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

Hudek: Could you say something about the position of the artist in your work? You have proposed a number of models, such as a collaborative model, where the maker's personality is submerged or undermined. But in this exhibition you also refer to the "old masters" as evidence of innovators who must speak doubletalk in order to get away with what they're trying to say. In relation to the piece tided A Collaboration on Scars between Fra Angelico, Conrad Atkinson, and Vincent van Gogh, made for the Courtauld, how would you position yourself or describe that position?

Atkinson: It's a difficult question. One of my motivations in this exhibition is the notion of the fragmented self. And one of the great problems of capitalism is specialization: in other words, one is formed to specialize as a reporter, or as an artist, and so on. The notion of the fragmented self paradoxically pulls the different fragments of the exhibition together. If there's any personal motivation in what I'm doing, that would be one. Larry Rinder, curator at the Whitney Museum, accurately characterized my work as the fusion of ideas and activities. (4) If I work with land mines, I will go and speak about land mines to people, not about my work. I will, and do, speak about how artists have to work and are material beings. I don't buy the notion that artists are aristocrats who can walk through the world doing what they want. There is an enormous myth about artists being free and good. I had an argument with Joseph Beuys about this, because he used to say "I catch the viewer when he is free, when he is u naware." My work contradicts that: Nobody is free, internally All of our internal experiences are ordered by external events. It is impossible to reverse this process; if it were possible, it would be very easy for artists to all get together and free the rest of the world. Except that we're not free. I am always arguing against that notion of the artist as being a nonmaterial, philanthropic, disinterested, individual force in the service of the reigning ideology or its opposition. You asked about positioning: positioning is the art, that's the most difficult thing. If you want to paint like Burne-Jones or John Singer Sargent, you can, I can teach you. There were students with me at the Royal Academy in the early sixties who were better painters than Sargent. than Manet. Physical dexterity and the handling of paint are not the problems. The problem is the positioning of yourself and the placing of the work in relation to the history of what you're dealing with: that's the art. That's what was good about Josep h Beuys. He did realize that most of what the artist must deal with is self-fabrication, against the Duchamps of the world, in a way I don't like the atmosphere of aesthetic veneration toward the art of Duchamp, although I like a lot of his work, obviously.

Hudek: Earlier you mentioned the episode in [968 when you were troubled by the fact that women were making coffee for the male protesters. This observation might indirectly dovetail with concerns about the construction of masculinities. Yet while you effectively attack the glorification of the male artistic persona, you don't seem to propose any gendered alternatives.