Gerald Matt in Conversation with Ricky Swallow

When something ends, it becomes sculpture, a commemoration of a prior life or energy, fixing it against a perishing time.

I first saw your work in the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2005. It fascinated me, not least because it seemed quite different from anything else I saw at that Biennale. Is ‘different’ a category you are often confronted with?

I guess the work did strike people as unexpected in the context of Venice, where a lot of large installation and video work is shown. It’s strange because when I’m in Venice I feel like I’m surrounded – even followed – by sculptures protruding from architecture and keeping watch over Palazzos. And I wanted to extend that feeling into the context of my show in the pavilion. I had in mind to slow the audience down, to allow for an encounter with tactile objects, which also relates directly to how the works are made. I think different is ok, provided it’s a category that can be integrated and approached critically like anything else. To be ‘different’ in form indicates taking a different approach to the idea of the problem, sculpture being the problem.

You work with the classical techniques of sculpture, carving objects from wood with your own hands, and recently you have discovered bronze for yourself. Traditional skills, your hands-on production – these seem to have a special value to you. One of your watercolors shows a genuinely conservative understanding of yourself as an artist, a sculptor with hammer and chisel.

The traditional skills I employ are tactics to keep myself from becoming an obsolescent medium within my own practice. It’s funny how scandalous the idea of the artist as someone who spends time making things with their hands in the studio can seem now. I’ve always liked images of artists working. It’s a romantic depiction, but a successful image conveying something of the transfer of gesture or action into form, the kind of hidden performance behind an artwork. There is a really beautiful photograph of Paul Thek with hammer and chisel in hand, working on a plaster cast of his own foot which I love, and a photo of Guiseppe Penone carving one of his log works has been on my studio wall for years. I’m attracted to these images because they remind me that sculpture solicits some kind of exchange with materials. Traditional skills definitely have a value for me, and I always find it hard to define exactly why: It could be as simple as maintaining a closeness to the work through the participation in it’s making, literally being responsible for a form from its conception to its completion. And once it’s completed, there’s this relief of not being connected to it anymore, it’s resolution or autonomy finally announcing itself.

Playing with established hierarchies of genre aesthetics clearly has a special charm for you. You produce in a certain sense hyper-realistic, incredibly finely worked objects with traditional woodcraft combining them with Pop-Art motifs; but the realism is disturbed by the visibility of the materials, which is reminiscent of the classicistic attitude of the 19th century, when undisguised material qualities stood for purity and beauty. In exhibition situations you present your ‘everyday objects’, such as a BMX bike, a PC or a cyclist’s helmet, in darkened rooms with dramatic lighting effects, and often in glass cases, too. The banal and trivial is staged in an auratic way. In contrast to that you place your sculptures on the floor without a pedestal. In an earlier phase, you used to make objects from plastic or cardboard, mostly framed in colour. How did this contrast come about?

I get nervous about the term pop motifs because I think it suggests something other than what I’m interested in. Most of the everyday objects I’ve used in my sculptures have a very ‘used’ quality, and often hold some kind of promise, such as the replica of my family telescope or even the BMX bike, in how it offers mobility/independence to the homebound teenager. The purity of my materials or finish is something that links all my works; mediums definitely carry messages (isn’t that what people got to mediums for?). This becomes obvious when you think about how a work would fail in a different medium, even the weight of something changes its nature conceptually. I’ve always thought of my sculptures as propositions, as prototypes of preserved static form. They have a distilled quality, just south of functionality, and the pure materials I’ve chosen, usually monotone with matt surfaces, are appropriate. The mediums have partially led to specific objects and vice versa, which explains how the subjects changed when I started working in wood and more recently, in bronze. Installing a show is setting this trap, and the best bait to draw an audience seems to be to remove any distraction. The pedestals and display devices have been jettisoned to encourage a more intimate encounter than one is afforded in a museum. A big part of the sculptures is the gravity and relationship they have to the ground and I don’t like to tamper with that … how strange would it be to come across shells placed on plinths whilst beachcombing. I also think the lighting is crucial and has the function of bringing out the form in the sculptures; it comes from the lighting often employed in still life paintings, which plays on both the painted surface and material surface of the subject.

You had a look at the exhibition space in Vienna in advance. Afterward the idea was born to conceive the exhibition as an enormous glass case. Due to the glass walls and the visibility from outside, the project space has a special quality. The glass case is also a way of presenting ethnographic objects or historical documents, and has connotations such as archive, cultural memory and historic past, but also intimacy and seclusion.

I like the idea of the space as a type of contemporary tomb, a display case unto itself that will work with the purity of the sculptures somehow. It also strikes me as a space you navigate differently in it’s passage-like layout, with the lower ceiling creating a concentration towards the works, most of which are floor-based. I always install shows in an austere fashion in which the economy of pieces or more specifically, the space between works, itself becomes a medium. I am conscious within my practice of creating this archive of works to draw from different contexts/shows, and while they are indexes with broader references, the sculptures often reference other works within this archive – an ongoing circulation, if you like.

In terms of motifs, you also resort to presentation types of the European art tradition, with the frequent use of vanitas symbols, which are concerned with the transitory quality of being and time just like skeleton and skull are the classical Memento Mori-images of art history.

Things inevitably get back here, and it’s a question I always have a hard time answering. This is because death implies a darkness or finality, and I see the works as possessing more flexible properties than that. When something ends, it becomes sculpture, a commemoration of a prior life or energy, fixing it against a perishing time. There is both a sustained time period within the narrative of my sculptures and the sustained time period through how they’re produced as carvings in the studio. It seems time is still the main thing looming over the works.
The skull is this tactile full stop, the most universal of death’s symbols, yet it walks and talks in every historic incarnation, from the dance of death to The Grateful Dead illustrations. I’ve made skulls as a way to imply the premature death of previous sculptures. Other times I’ve carved skeletons/bones and there’s activity or ‘circulation’ occurring. I’ve looked for skulls in other objects also, a skull-sized conch shell and a cycling helmet, which both projects and resembles the skull. There’s empathy in death and to monuments specifically, that I’m trying to reach, something beautiful beyond decay, within a structure both poetic and formal. The contradiction within the Memento Mori tradition interests me. Because, whilst the context is to admonish the vanity within the material and earthly belongings, it’s illustrated so lavishly and to such obsessive detail as if to celebrate both the subject and the skill involved in its creative representation.

Some of your sculptures in wood are Dutch still life paintings translated into the third dimension. Killing Time depicts the classical image of the lemon that has been peeled and is hanging over the edge of the table, with fish and lobster next to it. In Australia the European art tradition is not as immediate as it is here. How did this reference develop with you? Did you have specific Dutch paintings in mind?

The reference to the Dutch still life tradition came out of just seeing those paintings in a larger number when travelling in Holland. They had a hold on me, firstly because of the fidelity and their detail and also this silence looming in every composition. The Killing Time piece and the Salad Days are cover versions within my practice, literally attempts to specifically reference the still life tradition with certain arrangements and motifs. I was thinking, what subjects could constitute my own still life arrangement, so I created this sculptural inventory of all the animals fallen and found from my youth. It’s interesting that you’re referring to the falling lemon rind, because it’s an image that I’ve used in a recently completed work for this show. It’s one element of a group of carvings collectively titled, History of Holding. Negotiating sculpture is about what reference you hold onto and what you let go. This sculpture is based on a plaster cast of my hand clutching/presenting the peeling lemon, which becomes this natural bracelet winding around my wrist. I acquired these boxwood logs which resemble giant bones or preserved limbs, and in the finished work, part of the log is left exposed to become a natural plinth for the object. It’s always strange to describe a sculpture, because the work itself does something both formal and unpredictable when you see it in person.

The Baroque idea can also be detected in your work in the fact that you achieve moments of tension with certain light effects, stage elements really, which are used to intensify the illusionist aspect on an emotional level. But you don’t paint your works, so that the surface structure opposes their naturalism. How does the concept of the simulacrum relate to that?

The structure of the works (in some instances the seams of the laminated blocks are visible, for example) seems like a natural trace of production, a subtle interruption to the continuous illusion of the surface. The lighting of the work is really important to me, because it kind of awakens the rendering and surface to enhance both the form and the carving process itself. They can be too dead without specific lighting, too homogenised into their surroundings. I’ve never thought about my sculptures as illusionist or ‘hyper realistic’. It has a lot to do with translation, even transcription, of motifs, more recently into an almost diagrammatic form, but there’s a tactility there that separates them from a casting or digital rendering. It’s this very inconsistency with the hyper real that I’m into, the decisions and abbreviations enacted during the making. In terms of simulacrum, I think, the sculptures do become this new thing, true only to themselves. For an artwork to succeed, I think it needs to overtake its reference. Often in the work there’s this combination of two elements and the pairing creates this third new singular form through accommodation and adaptation. Something happens and the wood as a medium plays a part in that. Art should operate on an emotional level; it’s an under-rated quality, but something I work towards. It’s ambitious or maybe ridiculous, but I’d like the sculptures to haunt you like a great song.

Your success as an artist followed a path through the USA. Is that the usual course of an Australian artist’s career? How does one establish oneself, on the international art market as an Australian artist?

I’m sure there is not a usual course of an Australian artist’s career internationally. It’s frustrating that Australia is isolated geographically, because I think it’s a hurdle in terms of work affecting an audience outside of its immediate one. I feel fortunate for having interesting contexts and opportunities, and for having had supportive people behind the work from an early point, which has enabled me to exhibit the work here and in Europe, Japan, etc.

You work on your objects for a very long time: the production process often takes months. In the past five years your career has almost sky-racketed; you have been described as a Wunderkind of the Australian art scene and most of your works sell very quickly. How do you deal, as an artist, with the need to work extremely long and to simultaneously satisfy the demand of the market? Or the need for exhibition pieces, for that matter – for Vienna you started to work more than half a year in advance.

My main objective is to make work that hopefully sustains itself soundly beyond any market curiosity. I’ve returned to working by myself in the studio. Feeling my need to maintain an intimacy within the work is more important long term than making more pieces available. As to how I deal with it, I’m not sure, it certainly isn’t always great fun, but it’s always engaging in the studio, “weak obstacles impoverish us”. I think things take the time they need to take. You know, I have a quote on my wall from DJ Shadow that says “I need to explore my passions on my own schedule”, and whilst there’s music that moves me more, I think the sentiment is admirable here. Again I’ve been lucky to work with galleries who see a quality in the work specifically because of its production values and how this relates conceptually to my project.

In addition to your sculptures you also devote yourself to watercolours. These tend to be rather small, very fine and atmospheric presentations, often portraits. Here again, an academic technique can be seen. The title of one of your series makes me prick up my ears: The Hangman’s Beautiful Portraits. You seem, once more, to manipulate the viewer, setting a visual trap that plays with a certain expectation on the part of the recipient.

The watercolours are important in that they are a respite from the duration of making a sculpture. They are much looser. I like the term ‘atmospheric presentations’ as a way to describe them, because I see paint as this malleable medium. They dream of becoming paintings, but remain moored to the paper surface. I studied drawing as my major in art school and I see it as a nucleus for everything else. The drawings often form pairs or a larger group to become a set of related images, a family of sorts. They are sourced from existing images or ‘cover versions’ of existing paintings. In terms of The Hangman’s Beautiful Portraits, they are isolated faces from The Incredible String Band’s record sleeve titled The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, their sombre faces amplified to a faded Fragonard palette. I want to incorporate the drawings in exhibitions alongside the sculpture more and that’s the plan for Vienna also. The exchange they have with the wooden sculptures and now also the bronze works create a more representative view of my artistic process.

Your titles are often poetic and metaphoric. Does poetry have a special status for you, personally, and also in relation to your artistic work?

I think I’m always aware of maintaining a level of poetry or suggestions in the works. There’s a contemplative nature to how they’re made and, hopefully, received, that is important, which is why it’s hard to talk about individual works specifically, because sometimes defining too much dilutes any poetic interpretations. Duchamp’s line about titles being the artworks ‘invisible colors’ is perfect, because I think in assigning a title you have this opportunity to extend the work. I have a wall cluttered with title suggestions, song titles and lines I hear from the radio; studio notes become titles later, and sometimes words give rise to a new sculpture.

In your upcoming exhibition in Vienna, there will be beautiful examples of your sculptures which reveal in a very characteristic, but also in a very particular way, the essential elements and iconography of your work that we have been discussing – Younger than Yesterday, for example, or The Bricoleur. Similarly to other pieces, they appear like ‘leftovers’ from a complex narrative or traces of living creatures that vanished, indicating that ‘someone has been there’. What is the story behind that?

I do think of the sculptures as traces, or physical clues lay out and positioned purposefully. I’ve always been interested and inspired by narrative, in song and story, where description resonates with more emotive possibilities. And damaged goods make for a good description, I’m thinking of how Scott Walker can croon a room into existance. I try to leave these narrative possibilities open, in an atttempt to multiply an object’s usual reading or function. The ‘someone’ is naturally me and at time the sculptures have started from stubborn memories or associations to different forms. Barnacles, for example, return in various works, and they have always interested me. In attaching to an object they redefine it as a plinth/support structure, a dormant form to be dated by their growth. Sculpture is essentially remains – a domestic archaeology. I always feel with the carvings I’m digging/removing information in order to fabicate new information. I mention this because this information is so fixed, as if to appear fused or preserved by time, which is another important part of their story. At times, I guess, I’ve wanted it to feel like the water level has dropped in the gallery and the sculptures have been revealed, their compositions produced by both natural and unnatural acts.