Art and the Public

Marcelo Spinelli: How important do you think it is that people have access to the kind of things you've been telling me in this interview?

Georgina Starr: Well, I think in this piece it really is all there, and in the Nine Collections. In the other pieces it's "how I made it"; the information is taken away and you're just left with the work. But in these two pieces I've really tried to put almost everything in it. You've got a book that describes things, and you've got all the videos there. You've got text to read and there are photographs and objects. So all of a sudden I'm placing things and making them more accessible, rather than putting everything under a veneer. It's all there for people to flick through; they can look at all the drawings and they can try out how to be invisible - I think that one's really important for this piece; that people could really join in rather than just sit. It could have been a movie or a film and it wouldn't have been the same.

MS: Especially in a gallery. With artists of your generation, a lot of the work is quite accessible, but something happens when it goes into the gallery.

GS: Yeah. It just ends up like a photo on a wall or something. I usually try to stay away from that, especially with the Nine Collections CD-ROM. You actually have to touch the screen; you can become involved in looking at the work and you can make choices about what you want to see, and what you want to hear. Rather than just giving it to you all the time, you actually have to figure it out yourself, which is I think really important. Otherwise people either get confused, or they get quite bored if they've not got any other insight apart from just that image or the object, or whatever.

MS: What do you think is the role of survey shows like the British Art Show?

GS: I think the British Art Show is a great thing to have. I really remember when I saw the British Art Show 1990. At the time I'd just finished my design course. I knew about artists, but I only knew about the popular ones; I knew about Hockney and I knew about the really obvious artists, like Warhol and people like that, but I didn't have any access to contemporary art whatsoever. I didn't know the gallery system that well. And I think to show it in different cities is a really good thing to do; to let everybody see exactly what is happening. That there's such a lot of people in it is quite good as well. I remember seeing it five years ago and being quite excited that there was stuff that I never knew was going on. It was like a completely new world. I think it's really good for that.

MS: Why do you think that this thing is so concentrated in London? Do you think it is to do with the market?

GS: I don't really know why that is. I think a lot of people who are interested in the arts in general always think that it happens here (and that sounds really bad when there are so many other cities that are into the arts as well). People think that this is a really concentrated place where you've got film, you've got art, you've got theatre you've got dance, and really a lot of it; I think it's just obvious why people come here. A lot of artists do move here, don't they.

MS: But at the same time places like Scotland seem to have created a scene for themselves.

GS: Yes, definitely in Glasgow. But I suppose most of the people who are in that scene are actually Scottish, so maybe it's good for them to make their own scene. I mean there's always this divide between Scotland and England, and maybe it's a good thing that they start their own, instead of everybody flocking to England and leaving Scotland behind.

MS: But although they may be based in London, a lot of the artists who are in the British Art Show come from other places originally. You come from Leeds, don't you? Other artists come from different regions and they bring that with them.

GS: That's quite good because it makes it more diverse. We come from different backgrounds and different sorts of lives, and I really like to bring that into the work as well. The history of where you are from is quite important. In the Seventh Museum piece especially, and definitely in the Visit to a Small Planet. I started to bring in personal history, of family and things like that, because it becomes quite poignant when you're not in Leeds any more. It becomes a bit like you're looking at it through a microscope, because it's so different being here - seeing family life and how people live here

MS: And also being able to value these experiences somehow, which may seem mundane and only to do with you. Which I think is something popular culture sometimes does a lot better than art, in terms of a general sense that you can recognise yourself as not being alone going through these experiences. For me, pop music has very much that sense; when you listen to songs about love, and you think Oh, I'm not the only one. Words somehow pop out, words that you've heard lots of times. Suddenly, when you are in that situation, it's like someone is reading your mind.

GS: I really felt that with this piece, the Nine Collections, because there's so much information in it. There are odd records in it, like Long Haired Lover From Liverpool, this old '70s record, and other things, and people that have seen it say, Oh I remember that and it triggers a memory. So it's nice to use those things, even though I thought nobody will think it is significant. But like you said, they do think it is, because loads of people have a sort of common history.

MS: Do you think it is a generation thing? Maybe because we are this generation we can't see it, but I don't really remember that we were so interested in revisiting old TV programmes. People begin to sample sounds from the opening tunes of old TV programmes. All these things. We all recognise each other from that. I remember when I was younger there was a sense of embarrassment because that was your childhood, that was naff, and you wanted to move forward.

GS: But now suddenly it's allowed to be really fantastic, isn't it. You're allowed to use it and it's really quite important. And I think at the moment, especially in the art scene, that has become really important; your own history is just as important as major things in history. I think that a lot of people are really concentrating on those things being important, rather than big political things, or something like that. They are just as important because when you are younger you don't remember certain political things, well, maybe you do, but the most memorable things are personal history, aren't they?

MS: It seems to have coincided with discussions around post-modernity. Really what we are talking about is much more general, about people who are not interested in cultural aesthetics. Or it's more of a feeling of the time we are in, somehow, and the way culture has moved on.

GS: I think maybe it is important now because we have always had TV. Your parents' memory of their childhood is not to do with that sort of culture. It's not to do with TV, maybe a bit of Hollywood movies, but not really to do with watching TV when they were five years old, because they didn't have TV. I think it's just now that it has caught up.

MS: As you say, I think our parents' generation was still caught within the glamour of Hollywood, whereas we still have that glamour, we still look at that aspect of it but also look at all the other things.

GS: Like all the bad things, all the bad TV programmes.

MS: But not always ironically, not always with a knowing look. I think it's warmer than that. It's a real sense of 'yes, that was really fantastic', and it was fantastic.

GS: And whoever says it wasn't, they're completely wrong. It's like that Visit to a Small Planet; in the reviews it's a B movie. But who cares: my memory of it meant that it wasn't, because it actually made me create something else from it. So it can't have been that bad.