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ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #22
Tim Noble & Sue Webster @ P.S.1, New York, USA
Forever, 2001
509 lamps, holders, daisy washers, ice white turbo reflector caps, steel frame, painted aluminium, electronic blue neon transformers,
and an electronic light sequencer (584.2 x 302.3 x 52.1 cm)
Additional images
Working with junk is not uncommon, in fact Duchamp and Picasso
took the worldy steps of de-purifying Art with the World. Tim Noble (bn. 1966) and Sue Webster (bn. 1967), on the other hand, don't just bring in the World, they really do work
with junk, i.e. rubbish. Known for the piles of rubbish, which then create silhouettes
of the artists, their work touches on the louche quality of celeb life among other things. Perhaps more renowned for their flickering electric signs, of late
their portraiture by refuse has drawn more attention. With light-up dollar signs, boozing and smoking silhouettes,
resin primitive man self-portraits, they've confessed that they find inspiration in music -- specifically the Punk spirit, hence the anarchic of their approach. Represented by Modern Art, they have exhibited at Gagosian
in Beverly Hills (2001) and were included in Apocalyse
at the RA (2000).
Tim Noble and Sue Webster are exhibiting at P.S.1 until 29/12
The conversation began by with the sharing of travel experiences, Sue and Tim's, and Robin's recent travels through Vietnam as the
first electronic artist to perform in Hanoi. Much of our conversation was littered with laughter and obscure musical references.
Sue Webster: We should just talk about travel...
Robin Rimbaud: Fine, we can have a quick chat, then I can go off and make some rock and roll sounds...
SW:...and I can make some sculptures!
RR: Well, that's interesting because in many ways my work is about travelling. When making sound, I have
to be physically present in person when a Scanner
show happens, but the curious factor with visual arts is that often the work can travel independently.
SW: It lives on, you just have to be there for the opening. We've managed to send our work overseas without
having to travel with it, but it's quite difficult for us as what we produce is not just a painting that you
can hang on a wall. It's very much an installation as we've realised, and although we are involved in installing
some of the light pieces with the shadows, you have to compile a list of instructions to accompany the work. When
you are in the studio creating you are so focused on creating them that you are not bothered about how this
piece is going to live on, so sometimes I dread to turn up at some shows and see that someone has installed the
work so that my nose is out of joint! [laughter]
RR: I was curious about that -- the pieces are created out of loose rubbish aren't they?
SW No, it's actually sculpted. It's carefully manipulated. We started off making stuff out of trash, that's glued
and bound together very strongly. We then progressed to making work out of stuffed animals that we showed at Modern Art,
our home gallery! So, of course you can't glue animals together because they don't stick [laughter], so you have to keep
reinventing new ways of making your work, and for us, that's what keeps it alive and interesting. We make the works in the
dark with a light source and working sculpturally to make the shadow as perfectly recognizable as us as possible. Of course
to us we know what we look like and we'll return to the studio the next morning and I'll realise that it's not me because the
hair's not right or the nose isn't correct. We know each others profiles so well but you can then take it to another country --
for example, our show over in P.S.1 at the moment -- and people are so
astonished that this pile of junk can make such a perfect portrait, that interestingly they don't realize that it's a
portrait of the artists. It's important that we recognise it as us but to others they're not aware of this as they don't
know what we look like.
RR: That's something that really interests me actually. Working with music you can easily adopt this other persona,
so I can be equally Robin to some people, Scanner to others. With
music the personality is so prevalent in the work, especially popular music -- the image is often key. At the same time
choosing these other personas offers a buffer, a wall that you can choose to reveal as much or as little as you wish. I
was curious about how much of yourselves you reveal in the work. You are of course revealing yourselves totally, yet people
don't recognise you...
SW: Well, not abroad as people don't know what we look like. This is interesting as we recently went to set up a
piece that we'd not seen for four years and my nose was out of joint but no-one else knew that! [laughter]
RR: How do you feel about that element of trust then? Letting someone set up your work for you?
SW: Well, it makes us totally nervous. In the early days you never thought these things were meant to last and you
never considered that in the making of it. Now when you go back to pieces you created six years ago it's like seeing an
old friend! We recently saw a work we created that long ago out of a huge pile of junk but it reveals the personality in
more than a figurative way. This piece, Dirty White Trash,
was created to give the impression that the moment you walked into the gallery, the first thing you saw was this immense
pile of rubbish that had been dumped there but it also revealed a silhouette of Tim and I, except that it was made out of
the packaging of the food that we'd ate during the time it took to make it, so it had this conceptual edge to it. Going back
to it years later I was amazed that we'd lived off this junk. It's serving more than one purpose. It's the stuff that kept
us alive when we made it which dates historically, but also reminds us that we are earning better now so we can eat healthier! [more laughter]
RR: This makes me think of the aspect of the ownership of these works. Living in my cupboards at home are the masters
of all my works, with the artwork, covers, etc. When I've made installations they can generally be taken down and stored in
a drawer! I barely have anything I've created that couldn't fit into a backpack.
SW: Well, you're lucky! You can move around...
RR: True. For example my show at the Pompidou Centre recently was a 12-screen DVD installation (Esprits de Paris
with Mike Kelley) that could be packed up into a small unit. In some sense I am that small mobile unit, always travelling,
creating work on the move.
SW: Well, that's fantastic and might be where art will go in the future, but it's also unfortunate because I think
that the object is still interesting.
RR: I'm curious about your relationship to these objects then. When you say you haven't seen this work for six years
how do you feel?
SW: Well, it's like having a child adopted. Tim and I went through a period of having no representation from a
gallery and therefore no support structure. There weren't that many galleries and no-one was really making money out of art,
so for us, not even being from London either, made it all the more difficult. In fact the gallery we are with now, Modern
Art, we started from scratch with them out a need for it to happen. So selling work was a novelty. Financially of course it's
rewarding and a boost to continue creatively, but often with pieces that we'd made I'd be in tears when our dealer told us a work
had been sold. My reaction would be disappointment. The money was not the reason I did it. Sometimes we'd
be sitting on ideas for three or four years, especially when we didn't have the finances to execute them. When we did
The New Barbarians, that piece was sitting around for three years before it got shown, from the concept, through the research,
to finding someone who could assist in the making of it. A lot of the time it took us so long to create work was that it was
financially difficult, and without the support structure of the gallery, we'd just have to go out and work ourselves to try
and earn the money to fabricate the sculptures. So the timescale of having an idea to having it presented is often around
three years, then you finally present it, you're nervous, you’ve been through hell for those three years, then someone wants
to buy it and you have to learn to let go.
RR: It reminds me of the reason that I like live concerts and performances because of their uniqueness, the one-off
quality of the shows. There is a unique quality to the situation, a visceral physical element. I sometimes think of my live
shows as sculptures, temporary objects that exist only for that moment in time.
SW: Yes, and that’s the addiction of live music!
RR: I'm just thinking now in closing, that there's this link in our approach to work in that I largely capture sound
from around cities, taking what might be the debris, the junk, the very ordinary and through my processes create something
extraordinary.
SW: Like a big sponge soaking it all up! The work speaks about where it comes from. I realised that every single material
we find ourselves working with has something to do with the environment. At the moment we are working with metal, and when
we made British Wildlife -- the piece with animals -- we accumulated the materials from Tim's dad who was an art tutor
who had "acquired" the creatures from a local museum for the students to draw from... They never made it out of his house,
so he had them positioned in his rooms like ornaments. When he died we didn't want them as objects in our house, so they
ended up in the studio and it seemed kind of obvious to use them sculpturally. Our work speaks the vernacular of the place
where it is created.
Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner) is an artist whose restless explorations of an experimental terrain have won him international admiration from,
among others, Bjork and Stockhausen. As well as producing
compositions and audio CDs, his diverse body of work includes soundtracks for films, performances, radio, and site-specific
intermedia installations. He has performed and created works in many of the world’s most prestigious spaces including
SFMOMA (USA), Hayward Gallery (London),
Pompidou Centre (Paris), Corcoran Gallery (DC, USA),
Tate Modern (London) and the Modern Museum Stockholm (Sweden).
He doesn't drink alcohol, tea, coffee, smoke or watch TV but he does have an addiction to white bread and milk..
Image © the artists, courtesy Modern Art, London, UK
© 2003 KultureFlash Limited
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