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

The first thing I did, once I started looking at the pictures in the gallery, was to ask the Courtauld photographer to take photographs of all the wounds and all the blood in the collection. A lot of the art today seems to be about the artist and the artist's sensibility-the artist taking on the world in a very individualistic way I have previously discussed the fetishism and narcissism of the brushstroke in Lucian Freud's work (1) and said that I feel that my work has more in common with most of the pre-nineteenth-century paintings in the collection than Freud's has, at least on the level of sensibility, since every brushstroke Freud paints is ultimately about Freud himself.

It seemed to me as if the Botti Madonna and the Seilern Triptych are collective works, presumably produced by several people, which is how I work. And they try to deal with the serious questions of their day-martyrdom, religion, death, destruction, war, pestilence, and plague. (I'm not talking about a Tracy Emin kind of self-examination !) An outgrowth of the personal is political, I guess-in a comparable way, I try to let my pieces deal with shared contemporary issues of a similar scale and importance, in the forms of land mines, of AIDS and our real wounds. Comparing my work to that of the Seilern Master relates to the issue of "intervention," an issue raised by a note in the visitor's comment book in the Courtauld Gallery: "Thank you for waking me up from my bourgeois stupor. I realized how right Atkinson was when I cut my finger and the droplets formed the image of Lenin on my newspaper." The phrase is amusing but is probably a parody-I don't think it's genuine. Yet I can imagine that the person who wrote it is probably in his early forties, possibly an ex-revolutionary leftist party member in the early eighties, probably slightly disillusioned, white. He's conflicted because he is in a high-bourgeois art setting (which he deliberately visited), yet he's in there, he's not down in the pub drinking. The main point being that he probably t hinks that I'm there trying to shock the bourgeoisie (as it is called in that sweet old-fashioned way), but I have made the point previously that I am not going to waste my life shocking the British middle classes. I have more important things to do like raising the issues I mentioned, seeing what the possible outcomes of those issues are, if we're going to deal with them, and how we are going to think about them. For example, artists are always trying to find new ways to depict war. The land-mines campaigns have likewise tried to find new ways of representing the horror of it. Of course, once you've seen forty-eight kids with amputated limbs, you've figured it out for yourself Compassion fatigue and its companion, indifference, edit out war all the time, because it is unbearable. So the way I looked at the land-mine issue was basically to point to a contradiction: these (the Valmara shrapnel mines) were manufactured in Italy, the country that brought you the Renaissance. I am trying to attack the problem fro m a different perspective, as a living issue rather than as a dead one. These are some of things that I was thinking about when I started the Courtauld project.