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M.V. So when you left the Royal Academy, how did you imagine your
life as an artist? You clearly had a notion that you were going to be an
artist.
C.A. Yeah
M.V. Quite a strong identity in that. How did you imagine that you
were going to....?
C.A. Well, I was lucky, in my second year at
the Academy I was invited to show in Bond Street, and of course,
because our generation was such a kind of motivated one, in every area.
When I was invited to this gallery they said that, because it was first
of all a mixed exhibition, they said, “We want to put you up right away,
which ones shall we take down, the Picassos or the Klees?”. So
I said, the Picassos because they were big and I’d get more space!
But you know, that’s what we thought it would be, the old guys would disappear
and we’d go on forever, and so I was very snooty, like you are when you
are a kid. So it was quite good for me and I made a reasonable living
as a painter until 1968, which was the year in which we began to question
cultural values. We began to; the Art and Language people were at The
Slade the same time as I was in the Academy. We were almost exact contemporaries,
and so ‘68 was very important. I was in the LSE debates and I was in Hornsea
and then all those cultural debates about, “Who is art for?” and the whole
notion of art as a consumer object, because it had been a heroic kind
of task of Jackson Pollock and that group. Their great achievement
was that apparently a painting became an object. I mean it’s an old thing,
but it’s a concrete art movement - but painting as a discreet object was
thought to be the great achievement of Abstract Expressionism ten
to fifteen years previously, but by 1968 we were beginning to be very
dubious about the ‘Art Object’ and adding more objects to a world which
was already full of consumer objects, and becoming submerged and contextualised
by the notion of these high prices and stuff like that. So that was a
big changing point. Also in 1966 there was a ‘Destruction in Art Symposium’
which was organised by me as a very small part of it, but by Gustave
Metzer and John Latham, and I remember, one of the first meetings
was at Dover street at the ICA, and I remember sitting in there with Gustave
waiting for people to flock in to our meeting on destruction in art. We
waited half an hour chatting and first of all, this small American man
came in with black glasses and said, “Oh hi, I’m Man Ray, where’s
the meeting?” and we said “This is the meeting, hi, we know your work”
and so we all started chatting and talking about things and then about
half an hour later, a Japanese woman came and popped her head round the
door and said, “Is this where the meeting is?” and we said, “Yeah, yeah,
come in, because there’s only three of us” and we said, “Who are you?”
and she said, ‘My name is Yoko Ono”and then she said, “I do performances
in New York” because I’d never heard of her. So you know, it was
building up towards the end of the ‘60s. It was clear you were either
gonna make one choice or another choice.
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