SR/RS

The following interview with Queensland artist Scott Redford, was conducted by Robert Schubert, via post, over a 2 month period.

RS I don’t want to spend too much time talking about the influence of Abstract Expressionism since its been covered elsewhere, but could you, anyway, explain the relationship of your work to Abstract Expressionism?

SR Abstract Expressionism was the first art movement that I understood, as it were. I swallowed whole all that guff about Pollock etc., when I was 15 or 16. I used to try to paint like De Kooning and from there moved onto Rauschenberg, Johns and Dine.

However, what really fascinated me was Minimalism, which I didn’t understand at all, though I really loved the look of it. Also I had and have a strong figurative strain in my work which pops up now and then. I don’t see Abstract Expressionism, however, as a discrete entity.

RS So the interests of Pop Art are important to you?

SR Yes but again I would include in this discussion the Nouveaux Realists: Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri. Arman, Martial Raysse, Cesar, Niki de Saint-Phalle ect.. Basically, I look at Post-War Western art where I see as many similarities as differences between the ‘schools’. What I like most about Pop Art is exactly that; its popular.

RS Have you worked through any of the issue put forward by Minimalism in your own work then? I ask this because sometimes your work seems to be negotiating the two extremes which are historically represented by Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism.

SR Well you can’t have Serra without Pollock. Meaning the two are linked. You really can’t have Minimalism without Abstract Expressionism. I didn’t see too much point in replicating Minimalism ad nauseam. Usually one show was enough and I did that back in 1988 in with a show called Cold War, at Ballas Gallery in Brisbane. Although, the You Are Here piece I produced would also be a good example of Minimalism - a slab sculpture with fuck hole.

RS A slab with fuck hole? That’s interesting in one respect. Michael Fried in the 60s condemned Minimalism as a body oriented art, playing it against the high canons of modernism which have been dear to purveyors of abstract Modernism. He almost suggests that Minimalism is a kind of pornography in the way that it dealt with the less lofty ideas of the body. Is there a link here between the sculptural aspect of this piece and the body?

SR Well I’m all for pornography! The influence for the You Are Here work which was titled Formal Imperatives, was an article by Rosalind Krauss on Giacometti in the MOMA Primitivism catalogue. Krauss discusses the Giacometti work Head/Landscape (1930-31), which was initially called "Fall of the Body into a Diagram" which dealt with concepts of the vertical and the horizontal. She writes of Georges Bataille and says that "Bataille insists on the presence - behind the repressive assumptions of verticality - of lowness as the real source of libidinal energy."

The You Are Here work was the size of a household door and also close to the size of an AIDS quilt panel. Both, of course, are the size of a single burial plot.

RS Bronwyn Clarke-Coolee said of your work that memory and association are an enjoyable part of your work. How is that idea of art historical memory and personal memory worked through in your earlier monochrome works?

SR Well I’m self-taught, but in the 80s I read a lot of the re-readings/re-castings of Modernism, in the light of certain feminist theories and I was a bit hell-bent on forcing various things into my versions of Modernism. I’m not alone here. You can see these things working in Imants Tiller’s work, (my hero at the time) in Dale Frank’s work and Juan Davila’s as well. Even in Dale Hickey’s work and Robert Rooney’s and Robert MacPherson’s (all heroes of mine).

RS Feminism? Isn’t it more a kind of poststructuralism which seems to have influenced much of the work of the artists which you’ve mentioned? Davila perhaps? But what of the others? Isn’t it a more a general ethos of appropriation?

SR Yes, if course, you’re right. I’m not really very good at all with theory. It’s just that a few years ago, I was struck with how much Feminist thought (or at least what I’d read) had been so influential. I’d better shut-up on the matter as I’ll get into trouble here.

RS Davila and Tillers are academically at least encoded within the rubric of postmodern but I sometimes think that your concerns are more Modernist. Not formalist Modernist as such, but a kind of critical Modernism?

SR Yes, Janet Burchill once told me that I seemed to have a quite uncomplicated affinity to Modernism, an affinity I think she thought she didn’t have. I think my recent work is quite influenced by Janet’s 80s word works, works like Aporia.

RS But what of personal memory?

SR Well we’ve all got those. That’s about the only thing we have got.

RS I always get the sense in your work that you want the viewer to be a kind of archaeologist, not of course in the traditional sense of the word, but in the sense that the viewer has to dig for meaning. The shovel and the axe (tools of excavation) which appear many times in your work, might then be seen as literal embodiments of the relationship you want to set up between the work and the viewer. How do you feel about this assessment of your work?

SR Shovels and axes are easily available, good-looking things I could get in large quantities, reasonably cheaply. As Michele Helmrich has pointed out, I do play polemics with my audience.

RS But is that it though? A shovel is a shovel is a shovel. Isn’t there something metaphorical in them, or is the semantic choices of the axe and shovel neutral? I want them to mean more than "shovel" or "axe". And the thing is that they do mean things. Art historically, they reference Jim Dines floor pieces, but is that it too?

SR Of course, you want more. The audience always wants more. I filled those works up with so many metaphorical goodies you couldn’t lift them. I think I just wanted to be liked really. To give people lots of things to look at.

RS I wonder then if they can be called painting at all or is that a badge of convenience?

SR "Flag" not "badge". The black paintings were extensions of some of the basic premises of paintings. I was making a commentary on painting there.

RS Is there a paradox between what has been called variously "a luxury of meaning" or the "maximalist" aspects of your work and the way black manages to empty out this excess of meaning?

SR Paradox? The empty/full argument is the work!

RS Yes, but art works which claim to be paintings, even while they embody a paradox unique to 20th century art (a paradox between the ready-made and pure abstraction) still offer, as "entities", a certain amount of difference from other objects. Isn’t it possible for the paradox between the empty and the full, the abstract and the ready-made to be resolved in the term "art". Both, after all, are resolved in the notion of what is to make art in the 20th century. Is this your commentary on painting?

SR Well a painting is a "thing" made in private and validated in public. A painting has a number of attributes which allow us to call it a painting, for example Carl Andre’s, then Robert MacPherson’s Can of Paint as a Painting which is, amongst other things, a pun on content. I’m not sure that if anything too special resides in the actual object. Its the rhetorical space the object fits into that’s important. But an axe is still an axe. Thank goodness!

RS So far, we’ve not discussed the way your work also deals with issue of gay/queer identity. The point is important here because the questions I’ve been asking re-enact, if that is the right way to put it, a certain exclusiveness which has been grappled with by Chris McAuliffe in 2 articles published in Art & Text. In "The Blank Generation? Monochrome in the Eighties and Beyond," Chris discussed your work and others’ in the context of high modern abstraction. He pointed out that your work was a fragmentary reception of canonical modernism since it "ruptures its [modernism’s] historical logic" by virtue of a regional translation of Modernism’s major tenets. This is an aspect of your work also championed by Robert Rooney. The problem, at least the problem which Chris tried to grapple with in the second article, "Scott Redford: Untitled (The Critic Decamps)", was how the issues of gay/queer identity could be so easily excluded in the first article. How do you feel about the two articles?

SR The question is a bit confused. I think that its really about your ideas on Chris’s ideas. And Robert you keep re-writing the question.

RS I prefer to think of it as complex but anyway. And yes, it is my response to Chris’s articles, more the second than the first. The question is about the relationship between sexual identity and art. Why is it possible to perceive the division between gay and not so gay art in your overall body of work.

SR I think that it is a little misleading to think of my work as being the "Black" then the Queer/Gay works.

RS That’s what I mean and I think that Chris, judging by the second article, would agree as well?

SR I want to point out that my "Black Works" aren’t my "First Works. There was a whole group of figurative works which are contemporary with the first black works, its just that the black works took over from the figurative ones. I returned to these figures in 1993 with a show called Nostalgia.

These figurative works (especially the large group of drawings from around 1982 to 1985) were homoerotic, sort of political, personal and art historical as well as drawing on popular culture. Phew! There would be Sandro Chia’s, with swastikas, pop song titles, gestural scrawls, big dicks, ET, and lists of famous painters all mixed in the one drawing. In many ways, I’ve never changed this image-scavenging approach whether it be amalgamations of objects or non-sensical equations. Sometimes the sum of the parts is greater than the bits. Sometimes not. Other times I’ve gone very pure and just done say a minimal wedge piece and given it a misleading title as in It is No Longer Necessary to Review Popular Music (1989). It is true that I see myself as outside the mainstream movements whether they be gay/queer or modern/postmodern. Although I would accept the tag: Regional Postmodernist.

I should also say that Chris’s pieces were written with, in the case of the first article, no interaction with me and, in the second article, minimal comment from me. As a kid from Surfers Paradise I never felt I had much of a say in how my work was ultimately read. That’s why I send out so many clues, but after, I can’t, perhaps won’t, say much more. I can comment after the work’s reception (and I do) but I’m not too interested in controlling every aspect of the work. That would be very boring and nothing new would come out of the whole exhibition/reception process. I’m not a genius. I hate that aspect of many artists’ working habits

RS How do the black works sit with the idea of yourself as a Regional Postmodernist?

SR Because I was so determined to show that hopefully good, serious and engaged work could be made in Surfers Paradise, I foregrounded the art-historical basis of the black works rather than other aspects of their inspiration. Others who came to these works later saw them differently. They saw their abject nature. I always saw this and some reviewers did as well: one unfavourable review compared one floor piece to a pile of shit, another to a hill of beans.

There’s a good article in October (no.63), on Rauschenberg’s black paintings and works before his famous "bed" piece, a favourite of mine. Its a good way to re-read my black paintings and I’ll include a whole section if I may:

For Western civilization, whoever, the body ultimately is an obstacle. to be overcome. Civilization, as Freud has noted, requires the control of the bodily functions and the sublimation of instinctual drives. In Civilization and its Discontents, he writes: ‘The diminution of the olfactory stimuli seems itself to be a consequence of man’s raising himself from the ground, of his assumptions of an upright gait.’ By pulling his nose away from the ground, Freud argues, man lifts his senses away from the smells of excrement and genitalia, divorcing his sense of his body. Likewise, children are taught to repress their initial means of gathering information: groping, sucking smearing. Subsequently, the drive for knowledge that prompts the questions: where do babies come from? where do I come from? will need to be sublimated. But if we read the Black Paintings as excremental, as the daily expulsion from the body’s interior, can the implications of the instance of desublimation, an instance of a body not successfully overcome, transform the question ‘’where do I come from’ into ‘what is inside me?

In relation to my black paintings, if you take the question "where do I come from?" to read my art historical preoccupations versus Surfers Paradise. And if you take "what is inside me?" to read my homosexuality then the above quote pretty much sums up what is at stake in the question and the work.

RS The link between regionalism and sexual identity is an interesting one, and I suppose it does offer a way out of impasse which Chris identified. A kind of queer as regionalist effect. Queer, at least that kind of queer defined by writers like Douglas Crimp argue for a kind of regionalism in terms of response to the AIDS crisis. Is this is what your surfer/Surfers Paradise ads are about?

SR I’ll answer this with a story and don't worry it isn’t one of my scripts. I was installing my show Photo: Surf or Die/No Radio, at Ballas Gallery in 1995. I had previously asked Thomas Sokolowski, by fax, if he would write a forward for a catalogue or book on my work. Although he had written for You Are Here I had not actually met him before. Luke Roberts, however, knew him. Thomas faxed me back saying yes - he would see me when he was in Brisbane which happened to coincide with my show. He arrived as I was finishing setting up, On shaking my hand, the first thing he said to me was "Oh, you’ve only been a gay artist for two years." I was a bit taken aback but as I was feeling a little vulnerable, what with my show and all, I didn’t comment. The meeting was short but OK and he came to my opening and dinner afterwards, which was fine. We didn’t mention his comment at all. Afterwards, however, I was rather angry about it.

Firstly because he must have got his information from somewhere else as he hardly knew me, and secondly, although I’ve felt guilty about not being an agitprop-queen, I’ve always thought that such essentialist notions were out of date, but obviously they’re not when it comes to a bit of faggot power play. Should I have told him that in 1985 Paul Taylor, on viewing my work, told me to take all the gay references out. At the same time Taylor, on looking at the large male nude told me I had all the gay neo-x references right. That is Fetting/Salome etc. I thought the picture looked more like a Molvig.

I would dearly have loved to be at the centre of things. The fact is that I wasn’t. At 34 years old I can say that I’m reasonably happy with the work I’ve done and its honesty. I suppose what Sokolowski or Mathew Jones would say is that I should have been more forthright - more ACTUP. But for whatever reasons, I wasn’t. I suspect my very conservative upbringing and at times violent home life is at fault here and I do have a distrust of adults.

When I exhibited my early works, for example the male figures, there was no gay context for them in Brisbane at the time. There is hardly any now. The art world was obsessed with Postmodernism. Art & Text was, back then, a Nixon/Parr fanzine and the gays I knew were conservative people, barring Luke Roberts, of course.

RS I’m not sure if that really answers the question?

SR No it probably doesn’t. But at lest I’ve got it off my chest.

The thing is that most gay/queer issues are very regional. The Sydney Mardi Gras is really the inner Sydney Mardi Gras. And then only a select few are in charge. Really the art world is no different. Especially in Australia, Where Melbourne thinks its the centre of the universe and so does Sydney and outside of them, everybody else doesn’t exist.

RS You’ve started putting drugs in your paint. At your show last year at Sutton Gallery in Melbourne you produced a series of white/pastel paintings, some of which has AZT, Prozac, speed and aspirin in the pigment. Quite a pharmakon. Could you talk a bit about the paintings?

SR Well the black was being read as too black and as much as I wished I could be Robert Hunter and do just one thing forever, I can’t. So I thought I’d make some images which might have more appeal - be a bit easier to like - more accessible. I’m not sure it worked that well. Unless you present people with what they already know they’re not too interested. I thought one of the paintings, one called "Spilt Milk" with a smiley face upside down and a logo saying "AIDS is not Transparent," would be provocative. Instead one reviewer just ignored the title and dismissed the work. I wrote quite detailed catalogue notes and he ignored them of course. If you do a nude or an abstract painting, everyone understands that.

RS And what of your obsession with Keanu Reeves, Kurt Coban, River Phoenix and Dieter?

SR Its gone well past being solely sexual. I think I want to be them, not have them. Its got nothing to do with outing. Its not hero worship either as my list tends to change with each new movie or fanzine. I mean we’ve got Joaquin Phoenix now to replace River. At Artspace in Sydney, I filled the windows with pop posters of mainly boys although there were a couple of token girls. And what struck me was the strange sadness of it all. Not so much lost youth and looks but also this endless turnover society seems to condone and promote, whether it be early deaths by AIDS, war, or teen suicide. Pure Massacre, as silverchair would say.

RS You’ve done a whole series of equation works like Not the Formula for Population Standard Deviation exhibited at Perspecta in 1993, Photo: Actual Size (Dieter), and the show you’ve just mentioned at Artspace in Sydney which uses the equation logic again. Why the equations?

SR Well, I’m not going to do them any more. People find the whole notion of social formulas so abstract already that my parodies seem to just add to their unease. The show at Artspace used the equation logic only in a symbolic way. Like some of the other formula works, it used a does-not-equal sign to point to the impossibility of equivalence.

RS Where Does the Rosetta Stone fit into this?

SR After spurning your archaeology analogy before, I had better own up and say that as a kid it was a choice between being an artist or an archaeologist. Photo: rosetta stone (1994), is a painting while all the equations have been installations. It was commenting on subjectivity, translation and equivalence. Rosetta Stone was about painting’s current position, post-Warhol, post photographic, screenprinted Warhol. That’s the reason why the text is reversed. What you are actually looking at is the back of the painting where the paint has seeped through which I’ve always thought was a kind of primitive photograph. The other work in that show at Martin Browne’s Gallery in Sydney was Rosetta Stone: A Photo of Itself which was a set of photographic copies of newspaper cuttings. While this work also looked at AIDS and the news, its was inspired by how newspapers are laid out. How information is already pre-interpreted for us.

RS What do you think of gay art in Australia?

SR Tits and bums and Mathew Jones. Say no more!

RS No, go on, say more! You’ve curated a number of shows for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras under the project title, AGLASSOFWATER PROJECT with Luke Roberts. What were the rationales behind these projects?

SR Look, gay art in Australia is a simple equation. Basically, it refers to a limited group of artists with access to powerful writers and editors in the gay and lesbian press in inner Sydney and Melbourne. I don’t mean Art & Text, I mean The Sydney Star Observer. The curation of Ted Gott’s AIDS show Don’t Leave me this Way, which ignored Queensland and most other states, is an example. Work that is trying to push the boundaries of gay/lesbian visual culture beyond nudes and decoration is ignored. After initially being excited by the Gay and Lesbian Mardi-Gras Arts Program I’ve cooled as I really don’t see much of a place for myself there. I like big schlongs as much as the next queen, and I may do a series works based on porn. But then again I may not. The idea of QUEER being inclusive or whatever is rot.

There was a backlash to You Are Here, a show which Luke Roberts and I curated, because it was from Brisbane. Its what led to there being no Queensland art in Ted Gott’s show and I’m still a bit disgusted by that. Given the bitchiness of the Sydney gay/lesbian lifestyle, give me poster of Keanu any day. At least he looks like he would care about you - not!

RS There are two questions which emerge here. I get the sense that you identify more as a gay man than with queer. But still you did, for example, an ad with Mel Gibson’s face where the headline read "Mel Gibson Shows Scott Redford his ‘Lethal Weapon." Now, as a strategy, queer is about appropriating popular sources and bending them and this process seems to be part of this work. It resonates particularly with Mel Gibson since he’s gone on record as a bit of homophobe.

SR Well that ad was one of those tourist things you can get in Surfers Paradise or Darling Harbour in Sydney. I didn’t have it made. It was given to me as a birthday present by an old childhood friend - a straight girl by the way. Its really a piece of anthropology. I don’t consider it as one of my best works or gestures. Detournement has a way of coming back to bite you. Just ask Hany "Fuck off Back to Fagland" Armanious?

RS The other question is why there was backlash to You Are Here .

SR Because it came out of Brisbane. People in Melbourne and Sydney were threatened. I know I’m sounding paranoid here but I made a conscious decision to base my art career in Queensland (throughout the 80s it was Surfers Paradise). And although I’ve lived in Sydney and Melbourne, I keep going back to Queensland. Queensland and the other states really do get a bad deal from the Sydney/Melbourne axis. Also You Are Here sought an almost pluralist approach in that it mixed up art styles and political intentions. The fact remains that many gays and lesbians are not political in the extreme. Luke and I sought to tackle this.

Also, You Are Here was confined to gay men which both Luke and I felt bad about. The fact is we did that show on no money. We had no funding for research or interstate trips. We sought of stumbled into a political minefield. There was all sorts of rubbish thrown at us from every direction including the initiating institution, the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Mathew Jones took the show as a platform for his usual brand of careerist self-promotion, posing as the high moral ground. I got a bad case of shingles out of it. I wouldn’t do it again. Once is enough.

RS You mentioned the scripts before, could you talk a little about the short scripts you’ve been writing.

SR Only that you won’t publish them.

RS Do you think I’m being cowardly by not publishing them?

SR Yes. But I’m not really worried. Artists can only do what they’re allowed to do.

RS If I publish them would you talk about them?

SR I’d be morally obliged to I suppose.