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Excavating the body politic: an interview with Conrad Atkinson - Interview
Art Journal, Summer, 2003 by Antony Hudek
Atkinson: What troubled me when I was a student at the Royal Academy School was that I was part of the ruling discourse which seemed invisible. But I couldn't slot into a universal avant-garde because I didn't have access to those social circles where that discourse was taking place. I was fairly ignorant in many ways. Because I was a student at the Royal Academy and because I had shown in Bond Street, by the time 1968 and 1969 came along I was a little disillusioned. I had this great feeling of having been drawn out of my community, since the work I had been doing up until then wasn't connected with it. When the ICA invited me to exhibit in 1972, I told them that I wanted to do an exhibition about the place I come from, where there's a strike that is still going on, and I want to bring the strike into the gallery It was very, very specific. I wasn't an anthropologist going into a situation like an English photographer into Vietnam. I knew the strikers, we went to school together. I wasn't being parachuted in to a community, I was actually part of it, so I was able to look at it and do things with it in a way that nobody else could at that time. It became an explosive exhibition; people from as far as Australia would phone about it and ask questions. Later in the seventies when I was working on projects like For Wordsworth; for West Cumbria, and Sunset: for Wordsworth; for Shelley, I realized that I needed to go from the very specific--in terms of language and the issues themselves--to more metaphorical themes that would have resonance no matter what position you were in, whether you were in Mexico or South Africa. I wanted to find metaphors and individual images that would be striking, in order to rewrite history: so that I could uncover the radicalness of, say, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Delacroix, artists whose radicalness had been totally obliterated, obscured. In the first instance what you're doing is actually examining a situation, a set of issues. But the next thing you're doing is saying that your perceptio n of the historical underpinning of the situation needs to be rethought and reformulated. One person who understood this difference is Raymond Williams. Though I've never really bought his theory of literature, I realize that his arguments about the visual arts are valid. I had to find a way of making the work more accessible to a broader audience, even if people did see in the Strike exhibition a methodological model. I'm always quoting The Raft of the Medusa as an example, because Gericault was very conscious that he was working against the mass media: he interviewed the sailors who were on the ship and the woman who was raped; he asked the ship's carpenters to build the same raft in his studio; he went to the morgue and persuaded them to put some bodies in salt water to see how the water would affect them. He was like an investigative reporter on one level, which is not unlike my own methodology.
Hudek: With reference to this model of the artist both in and out of society and to your recent open letter published in The Guardian, (7) where you urge Britain to catch up with the American system of art patronage, how tenable do you think this tension--or compromise or collaboration-is for an engaged artist such as yourself?
