After party at The Birdcage, 80 Columbia Road, London, E2 7QB from 21.00.

 

Click here for images of ...That Make Up Some Things... the Alice Channer show

 

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An interview between Alice Channer, Ryan Gander & Rebecca May Marston, 6th June 2007.


RG: Ryan and Alice and Rebecca, it’s the 6th of June, Hoxton Street.
RMM: Ok, when was the last time you were in your studio and what were you doing?
AC: This morning. I was finishing off one of the works for the show, the Moorfields eye piece. I was making the faces of it. It’s two flat surfaces, the fronts of the eye, which have been pushed apart. I was drawing them then I ran out of green pencils so I had to go to the art shop.
RG: I’ve never asked you about this because I had a suspicion that it was a lady thing that I shouldn’t talk about: why did you have a monobrow and now you’ve got two?
AC: A lot of my works consist of two different parts. For example in the Associates show the Moorfields eye, half is on the eye hospital and the other half is in the space, but then there are also two in the space. Then the screenprint of me and Rebecca standing in the space is a pair of screenprints put together. Growing my eyebrow came out of that as well because I had my interim show at college and I made a dot and a [points finger in the air] and I thought I could make my two eyebrows into one eyebrow, then make a drawing of that to go with the dot and the [points finger in the air]. It’s also a way of folding myself into the work and bringing myself back out. I always set up these borders and try and go over them and back again.
RMM: You know how you have spots then dots and then [points finger in the air] getting smaller, we’ll have to say what that smallest is otherwise they’re not going to know.
AC: We can use one of them.
RMM: What? A full stop.
AC: Yes.
RG: Do you think your practice is a bit like the Bauhaus? In terms of design for life, or the way things you make slip into everyday living. It’s really utilitarian in that it’s about what people wear, what surrounds people, the way people sit, the cushions.
AC: That’s a massive question because you’re basically asking me what’s the relationship between my work and the whole idea of modernism.
RG: No, I’m asking you whether you could make a teacup. And whether you’re conscious that you’re doing that because it feels like you are. There’s some sort of you monopolising every little corner of living.
AC: I don’t think that I have the same aspirations as the Bauhaus in that I’m not attempting to make things that will become part of life because I’m also interested in hermetic practice and withdrawing anything that I make that could be useful back into the space of my work. But then at the same time I’m interested in the possibility that that thing could exist and be useful, so for example in my interim show there were cushions…
RG: Well there were people in hats sitting on cushions playing a game.
AC: And those people were actors. I was also interested in them being themselves in the work. I didn’t ask them to wear particular clothes, the one thing I did ask them to wear was part of someone else’s work. So it was about trying to set up movements into my work and then back out again. It’s hard to explain sometimes because it’s as if for every movement in one direction I need to set up one in another direction. So there isn’t an idea of progress and a complete utopian design for life, because that is a kind of flawed movement in one direction and what I’m trying to do is less decided than that and maybe more selfish.
RMM: I was going to ask you about using actresses, because before it has always been you and your body in the work and I wondered how it was giving it up to someone else?
AC: I was really conscious of how I was trying not to direct them and that was difficult because I didn’t want their actions to be expressive. Something really interesting happened there, but I’m still working it out. You know when you do something that goes a bit beyond what you knew already?
RMM: And as well as being the first time you’d used other bodies it was the first time you did a performance wasn’t it?
AC: Yeah, and there’s something… I think a lot about what excites me about pattern in the work is trying to make it embodied. In a way all of the work is an attempt to make a pattern that only exists when someone else enters the space and tries to put it back together again. So that performance was a demonstration of that by asking people to come into the space and be part of the work and bring something of themselves into it.
RMM: And the way you use Noel’s hats and Erdem’s dresses, and you set up your Goldsmith’s degree show where Lucy Parker made a blind for your window, as a way of collaborating… well it seems more like choreographing infiltrations. Do you always collaborate in that way?
AC: It’s never felt like collaboration, it is more choreography or setting up movement in and out of something, and I was really conscious of how in that show I’d asked Lucy to make me a blind because I thought that in order to get shadows from the spots I’d need to cover the window. So it was a movement from her work into my work and then from my work back into her work. It’s sort of not that good-hearted a collaboration.
RMM: It’s quite a flattering gesture to collaborate via invitation.
AC: Maybe, in the way that her work is still allowed to be her work and my work is allowed to be my work. It just rehearses where the border between the two exists and whenever I tell the story of my show I have to tell the story of her show.
RG: Would you say you have a signature aesthetic? Because I think I could spot your work a mile off.
AC: Yeah. I think I do, because with the Moorfields eye I knew I could use that object because it fitted in my work and that gave me licence to pick it, but I feel like I do try and do things to upset that aesthetic. I’m not quite sure how successful they are.
RG: It’s not successful at all but that’s the nature of making things.
AC: But what if some of the characteristics of that aesthetic are quite generic, like a spot or a stripe, you can’t claim those things as original. It comes back to that thing again of being really conscious of what the practice is as a whole and trying to use a signature aesthetic to set up something that appears to cohere and appears to be whole and then to set up these movements to disrupt that.
RG: But that’s why I see in your practice this mode for living because it’s like attaching an aesthetic to every area. Like using a domino, it has spots and stripes on every one and then that moves to the playing and that moves to the cushions and the bias binding on the edges of the cushions has stripes on it as well and that’s why I think a good word is monopolisation, because I can imagine it spreading…
AC: If that was the case maybe that’s the point at which I lose control of it because there are a lot of things in the world that are made up of those two basic elements.
RMM: I think what I wanted to ask was about style, which I think is different to an aesthetic. I think of style as being a language you’ve developed and play with, rather than a signature aesthetic…
AC: I don’t know, I think there’s two things there. One is to do with style and what style is and my interest in fashion, the difference between fashion and art, and trying to include works from fashion, which have a completely different velocity, different relationship to time and meaning. Then the other thing which is a question about formalism, practice and what happens when you start to try to develop your own language and that’s really interesting because it feels like quite a vulnerable way of working. It’s not trying to appeal to some kind of content or subject matter outside the work, it’s trying to use the work itself to develop things that might gain meaning within the space of a practice I suppose. There’s two works that are going to be in the show using these long columns of pleated fabric and they feel like they could be the beginning of developing a sculptural language.
RMM: When you first talked about them you said that they were very ‘RCA sculpture’. What did you mean by that?
AC: I think it comes back to that thing of saying if we accept that there might be a way of working that’s genre specific and it’s to do with an idea of sculpture, that is quite inward-looking, a hermetic way of working.
RMM: Why does it feel like a vulnerable way of working?
AC: I think because it’s a type of formalism and these works don’t appeal to things outside themselves for a right to exist.
RMM: And is it something that has been borne out of your time at Royal College on the sculpture course?
AC: I think so yeah. And part of that is being able to be sensitive to material and the way in which the objects in my work might be made. For example in the white on white screen print where you don’t recognise it as an image, to begin with you recognise it as material and that happens in a moment of perception, before recognition kicks in. There’s also something about the way in which material is the thing that allows an object to exist separately from your intention for it. Like the Perspex Graveyard show we’re doing at Dicksmith – the material of those objects is the thing that is completely disobedient, because their makers had this intention and the material goes on to completely pervert that.
RMM: Oh yeah, Gabo and those artists using Perspex as this amazing new material but decades on the Perspex is dying… Erm… got to round up so how did your experience of the RCA differ to Goldsmiths?
AC: They’re separate poles. I think my practice suits both of them…
RG: Can an art school just be a warm room?
AC: I think art school is really important and I think it should be a place where you’re encouraged to ask loads of questions but at the same time given space to find out what happens when you make stuff. The other thing is the people who are there. At the end of Goldsmiths I felt the most important thing was the people I’d met.
RMM: What was the last show you saw?
AC: Elizabeth Price’s film ‘At the House of Mr X’ at the Stanley Picker Gallery in Kingston.
RG: She’s good, isn’t she? She was my tutor on foundation.
AC: She was my tutor too but that’s not why I think it was good… Oh, and I wanted to ask you something… can I print a story on the back of the invites and the interviews? It’s the story about the sparrow.
RMM: Sure… Why do you like the Mary Quant book so much? I saw in your bag you kept bringing it to the false starts for this interview.
AC: I thought that there might be a moment I could get it out and talk about it and that there would be a point in the interview when we were talking about an object that wasn’t there and when you were reading the interview there would be words where we were looking at something you couldn’t see. To indicate where the edges of the interview were.
RMM: Now it’s a fiction because the book isn’t here… So why do you like it so much?
AC: It’s one whole book but because of the way you can read it by opening out both halves of the cover and then the pages on the inside there are always four pages open in front of you so it appears to exist as a whole book and then many different books in one and that’s the kind of structure I’m interested in for my work.
RMM: It’s a great book and they do proper Mondrian’s on faces.
AC: It’s that moment again when a graphic language that came out of the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s ended up in make-up.
RG: So say something about Associates. Do you think it’s good it ends after a year?
AC: Yeah. I think it’ll be sad but I think it’s a really good thing that it’s ending. Things stay good because they finish.
RG: Do you think the artists we’ve showed have shared anything?
AC: I’m not sure… I definitely think there’s something in the space, the size of it and its particularities like the step and ledge and vanishing point, which mean it is conducive to showing types of work, groups of objects that are set up to relate to each other like a constellation in the space.
RG: Constellation is a nice word. Last question: do you think that in the future there will be shinier objects and more silver things?
AC: Why are you asking me that?
RG: Rikrit Tiravanija said the future is chrome…
AC: The best science fiction, like Blade Runner and everything William Gibson has written, materially those things interpret the future not as shiny and high tech but as a combination of those and as more vulnerable materials like paper and fabric and ceramic, things which don’t try so hard to look futuristic. Shinyness reminds me of the past, the 70s. Is that too serious a response to your stupid question?
RG: It was a brilliant question. I’m sure there’s something else…
(00:43:37)

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Alice Channer was born in Oxford in 1977. She gained her BA Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in 2006. Since then she has completed the first year of her MA Sculpture at the Royal College of Art and had a group show at Galleri Specta, Copenhagen. She has an upcoming group show at Dicksmith, London (2008).

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For more information contact Rebecca May Marston at rebecca@associatesgallery.co.uk or +44 (0) 207 729 8173 or see www.associatesgallery.co.uk