A Stylish Start

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Dan Green: If I might start by asking you, as many have done, about your choice of the man often dubbed ‘Britain's Favourite artist’ as an opener; the use of the household name alongside a look at his earlier work might surprise the public yet allows for a more original show and one that nicely catches the media's eye.  How successful do you feel the opening shows have been in capturing the public's imagination? 

Alex Farquharson: In terms of volume of people we certainly have, although that is for other reasons too; the fact we were opening the doors to this new building, but we’ve had over 80,000 people which has exceeded our greatest hopes.  Anecdotally, which is the best response I can give now, there seems to have been a lot of interest.  I think with Hockney there are a lot of things going on in terms of how we have approached that early work.  First off, there are aspects of the exhibition that are quite well known to people, essentially the final paintings of that series of the mid to late 60’s when he was painting pools and lawns and all those iconic images of LA, but I think his earlier work was unfamiliar to people and I don’t think that people have had the chance to see his restless experimentation at that time and the incredible journey that he and the work goes on in that 8 years.  I don’t think people expected to see abstract work or work that combined multiple styles within one image and I think that was quite new to people.  

So yes, in one sense we wanted to begin with someone very familiar that would help introduce us to a very broad audience that we wanted to reach and on the other hand we wanted to show this very familiar figure in a new light; one thing I wanted to emphasise was how current that work looks right now and while on the one hand reconstructing something of the art historical and social context in which that work was made and sprang from.  I also wanted, given that we are a centre for contemporary art, the art of today, to almost suggest the illusion that if one forgot who Hockney was this could be an exhibition of a brand new artist.  I think in a way the sense that might work was suggested by the incredible interest of artists from today in the exhibition and the links that can be made from the last 10 years.  This is something we really wanted to draw out partly through the Frances Stark show, although that is also an exhibition in its own right, the Artists' Cinema programme around it, particularly the inclusion of someone like Mark Leckey and then through the public programme of talks.  One thing that makes the work so radical is how ‘out’ and ‘out there’ it was about his sexuality and what makes it such a radical treatment of sexuality is the ease with which he does it: the openness, the wit and the confidence, given that throughout that period sex between men in this country was illegal.  So we are not used to seeing statements of that kind in the art of that time, we are far more used to seeing that in the last 10-15 years, but there are many other traits of the art including its visual qualities that I think look really ‘now’.  I think for example you could think of a whole host of artists from today to juxtapose with that early work, it could be Enrico David, Jack Pearson and Elizabeth Peyton among others and in a way I feel that earlier work has almost found more company in our present moment than it had at the time.  Another thing I love about that period in Hockney’s exhibition is the way it really quite directly alludes to other art made at that time, particularly abstract art, but it displaces those various references into a figurative and, in the best sense, highly contrived context; I think that this is something that is far more current in the art of today than it was then. 

DG: I think that chance to look at something with the knowledge of now was  quite interesting.  The screening of ‘A Bigger Splash gave an opportunity to look at it with the knowledge of things like reality TV now and the impact of what we now know as culture; that discussion with the director who was perhaps looking at it through the eyes of someone at the time, allowing a different interpretation of how one might see it if it was made now. 

AF: I think the future possibilities of the past are always really fascinating and is an idea worth playing with and is an idea that is present in our new exhibition when we are going back on the historical moment.  The next exhibition contains work by Kabakov, Julias Koller and Stano Filko, its really for what they mean now and how they can perhaps acquire new meaning or more meaning subsequently than they can in their own moment, so when we do present historical moments within our contemporary programme that’s very much the approach we take. 

DG: That’s certainly evident with the use of Hockney and the bringing in of Mark Leckey and Frances Stark, the use of the established figure yet bringing in someone new, perhaps less known such as The Otolith Group within Star City. 

AF: I think audience wise, of course for most of the audience David Hockney leads people to Frances Stark, although Frances is very well known and admired in the art world, she’s not known beyond the art world, and I think likewise for the contemporary art audience Frances Stark leads do David Hockney in a sense that she becomes a vehicle through which to see that early work that’s apparently familiar in very contemporary terms.  I see it as a kind of two-way traffic, and in a way something that links either end of our programme and our approach to audience in ensuring that we are communicating meaningfully on different levels. 

DG: So Frances Stark.  I’m quite intrigued by the artist themselves and the work, Stark using a lot of herself within her work and Hockney as well; I was fascinated by the Rake's Progress pieces.  But then Hockney moves away from that and takes in the world and culture a bit more, there is that reflection of the artists path of starting within yourself and moving outwards, expanding horizons to the World as you grow, learn and take in other things.  It seems there might be a reflection of that within Nottingham itself with Nottingham Contemporary opening there’s bigger international things coming perhaps the city’s viewpoint is opened? 

AF: If you’re an artist and making contemporary art, whether you are making it in Nottingham or New York or London, Berlin or Bordeaux, a smaller city in another country, one way or another it's an international cosmopolitan language which isn’t to say that it doesn’t have regional variants or that in non first-world locations that it hasn’t got specific relations to a society and a politics of a given location, but its fundamentally an international language and artists aspire to be part of that, so I think it's quite hard to draw a distinction in terms of types of art based on where artists are from based on our own locality, and I’d like to think that whatever we show brings new meaning that connects to what’s here.  Its often hard to anticipate exactly how, and of course there are various ways of doing that directly as we did last year by working with contemporary historical sites introducing contemporary art here, I think things like things like Nottingham Contemporary increase the internationalism of the culture of somewhere like Nottingham and I think that’s very good for Nottingham, and it also exports Nottingham because people come to know about Nottingham particularly in our world through something like Nottingham Contemporary, and through a lot of the art and the ideas we bring here and that find a home here, and I think they have found a home here I guess through the volume of response we’ve had.  Of course audience numbers in general but also most of the events we’ve held, the talks the films and so on have been really fully booked.  That suggests to me there is already an appetite, a desire and often an understanding of these things and its hugely gratifying, it means the context already exists and we can work with it, increase it and diversify it and so on. 

DG: To pick up on that theme of the events; there seems to have been a focus on style, through ‘A Bigger Splash’ with Mark Leckey and the look at Architecture and art in the changing city; that forward-looking idea with heavy reference to what has passed, cultural shifts etc. 

AF: Possibly; I guess style was a component to what we were looking to discuss through the public programme in the first season, and I guess it was emphasised by the title to Hockney's show – ‘A Marriage Of Styles’ – I think maybe the interesting question is we think of style as meaningless, but it’s the language through which to convey meaning and content, and I think of style as content in its own right, you mention Mark Leckey and I think he’s someone that in his work explores that.  So what is the meaning of style?  In the case of a Dandy it’s highly meaningful, it articulates a relationship between the self and the world one that’s in someway about disaffection and critique albeit in a performative and sometimes celebratory way, so I think style is meaningful and is there to be decoded and that was an aspect of the kind of discussions that the first exhibitions gave rise to.  I think it’s always present when you look at art and in general material culture, and sometimes that style relates to meaning and content and other times it’s a variance within.  We live in super-stylised times, the fashion industry and essentially all the commercial arts are dedicated to new styles which come to define eras, but ever smaller increments of time, months, seasons.  We live in times when style is obviously very powerful and the question is what does style mean? 

DG: I’m intrigued by your quote in the handout guide regarding Frances Stark’s work sometimes being about the risk of opprobrium when an artist shows work; how has that experience been from the perspective of opening Nottingham Contemporary? 

AF: I think the opprobrium thing was specifically in relation to Frances Stark’s work and how her work is about, in a way, the anxiety but sometimes the thrill of the passage between the private space of her life; her work in the studio, being an audience of one and simply being an individual over and beyond being a public figure as an artist, and that journey into the public sphere specifically the scenario of exhibition which each of her works or many of her works anticipate.  But of course, thinking back to the period before it opened, of course you are very concerned that it’s a success and finally you don’t know what the audience response is; you can research these things as much as you like, you can get to know what happens in a city, what responses there are to culture and visual art in your city and you can also look at comparable venues of a similar size doing something similar in other perhaps equivalent cities; you can look abroad, you can look at all kinds of marketing strategies and have all sorts of curatorial ideas and you can weigh all these up, but having decided on your plan for the launch (artistically, educationally in terms of marketing and so on), the rest is unpredictable; its down to people and how they respond. 

We were fairly confident that we would do well in many respects and were more unsure about others, and in that sense the opening has been hugely gratifying because so far its just been very successful across the board.  Its particularly gratifying to see such a warm and large scale response that’s quite clearly new to going to contemporary art exhibitions, but perhaps goes to the museum or something more historical or more traditional or something that’s closer to entertainment than uncompromising exhibitions of contemporary art, and the general response we’ve picked up is that they feel very at home in the space and have liked the exhibitions a lot; I think that people feeling at home in the space is very important to us beyond the audience figures, we all know that to people not used to going to modern galleries they come over as quite intimidating, they look unlike most spaces, they often look white and frigid, or like laboratories and they almost sometimes convey a sense that they expect a certain kind of elite viewer to enter them, but I think that’s really not been the case in our building with the activity we’ve done so far, I think part of that is testimony to our front of house team who have created a very welcoming environment for people.  So its great that there seem not to be those hang-ups, that people feel at home there, they feel its theirs which it is, that was such an important message to convey. 

DG: Perhaps we could look forward to Star City, a bit different, group show.  What can we expect?  What can you reveal? 

AF: One of our aims was to make this season in a way as different as possible from the first season, I think they are both equally relevant and equally contemporary I suppose in a very simplistic sense you could say one is set in California and the other in the former Eastern Bloc.  I suppose they both have an element of history to them and they both have an element of mass visual culture, because amongst all the artworks in Star City, something like 15-20 artists there, will be artefacts from the Cold War, there will be these amazing, quite beautiful and quite unreal looking, from our perspective, Soviet propaganda posters of the space race from the 60’s and 70’s, there will be artefacts relating to the space programme like a cosmonauts glove that went up there, there are Science fiction toys of the 60’s and 70’s from Poland given to children, so that begins to suggest the theme of the exhibition which is what was the future like under Communism.  In a way that’s a bit of a paradoxical question of course, putting the future in a past tense but also talking about a moment when the future was present if you like and I think there are different aspects to that; I think the future was very present during the Cold War in general, it was present in the US, and I think people had an amazing will, they might have had a fear of the future because of the threat of nuclear war but there was also this amazing desire to imagine the future and imagine when we will be flying around in spaceships and colonising outer space.  Essentially technology, besides the bomb, would lead to incredible improvement and this wondrous life.   

In the Soviet Union it meant more than that essentially because of communism.  Communism was about achieving this utopian, classless society, the class struggle would be over and everyone would be equal, the state would govern on behalf of the people and no-one would want for anything.  The paradox under communism, both in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, was that the way that politics were communicated was that there was always a gap between everyday existence and the present conveyed monopolistically to the people.  So the people were always in this utopian future according to the official propaganda.  They would see pictures of themselves as these happy agricultural labours or these happy factory workers, everyone working together united, equal, prosperous; clearly seeing that the future hadn’t arrived but officially they were living in the future already.  There is a great Russian philosopher and art theorist called Boris Groys that has written about this, and he is one of the inspirations for the exhibition, and he talks about at the end of communism in '89 and '91.  For Russians they had to return to the past, they had to return to things like banks and insurance policies and their only real knowledge of that was from 19th century novels by Tolstoy and Checkov, so they had to kind of return from the future to the past, Capitalism was a thing of the past that had supposedly been defeated, it was an imperfect past on the way to a Communist future that they had been told had arrived but of course didn’t arrive with any degree of perfection at all, and now they were back in the past and they had to learn these old 19th century capitalistic ways.  So that’s one of the contradictions in the exhibition, and what is similar to the first season as an approach to showing contemporary art to a large new audience is we are seeking to take people from what they know to something unfamiliar or provide unfamiliar perspectives on that known and familiar.   

I think a lot of people are intrigued by the space race, how can you not be intrigued by the Cold War, we are in a quite different era now, the space programme will always be intriguing and science fiction is part of popular culture; its not really part of avant garde culture or not often, so we take all these things that are known.  But what I think the show reveals is that we really know them from the perspective of the former west via NASA, via actually also a very propagandistic popular culture who’s alien movies were essentially allegories about evil Soviets being better off dead than red.  In a sense we are showing something similar but instead of Neil Armstrong we are showing Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, instead of Star Wars we are talking about Stanislaw Lem, Solaris and so on, so the future was both a parallel project for the east and west, for capitalism and communism but it also meant something different, it meant something different in ordinary life, it meant something different in terms of politics and ideology of the state and it had a different philosophy, both in terms of the official philosophy and a kind of dissident philosophy and one thing that I think is interesting is that science fiction often in communist countries at that time was a very experimental philosophical and literary genre while in the west it tends to be much more pop cultural and even really great writers, Philip K Dick and so on, if you look at the covers of their books, it’s as if they are trashy pop novels and not great books.  So in the west science fiction has that stigma and in the east I think that science fiction and the speculation it gives rise to enabled artists to communicate and think in a much more open, philosophical and potentially critical way than if they were setting their work, whether it was art or literature, in the here and now because then the critique of the regime would be much more apparent, but by setting it in the future or somewhere very remote like space, you could establish a kind of distance.  So its going to be wide ranging; as well as three characters from the 60’s and 70’s, (Kabakov, Julias Koller and Stano Filko), it’s a way of showcasing a lot of the leading figures in art from the former eastern bloc.  It includes many of my favourites from that region so I think its going to be very exciting to bring that point of view as well.  Every artist in the show would be having solo shows at venues this size, so we are very fortunate to be working with such a stellar cast. 

DG: To finish, I wanted to ask about how Nottingham Contemporary is connecting with the arts community, I know there has been consultancy and so on before with the previous projects: how do you see this moving forwards? 

AF: First off I’d say it was very good and mutually beneficial.  Over and above the general audience response we’ve had I think I would feel there was something missing about Nottingham Contemporary if there wasn’t a vital artist-led scene as well. I think also the artist led scene, the venues, curatorial projects and on the other hand us but also other public venues, more institutions if you, like all have a different and respected role to play within an ecology of the visual arts scene in the city, and I think that’s working really well and I think its something that’s known about and admired around the country.  People are talking about the artist-led scene and they’re talking about us and they’re linking the two, which I think is really interesting.  So I think its really important that the artist-led scene remains independent, and I’m sure the artists would ensure it would be anyway, but I think its important that what we do is complimentary, which is not to say we do the same thing, and one thing we do is ensure we are in close contact with representatives of the artist-led scene here and we share with them, usually first, what were going to be doing in 2, 3, 4 months time and we invite responses to it, which could be completely independent responses in peoples own spaces or if both sides think its fitting we integrate it within our own plans. 

I would say that Nottingham artists are amongst our core audiences and I think that our public programme is, as well as working very closely with the university and being of great benefit to students in working in cross disciplines and so on, I think is a great facility to artists here; I think it really enriches the critical context within which artists make work and I think critical context, an international plugged-in critical context, is all important really for the success of artistic practice, so I think we provide a medium and a quite rich access to these ideas, these figures.   

In addition we find ways of incorporating artists within a programme that is primarily international in its orientation, so we’ve shown a number of people in various projects to date, we’ve commissioned S Mark Gubb, for example, he made one of our artworks but also signs of course, so that’s pretty spectacular.  Blue Firth contributed to the Byron show, so we look for ways to integrate artists within our wider programme too.  So I would say that artists are really important to the livelihood of Nottingham Contemporary and hopefully vice-versa too.  We can also act as an international advocate for the arts scene here, and one thing we can do is direct attention to the other spaces; because we’re very large, because we’re very central, because we’re very near the station we will be the first port of call for national and international visitors, particularly that art travelling influential art audience.  They often ask us, ask me, what else should I do, what else is happening or can you tell me where Moot is, this kind of thing, so we can act as a signpost literally but in other senses as well and I think that really helps profile and platform the practices that come from here.  I think that we are, hopefully a very important reason for particularly fine artists graduating form Nottingham Trent University deciding to stay here rather than moving to London or Sheffield or Manchester.  I think that with our arrival, the New Art Exchange, Moot and all the artists organisations that have, in a way, followed in Moot’s wake and done their own thing and with the new Fringe for the British Art Show, this is a real critical mass for a city this size.  There are lots of reasons to stay here, not necessarily forever but to make a contribution for a while, and maybe to go away and come back.  A lot of people are talking about it, not just us but Nottingham in general as far as arts are concerned.