Zérodeux

Mick Peter is a Glasgow-based artist, mainly producing sculptures, but also drawings or illustrations. His relationship to art has to be considered through his miscellaneous practices and through the various positions he occupies as a literature lover, a blogger and a writer… Any encounter with him or with his work, as well as any collaboration will probably start and end with a book…

Caroline Soyez-Petithomme: For the last two years you took part in several group shows in France, as well as a series of solo exhibitions : at La Galerie des Multiples (Paris, 2008), at Zoo Galerie (Nantes, 2009) and at La Salle de Bains (Lyon, 2010). This recent show is titled after Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Nose, and once again you have constructed a whole show from a literary reference. Structurally (based on a conception of fiction as a pure construction) your sculptures’ content is the result of a transposition of the absurdity and strangeness inherent in the narrative. As this is recurrent in your practice and has been already well documented in different texts and interviews, I’d like to focus on the new elements that have emerged in your formal repertory. In The Nose there are only two autonomous works or sculptures. The other sculptures belong to the exhibition space, as wall reliefs. For the first time in your sculpture, you also integrate (schematic) human figures, and not only hybrid or anthropomorphist creatures. Could you explain this evolution?

Mike Peter: This combination is to reflect the way in which a book can utilise the city as a schematic space in which the narrative can enact its absurdist fantasies. In The Nose St Petersburg is merely sketched as a rather impersonal and bureaucratic scenario where the nose can run riot, creating a disruption of the social decorum of the environment Gogol knew so well. In creating wall pieces I had the chance to fabricate an environment/context for other works. It’s something that has sometimes troubled me in the past; autonomous sculptures can seem rather opaque in terms of the intention when they are placed at seemingly arbitrary intervals across the floor of a space (having said that on occasion it can be interesting to do that as it plays a bit with sculptural histories). The notion of using figures is to present archetypes from the story as silhouette shapes. In this way I’d say that actually they are quite close to the hybridized and anthropomorphic things I have made in the past. The function is the same ; they are there to generate a tension between the different sculptural modes that I find quite interesting.

Your technique as a sculptor belongs to a traditional conception of the medium, you cut, carve or hollow the material, but instead of being made of wood your sculptures are made of polystyrene. Then, you cover this material with cement and sometimes with pigmented latex. This approach is disrupted by the effect of the rough and falsely soft surfaces. You play with those visual and sensory illusions, handcrafted aesthetics combine with incongruous or mysterious iconography. Through this syncretism you simulate a kind of folk practice related to an imaginary cultural background.

This idea of rendering a surface more homogenous by covering it in a material that either has the illusion of being hard or is anti-realistic in its vibrant colour is something that relates to abstract sculpture that I like. I’m thinking a bit of unfashionable people like Caro (his Red Splash for example). The surfaces become a welcome distraction in what I do! The cement takes on a quasi-painted appearance with its smears and marks. It’s also a way, after all the chopping and cutting, of stabilising the whole object and stopping the process, usually when the objects are ‘made enough’. The folk thing is not something I’m that conscious of, of course I can see the relationship with studying wonky and badly made things with great seriousness, trying to divine some cultural import by comparing and measuring them. Constructing a framework like this is something some artists do excellently, for example Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan in Glasgow make works that build in myriad artefacts with some totem-like iconography. It’s fascinating. They also use illustration in a different way by having someone make drawings to their instructions, which is a bit like looking in National Geographic at watercolours of ancient civilisations!

This syncretism, which structures your work, also results from your interest in modernist, experimental and psychedelic music. This part of the process usually remains hidden or implicit in your works. For the first time, you partly based your show on a musical source. The Nose is an adaptation of Shostakovich’s opera and you were interested in it because of its mix of modernist styles. How could you describe this transfer of the musical experience into the field of sculpture?

It’s less to do with the music, though it is excellent and does mix forms and styles very interestingly. It’s actually the compactness of the libretto, how the story has to be adapted and compressed, and perhaps slightly stylised, for stage. The ‘staginess’ is something that is curious and of interest when you are trying to make an environment of some kind in the gallery. Having looked at some sets like that (the ones made for opera sets), the adaptability of the scenario and its multi purpose features was something I wanted to look into. I started by drawing and using some of the processes of design, isometric paper to describe volume for one thing.

In your recent drawings, you created a completely different universe, which is really precise in terms of representation. In some of these, the human figures are not schematic at all, however they are not entirely visible. They are cut because of the framing and not because of their own fragmentary or hybrid form as your sculptures are. Is there any relationship or logical process between those sculptural and graphic representations of the body?

The framing is a device from illustrations and comic books I guess. It’s the closest equivalent to cutting and altering a sculpture as you go along. Generally speaking the idea of illustrating or illustration is quite fraught but all the more interesting for it. The bodies you describe in these drawings I think of more like drawings of statues, as they tend to have a homogenous and anti realistic colour (red in the series you’re describing). I take a lot of inspiration from underground ‘comix’ of the 60′s and 70′s in this respect, as the body is much more malleable and subject to transformation and violence. On many levels that links it to The Nose. Another factor comes again from books and as I’ve talked about in the past how in Flaubert’s journals he describes birds shitting on statues in Egypt with great amusement!

Let’s keep talking about fun! Did you use to read comics when you were a teenager? Or is it something you got interested in as a cultural phenomenon, for instance, when student at the art school? Would you claim that comics equally combine intellectual and structural strategies as well as fun, such as you mentioned before about Flaubert’s, Roussel’s or Gogol’s work?

I read things when I was a teenager aimed at teenagers in terms of comics (literature was a bit more highbrow as you’re inspired to do when you’re at school and that took me away from the realm of Penguin Classics). The ‘comix’ phenomenon was something that interested me more at college when the things in them, music and art historical references etc seemed more relevant. The fact that comics are theoretically not considered high art is something that I have always found a bit tedious and when good artists in the field make work about that particular chip on their shoulder (Robert Crumb is one of many who are guilty of this) it makes the form seem a bit adolescent.

Have you also been influenced by any contemporary comics?

The slightly miserabilist tendency on the one hand or the goth/superhero on the other I find deeply uninspiring. I suppose there just doesn’t seem to be much imagination or subversion in them. From a technical point of view there is plenty of nice drawing but that’s about as far as it goes.

The 60′s and 70′s comics were subversive cultural artefacts, breaking political, social and sexual taboos. They were also generating their own economy. As you produce many different forms of art including sculptures, drawings, and books, you only refer to comics as a ‘form’. I imagine you are not into an artistic process such as Raymond Pettibon’s who produces only comic-like drawings (which for some reason entered the art market, and became luxurious comics or artworks and are completely out of comics field of diffusion). Do you consider this influence of 60-70s comics as a form of nostalgia or is it only a tribute, a respectful reference to the golden era of this means of expression?

The small-scale self-production is attractive of course. I’m less nostalgic about that era then I am disappointed in some of the things I see now (I would have to be quite a bit older to have proper nostalgia anyway!). Pettibon is great; I don’t see him as some kind of crossover act at all. Formally, the tension between words and images is inspiring and an endless source of possibilities and of course you can easily make drawings of any insane scenario that pops into your head which, with a little evaluation, can turn up some good things.

Do you comment on the impossibility to be subversive in contemporary art? How do you feel about this as a potential critical position if the effect is limited by the form and content being immediately integrated into the institution?

I’m sure it’s quite easy to do that (be subversive). Whether it makes for interesting work or if anybody is doing it well is another matter. I don’t feel very subversive, dealing as I do with some fairly old-fashioned concerns about sculpture and drawing. The only mildly difficult thing built into the work is its complexity, its motivations and references, as well as its relatively free imaginative content. I suppose it could be seen as not being very user friendly if you don’t find the mechanism of it appealing. I would hope however that some of the material solutions seem quite novel and curious!

Have you ever created any posters or illustrated any books, newspapers or magazines (which are not art-related possibly but more kind of underground, a collaboration with local music scene for instance)?

Sadly not really, everything is art related! I am however working on a fairly bonkers illustration for a recording of Terry Riley’s In C, which will appear on the Junior Aspirin imprint later this year that I’m pretty excited about right now.

You can find a complementary interview of Mick Peter by Nathaniel Mellors on the website zerodeux.fr

http://www.zerodeux.fr/nathniel-mellors-by-mick-peter

Tags: galerie Crèvecœur, La Galerie des Multiples, La Salle de Bains, Mick Peter, Zoo Galerie