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Excavating the body politic: an interview with Conrad Atkinson - Interview

Art Journal, Summer, 2003 by Antony Hudek

Antony Hudek: Could you introduce Excavated Mutilations, your Courtauld Gallery exhibition?

Conrad Atkinson: The project started because I was on sabbatical from the University of California at Davis. Eric Fernie, [then] director of the Courtauld Institute, and I met, and I told him that I was going to be in England for most of 2002. We thought it would be good to create a link with the Courtauld. A little later I proposed to do an exhibition in response to the works in the collection, which is obviously the first thing that an artist would want to get involved with. Eric agreed that it was a good idea.

Hudek: So it was your initiative to respond to the collection?

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Atkinson: That was my suggestion, yes, and he liked it. Basically, I came to London in January and spent a lot of time in the collection. As I mentioned in my speech at the opening of the Courtauld exhibition, I was quite surprised, since I thought that I would be starting with the Impressionist and post-Impressionist works. They heavily influenced us when we were students, in the late fifties and very early sixties, before the Americans--Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol--really became prominent in Britain. At the time there was a definite avant-garde, and if you joined that avant-garde, you were at the cutting edge of progress and of modernism. It was a world in which it looked like everything was going to get better and better, and everybody was going to get more and more comfortable. Then, with the advent of the women's movement, "minorities," new cultural references, and the breakdown of a recognizable avant-garde, it became more difficult to belong to any elite; it was, in other words, postmodernism--a reaction against modernism. Finally, with the emergence of Margaret Thatcher, it seemed impossible to believe that everything would be more and more progressive and just get better and more democratized. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late eighties and early nineties, I was in Moscow for my first Russian solo show, which was called At Last We Can No Longer Predict the Future. Of course the Muscovites thought I meant the USSR, but I also meant capitalism--I meant the West as well. Obviously you never could predict the future, but there was a period when it was thought that you could, with all the five-year plans and budgetary forecasts. It became very clear in the late eighties and early nineties, a time of increasing domination of corporations and business, that we could no longer predict the future. For the last ten years there has been a growing cynicism toward politicians, with religion waiting in the wings--we saw it at its most stark in 9/11.

So when I came to the Courtauld, I realized, looking at the medieval art and the later work of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries--that is, before the "Age of Reason"--that a lot of those images have more in common with the unreasonableness of the last decade than they do with the apparent reasonableness of the past. I'm not saying that there weren't breaches in reason in the previous decades, the Vietnam War being one of them, but nevertheless there was still a perception of progress, of justice, of purity, of democracy, and so on.

In the last ten years we have witnessed the emergence of religion as a force, which was epitomized by Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, for example. I did a show in Atlanta in 1996, in which there were real animal tongues in a freezer, along with golden books, one of which was the Bible. The show provoked vicious reactions from Southern fundamentalist Christians. All of these thoughts came together when I started looking at the Courtauld collection, where there is one painting of a saint with an axe through his skull: he bleeds and his blood forms words on the ground, and the trees around him bleed as well. This is one example of an unbelievable, unreasonable, and murderous image. I began to realize that we have seen more and more of these pictures in our media photographs and newspapers over the last ten years than we have previously The advances in technology are the prime reason: we can now get instant images from all over the world, and people in the media get less and less frightened at printing them. For e xample, before, you would have never seen those photographs of the dead people during the siege of the Moscow theater on the front pages of the Times or the New York Times. Showing us that is something fairly new. We have an equivalent of those pictures in the Courtauld.

Excavating the body politic: an interview with Conrad Atkinson - Interview

Art Journal, Summer, 2003 by Antony Hudek

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