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.

Sorcha Dallas is the first gallery-​owner fea­tured, but there’s plenty of artists to choose from, includ­ing Toby Pater­son and his fellow Modern Insti­tute artists, Martin Boyce, Jim Lambie and Simon Peri­ton. Just to show I’m not a total Mod. Inst. fanboy, there’s a rare inter­view with Robert Ther­rien, a crack­ing chat with Israeli artist Nahum Tevet and a reveal­ing talk with Sebas­t­ian Boyle, of Boyle Family.

Moving on to authors, big famous ones at that, Michel Faber talks about his best-​selling novel The Crim­son Petal & The White, while Dou­glas Cou­p­land touches on every­thing from Columbine to Robert Crumb via Mac­in­tosh computers.

The lone film-​maker in the set is Henry Bean, who dis­cusses the making of, and reac­tion to, his debut fea­ture as direc­tor, The Believer.

Last, but def­i­nitely not least, the music people: peren­nial Glas­gow favourites The Del­ga­dos chat about win­ning the Mer­cury Prize, Dia­manda Galas scares the pants off me by talk­ing of her loathing for cer­tain sec­tors of the press, and the protest­ing pol­i­tics that inform her work, and - my favourite, I think - David Man­cuso, the man who invented night­clubs as we know them, is his usual pas­sion­ate self dis­cussing the his­tory of The Loft, and his love of music.

Apolo­gies for blow­ing my own trum­pet there, but I really enjoyed re-​reading the inter­views, and since they don’t get a lot of traf­fic, it seemed worth over­com­ing my over-​developed British reserve to point them out.

Many thanks to all the inter­vie­wees, and Leon, of course, who con­ducted half of them.

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.

I don’t think it’s pos­si­ble to touch people’s imag­i­na­tion today by aes­thetic means. Emin’s bed, Hirst’s sheep, the Chapmans’ defaced Goyas are psy­cho­log­i­cal provo­ca­tions, mental tests where the aes­thetic ele­ments are no more than a fram­ing device.

It’s inter­est­ing that this should be the case. I assume it is because our envi­ron­ment today, by and large a media land­scape, is over­sat­u­rated by aes­theti­cis­ing ele­ments (TV ads, pack­ag­ing, design and pre­sen­ta­tion, styling and so on) but impov­er­ished and numbed as far as its psy­cho­log­i­cal depth is concerned.

Artists (though sadly not writ­ers) tend to move to where the battle is joined most fiercely. Every­thing in today’s world is stylised and pack­aged, and Emin and Hirst are trying to say, this is a bed, this is death, this is a body. They are trying to rede­fine the basic ele­ments of real­ity, to recap­ture them from the ad men who have hijacked our world.

Emin’s beau­ti­ful body is her one great idea, but I sus­pect that she is rather prud­ish, which means that there are limits to the use she can make of her body and its rack­ety past. Mean­while, too much is made of con­cep­tual art - putting it crudely, some­one has been shit­ting in Duchamp’s urinal, and there is an urgent need for a strong dose of crit­i­cal Parazone.

And, later on:

Can art be a vehi­cle for polit­i­cal change? Yes, I assume that a large part of Blair’s appeal (like Kennedy’s) is aes­thetic, just as a large part of the Nazi appeal lay in its tri­umph of the will aes­thetic. I sus­pect that many of the great cul­tural shifts that pre­pare the way for polit­i­cal change are largely aes­thetic. A Buick radi­a­tor grille is as much a polit­i­cal state­ment as a Rolls Royce radi­a­tor grille, one enshrin­ing a machine aes­thetic driven by a pop­ulist opti­mism, the other enshrin­ing a hier­ar­chi­cal and exclu­sive social order. The ocean liner art deco of the 1930s, used to sell every­thing from beach hol­i­days to vacuum clean­ers, may have helped the 1945 British elec­torate to vote out the Tories.