Philip Gurrey: Interview

Bruce Davies: I’d like to start by asking you about your interest in 17th Century Dutch painting and how that relates to what you have started with in the from room

Philip Gurrey: Yeah okay, well I suppose it came from studying painting, studying certain techniques of painting, as part of my undergrad. As soon as you start to immerse yourself in a medium with painting or photography or sculpture, you start to look at works of art from that medium completely differently, you haven’t got a naive eye or an objective eye anymore, because your considering methods of application, how they got to the point they’ve got to, and that’s well before you consider any schools of painting. This is just looking at pure technique, how did they arrive at this technically and how can I arrive at this technically, so you’re starting to understand in paint rather than just an image or visually. So it came from that really. For me the most in depth, crafted paintings were of that sort of era, 17th century Holland, the golden age. A massive influence was Velasquez and Goya. So Spain as well as Dutch painting. They were sort of experimenting with the medium in a way that… you would consider Rembrandt quite a conservative painter. They think of him as being quite old fashioned, but at the time, if you look at some of his etchings, he was creating what we now consider to be a modern etching process. He was creating that whilst he was making them, because he was frustrated with the traditional etching process he was being taught or coming to terms with. So he invented techniques like ‘Spit Bite’, which is pouring acid on a plate to make the plate erode, which then when you ink uptake. plate you almost get watercolour washes. In etching that was unheard of because that was just a printing medium. So these guys were doing the same in paint.

And so I had this frustration with [the attitude] ‘oh that’s 17th century, you don’t need to look at that, it’s the stuff that’s been done in the last fifty years, or even the last twenty years [that’s important] .’ I remember I went to an interview in a school in Holland to do my masters, and there was a real emphasis on who inspires you now, who are you looking at now, and it’s like literally making work this year. I can massively see the interest and need to have that understanding of the art world, but on the other hand I’ve got much more of an idea of what’s happening this weaken the rest of the world, because you pick up things like that. It was almost shameful to say ‘well actually my influence is 17th century painting.’ But it was purely from a painter’s technique point of view. So that’s why I was interested in it. It made up the major body of post-degree work for me really. But there were big questions being asked there for me that I can only ask now because I wasn’t really aware of them at the time, but I was making work from reference books, because these paintings aren’t very accessible in the flesh. If you wanted to go and do a temporary study of the Mona Lisa there is no way you can do it. Because you wouldn’t be allowed the time in from of the work; it’s too much of a commodity, too much of an attraction, brings in too much money to let an eighteen year old student set up an easel in front of it and start copying it. You can do it, and you can see them doing it sometimes in the National Gallery in London; I remember a chap stood in front of a Velasquez when I was down there. But it was never about that for me, it was never ‘I need to copy this completely,’ it was only to sort of trade some of the techniques, so then I could move on. So I was never indebted to it. That can be a trap in itself.

So… how it ties into the work in the living room is really… I realised that a lot of intake of art, contemporary or historical was through secondary media - magazines, books, the internet - and because I had been considering photographs of paintings to work from, I wanted to see… I did then start to work from Percy O’Neill photographs, who’s a well known photographer now, and I thought ‘why can’t these photographs be my own?’ Then I’m not working from anybody any more, I’m working from myself. So that was why the subject came about really - I can take these photographs and I can work them into paint, and I can manipulate them in the way I was manipulating Percy O’Neill’s photographs or photographs of paintings, and just see where I end up. So that is technically how I got to the paintings in the living room from my interest in Dutch 17th century painting. But by studying, even in books, Dutch 17th Century painting you can still deal with composition. I learn a lot compositionally, tonally, formally from looking at these paintings. I speak to a lot of people about the work and a lot of people I must say put words in my mouth, but they say there’s an age about the work, there’s a historical aspect to it, as if it has come out of a history of something. I have to associate that to formal, historical paintings really, and picking up techniques from them. Composition never changes, composition develops, but it’s never wrong or right. There are traditional ways of framing things, contemporary ways of framing things, but the devices are still the same, so I was learning the devices really.

BD: So whilst you’ve knowledge and necessity, or ability to research images and stuff, through the internet and books, you would still place a large part of what it takes to actually experience a painting from managing to get in front of the painting itself. Do you think that is why there is a turning away from painting at the most almost, and there seems to be a thing of ‘oh no, this is painting… we’ll do video, do a performance, and painting is getting pushed to one side?

PG: Yeah, it’s funny, I find it extremely paradoxical, because getting to know the commercial contemporary gallery system (it would hate to call itself but that’s what it is), there’s been a push by some of the major, major players in contemporary art to put on, rather than travel around the world to art fairs - Miami, New York - because that’s a great expense for galleries, could they do an internet show instead? I know it was proposed a few years ago, and it was part successful, and part not. The only way they, from a commercial perspective, could make it successful is if it was invite only, so you buy a ticket for first viewing of the work, but what you are viewing is a 360 degree video of a space which you’ll never inhabit. And that for me goes against absolutely everything we know about art. But these are the highest echelons of contemporary art, this isn’t your Flowers Gallery, London that’s selling modernist paintings, this is Turner Prize winning stuff. And your thinking ‘well, hang on a minute, this doesn’t work for painting or even for drawing,’ and drawing is quite two dimensional (or can be) - this doesn’t even work for that, because you’re not getting to understand the object. But what they are actually looking at is sculpture; that has the necessity of space and object and personal relationship. They seem to have ignored iyt within painting but they’re vastly underestimating the nature of sculpture if they think you can look at it on a screen and understand it, even if that screen moves into 3D space. You are not having an understanding of that bodily space anymore. If you consider a 6” Henry Moore maquette of a female reclining nude, the relationship that you have with that, that you can hold in your hand or circulate around, to three metre bronze statues of exactly the same figure in a landscape with Sheep walking around it, they’re two different works. They may have the same proportionality, but they’re two different works and that’s what the screen does for me. The screen completely augments a physical relation with the work. So yeah for you to reference that within painting, which I think there is a dire need to re-address a sort of Merleau-Ponty, Heideggerian understanding of horizon. They talked about, what is your horizon? Is it the end of your consciousness or is it visual focus? Hiedegger talks about the table being a horizon, and only when you shift your visual focus and concentration does that horizon open out. So If I’m looking at this recorder on the table (referencing my recording device in front of us) this is the object, this is the horizon, this is it’s parameters. Then when I consider you and I in a room, the room is the horizon. If we weren’t able to compartmentalise things like that, we’d be living with the world in our head all the time, and space in our head. Well we do don’t we? We concentrate and we have the ability to focus in on things and Hiedegger talks about that being varying horizons, which are limitless and moveable. And Merleau-Ponty basically said, well that then suggests a physical, bodily understanding of something, because your horizon is the space you encounter; it isn’t a visual encounter, it’s a bodily encounter. That for me, even if a painting is completely flat like a Glen Brown, even if it is completely two dimensional, unless you can approach that painting with your body then you’re not experiencing the work. Because it could be hung low, it could be hung high, it could be hung in a corner. Then you enter into Donald Judd territory, where you’re encountering objects and they make you feel uncomfortable. Well you can’t look at a picture of a Donald Judd and feel uncomfortable! That necessity of getting people in front of a work is essential. And I suppose that’s what that text piece downstairs, in the end, came to be about, because you can read that online, you can read it on a piece of paper, you can read it in a book - the text doesn’t change, but it’s next to a painting. Whether or not you can think about that painting. while you’re reading the piece, the relationship isn’t the same. It’s next to that painting for a reason. There’s a specific space between the text and the painting for a reason, it’s hung at a certain height for a reason. I don’t know that reason but they all count for something, and that something is experience.

BD: Decisions in hanging exhibitions and placing work can be both conscious and unconscious can’t it, so whether we understand what we’re doing at the time [or not], it might only be later on that reason emerges, even to yourself. At the time, it can seem just visually pleasing.

PG: At the time I think you’re really dealing with gut instincts. And I think as soon as you try and conceptualise them, you’re denying other instincts. That’s something I’ve only found out in these two weeks (at BasementArtsProject). I realise that when someone asks me what my work is about, I can tell them what everyone else has said my work’s about, and that’s quite concrete in my head. ‘Oh, it’s about revisiting the Dutch golden age, because that was the birth of Contemporary culture, that was the birth of where money started to dominate above royalty or religion’. And I think, ‘yeah, maybe that was it.’ At the end of the day it’s just the work; the work is the work, and it’s been a trap for me to think like that. I’ve been thinking like that for the last six months.