Ken Currie

 

In 1958, Samuel Beckett found himself an unwilling traveller on a trip to Berne in Switzerland. According to biographer Anthony Cronin, the trip was enlivened by the chance to see one of Cézanne’s last portraits in a private collection. His head already full of thoughts of infirmity and death, Beckett felt the picture to be overwhelmingly sad. It was a picture of a blind, broken old man. Decrepit old men (or even decrepit young men) populate Beckett’s work in his search for a story form that could strip back the veil of deadening habit to get to that “thing” (maybe that nothingness) that lies behind.

When viewing Ken Currie’s work of the last 5 years, it is hard not to surmise that he has been on a parallel search behind this habitual shroud. Engaged in an attempt to capture ‘that’ pensive moment or to make a study of those whose job it is to literally get under the skin of humanity, cutting into it to reveal the inner workings. Like Beckett before him, Currie’s practice expresses this inner world with a surgeon’s scalpel but does so with a painter’s instinct.

Can you tell me a bit more about the dynamic between yourself and artists such as Peter Howson, Steven Campbell and Adrian Wisniewski at the Glasgow School of Art in the early Eighties?

I met Steven Campbell on my first day at Glasgow School of Art in 1978. Peter Howson was in the year above me and Adrian joined the Painting School in second year, transferring from Architecture. Steven and Adrian then left Painting in third year to join what was called the “Mixed Media” department. They were a truly formidable double act and two of the most interesting and creative students in the whole of the art school at that time but I was closer to Howson in terms of subject matter and influences. He had just returned to finish his degree at Glasgow after a stint in the Army. The central figure for all of us was the tutor Alexander (Sandy ) Moffat. He encouraged and supported us all equally and understood our desire to break away from the traditions of the Painting School at that time. Although there were broadly similar areas of interest, for example, the human figure and narrative imagery, the dynamic between us was mostly antagonistic and fiercely competitive. With hindsight it’s clear that the rivalry between us was one of the very things that helped motivate us as artists.

I should say that Steven Campbell died recently at the age of 54 – a great loss to Scottish art and contemporary painting.

Can you tell me a bit about how you typically begin a painting?

I fill sketchbooks with very small, very tentative pencil thumbnails of ideas. These ideas mostly come out of nowhere into my head, or come out of a train of thought, or something I’ve seen or read. Out of these sketches I firm up ideas for specific paintings. Occasionally I’ll make a larger preparatory sketch but usually I begin drawing directly onto the canvas with charcoal. These initial marks are crucial. If I over-revise the drawing I feel I’m killing the idea so I try to keep things as fresh as possible at all times. Once I’m happy with the drawing I then begin a lengthy process of building up a ground and when that’s ready I begin to paint – then anything can happen. This may all sound rather mechanical but really it feels quite frenetic and spontaneous when I’m doing it at the time.

As your work has developed, you appear to have abandoned a detailed rendering of space in favour of more minimal compositions often featuring a mass of darkness giving way to a single figurative element. These figures in sparse settings put me in mind of some of the plays of Samuel Beckett – such as “Rockaby”: where an old woman sits in a rocking chair on an empty stage – can you tell me a bit more about why you think your work has developed in this way?

Samuel Beckett is a major influence and always has been.I admire the economy and precision of his art, not only in terms of language but in his stage directions, lighting and the placement of props.The work you describe, where figures appear out of a void or darkened space have a theatrical quality about them that clearly shows the strength of Beckett’s influence on my work. But actually it’s often very difficult for painters to give definite reasons why their images appear as they do.I made the images in the way you describe because they instinctively felt right at that time.I should say I have already moved on from this phase and backgrounds have begun to appear again.

I believe that you originally wanted to be a filmmaker, what made you decide to switch to painting?

I’ve always thought film is an immensely powerful medium. When I was a student I was president of the Glasgow School of Art Film Society and we hired all the great and most influential films for our programmes – the works of Bergman, Tarkovsky, Fellini, Eisenstein – the usual names. I was so influenced by what I saw that I wanted to make films myself. I chose film as a secondary subject to painting, bought a Super 8 movie camera and as much black and white film stock as I could afford and started shooting and editing. I managed to put a couple of short films together.

By the time I finished art school in 1983 after a post-graduate year I had more or less abandoned painting and then went to work at, what you could describe as, a community arts project, in the east end of Glasgow. My role there was to make films with young unemployed people, pass on some technical skills and ask them to start looking and thinking about their immediate environment in a new way, through the lens of a camera. We got significant funding for our projects and eventually made a full scale, broadcast standard documentary film about social and industrial change in Glasgow. Following that I was keen to more or less become a full-time filmmaker and began work on a script for a “feature” film set in Glasgow. This involved collaborating with a writer, meeting production managers, talking about budgets, locations, casting, etc. This was a completely dispiriting experience. I suddenly understood why it was called a film “industry”. I could see the purity and integrity of ideas being mangled in the budget driven production process. The whole thing was about as far away from what you might call “art’ as you can imagine.

I decided that the kinds of films I wanted to make would probably never get off the ground or end up becoming a mere shadow of the original vision. I went back to painting, where creative control is always total. Having said that, since then, I have continued to shoot in Super 8 and now have a large archive of film material. I still love the qualities of film, the projected and enlarged moving image, the beauty of the close-up, the softness of the light. Unfortunately digital imaging is sweeping all that away.

You have held the Visiting Professorship at the Glasgow School of Art since around 2002, when you took up the position you stated that you were particularly interested in engaging in the debate about the future of painting as it competes with a plethora of other powerful image making technologies. Five years on, what are your thoughts on the current state of this debate?

This is a huge debate complicated by the fact that there has been a remarkable market driven revival of interest in contemporary painting in the last few years. There are a number of painters around at the moment whose work is deeply fashionable and influential – John Currin, Peter Doig, Luc Tuymans, Marlene Dumas, Neo Rauch, Gerhard Richter, to name but a few. Interestingly, most of this work is figurative as well and is somehow acceptable to the powerful neo-Duchampian orthodoxy of the international art world, with its overwhelming emphasis on video, installation and conceptualist strategies. I think the feeling is that painting is now simply one of a number of viable options for contemporary artists providing, however, that it stays within certain strict parameters such as – that acceptable works should present an attitude of ironic detachment delivered with dead pan painterly sloppiness. So only certain “kinds” of painting are allowed, as it were.

I often hear fellow painters tub-thumping about how painting will go on so long as human beings are around but when I look at children today I’m not so sure. Children nowadays are living virtually their entire lives through a screen of some kind – TV, computer, mobile. It is how they predominantly relate to and interact with the world. A generation may eventually emerge in the future for whom painting will be, in a total sense, archaic and barely comprehensible. However, when I occasionally talk to students, many of whom have grown up with computers and play stations, there is a strong desire to get away from the essential sterility and passivity of the interactive screen, to get their hands dirty, draw, manually create images, actualize what’s going on in their heads through one of the most eternally subtle, allusive, beautiful and sophisticated mediums of communication ever invented. Then my faith in the future is restored.

I should also note that my Visiting Professorship at Glasgow School of Art is now at an end.

Do you see your work as being concerned with the various struggles of the working classes, whether it is a large-scale struggle for union rights in the history paintings or the more private struggle against disease in your more recent work?

You’ve described two phases in my work, one associated with the Eighties and the other more recent. I hadn’t considered the possibility that my work could be generally read in the way you’ve described but it’s a good way of putting it. The early work could be said to depict images of mass action for social and political change. The later work focuses on the individual and attempts to depict the effects of capitalism on the individual bodies of “workers”. Disease could be seen as a metaphor for the ravaging effects of unfettered free-market capitalism on their lives.

In 2002, you painted a picture entitled “Three Oncologists”. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this picture and I’m fascinated by the ambiguity that I find in it. The surgeons appear to be almost startled by the intrusion into their work, on the other hand, I am sure that I can detect a slightly guilty sheepishness, a sense that they may feel that they’re doing something a little bit naughty but then also a straightforward professionalism. Were you interested in the tension between the different facets of the surgeon’s role?

You’re absolutely right to use the word ambiguity. I want ambiguity to be the central, defining feature of my work, where there is no easy pinning down of the meaning of the image for the individual viewer. The “Three Oncologists” painting is meant to have ambiguities and work on the viewer in different ways. As a group portrait commission I had to get to know the sitters and understand why they were regarded as significant enough to be included in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

In the case of two of the surgeons, I had to watch them at work in the operating theatre. Rather than being the stomach-churning sight I expected, I found myself completely mesmerized whilst observing the surgical process. Although what was happening was profoundly technical and skilled and of course, medical – I thought the whole process deeply mysterious. The strangeness of the wounding and cutting open of the body in order to heal it. There is something slightly obscene about it all- a disgraceful intrusion into someone’s innards, into those parts of the body that always remain hidden. One of the surgeons replayed me a video taken inside an old lady’s body during keyhole surgery, in amongst her internal organs and rib cage. He projected it on a huge screen in a special darkened viewing room. It was like peering into another universe. I felt the nausea of the sublime.

Image Above: “Room with Two Windows” Ken Currie (Courtesy of Flowers East, London and New York). Ken has an exhibition coming up at Flowers East in May 2008. Click here to view more images by Ken Currie or go to his page at the Flowers East website: www.flowerseast.com

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