John Newling

Interview with John Newling exploring mediating an idea, currency and value, responsibility, site-specificity and context, the ontology of absence, sacred and secular, theology and philosophy and acts of communion.

MP Michael Pinchbeck
JN John Newling

Mediating an Idea

MP There are three strands I want to explore: ideas of site-specificity, working within a community and working with references to religion. One of my research questions at the moment is Theatre in and for a community – does it have to be dumbed down to succeed? It’s a problematic question but working in Q Arts I have experienced participatory work that I always had issues with – how did you put it in your talk on Chatham Vines? – ‘I’d always thought of community art as abhorrent’ and I wondered if you could take that as a starting point:

JN I think certainly my education was early seventies and the idea of community artwork then was a mural. And the idea of that having any value whatsoever was never there. Commissioning money often means there usually has to be an education strand. Up until about 5 years ago I would say ‘Well I’ll do the work and then you can sort out the education strand’. Then I became interested in what people were doing and I realised it was something very important. They were mediating an idea. One of the central ambitions that I’ve had has been that you can take truthful but difficult challenging ideas to a wider public but in order to do that a) you’ve got to know what you’re talking about and b) you’ve got to be able to articulate that not in simplistic terms but in simple terms so that people can understand it. You can’t start off by saying ‘My work is about free will and it’s relationship to Heidegger’. But you can say ‘How many things in life do we think are predetermined?’ Then you can start to get access.

One of the revolutions that I think is perhaps happening in arts practice is much more attention is being paid to the dissemination of ideas around the project – not describing the work ever but exploring the ideas that the artist is exploring. I think art’s too important as a proactive tool in society just to allow it to be a commercially driven marketed product from metropolitan cities. The other option is to talk about what is happening and what it is felt by those experiencing work.

Currency and Value

MP You’ve just had your estate valued – what value does the work have to that community and that audience?

JN Currency and belief and currency and art fascinate me. The history of money is interesting because it’s moved from weight to electronic transactions. In a way ‘value’ is a key word for arts strategy and production and artists need to evaluate the ‘value’ of art as well as the ‘value’ of their art. I think traditionally we have had a problem with the fetishisation of the individual where artists are immensely articulate about their art but less articulate about art in general. The really good artists I know are highly articulate about art not just their art.

MP By that do you mean they can place their work within the broader context?

JN They can value the transactions that take place in art as playing a crucial part in culture and society and that is a completely different type of value – it could have a monetary value attached to it but it’s not really about that. I think questioning things and displaying risk and courage is dampened down by the situation in which we’re living, The fear of doing that is prevalent. Art is one of the few things that displays risk and courage and part of its value is that it does this.

Responsibility

MP You also talked very passionately about the responsibility you have as a funded artist. When you receive this financial transaction you have the responsibility to the community in which you are working.

JN I think that’s a responsibility that’s grown over the years with a dawning realisation that I wasn’t just getting away with it. None of my work can happen without a team that I support and manage. My work often arrives in a town in another country and it’s cost a lot of money. It’s very important that a community gets as much out of me as possible and that a debate takes place to try and stop the arguments that actually don’t happen in other countries but only happen here. Which is the cost of it. That’s starting to dissipate a bit. People are less obsessed with the fact that an artwork could cost the same as an air ambulance.

MP Yes. A nurse’s salary for a year or even a tabloid journalist’s salary for a year. And in terms of Chatham Vines how did that dialogue work with that community?

JN It worked globally because of the remote cameras. Very good marketing was involved prior to the cameras going live. Locally – and this was luck – the editor of the TV station is a wine expert so he did monthly bulletins on his news programme to inform people about how the vines were progressing. Then the local newspapers picked it up and the people of Chatham had public events they could go to. Part of the deal was to do a series of lectures at local universities. Visually you could see what was happening because the lights were on all night so the church was illuminated. The whole community knew what was going on.

Site-specificity and Context

MP My question is can something be site-specific to a community without it being exclusive to that community?

JN I think it can be contextually specific. Round by us there’s a sweet shop that’s grey but it’s referred to locally as The Pink Shop. I found out recently that at one point somebody owned it and painted it pink. It caused quite a rumpus in the area and was eventually painted back to grey. It became mythical. The gap between the event and how people refer to the event gave it a name. That place will forever be called The Pink Shop.

So in a sense one has that local investment in context and places and if you jump into you’ve got to be quite conscious of histories. Also if you go into places like factories or prisons you have to be very conscious of context and the work often isn’t a response to that context but if it isn’t then I wonder what the point of that work is. I think it has to be. It can be wonderfully useful for other things e.g, social services or a parallel education or community project that is related to the work but is just an excuse to talk about unemployment.

Artwork can open all of that up because people don’t consider it to be important. In a sense it has a wonderfully impish way of sneaking into places which it wouldn’t normally sneak into. The debate is very interesting.

MP This idea of The Pink Shop puts in mind your project in Temple Bar – Mad Helen’s – and that building’s importance, history and resonance to a locality. Also in that talk you mentioned the Ontology of Absence.

The Ontology of Absence

JN The Ontology of Absence influenced a lot of artists in the late seventies and early eighties in Europe. Boltanski, Sophie Calle, myself, a lot of us were interested in working in disused spaces. You’d walk into a place and it might be an old hospital ward and you might see evidence of where the bed legs had been, four shadows on the floor. You might go into a disused factory and see a hammer or a pay slip. Artists view those objects in a different way or a heightened way. The pay slip becomes not just a pay slip but all the pay slips, so you need to think about the consensual responsibilities of occupying the space.

MP Do you see that pay slip in a different way because of your interest in value or currency?

JN I think so but it’s also to do with walking into a disused space where there are objects. Most people have a tendency at that point to almost fetishise, not to sacredise, but make important the objects that were mundane at a certain point. A hammer’s a hammer. But a hammer left alone on a disused factory floor and the poetics of that hammer is different to the poetics of a hammer in Wilkinson’s hardware store. Artists work with that a lot – really from the 20th Century.

Du Champ was classically aware in theological terms of the ontological absence, Anselm of Canterbury, the always beyond argument. Duchamp was also aware of Aristotle’s argument about substance which is again connected to the ontological argument. And when Duchamp put a urinal in a different space he opened up a medieval theological view. That to me is his great legacy. Not just that he knew it but that he did it. Transubstantiation. Ontolological argument. Secularised it by using a urinal. Revolutionised art. Great. He’s a good artist.

MP Again I think you see these objects and you create narratives. The history of that urinal and if someone pisses in that urinal as somebody did it creates new narratives and a new legacy. The ontology of absence also relates to the absence within the church in Chatham Vines, just the fact that it had been abandoned, and those clues you found within it. Abandonment creates new narratives. How does that then inform the process? I read the installation within it and the detritus of the community, the remnants of congregation as separate things. They were already there. You were installing alongside those traces.

JN The first idea of that project was to data collect to make an inventory. It was extraordinary. No tidying up had been done. Then the next impetus was how do you make something living and hugely problematic within the space. It was hugely challenging and hugely risky. The responsibility there was really heavy. The nightmare of making sure the plants were looked after was massive. That feeling of getting the money and then thinking ‘What I’m doing?’ I get that a lot.

It was important to have something that was alive of nature. That was given ‘plant heaven’ and we all felt that enormously. That connected to an American project I was doing called Mine – which involved small gilded calves with the word Mine stamped into them like a logo. Part of the deal for that was we purchased a calf and we looked after it for a year and gave it everything we thought it could ever want. They wouldn’t pay for it in the end but it would have been great. So it was a responsibility, if you like, to look after something living.

MP The project I’m planning is located within a suburban church. Rooted in the site-specificity of the church site. It was a Methodist church so they use Shloer for the blood of Christ. So when they host wedding receptions you can’t drink alcohol. Every year they have an amateur dramatics show. The funds go towards the church so the funds buy the Shloer. I’m exploring symbolism and iconology. The dichotomies between the live and the recorded. Populism and elitism. Secular and religious. Am dram and MA dram. The similarities of both communities. Could you talk a little bit about the religious and wine symbolism?

Sacred and Secular

JN I recently did a lecture at Ludlem University of Poland. I’m doing a project for the museum of modern art there. It’s a place that’s highly charged religiously. Catholic and Jewish in a cultural sense. They wanted me to talk about sacred art. I don’t consider my work to be sacred. I started off by saying when I was a kid I really hated singing ‘There is a green hill far away.’ It made me sick I hated Christians. I couldn’t work out when I was a kid how Easter eggs connected with killing someone. I was not an easy kid but they let me paint the Easter Service backdrop it was a huge crucifix and it had them gasping as the curtains drew back. I started with that and the audience stood up and started applauding.

My view comes from being at distance from religions. I am interested in all religions and in the difference between belief and faith. I think faith is absolute and belief is easily changed. In Poland they thought I did ‘sacred art’ because I’d worked in Cathedrals and churches. It isn’t sacred art but what it does is gently challenge the premises of religions. I am much more of a humanist. I understand the perceptions of God because I’ve researched it and I believe that we need it. We need psychologically the notion of a constant other. Of something beyond ourselves.

MP By researching it did you find that you don’t need it?

JN No I need it. All of my writing I about these areas is based on personal experience. I know that at very difficult times like anybody else I’ll pray.

MP To an unknown other

JN To an unknown entity. At very good times I’ll pray to say thank you. Have done since I was a kid. I don’t know where that comes from but I’m willing to go along with it. My interest is personal because I think religion is personal in many ways if you start to really unpick it. It is part of what makes us human and the need for it and the community aspect of it is increasingly important. Also it is completely taboo in terms of artists. If you say to an artist you are making work in a cathedral they’ll immediately assume that you’re making religious work and therefore that’s not valued in terms of contemporary arts practice.

Theology and Philosophy

MP So you don’t refer to your work as religious work?

JN A lot of people say ‘Are you religious?’ And at first I used to say ‘No’. Now I won’t say that because I don’t think that’s correct and it sounds like I’m copping out. What I will say is that I’m really interested in religion and that I have a personal sense of the necessity for God and the elegance of communion and all the rituals associated with the Eucharist. I have a personal sense of the danger globally at the moment with religions getting it wrong. Getting very confused in their powerbases and using religion for political gratification. Theology is a parallel to Philosophy. So I’m not anti-religion.

MP Could you say your art is your religion?

JN I think if you take the deepest thoughts not necessarily in faith but in theology and the deepest thoughts that exist in philosophy you find parallels. If you take a 20th century Theologian like Paul Tillock and the essay he wrote when he was 23 which is when we all stop trying to identify God because that’s a fruitless task. He talks about risk and courage being the evidence of God. I can buy into that and I think artists at their best display risk and courage – sometimes naively, but to keep going as an artist requires it. Problematics arise when you question the relationship between God and contemporary art. I have done talks for the Arts Council and they are aware of the resources of empty churches and theological, philosophical thought that people like Damien Hirst have played with – in my opinion with a lack of understanding. It’s no good saying things like ‘God is Dad’. It just doesn’t work. You’ve got to throw yourself into it and really try to work it out. Warhol’s multicoloured crucifixes are amazing. His work is beautiful and it becomes sacred when it’s agreed. Sacredness is an agreement between people. A flower can be scared. Chatham Vines can be sacred.

MP Interesting how that can be used as a secular adjective.

JN I think it is. In all the work I do I look at the secular. I look for comparison. Sometimes connections between what I’ve read and thought about between the religious and the secular. I find parallels.

Acts of Communion

MP How does your wine, the gestation of this immense project, being filtered literally through this communion service fit into this idea and how does it make you feel as an artist?

JN It makes me feel very nervous because we’ve bought the bottles, made the labels – we’re going to have 24 bottles.

MP Is that a symbolic choice?

JN No it’s how it turned out. The final phase of Chatham Vines which is the Liturgy of the Eucharist at Rochester Cathedral is a much bigger deal than I thought it would be. It isn’t a service it’s more that that. It’s an all night vigil. It opens at Five O’Clock in the morning. It’s the first Eucharist. And to think people are actually drinking the wine. In a way I distance myself from that. There was a moment in the church where the Chatham Vines project was where we had Bishops turning up to bless the vines. It was absolutely amazing. What I can say is that what people are drinking there is wine that has come out of a very particular context that has been made with a full sense of responsibility and a huge amount of work. That it’s been blessed all the way through. You sense that the next thing is that it will be out of our hands when it enters the communion process. It will become the responsibility of the Bishop of Rochester.

MP How important to you is it that the congregation know that?

JN It’s not important at all but there will be a reference to it in the service. TV wanted to film it but I don’t think it’ll be allowed because it’s a very personal act. They will be filming it but from a distance. Very discreetly.

MP To what extent is it an art project or an act of communion on that day?

JN The first time I used communion wine was at the V&A. It was laminated between glass and you looked through the wine at the objects in the Church Plate gallery really reflecting their purpose and function. People don’t understand why they exist. They just think they’re really ornate gold things but they’re really important objects some of which have been melted down and recast. They know their history at the V&A. They gave me a 1304 Irish chalice to work with. That was the first time but I am still enchanted with the notion of communion and the notion of transubstantiation and this notion of drinking blood. Wine is chosen because it’s the colour of blood and vines are things of nature. Difficult to grow. They are amazing and I think religion is predicated on nature.

MP Will you be taking communion? Would that sit well with your faith?

JN I think I might. It would be my first time. I’m not sure. I’m still not sure.

MP Will you actually taste the wine?

JN I will