Artist Interviews: From the Cutting-Room Floor
Here you'll find interviews with the artists in the New Art Up-Close series. These clippings didn't make it into the final interviews in our books, which is why we call them 'From the Cutting-Room Floor'. However, we still wanted to make them available, and so have published them here on our website.
Click on the 'read more' links below to view the longer texts.
Gary Hume Interview
DAVID BARRETT: How does the studio set up work? You have assistants, right? What do they do?
GARY HUME: Zoë's my assistant. She comes in, she has coffee, jam rolls. She works for me two days a week. She prepares the panels, she cleans the brushes, and she paints the paintings.
Gavin Turk Interview
DAVID BARRETT: Is your piece 'Slide Glasses' also about the framework that surrounds art?
GAVIN TURK: When someone was chasing me for slides of my work for a publication, I got the idea of seeing the whole world through the slide - as if the slide itself was fixed to your face. The joke of course being that if the slide was that close to your face, you wouldn't actually be able to see it because it would be out of focus. It was a kind of 'You want slides? I'll give you slides!' moment. It's like giving children too many sweets: they want sweets, so you give them too many in the hope that they'll get sick and won't want any more. But in my own personal experience that never quite works!
Jake and Dinos Chapman Interview
DAVID BARRETT: While the Surrealists would try to make a representation of the subconscious, your works are more like actual expressions of the subconscious - the subconscious drives are made manifest in your sculptures.
JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN: On one level, we attempt to have the work make itself, following certain logics. With 'Little Death Machine', for example, that's a really ham-fisted attempt to make a machine that was a representation of the subconscious and the ego and all of these Freudian things. But it went further than that. While of course it wasn't a living thing, to a certain extent it stopped being about something and actually became something. It was like an icon, which is magical. It's a thing in itself: a stand-in for an object, rather than a representation of an object.