Interview with Artist, Art Critic and Broadcaster, Matthew Collings (2021)

 

Can you speak about the child Collings? Were you always interested in Art? Were your parents supportive of your interests?

I only had one parent, my mother. My father committed suicide before I was born. My mother, who died in 2007, was an artist, she went to several London art schools, including the one I went to – the Byam Shaw.  Unfortunately, she suffered from mental illness and was frequently hospitalised for long periods, receiving ECT.  That meant from the age of six I didn’t live with her but was in care in a children’s home in a nightmare suburb of London called St Mary Cray, whose other famous son is Jeremy Beadle. I was there for seven years, then, soon after I came out, I went to live in a therapeutic community in the Kent countryside, near Tentenden.  That’s where I was a teenager.  So, I didn’t really have any parenting.     My mother’s scene in Chelsea was very ragged and bohemian and I was there sometimes, living a parallel life, two extremes, the home which was terrifyingly physically violent, and emotionally utterly abusive and negligent, and a house in Oakley Street off the Kings Road, which was full of intellectuals, beatniks, dropouts, unmarried mothers, weird Americans, Quentin Crisp and Ban the Bomb people.   It was a sort of pageant.  I could do anything I liked because it was anti-rules.  But no one cared if I washed or had any food.  It was run by a woman called Rachel Pinney, a radical psychiatrist, who’d known my father and felt some responsibility for me.  I’m very proud of her.  She often had me at the house when my mother was in hospital. I was always regarded as being good at art.  It was a double-edged thing.  It meant I felt special when in fact I was neglected to the degree that it’s amazing I survived at all.  But it gave me confidence to know I had this power.  While, at the same time, having it meant people assumed I’d be all right because I had something to sell.  And it was therefore easy for them to forget I might need looking after.  I remember once the police came and took my mother to hospital, and I was just left alone in a room.  I rang up the telephone operator to say I didn’t know what to do.  At the children’s home, when I was seven, I would wake up suddenly not being able to breathe, because I’d just been punched hard in the stomach.  There was no one to tell.  I’m proud of this crazy background although I say bitter things about it.   I don’t have a single qualification other than the certificates I got at the two art schools I went to.  I read books all the time and still do.  I never had any formal schooling after the age of about 12. I copied others I met in different contexts: mainly the art magazine I worked on and the BBC.    

 

You were a student at Goldsmiths’, which has produced some of the most influential figures in British/world culture. What was your area of study? To what do you attribute the creative force that the college represents? Who were some of your fellow students?

I did the MA with Glenn Brown and the Wilson twins, 1990-92.  I loved the experience, but I didn’t stand out as an artist, in fact after the first year they wanted to get rid of me because I was so rubbish; then I did much better in the second year.    Attitudes I have to art making now, I owe to what I learned there, just from the discussions and crits, and doing them consistently for a long time.  You did the course part time.  I was working very hard as a TV art critic for the BBC at the time, where the other students did the usual jobs students do.  I knew much more about art than anybody else because I’d been years editing an art magazine and then working on TV shows explaining art.  I was amazed by the ignorance of the MA students, plus some of the tutors, and found it hilarious that the MA course was associated in the artworld’s imagination with “Theory,” which it certainly wasn’t in reality.    On the other hand, I always knew art making isn’t about a conventional type of learning; you learn what you need to know.   And the good tutors there were incredibly wise about the psychology of art making.  I was lucky to go there when I did. 

In 1983, you took over as editor of Artscribe, and successfully steered the magazine into a fresh and relevant platform for international contemporary art – which included neo-expressionism, amongst others. Did you encounter much resistance to that new direction?

Not really.  There was some but I ignored it.  Mostly there was a lot of amazed gratitude that suddenly there was this magazine in London which knew all about what was happening in Germany and New York.    

 

 Your televised debate with Peter Fuller, on BBC2’s The Late Show, in the late 1980s, highlighted in art criticism the sudden and abrupt gap between the old guard and the new. It was almost Oedipal in its challenge to the paternal Art-orthodoxy. I think it paved the way, slightly later, for another upstart, Waldemar Januszczak.

I really liked Peter Fuller behind the scenes, he was genuinely funny, but I had nothing to do with his ideas.  I thought he was just barking up wrong trees all the time.  

 

 Can you speak a little about the experience of Martin Kippenberger at the BBC?

I knew him because I’d worked with him on projects for Artscribe, and my partner at the time was from the Cologne art scene and knew him.  I got him to come over and create an installation in a BBC studio, for this debate with Peter.  Peter spouted his usual stuff, and I struggled to explain what Cady Noland does and some other people.  I had a fantastic very large painting by Simon Linke which the Lisson sent over, and Anthony d’Offay the Polke painting featuring Polke’s transcription of Durer’s hare – again a very, very large work.  And then this installation by Kippenberger.  He came over, I put him in a hotel, he did the task and went home. Looking back, I suppose the work was precisely about interpretation. A lot of simple metaphors amounting to that idea. But I don’t know what I said on the live debate. There was an audience of late-night culture vultures of about half a million. It was the first time Kippenberger’s name was ever mentioned on TV. He asked BBC fabricators to make a big grey keyhole, a board 4 feet square and a grey plinth. He brought some rolls of different coloured plastic wrapping tape with him. On these lengths of tape he’d had a slogan printed in 3 languages, English, German and Spanish: “I hold myself closed.” He spent a long time adhering lengths of the tape in vertical stripes to the board, making a mock abstract stripes painting in green, blue and grey. On the plinth he placed a bronze cast of an Osborne brandy bottle, which he’d also brought with him along with the tape and asked for a real lighted candle to be stuck in the neck of the bottle for when we were filming. So, in effect you looked through a giant keyhole at an abstract painting with a disclaimer expressing something like “this won’t reveal me, you’ll remain in the dark,” with a flickering light provided by a candle in a brandy bottle created by a Surrealist artist notorious for insincerity — Kippenberger explained the bottle design was by Salvador Dali (although it’s not like that really explained anything, I felt, worrying about the talk coming up shortly). He sweated and smoked and drank Campari sodas. He was absolutely benign, generous and friendly. After he finished the work he left, and the live debate happened a couple of hours later. He said I should say the title of the work was “View onto an Embarrassment.”

 

  Your book, Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst (1997), was a refreshing antidote to the innumerable ‘worthy’ but turgid art books written on British art up to that point. Do you think that as you were writing from the perspective of an insider/practitioner it gave you a unique perspective on the subject?

It was more the voice of the book than access to the art and artists, though that access was certainly meaningful too. The book was a work of literature more than a duty of explanation and education.  It was a satire on a scene which I didn’t feel part of but was very familiar with.  I was familiar with it enough always to have a sort of inner feeling of amazement that it was still “art” in the sense that art culture which I’d literally grown up with (because of my mother’s connection to artists of the 50s) was art.  The title is about that contrast although it proposes the two things as a continuity.  On the other hand, I also knew enough to know that no one knows what art is and it’s always changing.    I was lucky to be commissioned to do the book.  David Bowie was in a lull in his music career, he decided to get into contemporary art, and he started an art book publication company.  He wanted the first book to be about Daman Hirst.  I said I would do it, but I was relieved when Hirst said he had his own book on the way.  I proposed this other book, which became Blimey!, and David liked the idea.  I was amazed to learn he was my fan.  My mother once wrote to him in a nervous breakdown.  She often wrote to important people when mad.  The Queen usually.  She addressed the envelope: David Bowie, BBC.  And it got to the BBC who passed it on to his people who got it to him, and he phoned up my mum and had a long chat with her about me.  She was in this psychotic episode, and he was kind and was in fact intrigued by her: his brother was schizophrenic, so he was used to that. Blimey! was very successful and he got into the habit of phoning to report on sales.  It was surreal.  The kids would say “David Bowie on the phone in the kitchen.” Then he’d be on the other end of the line, laughing about U2’s light show going wrong.         

 

Your award-winning tv series, This is Modern Art (1999), ushered in a fresh new way of presenting art and culture, at once both authoritative and informal. Was it your express intention to demystify Art for a general audience?

 Well, I don’t think any other art programmes have been like that.  It was an extension of Blimey! in that it was full of knowledge but didn’t have the conventional language of knowledge. I didn’t really demystify things, I talked about great mysteries and preserved their mystery, as I saw them.  But I used ordinary language.  It was nothing like what some commentators assumed.   It wasn’t at all a sort of matey translation of ordinary art books.  It was a chat over six separate programmes, allowing a lot of streaming associations personal to me.  I was very lucky that circumstances came together to allow me to do it.  It was a very expensive series.  It won loads of awards and that was because it was original but also amazingly well made, due to the directors who worked on it, and the series producer, Ian MacMillan, who was also one of the directors.   Chris Rodley and Chris Smith were the other directors. They were all incredibly visually ingenious.   

 

 Could you talk about your collaborations with your wife Emma Biggs – which includes artworks as well as curated exhibitions?

We’ve been making collaborative abstract paintings for twenty years.  They’re represented by our gallery, Vigo.  They sell and we have a lot of shows.  Emma thinks up the colours and I paint them.  She doesn’t just conceive them; she mixes up the paint.  I put the animation into the surfaces.  They’re about nature and reality, but everything distilled into a very intricate and patterned colour abstraction.   

 

 You have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Artist Support Pledge. What can you tell us about it, and your involvement?

 Wow that thing really changed my life.  It’s pretty much my job now to post drawings and sell them through the ASP.  Matthew Burrows is another artist at Vigo.  He’s a friend of me and Emma.  He deserves all the praise and official acknowledgement he’s received for that idea.     Every work costs £200, once you sell five you must buy one from someone else doing the pledge.   It helps artists through the pandemic.  When everyone’s vaccinated, I hope he develops another scheme to keep the ideal going. 

 

Your current series of drawings are affectionate re-imaginings of art-historical figures, set in semi-fictionalised situations. This would seem to be an unlimited area of exploration.

 It’s very important to me because it continues and encapsulates, and maximises, every single thing I’ve ever done in my life. It allows me to go on thinking in my own way about what art is and has been, and to get those thoughts out to people.   It’s not real events but idealized versions, like the History Painting genre: you show what’s in people’s heads at a sort of subterranean level.  Sometimes I put different times together: Basquiat visits Pollock.  Or I get Philip Guston anachronistically to comment on political news from the USA.  He’s always thinking about Trump not just Nixon, both criminal monsters.  But he’s very suspicious of Biden’s gang of corporate neoliberals: all that shit was what led to Trump’s popularity.         

 

 Is there an art movement of the C20th with which you have a particular affinity?

 Not really, nor any individual artist.  I don’t find it real to have favourites.  It seems strange.  But I understand why people ask that question. I would say aesthetically I appreciate modernism, the way it contains and distills everything that ever happened in art.  I’m always absorbing different things though, and reading and rereading commentary and analysis: I’m open all the time just because that’s my life.  But in my drawings, and my joint paintings with Emma, it’s that visually intense stream of art, summed up by classic modernism,  that’s important to me.     

 

Now that there are no art movements for artists to align themselves with, what do you see as the current trends in contemporary art?

I think there’s been a rise of a loose expressive painting, sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative. I’m sympathetic to it.   

 

Have there ever been any good biographical movies about artists?

Not in my view “good” exactly, although I rewatched Lust for Life the other day and found it really surprisingly emotionally moving.  The most real and beautiful portrayal of an artist in a movie is Pasolini’s Decameron where he plays Giotto: it’s only a minute or so I guess, but it burns into your mind, it’s so true.    

  

You can have dinner with four artists, contemporary and/or historical – who are they, and why?

 I wouldn’t expect it to be a good evening, they’re all a bit boring because of the inevitable distortions of being famous where you become emotionally stunted and unreal, because nobody treats you like a human any more.  If it was four cave artists, that could be great.