DUPE chats to Contemporary Artist Joseph Buckley about being a BME Artist, the US vs the UK and Mircoagression at Art School.
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Joseph Buckley and I'm an artist.
Describe you practice in 5 words.
You have a countdown on your website. What are you counting down to?
Once, the entirety of my practice manifested as a series of Elegies. There were eighteen Elegies in the Elegy Series. Each Elegy revolved around an individual and specific set of ideas and concerns that branched from a single sad inverted genesis. This period constituted something like an 'Eternal September'. Back then, it felt useful to think of the series as a kind of mystic iron lung. Having awoken into an unforeseen October (or a November or, perhaps, a January) I am less sure.
The Elegy series, never truly ended, has entered a twilight stage as new inelegant and un-elegiac investigations bulge forth - content from the shadows. And so: I am forever unsure of how pertinent it would be for me to talk about what i think my art means or of the particularities of the geneses of this new art that I produce in the daytime & so, to answer your question in a more direct manner: the count-down is, in fact, a count-up. The simplest answer would be that I'm counting up from the moment I became an artist/the elegy series began. The specific reason regarding the ‘why’ of the beginning, that which is occluded by design, I will not share with you.
Thinking now: a count-down is a funny thing in that it, shuttered from context, inspires a sort of entropic dread in people - of time wasting away, etc. I am thinking now, years after the initial decision, that I might be more interested in the potential for a count-up to serve as a far bleaker symbol.
line trying to describe itself into a hand & Berlin Ticket Text
Welded steel stand for two Samsung 40” televisions, front screen: a line trying to describe itself into a hand (based off of that bit in Selvon’s Lonely Londoners where Galahad curses his hands for not being red, blue or green), looped, .mp4, rear screen: Francis and Mathias on the underground as Mathias performs Berlin Ticket Text to camera, looped, .mp4. Novelty USB drives: one 9mm handgun (in two pieces), one prosthetic finger,
2014
You have an impressive CV and have shown works across the US as well as the UK. You are also a Curator, what do you look for when choosing Artworks to exhibit?
The simplest answer is that I choose work that excites me. That, perhaps, sounds non- committal but I like to think of whatever my meagre curatorial practice amounts to as, first and foremost, a personal commitment to the format of the exhibition which, in and of itself, is fun to think of as a sort of love letter to artworks in the first place.
I really, very much, believe in the format of the exhibition. I am endlessly intrigued by the ethics of curation. I enjoy, thoroughly, the practical and facilitative aspects of how to get thing A to point B and back again almost as much as I enjoy the opportunity to warp space and to push and pull people around spaces without their express knowledge.
I am, within my personal practice, fascinated by the mechanics of power as manifested by the various disciplines - through Sculpture & Statue, Architecture, Film, Graphic Design and it’s cold twin: Advertising. I’d like to think, in my more generous moments, that my desire to curate is borne of a subconscious attempt for me to understand this vast history of manipulation in order to try and find the potential within it for use towards my own artistic ends and against itself.
Whilst I know that curating makes me a better viewer of art (in that i must regularly care, very dearly, about artwork and artistic decisions that are not my own) I hope also that my being an artist, in turn, might make me a better curator ;)
‘ELEGY NINE’
custom made scleral contact lenses,
(sixth incarnation)
2014
Who or what inspires you?
I tend to consider many things at once and, of late, I have been considering:
-Orcs (& Tolkien's queasy contextual racism - his impact on the infrastructure of the genre of Fantasy).
-Neanderthals (& the genocidal extinguishing that constitutes the first global act of our own species).
-Pigs (including & beyond their obvious pun - & the practices surrounding their keeping).
These 'things' currently serve as 'mascots' and, simultaneously, as skewed and oddened ciphers for me to think through:
-Frameworks for the distribution of credit (director/cast&crew, gallerist/artist, master/ slave).
-The dissonance of values (between contemporaneity & the past (& contemporaneity & the future)).
-The peristalsis of capitalism (& our own contemporary supra-national capitalist- feudalism).
-All manifestations of power wherein people are made to be less than people (& thusly rendered into objects...) and fuck it, y’know, if someone's been turned into an object, who's to say they're not also a sculpture?
I am drawn, as if hooked by chains, towards an illustration of a banal yet mind bendingly eldritch horror (slaveships & gas chambers, anyone?). These are my concerns. Although I am unsure of the importance of their immediate legibility in my work. I find myself asking something to the effect of: “Is all of the practice that an athlete conducts in order to eventually run as fast as she might really worthy of the same scrutiny as her final performance on the track?” This, I suppose, is my justification for having my research and ‘interests’ be not immediately apparent in the things that I produce but, in another, more real way it is a manifestation of my fascination with the idea that our interests, our considerations, our conceptual engines might be mobilised in a 'hypodermic' manner and that symbols, usually so wild and unwieldy, might be brought to heel under a mechanic of 'ventriloquisation'. Which is to say: perhaps i can make a flute or a sandwich or an alien say that which an audience might not otherwise be willing to hear i.e. perhaps, by approaching white fragility at oblique angles, I can make my primarily white, upper/middle class audience legitimately engage with the mechanics that continue to make marginalised communities of us all.
‘ELEGY SEVEN’
pair of earrings: inserted into walls, worn in ears,
(sixth incarnation)
2015
You seem to have a strong relationship with words in your practice in particular ‘Perverts Lament’. Do you write in your spare time?
Once, many thousands of years ago, I was a writer - specifically: a poet. It constituted my ‘practice’ before I became an artist (and before the above mentioned count-up began). For many years after the end of my writing-only practice, words fled, and became narrow and traitorous compared to the potential pan-cultural, utopian light I projected onto symbols, colors, and gestures. I learnt the hard way (in critiques and in arguments) that symbols, colors, and gestures constitute a fickle and traitorous language of their own. That they ran in an inverted manner to words, sloppily gathering meaning up into themselves & rendering themselves inchoately inconsistent (consider the swastika, from ancient india to today) as opposed to the way that words constantly shed meaning and nuance in order to become shelves for new things (consider the word ‘woman’, from old english to today).
Now, as I finally learn to write again, and as if in vengeance, all writing is folded into the practice. When I write I no longer write as a writer or as a poet. I write as an artist. The distinction might mean nothing to you or to any reader but, ultimately, it is as the difference between a Ichthyosaur and a Dolphin. Also, as an artist, I have no spare time (hahahaha).
‘CHROME RUINS’
mirrored self adhesive vinyl, mdf,
2015
You studied at Leeds College of Art and then Goldsmiths. How did you end up in the US?
The simplest answer is that I wanted, quite eagerly, to not be in England. I can’t speak any other language (which leaves me with the Anglophone world). I wasn’t about to go to Australia. Canada is too cold. I can’t drive (which knocks out Los Angeles), and after a couple of years of London I wasn’t keen to throw myself into a brand new snarling metropolis where I didn’t know how the trains worked.
Yale offered a very handsome scholarship and I couldn’t have afforded an MFA anywhere so the scholarship made it very worth it for me. I only applied there that year, as I didn’t really want to go anywhere else and, thankfully, I got in.
‘BENCH’
institutional stools, red gaffer tape,
2015
What is the Art scene like the US in comparison to the UK?
The money presses on all things much heavier here.
Every artist run space feels like a commercial gallery waiting to be born.
I see artists make decisions, in the production of their work, as if they are haunted by the very real possibility of selling & i feel the haunting too.
Indeed, people here seem far more willing to trade work. It is very easy to grow quite a large collection of contemporary artwork just by being friends with other artists - everybody seems keen to swap and to, in their own way, collect. I mean no disparagement, I mention this to speak to how heavily the money presses on all things here.
I remember once going to a Leeds University MA show where they hired an eagle for the day to stand in for the collectors they knew weren’t going to come. I mention this not to disparage that particular year’s class of Leeds Uni MA graduates but rather to point out how mythical the idea of selling art was, as i understood and experienced it, in the uk.
I understood/understand that it happens of course but only really in an academic way and have never felt that it had anything to do with me/was ever soon likely to happen.
London’s big claim that it is ‘the financial centre of the art world’ is based primarily on the warping effects of the big auction houses which, of course, want little to do with living artists... much less actual young artists.
To summate: Were i a painter here i would feel very comfortable and all of my painter friends here have a relationship to selling. the art market is a reality here that it never felt to be in London. But, again, I say all this coming out of an MFA with an older circle of peers than i ran with in London. Perhaps I would be saying the same thing about the UK had i graduated from the RA.
No, actually, I don’t think i would. the money is definitely palpable here. But it also warps and corrupts - as it does in all places - the insider trading is real and the price fixing is real and the money laundering is real and the gallerists scamming artists are real. There are good galleries and good collectors and good dealers but there are also many, many rotten ones and I know people that have been cut. And so, whilst I am fascinated by the nature of the commercial system (and of the museological system, which has in many respects annexed itself to the galleries’ interests), and do think of it often, I try not to think how I might fit into it.
still from
‘AT THE AUCTION OF THE LAST WHITE GIRL IN THE WORLD’
feature film, .mp4 looped,
1 hour 19 minutes,
2015
I know Contemporary Artists can struggle to sell work. How do you survive?
I hold a technical position at Cooper Union in the Film & Video Department and I work freelance as an artist assistant and art handler when the opportunity presents itself.
NYC is an expensive city, of course, but - and I say this fully cognizant of my privileged Ivy League graduate status (vom) - NYC is a city where it feels easier to balance rent- work and art-work and a semblance of a social life than it ever did in London.
Too many artist friends back home are struggling to make ends meet, and that’s not to say that I’m not struggling too, but rather, as it appears to currently stand, if one craves the metropoles, I think it is easier to be a young artist here - esp. if you don’t have Mummy & Daddy sending rent money from Kent (as too many motherfuckers in London do) - than it is in London.
‘Orcish forms, used foundry wax, three black shirts and three pairs Levi’s 511s, black Gorillatape grid, traces of plaster, traces of clay, 40” Samsung LED screen displayed low down and on a 10° tilt to the right, illustrated interpretations of Milo Manara’s illustrated history of the world over panels of the Parthenon’s frieze from with all sculptural detail photoshopped out and with the sound of a kickdrum to mark their change, 2014.’
We have recently connected through the internet and discussed about being Mixed raced and in the Contemporary Art world. I felt lonely were as you talked about finding those connections. Tell me about that.
When an immigrant, i suppose it is inevitable that one will compare their culture of origin with the culture in which they end up.
In america I found that the gestures, languages, and modes of behavior, which at first seemed alien, had cognates in my own cultural education and I began to understand some of the general differences between Britishness and Americanness. Being in America one must try very hard indeed (and deaden their heart very much) to not consider the profound racism that performs itself every day in front of everyones eyes. It made sense to me that, as American racism, the product of proximity to violence, expresses itself as a blinding rage, British racism, the product of the distances involved in Empire, should express itself as a cold and detached infantilising contempt.
And so, In experiencing American racism I began to also think of my experiences of racism in the United Kingdom. In doing so, and equipped with these new knowledges, I ended up inadvertently reverse engineering my readings of past experiences and situations and saw all the racism fall out of my memories like dried flowers from old books.
So yeah, Goldsmiths was lonely. For all of it’s brilliances, and despite it’s thoroughly solid and enjoyable seemingly-empty-zen-education, it was also a comprehensive education in microaggression. I was constantly reminded of my difference and yet expected to play it down. Alongside a host of one-off instances of racism, I was consistently and casually informed that: I only got to be in shows, that I had only gotten into Goldsmiths, that I had only gotten into Yale (etc etc etc and on and on) because of my minority status. These are not grievances for which i expect apologies, but rather, they are the only data I have been able to gather and I read them, perhaps generously, as fascinating symptoms of ‘unconsciously generated’ contempt spun from a culture of cold aggression and entitlement.
Looking back 2011 was an important time. people, as i experienced at goldsmiths, like to talk loudly about what issues are in vogue. i distinctly remember a vicious and omnipresent buzz of contempt for Mark Duggan and the ‘thugs ruining the country’. i remember the casual remarks regarding forced repatriation and the mobilization of the military in response to teenage rioters and i recall it all against the context of the almost omnipresent facebook posts bemoaning the endless violence against black bodies in the united states.
That a march that shut down Oxford Street, expressing solidarity with Michael Brown and the people of Ferguson, was favourably covered by the BBC (the same BBC that did everything to demean and belittle intelligent conversation surrounding the London Riots - watch please, if you haven’t, Darcus Howe’s BBC news interview from the time), strikes me as one of the bleakest of ironies. how tragic is it, that solidarity, as i have seen it elucidated, could itself be deployed within an appropriative matrix of gentrification?
To be an individual of african extraction on planet earth is to be, very literally, either borne from the industrialization of cruelty or it is to be currently witness to it.
I went to the caribbean for the first time in the Autumn of 2014. It was a very important experience - in hindsight is no coincidence that the birds there sounded like car alarms.
I left the United Kingdom because I didn’t feel welcome. I left at a moment when the legitimacy of our nationality was (and forgive me for daring to speak on behalf of every not white person in the UK), in a horrifying manner, all of a sudden, up for discussion. Better to be a foreigner in a foreign land than a foreigner at home, I thought.
‘Cabinet of Victory’
digitally printed vinyl, curator's heads,
2015
I am currently writing for a project titled ‘THE DEMON OF REGRET’, by mentioning it here today, I bring it fully into being as more than just ‘an idea in a studio’. Now it is a promise and my ability to actualize it might be metonymically understood in the context of my ongoing life project to be considered not-a-total-failure. I’m thinking about Abyssinia. I’m trying to read more. I still need a jigsaw.
Other than that? couple shows, couple exhibitions... The struggle is real but I’m glad to be alive.
p.s. shout outs to Crazy-Horse Ben Slinger, shoutouts to my favorite Frenchman Harlan Whittingham, shoutouts to the Frightful Francis Lloyd Jones... shoutouts to the Evil Wizards of the Panj, shoutouts to all the fucking well dodgy Leeds gang, shoutouts to Wes & Martin & Luis (& the rest of the Space Cadets), shoutouts to Dylan Hewson, shoutouts to LYA, shoutouts to the entrenched survivalists still alive in London, shoutouts to Ella in Japan & to the wild men of Nottingham, shoutouts to Liv and all the other Wombles, shoutouts to all the Danes (but not Martin), shoutouts to those people who did bad things but weren’t bad people ;) , shoutouts to O.G. Buckley for keeping it too real & keeping out the game so i can have a shot, shoutouts to Happy Fruit, and shoutouts to Simeon Barclay for providing a strain of conversation without which I think I
would have lost my mind. Nuff Love 2 u all xxxx.
Still From ‘AT THE AUCTION OF THE LAST WHITE GIRL IN THE WORLD’
feature film, .mp4 looped,
1 hour 19 minutes,
2015
