British Art of the Long 1980s

Diverse Practices, Exhibitions and Infrastructures

Imogen Racz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350191556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: European Art

The sculptural history of the long 1980s has been dominated by New British Sculpture and Young British Artists. Arguing for a more expansive history of British sculpture and its supporting infrastructures, these twenty-three vivid and enthralling interviews with artists, curators, dealers and facilitators working then demonstrate the interconnected networks, diversity of ideas and practices, energy, imagination and determination that transformed British art from being marginal to internationally celebrated. With a substantial introduction, this timely volume provides valuable new insights into the education, work, careers, studios, infrastructures and exhibitions of the artists and facilitators, substantially enlarging our understanding of the era.

1

Rasheed Araeen

Figure 1 Rasheed Araeen, Sculpture No. 2, from the exhibition Rasheed Araeen: Before and After Minimalism, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2014. Rasheed Araeen, Courtesy Sharjah Art Foundation

Interview 20 February 2018

IR	I wanted to start by saying that you have had such a rich and diverse career: as an artist, writer, curator and publisher. Do you see these as being interlinked?
RA	Yes.
IR	Is there one that feels more ‘you’?
RA	Primarily I am an artist. Whatever I have done, it was from the point of view of being an artist.
IR	So your curation started from the art itself.
RA	Yes. My main pursuit was for art, to make art, but with my experience of the art establishment in London I realized my work could not be recognized. This was the situation, I also realized, faced by most non-white artists. I had then no choice but to do something about it. So I began to collect material about their work to set up an archive, which eventually led me to do curation.
IR	Yes, you are right. In a recent statement in Apollo^1 you said that there was an aspect of optimism in your art, and I thought it was interesting that you talk about the dominant culture and suppression, and thought that it was both brave and optimistic to take on a whole system.
RA	Yes. There were a lot of risks involved – career-wise. I was aware of that. But, for me, the pursuit of ideas and truth were more important than a career. When I came to Britain I brought some works with me, thinking they would be the start of a successful career here. But I decided to abandon this work so as to start with new ideas. That is how I became interested in sculpture.
IR	Thinking about that, you said that when you arrived in London you were interested in Caro, and you had a SPACE studio. Did you find yourself surrounded by artists with similar ideas?
RA	This was four years later. Before that I spent four years in isolation. I had then no contact with anyone in the art world. Even when I had moved to a SPACE studio, which I shared with an Australian artist Jeff Sterling, I did not have much communication with other artists. Everyone was busy doing his/her work. There were a few artists who were doing Caro-like sculptures, but they were not interesting. I did though have some friendship with John Latham as we shared some ideas. But now I’ve no contact with any artist in the UK. But this was four years later. Before that I spent four years in isolation. I had then no contact with anyone in the art world.
IR	That must have been very lonely.
RA	No. I lived a full life. I excluded myself from the art world, as I was not ready for it. I was too busy earning my living, also thinking and trying to develop new ideas about sculpture. I can’t therefore say that I was excluded, because no one knew about me. But I had a full life. I regularly went around to see what was in the galleries and museums, and in the evening I was in the pub with my wife, drinking, eating, and so on.
IR	You started making these lattice sculptures, which is a theme that has run all through your work. What is it about them?
RA	I didn’t know then. I was just looking for something new. When I came to discover the lattice structures and its role in the construction of modern sculpture, I was working intuitively. But now I can look at them, analyse them and can even place them historically within the trajectory of modern sculpture. But all this is obviously with hindsight.
IR	There is a rightness about them.
RA	I don’t know about that. When critics and art historians now look at my work of this period, especially the pile of girders arranged symmetrically, and then the use of lattice structures from engineering, also arranged symmetrically, they always see them in terms of an antithesis or a confrontation with Anthony Caro’s work. But that was not the case when I started making these works. I was just looking for something different, something new, instead of following Caro, and I hit upon the idea of geometry and symmetry. That was all.
IR	I have seen them in galleries, and the audience is invited to move them around and rearrange the forms.
RA	The work you are referring to was conceived in 1968, the beginning of my post-minimalist work. I then realized that there was something not quite right with fixed geometry, because it followed the tradition of art being something to look at. I wanted to do something more than that so that the audience could get physically involved in my work. I decided to break the rigidity of fixed or static geometry, which initially comprised four structural cubes, and allow the audience – spectators if you like or whatever you want to call them – to reorganize the work in their own way. That led to Zero to Infinity.
IR	I was also interested in the dialogue that you had with Richard Long’s work. One of his works was Walking a Line in Peru (1972), which was a photograph of a line he made in the landscape. In others like Stone Line (1980), he brought objects connected to his walks into the gallery. You made White Line through Africa (1982–8) and Arctic Circle (1982–8). How did you want the audience to relate to those? To see these in relation to those by Richard Long? To see the bones and think of an imperial past?
RA	It was very obvious from the work itself. The line of bones. When you see the work from a distance it looks like a Richard Long. It is only when you are closer to the work that you see that they are not stones, but bones.
IR	Where did you get the bones from?
RA	It was David Thorpe, who ran the gallery called the Showcase in East London. When I spoke to him sometime in the 1980s about my idea of making the sculptures of bones and empty beer and wine bottles, he became very enthusiastic. It was easy to go around and pick up empty bottles, but where were we to get the bones? He said, ‘Don’t worry – I will get them for you.’ One afternoon I got a call from him saying, ‘Can you come over?’ I went to the gallery, and he took me around the East London, where there was a big factory which collected bones from the butchers. It was so smelly. He arranged a small van, and we put the bones in it, and he took them to a hospital near Whitechapel, which cleaned them and bleached them. In the gallery we were going to do two works, a circle and a line. I myself arranged the line of bones, but he invited some people who went around the pubs and collected empty wine bottles and beer cans. I just asked them to make a circle, so they made the circle.
IR	What was it about Richard Long’s work that you wanted to confront or have a dialogue with?
RA	I admired his work, particularly of the late 1960s, but I wished he had remained in Britain and engaged with his own environment rather than going around the world, by which he was following the footsteps of the imperial explorers of the nineteenth century.
IR	You also had a dialogue with Andy Warhol. I am thinking about Golden Calf (1987) in which you used his image of Marilyn Monroe from 1967.
RA	A lot of time things happen in my work by chance. When I visited the Tate Gallery sometime in the mid-1980s, I saw the prints of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, which were being sold for £1 each. I bought four of them and brought them home without knowing what I was going to do with them and put them away. It was only sometime later when by chance I encountered other things that the idea of the work occurred to me. First, while looking at an Iranian magazine I saw in it a photograph of a dead Iranian soldier lying down in a pool of blood. He died in the war between Iraq and Iran, a proxy war started by Saddam Hussain on behalf of the West, which gave me the idea of the work in which the dead soldier and four prints of Marilyn Monroe by Warhol came together. After I finished the work I titled it Golden Calf and signed it ‘RA 87’. I also began to think about Andy Warhol’s relationship with Iran. In the early 1970s the Shah of Iran invited many American experts to build and establish the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran. He had spent millions and millions on American artworks. What interested me most was the interest of Farah Diba, the Shah’s wife, in American Pop art, and somehow it also came to my mind that Andy Warhol must have visited Iran then and that he probably then also painted a portrait of Farah Diba. However, there was no documentary evidence of this. But I kept on entertaining this until about six or seven years ago when I contacted a friend of mine in Tehran, who was interested in art. I asked him whether Warhol had visited Iran, and he said ‘yes’. Two years ago this was actually confirmed by a film about Warhol I saw in Dubai. He had actually visited both Iran and Iraq at the time. Whether he did do a portrait of Shah’s wife or not – there is still no evidence of it – is not important. What is important is the complexity of the work alluding to Warhol’s role in what Edward Said has described as cultural imperialism.
IR	It is an interesting connection. You also did a number of images and performances related to your experiences. One was Paki Bastard (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person) of 1977. Clearly it was a performance as well as photographs.
RA	There was a series of photographs with a commentary.^2 In the 1970s I was very close to David Medalla. In fact, I would not hesitate to say that he played a major role in the politicization of my work in the 1970s. We would quite often meet together to discuss the relationship of art and politics. In 1977, in the summer, as I was sitting with him and talking, he said: ‘Look, Rasheed. I know that you have been interested in performance, although I haven’t seen any of them. I would like you to do a performance on the closing day of the exhibition at Artists for Democracy.’ I said: ‘Forget it, David. Everyone is now doing performances.’ But he kept on insisting. And when I went home after this meeting, I began thinking about what David had suggested. It was then the idea of this performance began to appear. I began to think about my visits to Brick Lane in the 1960s – I had a studio near there in the late 1960s. The racism and the violence of the skinheads were then endemic. Many Bangladeshi and other South Asian people died because of the skinheads. So all that began to appear in my mind, and I decided to do a performance based on this memory as well as what was still happening to Asian people. At that time, there were also Asian women on strike against the Indian owner of the Grunwick photo processing factory, which was actually just around here from my studio. I read about the strike in the Guardian, which was my regular paper, and one news story was that during a demonstration there the police had grabbed the testicles of men and the breasts of women. It was also reported that a policeman had called an Asian man ‘Paki Bastard’. So that became the title of the performance.
IR	Did you do many performances after that?
RA	Paki Bastard was my first performance in front of an audience, and I f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Narratives and Contexts
• 1 Rasheed Araeen
• 2 Susan Hiller
• 3 Robin Klassnik
• 4 Bill Woodrow
• 5 Alison Wilding
• 6 Jacqueline Poncelet
• 7 Richard Deacon
• 8 Katherine Gili
• 9 Nicholas Pope
• 10 Roger Malbert
• 11 Jonathan Harvey
• 12 Mikey Cuddihy
• 13 Kate Blacker
• 14 Richard Wilson
• 15 Antonia Payne
• 16 Hilary Gresty
• 17 Veronica Ryan
• 18 Langlands & Bell (Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell)
• 19 Cathy de Monchaux
• 20 Laura Ford
• 21 James Lingwood
• 22 Karsten Schubert
• 23 Abigail Lane
• Afterword
• Select Bibliography and Suggested Further Reading
• Index
• Imprint