Stephen Wright in discussion with Neal Beggs
KNOW THE LEDGE
“Standing on shaky grounds too close to the edge Let’s see if I Know The Ledge...”
Eric B And Rakim, Juice

Stephen Wright : What first struck me when I saw your video piece “Surfaceaction” was how utterly absorbed you were in the action, flagrantly turning your back on the viewer. I saw that as a metaphor for the work’s painterly dimension but, above all, as a comment on your attitude toward spectatorship.

Neal Beggs : This piece has often been misinterpreted as a performance. Any action taking place in contemporary art is seen in terms of conventions –something that has been verified by media– and actions per se tend to be construed, wrongly, as performance. In preparing the work, I obviously carefully considered its visuality: whether to go from the side, from the back. And in traversing the wall, there is an obvious decision: film from the back and seen only from the back. For one thing, I wanted to avoid the macho connotations of doing a highly physical and unusual activity, using ice-axes and crampons; I also wanted to avoid being identified as Neal Beggs. The point was to depersonalise the work as much as possible.

SW : That is true of all your work. Apart from “Expressway”, where the camera catches you in profile, we never see your face.

NB : Depersonalising the work gives it a slightly mystical quality. In an actual climbing situation, you are utterly involved. At one point while shooting “Surfaceaction” at the Galerie du sous-sol, the surface was so difficult I actually fell off: I couldn’t get the axes to stick in the wall. But generally, the traverse was extremely easy, the axes penetrated the wall surface without any problem. So there is certainly something playful at work –I’m deliberately pacing myself. It’s not actually that hard to climb walls; I could have done it much quicker. But yes, my back is to the viewer and I am totally engaged in what I am doing, in the hope that it will, in turn, engage the viewer. This is linked to my notion of the real. The real is what I take as a space of non-mediation, of unmediated experience. Often in life, we desire something real –like sexual experience– but it usually refers to something other than what we are experiencing, which is reality (mediated) as opposed to the real (unmediated). In the action of climbing, you normally have a real, unmediated experience. Likewise, when we see a work of art that takes us out of life, we enter into the free fall of unmediated experience. By engaging with the real, I hope to engage the viewer too in that space.

SW : To take a metaphor from Wittgenstein, one might say that art is a ladder toward the real. Once you reach the real, however, you have no further need for the ladder. Art is a self-effacing mediator. That’s the paradox of mediation: successful mediation eliminates the mediator. The ladder metaphor occurs to me because in the bottom left corner of the photograph of the installation called “Jump”, showing you jumping feet first onto a pile of mattresses outside an art gallery on a street in Glasgow, we see the leg of a ladder. In an earlier version, you photoshopped that out.

NB : Once the ladder, that mediating device, is eliminated, we exist in pure immediacy. And what we like, what matters in life, is that struggle. Which is why it is so important for me to reveal the devices of the game of art. In a sense, I want to tear down the greatness of art, which at the same time I seek to attain.

SW : Revealing the devices sounds Brechtian. But your work is more about obliging individuals to assume responsibility for their decisions, their actions and the consequences to which they lead. You merely set up the device, and let people do as they see fit. The precariousness of the work is partially due to the lack of a clear frame around it. The links between the different pieces in the show at Bourges are also precarious, as is the image of you standing on a ledge, while before you lies an immense vastness.

NB : Sometimes it is as simple as that: there is the void before you, what are you going to do? The vertiginous feeling one has in the face of life. The existential dilemma is far less acute in the face of art. There is an old wall around the city of Dublin known as the pale; in local vernacular, things were either “beyond the pale” or “within the pale”. Calling something “art” is a way of assimilating it into culture, bringing it “within the pale”. Free-climbing actions, of the kind I sought to do at Charamade, will never be brought within the pale of art, whereas the more domesticated version, Escalade, has been well received in art circles in France. But what fascinates me is the possibility of going beyond the pale.

THE ANALOGIC IMAGINATION

SW : Before we move beyond the pale, let’s go back to “Surfaceaction”. It is a work that stems from your earlier practice as a painter.

NB : It came very soon after the grey paintings, which was actually a single monochromatic canvas that I perpetually resanded and repainted. “Surfaceaction” was a very physical act of painting, climbing around a room on the wall, leaving gashes and scars of my passage by driving my axe through the wall surface. It was a Pollock-like expression of desire and necessity – as well as a gesture of pure anger at having been stuck in painting for so long. Had an actual painting (that is, canvas mounted on a frame) been physically able to support such an action, that would have been better still. “Surfaceaction” also touches on such notions as skin, as touching surface and moving across it with the hand. This was the essence of the grey paintings, and the successive sanding and repainting in the quest for perfect smoothness. How the hand moves across a human body, the body of a car, a body of rock, and how the eye glissades across a surface, crossing it with minimum effort.

SW : In this case, Bernard Brunon, of That’s Painting Productions, came along and carefully restored the surface of the gallery walls to their previous state. It was a great match: you hacking your way across the surface and of Bernard Brunon mending it, showing the inseparable forces of destruction and creation inherent in any art process.

NB : Processes lead to objects, and that can be awkward. I am happy with “Surfaceaction”, or “Adidas Kids” or “Corridor”, but on the other hand I don’t know what to do with the object-based works, like the sleeping bag.

SW : Because it is so self-evidently, embarrassingly art-like?

NB : I just wish somebody would take it off my hands. What interests me about it is its grammar. You take a sleeping bag and sequin and join them together; that is, you join the space of security and reverie, imagination and security that is the sleeping bag, and you join it with a flashy material used in dance and in theatre –other dreams– thereby joining the space of the unreal with the very real, practical space of the sleeping bag, creating a hybrid element out of sequin.

SW : I find it a contrived hybrid, even as you describe it now. Whereas with “Adidas Kids”, you simply came upon an existent symbolic configuration. You were out looking for something, and you found something else. In that respect, it is not so much an artwork as the by-product of a certain artistic disposition and openness toward the world.

NB : Being an artist means having acquired a disposition which puts you in a certain position and enables you to keep the camera rolling once you get there, even when things get weird. What interests me most about art, or rather about artists, is the acquisition of this ability to identify similitude, to turn an apparently commonplace situation into “the right place at the right time”, to be a go-between, to bring two or more things together in order to highlight experience. This is a key role of the artist, and one which is difficult to maintain in the context of the contemporary art circuit –which the artist cannot do without. So I will continue to make objects, live with them for a bit and then hate them. Part of that continuing to make objects is an economic need, resulting from the expectations of the artworld.

SW : Those expectations are based on the conventional view that art somehow manifests itself in objecthood. In “Art as Experience”, written in the 1930s, American philosopher John Dewey tears down the distinction between art and everything else, arguing that art should be thought of as experience rather than as the production of objects. Yet art, he contended, had no monopoly on experience and was more of an experience intensifier; many other activities could be experienced aesthetically and even artistically, depending on how they were framed. The only reason he wrote about art is because it is incontestably framed as an experience-engendering activity.

NB : Art itself is a primary context for seeing things. In deciding to put climbing in an art gallery, I draw attention to it as art. So the equation becomes, art-gallery + climbing = E, where E is the possibility of renewed experience. The notion of artwork can be understood in at least three ways: as the work (the object) of art, and as the work (the labour) of art, that makes the object, and then the work (the effect) of art on the viewer who experiences it. I am interested in the “work of art” in that all-inclusive sense, which could otherwise be described as a “work of humanity”.

SW : In talking to you, it is obvious that you see the work of the artist as essentially analogic: seeing one thing in function of another. Hegel, too, in his “Lectures on Aesthetics” considered creative activity as the intuitive postulating of similarities between apparently dissimilar things. All too often, however, art is taken to be not only a different form of creative activity, but the superior form –the summit of creativity. What is interesting about climbing as a creative form is that it need not be subordinated to artistic creativity: reaching the summit is not the finality of climbing. Think of the people who use the climbing walls you install in galleries: there is a physical dimension to what they are doing, but also the expression of body language as they move on and fall from that vertical dance space. What interests me in that is what might be called extraterritorial reciprocity: on the one hand, you move climbing into an art-specific time and space, and on the other, you shift an art practice out of its time and space, when you go to a real rock face and climb. You take art out of its territory and deploy it outside its defining framework, and then fill the space which is thereby opened up with an activity that, conventionally, has no place there. A sort of swap.

ART AS EXTRADISCIPLINARY PRACTICE

NB : Scottish artist Christine Borland deals with genetic research very much along the lines you have just described. Critics are sometimes reluctant to deal with the conscious decision of taking such positions in art, or of trying to transform a symptomatic position into a symbolic stance. Over the past few years, I have been struck by the position taken by the American artist Mark Dion, particularly his quasi archaeological study on the banks of the Thames. Occupying both a position at the Tate and on the edge of art. I have an affinity with artists who engage with life. Not just in the second-hand, received experience of life, but of actually engaging with it at ground level. At the same time, I am sceptical about art’s ability to get outside. I have been wondering whether art research can ever be validated in the academic sphere. I think it can, provided that it becomes a subject of discussion, thereby generating different ways of seeing and thinking that might be of interest to science.

SW : That raises the whole issue of interdisciplinarity and the specificity of art. It is possible for a biologist to collaborate with a physicist for instance because they both come from historically constituted canons of knowledge, with specific methodologies. By definition, interdisciplinarity requires the existence of two or more existent disciplines. But art is not a discipline per se –and that is its specificity. It is specifically defined by its extradisciplinarity, which of course makes interdisciplinarity with art impossible.

NB : I am currently working on a piece in Berlin that involves taking all of the street names of the city, categorising them in encyclopaedic fashion: writers, artists, war heroes, engineers, animals, vegetables, etc. Through that, one is able to dissect the psychology of a city. If you then attach dates, you can real-ly tie that information into historical factors. One ends up with a pie chart showing, for instance, that Berlin is two-thirds organic in terms of the etymology of its street names, which reflects decision-making power structures over time. One might say, “that’s just social history”, and of course it is social history –except that I’m an artist, not a social historian. As an artist, one has to apply one’s own rigour, one’s own discipline. If I had to identify one specific artistic skill or competence, it would be to recognise similarity and analogy across disciplines, meaning they can be brought together without any barriers.

SW : I was amused to note that a professional archaeologist, Colin Renfrew, writing about Mark Dion’s archaeological excavation project, entitled his essay “It may be art but is it archaeology? Science as art and art as science”. That is an ironic reversal of much aesthetic logic, suggesting that such projects may be beyond the pale of both art and science: genuinely extradisciplinary practice. However, what usually happens in such cases where art makes forays out beyond the artworld and then imports the spoils back into the frame, is very much akin to colonial museum practices. It is a market-driven ploy to more thoroughly colonise lived experience, rather than to foster new experience.

NB : In the struggle to survive as an artist, you are literally forced to stake out new territory, to make your mark in the reputation market. But whatever you do, there is inevitably some kind of economic policy, in terms of funding structures and strategies, behind it. For instance, I made a series of maps of the Scottish highlands, in an endeavour to work with another discipline. I wanted to put forward the idea, based on a practical observation, that the mapping of the Scottish highlands is always done in the summer, whereas for six months of the year they are immersed under snow, which is when much of the climbing activity takes place. I suggested the highlands should be mapped in snow conditions, which, for a mapmaker, is an absurdity, because snow is forever shifting. Actually, of course, the snow is invariably in the same place; it responds year after year to the same prevailing conditions, leading to a relative stability in climbing routes and ski slopes. If I was able to make those maps, it was because of a funding opportunity based on a residency programme in Scotland, which enabled me to work with the Mountaineering Council of Scotland to produce winter maps. It all stemmed from the fact that I had no money and that the residencies offered both money and artworld legitimacy. There is a lot of pressure to play the game.

BEYOND THE PALE

SW : What would happen if, so to speak, you just “left the game”?

NB : The idea is to leave the game, the question is how you leave it.

SW : I feel that we can’t leave the game; that no move off the board is possible; that any attempt to make such a move leads either to invisibility or to expanding the game board.

NB : The only way to leave the table is to win. The winner gets to walk.

SW : That is tantamount to saying that the game always wins; that the game just needs players in order to pursue its own logical purposes. Our will to win is just a ruse engendered by the game so we will play harder, thereby enabling the game to perpetuate itself. At best we can hope to be secondary non-losers, but the system is destined to prevail.

NB : It’s an inescapable paradox: one wants to continue doing art and one needs the validation of the system to do so.

SW : Which means one walks a fine line, and one must intuitively, prereflexively know the ledge.

NB : The system itself is not so bad, or at any rate, it has an intrinsic intelligence. On the one hand, I remember how amazed I was when I discovered there was such a place as an art school, a space of generosity, where your ideas were not ridiculed, where lateral thinking was encouraged, where you could discuss the merits of a white sheet of paper, discuss philosophical, scientific or religious ideas without having to be an authority. Outside of the exceptional space of art, you could have a drunken conversation about such things, but never go any further. But that initial breathing space can very quickly become a suffocating little box. Because, on the other hand, contemporary art ends up reflecting dominant opinion of the day. French contemporary art today merely reflects the abashed neoliberalism of recent time, just as the British art of the eighties and early nineties reflected the brash Thatcherism of that period. The analogy with politics goes even further. In Western democracies, the role of the Left has been, historically, to keep the Right under control, in order to protect the system; yet if ever the Left were truly successful in this role, it would become the Right. I decided to take up the utopian student slogan from May 1968, l’imagination au pouvoir, as the title of the exhibition in Bourges, because it seems to me that there is a double subtext at work: if ever the imagination were to take power, it would cease to exist as imagination; and yet, the imagination has been very successful, and indeed it has taken power, albeit in an instrumentalised form, in contemporary capitalism. Thus, the imaginative pressure in contemporary art is an exact reflection of the market place.

SW : That’s way I am fascinated by the possibility of taking all art frames away. Because once the imagination is framed, it becomes susceptible to instrumentalisation. But as long as it has not been framed, it cannot be identified as such. It can exist, be experienced –but not as art.

NB : The anxiety to which this leads for the artist is extreme; you really are on the edge. When I spoke to a group of students recently, I asked them if they thought art was dangerous. They didn’t know what I was talking about.

SW : Really? I would have thought the dangerousness of art was a commonplace in the artworld’s self-styled image of audacity and adventure.

NB : There is an enlightening analogy here between art and climbing, for the Romantic dream is common to both. In French rock climbing, bolts are placed everywhere, and danger is greatly diminished. In British climbing, bolts are rarely used, so if you slip, you can fall to the ground. There really are two different cultures: for the former, one attains success with appropriate safety, whereas for the latter, success is attained at the risk of bodily harm. It is interesting how sport is moving in the direction of a greater climax for lesser effort, which is a general trend in Western history: achieve the greatest thrill for the least effort and risk.

PRIMARY SIGNIFIERS

SW : While we’re on the analogy between art and climbing, let’s talk about your notion of primary signifiers.

NB : Why do I like to climb? Aside from a certain innate human inclination for climbing, landscape has profoundly structured language and the subconscious –our phobias, hopes and dreams. Human history and invention too are stimulated by landscape and the need to adapt to environmental conditions. Our adaptation has gone so far that we have reached an almost posthuman stage, where we can virtually exist irrespective of nature. But mountains are, with the sky and the stars, one of the primary signifiers of nature, which is why they crop up so often in literature and film. No Hollywood film is complete without somebody falling off something.

SW : Is all human structure and artifice to be understood in terms of nature, to which it is ultimately subordinated? What about architecture? Is it a primary or a secondary signifier? A lot has been written in linguistics about the metaphorical presence of the house in language: vernacular and learned speech alike is rife with metaphors referring to structure and framework, from the underpinnings to the pinnacle. I would say that the imaginary of the shelter is inseparable from the emergence of language per se.

NB : By “primary” I don’t mean “primeval”. I think the car and more recently the computer have become primary signifiers. I’m not looking at the notion of primary signifiers in an historical sense. Architecture has become a new landscape, a cityscape, bringing new metaphors into language. Art has specific playgrounds and stage sets –painting, sculpture, white cubes, video– almost as if certain things were authorised for use and others were not.

SW : I see your practice as highly conceptual, though I’m not sure it is usually seen in those terms, given its obviously sporty dimension. Yet, without the irreversible gestures accomplished by conceptual art, your practice would not be possible.

NB : Conceptual art scored a great victory and its prize was in effect the right to use real objects in an uninhibited way, to engage with physicality and sculpture without renouncing a conceptual focus. To bring a climbing wall into the context of a gallery, to say that the art is not the climbing wall per se but rather what occurs when people come into the space, is to pursue conceptual art.

SW : On its own, that sounds suspiciously like what Nicolas Bourriaud calls“relational aesthetics”. But what happens when the artist goes out into the real, makes those sorts of links without necessarily claiming them as art?

NB : That is the space of freedom. That is what you try to achieve when you have a life outside of your gallery-artist life. I am often inclined to think that an artist has to leave art; but of course one can’t just leave art. One has to be socially involved in art in order to be an artist, because art is part of language, and outside of language one is reduced to silence. In some respects, art is happening all the time, but it only becomes art when it is territorialised as such.

SW : There is a moment of nominalism, whereby someone with the requisite authority –that is, someone named by the artworld– proclaims something to be his or her artwork, in the absence of which there is no art. To be an artist, one has to step into the artworld: outside that world, the self-proclaimed artist would just go unnoticed like a cry in the wilderness. But can an artist step out of the artworld?

NB : I think it’s necessary for an artist to step out of the artworld, but only with one foot. One needs to be at once autonomous and connected. If one stepped out any further, then what they did would work only the way the creative activity such as graffiti works.

SW : This really raises the question of what allows something to be art rather than being merely the real thing. It cannot be its perceptual or physical qualities. You can eliminate the art object, and the artist planning the work. But it is spectatorship which constitutes the mainstay of art because it constitutes the object as art, and buys in wholeheartedly to the illusio. Doesn’t it strike you as preposterously aristocratic that a symbolic configuration or activity becomes art just because it is set in a particular frame and that exactly the same configuration or activity is not simply because it is in any other frame?

NB : I think you’re overstating the case. It is possible for the contemporary artist to intervene in the urban landscape with a highly sophisticated work that just twists something ever so slightly, reconfiguring it in such a manner that the human mind flows into it, triggering something that then says, “This is different. This may be art!” Being a artist involves understanding what the key signifiers in culture are and being able to manipulate them. And just as if you changed a 0 into a 1 in your computer, you change a perceptual function in society.

SW : That’s easy to do when the frame is there, but more difficult to imagine in the absence of any art-specific framing device. The ability to recognize some change, some anomaly or fissure in the accepted order and thus to perceive it and appreciate it as art –and not just as if it were art– is not prerogative of art professionals, though it is something which would be impossible without the refinement of perception made possible by art. It is a perceptual skill which can only be learned in an art-specific frame, though it can be deployed anywhere. What I cannot understand, although I see a lot of art exhibitions, is why they are invariably so bad. Of course, a failed artwork or exhibition can sometimes be more instructive than a successful one, because it reveals what is implicit in the very notion of success.

NB : A good show is a feast of connections, of connectivity, where the synapses just connect. Because what we’re all after is an intense experience of the real, where two things come together. Perhaps a masterpiece is just a really good connection.

SW : When I looked at your show in Bourges, I was struck by the almost tantalisingly tenuous links to the bigger picture: almost but never quite enough information, like the threshold of a dream that one can’t quite remember. It’s a way of straining perceptual linking skill to the utmost.

NB : That way, the next time you’re in the jigsaw puzzle shop or the hardware store, you have a little more playfulness in how you interact.

SW : Which leads me to conclude that at their best, art exhibitions are like walk-in toolboxes, full of the perceptual tools of worldmaking.

NB : It would be untruthful if I were to say that the object is unimportant. However, to try and make artworks as often as the artworld requires an artist to do is just absurd –and the result is often so trivial. It’s actually difficult to think of an artwork that actually holds its own; their survival over time is usually a matter of consensus rather than real inner strength. Can you think of any good artworks you have seen recently?

SW : By and large, I think art has exhausted that possibility. If the artworld refuses to rethink its own expectations with regard to art –given the extent to which supply already vastly outstrips real demand– it is doomed to collapse under the weight of its own absurdity. But when that happens, as I am reasonably confident it will, it will have little effect on people like you and I, who are at once centrally and only marginally involved in the system we are talking about; if we were not involved at all, we would have no legitimacy. And the fact is, for the time being, that’s the only world we have to world in.

NB : Paradoxically I want to be part of that world, to work, to do what I want.

SW : It’s not really such a paradox, or rather paradoxes are the rule rather than the exception in art. It is a system which thrives not on conformity –because, after all, if everyone conformed, the system would ossify and collapse– but on critique. It is by absorbing critique that it is able to identify new territories to colonize. In a post-traditional society, it is only when people kick against the pricks, usually through critical attack and the innovation implicit in it, that the system can expand and thereby stabilise itself.

Stephen Wright, december 2004