18:30 - 19:30
Donald Macleod surveys Walton's legacy and plays music from his final years.
The John Tusa Interviews |
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Transcript of the John Tusa Interview with Richard Hamilton If Richard Hamilton were American, he'd be far more famous than he is. Anybody who can be credited with founding both pop art in the 1950s and conceptual art in the 1980s deserves more than a footnote in the art history books. After all Andy Warhol was influenced by Hamilton . So was Damian Hirst. Is this just an instance, not the first by any means, of the pupils out-stripping their teacher? I think it's much more than that. For a start, Hamilton defines himself confidently as both a pop artist and a fine artist too. He's devoted to the images and the influences of the modern world all around him, but he laments the ignorance of the history of art that young students today display. Then he makes it hard for the general viewer to recognise a Hamilton by rejecting any connection with a particular style. Ideas are what interest him. Why should he be imprisoned by one way of painting? Plagiarism doesn't worry him either; it was good enough for Picasso. And finally, there is Hamilton 's unabashed devotion to two idols, to both of whom he has given significant portions of his life. Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce. In the 1960s Hamilton spent one year reconstructing Duchamp's 'The Bride Stripped Bare By The Bachelors' from Duchamp's own notebooks. At the end the artist signed the Hamilton reconstruction as if it were his own creation. As for James Joyce, Hamilton read Ulysses during his national service in the Army and he's spent parts of the last 50 years creating his vision of the masterpiece. Intriguingly, Hamilton and Joyce share the same birthday. The body of work that resulted: drawings, prints, etchings, repeated attempts at certain images, look striking and ambitious at its recent showing at the British Museum . Hamilton has not been illustrating the book, you understand, rather he's been discovering the images which lie concealed by writing, that gives clues to likeness, but no clear description. Does any of this make Richard Hamilton less of an individual creative artist? Rather it speaks volumes for the strength of an artist who can take on his idols and not lie down in slavish servitude before them. ____________________________________________________ Now the first label that is stuck on you so we may as well get it over and done with is, of course, the father of pop art, I think you're quite proud of it, but are you also a bit embarrassed by it as well, simply because it has been around for so long? I don't think I'm particularly proud of it but I am willing to accept that I do feel some responsibility, in that I felt that I was trying to define a possible aesthetic for myself and this was the outcome in 1956-57. That was when you wrote your letter defining an aesthetic programme and where you defined pop art as 'popular, transient, expendable, mass produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and big business'. Yes but it's difficult to get away from this idea that pop art is what we now think of as pop art. Pop art was what we called mass media. Cinema and television; it had nothing to do with fine art . In fact I was accused of a kind of heresy by trying to approach the subjects as a fine artist; to make paintings. That was really hard to take for my colleagues and my friends. So the hard-core pop art was absolutely rooted in the values, the surfaces, the treatments of the commercial world? We called it pop art and Elvis Presley would be a manifestation of pop art, and advertising would be a manifestation of pop art, and so all these things were not seen to be susceptible to treatment. These ideas were not seen susceptible to treatment in the world of fine art, and all the people that I associated with were really hard-edged painters. That was the fashion at the time and Lawrence Alloway, who is always attributed to be the man who invented the name pop art, was curating the exhibitions of just that kind of art. Your definition hasn't, as you said, stood the test of time because pop art as we now know it and as it became, has ended up being anything but transient, expendable and commercial. It's been in a way co-opted by the systems and the commercialism of the fine art world itself. When I made that list I thought what are the characteristics of what we call pop art, and then I listed them, big business and so on; the record system, Hollywood and all the other things. Then I looked at this list that I had made, which had nothing to do with fine art or anything that I was painting or doing and said, is there anything in this list which is incompatible with fine art? And my answer was no, except for one thing and I said, expendable. Now is fine art expendable? And I thought no; I can't quite stomach that. Everything else, OK, but expendability as a throwaway attitude is not something that can be acceptable as pop art, and I was proved wrong. Warhol, approached art from the point of view of expendability, so I admire him enormously having brought my attention to the fact that I was wrong. Well except he's anything but expendable. I mean there's a huge exhibition at Tate Britain or am I misunderstanding you? You're misunderstanding me in the sense that his attitude was of expendability and he didn't really believe that it could last. In every way I think he was prepared to go as far as it was possible to go. Getting other people to sign his work... I mean somebody who rings up and says, we've got some prints ready for your signature Mr Warhol and he tells an assistant to go down and sign them. But does the fact that there is this large body of work and activity of art, which is called for better or worse, pop art, that this has become co-opted by the fine art establishment? Does this undercut or does this diminish what you thought pop art might do 50 years ago? Not in the least. No. No it's the museums that make art, give it a value. Duchamp didn't ever think of his work has having any value, particularly those things that he called readymades. He didn't think that they were permanent in the sense that the Large Glass was permanent, although the Large Glass wasn't all that permanent because it broke. But I think, as a mental attitude, expendability is something that I thought, this is not something that I can incorporate into what I'm trying to forge, a new aesthetic. But I was wrong. I'm glad to admit it. Let's go back to the early years. From the age of 12 you decided to become an artist, a painter. You were clearly a very good young draughtsman. It was just there? Just appeared did it? Yes, there was no reason why I should have been interested in art anymore than anything else. My family had nothing to do with art and we didn't have any money so... we didn't have any rich relatives who could have had some influence on it. I was just a lorry driver's son that who had this aberration about wanting to be an artist. Did your parents' think one way or the other, did they think either this was going to set you apart from them or did they think, he's incredibly lucky and we're very proud that he can do something so exceptional. When I was a student I was deterred from going to the Royal Academy of Schools for example and my father always said that you ought to get a real job, this was a waste of time. But they were always very tolerant and very kind to me, very nice and helped as much as they could, but my father was certainly aware of the difficulties and said forget it. You went, of course, to various schools. You started at the Royal Academy . Was the very awfulness of the President then, Alfred Munnings, was this one of the things which made you break away totally? I mean, it's hard to believe how he behaved isn't it? Well when I went there I was 16 at the time. I was being helped by the Keeper of the Schools who was then Phillip Connard, Sir Phillip Connard, and I loved the school. I thought it was absolutely marvellous and I was treated very well and I was even awarded the second prize for antique painting. And second prize for antique painting is given to the most conventional student in the whole place. You cannot imagine a really gifted, favoured art student who would get second prize, he might get first prize, but second prize is really to say this boy is really trying hard to do what he is supposed to do. So I was surprised when I went back after the war to find that the place had been turned into a mad house by this Munnings. He'd taken over the Presidency and somebody else was er, I think it was Monnington, the keeper, one of the teachers, and it really was insane and I found it quite hilarious... Monnington said to me one day, Augustus John could knock spots off Cézanne. I thought it was a joke, you know, Cézanne's thought of as being spots and Augustus John knocking the spots off Cézanne, I thought it was so well phrased that it had to be funny and I couldn't refrain from laughing. And then the next occasion we discussed anything, he always got angry with me, probably because I laughed about it, and he said 'they're not even good honest Frenchmen, they're a lot of fucking dagos' and that made me fall off my donkey, the seat we used in the art school, was called a donkey, and I really fell off my donkey with laughter. He went red in the face and I thought this is insane, and then I got a letter saying you are not profiting from the instruction being given in the Royal Academy Schools. It was true. And I thought I can't deny it. [laughs] But it is incredible looking back at those sort of comments, at how... I mean parochial isn't the word, reactionary isn't even the word, the British art establishment was just after the war? Yeah, it was frightening and the interesting thing was, that there was an avant-garde establishment beginning to emerge. Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, they were beginning, I think, in 1948-49, so things were happening then. And you were off to the Slade School of Fine Art between '48 and 1951. Were you already then starting to explore, in your own terms, these whole questions of the connections and inter-connections between supposedly different forms and types of art? No. I think by that time I was trying to think, what's it all about ? And one of the reasons I make lists is because it's helpful in programming, so I thought, what is the right way to go about it? Start from the beginning. What's the first mark you can make on a canvas? You have a rectangle; you put a spot on it. Where do you put that spot? As soon as you put that spot, it does something, then the next spot is a consequence of that first one and the rectangle. So it was a very systematic idea and so they were kind of abstract paintings, there were only two or three paintings, but they were just coloured sticks. There's one which is now in the Tate that I did at that time, which I thought of as perhaps the first real painting that I'd ever done, which is called Chromatic Spiral and I think it looks good in the Tate at the moment, I'm surprised that it does, but it was attempting to go down to the absolute fundamentals. And this was personal exploration and discovery, nobody was leading you down this road? This was all driven by yourself? By then I was what might be called a mature student you see. I was in my 20s... mid-20's I suppose, and I'd done a lot of things of being a kind of infant prodigy, making charcoal drawings of down and outs... I'd done all that and I had to go back and start from the beginning. And then I began to get interested in Futurism and Cubism but I thought that the Futurists were a bit too subjective, in their approach, that it needed a little bit more precision. Is there a way of developing a perspective; something like a perspective convention, which has a static eyeball? What happens if you start moving the eyeball? Is it possible to overlay perspective conventions? So these were kind of the outcome of abstraction but bringing it back to the eye and to the human being and moving around in nature. And I made three or four paintings of that kind and then there was a break-through when I made two pictures, which were,...they're a mixture of Cubism and Futurism. They are taking a static subject and moving in relation to it but not in the way that the Cubists did it, in the way that the Futurists would have approached that. Is this the one where you were doing a nude and you moved up and down on your horse, so you see the nude...? Multiple viewpoints of the nude was one of the pictures and that was called 'Study Re Nude' which has a meaning as well as being a nice title, and the other one was the experience of being on a train and looking at landscape and focusing on a tree and you rotate around that tree, the eye fixes on that point so the movement causes a rotation of everything around. Being quite systematic about it I could then begin to use this kind of idea of motion perspective in relation to a specific subject. Was this regarded as being a peculiar thing to do? Were you rather on your own in these sort of experiments? I would say so yes. Yes, totally. [laughs] And did your colleagues... did your contemporaries think that you were just peculiar? Well, at the same time I was doing other things. In 1951, which was the last year of my stay at the Slade, I did the Growth and Form Exhibition at the ICA which was a major exhibition, it was their contribution to the Festival of Britain, and it was based on Darcy Wentworth Johnson's book Growth and Form. So I had this other life, apart from being a painter, where my paintings where either not seen or ignored. If they were seen it was like a nasty smell [laughs] in the corner and this is from my friends. But on the other hand I had this kind of expectation as being a bright young thing and doing these exhibitions... Smart exhibitions; clever designs? Yeah. I was thought of to be a designer; a thinker, not an artist. And, at this time, of course you'd already read James Joyce and Ulysses which you had read during National Service and you were already, presumably, under the influence of Duchamp and there's a Joyce quote that seems to knit these various themes together when he talked about 'the soul of the commonest object appears to us radiant'. Now does that knit together both his view of the importance of the everyday, and Duchamp's exultation, you might say, of ordinary industrial objects? Yes, but I wouldn't put it at Duchamp's door. Duchamp approached a common object in a completely detached way. He wasn't concerned about its radiance. He didn't choose a typewriter cover or a shovel because he liked the look of it, or he thought that it had any particular quality. It was... it is avoidance of quality, his desperate attempt to find a way not to make a choice, not to make a decision that something should be chosen. But he was making a choice because he chose one object rather than another, one hat-stand rather than another, one bottle stand rather than another. There's a whole methodology that he was investigating and one of the most significant notes that he put in the Green Box was make an assignation with a ready-made, the time, the place; so what occurred at that moment would be, that was a way of his avoiding that decision of choice, and this is absolutely vital to the idea of the ready-made. It's not what one understands by the artist who followed that kind of idea of using a ready-made, but I think that it is the key and also, everyone of those ready-mades is another explanation of those possibilities. But there are two ready-mades, so called ready-mades, which I regard as being not ready-mades. The Bottle Rack is one, which is a kind of choice, I agree, and there's a Bicycle Wheel, which I think he liked. The Bicycle Wheel, which he put on a stool, leaving the wheel free to rotate; he could touch it and he said it's like a fire in a fireplace, it's something to enjoy; visual stimulation. But those were done in 1913 before he'd really arrived at the idea of a ready-made, but I think they follow on from it. Are those the two ready-mades that you personally like? No, no. I, like Duchamp, would not wish to make choices anymore than he did. I once wrote a little note in the catalogue for the Duchamp Exhibition and I said that these two were not really ready-mades, and all of the notes that I wrote, the little captions, comments, were shown to him before they were published and he read that and it was the only time that he said 'good'. Because I don't think he'd thought of it before; he'd forgotten that there was that distinction. But by the time he got to New York he was looking at a snow shovel, or a box of cute little chips of marble in a bird cage with a thermometer, that is one kind of ready-made which is really a found object and a ready-made which is quite elaborately conceived. And then there are others like 'use a Rembrandt as an ironing board', that's a reversal of a ready-made, you use a work of art as an ironing board and then that's reversing the idea of the ready-made. What is this doing apart from jolting everybody into thinking what is art, what are art objects, what is the artist, what is the role of the artist? Was it doing anything more than just trying to jolt us to think? I don't think he had any contact with anybody at that time, he wasn't trying to jolt anybody, he was trying to jolt himself. Everything that he did is something that went on his head. It was doing something for him, and he had no real perception about its consequence or influence on other people. What did it do for you? For me? Yes. It led me to an understanding of one of the great minds of the century I suppose. But what did it do for you in your understanding of art and the sort of art and work that you should get involved in? Well that's a good word involved. What was marvellous about Duchamp I found, and what I admired him almost most for, was his detachment. It was as though he's looking at the thing from quite a distance and so I was quite happy to adopt that as one of the useful things that he could teach me; stand back a bit. And you think you put that into practice? Yeah, yes I do. I was not prepared to go along with Duchamp in some ways. Duchamp was iconoclastic. That was the other thing that I found admirable in him. He always questioned, anything that happened before, and he clearly tried to create a work, which was unique. I say a work, I mean, his life work; his life's work was something that was completely unique and had never been done before and I think that's quite deliberate, in fact. And he achieved that? He achieved it. Starting with the Large Glass in 1912, the notes he wrote, and the progress he made over 12, 15 years towards its completion, which wasn't completed anyway, and that was a very pronounced, aggressive way of dividing himself from everything that had gone in the past and I think it's tremendously successful... Why did you reconstruct the Large Glass? I know there was an exhibition that, that you were curating, of all of Duchamp's work, but it was more than just making that work available for the exhibition because you couldn't get the original. Was there was some very deep act of homage that you wanted to do to Duchamp? No. It was in a way inevitable, because far more important than doing the Large Glass was the process of working with Duchamp for three years, from 1957 to '60, I worked on the notes of the Green Box as a translator, in a sense. I wanted to know what those notes were all about and they were in French, and hand-written, and so it was something of an effort to get access to them. I didn't speak French and so I had a certain problem in that respect, but I got a friend to translate it with me as we went along. But it was quite meaningless; as a literal translation it was a bit difficult to grasp. Did Duchamp help you in that this...? Not at that stage. I did that with a friend of mine up in Newcastle . Then I began to use it as a lecture vehicle and then I was in a position where I was uncertain about the diagram that I'd made, because people who knew Duchamp said 'he would laugh at you if he knew that you were doing this', and I sent it to him and said, 'can you correct it for me please, Mr Duchamp' and I heard nothing for a year. I sent it to him in 1956 and I heard nothing for a year, almost exactly a year, and then his letter came in a very familiar handwriting, because I had studied those notes very carefully, and it said: 'I didn't bother to reply to your letter because a lot of proposals had been made to make a translation and a book of the notes of the Green Box, and none of them had come to anything. But a friend of mine called George Heard Hamilton, an art historian at Yale and a very distinguished art historian, who has done some of my shorter notes as translations. I showed him your diagram and he said that he would like to work with you on a complete translation of the Green Box.' But I had already got half way, I mean half way in the sense that we had done a draft in Newcastle with my friend, George Knox, and that went off and I don't think there were many changes made. But the great thing about my venture into these notes was to realise that the words aren't the whole story. It is the writing, the erasures, the corrections, the way the mind of the artist is revealed by his re-thinkings and doubts. All of these were expressed in his handwriting. But how could they be expressed in type? Did you feel ever that you were either wasting your time, or that you should be doing something different, or that you should not be burying yourself in another artist's work like this, while you were re-constructing the Large Glass? I didn't ever feel that. I found it rewarding. It did mean that I didn't paint as much, but then maybe I was doing one painting a year... two or three paintings a year at the most. But to get back to this question of where Duchamp, I won't say failed me, but he was very insistent that the eye isn't important to the artist. One of the things you have to do... he had to do to get that kind of isolation from the past and other methods of thinking, was to divorce his eyes from the process and so it's mental facts, the grey matter that counts, not what you see... But you use your eyes the whole time don't you? You do. Yeah and that's why I said Duchamp is an iconoclast. He cast away everything, knocked down every idol around him and created this uniquely personal work. But you can't follow that and I thought, really, the one way to be iconoclastic in relation to Duchamp, in the way that Duchamp was, is to be retinal, and I thought I'll go that way, and I thought Marcel would be pleased. Now I'm going to ask you to be very retinal and describe a picture, a collage which is one that you're very much associated with, did it in 1956 for the Whitechapel Gallery Exhibition called 'This is Tomorrow', the collage is called 'Just what is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing' and rather than me trying to describe it, I'm just handing it over to you and perhaps you'd describe it. Well the important about is that it starts with a list. I was in this habit of making lists. The title of the exhibition was 'This is Tomorrow', and I thought what distinguishes tomorrow from today, how can we know. But what distinguishes today from yesterday, we do know something about, so I'll make a list of those things that are important at the present time. So I wrote down things like, man and woman. Man and woman come first, Adam and Eve are the pre-requisites. And then I began to add other things like cinema, comics, tape recorder, newspaper, cars, people as a mass rather than as individuals, and domestic appliances, and space; that was about the time that the first satellite was... and that was not a man-carrying satellite but at least a camera-carrying satellite, and the earth was photographed from space for the first time. And these are photographic images collaged together into one image ..? Well having made my list I then looked for a suitable man... An idealised Mr Superman type man, lots of muscles? Yes, a Superman type... because I thought that I must avoid any dating and if he had clothes, he could have dated much more rapidly than a nude. Same with the woman, I feel it's always necessary if I'm going to have this symbolic man that he doesn't have clothes on, because that makes him too specific. And these were then assembled in an interior space. And they have to be looked at fairly carefully because you can see, if you read the list which I think is on the opposite page, the page on which it's reproduced at least in the book that I've produced, and it's simply this listing of things that were specific. Not only things that were specific to the time, but it has a picture on the wall which was a kind of ancestral portrait, there for no other reason than that I had to have some representation of history. Because I said if I'm up to date then I also have to say that there was a past. What is that past going to be represented by? I found a little picture of a Victorian gentleman and stuck it on a wall. But did you expect that this collage of images would have the resonance that it has had? I mean, some people say it's one of the most important British paintings of the century. Are you surprised that it's lasted? Well the thing that surprised me right from the start was that it was reproduced. It's just a small thing, it's only about nine inches square. The size of a magazine, and collage has always irritated me a little because you're limited to that scale of a magazine. So it's main mystery to me is that it has been reproduced, I think, more than any other work that I've ever done, but it's been reproduced more than other work than almost any other artist in the world has been known. Why do you think that is? Yeah. I don't know. It's like being stuck with... with being a one-record pop star. Now you're famous... I mean, you did this and then you worked in many, many other styles, and you're famous for rejecting the idea that one style should define the artist. I'm mean, why do you regard the idea of style as being restricting and inhibiting? I suppose it's seeing what other people do when they're stuck in that groove. Of course, looking at Cézanne you think well you can identify a Cézanne immediately and I don't admire Cézanne less for being stuck in his groove but... Some groove. Some grooves are better than others. [laughs] But I've never felt that I wanted to repeat something, because there's an excitement in inventing things. Being creative is really a desire for this experience of finding something new. So it's that newness that I've always looked for. And that's an intellectual newness. I mean, you said that really painting is about ideas and concepts, isn't it, rather than about style. So these things are all generated from the brain, I mean, I suppose creativity is as well; but that's another argument, but it's the intellectual drive that really makes you find the style which is appropriate to expressing the idea. Yes, but I've found it necessary to contrive the possibility of finding new things. For example I went through the whole of the genres of art, portrait, do a portrait. Next thing you do is a flower- piece maybe, then a landscape, seascape, and portrait of a building. Have I done that? No, and I was ticking these things off on a list. That was another of your lists? That was another of my lists. [laughs] Make a list of the genres, because artists are very often stuck in a genre. Even Cézanne one could say was stuck in the genre of the landscape of Provence and it's the same subject that's coming up all the time. But I've found it valuable to say, well maybe I can make a painting of that domestic appliance, that toaster or that advertisement has given me an idea. Have you ticked off all the genres on your list, or are you constantly updating it with fresh genres? I've reached the end of genres [laughs] now. I'm pretty well stuck with my favourite genre, which is the interior because that is pretty flexible anyway, so I think that I've done pretty well everything that I could think of in words to put in a list. But just going back to the question of style, and maybe this is interpreting style in a different way, it seems to me that looking at a wide range of the things that you do, that they're characterised by, and you might hate the word, a certain elegance, a certain fastidiousness of composition. That that does stand out.You don't do things which are rough, you don't do things which are brutal. Would you admit to the word elegance in a lot of your line? Yeah, I think it's true. When I tried, on one occasion to do it, because I felt the need not to get stuck and all the things that I had been doing had this kind of thing that you describe as elegance, and I thought I'll make a portrait of something I really hate, really dislike, and what is that going to be? And I decided that Hugh Gaitskell was somebody that I found really unpleasant. Poor Hugh Gaitskell? Poor Hugh Gaitskell. Because he had made a speech, I don't think that he actually made that speech. He persuaded Aneurin Bevan to make the speech, we can't go in to the Council Chambers of Europe naked, by which he meant no Atom bomb... Yes. ...and that he should succeed in moving the Labour party away from the path they were taking, which was to say, why do we need this Atom bomb? America has got an Atom bomb, and lots of them, and Russia 's got lots of Atom bombs. What did our little stockpile mean? How could it possibly be used, and Gaitskell persuaded the Labour party that it was really necessary to be a power. And you wanted to create this image, this portrait of a person you disliked? Well, it wasn't a question of starting with the idea that I hate Gaitskell. It was... I want to do a picture which is passionate and aggressive, and so I looked for the subject and then decided on Gaitskell and then I began to make a picture and somehow it didn't soften from the point of view of my feelings, but it became rather elegant and beautiful. Yes. I mean looking... I have to say looking... I didn't succeed...(laughs) Looking at it now, what it looks like is a very ingenious portrait, which amongst other things, uses masks to suggest the masks that a politician has to put on. I think it's come out as a much more complex work. It was called. ' Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a famous monster of film land' and I went to those pulp magazines that Hollywood was producing at the time, with all the stills of monsters, and masks were quite an important part of that. A picture of Claude Rains as the Phantom of the Opera is very clear in it. But I think you're right, I cannot overcome this fastidiousness [laughs] try as I might. It strikes me that you are not, although you have done some political paintings, that you're not a political artist, are you? That your famous one about the IRA hunger striker which comes out as a sort of Christ figure diptych with the Christ figure in the blankets on one side, and then the excrement from the cells on the other, and then I think quite soon after that you also did one of the Orange marchers, as if you felt that you needed to balance the one set of images with another set of images, almost as if you were being consciously politically neutral. No, I wasn't politically neutral by any means, but I did find that there was a kind of neutrality which had a strange outcome in that partisans on one side or the other, would look at the painting and say,.... a supporter of the IRA, a girl, once said to me when it was exhibited in Londonderry, 'why have you made his eyes so evil?', and another supporter of the other side would say, 'why do you celebrate these terrorists?' And I didn't think of it as a celebration, I certainly .... but I do feel that there maybe was a little bit of truth in the girl's idea that I had made his eyes evil. But principally you were driven by the strength of the image just as you felt there was something strong in the image of the marchers of the Orange order? Yes. But... but I did the other one because... not because I wanted to remain neutral, but because I felt that there was a little idiocy involved in this dressing up game, and it started with a feeling that really it's dressing up, it's about imagery. And the Dirty Protest was very carefully contrived to make the martyr image, and to be granted the opportunity of showing it on television, as they were, was very valuable for them, and this was a big part of the propagation of the idea that they were not hooligans, that they were not terrorist hooligans, they were martyrs. But as an artist you were making a critique in both cases of the Dirty Protest and of the Orange Order Marchers? I said it was all part of the same dressing up, that the dressing up in the blankets and the crucifix in the cell with the shit was the same as the Orange Men wearing bowler hats, carrying the symbolic sword, which is an umbrella, wearing sashes and King Billy gloves and so on. But the second part of the picture is the shit that they created. This is not mentioned... [laughs] No. Or not seen very much... No. But the abstract part of the picture and there's a figure and it's a diptych with a more or less abstract, and that abstraction, that is to say, the Orange Man's abstraction is the bomb that is in the street. They're responsible for all of that damage. What are the great images of now? What are the images that you come across or see on the television, or videos, that are crying out for that sort of treatment? Well I think about that a great deal, but it's very difficult to do something with a subject that's as powerful as that. I thought that the Irish thing was perhaps plausible, that I'd managed it, but I didn't really like political art because painting starving children or battle scenes isn't an easy thing to do by any means. At the moment, the thing that's in my mind is that I would like to paint a portrait of Mordechai Vanunu. The Israeli Intelligence Officer who passed information on to the United States ? No he wasn't an Intelligence Officer. He was a worker in the nuclear industry, in the secret nuclear industry, in Israel and he told the Sunday Times, no money passed hands, he said, 'yes they're working on the bomb, they've got the bomb' and they gave him 18 years solitary confinement. Why do you want to paint him now? Because he's a martyr. I think that if the Zionists can do this to their own citizens, put him in jail, in solitary confinement, -he was for the first 12 years of his sentence in solitary confinement, it's enough to drive anybody mad and perhaps he is mad, - but I think that that treatment of their own citizens shows that they're capable of anything, why should they be nice to the Palestinians, if they're that nasty to their own citizens? Why that martyr rather than others? Or is it just that there's something about the image of solitary confinement which seems particularly strong to you? No it's not that. I think that he's an unsung hero. I could paint a picture of Yasser Arafat but it wouldn't be very... it wouldn't be very subtle. [laughs] You wouldn't have anything to add? ... but I do have this feeling for Mordechai Vanunu in a way that I have for no other political prisoner, which is an absurd thing to admit. Well, of course, the images and the people that have been obsessing you or concerning you for the last 40 years, are the images of James Joyce's Ulysses and this wonderful exhibition that there has been at the British Museum. Was what attracted you to it, the variety of styles, written styles that there are in Ulysses and that you felt that you could complement this with adapting a whole variety of painting and etching styles as well? There was something inside you, which responded to the sense of a multiplicity of styles. You were asking me earlier about Duchamp and was it a rewarding experience? How could you spend that many years on the Large Glass? How many years have I spent on the Green Box, and another two years I was spending on the White Box? But the years that I've spent studying these great figures has been rewarding because they provide me with my life in a way, and Joyce let me into an enormous mystery in a way, which was that you don't have to think about style, that every chapter in Ulysses is in a different style. Some chapters are written in a progression of styles and he is an absolute master of language. I read something in a newspaper the other day that Joyce had a vocabulary consisting of twice the vocabulary of his nearest competitor. That's unimaginable, that this genius should have these words that can pour out of his mind, and they're so unmistakably beautiful, you read any passage of Joyce, and it's Joyce and yet it's very often parody. Part of the Gertie McDowell chapter is slush, it's romantic fiction, it's schoolgirl, in fact here was a serving-girl writing. But it's Joyce, and it takes its place in the context of this variety of language. But was this what drew you to the idea that you had to illustrate it. After all you're reacting as somebody who loves the book. To say, I'm now going to realise this in pictorial terms, that's very, very different. Well I was young at the time and I was interested in printmaking and I saw French books, just after the war there was a wonderful exhibition of French book illustrations; Picasso and all of them, the great publications,...of Baudelaire. So you thought of it as illustration to start with, this work on Ulysses? Yeah, I thought of it as illustration but because it was a book that I loved, I dropped it fairly soon after starting on it. But then I began to become more interested in printmaking for its own sake, and I began to see that some of things that I had been interested in would make plates in their own rights. So I returned to etching and worked with Aldo Crommelynck , who had worked with Picasso for a good many years, and about the time that Picasso died I took over in Crommelynck's affections and I worked with him a great deal and we were very, we still are, very close friends. But at some stage this must have become more of a conscious project, didn't it? That you thought I will work through, not that you're doing it chapter by chapter, are you? No but I recast some of those things that I've done before but I wanted to make these etchings, which were of a classic kind. That showed a kind of mastery of craft, which I admire [laughs]. It is in a way, I think not quite understood that printmaking is important, has been important to a lot of people. After all Durer, one of the greatest artists in watercolour, greatest painters, unimaginable genius, is interested in printmaking. You're asserting your connection with that part of the fine art tradition. I only thought about this [laughs] fairly recently, that I began to think, Rembrandt, the other great figure is a great genius of printmaking. Picasso is a great printmaker, and there must be something in printmaking and I should think that I was trying to emulate, if not compete, in that kind of area. Do you have a hunch as to what the next revolution in our approach to art it going to be? We've been through pop, minimalism, etc. etc. all the isms; do you have a sense of what the next revolution might be? I don't and I feel very sad that I feel I'm losing contact with young artists. I taught a lot, 13 years in Newcastle and I taught also at the Royal College and other places and I spent a lot of time in art schools as a student, and it makes me rather sad to think that I no longer feel anything in common with young artists, and I feel nostalgic about my old friends, like Diter Rot and Marcel Broodthaers and Joseph Beuys, I haven't got anyone to admire. I don't think I have peers any longer. Well I suppose it's pretty fair to leave the next revolution to others. You've done your share of revolutions. [laughs] I think so. I don't think there's much point in my forecasting, but on the other hand I am working now in such a way that I think this is, there's so much new happening in image making, in printmaking and new inks being developed and new printing machines and all sorts of things are happening, and I keep abreast of it. I think I know as much as anybody about print, and I appreciate the potential that there is in using computers in this way, and so I don't feel that I'm a fuddy-duddy by any means, but I don't feel that there are other people who are making very good use of new technologies as they become available to us. Richard Hamilton, thank you very much. |
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