Broken English and Elitism
Anya Gallaccio: It's all a big blur.
It was about 6 -7 months after the kettle piece in the summer. The show was already called Broken English [at the Serpentine Gallery in 1991].
I won't flatter myself; they didn't name the show after the piece of work, but I was asked to be in the show. Even at that time, the Goldsmiths' artists were getting a lot of flack for the whole Goldsmiths' phenomena.
There was a real backlash going on. It was a very complicated situation. I don't really want to go into that. Rachel [Whiteread] isn't part of Goldsmiths', but she had been looped into that.
This show was another show of mostly Goldsmiths' artists. Before it even happened everyone wanted it to fail. It was a very complicated situation to be in when your peers are around you. You can sense the animosity; all these people don't want you to succeed, and what do you do? There'd been this book called Technique Anglaise (Current Trends in British Art, edited by Liam Gillick and Andrew Renton) which had been brought out.
I wouldn't put the blame of the book on Liam Gillick, but basically Andrew Renton and Karsten [Schubert] and Maureen [Paley] brought this book out. It was supposed to represent the London art scene. It didn't.
Everyone involved in the book has reservations about it, but of course the book was being used as a kind of guide book, as a kind of bible for people outside that set who didn't know what was going on. Who were in a hurry, coming to London - as a directory to look up what they should go and see.
There are lots of problems with the book itself, but despite that the list of people was arrived at in a very haphazard manner.
Then there was the [Broken English] show and I just was thinking O.K., here we go again. And it seemed that I was being given an opportunity to redress the balance in some way, to show that I was not so complicit, there wasn't a massive conspiracy.
You're trapped in a situation: someone's asked you to do a show; if it's good for you to do it, you do it. I'm sure if you got nominated for the Turner Prize and you said, 'sorry I don't want to get involved in the politics of this' no one would hear about it. I don't know. You can't protest from the outside.
You have to be within a structure, engaged with a structure to change it, to have any effect.
So I agreed to be in the show and I had a very, very short period of time [to put my piece together, so] I asked everyone I knew and I got Andrew Renton's phone book and a couple of other people's, and I went through and I phoned all these people up who I didn't know (It was absolutely terrifying).
I asked them to send me photo-booth photographs of themselves. I decided I needed a formal device to link everything so there was no hierarchy - some people might send me huge pictures of themselves or whatever.
I think in retrospect I would have got more pictures if I'd actually gone round with a camera with black and white film and taken mug shots of everyone, because there had been a lot of [exhibition] openings at that time. Anyway, I was really panicking and thinking on my feet. I liked the idea of the photo-booth, it's a neutral space. Also, the people that work at the Serpentine, that look after the gallery, are artists. That's a policy that they have there. So I also asked all these private people, these people that you don't normally associate - some of the curators, the people that install the exhibition; there were successful people in there, there were some art students in there, there were curators, there were critics.
There were all sorts of people and I wanted it to be almost like autumn leaves in a kind of puddle. I had problems with the physical realization of the work. It was done very, very quickly. And the actual tank that the pictures were in was far too substantial; even though I had about two or three thousand photographs in the end, it looked like nothing. I spent three days at this photo booth, (International Photo-Me Factory), photographing the curtains to add colour.
They gave me all these different coloured curtains, so I made all these thousands and thousands of pictures. It took days just making all these pictures of the curtains, which I then varnished and I cut up, to represent all the people that I couldn't invite. I did it very, very quickly. But of course the piece was read in two very different ways.
There was a fan on the wall as well, so initially it moved the photographs around. They floated around in this pool and all the pictures were just thrown in at random. And it was very, very interesting; it was quite funny, the little groupings that appeared. If you knew the people in the art world you read the piece in a very different way.
People looked into the pool to see if they were there, who they knew, who they were next to, who was floating, who was sinking, all that kind of stuff. It was very, very funny to see the dynamics going on. People that you knew could not bear each other would end up next to each other in the pool. Or someone that was incredibly pushy would end up floating next to Anthony d'Offay or Leslie Waddington; just funny little stories that were going on in there. But then again, other people coming in who didn't know would just see all these anonymous faces and these colours or these people floating around. In that sense again, it's very true of the art world; they don't know who these people are. It's two very different conversations going on there.
[Recently] there's [been] a tendency with a small group of people to make art that's very elite.
The art world is very elite itself, that's the way it survives. That's the way it has to be to perpetuate itself, and there's a certain group of artists who align themselves with that and make very elite work. And I find I have a problem with that.
I feel that for me the best work functions on many different levels if you look back through art history. If you know something about your subjects, it's the same as going to see Shakespeare, you get more out of it. But at the same time you can go in to see Shakespeare and you don't know the play and you get something back, and for some people that would encourage them to go back and look into it further; but even if you don't you get something. I'm much more interested in making work that draws people in in that way, so I think for me the work has function on two levels. That it should be in one sense immediately accessible, and also be much more rewarding for people that can be bothered to do the work. I went to art school. I go and see a lot of art. I haven't actually ever studied art history, but I'm quite knowing. There are a lot of references within the work, clues or references to other figures, other accepted forms. But at the same time, for me, one of the most important aspects is that the work functions on a very physical, emotional basis as well.
I just feel some work is very knowing, which demands that you make a lot of effort with it, does it in a very obscure way; that often annoys me.
If a piece of work draws me in and is generous, then I want to go away and do the work, and do some reading or find out more about it. But it has to be generous to me in that way. Other people are very opposed to that; they think you should have to do all the work. I don't tend to respond so favourably to work that operates in that way.
Often children respond brilliantly to work, in that they're not frightened that they're going to say the wrong thing; they just respond. And they say incredibly pertinent things. I also think that real life, real experience is very, very important. It's something that is quite precious and precarious, and for me that is very important in the work.
I'm not interested in functioning in an alternative, marginalized position. In the '70s a lot of the feminist artists felt that they had to operate outside of that. And that was a very, very important time and they had to do that. But by them doing that, that has allowed me - earned me the right, the privilege or whatever you want to say - to function now in this mainstream space. But I wouldn't have been able to do that without those other women, those other people having that period of time outside.
Apart from Broken English, I don't think I've really dealt myself with those issues, but it does seem that to function well, to be able to have a bigger voice, you have to function within that establishment.