DUPE talks to Luke Burton about inspiration, ambivalence and heritage
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Luke Burton, I am an artist and I mostly procrastinate with interludes of intense, ill-considered, yet often rewarding and occasionally triumphant production.
Image: Ambivalent Man with Fountain, 2015, ink emulsion on paper, 210cm x 180cm
Describe your practice in 5 words.
Things you must(n’t) leave behind.
Image: Diapers, 2015, plastic bag, tissue, photograph, spray paint, emulsion, indian ink, dimensions variable
Who or what inspires you?
This is the dream and nightmare question! I have the short and prosaic answer: everything! The long and real and contingent answer is in the form a very incomplete list…
1) People I know who have the capacity to love the whos and whats passionately, messily, precisely, and without totally compromising the who for the what. I basically just mean managing to be a compassionate and kind and generous person to those around you and still sustain a fierce passion for your work.
2) James Baldwin’s novels Giovanni’s Room and Go Tell it on the Mountain - his artistry in being blindingly and bewitchingly bright and expressive AT THE SAME TIME...it’s possible! I love his care for minor characters too which, in just a few pages, can feel devastating. I’ve just started reading Another Country…
3) Lee Krasner’s Gothic Landscape. It’s got so many of the attributes I want in painting.
Image: Filigree Endings, Bosse and Baum, solo show 27th February-26th March Photographed by Oskar Proctor
4) Deliberate shallowness that suggests great depth. Henri Matisse understood this. And one of his peers, Gertrude Stein, did exactly this in The World is Round, a children’s story that distils the ‘difficulty’ of her writing into something totally approachable and playful. This idea of something superficial, surface-laden intimating profundity is also one of the reasons I am so interested in the inheritance of decorative and ornamental visual languages.
"Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around.
Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals. That is the way it was. And everybody dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children all wanted to tell everybody all about it and they wanted to tell all about themselves.
And then there was Rose.
Rose was her name and would she have been rose if her name had not been Rose. She used to think and then she used to think again."
The World is Round, Gertrude Stein
5) Artists who quietly get on with making and thinking and being hopeful, if not certain, that what they will contribute to the world is worthy of it and that the world is worthy of their contribution too. That these two dynamics are in cahoots and we must face this and make work in the face of this. And of course that these things are done with the very real prospect of on-your-own-terms failure...all of which produce a kind of series of Beckett moments: ‘...you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on’.
Image: Hanging Basket, 2015, brass, acrylic, silk, studio dirt. Photographed by Oskar Proctor
6) Almost everyday for the last ten years I have thought about Ken Jacob’s Little Stabs at Happiness, a film so perfect and perfectly full of youth and exuberance that I want to consume its spirit and birth it and kill it and never think about it again whilst always having it with me, like a little bird of paradise on my shoulder. It’s actually available on YouTube and better than seeing the Lux’s (perhaps overused) print on 16mm - though if you can see it on celluloid with a decent print, that would be ideal. It has all the characteristics and productive contrasts I have affinity with. It’s camerawork is loose and yet purposeful and painterly; it has a hyper sensitive relationship between image and music and song and the human voice; it has a cool temperament but represents what I would call muggy if not downright stormy relationships utterly tenderly - Ken Jacob’s voiceover candidly but cheekily declares he ‘doesn’t speak’ to anyone in the film anymore. Oh, and two more words: Jack Smith. A performer so electric that he can merely tilt his head up for a moment and it produce all manner of filmic and psychic consequences!
7) Varda Caivano’s paintings that she made when she was still a student at The Royal College of Art - perhaps the best student work I have ever seen. It reaffirmed that abstract painting can still feel vital and be small and palpably confidential; alternately subtle and yet somehow brash. The paintings shake hands with the figurative world and then take that same hand to slap itself round the face. They are beatific and yet anxious paintings.
8) Nathaniel Dorsky’s life’s work - pretty much everything he has made, the grace and grandeur of it; a body of work about the possibility or question for beauty within cinema ‘as such’. His work often feels more stately than Antonioni and always exposing and intimate as if it was only ever to be made for one person. Yet his films must be seen in congregation mode, with your eyes wide open, with the projector on ‘silent’ speed (18 frames a second). He understood how to work with and through Brakhage and Bresson and introduced me to the poetics of camera movement and that montage means more than shot A next to shot B next to shot C. It means a polyphony of images, all cascading and careening over time, and in his hands, a series of images that arrest you in and of themselves, but find their truest calling embedded in the montage.
9) The National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Its collection of Attic pottery made me go gaga and its palatial yet unfussy atmosphere made me realise how unnecessary the full-throttle bombast of the British Museum is and how it often gets in the way of seeing the stuff inside it.
10) The complexity of sport and in particular football: it’s cultural, social, political and economic value in the world. The elegance and aesthetic rewards of watching bodies move with a competitive drive; its relationship with the need for people to be in the same space and commune in devotion and loathing and hunger for narrative on a macro and micro level; its ancient roots and its contemporary bloatedness; its understanding of flashness and its hunkering down on nostalgia; its continued baseness.
11) For those lucky enough to see it, who doesn’t love and admire the work of Rose Wylie?
Image: Ambivalent Man with Screen, 2015, 165cm x 110cm, walnut, birch ply, emulsion, gouache and ink
Can you talk us through your making process?
I tend to make in fits and starts. When things start going well, I generally think this will be it, I have found my methodology for life, my set of concerns, and then just as this (immature) notion descends, I invariably lose focus and track and tack and have a kind of involuntary impasse. I used to think this impasse was appalling and shameful, but now I recognise it as an internal timer conjoined with the necessary energy to produce work.
At the moment I am making a lot of drawings and paintings that take as their cue visual tropes such as fountains, hanging baskets, exotic birds like peacocks, and tennis rackets. The fountains have jet sprays of water that partly conceal male figures, drawn in a semi-classical, semi-expressionistic way. I am interested in the idea of concealment, obscurity and revelation as something that can be shown through a kind of cramped, compressed pictorial space and composition. Max Beckmann did this so well in many of his paintings like The Gobblers, which can be seen in the Tate Modern.
I don’t tend to do that much preparatory drawing, and as I’m using neat black ink much of the time, the work feels quite performative, as I don’t really have a second go at each respective mark I’m making. However, I make a lot of drawings and many of them have very similar compositions and imagery, so there comes a point where I start to feel both excited at the new kinds of images I’m producing, which have a ‘live’ element to them, and yet also confident in managing the material’s fluidity and therefore greater control of the imagery. There is a tipping point when I feel a little too confident with what I’m doing in terms of the handling of the ink in relation to an over-familiarity with the image, and at this point a certain degree of energy is lost and things start looking ‘flabby’. There is a kind of sweet spot where I’m neither inept nor too well-versed that seems, for my purposes, productive, but time-sensitive.
Ambivalent Man with Peacock, 2015, ink, emulsion on paper, 210cm x 180cm
The male figures are supposed to be a personification of ambivalence, with their somewhat confused expression on their faces, their puzzled brows. Ambivalence is something that pervades the work and its attitudes. It’s something that I feel is a base-line condition for the work as so many of the things that I think are paramount to it, feel irrefutably complicated and without straightforward answers or positions. For example, I make paintings and drawings and objects that are ready-made for a market and are (in part) perceived to be made for that market. Whilst I refuse to reduce the medium of painting to ‘merely’ the world of luxury goods, I cannot deny that we make work in the face of that and despite that condition. But I continue to make these things because I see that they can and continually do transcend that particular status, as well as realising that this may also be impossible. I want my work to speak to this dynamic between its potential role as critical agent and its function as complicit to the very thing that might undermine that criticality. I’m interested in wearing this kind of problem on the works’ sleeve, but also wearing it lightly, so that there are other thematics that can be legible over a medium that has a lot of political baggage.
On a micro level, I also feel ambivalence in terms of painterly expressiveness versus cool, distant and even classical mark making. I don’t see these things as oppositional necessarily, but I do want them to ricochet back and forth in the work. This is played out in my approach to the grid. The grid, that great modernist monolith devoted to abstract languages in painting. It is hugely pleasurable to draw a grid loosely, like you really do and don’t give a damn. In my drawings, the grid often finds its home as the strings on a tennis racket. Immediately, it’s not exclusively in the realm of abstraction, but part of an object that signals sport (obviously), leisure, play, objects designed to be handled, weaponry, objects that obscure and frame what’s behind them...etc. I’m interested in these specific associations but also hope these figurative, symbolic gestures might recede back into a more formal and abstract language again. These male figures are also ambivalent to their environment, their own reality, even themselves and their own masculinity. They are usually depicted naked, with hairy chests, but have boyish faces. They are vulnerable, but white men, so fundamentally empowered, and are imbued with an inescapable historical legacy of privilege. They are at once confident and abject, but we cannot and should not pity them.
Video: High Line (2013)
For the video work, I often become compelled by a particular patch of the city or even a particular architectural detail or ornamental flourish. This occurs after a period of time moving through this space on a daily basis. I become very familiar with it, and sooner or later a particular physical gesture or series of gestures will suggest themselves based on the specificity of the site. In the case of High Line (2013), for example, there were rivets lining Chelsea Bridge which elicited a series of gestures that might be described as both intimate and estranged, where I treat the rivets as objects to caress, stroke, gently slap, and run my hands through. Then, a particular song by Donnie and Joe Emerson would play over and over in my head as I walked across the bridge on my way to college - it has a very silky - almost liquid - sound, the melody floats through what feels like a fusion of ambience and soul. The song felt essential to translating the everyday experience into moving image, but it was also a form of superimposition, a kind of decoration ‘on top’. I like the way music in moving image relates to ambience and atmosphere and then in turn how decoration is a form of ambience - it is enveloping, but also about integration. I imagined the video being shot at dusk and we did several takes without getting anything satisfactory. Then as it grew dark, the lights on Chelsea Bridge suddenly switched on. The rain-slick surfaces became illuminated and resplendent - it became much more cinematic, much more the language of celluloid film and like a fragment from a larger piece. This element of contingency is very important to my practice because it requires trust in something outside of my control, something that will enliven the moment of production and embolden me in front of camera. I also wanted the film to have an emotional charge but simultaneously ask questions about sentimentality and its relationship to film, Romanticism and the representation of the male-protagonist.
(Video: Com)passionate Croissant 2013
What are you working on next?
I’m currently living in Baku, Azerbaijan for three months for a residency and solo show with Yarat Contemporary Art Organisation. It’s an exciting city to work in and has an incredibly chequered and complex urban and social fabric: ancient Islamic heritage and culture, one which has moved through Russian Imperialism and then Soviet rule and now embraces hyper-capitalism in a flamboyant manner. It’s interesting being in a country that takes pride in representing itself as a kind of pendulum swing between ‘East’ and ‘West’ and how that might affect the use value of these terms in turn. The simplest things also amaze me here – so much of the pavement seems to be privatised, so many of the new buildings (and there is a heck of a lot of building being done here) have their own patch of pavement with their own idiosyncratic style to integrate (or not) with the style of the building itself. Consequently, you might walk over marble slabs, ceramic tiles, patterned bricks, wet concrete, uneven mud and stones as well as absolutely no pavement at all in a simple 15-metre stretch.
Is there anything specific you would like to talk about?
Heritage for example?
As you can tell by my lengthy and diffuse answer to who or what inspires me, the idea of heritage, or to put it another way, the things which we are told are shared gifts or burdens, and the things we feel are shared gifts or burdens play an integral part in my work and thinking. I am very interested in the private and public dynamics of history - the weight and necessity of influence and how this influence manifests itself over a vast amount of time, specifically, but not exclusively, from a visual arts history perspective.
Ambivalent Man amongst the footballs, oil on birch panel, 150cm x150cm, 2016
http://lukepburton.tumblr.com
reference links:
Max Beckmann, Prunier: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/beckmann-prunier-t02395 Lee Krasner, Gothic Landscape: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/krasner-gothic-landscape-t03291 Varda Caivano: http://www.victoria-miro.com/exhibitions/220/