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Out of context: Reply #21002
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Peter Saville: ...and this is the point in which fine art and late 20th century applied art diverge completely. In the applied arts we learn to please people, we learn strategies of pleasing others. Pleasing yourself or expressing yourself, the confessing self, is not pertinent within the applied arts. It might be terribly interesting but it’s not exactly what we’re looking for. The prevailing condition within the applied arts is also to make things look good. Things that look good tend to be familiar – things tend not to look good until we are to some extent familiar with them. We see this in the culture of design all the time, what was radical 20 years ago and received with shock, we now see as kind of easy on the eye.
Dan Fox: It becomes part of the canon.
PS: Exactly, and then it’s OK for a Habitat kitchen – and so there’s a process that happens there. The shock of the new is quite counter-productive in the applied arts because mostly it’s not what the market’s looking for. The applied arts generally rely on making things look good and take it into iterations of the canon. Once I tried to sit down and do some work of my own that would have any kind of place in what I thought a gallery should be, I realised I was just quoting the existing codes. That was my first big embarrassing moment – the first Frieze Art Fair three or four years ago, where I had some digital recycled pieces, which conceptually were quite an interesting idea.
DF: The Waste Paintings?
PS: Yes, which were literally a shredding of something “finished”. So conceptually it was, “Nothing lasts very long, we just finished this today, so let’s make something else out of them tonight.” But of course the tendency with them is always to make them look good, so they ended up looking like variations on Abstract Expressionism. I was quite happy that they looked like a Morris Louis.
DF: And why not!
PS: And then I took a walk around the art fair and it was probably the first time I’d ever been in an art fair and, you know, I’m walking down Avenue B, second left and there was a Morris Louis! I thought, “Shit! I’ll get my coat.” That was the first day of the fair and it was there for another three days... I just wanted the world to open up so I could disappear into it. It was the most embarrassing and shameful experience. I thought, “Well Peter, the art world doesn’t need another Morris Louis, it’s already got one...” And that gave me an insight into how I’d been able to freely work within fashion and media cultures, where putting a Morris Louis into a record store was a reasonably idealistic gesture. But it would have been much better to let [The Waste Paintings] be what they were – to some extent ugly and unfamiliar – that would have been a better way of brokering them than ending up with something that looked familiar. Why would anyone go beyond the surface to find out anymore about it? So that week I realised how wide the divergence was.