism intellectually, in sharp contrast to most of the other skinheads he knows, who just hate without really knowing why; were you aware that putting such stridently amti-semitic arguments in the mouth of a character would be controversial?

Well, of course I was aware that saying those ideas at all went against acceptable discourse. Putting them in the mouth of a Jew made it look like “self-hatred,” but putting them in the mouth of a rabbi-manque made them, to me, a form of prayer. (It’s also true that virtually all of Danny’s anti-semitic remarks can be read ironically, as a mockery of anti-semitism, even as they are, also, instances of anti-semitism.) I took it for granted that no one would seriously believe that a publicly shown film would, itself, espouse these ideas.

In the aftermath of the events of September 11, how do you feel about the film? In the article you wrote for Sight And Sound, you said at one point that you had a “terrible thought: I shouldn’t have made The Believer.” Are you worried that the film will be marginalised because it’s too close to the bone, in that it deals with religious fundamentalism (if you can call Daniel’s brand of Judaism fundamentalist), violence in the name of ideology and suicide bombing, or do you think it’s now maybe more relevant than before?

I am worried that it will be marginalized. In the present war, and with the current U.S. administration, the country seems to have little patience for complexity, irony, nuance. Perhaps this is, for certain people, one of the benefits of the war. One could say, of course, that these events have made the film all the more pertinent, that it offers an insight into the mentality of fanaticism, of people who follow the internal logic of an idea without lifting their heads to take account of the worldly consequences. I suspect that that’s so, though whether it will pay off at the box office remains to be seen. But, finally, I’m relieved that I made the film and finished it before all this happened. The film has a truth, I believe, that is just as true now as ever. Among other things, it is a plea for tolerance of the forbidden, for seeing the love that often lies behind hatred. It’s possible, of course, that some people might take the film the “wrong way,” but that seems to me unlikely, and, in any case, I suspect that in the end it would do more good than harm.

How did writing the script (and directing the film, for that matter) affect your own view of Judaism, if at all? And if it did affect it, was it in ways you expected or not?

It didn’t, really. Judaism affected the writing and directing far more than the reverse. I suppose in the writing I was startled to discover the exuberance of my own anti-semitic invective; it seemed I could have written that stuff to the end of time. And yet I never worried that I was an anti-semite or a self-hating Jew. (A self-hating human perhaps.) I always felt that those outpourings were, really, of love, however demented.

Is it difficult to be political within the confines of the film industry? And on a related note, have you had any success finding a US distributor yet?

IDP (a consortium of Fireworks—who financed “The Believer”—Goldwyn and Stratosphere) will distribute the film theatrically in the U.S. after it shows on Showtime (now scheduled for March, the planned September premier having been delayed by the attacks). Political in the film industry? It’s very difficult. Producers, studios and so on are frightened of offending any constituency whatsoever, and particularly the more vociferous ones — often more worried than the groups themselves are. It’s an inevitable result of trying to market to everyone. I thought “Three Kings” was a very interesting film politically (and in other respects) as was, in a completely different way, “Dazed and Confused.” But, more deeply, America tends to be, or tries to be, a resolutely “apolitical” nation. That is self-deception, but it means that to address the movie-going audience politically one generally comes at it obliquely. I’m presently writing another film that is all about politics yet, I hope, won’t look like it.

Why is Carla so drawn to Daniel (apart from the better sex and the “tragic dimension”)?

Well, that’s a lot. But, also, I think she feels that he is serious and very demanding of himself in a way that she respects and is drawn to. I think that there is a direct line from telling him, “Hurt me,” to her wish to “submit to God.” She is a willful creature who is searching for something larger and more powerful than herself. At first she thinks he might be that something, then she finds in him a way to another alternative.

And finally: could you could look on Daniel’s nazi beliefs as being the ultimate test of faith? Is this how far he is willing to go to test his religious commitment?

I think that’s a good way to put it. There is something in us that wants to speak the unspeakable, to hold up for inspection and consider seriously the most hated ideas. We want to get past our reflexive, culturally-learned reactions and see what we really think if our minds are open to anything and everything. I think we also sense that whatever the culture has categorically and collectively rejected must have some tremendous appeal (or why would they have martialled their forces against it), and we want to see for ourselves what that is. In the end, Danny’s Judaism is stronger, more vital, more living because of his Nazism than it would have been without it. Danny wants the impossible (to be a Jew and a Nazi); it destroys him, but for a period it gives him true life.