ABSTRACT
Adrian Heathfield It is eight years since we last did a formal interview. Bobby Baker All of your cells are renewed within seven or eight years. So there’s not a fragment of us remaining. Oh no, there’ll be the bone. A Well, in that eight years how do you think your relationship to your work has changed? Does your work occupy the same place in your life? B There have been considerable changes and this is also related to my mental health, which has obviously changed considerably since then. The most significant development for me is that I have become more confident and clearer about trusting my judgement. Over a great deal of my working life I’ve had hunches, ideas, images or a whole set of very complex notions that I have sometimes been unconfident about. When I look back on early work, quite a few things were very precise because I followed the hunches, and then I think I went into a long phase where I had the hunches but I questioned them more because I was at the same time searching for more understanding or a more intellectual approach to what I was doing. I certainly feel much happier with my work life now. It’s one of the main focuses of my life, rather than my mental health, which at that stage I think was still very much in the foreground. Now when I get ill in the gaps, that question is there, but the rest of the time I am making work. Also my life is much easier: our children are grown up. So I feel I’m in the happiest position I’ve ever been in with regards to my work and family and that has to be partly because of being at Queen Mary, University of
London. I finally feel I’ve found a space where I can have conversations on an ongoing basis about ideas and get a variety of responses. Whereas before you know I’ve had this wonderful resource of working with Polona Baloh Brown, but that was very much focused on the making of the work. Now I find myself in a space that is like being in a hall of mirrors: I keep on getting dazzling glimpses of other things. Though I’m not sure about that image of the hall of mirrors because it sounds rather grandiose, and as though you are looking at yourself. It isn’t that. It is like being in a space where you have had some idea that you haven’t been able to put into words or something that you have almost known and then you have a conversation and you are pointed in a direction, or towards reading the right book and it is like an extraordinary explosion of awareness. I do find that very comfortable. I feel the most optimistic or excited and lucky to be where I am that I’ve ever felt; whereas before it was always this relentless struggle or battle. A Your work in some ways is closer to your life because you have been more able to draw on mental health as an explicit condition and resource? B I have been thinking how odd the situation is that because I’ve been ill, I’ve had to do a great deal of thinking and talking. The most stimulating thing is engaging in this ‘dialectical behaviour therapy’. I then went on to research this with Dr Richard Hallam, a clinical psychologist, that working process was more a social anthropological investigation. It wasn’t like going into analysis or therapy and delving into my past, because I know more than I need to know about all of that. It was more a distant reflection on the whole phenomenon of therapy and mental illness, and that’s where I have found a particular fascination in how it relates to being an artist. I’ve gradually been able to focus much more clearly in my work. I used to just hope for the best that I was getting things sharp, whereas now I feel like I turn the lens and move from thing to thing with a confidence and a lack of anxiety about getting it wrong. I just don’t care. Because it is OK and it is funny, and I don’t know whether it is going to be a successful piece of work, it is just part of a process. I am just the most totally bound up I have ever been in this process. I can’t see it ending while I’m alive. Maybe it will; I don’t care if it ends. But at this moment I’m in the thrall of this process, so it is a constant exploration and experimentation. I’ve got ideas to make all these new pieces of work. I might like them; I might not. You know it doesn’t really matter. I’ll make them and then they will inform the next stage. A Well, you embarked on making a mammoth series of works that took you … B Ten years. Yes, I’ll never do that again … A There’s a strong constraining idea in such a series: the need for … B Approval? A … Well, for completion, and for such a long set of works to be representative and reflective of a life, so presumably, leaving that behind is quite freeing. B It is absolutely liberating, and I’m glad I did it. The whole process of making these five shows was a learning experience. I feel the first Kitchen
Show and the last Box Story are the strongest pieces, although Pol and I rather like Take a Peek! at the moment. But going through the process of making those other shows – many elements of which I like and enjoy – was a way of gradually investigating and developing the ability to collaborate with people in a more reflexive way. It was a monumental idea, but that was the point. I still think it is quite funny, to do a quintet about domestic life: the absurdity of stating that you were going to spend ten years making five very ambitious shows about the minutiae of daily life. I still stand by that, but I’m really glad I’ve got it out of my system. I then got taken over with the bombastic project of How To Live, which had to be enormous for the same reason. Something huge on the Barbican main stage, to point out the absurdity and the significance of the subject at the same time. So it was a conceptual statement, but I’m rather horrified that I’ve now come up with an even bigger idea, which I’m trying not to think about or talk about too much because it is a tad overwhelming. I wanted to go back to just doing small, simple pieces but it doesn’t seem as though that’s going to be the case. A You’ve always oscillated between scales of production and proper and improper sites. B Yes and I can’t see myself doing a huge amount more in the theatre after How to Live, for a while, if ever … A If your earlier work centred on questioning the institutions of the family and the domestic sphere, Box Story brings you closer to the institution of the church, and then How to Live obviously to the machinery of psychiatry and therapeutic culture. These are all institutions that have played pretty big roles in your life. The attitude towards each institution is different in each piece, but in the last piece How to Live, you are heavily in the mode, if not of parody, then of pastiche. You inhabit the form of the therapeutic talk whilst commenting on that form at the same time. B It is also quite constraining to be within that form. It is slightly puzzling when some people don’t realise that I’m trying to throw a grenade into it, to explode it. But people take it in so many ways. With How To Live the radio version and indeed the live version, people quite often seem to take it as a self-help guide. I mean quite literally, it seems to make people feel better. I find that astonishing, satisfying, but very surprising considering my initial intentions. A I’m sure the quality of parody works differently in the different forms it takes. The DVD, say, which is already a form that a self-help guide might be distributed in, will be read very differently from the theatre show, where there’s already a real disjunction of form in place between a theatre show and a rather warped psychology lecture … B Yeah, I remember going back to How to Shop, that sort of model. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it. I find the pastiche element rather irritating and yet I couldn’t have done anything else in terms of relating to the whole subject. So the next major piece I’m working on is a bit of a pastiche. Ah, damn – I’ve done it again. A In what way? B I want to do a version of Big Brother or House of Tiny Tearaways: like
a reality TV event, but complex in terms of what I’m doing in there. It’s about family history and mental health: revisiting An Edible Family in a Mobile Home, reworking that in a very different way, with my knowledge and experience of having a family of choice as opposed to a family of origin, and how the two connect. Oh, god that’s really irritating! And yet I really can’t resist. I want to be Dr Tanya Byron, the psychologist, but also a farmer and artist ‘fat controller’. At one level, I want to be the expert. But I think it’s a much more complex piece in its form, its location and how people will relate to it. A Yes, the expert is an important recurring figure in your work, but it is always a fallible expert. B The absurd expert. Questioning the whole notion of there being a ’true’ authority and expertise. I am chipping away at those authority figures: the posturing that goes on in life. I can’t say that I’m not part of that, but I really object to it on a quite regular basis. Those people who invest themselves in these bodies of knowledge and the status that goes with that, and then strut around the world telling people how to live and what to do. I’m constantly fascinated by it: it isn’t that I don’t think they have valid things to say, or useful advice or skills or strategies or processes. I suppose it is a recurring infuriation with a lack of awareness that we’re all just part of some giant hamster wheel! You know? I suppose I want to step outside and say ‘Look, this is all a bit of a joke really.’ That’s one aspect of what I’ve done. Even with Drawing on a Mother’s Experience, there was quite an angry side-swipe at my education in the art world, at art history, and its canonical figures. But I could never say that I am knocking something totally because I’m in an ambivalent position of really loving it at the same time. I love Jackson Pollock’s paintings, for instance. So it is a tension that I never quite resolve. A This is the tension of pastiche, which has an affinity with the form that it mimics; it never quite destroys its values. Say, for instance, at the beginning of How to Live, your use of ‘profound’ philosophical quotations, in one way, you could see those as being utterly ridiculous things, and yet at the same time they do have some good philosophical value! B I am trying to constantly keep that tension. A You haven’t really returned to the earlier pieces like Kitchen Show to restage them in any way, have you, though I am sure you are asked to? B Occasionally, yes. A Do you take up the offer? B No, I wouldn’t do that piece again. A You have a window of a few years after a piece is made when you can re-stage it? B Yes, I was thinking of doing Drawing on a Mother’s Experience again recently and then it didn’t happen and I was really relieved. I thought it was absurd to do it at my age now, with the distance I have from it. My experience is so different now. But then I got myself caught up the other day in thinking Cook Dems and Table Occasions No. 19 were quite a good package. I’ve done them a few times, and I thought ‘Ooh, I’d quite like to do that again’, but too much repetition is tedious. Yet, we are talking about
that, for the launch of this book, potentially doing a mini retrospective but what would I do? What could I do? I was thinking about Packed Lunch because I really liked that and My Cooking Competes that I did in 78/79, but I think it would be quite odd. A Perhaps this says that there is something inherent in the work that ties it to your body and presence in a particular time. Perhaps there would be something dishonest about restaging a piece 15 or 20 years later, unless you genuinely encountered and worked with the difference between doing it now and doing it then. B Yes, changing the piece, which I assume would be the only way of doing it – to do it from my current age. It is an odd notion, and yet, look at what Pina Bausch did with that piece where she worked and then reworked the same show with much older people. A Oh yes, Kontakthof. B Yes. I didn’t see it when she first did it, I had just read about it and I think it is one of the most inspiring things I’ve seen. The knowledge that this was a piece that was done with younger bodies and then redone with some of those performers when they were older, and a whole range of other older people. It was remarkable. A … The way in which the age and experience of the performers fills the piece with a different content is extraordinary. B Also, to watch it with the knowledge that it had happened in this different way with those particular sorts of bodies at a certain stage in their lives. I found that just wonderful. A But of course the work that you were doing, say with Kitchen Show, is of a different order, in that you were directly speaking from the place that you were in at that time. It doesn’t aspire to timelessness. It interests me why certain performance works lend themselves to repetition, reenactment, and re-circulation. What aesthetics enable or disable this. B With Kitchen Show it was my intention to make versions of it that I could bung in envelopes and send off all over the place. My assumption was that it would be the book that had an afterlife, but that sold out relatively quickly. What astonishes me is that the video version that I made with Carole Lamond, which was such an experiment (I had never done anything like that), has had an extraordinary life. It is the economics of it: video is relatively easy and cheap to reproduce and to disperse. So in a sense that became the show, not the original live version, which I find really fascinating and funny. A You have increasingly been using and playing with more popular media. What drives that interest? B It was a very conscious decision. If you’ve got a set of ideas or a set of images or a set of experiences or knowledges that you want to bounce off people, you need to put them out and about and see what people think, what happens as a consequence, where it will lead. I gradually felt more frustrated with the simple doing of something for itself. Especially with pieces that I’ve worked on for long periods I just can’t stop thinking about how to document them – it isn’t just documentation, it is how to make the work into some other form that could communicate it in a slightly different
way. But while I’m doing that, I also realise that it is problematic. There is a tension in the motivation for doing that, so again there is a commentary on the whole idea of documentation and archiving. With How To Live, we made a DVD and we have developed a website, but this was all about the posturing of having a truth that would save the world. A As an artistic strategy it also means that an artwork can have a life in many different forms, and because of that, it can access different audiences as well. B That’s always the hope, because I must say I’m always terribly attracted to the idea of art getting to as many people as possible in whatever way they want to take it. You know that serial questionnaire in the Guardian, it is like the form of Desert Island Discs: they ask the same questions every week, and one of the questions is ‘What is the trait in others that you most deplore?’ I decided this morning that it was elitism. I went through meanness, martyrdom, misogyny and hypocrisy. Today I picked elitism. I can’t stand bodies of knowledge that are exclusive to a set of people, which is why I think I object to psychoanalysis to the extent that I do. It is about secret knowledge and the power that knowledge gives some people over other people. A Some bodies of knowledge are keen to defend their borders and professions are often very keen to police entry. You’ve worked with ‘experts’ before, haven’t you? How has that worked in terms of their perception of the relation, because you are often clearly appropriating and playing with their knowledges? B Well, yes. It feels slightly manipulative. The collaboration I had with Richard Hallam was very equitable, though. It was an ongoing discussion. It was really enjoyable. He’d give me information; I’d give him information. I was learning a lot from him. Though it got to a point where I took his knowledge and I ran away with it and it was at that point that I changed the way I work: making decisions much more clearly about which bit of knowledge fits in, using an editing process. I feel that other people’s ideas can become part of the work. Other people’s images, even. For instance, Deborah May’s amazing animation of the pea in How to Live. That would never have been anything that could come from my mind, and I feel it is a very important part of the show. It is being at ease with collaboration, while at the same time keeping control of the whole project. A Perhaps this confidence also arises from the way you are dealing with ‘what is your own’, as well. In Box Story you are delivering material that is traumatic in terms of your own past. In a sense one can never finally control this, but there is an expanded capacity to make it present, to speak to and through it with ease. B Yes, that is a power, because some people don’t talk about these things. When it happens in an autobiography, or when I experience it in people’s day-to-day stories in whatever form, I never cease to be delighted or enjoy it. So to make that more formal is quite empowering, because you’ve said the unsayable, which I’m now in the process of doing by talking about madness. This has been a bit of an exploration, because when I first started to talk about it I somehow colluded with people’s embarrassment.
