Peter De Potter Interview
Peter De Potter is an artist and photographer hailing from Belgium. He studied at the bougie Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, he’s Tumblr famous and is not a fan of labels. Most of us became aware of his work through a collaboration with designer Raf Simons. His gritty black and white images of predominantly young men in suggestive scenarios were manipulated through collage with engaging and thought provoking texts. Images of Scally-boys in compromising positions and half-naked men lasciviously hanging off beds, lead the viewer to see a heavy dose of ‘man’ in his work. It’s easy to file Peter De Potter away as a ‘queer-artist’, but that’s the last place he wants to be.
me: We were talking about masculinity earlier, you mentioned you prefer to use the subject as a “tool” for your work?
Peter De Potter: If a painter paints flowers, does that make him a florist? Apparently people seem quite intrigued as to why my work features predominantly male figures. I’m more intrigued why people even notice that in the first place. As if it is something noticeable. The male figure, together with the female figure and the landscape, has been part and parcel of art history for centuries. It’s completely natural – every day you see at least a hundred male figures anyway, on the street, on the train, on your computer screen. More than anything else, my work is about the image. The image as an event, much more than the image as a summary of content. What it is exactly what you see on a picture I’m less interested in. I care more about what you feel and experience when you see an image. My work is not about masculinity. It’s not the subject. I mean I would tell you if it was, but it isn’t. All the images, all the people in my work, all the pieces and samples are tools to construct a new visual story. Or a specific feeling. Or a state of mind. Or a moral statement. Masculinity, at least the visual side of it, is a very interesting tool to convey new emotion or meaning. Because as a subject it seems to be taken for granted, like it’s this monolithic, one-dimensional thing. In a way it’s almost a blank canvas. It’s generally more accepted that femininity, even outside the arts, is more layered and intricate. I want to show that the depiction of a male figure can equally be used to symbolise endless complexity.
me: You said, “There seems to be some confusion already about the exact nature of my work.” Let’s clear things up then. What is the exact nature of your work?
Peter De Potter: I was referring to the more practical side of things. People have seen my work online, in magazines, as part of projects, in the past on clothes even. But especially with the online versions, it’s confusing to people whether these works actually exist in real life, how big they are, that kind of things. In fact, I like the idea that the status of my works is often ‘in-between’. I have images I make to put on people’s walls and I have images I make solely to store on people’s hard-drive. Obviously there’s some sort of overlap, but the online works are not some sort of introduction or side-project. They are equally important. I plan to keep on doing them regardless of anything. In general I find that artists are somehow too absent from the digital world. Not many are really engaged in the internet. Which is really strange. I’m not talking about networking or marketing the art. No, I mean the actual presence on the internet. It’s like they’re all hiding. All over the world people are talking about music and movies and politics and fashion and war and yes, art as well. But the creators of said art are pretty silent themselves.
me: You started collaborating with Raf in 2001. What effect has the relationship had on your art?
Peter De Potter: We were friends long before that. He knew that I was doing things with images and text in my own time so he invited me to collaborate on visuals for one particular collection of his. We both liked the outcome of it and it just developed into being involved over and over again. It happened very organically. Very good times indeed. I’m very proud of everything I ever done with Raf. And what I am doing now doesn’t differ a great deal from what I was doing back then. How could it, I’m exactly the same person. I have always been doing my pictures and my collages and my texts – it’s just that a designer decided to put some of them on clothes and on show invitations and on brand imagery. An image can come to you from the front of a t-shirt or from within a frame on a gallery wall. There’s little difference. In both cases an image is used to communicate. In both cases a work is kissed to life. It’s being released.
me: You’re not a fan of the term ‘source material’. Does it detract from the personalisation of your work, to have it seen as almost second hand?
Peter De Potter: I like when a new life is breathed into existing images.
me: I’ve read some negative comments regarding collage and appropriation work in general. That it often borders on plagiarism and not so much reinterpretation. How do you respond that, though?
Peter De Potter: Appropriation is just an art technique. Just like some artists will push a brush against a canvas in order to place some paint, other artists will re-appropriate images. Like anything, it used to be an art statement that has turned into an everyday technique. I make images with images, nothing more to it but certainly nothing less either. Self-made images, and also treated images, fragments of images, reworked images, sampled images. To the point where a lot of people can’t tell one from the other, which was never the plan, but pleases me nonetheless. There’s this whispered assumption of laziness however to the way collage and anything even remotely resembling appropriation is looked upon. To me, that whole discussion is completely outdated. In fact, the more the technical or crafty side of an artwork is discussed or pondered upon, the more it loses its value as a good piece of art. Technique is the responsibility of the artist, not the viewer’s. I think it’s the artist’s job not to bother the viewer with all of that. There’s this famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe standing on a subway grate. You might remember when it was taken. Or you might think of the photographer’s name. But does anyone care what type of camera that picture was made with? Exactly.
me: You mentioned internet images bring an informal, less reverential approach to your work. Aside from your self portrait pieces, have you ever been tempted to play with the opposite side of that spectrum and fully blow-out budgets with hyper-stylised shoots and use top models?
Peter De Potter: The catch is: there really are no fully blow-out budgets at De Potter HQ, quite, quite the contrary. Given the opportunity – or said budget – I think I would consider doing it, yes. Internet images, smartphone pictures, webcam portraits, social media imagery in general, they all differ from professional shoots in the sense that they have only one purpose: to capture a moment, or a face, or an event. It’s very traditional photography, totally basic, totally comprehensible. Most professional shoots by very nature have a message to convey, be it of beauty or impact or whatever. They want to be the opposite of hands-on photography by focusing on composition and lighting and what have you. So from whichever angle you look at it, they are constructed images. The social media images are definitely posed, but that’s not the same as constructed. The professional image presents itself as a product, while the social media one presents itself as just an image. It’s a different approach, nothing to do with one being better than the other.
That is not to say that social media images are made without any knowledge of beauty. Quite the contrary. ‘Real’ photographers tend to look down on the digital camera revolution, implying that everyone else but them are complete simpletons with an Instagram account. I don’t agree with that. I am genuinely excited by the fact that each day a few million pictures are being added to the global canon of imagery. All because of technology. And people’s apparent instinct to document life. And themselves. No matter the content. Of course the majority of those kind of pictures is pointless and uninteresting and forgettable. It’s not people’s job to produce a ‘good’ or an artistically ‘valuable’ image. Or decide whether it’s useful or not. That’s where artists come in. Let them sift through the rubble.
me: Your work presents images in a new light, venerating found images with esteem. Is it sort of like iconography of the mundane?
Peter De Potter: As an expression, ‘iconography of the mundane’ has this whiff of faux-liberal superiority to it, and I’m very much against that. This subtext of ‘oh look at that chubby girl down at the chip shop, so quaintly vulgar and therefore fabulous’. Also, when it comes down to it, is there anything else but the mundane? Even the purest fantasy takes its origin in the mundane. In my work I don’t have a judgmental eye. And I would be upset if my work would come across as judgmental. I’m not celebrating or criticising anything, least of all my visual material, whether it’s a person or a scene. There are no ‘high’ images and there are no ‘low’ images. Whatever you think you see, it’s only played out in your mind. In that sense, images are blameless.
me: We were talking earlier about vanity and male ‘peacocking’. How social networking and dating sites have essentially changed the way we present ourselves to the world; blurring honesty with vanity, projections and perceptions. Why do you think this incarnation of male-bimbos has emerged?
Peter De Potter: Maybe the new thing is not the peacocking itself but the ease and eagerness to make it more public than ever before. Or that it’s made public to start with. It’s not so much the fact that men have become aware of their physical and aesthetic features that’s the revolution. It’s the fact that they are willing to display them so openly and brazenly to be judged and evaluated and commented upon I find very novel. In general, men have become very cocky about their own beauty yet at the same time they put themselves in a vulnerable, passive position because to let them know otherwise is only a click away. They really put themselves in front of the jury. Beauty for a long time seemed to be a woman’s business, you know, the feat to put to her own advantage. And now men seem to be stealing that particular thunder in quite an ostentatious way. Yet while every woman that ever lived was instructed to feel modest, apologetic even about her natural beauty – if she didn’t she was labelled ‘vain’ and ‘superficial’ – men nowadays are much more sympathetic to the cause, turning it into a very public competition. It would be really interesting to hear more female voices on the subject. Or to see a female counter-reaction.
me: What does your online presence say about you?
Peter De Potter: The thing is that all of us are now getting versed in the act of self-portraiture. We just had to. In the internet age it just comes with the territory. We all used to be a bit hesitant and we weren’t really up for it, but we’re all way past that point now. But we shouldn’t forget it’s actually a very new phenomena. You didn’t have it 20 years ago, let alone 100 years ago. Apart from artists, no-one did it. The actual realisation that all of us are now being watched and looked at and visible to each other is still such a silent shock to people’s mind that I think we’re not even close to grasping it, let alone coming to terms with it. Online self-portraiture is rapidly becoming a discipline of its own and I think that’s quite fascinating. It’s like vanity born out of necessity. Some pictures I’ve done have been a kind of send-up of this idea, others are just another batch of visuals to use in my work. It’s no longer me that’s in the image. It’s an image, from start to finish. I like the fact that an artist can now represent himself with a set of images instead of his or her physical self. Like a free-for-all Cindy Sherman.
me: You divide your works into separate series, each with its own dedicated Tumblr page. Take us through each of those projects.
Peter De Potter: Angelic Starts: Basically a list of values. Values are somehow not very hip but they should be. It’s not a didactic list of values. It’s more this hazy, slurred list of values. They’re all presented, or better: carried by bodies. Sleeping bodies, drunk bodies, ecstatic bodies, unwinding bodies. The series is also about contours. And about the statuesque effect of a body in an image. I keep getting comments and questions about this series. It seems to strike a chord.
Routine Routine: This is more some sort of diary. About making images as a routine. Like working out. One after the other. It’s going in all kind of directions. And as such there’s this surreal, dreamlike mood in a lot of these works. Shaken images, blurred colours, juxtaposed quotes. It’s a very psychological page, without the logic. Very ebb and flood.
I Am An Image Machine: This series was directly influenced by the internet. It’s about the way the modern generation deals with images. Authorship, history, context, all of these aspects of an image seem to have become redundant, unimportant. The only thing people respond to is the emotional resonance of an image. Any image. I find that very modern, very effective. It’s about the way people now communicate with each other through images instead of words. People show a picture of a dying flower or a clear-blue sky and everybody instantly gets the message. It has become so commonplace but in itself it’s quite remarkable. So the series is about bringing together images solely chosen for their emotional resonance. And in doing so creating new emotion.
