Always On My Mind...

Memory

David Lillington: Presumably without Jung you wouldn't have your title, 'Collective Memory'

Greg Hilty: It's not quite Jungian because the collective memories we're talking about are actually quite conscious. There's a movement between the unconscious and the conscious, between things that appear very much on the surface and things that disappear under the surface. And how they come up and down. We've got Jung in the catalogue though. A text about flying saucers.

Sounds nice. Is there a distinction to be made between the collective memory theme and the other theme apparent in this show, that of private versus public domains?

The difference is that what we're trying to do is to explore ideas of collective memory of all different kinds as embodied in the body, or in mass media or in art for that matter; you know, there's a lot of art that's happened in the past and it may be seen by a specialist audience but it's also known by a general audience and there's a lot of value embodied in these things. I think we're questioning the extent to which you can talk about a collective memory, the extent to which fears or emotions are common across cultures and across times, so we're bringing together disparate media and people from different countries.

What exactly is your notion of the collective memory? You say it's both conscious and unconscious?

Yes, absolutely.

You've written that 'memory is often embodied in public objects'. What's the opposite of that? What is a private object?

Narelle Jubelin's work would be a case in point. She's making these petit point works which look like domestic objects, the sort of thing people would have in their homes, and that you would think of as a representation of a memory that is private to you. And then the thing itself is also a private souvenir that can be handed down from generation to generation, so it would clearly have some resonance for the people who owned it, but she's given that a twist by reproducing very well known scenes or monuments, so there's a flow between something you'd see in the public domain and recognise in that sphere and something you would see and recognise as being private.

So what's new? Isn't all art like that?

I don't think it needs to be different to need pointing out. We talk about the crossover between tradition and innovation and that's absolutely fundamental to the whole development of art but I think that you can look at it from a certain angle. I've not known any other exhibition that deals with collective memory, even if a lot of the same issues have come up. At the moment art is in an in between position.

Between what and what?

Between having public significance and having none.

Hasn't that been true all century? In fact hasn't it always been true?

I'm sure it has.

Couldn't you have put any artists there and had the same catalogue essays and it would still have made sense?

Well not the same essays since they talk specifically about the artists.

You know what I mean.

It's a subject that has a wide application. You certainly you could have had 20 exhibitions that had the same title and the same theme. We've limited it to 23 artists. Which is really a very small number for something that tries to have ambitions. There could have been an entirely different personnel but we focussed on these because of their current work and because in some cases they are very specific bodies of work and as a grouping to make some dynamic whole that would make a good exhibition, that would say more than the sum of its parts.

Is Joe Public going to grasp these notions?

I think part of the point of doing it is that it doesn't need to be grasped intellectually. A lot of exhibitions that have great integrity from an intellectual point of view don't feel all that interesting or don't hold together as physical experiences and that seemed important to the artists we were looking at. As for extending it outside the gallery - we don't have any illusions about thousands of people seeing something outside and rushing into the gallery to get more - a lot of people may not pay any attention and may not necessarily know what they're seeing but it should create that moment of unease or moment of recognition or of something that makes it worthwhile.

Obviously, the worst thing is to patronise the general public.

I think so.

Sound

Why is there suddenly a fashion for sound pieces?

It may be part of a fashion for artists to use all different kinds of materials. There really seem to be no rules at all. People who would call themselves sculptors are using anything. There's been a very definite history of sound work since the late 60s. Katherina Fritsch will be showing a composite piece, including paintings and sculpture and the sound from a record that she made called 'unken' which means 'toads' and is of the chirping of toads. Gary Hill has a sound track to his video piece. In each case they're quite quiet. Then there's Jon Kessler's machine and Christian Marclay's single performance.

Why toads?

I think it might be a case of using sound as another register, for its own sake.

Barbarism

I think Ann Hamilton's work will be a real surprise for people, she has not ever shown here before and it's always worth seeing them. I've seen three of her pieces before. In reproduction there's a sense of them being quite theatrical, which they are, but when you experience them it's quite different because there's always some sort of sound, even if it's just the sound of somebody washing his hands, and there's always some kind of smell and some kind of warmth and always something organic about them that keeps you from feeling manipulated. You feel like you're inhabiting something rather than watching it, which I think is quite an important distinction.

She's quite unique in doing that. I think it could be quite disturbing, the way the skin looks and the links with lampshades made out of human skin and things like that. The stamps that they put on the pigskin - different numbers and letters - make the connections quite obvious. It evokes traumatic histories and being so animal based it suggests something literally before our culture, an animal culture. She's always linking that to real culture: there's the raw pigskin and then the very finished and perfumed soap. The distance between them seems to be what interests her.

The move towards barbarism is welcome. The cool school stuff is fine if it's good but it can be so bloodless. What's the significance of this fashion? Is it because we're in the 90s?

I don't know. It's like the sound element. It's a part of people's experience. It would be a pity if everybody was slaughtering animals and showing them in a gallery because it would lose its point.

At least it's...

something real. Of course it's not just blood and guts. It's also sex, explicit sex, as in the case of Jeff Koons. Talking of the 'cool school' - he seems to embody the logical development from one to the other. There's a clear line in what he's doing. It is hard-hitting and it makes you question a lot of things but it seems entirely unemotional. His new work is the most unerotic thing you could imagine, even if it's terribly explicit. Another example is Sophie Calle, who in quite cool presentations evokes danger and unease and rather close personal relations. It's like if you're with somebody you've never met and they touch you. It feels like that. I think that that wide spread of somehow trying to get close to an audience, either a general audience or to some kind of ideal viewer is probably going to characterise future work.

The three artists you've mentioned all use 'real materials'. I mean, not chemicals, like paint is ground rocks and so on.

Although Koons still keeps the bridge between the completely artificial and the completely real.

Whether his wife's a 'real material' or not, I don't know.

Interesting question.

Metaphor

Do you think that these artists have a different idea of metaphor from the artists in the last big show like this, 'Falls the Shadow' of 1984?

The difference is embodied in something Robert Smithson said: 'time turns metaphors into things and stacks them up in cold rooms.' It's a really telling phrase. These artists do deal with metaphors and with the kind of analogical frame of mind - that things can stand in for other things, but it's part of our material reality, it's not an artistic, a poetic intervention, it's dealing with things around us and I think that's quite a significant difference.

But wasn't art always doing that? Doesn't metaphor by definition always deal with things you know?

Yes. But now it's not trying to take them into another realm which you would call 'art', necessarily.

You mean it's less magical?

It's a difficult question. It's still magical...

Less Platonic. Less Platonist even.

Yes. It always seemed that how ever effective work like that was there was a difference between art and life. Was it Plato?... No, it was Aristotle, excuse me, who said that there are right names for things and wrong names for things and the wrong names are metaphors. And that there's always a division between reality, however you define it, and description - which description it's usually the role of the artist to create or enact. At present there is a blurring of that distinction. Artists are taking metaphors from a broad culture, metaphors which are actually a part of our material reality and bringing them back into their art. So there's a weaving between two things that doesn't deny magic and artistic activity - which is still valuable and different from other things that happen - but is somehow not so exclusive.

Do you know any good analytical texts on this subject of visual metaphor?

No. I don't.

A couple of the contributors to Technique Anglaise spoke of the work in that book as 'non-metaphorical'. There's been some talk of 'death of metaphor'. I don't know what this means. Isn't all art metaphorical of its very nature?

The artists here aren't trying to take you into a spiritual realm. It's as if spirituality is again part of our material reality, and a part of us. It's just another gloss on reality, or what we think when we're in another frame of mind. Julian Opie was once saying that he tried to find the image of an ideal table. What he ended up sculpting was a table. That's what it was. A table. Is it an ideal table that comes to him from the spiritual realm or is it the material reality that makes sense? The point is that the ideal form turned out to be an everyday form as well. And where do you draw the line? Is there an ideal form? Or is it that the everyday form creates the ideal form? That seems more likely.