Interview with Guy Denning

Paul Nash and Guy Denning

Guy Denning is an English contemporary artist and painter currently based in France

Paul Nash: In a recent interview you equated exhibiting art to performing live as a musician. It’s all about engaging with your audience as opposed to making money. Now that you’re “signed” as it were or represented by Red Propeller Gallery, how do you balance this now that your paintings can command a price tag of around £4,000 to £5,000 plus?

Guy Denning: It’s still important that the work is seen and I feel the work is best served if seen live and not in reproduction or on the internet. Obviously I’m extremely happy that people are prepared to buy and live with the finished paintings, however, purchasing is not compulsory! I don’t think there is any contradiction between showing and, if I’m lucky, selling my work. I am at an age now where I more or less have the material acquisitions I want and the work is paying for the bread, wine and tobacco! I do think that last year’s sudden rise in the cost of my work could potentially alienate a large number of my old audience and collectors but I’m trying to address this by asking the galleries to hold the prices at their current levels. It’s a difficult line to walk as the galleries are the ones that take most of the financial risk in the gallery/artist relationship, and I can see why it’s in their interests to raise prices if they think the market will support it. It was after all the surplus generated from previous successful artists that allowed other galleries to consider taking the risk of exhibiting my work when it was an unknown quantity. I have also been fortunate that the galleries I’m currently working with, and Red Propeller in particular, have given me free reign to paint on the subjects of my choice without any interference or complaints and some of it (the Pharmaceutical Bestiary specifically) have been considered by many viewers as too miserable and even frightening. The main way I can challenge the increase in prices is to reduce painting sizes and hopefully maintain a degree of affordability that the galleries can afford to support too. It is something I worry about.

PN: When talking about Cashing the Put Options, you have said that you are wary of the “pornography of war” or the subject of war being exploited and over-rationalised in art. Do you think that artists are at risk of feeding off society’s dysfunction for their own ends and becoming merely voyeurs?

GD: I can only speak for myself and I’m now not sure where the dysfunction actually lies. The negative aspects of human existence have been with us now for so long that I’m not sure they even are the dysfunction of society. Perhaps the dysfunction is mine in that I can’t personally deal with ‘normal’ societal functioning with a shrug of the shoulders and a grateful acknowledgment that I’m not subjected personally to the extremes of it. If ’society’ is actually without any dysfunction, i.e. war, poverty, social inequity and corporate greed are normal functions of a globalised society, then an association of ‘feeding off’ of it becomes just as normalised and justifiable whether morally right or otherwise. In moments of deluded optimism I hope that the intrinsic misery of much humanity is a dysfunction and that it can be changed. I don’t expect art to be able to actually effect this change but it can act as a sign-post to others who feel the same. That their aspirations for a fairer world are felt elsewhere and that these aspirations are reasonable. It’s about reaffirming just where the dysfunction does lie and sometimes that is difficult. It’s an easy target for some critics.

PN: With the impending loss of one of your key muses, the exiting Bush administration with all of its attendant failings, what does a black African-American president-elect mean to you both as an individual and as an artist with well documented ideological beliefs?

GD: As with many others, from all political persuasions, I did get caught up in a kind of post-Bush euphoria. It’s an obvious reaction when you see so much state-sanctioned violence being meted out around the globe on an agenda that was clearly driven by a corporate natural resource grab. However I can’t say that I’ve necessarily seen any great distance in the political league tables of warmongering between Democrats and Republicans. In terms of what the man can potentially do as president I think you only have to look at his recent political voting history.
Even if he was an undercover radical (which he most certainly isn’t) I don’t think the weight of the established political/corporate machinery would permit significant change. But I hope I’m wrong.

PN: You have said that since moving to Brittany and being able to paint full time, you can see a marked difference in your work. Do you feel more confident as an artist now both in terms of your technique and chosen subject matter?

GD: I have certainly seen a technical improvement in my work over the last year but I can still see plenty of room for further development. I do feel more confident in my working methods but I am concerned that my subject matter is becoming perhaps too obvious. I’d like to move away from the work that’s too easy to read and allow the viewer to find something perhaps more personal and individual to themselves in their own interactions with the paintings.

PN: Now that you are a Breton, was this a conscious move to live in a more politically-aware or perhaps politically-active environment, to position yourself among anarchist artists and have social-minded communist farmers for neighbours, or was that merely serendipitous?

GD: I don’t know if I’d consider myself a Breton but I do feel an empathy with this community. Whether their political sympathies are particular to this region of Brittany or not I don’t know but it certainly wasn’t known to me before I came here. So yes it was a fortunate aspect to the move rather than a reason for coming here.

PN: You once said that you intentionally threw your work on a bonfire and more recently you lost work in a studio fire. Do you think that you have benefited from these purges, pre-meditated or not, and that they have made you a stronger person and a better artist or do you look back in anger?

GD: I don’t look at any aspect of the past and worry over it, or wished it had turned out any different. Besides it being part of the road that got me here and now there’s nothing to be achieved in wondering about what may have happened ‘if…’. And as for looking in anger I probably look to now or to the future in anger, but not back. You can change the now and the future and sometimes anger is the catalyst to that change.

PN: At a recent joint exhibition in Bristol, 12 Days of Xmas, your work stood out among other pieces by some contemporary “urban” artists, whose work, it could be argued, is a blatant carbon copy of Banksy’s. Do you feel that physically distancing yourself from Bristol and the UK has helped to broaden interest in your work and “urban” art in general?

GD: I do think that a lot of street stencil work suffers from the fact that the medium is the initial focus. I think this is because it is a relatively new artistic phenomenon and the subtleties of different artists aren’t always immediately apparent. There are millions of people using oil paint but it is still (generally) easy to distinguish between the individuals using it. That too will come in time with the ‘urban art’ movement. Personally I love the stencils of Will St Leger, SPQR, C215 and Jef Aerosol and find them all distinctive. I’ve never really understood the ‘urban art’ tag and I suspect it was coined to allow dealers and galleries to bring a moneymaking street scene into the established art market, as well as the reverse of course giving artists whose work would be considered ’safer’, or at the least more traditional, a more contemporary and marketable edge. I’m not sure that there are many artists out there who would call themselves ‘urban’. I think you’d be heading for a rather obvious pratfall if you went in that direction!

PN: Allegory and myth underlies some of your work, for example in the form of the Minotaur and the character of Lilith, and now in your personalised bestiarum vocabulum, following in the footsteps of artists like Michelangelo and Lautrec. How much of your body of work entitled The Pharmaceutical Bestiary for your current solo show in London is a way of exorcising your own psychoses or demons?

GD: The Pharmaceutical Bestiary was a project that I’ve wanted to carry out for years. It was just that with the success of the past year I was in a position to finally realise it. It was very (intentionally) self-indulgent and I’m really grateful to Red Propeller for letting me do it. The personal aspects of that work, or of that time of my life that the work represents, were dealt with years ago so really it was more of a documentation of how I felt then and not necessarily how I feel now. It wasn’t cathartic in the way that it could have been ten or twenty years ago but then, with the benefit of time, its edge has been blunted somewhat. The original preparatory work for it was far stronger and possibly unpalatable for even Red Propeller to put their name to. Some of it I’m not sure I could even paint myself now.

PN: Do your titles generally inform your work or vice-versa, and what importance do you place on titles in terms of engaging with your audience? For example, how did you arrive at the title De Clérambault is my Lover?

GD: I hope that the audience will look at the title as much as the physical work. They are both there as ingredients of a finished painting. People frequently look to an artwork’s title to lead them towards some kind of affirmation of their interpretation or even to instigate an interpretation. For most, the written title is like a safe boundary to explore because the word initially seems so less open to a vague interpretation than the image. Sometimes there is a direct reference from one to the other and other times the title is a personal reference that only I would know. However I always hope that someone can work out what’s going on. Perhaps not everybody, but at least a few! De Clérambault refers to the French psychiatrist who published Les Psychoses Passionelles in the 20s.

P

N: In The Pharmaceutical Bestiary, there is a foreboding sense of desperation, isolation and ultimately self-negation. In the world of “carnage and absolute terror” that you present, do you see art as the only true salve for society’s ills?

GD: Perhaps I may have done once. But it’s clear that if art could affect significant change then humanity wouldn’t be in the permanent warring state that it always is. We’re fucked.

PN: You have said that you have been influenced by or have taken “a great interest in Caravaggio”. In your piece entitled Treatment Resistant, the motif of the elongated arm hanging down can be traced back to David’s La Mort de Marat, an inspired political statement, and a painting that has been compared to Michelangelo’s Pietà as well as Caravaggio’s The Entombment of Christ. Is the similarity in the use of this motif in your work the result of an unconscious mental alchemy or is it deliberate?

GD: It was intentional, though modified over years of preparation in ideas and failed attempts in compositional sketches. La Mort de Marat is a beautiful painting and I have been trying to work towards using its composition for a contemporary political translation. Also that pose and depiction of the hand is so evocative of so many internal conditions. As I said earlier I have been trying to move away from more obvious work, which is why, after years of working with the idea I finally ended up with the most pathos-ridden element of those great works, the single gesture of the dead hand.

PN: You have said that you would like to see a reduction in the amount of artists who contract out the actual labour of their work, particularly those who contract out tasks like painting and sculpture. The Damian Hirsts and Willem de Koonings of the contemporary art world then, do you view their practice as being soulless, vacuous, factory-farmed and ultimately dishonest or are they merely carrying out an age-old tradition whereby the successfully commercial artist can afford to be more a project manager than an artist per se?

GD: I’ve thought a lot about this lately. I think I think I was wrong. But I’m not sure. It’s a grey area I think. Or perhaps it isn’t. I don’t know Paul. Not in the art world outside of my studio at least. All I can be sure of is that I want the maximum control possible of my own work. I’m qualified to comment on that, the rest can do what they bloody well want. It’s nothing to do with me and who am I to judge?

PN: In a recent interview you said: “It’s a shame that in the wider world, non-experts (generally creatures from that strange breed known as ‘celebrity’) get given air time to view half-baked opinion at the expense of the knowledgeable in all arenas from culture to psychology, war to moral philosophy.” Do you think that your recent, iconic painting Fucked-up Celebrity Portrait #1 will ironically perhaps become one of your most celebrated works and even the painting that you will be most remembered for, and if so, how would you feel about that?

GD: I hope it isn’t, otherwise that means I’ve peaked; I’m too young to peak and I’ve got too many paintings left in me. In fact if that was to be the case I’d make damn sure that future work is stronger. That’s all I can do isn’t it! The celebrity subject is currently on the studio walls again. This time for shows late in 2009, including the solo show in Hollywood. The location demands it really doesn’t it?

Guy Denning forthcoming shows:
14 – 18 January 2009
London Art Fair (COSA Gallery), stand G12
02 – 28 February 2009
“MIX/RE-MIX”, Mauger Modern Art, Bartlett Street, Bath
March 2009,
“Ad Nausea”, Signal Gallery, Curtain Road, Hoxton, London

http://www.guydenning.org/

Paul Nash is a musician and poet living in Bristol. One of his poems was recently published in Geometer, and can be found here

http://www.silentagerecords.co.uk/nsn/

www.myspace.com/northseanavigator