artistteachercef

CEF: I’m an artist teacher and the Artworks Fellowship is about looking at my development as an artist rather than a teacher and in order to do that Baltic and Barbican have got together to offer me a way of doing some research and the opportunity to work with artists. The project that I’ve chosen to work with is the idea of me doing some work experience with Baltic as an adult, rather than a 16 year old and as part of that I’d really like to know what your influences have been.. your key influences …you might include your own work experience but might not … I’m just wondering what made you tick initially as artists if you could go back in your memory perhaps your earliest memories of when you felt that push me/ pull you thing that you get now that motivates you.. those are the key things I’m interested in as an artist educator.

MATT : Well I mean we do this together collaboratively as the three of us and we each kind of each do our stuff individually. Mine’s like, most primarily out the three of us within yeah specifically in an art context and Rose does a lot more writing stuff so I guess there’s a lot more ways we can approach something like that yeah which leads to this kind of thinking and one is a more personal one but then they’re also kind of mixed up as well yeah certainly for me they are so

As a social aspect is it really important for you…

ROSE: Yes definitely and especially as Da Thirst. What we do is with our magazine which is our primary output it started with us in the Slade School of Art, for our finals, we got money to do a ‘magazine’ of work as undergrads in the Fine Art Media Department and so that was obviously very social to begin with, everyone knew each other, we were all friends and then it expanded beyond that and we started asking more established artists to do stuff with us. I had just graduated and Matt and Claire were still studying and that has been- I mean I think that has just- sorry I think I’m just going off on wild and losing my train of thought-

..no its really interesting the idea of the magazine format must’ve been a key point for you.

Its kind of developed into like its own thing, gradually as we went along as it was at first a kind of flippant thing, but to be honest, anything that’s done any good ever has started from a point that is non contrived. We don’t just set about starting sometime by writing a manifesto.. usually I find that once doing the work it actually and theoretically makes sense in terms of what I stand for on things and I guess in terms of our principles as Da Thirst. What we do is so obviously collaborating with as many people as we can, Artists who we respect. There are a lot of people out there and that also is not limited to a certain art context; we have worked with quite a few people right outside of that who would never refer to themselves as artists and that’s fine and we’re not necessarily calling what they do art. The thing itself is just er.. it has its own energy. We interact and observe and involve a whole bunch of people in expanded fields such as writing and theatre and cartoonists yeah. Each project has been a different way of developing and expanding.

The other strong pillar there is probably just self-entertainment. So the idea of there being no financial reason to make a magazine but there is rarely a financial reason to make art so that is kind of in the same category and from a similar platform but there’s also, sometimes it feels like there is less of a reason to publish something or print something when you could put all that content out there pretty easily online. There is something about the format that we kind of like indulge in because we like it and also I like just seeing somebody’s work, and thinking about their ideas – there is obviously a huge hierarchy and system in place within the art world but within artists it is kind of remarkable how easily people are approachable and you can fire off an email very easily and get in contact with someone you really respect and end up working with them so it’s kinda like just creating a context that we ourselves want to have our work in. Like I always feel like what if someone just fired an email off to me saying this is the thing I’d be totally into it. I like artists, I like their work and its not just like some badly curated group show that has suckerpunch of theory attached to it that you can’t really apply to your own work that somebody’s trying to force onto a group of artists that they think are alright! – yeah its is kind of entertaining ourselves, creating that context and within stuff like this there is a level of – well we’re having fun.

Yeah and with the fun aspect well yesterday one of the things we did was interview Chi Onwurah who like for those of you who don’t know is the Labour Member of Parliament in Newcastle and I spoke to her on the phone before she came in said we’d play a game with her and I told her it was going to be really fun and she the said to me afterwards usually when people say this is going to be really fun its never ever fun and that’s kind of – well I think we all take our work with Da Thirst very seriously and it can stand up if you were going to theorise about it but primarily we just want people to go this is kind of ridiculous and I’m enjoying this.

There is also a tendency for young artists to feel they must professionalise themselves to a standard so they get offered a show or they get offered something and they feel like all of a sudden they’ve got to start making art that can be categorised as such, that looks like this or that and should be kind of polite about it, which is not on my personal agenda because I can see the flaws quite clearly in the established system of the way art is viewed and consumed and would like to change that. Clearly its about retaining those ideals and then when you get offered an intuitional space you then suddenly have a platform to kind of go kind of beserk on it and show them how it should be done (laughs)

 That’s an interesting idea, the ‘offered’ bit yeah mhmm I think I’m a bit like you in the way I asked to work in this ‘non gallery or studio space’ I want to get know these peoples’ stories, so perhaps its that kind of way into getting into spaces intuitively that makes my work authentic.

There’s also only so much that – obvious thing would be to find more autonomy; running artist spaces..there’s always that kind of pride that we in Britain more than America for example, not that they are the only two places where people make art but erm that we attach ourselves to a project spaces and the self run artist spaces which are great and they have their merits and everything but they don’t have much money and they don’t have much infrastructure or backing and when you’re doing something like this show ( FIGURE 3 ) that involves so many people, you still retain what it is that you’re trying to do and you can use – essentially what we’re doing upstairs is using it like a project space in that pure, purest way of thinking and actually a lot of those project spaces and artist run spaces are desperate themselves to conform and then turn themselves into galleries which you just see all the time now and what was once a semi-interesting stance is now a representing artists and its just like hmm well ok you’re not interesting you’re not offering anything new here..its just another gallery and we don’t particularly need those.

Its really good that you’ve come to Newcastle.. do you know the history of the FIGURE 3 project?

A little bit yeah we’ve talked about it a little bit

You know the third floor thing?

(laughs) 3s 3s 3s! yeah

Its still open its still fresh its still new even though its in its third rotation and we’re really quite interested in this building, for instance; an academic building … they do open things, social things… they’re really funding, research, and things like that. It’s a real conglomeration. I’m quite interested in the staircase thing, placing things together, linking people.

Can I just be quite probing yeah sure and ask you about this self-entertainment and ask whether your childhood was you making entertainment for yourself and involving collaborative actions?

Um, well for me personally I was definitely – well we talk quite a lot in Da Thirst about the difference between making art for yourself or for an audience but then as a child I was very much the person who sat in their room for hours on end and made weird things out of plasticine and just like was completely shut off but then its nice now to kind of get that kind of… I don’t know so you go from that kind of self entertainment.. I think what we do definitely is about amusing ourselves but its not done in a very like solipsistic way, we are very much about involving as many people as we possibly can but we start from places like what do we find funny? What would we go see? And also just making things and asking – or just puting things together and asking why does this have merit? And if you’re just doing something and you’re like ‘oh I just think its great’ well that doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone else does.

Yeah I mean I think there’s definite merit in just indulging your obsessions and idiocyncracies of thought and interest but at the same time I mean I think I make everything I do from a total audience point of view really, so there is a divide between those two things. I spent all of my childhood putting on plays for my brother and making costumes, films… like a lot of films, I literally spent all my life making films, really bad ones for a long time, but then I started making them quite properly when I was 13 or something and just like carried that on ever since, so definitely just always made stuff and just out of cardboard or whatever and that’s pretty apparent in my own work. Yeah Which is very much like high narrative based and low fi in a kind of aesthetic of the prop base and includes an adolescent energy to it I guess but that’s you know just ’cause kids don’t have habitations about this that and the other but then yeah they quite like very dumb things…

We were talking the other day about the difference between doing things that are childlike and things that are adolescent. And I think that with Matt’s work , like you’re obviously not an adolescent person but the way that the narrative works in your practice is quite adolescent and maybe like angsty in a way but then with Da Thirst there are elements of that but its more like.. not child-like wonder but more… youthful spirit…youthful spirit like just throwing things together. Like with this show we found out we were doing it 5 weeks ago and kind of went ‘oh god how are we going to do this, we’re live streaming from a gallery 6 hours every single day and we have to do so much stuff’ and then we just went well were going to do this and see what happens and mess around and have a good time which is absolutely what we did but then after the fact when we’re done we’re gonna have so much content that we have to whittle down to say that this was about messing around and feeling things out but within that there are like real kernels of things that are really good and we should definitely keep for posterity prosperity? Or posterity? Sorry prosperity well both both! (laughs) it’s been a long week we’re very tired.

Yeah well I just think that very dumb things are very important because there isn’t a single thing on this planet that’s genuinely profound that isn’t dumb ..and sophistication tends to be kind of overrated cause it’s that level of complexity of thought that never really gets at the heart of the matter and the heart of the matter is kind of… living and dying and all that… yeah so I think that when you strip away some of those clichés of language and thought it can be quite important and .. yeah you can get to the heart of the matter. And basically the heart of the matter is just YOLO yeah just very YOLO just running round and screaming yeah! the end days of Rome. That’s the ideal, if we can get to that point.

I think one of the many things that I’m so engaged about in your work is this duration and way that you’re happy to live.. Live now and also have it recorded. It’s so interesting and I saw you both with the cameras over there and you are engaging with the cameras and reflecting and I heard you saying how you were tired, and you didn’t know if it was rubbish yeah, yeah all this self questioning it’s really interesting.

Well I can’t remember who was saying it, I heard somebody taking about it, they were saying that in like… sorry to name check the internet… but the way technology works is that fact that everything is archived and recorded and that’s very daunting on one hand but if you treat it with the flippancy it deserves then it is quite freeing because yeah there is all this stuff and you just have to live with it and it’s out there and it will constantly be, but you just have to update it and constantly push the next thing on your Google search or whatever

And for us it is exhausting and monumental and at times stressful but then it’s occurring to us more and more throughout the week that this is kind of… there’s already so much stuff and no one has time to watch us for 6 hours a day um..

Yeah its like such a big thing to ask of anybody which is quite funny really yeah so I think our viewer ship has dwindled slightly throughout the week (both laugh) Yeah it doesn’t matter Yeah absolutely it doesn’t matter none of it really matters. I kind of like the bits where I’m just sitting there moaning for a little while and then just cutting to the next bit or coming up with a not that funny a joke and then just going with that for a bit and that seems fine and suitable and nobody needs anything else really, no yeah and then we can have that one… killer.. . killer moment yeah that can be a video by itself and then somebody might have seen that and then we can say we did our job.

I’ve noticed from all the stuff you’ve done all the conversations you’ve had.. And it might be interesting that you’ve worked together a lot I presume?

I mean yeah, we spend a lot of time not arguing but going over things. There’s some things that all 3 of us are like yes that’s perfect. One of the good thing about working together is… as Matt said before about because he mostly works within an art practice and I am primarily a writer and Claire, who isn’t here, works in TV, so we all have these… well we all studied in Fine Art together but then went in different directions. If we had all been art school students and then all practicing artists… If we’d all gone in the same direction I don’t think what we’re doing would have been as interesting and I think that is a problem, it happens a lot with others, we’re very critical of other print publications specifically about everyone using the same aesthetic and same processes and its potentially just because people come from a very homogenic environment but you just need to open yourself up a bit more and stretch things. And I think that’s one of the things we do which makes our work quite interesting because you know.. I have an MA in Media Studies so we gave a talk the other day that we’d pre recorded and was very like irreverent and frivolous and kind of gave the history of what we’d been doing but finished off with this media studies tirade about the internet and how we position ourselves within that, which is a kind of curveball for people to say that if you don’t think we know what we’re doing ..we completely know what we’re doing…

…And this is how it is now? It might not be like that soon?

Yeah ! like we shift format for every magazine issue we do. So for our second issue we did a party bag and for our third we did a USB stick alongside our printed A3 and then for our 4^th one we went back to a classic glossy magazine tried to make it good yeah (laughs) But then for the fifth one we haven’t decided what we’re doing yet and we’ll decide sometime this year and just… mess it up again and see what’s making us tick right now and just carry on from there. Self sabotage yeah (laughs)

Transcribed by H.Egan-Fowler from a recording made by Ruairi McGuiness in the Stairwell at BALTIC 39 during the FIGURE 3 Exhibition.