Lighting fires

In the artist's studio, sitting at a table, drinks and ashtray at one end - an unfinished work of art, involving a set of weighing scales and two metal cups, at the other.

Richard Wentworth:... Like a dragonfly, I don't stay on the subject. I go off to the side, and then come back to it. It's not that I actually forget the subject.

Jonathan Watkins: It's something that I've noticed very much. And you do come back to the subject. The way that you talk is a bit like the plot for Tristram Shandy. You start at one point and then there are a number of diversions.

Well, it doesn't make for good nine-to-five art. I can't work like that. I can't go into the studio in the morning, start sandpapering and by late afternoon have the undercoat done.

You were saying, before we started recording this conversation, that preparation for your forthcoming Japanese exhibition was particularly erratic.

Well, it's all to do with difference. When Mr Ogura, the gallery director, came to the studio, he sat here with the curator of the exhibition and Sumiko, interpreting for us. I was doing that awful thing, being a voyeur, jumping out of one's own experience, like being a photographer. I thought this must be what the whole East-West thing comes down to - failure to really meet, because your soul keeps jumping away and watching.

The highlight of our conversation involved a piece of wood, leaning in a corner of the studio, with three Japanese characters on it, just by chance - precisely the kind of chance I employ in my work. It wouldn't even have occurred to me, you know, 'there's a Japanese man coming, and somewhere there's that Japanese object. I must put it out of the way or accentuate it.' Mr Ogura said 'Where did you get that piece of wood?', so I said, 'It came from the Garden Festival. It was in the rubbish they threw away while they were making a Japanese teahouse.' He said 'Oh yes.' Then I asked him what the characters meant. He said, 'They mean "Floorboard".'

(Throws head back laughing)

Come on! I've picked up a piece of wood because it happened to have Japanese characters on it.

It might have said something like 'Earth, Heaven, Unity.'

I suppose I thought it might have said 'Frank, cut here', or 'Have gone to tea'. Or 'Deliver to site'. But it actually said 'Floorboard'. And Mr Ogura didn't laugh. I was about to explode with laughter. It was so ridiculous that I found myself in this compressed space, with such a complexity of difference.

I suppose it might explain why I make things in pairs. You know, this and that. Either, or. Here and there. It's a long-standing preoccupation, and I can speculate infinitely about what that pairing might mean. I'm not certain...

... And I've recently made something which might be mistaken for a mutated Jasper Johns - with tin of cat food, and a tin of dog food, but they're empty, with the tops taken off, open, the cans are soldered in place. The labels are still on.

(Picking up another work from elsewhere in the studio.)

Here's a version which I made earlier in the year. I like its sculpturalness - and the surface is like a blade. The placement of the cans is nice - by 'nice' I mean precise, particular. What 'nice' used to mean.

(Indicating the arrangement of cigarettes in the ashtray as if it were still-life)

We all make 'nice' things. There's a logic about it. I think God's in this little arrangement here. The impromptu posing as permanent. There's an inevitability of such things...

It is an inevitability but you weren't expecting it either. That's what you find so thrilling about it. When you say God is here -

God with a small g... Determinism with a big D.

(Pointing to the ashtray)

It's not as if there's a set of logical steps which led to this. You weren't imagining it was going to happen.

No. That's why a junk shop is an interesting place. You go there, if you're so minded, because you want a kind of emotional and intellectual tourism, and you're not obliged to do anything about it. You don't have to buy anything in a junk shop.

You can't cruise in a sweet-shop. Shop-keepers would say 'What do you want?' Supermarkets are different, because they're like models of cities, you can get lost in a back street...

In relation to your use of cans, which could have come from a supermarket - probably did come from supermarket shelves - there's a difference between supermarket shopping and shopping in a junk shop or bookshop.

Yes, but there is that expression 'being pleasantly surprised'. A supermarket is a pretty dull phrase book of contemporary life. A Berlitz for eating or something. You don't go into supermarkets in the way you'd go into one of the Italian shops on Clerkenwell Road, and think 'Fabulous, they've got that ham in.'

This is interesting in the way it relates to Pop art, but by no means am I suggesting you're a Pop artist. There is a difference between finding a set of scales in a junk shop and going to buy pet food in a supermarket. It is a significant difference. Perhaps I'm trying to draw a line between Pop and Dada.

You've used cans before, but the kinds of cans that you buy tend to have a classic design. A classic sardine can... It seems that you're looking for archetypes. In a previous interview it was suggested that the kind of objects you choose might be seen to signify a nostalgia...

I'm probably talking about design. I'm interested in how things are made. By design I mean the character you find in a six-inch nail, or the tread of a tyre. Or a plough... I'd like to know more about ploughing. I understand it intellectually, but I have no experience of it. When you see it being done you realise that it's very primitive, that it's been going on for thousands of years. Now it's done with an oil-driven tractor, but it's still incredibly sensual and highly artistic - whether you go across the contours in a field or against them.

Ploughing as a philosophical activity?

Yes, it's obviously very boring - or, rather, it's very continuous, and you can't afford to get bored in the middle of it. You have to keep going. I don't know what ploughmen think about when they're doing a field.

... I like making things, but I'm too much of an intellectual snob to enjoy making things that much. My days in the studio are not spent to the hum of the saw and the rasp of the file.

But the sculptures you make are very finely finished.

I think of 'finish' in the same way I'd think of saying something properly. I see it as a kind of exactitude.

You talk about language all the time. Its very important to you. You're not just interested in the can, you're interested in the label.

I've suddenly realised that the things I'm interested in have got labels on them. I'm interested that things don't want to be what we call them, because they're always dragging in a whole pile of other stuff. However much we try to control the world, the world is always turning round and yapping at us, and being different. We obviously contribute to that.

For example, if I stand on a chair and change a lightbulb - and for that moment the chair is a set of steps - the chair isn't a chair. I quite like that... There are all these unforeseen things. And they're all human exchange.

I assume animals don't wonder, but we wonder all the time. And we are given to reverie. If something goes on in the studio, it's probably reverie, and a certain amount of melancholy as well - but reverie and melancholy are not unrelated. It seems a very odd thing, but as soon as you put something somewhere, it's able to be something else - and maybe a thousand other things, if there were a thousand people there to think about it...

The joke about the tins is that suddenly I realised they come with labels. Sardine tins come in a certain shape, which is related to the contents, the little fishes. There is a vast number of things which go into tins, some of which we give high status to, some of which are really base. Keeping the labels on is quite novel for me.

(Referring to the unfinished work at the other end of the table)

... I had these steel cups standing together upright, the lips touching, kissing each other. That pair have now been filed so that they become one object...

... Siamese...

... marrying, interpenetrating. It's like some earlier work where circular things are meshed into other circular things. They make figures of eight, and there's an odd dynamic in that... If the object is a cup, other things happen - you've only got one mouth, but we often drink with other people.

I put the cups on their side and suddenly they seemed more poignant, stranger, maybe because then they resembled binoculars.

Also they become less functional. They might have contained something, now spilt out. The weighing machine might measure something lost. It's very sad, that absence - you were talking about reverie and melancholy.

... Cans suggest the way we pack up our wonder. It's like the Turin Shroud, any of those things in which you invest belief.

At home, in a suitcase, we've hundreds of stones collected over the years and we don't know what they are. Some might be arrow heads. There's one which looks like the wildest fossil, but it might be just a bit of white cement. Perhaps we should go to the Geological Museum and find out. I suppose we have a suitcase which we know is full of disappointment.

It's new for me to pay so much attention to what it's like opening up the cans. Before I just needed a tin, the image, the recognition.

The idea of vessels tipped over, cans opened, what is your interest in that? What does it signify - or are you feeling around something?

I'm feeling around. My procedures are like being nervous at dinner, playing with the knife to see if it fits in the gap between the leaves of a table.

I remember being bored at school, and irritated that the width of two floorboards didn't equal the length of my foot. I was using the available dimensions and order of the world and seeing where one might fit. And then realising that one is not exact.

I've always measured myself against objects in the world... In France, I went to buy some steel in a steel yard. mere was a beautiful guillotine there - it had shaped holes punched into its side, angle, T, square and round, through which lengths of steel were put for cutting. I bought two round bars, six metres long, which had to be cut in half. The guillotine operator posted one bar through the round hole until it balanced, and then he cut it.

I thought this was the sexiest thing I'd ever seen. I thought it was fantastic. I asked the operator if I could photograph him doing it again. He looked at me as if I was a complete idiot, and asked me why I wanted to take a photograph. I told him that I thought it was delicious, him finding the middle of the bar by using its weight. He said, 'C'est logique'.

This is a superlative version of me trying my feet on the floorboards.

What are you aspiring to?

I yearn for that directness. But I find it difficult to say what meaning there is in that - maybe its half-way to some hippy notion about solstices, or being in the right place at the right time, seeing the sun come up through a gap between stones at Stonehenge... all that stuff.

Even in the city dawn is a magical thing.

There's something archetypal in your response.

I like the anthropology of it, realising that I don't have to take it all for granted. We are highly described by these things, and we conform to them. And they're very deep. The power of a metropolis doesn't drive these feelings out.

Do these feelings transcend culture?

No, I think they might be culture.

Most of the time I think our culture's completely crackers. I think, "Do I really live like this?" ...

... Flying, in many ways, is one of the most exhilarating things which our century has to offer, but we know it completely destroys time, gives us no sense of going anywhere - flying, we don't wear out any shoe leather whatsoever. We just arrive feeling a bit weird. We notice people speaking French, so we think this must be Paris. Here are some people queueing, this must be Moscow.

It's amazing how often you talk about talking... Language is so particular, so accidental, like two cigarette ends in an ashtray.

You call it 'accidental', but I think it's another of God's jokes.

(Pointing to the ashtray, a photograph that appeared during the conversation, the glasses and bottles.)

We know why these objects are not all up at the other end of the table - because we're here, and we can only stretch so far, and so forth.

... Also you don't stub out cigarettes on the photograph because we've already given it the status of a photograph. We tend to leave photographs that way up, not upside down.

But, now that we've been talking about it, stubbing out my cigarette out on the photograph wouldn't be so radical.

... which reminds me of something that happened during the punk years. Along the street from where I live, there was an empty building which some Dutch punks squatted. It was probably 1977-78. They were pretty wild - lots of gobbing on people from windows. Full-frontal, hard punk stuff. As the summer of their squat wore on, bit by bit, through one activity or another, mainly through sheer decrepitude, the windows in the house all fell out. I would walk by, and I remember thinking quite clearly 'How radical, living in a house with no windows'. Also, I remember thinking 'It's still a house - OK, it's missing this transparent element we call "glass" but it hasn't stopped being what we call a "house".'

Through these open spaces they continued to do what they did. When the autumn came, little by little, bits of plastic, polythene, were taped in, in a very ad hoc way. A bit of blanket here, a bit of cloth there. Mostly plastic. By the time winter came, all the windows were filled in, albeit with 'incorrect' materials. I remember thinking that's the beginning of civilisation! Whatever their values, their intentions, their intellectual opposition to a system that may or may not be, they simply were not physically strong enough to cope with the fact that the temperature was dropping and it made their lives uncomfortable. So they re-invented 'glazing'.

I don't know what grand meaning there is in that kind of thing. I do enjoy us feeling those forces, engaging with those forces.

In previous interviews what do you feel other writers might have missed?

There's a remark I read of Oldenburg's, where he explained that no one really knew what his work was about. It was charming, as it suggested 'No one's going to find out about me' and at the same time, wistful, 'I wish somebody would find out about me, because no one's told me yet.' In a way that's slightly how I feel.

You want them to find out without you telling them?

Well, I'm pretty talkative. It's not that I'm, as it were... suddenly I'm not sure if I was being honest... that I'm intentionally secretive. I think that we're all secretive. Perhaps that's why we talk, because by talking one diverts, taking the conversation over here, because we're not going over there. Because we can't face ourselves really.

I suppose I really don't understand what I do. I can see patterns in my work, but I find it completely impossible to be programmatic.

(Picks up a pen and draws a diagram on notepaper)

We draw this sort of spiralling thing and the line keeps crossing itself, but nevertheless the whole thing proceeds.

Again, this is like Sterne's graph of the progress of his novel.

(Drawing in the air)

It starts there and it does this. It moves across the page, but in the most incredibly complex way...

In my work I want things to fit, to be apposite.

I really like lighting fires. I get pissed off with other people who can't do it. I can't bear coming into a room and somebody's there with a half-lit fire still poking at it. It's not to say that every fire I light goes. But I love the process of talking to the flames, so you encourage and nourish them. That's all you have to do. You often see people who sort of shove things in or try oversized lumps of wood.

I think that if I went back into teaching, even a little bit, I would take students to a bomb site and I'd tell them to light a fire, each, separately. Because I think it contains all you need to know - a very simple set of almost finite relationships. And as soon as you understand about things that are too wet, too dry, too big, too small, there's the flame - and when it gets beyond point X, it will take care of itself. It's a very sustaining experience doing that. I wouldn't like a month to go by without having lit a fire.