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

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?

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.

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.

Hudek: It's interesting to note that the Courtauld Gallery has just opened a new twentieth-century floor, whereas it traditionally stopped at the nineteenth century, with Manet representing the furthest reach of the avant-garde. In a way, that is the accepted historical seam, viewing the nineteenth century as a historical break with the past, the birth of modernism confirmed by, among many others, Marx. But you seem to suggest that there may be another social history of relevance to us, well before the nineteenth century.

Atkinson: Yes, but it isn't the Third Way! [laughs] We talked about Hornsey. (2) One of the things that was very evident to a few other people and myself who were sitting-in at Horusey was that the women were still making the coffee. People in the Communist party--like Kim Howells (3)--were predominantly male, white, and, you know, full of testosterone. That just didn't feel right anymore in 1968. I remember that women in the Communist party were realizing this too. Even the Labor party was more open to women's participation than the Communist party was. We all began to realize that there was more to problems of oppression than a simple World War I image of the working class against all the other classes. It was no longer that simple, and it definitely wasn't like World War I: you couldn't be pointed toward the enemy and just shoot, and then the war was won. The ideological war was happening on so many fronts that if you had a closed mind about it, in terms of what the revolutions were going to be or what thi ngs were going to change the world, you had already edited out what was probably going to change the world in the first place.

Hudek: To pick up on your mention of the First World War, historically the first global technological conflict: would it be fair to say that your work confronts us with a reeducation on the significance of suffering in the age of the mass media?

Atkinson: To a certain extent. In the late seventies I did a show called Material at the Ronald Feldman gallery in New York. In the face of the great French theorists of the time, I was basically trying to reintroduce the notion of materialism. Interestingly enough, it struck a chord among young New York artists, in particular four young artists--Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Mundy McLaughlin, and Tim Rollins--who had just formed a group and wanted to call it "Material" after my exhibition. Group Material, as they called it, was also very interested in materialism at a time, at the end of the seventies, when everyone was still concerned with the dematerialization of art. Actually, one of the problems of dematerialization is that you just can't have it. If you have an idea that you want to see materialized, it can only be, in the last instance, a material manifestation of the thought. There is no such thing as an idea without a material manifestation of that idea. In that sense, what I'm going back to in the Court auld exhibition are the material effects on the body caused by war. The letter to George Bush from Ken Lay, then president of Enron, in the late nineties, when Bush was still governor of Texas, overlaid with symbols of viral infection and disease, is an example of the kind of material artifact that has very real effects on people's bodies, just as the body of Christ and his wounds were metaphors in the Middle Ages.

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.

Atkinson: My attitude towards masculinity, as it is constructed in our society is that it is just that, a construction. There are of course two things: one is a biological construction--people with dicks. The other is sexuality and sexual preference, which is another thing altogether. I can't subscribe to what is still basically Playboy masculinity in our society But on the other hand I don't have a proper version to offer instead, because I'm limited: I can't deconstruct my own sexual preference, my own masculinity I just don't see how I could do this. If you were to talk about my position in terms of sexuality and gender, I would ask you to look at a lot of "political" artists--and I use the term ironically, because I believe that all art is political and ideological. If you compare me to most political artists today, the differences are, I think, that I have a better sense of humor, I'm more aware of gender, I'm more aware of being wrong, I'm less didactic: I'm probably a mixture of Hamlet, Bobby Kennedy, Billy Liar, and Billy Elliot--all indecisive, conflicted males. That would be a rough characterization of how I see myself as different from the "male political artist."

Hudek: About the other party, the viewer. How many viewers do you think will see themselves in the statement "Thank you for waking me up from my bourgeois stupor." Is fragmentation, a sense of disorientation and loss, important to the reception of your practice as much as it is to its conceptual program?

Atkinson: I would rather it be more positive than confusion, although my viewers probably leave confused at a higher level. I would rather it inspire a reexamination of the issues that I've raised from a different perspective. As I said, the goal of my life is not to shock the British middle classes or the bourgeoisie. I was interviewed on British television a couple of months ago, and the interviewer asked a very difficult question similar to yours: "What do you want us to come away from your exhibition thinking?" g?" I said that I wanted viewers to come away thinking that ideas are important and that change is possible. And if they came out thinking that, I'd be happy I never thought that I'd be quoting Matisse, but he once said, "Don't judge me by individual works, but by the general direction of the work," I'm also interested in the notion of the role model, even though it is a really difficult one to argue. I know a number of working-class kids from Northern England who have never seen my work but who co uld identify with my positioning. I come from quite a difficult background, quite a violent one, a very working-class family--my grandfather was a miner, my father worked in Sellafield (5) (as did I), so the notion of role model is important in my work. In 1979 I did a huge work called Asbestos, which went to New York and then to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1981. A year after it was shown at the Hirshhorn, five or six young artists came to see me and told me that there's this disease about which nobody knows anything and which is killing many artists or making them very ill--the virus didn't have a name yet, just a number. The artists said that Asbestos was one of the very few works that dealt with illness and asked me if they could use it as a model. By the middle to late eighties, we knew that this disease was AIDS, and many of us began to try to deal with it in our work. It is difficult to find, before Asbestos in [978--79--apart from the Thalidomide print which I did, which really deals wi th the political cover-up of a disease--anything concerned with illness. I can't think of anything.

Hudek: There were artists dealing with breast cancer...

Atkinson: That was later. Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke were later. I don't mean to say that I was the only one. At that particular point, those six or seven years in the seventies--which for me started off with the 972 Strike exhibition, where I was also documenting mercury poisoning--we were talking about diseases that mostly preoccupied the working classes. Members of my family died of pneumoconiosis and cancer in Sellafield. I was very aware of this, although, of course, in Sellafield it wasn't only workers who were affected. But it remained essentially a working-class subject. When you're talking about an exhibition being open-ended, it means that you can never be too certain about it beforehand. I could never have imagined, doing Asbestos, that five years later it would suit the formulation of a completely different disease. I don't know if I've ever told this at a talk you've been at: someone asked me to say something about culture, and I told them about an incident that occurred when I was in Moscow for the second time, in 1991. I was a guest of Moscow News, (6) so I got all the scoops and knew immediately what was going on. This was August 1991 : There were barricades across the city, people were killed in street fighting during the coup. Boris Yeltsin was in the basement of the Russian White House that night. Nobody knew what was happening because of the ongoing coup waged by the Russian generals. Yeltsin wanted to listen to some music, so he went through his CDs, picked one out, and put it on. He didn't play Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, or Russian folk songs. No, the CD he chose was "Are You Lonesome Tonight" by Elvis Presley. It's a true story. Later that night, Yeltsin's aides were phoning around the world asking for endorsement and for condemnation of the coup. They didn't ring George Bush senior, they didn't call John Major: they asked for Mick Jagger.

This is for me the postmodern moment, with its mixture of cultures and traditions. After this anecdote you could say that you can never know when you're going to need culture, you never know where culture is going, you never know where culture will come from, you never know what culture is going to look like, and you never know what culture is going to do.

Hudek: This story, coupled with what you said about your influence on how to visually address AIDS, is significant because you seem to first develop local discourses in response to specific communities, but then, as in the AIDS pandemic or the globalization of culture, the validity and applicability of your work seems to accompany the expansion of the problems themselves.

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?

Atkinson: You have to be paid by somebody. My grandfather was an iron-ore miner and was paid by his employers: that didn't make him a collaborator. We are now faced with a different situation, one where multinational corporations are more powerful than nationalities and customs. Right now most of them are based in the U.S. That doesn't mean that the situation won't change. In the next century they all may settle in China and become even more powerful than they are now We've seen a very strange coalition developing. In the article you cite, I'm arguing for a less homogeneous method of patronage. If you look at state patronage as practiced by the Soviet Union from the thirties through the eighties, and based on observations of some of my friends in Moscow, you see that the unofficial artists were struggling, while the official artists, who were paid for their materials and studios, were actually buying paint for the unofficial artists. In 1993, everything was reversed, because the American dealers were coming t o Moscow and celebrating the unofficial artists who were now the official avant-garde, whereas the ex--official artists couldn't get any work. You never want to be in a position where there's one monopolistic patron; you have to diversify this patronage in the hope that you will allow more things to slip through. (We call this patronage, with overtones of paternalism; it might as well be monopolistic matronage, but it still would be undesirable.) When I was in the GLC, I helped many artists' groups to start out. (8) When the GLC died, they died, and not only did they die as organizations, but their work died with them because they hadn't inserted themselves into the art hegemony; they had been submerged. Nobody in art schools today talks about the Docklands Community Poster Project or about the numerous other collectives and workshops which have been progressively edited out of history. One of the things I have argued for, in the seventies in particular, is a presence, a visibility in the gallery system, as w ell as on the level of organizations such as trade unions or workshops. Maintaining those two presences simultaneously was, and is, crucial.

Hudek: Enron would then be an example of the demise of a wealthy and influential patron that leaves its proteges out in the streets after its collapse.

Atkinson: That's also what happened in the Twin Towers. Many major art works were destroyed, and the local artists' studios housed in the towers were wiped out. Several artists I knew--if not personally, then indirectly through other organizations in New York--were killed.

Hudek: Aside from the question of "generation," how do you relate to certain contemporary artistic approaches to the political, as presented for instance at Documenta 11, which could in some ways compare to your own work since the seventies?

Atkinson: I'm not up to speed with the work at Documenta. I was, however, invited to one in the early seventies. The 1970s was a period of immense political activity. The audiences' responses were very strong. A number of critics--Lucy Lippard, Richard Cork, John Walker, a few of us--were very committed politically. It was the first time that we started bringing three or four artists together to meet and discuss topics important to us as artists in society. The first time we got artists together was for Art Spectrum (9) in 1971 . After that we went to union meetings to discuss the purposes and funding of art. One of our collective decisions was to become involved in the public structures that formed and funded the arts, which soon raised organizational problems that we hadn't known before. I've just been appointed by the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport to the board of North West Arts, which is really a continuation of the work I did at the GLC and elsewhere. The Arts Council of Great Britain is your classic English appropriation organization. In the 19705 I sued them over the Thalidomide print, and I won. (10) And, as is typical in Great Britain, you then get invited by that same organization. But there are certain things you just have to let go. For example, my Northern Ireland works came to London in 1975--after starting in Northern Ireland--and I had to reorganize, recontextualize them for a London audience. They then went to New York, and I had to rework them again. By the time they went to Paris, I had to give them up, otherwise I'd spend all my time repositioning the works in terms of new audiences and contexts. Duchamp used to say that a work of art lasts fifty years, after which it becomes something else. I make art for now. If it works now, that's great. If it still has resonances which can prove useful for the future, then I would be delighted, but I can't work for the future. To put it differently, if there's a Chinese hegemony in the twenty-second century as there is an American one now, how are they going to look at this work, from what perspective? There's no way you can project, because the future is nothing like the past. In other words, while there still might be a geographical place called England, there might not be a cultural place called England.

(1.) Conversation with the author, printed in the exhibition brochure for Excavated Mutilations (London: Courtauld Institute of Art, 2002).

(2.) In 1968, taking their cue from the Paris uprisings, students of London's Hornsey College of Art protested against what they saw as the system's selling out to the ideology of the ruling class.

(3.) Under the current Labor government, Howells is minister in the Department of Culture, Media, and Sport.

(4.) Lawrence Rinder, "Conrad Atkinson: Making History," in Peter Davies, et al., Transient: Conrad Atkinson, exh. cat. (Carlisle: Tullie House and Art Gallery, 1996), II.

(5.) The nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria, focus of mass antinuclear protests.

(6.) The English-language weekly newspaper of Moscow.

(7.) "Art Needs New Patrons," The Guardian, November 2, 2002.

(8.) The Greater London Council, London's Labor-dominated governing body, abolished in 1986 under considerable pressure from conservative politicians.

(9.) This exhibition of contemporary art took place August 11-30, 1971, in the Great Hall of Alexandra Palace, London.

(10.) In 1978 Atkinson produced a print titled Anniversary Print, A Children's Story, which denounced the royal family for granting the highly coveted Royal Warrant to Distillers Biochemicals, makers of the controversial drug Thalidomide. After agreeing to exhibit the print in the Lives exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London, the Arts Council of Great Britain decided not to show it. Atkinson sued the Arcs Council for breach of contract and won, following a protracted legal struggle.

Antony Hudek is a Ph. D. candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art and an independent curator.

The exhibition Excavated Mutilations: New Work by Conrad Atkinson took place October 25. 2002--January 9. 2003. at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. The interview took place on November 5, 2002, in London. Anthony Hudek would like to thank Kate Ballard and Louise Sorensen,

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