Moira Vincentelli interviewing
Conrad Atkinson

C.A.  I didn’t see one! In 1971, I was invited by David Thompson, really on the strength of my work as a painter, to do a show at the ICA and I said, “There’s nothing I want to do. I don’t think I’m gonna go on” and David said, “Oh, come on that’s crazy” so I said, “Look, the only thing I’m interested in right now is the strike in the North of England in my home village” he said, “Well, would you do something about that?” I said, “Yeah, okay, I’ll do that but it won’t be paintings”, and so I went back to my home village. I mean, it’s like going back to your roots, the ‘70s was eventually about identity and stuff. So I went back there, and I met the strikers. I interviewed them. I had this massive video camera and all that equipment that it was then. It took us ages. In the mean time we were founding the Artists’ Union, so there were huge meetings, we were getting two hundred people at these union meetings. The women’s workshop was starting. I was going to four meetings a night and so I did that, and the strike was basically by women workers and it wasn’t about money, and then there was the question of the employer saying, “They’re only working for pin money anyway”, but we were beginning to realise that they weren’t and so the interviews with them and the photographs of them and the documentation of them and little stories and anecdotes, of course the great crime in the ‘50s and ‘60s when I was a painter was to have words on your pictures, despite what Paul Klee or what anybody else had done in the past. That was, to have words on was outrageous because the dumber you were as a painter, the better the painter you were supposed to be, and I just thought, “Well look our tradition, the British tradition, is one of documentary. It’s one of story telling and it’s a literary one and it’s silly for me to pretend that I’m Rauschenberg or Johns and have their kind of visual history”. So I was looking at Shelley. I was looking at William Morris. I was looking at Hogarth. I was looking at Cruikshank

M.V. So much earlier. I thought you might be going to say 1930s..

C.A. No, because we had to find the long English tradition. There was nobody I could think of in the ‘30’s. I mean Stanley Spencer. I liked Stanley Spencer but that was again too close to the Academy, and I couldn’t kind of work it out, and the other thing was that performance and installation was kind of. I mean they were called happenings but that’s what it was, and so I filled the gallery with it. We had the local MPs in because it was near the Houses of Parliament. We had the strikers down. We got money for the strikers to come down to the ICA which was kind of like a little breakthrough. Half-way through the Arts’ Council wrote to us and said, “We now think video is an art form” because I’d applied for a grant and the arts’ officer said, “We don’t think video is an art form”, but half-way through they wrote and said, "Now we think video’s an art form” - I don’t think they’d been to the exhibition, and the other thing I did was I got roasted by the critics for being political etc. “This isn’t art, this is social comment.” So I pinned all their stuff up on the wall, and I hadn’t invited them That’s the other thing that really pissed them off. I said, “I don’t want them invited. I want the TUC invited“. I was mad, so I pinned their crits up on the wall and I wrote replies to them in the gallery which they were outraged by. The only one who acted decently was Richard Cork and he’d actually slaughtered me in print. I mean the headline was, “Clumsy Atkinson fucks up.”  Then he wrote a letter to me saying, ”I suppose I’m the last person you would ever want to meet, but I’d really like to meet you and talk to you” and I said, “Okay” and there was this prickly meeting and he invited me into do a show in 1973 at Tooths Gallery. In the meantime I’d been to Cuba and America. America on the Churchill fellowship.