Wednesday
Jan072009
Allen Fisher Interview (Extract 3)
Wednesday 7 January, 2009 in Allen Fisher
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Download edited transcript (PDF, 44KB)
Extract 3: Edited Transcript
Steve: It might be interesting to phrase this question from Paige in relation to what we've been talking about.
Alex: ‘You are Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, and as a mature student trained formally as an artist. You began making visual work long before then, from the beginning of your career as an artist-printer. But your artwork is rarely seen and is probably only accessible as illustrations in or covers for books by other poets. Can you tell us a little about the relationships between your written and visual work, especially with reference to the concepts 'facture' and ‘collage’? What are the aesthetic links, if any, between your conceptual art, such as 'Printing Days', visual publications such as 'Amnesic Instant' and more recent work, such as the big painting series, 'Views of the City', and works on paper such as the 'Meditation Traps' and the 'Scattered Studies'? Who are the artists who have most influenced your aesthetic development?’
Allen: First of all talking about the relationship between writing and visual work is quite hard and [there’s] a wide range of questions that need to be asked. One is a sort of day to day energetic question. What I find is that at certain times I feel in a better mood to write than to paint or vice versa, and that is to do with energy. I can actually be too exhausted to write, but I can stand up and paint, because the physicality is quite different. Even though the mental activity might be similar, there's a physical difference which is important. That's one of the relationships that I find important.
Alex: Do you literally mean in terms of your body position?
Allen: Yeah, it's to do with posture and muscles.
Allen: Then there's another relationship which is to do with... which is hard for me to articulate - it needs others to help me. I've got a whole series of paintings that relate to Gravity, and then all of a sudden you go 'just a minute I've used vocabularies that crop up in the writing' and there must be a relationship here that I haven't analysed.
Steve: I've been working with a musician recently, and he talks a lot about non-verbal concepts. As a poet that's incredibly hard for me to get my head around. Is that the level you work at with your painting?
Allen: Yeah, I do. However, because I'm a poet I still maintain it is verbalising - although I wouldn't use a terrible word like that again. But it's not in a way that you first of all expect, not as an explanation or as an event of that kind, it might just be a parallel experience, but in writing. It's difficult. Just trying to grab up this question - one of things Paige mentions here is 'Printing Days'. That's not easily reproducible. It's a set of, let’s say, A2 sheets. Every time I finished printing on a letter press, which was late 60s, early 70s, I rolled out the roller, cleaned up what I’d done so the roller was clean, and I got attracted to that movement - the roller creates this sort of mark as the ink's running out. So every time I did it I dated it, and just had a whole set of them, and it was contemporary with or just after I'd seen work by Barnett Newman, called 'Cantos', which is a series of prints that have a similar shape to them... probably don't look anything like them - but I sort of don't remember whether they do or not. That answers two parts. I was influenced by people who do things in series, and I quite enjoy that. It's not the only way I've been influenced by art, but I enjoy the way Jasper Johns uses series... other examples - there must be hundreds.
Steve: There's book arts as well, like Ed Ruscha.
Allen: I'm quite keen on series of paintings. The term might be 'project-ing'. I think that's where my best work is, always, it's organised that way, planned as a series. [Goes back to the question] The relationship between the written and the visual, concepts of ‘facture’ and ‘collage’... I think we've touched collage pretty well, so let's not reiterate that unless you think we should.
Alex: Give us something about 'facture'.
Allen: Facture came out of a discussion with constructivists, not that I was having them - I wasn't born! - and they'd understood a difficulty with using words like 'make' and 'produce'. It was partly to do with the fact that they didn't want the religious association with making, and they didn't want those god-like feelings about it, and they were trying to prevent that politically. And the idea of production, for me at least, meant completion, it meant the end of it: that's it. I think I said earlier that I'm really quite keen to recognise that you and I, when we're looking at a piece of work, are producing it. Therefore that's part of the production, therefore how can the artist be the producer: full stop? And so the terminology cropped up by using the word manufacture. The word ‘facture’ cropped up as meaning you're the person involved in facilitating the process that brings about production.
Allen: 'Amnesic Instant' is a publication I put out from Spanner which was taking off from something Charles Olson said. He was at [inaudible] lecture and he talks about the universe being like a rubber band, so I've taken his rubber bands and enlarged them on photocopies and it starts to fragment. Oh, look at this.
[At this point a group of protesters walked past the Cornerhouse, carrying placards deriding news coverage and perception of China. In particular, the BBC were singled out.]
Steve: It's a pro-China protest.
Allen: 'Stop the media distortion. So that's why it's Oxford Road, it's the BBC.’
Download edited transcript (PDF, 44KB)
Extract 3: Edited Transcript
Steve: It might be interesting to phrase this question from Paige in relation to what we've been talking about.
Alex: ‘You are Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, and as a mature student trained formally as an artist. You began making visual work long before then, from the beginning of your career as an artist-printer. But your artwork is rarely seen and is probably only accessible as illustrations in or covers for books by other poets. Can you tell us a little about the relationships between your written and visual work, especially with reference to the concepts 'facture' and ‘collage’? What are the aesthetic links, if any, between your conceptual art, such as 'Printing Days', visual publications such as 'Amnesic Instant' and more recent work, such as the big painting series, 'Views of the City', and works on paper such as the 'Meditation Traps' and the 'Scattered Studies'? Who are the artists who have most influenced your aesthetic development?’
Allen: First of all talking about the relationship between writing and visual work is quite hard and [there’s] a wide range of questions that need to be asked. One is a sort of day to day energetic question. What I find is that at certain times I feel in a better mood to write than to paint or vice versa, and that is to do with energy. I can actually be too exhausted to write, but I can stand up and paint, because the physicality is quite different. Even though the mental activity might be similar, there's a physical difference which is important. That's one of the relationships that I find important.
Alex: Do you literally mean in terms of your body position?
Allen: Yeah, it's to do with posture and muscles.
✂
Allen: Then there's another relationship which is to do with... which is hard for me to articulate - it needs others to help me. I've got a whole series of paintings that relate to Gravity, and then all of a sudden you go 'just a minute I've used vocabularies that crop up in the writing' and there must be a relationship here that I haven't analysed.
✂
Steve: I've been working with a musician recently, and he talks a lot about non-verbal concepts. As a poet that's incredibly hard for me to get my head around. Is that the level you work at with your painting?
Allen: Yeah, I do. However, because I'm a poet I still maintain it is verbalising - although I wouldn't use a terrible word like that again. But it's not in a way that you first of all expect, not as an explanation or as an event of that kind, it might just be a parallel experience, but in writing. It's difficult. Just trying to grab up this question - one of things Paige mentions here is 'Printing Days'. That's not easily reproducible. It's a set of, let’s say, A2 sheets. Every time I finished printing on a letter press, which was late 60s, early 70s, I rolled out the roller, cleaned up what I’d done so the roller was clean, and I got attracted to that movement - the roller creates this sort of mark as the ink's running out. So every time I did it I dated it, and just had a whole set of them, and it was contemporary with or just after I'd seen work by Barnett Newman, called 'Cantos', which is a series of prints that have a similar shape to them... probably don't look anything like them - but I sort of don't remember whether they do or not. That answers two parts. I was influenced by people who do things in series, and I quite enjoy that. It's not the only way I've been influenced by art, but I enjoy the way Jasper Johns uses series... other examples - there must be hundreds.
Steve: There's book arts as well, like Ed Ruscha.
Allen: I'm quite keen on series of paintings. The term might be 'project-ing'. I think that's where my best work is, always, it's organised that way, planned as a series. [Goes back to the question] The relationship between the written and the visual, concepts of ‘facture’ and ‘collage’... I think we've touched collage pretty well, so let's not reiterate that unless you think we should.
Alex: Give us something about 'facture'.
Allen: Facture came out of a discussion with constructivists, not that I was having them - I wasn't born! - and they'd understood a difficulty with using words like 'make' and 'produce'. It was partly to do with the fact that they didn't want the religious association with making, and they didn't want those god-like feelings about it, and they were trying to prevent that politically. And the idea of production, for me at least, meant completion, it meant the end of it: that's it. I think I said earlier that I'm really quite keen to recognise that you and I, when we're looking at a piece of work, are producing it. Therefore that's part of the production, therefore how can the artist be the producer: full stop? And so the terminology cropped up by using the word manufacture. The word ‘facture’ cropped up as meaning you're the person involved in facilitating the process that brings about production.
✂
Allen: 'Amnesic Instant' is a publication I put out from Spanner which was taking off from something Charles Olson said. He was at [inaudible] lecture and he talks about the universe being like a rubber band, so I've taken his rubber bands and enlarged them on photocopies and it starts to fragment. Oh, look at this.
[At this point a group of protesters walked past the Cornerhouse, carrying placards deriding news coverage and perception of China. In particular, the BBC were singled out.]
Steve: It's a pro-China protest.
Allen: 'Stop the media distortion. So that's why it's Oxford Road, it's the BBC.’
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