CHRIS GARDENER INTERVIEW - December 1999

CG - In a conversation between us some years ago, Chris Fortescue remarked that he thought his artworks were like electrical circuits - if the elements of the work existed in a certain relationship to one another, energy would flow. Near the beginning of our recent dialogue I asked him if he still thought his work operated like this.

CF - Perhaps I'd choose a wetter metaphor now, one with softer edges and more complexity. I'd be more likely to use an ecological metaphor in which the flow of ideation is unpredictable and distributed and all the elements are understood to be alive. I thought about it then in terms of potential difference - the idea of having elements which were compatible with one another but which were autonomous and independent and served different functions somehow. If I could make the elements maintain their differences and yet be integrated or compatible with one another, that would produce a high imaginative voltage. I was interested in structures, real and imagined, and I still reflect on my work as being concerned with power relationships and hierarchies.

CG - In what way?

CF - In terms of the process of making; the process of acting in the world and making decisions, and with regard to perception. Around the time you mentioned it seemed to me that making art required wilfulness, concentration, focus on a particular idea. And along with that came a weeding out of all the other ideas that were constantly springing up - I labelled those ones distractions. I thought this was a good thing to do, because it was discipline. You know, rigour!!

CG - Discipline involves domination!

CF - Well, it can do. Something which I thought of as "I" was deciding that out of all the products of my fertile imagination some were worth something and others weren't, and after a while this process started to make me feel sick! So I began to pay more attention to the flow, the connections between events rather than the events themselves. Allowing events that previously had been marginal or extraneous to have equal attention. But these days I don't think discipline is necessarily a willful thing - you could think of self regulating systems as disciplined and they have no central control. Maybe the whole idea of control and free will is a patriarchal furphy.

CG - It's just an illusion to think you can surrender your will isn't it?

CF - It isn't a matter of surrendering your will, just giving it another kind of job to do. I can use my will to not use my will in certain circumstances! Apart from anything else, this might allow me to differentiate between habitual thought and action and something more embodied and appropriate. A better job for my will to do is oversee and encourage diversity and maintain balance. But since it's not possible to actually prove that I can separate action from reaction it requires an act of faith.

CG - People have criticized your work for being empty, not "about" anything; someone even once said that perhaps you had nothing to say! How do you answer such criticism?

CF - I kind of agree with it! My work is certainly empty in some way. I feel as if I use my work to try produce a sense of stillness in myself, and I think in the past I've proceeded by setting up oppositions or conundrums, either perceptual or categorical ones, to confound my need to characterise and understand and control everything. I've been very interested in incommensurability, and with the idea that opposites in equilibrium produce a kind of active stillness, where maximum potential resides. Its that idea of paradox, a zone where categories fail, where perception flips back and forth between possibilities or endlessly circles around. And anyway, I hate the idea of work "saying" something - the context speaks to the work at least in equal measure. It sounds corny and Platonic perhaps but I like the idea of trying to make things which operate like natural things. Nobody would ever ask what a tree meant, but they might be able to describe what that particular tree in that particular place and time meant for them.

CG - Yes, but a person didn't make the tree!

CF - Well, we could talk for hours about whether the tree is an independent entity outside of language. What colour is the sky if it isn't being looked at? Schroedinger's cat etc. But the whole thing about the artist's intention being the source of the meaning in the work is so monotheistic - its something which can blind people, silence them. As a viewer, I'm equally responsible for the generation of meaning. If a work has no meaning for me perhaps its because I'm not interested or couldn't be bothered engaging for one reason or another. And as a producer, well, I think I'm trying pretty hard to avoid putting a particular meaning into it, because any meaning which I've wilfully placed there is probably trite and boring compared to the meaning that a viewer could bring to bear on the piece, given the inclination. Or at least necessarily smaller and paler, since every individual's own subjectivity is an entire universe. I provide the space for someone else's construction, rather like in a conversation where the questions, answers and statements of the participants are constantly providing the impetus and the space for the conversation to continue. I think that whole thing about the artist's intention is tied up with some enlightenment baggage about genius. Didn't God die somewhere in the 19th Century? And surely genius and authorship must have followed him out in 1968 - they'd been on their last legs for quite a few years before that!

CG - Aren't you just trying to avoid responsibility for the work?

CF - Not at all. The work has to be interesting! I try to make the work engaging. As a viewer I'm most interested in things that don't reveal themselves, or are connected back into impossibly deep networks; you know, the sublime! And so when I'm working on something I try to emulate that state of being simultaneously powerless and contented. The work should be somehow endless for it to be satisfying. I don't find art that is museological or didactic or direct like advertising particularly interesting. Advertising and cinema are all ultimately about closure. Meaning doesn't reside in any thing. Its not something to be discovered, like whether or not the butler did it. Meaning isn't information, in my opinion. Significance comes into being in the relationships between things, the viewer and the work, the work and its context etc. It doesn't inhere. Its not in here!

CG - So the artwork can mean anything the viewer wants it to?

CF - Oh well, yes I suppose. But its not really a matter of want. Some stories are more plausible than others and you're more likely to spend time with a reflection of your world view if you can detect it. The urge to categorize is a pretty strong one and basically we'd all be more comfortable if everything was in its little box - for a while anyway, before we suffocated! Some people find the spaciousness that empty abstract work can provide significant, and other people find it vertiginous and anti social - its probably just a matter of taste.

CG - Would you describe your work as abstraction?

CF - Yes; even though everything is present and recogniseable. Perhaps abstraction is an old fashioned term, part of an irelevant dichotomy. In some way I'm trying to make the edges of everything disappear, so the elements melt into one another while retaining their separateness. And the clearer and more distinct the elements, the more the fog rolls in!

CG - You said earlier on that "in the past" you've worked with oppositions and conundrums. Is that no longer the case?

CF - I think that extremity is part of my personality to an extent so my attraction to polarities remains, but I'm interested in distribution and heterogeneity more these days. Equilibrium is a very beautiful and powerful state, full of potential, not at all static. But just on either side of equilibrium there can be a great deal of agitation because well matched forces are in conflict. In some ways, being dominated by one force or another is easier, more straight forward. That's what passion is, don't you think? The danger is if one direction dominates, the other directions loose energy and may disappear, and if that happens you have death and destruction! The Dark Side! But of course there's no singular system, just an infinity of systems interacting, and maybe polarities are only important in simplified systems.

CG - Can you talk about your sound work then because it seems to me that the work you've done using sound is less to do with polarities and extremes.

CF - That's true! The sound works are like spaces where hardly anything at all happens! The sound work came about because I realised one day that my visual sense was accompanied by a very strong analytical and critical mental state. Perhaps because of my training, but also because vision is our primary sense and we depend on it for our lives. So understanding and vision go together, and you can "see" that in all the visual metaphors we use for understanding. Anyway, I realised that this analytical mental state was accompanied by a kind of physical rigidity, which had something to with "trying", and therefore I suppose with control. And it also made me feel a little sick. Actually it made me feel quite sick. So I started listening and working on my auditory acuity and found that when I was listening I was immersed in a way that I could never be when looking. Looking was always looking at, in a similar way to consciousness always being consciousness of something. Looking was a distant operation, and listening didn't seem to be. Listening was closely connected to touch, and if I was really listening, I felt good, I was touched.

CG - But we listen "to" things in the same way as we look "at" things!

CF - Yes, it had to be unconcentrated listening, not listening to. I had to concentrate on not listening to one thing over another; if I could suspend my judgement and just let the sounds of things in the world wash through me, it made me feel loose and aware and equilibrated. Ambient sound was better than Mozart. I like Mozart, don't get me wrong! But with Mozart and Snoop Doggy Dog you have to have your ears pricked, you have to get with the formula, allow yourself to be dictated to, you can't be detached. It might also be that Mozart and Snoop Doggy Dog most of the time come out of loudspeakers, and loudspeakers always sound similar, in the same way that photographs reduce everything to "content". You know, photographs and loudspeakers homogenise everything, re - present everything, so there's always an implicit intentionality about them.

CG - All of your sound installations use loudspeakers and music!

CF - I don't think loudspeakers are bad things! But I find it annoying the way they are used without an acknowledgement of artifice, you know like those museum displays where you hear twittering birds and you know its a CD player and hidden speakers because the sound is so tinny and one dimensional. My installations tend to foreground the artifice.

CG - Do you think you could train yourself to look without looking at?

CF - Perhaps, but it would be the work of a lifetime!

CG - Could you train yourself to be conscious without being conscious of?

CF - Now there's a question! Maybe that would be the work of a number of lifetimes!