Making PicturesInterview with Simon Starling | 07 01 2016Benjamin Price

Ben Price: I suppose we can start at the beginning. Where did Pictures for an Exhibition begin?

Simon Starling: In one way it began because I got an invitation to make an exhibition at the Arts Club in Chicago. But on top of that the work had started to evolve already back in the ‘90s. Back then I started working as a photographer for museums and artists making installation views of exhibitions and I guess that was in some way an important part of my development as an artist. In a way I think I learned a lot about exhibition making having had to make sense of them in photographic images and I’d always had an idea that it would be nice to curate an exhibition about that genre, the installation view. It’s a bit of a niche subject, but it has an interesting history. So there was that interest that I suppose fuelled my curiosity to investigate the making of these images of the Brancusi exhibition.

BP: Curating an exhibition as well as making it puts you at an intersection between being an artist, curator and art historian, which, when I was reading about it, echoed the role that Duchamp had in the 1927 exhibition.

SS: Yeah, that’s a nice observation actually. Just backtracking a little bit, that interest in installation views, had already re-emerged in a few things that I’d done prior to the Chicago show. The most obvious one was the exhibition that I curated at Camden Art Centre, which on a conceptual level has many connections with the Pictures for an Exhibition project.

BP: I see a lot of Phantom Ride in it as well.

SS: Yeah, sure. The Phantom Ride was very much an extension of the thinking behind the Camden show. I have this idea that very often the best work I make is work in which the number of decisions that I have to make is reduced to the minimum. In a way it’s about putting a system into play and sort of sitting back and seeing what happens. It creates a lot of interesting problems and dynamics doing that and you need a lot of will-power to see that system through. But I think there is something very beautiful about working with decisions that have been made 70 years prior to your re-working of those things. Camden was a very good example of that, to the point that you were almost uncovering rawlplugs where you could actually put a screw back in the wall where something had hung 3 years before. And then of course the result of that is a very interesting sort of energy that gets created because of accumulating or overlaying decisions that have been made at different moments.

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Collapsing them into a single moment created all these interesting energies I think.

BP: That word ‘collapsing’ comes up a lot in various pieces about Pictures for an Exhibition. I’d like to ask you about that, in particular the kind of spaces that result from it. You have the composite images with all the Brancusi sculptures there and the sculptures themselves are so clear and sharply defined but the space around them is very unstable and amorphous. It kind of reminded me a bit of Roland Barthes’ phrase, “a gentle apocalypse”.1

SS: I think the space of the photographs is a result of various kinds of collapses. Of course there’s the temporal collapse — a sort of return. It’s like rewinding a film of an explosion or something, you start with these two images of an exhibition at a certain moment in Chicago, then the sculptures all went their own ways and had their own lives, ending up in different parts of the world. Then what you’re doing, in a sense, is kind of rewinding that and bringing them back together. I suppose it’s something that’s common to many of my works, this sort of confusion between temporal space and geographical space … the two things getting kind of confused. And I think that that’s what’s happening in that project.

BP: Another one of the photographs I found particularly interesting was the one of you photographing the Christopher Williams photograph of the Mies van der Rohe staircase. At one point (late at night) I started counting the layers between the staircase and where I was – I think I got to nine. I then laughed because I then realised that if you were standing in front of the picture, you’re only a few feet from the staircase itself. It reminded me a bit of Flann O’Brien, who you’ve mentioned before, and that importance of ‘detour’ as well.

SS: Absolutely. I think that this idea of making a copy of something but doing it in an incredibly roundabout way (i.e. starting with these two images of the exhibition and essentially ending up with those same two images) is a detour and that’s fundamental, as I’ve said before. If you start and end in the same place, in a way the journey is what becomes the important thing. In a way getting from A to B is a kind of device to send you on that journey in time and space and to create the sort of framework in which to explore the history of those things. That’s something I’ve come back to as a model many times; think about the Heinzmann, Unisolar, Trek project, that was a journey across France from one Le Corbusier building to another France but both buildings where made from the same plans. You end where you began in a sense, so the journey becomes the important thing.

BP: On that point, and looking at the mind-map that we pinned up to the board yesterday, it seems that Pictures for an Exhibition has a real 1 Barthes and Howard, “Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collège de France, January 7, 1977.”

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interest in objects moving from place to place – a sort of material history. But just as I was looking at the diagram, it seemed that a lot of the time the objects’ artistic qualities – their aesthetic value, their meaning – seem muted when you were treating them. You treat them as objects of transference and maybe economic value. I was wondering if that’s perhaps a critique or do the sculptures still have that vibrancy and meaning to them?

SS: Yeah, one of the things that’s very nice about doing the project was that it was almost testing the continuing hold of those objects. You know, when you make these crazy journeys right across North America, wherever it was, Seattle or Dallas, there’s this sort of sense of expectation and pilgrimage. And in general the sculptures never disappointed, they are still incredibly captivating things for all sorts of reasons I suppose. There’s certainly an interest in, for example, what Duchamp was doing with those things in the context of that exhibition and how he was playing with them, working with them, kind of valuing them or not as autonomous things or perhaps as these kind of chess pieces in some sort of curatorial game that he was playing. And of course Brancusi is always talked about as the artist who took this very important step in re-thinking sculpture and its relationship to space, co-opting the plinth as part of the work, which then of course was taken further by other artists where the plinths kind of disappeared and so on and so on. All of those things are sort of there or there abouts in the way that I tried to structure the work.

One of my first real engagements with Brancusi was through the Bird in Space project which was very much directly trying to find some sort of parallels between the art world’s economies and global industrial economies through the steel industry and the story of the import of steel, but also the controversial import of Brancusi’s sculpture by Duchamp (again) into the US. Somehow the concerns of that work were also the starting point for this project. I guess just by doing the very initial tentative bits of research into what happened to those sculptures it was clear that, in order to make the work, it meant engaging with the whole economic history of North America since that moment in the ‘20s when the show was made. Also working in Chicago, which is considered to be such a centre for economic thinking … Chicago really is Chicago because it’s where it is in the country. It’s a kind of meeting point for all these different sort of things – the cattle industry, steel, etc. It became the power-house it is because of that and because of its geography. There were a lot of different reasons for taking the project on I think: some art historical things, some economic things.

BP: From what you’ve just said there, the Brancusi sculptures were that product of their time and place and were very key in that moment. Does your project have anything to do with, and it’s a phrase that comes up a few times, “museological remove”? And maybe countering that effect?

SS: Sure. I think a lot of what I do is about trying to reconnect objects to their origins; to break down the walls of the museum and push things back

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into other spheres (not just aesthetic spheres, but economic spheres and political spheres) and reactivate them in relation to those particular histories.

BP: Again, on that point, all of those other spheres seem to be the very complicated elements of the work, the ones that require a lot of unpacking and research when you’re looking at or reading about it. But just thinking of my own experience of this last year, trying to explain to people what I’m working on at the moment, I always start with Autoxylopyrocycloboros. But the first thing I say is that you resurfaced a boat and then sunk it by feeding it to itself. That always gets a bit of a laugh, but immediately people are engaged with the work and then we talk about the other allusions going on: nuclear submarines and so on. I was wondering if that play between humour and those other spheres is an important one?

SS: I like when the work has a double life; when it can exist as a rather simple little narrative structure – perhaps lyrical, perhaps comical at times – and at the same time that that parable-like story connects to all this other stuff. Of course, I probably wouldn’t have made Autoxylopyrocycloboros in any other place. Its logic evolved out of the crazy logic of trying to stop a nuclear submarine with a canoe. The culture of demonstration that has dogged the naval base for a long time was very much an inspiration for this work, but at the same time it’s not really about that. It resonates in relation to that perhaps. It’s different to Pictures for an Exhibition, but at the same time there is that sense of a very simple diagrammatic logic to that work, which I’ve talked about already: starting with the two photographs and ending at the same point with two copies of that image. That’s the lyrical structure of the work and everything else clings to that. I often talk about this idea of constellations and trying to create a gravitational force or something that holds these different things in sway somehow, in some sort of an orbit, a cosmos of things. Perhaps in the case of Pictures for an Exhibition it is that very simple idea of the reiteration of something.

BP: The word reiteration actually is quite interesting because when you iterate something in mathematics it grows and it adds to itself and I quite like the idea of reiterating the Duchamp exhibition but you’ve added in the pictures of the American football or the Streep Headquarters as the next iteration of it. It grows and grows and grows …

SS: …Ripples. Yeah exactly

BP: It’s like a more lyrical Sol Lewitt sculpture that seems to grow out of these starting conditions.

SS: Yeah, perhaps.

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BP: Re-reading the interview from Cuttings, the word “Slippage” comes up quite a lot. It seems to be the key term that is bandied about. I was wondering if you would say something about the concept more generally and how it relates to Pictures for an Exhibition if it does at all.

SS: I’m interested in the way that “slippage” is a productive, progressive phenomenon rather than a problem or loss of some kind. The idea that every time you transform one thing into another or transfer one piece of information from one place to another, be that in the form of an anecdote or a bit of binary code or a copy of a film or whatever it is, that there’s some sort of loss or mutation that happens. I suppose I’m interested that that is a productive force in culture and there’s works that I’ve made that deal with that in a very specific way I suppose. Perhaps most obviously the Black Drop project is very much about that idea on many levels in terms of the way that work is being pieced together in a very overt way in an editing suite with someone cutting and editing film. It’s about the way history gets told and mutates, and shift of emphases and things like that. But it’s also about a man who, in a way, was responsible for the beginning of cinema because a machine he built to do something didn’t really work. In fact, he built a machine to try and stop motion and in the end created a device for moving image. The idea of things happening in the gaps between things and odd by-products is quite an interesting idea.

BP: With that notion of there not being a loss when things are transferred or moved around, and the interest in the dispersal of the sculptures in Pictures for an Exhibition, I was wondering, with relation to your own images and vitrines that have moved from The Arts Club to Montreal and then to Vancouver, if you think there is a loss there with the loss of site-relevance or if you think they gain something by changing around? Or if they simply slip and don’t lose or gain anything at all?

SS: I suppose that’s an ongoing thing with all my projects. So many of them are made for specific places. But at the same time one of the things that’s been really exciting in recent years has been this possibility to look at these things that have been made for very specific places in relation to each other and to build these other kinds of connections between the works. But also, in a way the first time I show works is not always the best. I think you learn. These things are absolutely fresh when they get exhibited for the first time and that means that it’s always a bit of an experiment – you’re testing something the first time you show it. I think, in the case of Pictures for an Exhibition, that the hang we did in Montreal was better than the hang we made in Chicago. Partly because of the nature of the space, it forced me to re-think that work. It’s a more non-linear hang because the Arts Club is a very linear exhibition experience – it almost has a bit of a corridor feel to it. That was actually a little bit contrary to the nature of the work which was something that was all about the cross-referencing on a visual level; these echoes, these things that repeat from one photograph to the next. But also on a geographical level, the Salon hang that we did in Montreal was very much closer to my mind-

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map that you re-installed yesterday and much nicer in that respect, because it’s much less prescriptive about how you navigate, particularly in this very simple white cube where the architecture doesn’t play such a role in your journey through the work. I think that worked very well. But of course you also lose the local knowledge. So many people who came to see the exhibition in Chicago had a very direct connection to or were involved in those stories told in the work. People like Phyllis Lambert for example, is somebody who a lot of the audience in Montreal would know or know of. So every time you change the context the local knowledge changes. I suppose the immediacy of the resonance of the work shifts. It’s just part of the practice, to re-contextualise these things – I’ve enjoyed it a lot.

BP: I have a question here actually that I was going to save until last and it might be the right one to ask here in terms of re-contextualising actually. Having picked up Francesco’s MA thesis there in the archive, and reading the interview in the back, you said – and this was 13 years ago – that you found it strange to have your work considered in a broader, academic context. I was wondering if you still think that’s the case because, with Pictures for an Exhibition, it seems like you’re almost doing that to Brancusi and I suppose by extension with your projects with Henry Moore, you’re looking at them with a fuller context. I was wondering what your thoughts are on that.

SS: What was the conversation 13 years ago about?

BP: Alchemy and science.

SS: But I was talking about an academic context as in a scientific one?

BP: No, as in his own thesis I think.

SS: Oh I see, oh okay. Maybe I was just being falsely modest or something. But no, it’s been very very interesting. In a way I’ve assumed this role in this project as a kind of pseudo art-historian, which of course I’m not qualified in anyway to be. But, it’s been very interesting to actually understand how sketchy and partial a lot of Art History is. When I started to investigate the provenance of these works, which are all hugely important art works, in many cases the history was very sketchy and I tried to fill in as many of the blanks as I could, but there’s still a lot of unclear moments and transactions. I got quite sucked into the detective work that I guess is one of the excitements of art history somehow. I also think that as an artist you have a little bit of a free pass in a way. I think people were amazingly generous towards me and the project. Sometimes they took a little while, there was always this initial reserve, particularly from the big institutions – ‘what is this? what’s this guy up to?’ kind of thing. But as soon as I showed then the back of the two plate cameras with their overprintedground glass screens they got it. That was a great device for co-opting people, getting them on board. It was very clear

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and something that curators and art historians can relate to even though it’s not something they would do themselves. They could understand it and what it might produce.

BP: I had a similar experience with a friend of mine actually. I was explaining the work to him – and doing a terrible job of it – and eventually got my laptop out and picked one of the photographs where you could see the back of the camera and it clicked, which maybe said something about that. Do you have anything that you want to say about the Pictures for an Exhibition itself?

SS: There were a lot of questions all the time about what I should include and what I should leave out. There are many other possibilities of images. There are basically these three series: the collage images; then the making of the collage images; then there’s the provenance images. At times I thought, ‘do I really need to include the provenance images in the exhibition?’, ‘Can they be part of this?’, or ‘what is the work exactly?’ So in that sense, I hope it feels provisional and open in a way; there’s this sense that it could grow and be a little amorphous. I don’t know, it always takes some time to understand what things are and what you’ve actually made, which is why it’s so nice when people start writing about them in a serious way. That helps. And it helps inform the next move or the next work, so it’s a luxury when somebody starts to nudge at it a bit and ask the right questions of it I suppose. But yeah, as a work it’s perhaps closer to the way that I’ve been making films, which is much more inclusive. Most of my films have far too much information in them for example.

BP: They certainly merit a re-watch.

SS: Yeah there’s a sort of density to them. I suppose it’s this ongoing conversation I’m having with myself all the time about the relationship between what gets shown and then the research and the history, what has been call the backstory. I was reading this great book the other day where somebody was describing homeopathic medicine as a placebo with a good backstory. I thought that was really beautiful. This idea of diluting and diluting and diluting is almost like the drug is just a memory or a backstory of that thing you take. I thought it was very beautiful. That’s a diversion, sorry. If you take as another extreme, the Bird in Space work, which is a slab of steel on three inflatable jacks filled with helium, and then of course its title and text description, it’s also a work that deals with a big geography and geographical frame. But it does it in a very very reductive way. I suppose this project is a little bit at the other end of the scale, closer to Project for a Masquerade where you keep adding and packing it all in, adding another level, another offshoot, another layer. So yeah, I don’t know, but what I quite like about it is that it’s a project that you can also take apart. You could just show the two ‘end-results’ and it still functions. There’s lots of permutations to it.

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BP: Going back a bit, you’ve spoken about photographs as ‘sculptural objects’ and a lot of your work takes photographs apart quite literally, like The Nanjing Particles or the project with Man Ray. Comparatively the photographs in Pictures for an Exhibition seem to be quite straight down the line photographic prints but they do contain images of sculpture, more so than what one might call your more ‘sculptural’ photographs. I was wondering if there was a different thought-process.

SS: One of the things I like very much about the work is the way that the way that the images were made on a physical level seems to have a lovely resonance in relation to the conceptual, historical, geographical frame of the work some how. It’s a little hard to describe exactly why. I worked a lot with this guy Emil, who’s a kind of Photoshop genius. Many of my works exist in this funny flik-flak interface between the digital realm and the analogue realm, and these are a good example of that. You take a very archaic photographic instrument, put some film in it and make an exposure. Then you scan that exposure and then you work with it in the digital realm, pulling and pushing information through that image. Then you take another image, overlay that on top and do the same. Even just thinking about the complexity of the Photoshop files that generated those images – some of them had 45 – 50 layers in them. Each layer could be pulled or pushed backwards or forwards in that image. As a model for creating a picture, it seemed to resonate so well in relation to the way that I structured the whole project and that is quite exciting when that happens I think. When the means of production echoes the concerns in a nice way.

BP: Of course the project also came from two photographic objects, you know, things found and filed in archive or folder.

SS: In a way it’s not unrelated to some of those works you’re talking about. The Man Ray work, where you sort of go back into the micro-world of the silver particles that constitute an image, there’s something that’s not a million miles away from what’s happening in the digitisation of the image in those pictures too I think.

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