Clement Page in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Hans Ulrich Obrist.

We met through Stuart Morgan when you were a student, what is the number one in your catalogue raisonne, what is the first work you were happy with, where you found your language. Was it before or after we met.?

Clement Page

It was after we met, I would probably say the film installation you saw at the Pinakothek der Modern in Munich, ‘Sleepwalker. I had the idea of making the film on two screens, but I wanted a genuine reason for doing so, and that was the subject of how the body and mind are involved simultaneously in sleepwalking.

HUO

Can you tell me a bit more about Stuart Morgan and your relationship with him?

CP

Stuart was a mentor and friend to me, we met because I asked to write the catalogue for an exhibition.

HUO

And I had this commune in the same building as Stuart in Crampton Street, London. Klaus lived with me at the time in that apartment. It was really a co-habitation or commune you could say, I sent the key to fifty people, I had this apartment when I prepared ‘Take Me I’am Yours’ to show at the Serpentine, my first ever show in London, it was very interesting , because in a way, we started to have a dialogue with Stuart and that’s how suddenly you came into the picture because you stayed with him and you were there, so yes that’s why I was wondering what you learnt from Stuart. ?

CP

Stuart showed me that art can be a search for meaning, that being vulnerable to yourself is what really counts.

HUO

He was one of the most important critics in Europe of that generation.

CP

Yes

HUO

So can you tell me more about that first piece of yours?

CP

Yes, my initial idea to make a film exploring sleepwalking came from my own experiences. I remember while writing my degree thesis I became quite overwhelmed by the amount of research material I had found. One morning I awoke to find that I had destroyed my study while sleepwalking, nobody else was in the house, it was a weird feeling finding my books and papers thrown all over the room. The strange thing of course is that one has no memory of these episodes and that it is only the account of witnesses or the evidence of objects, which have been disturbed that inform you of what you have done. Little is really known about sleepwalking, science attempts to explain it as a malfunction of the brain. I think Freud was right, sleepwalking is powerful evidence of the role the unconscious. Sometimes the only way for the unconscious to release buried feelings is to get the body to act them out. During my research I found that dream content often precedes and correlates to the actions and movements of the sleepwalker, but when the sleepwalker’s body encounters obstacles, like a wall – the dream activity temporarily stops and the body continues the work of the dream. In this sense the body and mind are in two different places at the same time. The dream literally uses the body like a puppet to live out the content of the dream.

HUO

Yes

CP

That gave me a genuine reason to use more than one screen, so that they are interconnected, one screen shows the dream activity, the other the sleepwalkers body. I was interested in the information loop between the body and the mind, where the body has to protect itself from danger and these physical events feed into the content of the dream. The juxtaposition of the dream and the dreamer’s sleepwalking body on two physically distinct screens invites the viewer to cross reference events from both. I varied the way I would install the two screens in exhibitions, sometimes the screens would be close to one another at right angles, making it easy for the viewer to compare the two screens. In other installations I placed the screens at opposite ends of the gallery, so that the viewer would have to completely turn around in order to see and compare both screens. I wanted the audience to have to physically engage with the film.

HUO

Then what would be the second main piece?

CP

A series of large watercolours I began in 2006 after moving to Berlin. They were based on black and white photographic negatives I had taken at night in Rome. I didn’t want to just reproduce the negatives in paint, that would have been pointless. What interested me were their abstract qualities, the strange contrasts and spatial distortions inherent in them. Pictorial space is reversed which makes the images hard to read, I liked these problems. I also wanted to challenge assumptions about the watercolour medium, by making them in black and white on a large scale. The watercolours later developed into ideas for my second major film, ‘Hold Your Breath’.

HUO

Where do you see the work now, I mean we are a few years later and obviously you’ve done a lot of video and film, but you go beyond that now with painting, can you tell me where the work is going.?

CP

In the last few years I’ve been exploring ways to involve the viewer in a direct way with painting, comparable to film. I’ve been experimenting with a variety of paints and different substrates which would enable this and I arrived at the use of mirrors. Using mirrors as a substrate for painting allows me to inscribe the viewer’s reflection and the surrounding environment into the painting. The ‘to be looked at’ aspect of painting is contrasted with the ‘to look at oneself’ aspect of mirrors. By combining multiple mirrors hung at right angles I am able to create a situation in which reflected paint from each mirror conceals and reveals the other as well as concealing or revealing the viewers reflection. The meaning of the work then changes depending upon the reflected environment and who is viewing it. The painted images I create on the mirrors may at first appear abstract, but I give them a three-dimensional quality. I want them to exist as forms within the reality/image of the mirror, to signify obliquely. I seek painted forms which are ambiguous but suggestive, which can signify organic forms or just be taken as turbulent paint. For me the opposition between abstract or figurative no longer holds water. Every mark placed in a painting signifies, it is a question of how resistant the painting is to interpretation. I use a liquid glass paint to make the images, which I pour directly onto the mirrors, and manipulate by drawing into it with turpentine rags. I work with the mirrors placed horizontally on tables, so that the reflections are minimal and the liquid paint can be more easily controlled. Gravity is essential to the process, I tilt the mirrors at different angles creating flows and unexpected events in the paint. It’s a very intense process, because the paint hardens within seven hours and will no longer move, so I have to work quickly. I like this time factor, as it forces me to go from reaction to decision in a more spontaneous way. I have to remain constantly attentive to the transformations and suggestive states of the painting. In a way it’s like a battle between freedom and control, chance and intention. Although I make preparatory drawings, which give a loose idea of an intended image, during the painting process these ideas always change. I try to allow the fluid paint to suggest images to me, to be sensitive to its living possibilities. It makes me think of Adorno when he said, “art is always semblance, even in the midst of meaninglessness, it is unable to escape the suggestion of meaning”.

HUO

And where do the mirrors come from, at the time when we met in the 90’s, I spent a lot of time not only at the Elephant and Castle, but also at the Sir john Soane’s museum, which is full of mirrors.

CP

Yes, Soane’s architectural use of mirrors was in my mind, probably my earliest thoughts about mirrors and paintings came from Velasquez and my experiences of being taught painting. At art school we were encouraged to look at our paintings in mirrors, the reversal of the painted image reveals problems which would otherwise be overlooked. But primarily my use of mirrors as a surface for painting came from my filmmaking. In my films I used mirrors to give unreal views of interiors, where the edge of the mirror is not shown, in a sense an imaginary image which could not exit in the real space of the film. Another motivating factor was to question our narcissistic culture, where self-image and art have become a currency of social media. Identification and social interaction via images makes us blind to each other and the world. I want to hold a mirror up to the viewer and the world, to bring the paintings ethical and aesthetic message to the forefront of the viewing experience.

HUO

Do you have any projects which have been too big to be realised, unrealised projects.?

CP

Yes, a project which involves filling a cathedral with a series of painted mirrors attached to tables on wheels. The mirrors become the table top and are partially painted allowing reflections of the cathedral architecture to be combined with the paintings. The public are invited to wheel the mirror paintings around the cathedral floor, so that the painted forms change and merge with the moving reflections of the building. Another reason for wanting the mirrors to be lying flat is to make it difficult for viewers to see their own reflection, encouraging them to focus on the painting and the cathedral. The installation refers back to Baroque art where painting and architecture were inseparable.

HUO

And any Utopic projects, you know because I remember when we used to hang out with Stuart and co, Douglas Gordon was sometimes there, and we often had the visit of John Latham and Barbara Stevini and of course they worked on their vision of the artist placement group. We talked a lot of about concrete utopia, you know, do you have any projects in terms of society, to go beyond exhibitions. ?

CP

Yes, a project which involves replacing all the windows in a row of shops on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin with mirrors which have painted forms on them. Shoppers are confronted with reflections of themselves and painted forms rather than objects for sale. I want to question the relation between people and commodities under capitalism, where objects and people exchange semblances, objects take on the agency of people, and people the quality of objects. We are defined to an extent by what we own, what we wear and how we appear. The intention is to reverse this opposition to make an intervention in this exchange.

HUO

Do you draw?

CP

Drawing is very important to me, I don’t believe in a separation between painting and drawing, or drawing and film, they are integral practices. All my films began as hundreds of drawings which I would re-arrange until I found a film in them. Recently I’ve been making drawings while listening to experimental music. The drawings involve dropping pieces of white thread onto a dark background, the pieces of thread form random shapes as they land. I then manipulate the threads while listening to music. The dissonant notes and unconventional rhythms push me to look for new visual structures in the thread. Later these drawings become the basis for the shapes I use in the mirror paintings. Recently I’ve also been making these thread drawings on canvas.

HUO

How do you make these drawings?

CP

The white thread is dropped onto the primed canvas.

HUO

Ah yes so you have a canvas which is painted and then you drop them on it in a Duchampian way, they are like stoppages ?

CP

Exactly yes, there’s a transparent glue on the canvas, so however they drop they stick.

HUO

What role does chance play in your work?

CP

I consciously embrace chance. Chance introduces a disruptive element into the process of making work which is positive, it throws up unexpected possibilities, a life outside my control. My drawings use chance as the primary means of conceptualising future works. The liquid mirror paintings in particular embrace the unexpected, the forms that occur in the paint as it flows across the mirrors constantly surprise me. I’ am searching for something that I could not have planned. In a way my paintings are about an absence of control. But it’s never blind chance, I set up situations in the painting process which allow unforeseen things to happen. When it works and is made freely it proliferates its own possibilities and grows to contain its own order, not of control but of more choices. I only know when the painting is finished when it convinces me of its freedom, when I believe it has a life of its own.

HUO

And then of course there is music. The relationship between art and music. Diaghilev worked with Stravinsky on the Ballet Russes, and I was fascinated how Diaghilev used this interdisciplinary approach of bringing music and visual arts together with dance and choreography. I wanted to ask you how music influences the unconscious and your work.?

CP

In my films, especially Sleepwalker I was interested in the idea of peripheral sounds or background sounds, which the audience are barely conscious of, but they have an increasingly emotional impact on the viewer because they gradually become aware of these rhythms over time that begin to be created by the live sounds. I believe music connects us to our unconscious and to animals, this is why it’s such a crucial art form and so pervasive in all cultures. Animals are unconscious in our terms, even if they have a level of consciousness we don’t understand. Perhaps one of the best ways for humans to connect with animals is through sound or music. Music has always been essential to my life, I listen to a wide variety of genres from classical to punk and everything in between, it’s always playing in my house, I cannot live without it. But when I am working in the studio I need silence so I can listen to the needs of the work. I often use musical references for the titles of my paintings, to evoke associations with emotional or psychological states. In music content and form cannot be separated, also in the aesthetics of painting form and meaning cannot be separated, there is a point of convergence between the two. I do believe there is a strong relationship between music, painting and drawing but it is largely an unconscious one. Painting can only approximate music using analogy or rather association. When I am making thread drawings I listen to experimental music, not to make visual analogies, but rather the dissonant sounds push me to challenge the visual structures I find in the thread.

HUO

Also you have talked about the reversal of opposites, and that’s interesting because one of my favourite books is by the young Chinese scholar Zairong Xiang, and he wrote a book called ‘Queer Ancient Ways’. The book is all about how we can go beyond these dualisms, because he basically says in antiquity we often think about Yin and Yang in the west as female and male and these opposites, whereas actually in the history of Chinese etymology, Yin and Yang is much more to do with the sunny and the shadowy side of a mountain and actually these are transitions throughout the day….so it’s not about opposites, it’s about fluidity, and he writes in his book ‘Queer Ancient Ways’ that we need to find ways to go beyond these dualisms which were really implemented in the colonial age.

CP

Yes, of course these binaries are ridiculous. In a sense western linguistics creates a prison for whoever speaks its language. It Is often assumed language communicates our experiences and thoughts in a transparent way, but it actually manipulates our thoughts, it only allows those ideas which can be contained within its structures. If it cannot be signified, it cannot exit. In dreams the oppositions inherent in language, the power structures embodied within it, are shown to be ridiculous. Dreams subvert the certainty of the world as experienced through language objects, this alone makes them useful. I believe that’s why visual art is so important because it attempts to communicate these experiences and ideas which cannot be contained within linguistics.