Marcus Rees Roberts in Conversation, Full Transcript
Pease find below a full transcript of
Marcus Rees Roberts in conversation with David Stent.
12-1pm, Saturday 18 October
David Stent: It's nice to see so many people here. I was thrilled to be asked to be part of this conversation, both because I've known Marcus for a long time and its great to engage with this wonderful exhibition that is all around us, which is on until the end of the month. I worked alongside Marcus for many years at West Dean College, just north of Chichester, a few miles outside of the town, where I am still Subject Leader in Fine Art. I've been there for a scarily long time, some 12 or 13 years, and, when I arrived, Marcus was already teaching there and had been since the Fine Art programmes were started. In some ways he was very much part of the furniture, a really important part of the programmes, both before I got there and since then – his influence has been wide and deep. So, it's great to thank him for that, somehow.
I want to be quite selfish in starting this conversation, Marcus, given that we know each other from an educational setting, and wanted to ask about your own education. You studied English at Cambridge and then went on to study printmaking at the Slade… what was your attitude to education at the time – did you enjoy Cambridge, for example? And how do you think back to that time?
Marcus Rees Roberts: Yes, I did English. And I enjoyed my time there, but I just was not very good at English. And one reason for that, I think, was, I've recently discovered that I'm quite badly dyslexic. And so, when a tutor said, Why don't you read these eight plays by Ben Johnson? And then perhaps these plays by his contemporaries, and then read these critiques of the plays; and then this book is really important, but it's in French. And we had to write an essay on it all too. All for next week! I just couldn't manage. But the boy I'd be in the tutorial with would be absolutely fine with it. Had no problem at all, and perhaps even suggested something else as well! I was just completely overwhelmed by the workload and found it very, very difficult. I think I was quite good at some aspects of English but the mechanics of reading all this stuff in one week… I had actually wanted to go to art school rather than university. My parents were both painters. They were horrified at the idea of me going to an art school. They had a very low opinion of the contemporary art scene, of art schools and, worst of all, the staff at art schools. So it was, in a way, to appease them that I went to university to read English. Then, I progressed to the Slade to write a thesis on the German Expressionist cinema. And while I was doing that, I started going to the print room and fell in love with it. I then did another postgraduate course. In printmaking. In those days I had to pay only for my second postgraduate. The fees were £100 a year. Otherwise, I hadn't paid a penny for my education. A huge difference to nowadays.
DS: A number of students here are probably rolling their eyes! The reason that you went to study English at Cambridge, there must have been a passion for literature?
MRR: Yes, there was. I wrote a lot and, yes, I loved literature. But I just couldn't read it in the amounts that was expected of me.
DS: Was poetry a part of your interest early on too? We can see the presence of poetry on the walls.
MRR: Yes, that's right. And I think particularly I liked then, and what I still like, and were quite fragmentary poems, ones where there isn't a long narrative, or a long argument, a political argument say, but just fragments of crystalline phrases, which come at you and excite you.
DS: Strikes me as quite a visual way to read poetry.
MRR: Yes, I think that's right.
DS: Do you think that that connects to your interest in cinema that you then went on to?
MRR: Yes. Well, at Cambridge, I spent half my life in the cinema. I forget how many cinemas there were in town. On any one night there were so many films available, even if was a College Film Society. There were also so many cinemas in the town. I loved it.
DS: And was that to see any films that you could get into, or was it more selective and… art house?
MRR: It was mostly art house. Occasionally, you know, a great David Lean blockbuster would come to town, but mostly in the cinemas they were films which would be on for three nights and then were gone, and you'd never hear of them again.
DS: It feels like we're in a very different era. You have to seek that out now, in more or less direct ways. So, when did the specific interest in German Expressionist cinema come in?
MRR Well, the film course I did at The Slade like art history but about films. And what interested me was very early cinema, from its inception up to about 1920, and the way in which the conventions for narrative were being developed, the techniques used, the mistakes they were making, how they involved the audience, how to tell a story in a sort of continuous way. All those conventions were completely new and artificial, but filmmakers all over the world were slowly but surely making it possible to have an illusionist narrative. I was fascinated by how they were doing it. By about 1910, the conventions had been established After 1920 they had been perfected, and never changed. And even now, that illusionist project is still embedded in cinema, and all the inventions since then have continued that same illusionist project. The introduction of sound, and then colour, cinemascope, 3D, CGI - it's all the same project, begun in 1896, of creating an illusionist artefact. So that's what I was interested in. And then what fascinated me was that from 1920, when this project was perfected and fully established, the German Expressionists came along and scene by scene, shot by shot, undermined those conventions. I was excited by that desire to be subversive of the Hollywood conventions.
DS: Did you find it quite shocking when you saw that?
MRR: Yes, yes. At first, it just seemed rough and cackhanded, but then one realises that, no, it is absolutely deliberate and it's almost systematic, the subversion of those conventions. And not all the German Expressionists filmmakers did that, of course. Some became, in fact, Hollywood directors, like Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau, so in a sense there were two separate groups in German expression cinema. I think the greatest is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I forget what your question was!
DS: Something about the way those films, at least in my experience, bring theatricality and artifice to the forefront, and they don't hide it. It doesn't discount the idea that it has an emotional impact nonetheless. You know that it's fake, and you know that is showing its workings, but it still can impact you. And that's quite a strange, challenging experience.
MRR: Yes, I think that's right. Also, I think why I was attracted to it was that I love German Expressionist art as well, particularly Die Brücke. There's a sort of roughness, the desire to emphasise the physicality of the thing, of the picture, the painting, or the print, or the sculpture. I love that. Again, a subversion of what was being done before - someone like Auguste Renoir. It's just miles away from what Die Brücke were trying to do.
DS: Did you think there was an air of violence to what they do those conventions at all?
MRR: Yes, I think that's right.
DS: Not disrespectful violence necessarily. And the question is how this works. I find it really fascinating how those influences may be present in your current work – if we look around, you can see it – so I wonder whether these works are cinematic… or in what way they are cinematic?
MRR: Oh, that hadn't occurred to me to be quite honest. Well, one thing possibly, that does influence me, or has always influenced my prints, is a sort of Brechtian idea, or Eisensteinian idea of juxtaposition, of images, of textures. A desire – certainly with Brecht – to break up the illusionist, realist theatre of the 19th century and to make the audience think critically. And what I want is always to have a juxtaposition which doesn't fit perfectly. To have a tension between the two elements within the picture.
DS: Which cannot be identified or pinned down?
MRR: That’s right. I don't want a harmony between the two. Most of the works have two parts and I don't want a harmony between them. I want the whole thing to work as a one image, to orchestrate the two parts into one is very important, but I don't want an easy reading between the two elements within the picture.
DS: A specific and quite deliberate approach to collage, one might say. At the recent Brecht exhibition at Raven Row in London (https://ravenrow.org/exhibitions/brecht-fragments), a lot of his sketchbooks and notebooks were included. Obviously, he’s known as a writer for the theatre but it was fascinating to see the way that collage was prominent in his thinking.
Okay, perhaps we can turn to your discovery of printmaking and the print room. What were the qualities that first attracted you?
MRR: The print room (at the Slade) was dominated by a character called Bartolomeu Dos Santos, who was in charge of etching. He was very charismatic. We remained quite close for a long time but he was a domineering presence and, to a large extent, he was a complete buffoon. Only interested in his own work. But what I liked was his approach to printmaking, which was very robust, very physical. And he was very happy to, if something on his plate wasn't working, just go at it with a Black and Decker sander and just take off great swathes of the plate and start again. Constantly muttering to himself as he was doing it, giving himself instructions. Okay, okay, okay. Now we do it. Tuk, tuk, tuk. Okay, okay. Now that, tuk, tuk, tuk…. [DS: This sounds like a German Expressionist film!] What I came to love about etching, in particular, was the depth of the ink, the way the paper blazes from behind the ink and gives the print a luminosity; the physicality of it, which I think you can get in any other medium - the way the ink stands up off the paper, rather than just disappearing into the paper as with an ink drawing.
DS: And when you were doing this, both for the first round of studying and the postgraduate after that, what was the status of printmaking at the time at the Slade?
MRR: Good question. There was a postgraduate course in etching in printmaking; another studio for lithography, and another for screenprinting. Undergraduate students and postgraduates would come in and ask if they could work there. And they were always welcome. Barto particularly loved foreign students because he always thought he could get - and often did - some sort of exchange visit out of it. But Printmaking was a ghetto. Up in the eaves of the building. I think people thought that the real work was being done in painting and sculpture. Another ghettoised department was Theatre Design and, speaking since to students who were there, they felt even more isolated than we did. But strangely, we did achieve some sort of popularity in Printmaking when, in the mid-1970s, there were a lot of student strikes and occupations. Suddenly, the Maoist students who had no time for art whatsoever – for them it was a bourgeois, valueless activity – they suddenly appeared wanting to make posters.
DS: If you were to describe the work you were making then, would we recognise it? How would you describe it?
MRR: Figurative, always figurative. And often with the juxtaposition of images. I used to love going to markets and junk shops - and there was a fantastic print shop in London called Andrew Edmunds, which had a drawer full of eighteenth and nineteenth century caricature prints. He was a great expert on them. This drawer was labelled Five Pounds or Less, and you could buy the most beautiful things. Even Hogarths, and Rowlandsons, and Gillrays. So I used to have a huge collection of these and I loved what those artists were doing - their critique of the hypocrisy in society. At that time, early to mid ‘70s, Continental Philosophy was coming into the universities, into colleges, and became extremely popular with art students. Possibly, because no one quite understood it. The opaqueness of it, I think, appealed to students, because it just sounded so good, and it sounded as if incredibly difficult and complex things were being said, but no one had the bravery to question what it actually meant. I know you're a great fan of Continental Philosophy… [DS: Not a fan perhaps, but I'm interested in it!] I was suspicious of the influence this was having in the studio. And so, a lot of my early work was like an imaginary sketchbook by Rowlandson satirising Continental Philosophy. And at the same time, I was using cartoons, newspaper clippings, press photographs, everything I could get hold of, and making collages on the etching plate. A complex, chaotic critique of the Continental theory.
DS: So you thought of this in the tradition of the satirists, as an oppositional stance?
MRR: That's how I saw it, yes.
DS: But also something that's quite close to home in terms of the art institution.
MRR: Yes. Something was being imposed.
DS: Did you feel quite free from the start to combine these materials, collage things together? You weren't worried about quotations from other works, especially if it was text as well? What kind of selection process was there?
MRR: Oh, I'm not sure there was anything systematic. I'd just come across something and think, how can I use this? This would be great to put against that. It was it was completely ad hoc. There's no system there at all.
DS: Was it coming from your reading, though?
MRR: I suppose it was, yes.
DS: We've spoken about the presence of poetry already, but I wonder if it its certain types of poetry… perhaps Modernist poetry is quite prevalent?
MRR: Yes.
DS: Is that's something that you were finding naturally or that you sought out? Did it seem the right thing to counter these narratives, or was it that you were interested in the poetry, or both?
MRR: I think it was a mixture of all those things, yes.
DS: And when did you start showing the work?
MRR: I didn't really show it at all. Not for years. I didn't show it.
DS Consciously? Deliberately?
MRR: No, no, I would have loved to have shown it. But there was no great interest in it at all. I think I possibly made the mistake of always working in series. I would finish a plate, print it six times, and then alter it. And maybe alter it again. So there would be only six copies of that image, and then I would change it. There would be a geology building up on the plate of previous images. And possibly I was too precious about not wanting to break up the series.
DS: Not wanting to show them outside of that series?
MRR: Yes.
DS: But that's interesting because one of the reasons someone might work in printmaking is its possibility for reproduction. So it's almost a little perverse at the same time to make variable editions and keep changing them.
MRR: Yes, it was perverse. And it was probably really stupid of me. But what I did feel was that the reason I made prints was not the reproducibility of it. That's just a side thing. I made prints because of their appearance and only that reason. So, the fact that it could be reproduced 10 or 1,000 times was irrelevant to me.
DS: So the fact that you weren't showing these things, did that affect what you were making? Or did you just keep beavering away?
MRR: I think it gave me a license, in a way, to do exactly what I wanted. And when I started teaching, I was hugely privileged to be able to teach and do something I love, but also to make my own work, and not have to rely on that work to make a living. Yes, I was hugely privileged in that way.
DS: And so, going from this series reacting to what was happening at the university, how did you then shift to other, wider political concerns? Obviously, a lot of stuff is happening during the ‘70s and ‘80s that would've been of interest. Did you start to look outside at what was happening?
MRR: You know, I was talking about with the sit-ins and occupations and demonstrations, in universities all over Britain… At the Slade, there was a group of people, a very charismatic kernel of three or four students, who managed to persuade almost everyone to give up art. They considered art to be intrinsically bourgeois, with no value whatsoever apart from a spurious value endowed by the market. We should give it up. The only acceptable sort of practice was photography, but, if you do make a photograph, don't give it any sort of aesthetic quality, make it as bland as you possibly can. Print it as blandly as you can; don't try to bring out the darks and the lights... Extraordinarily dismal things. But photography was acceptable because, even though it was a mistaken belief, it told the truth. What it depicted was the truth. And so, after all these years, having wanted to go to art school at 16, at last I was making my own work, and now I was being told: "Give it up. It's unacceptable in a modern society.” So, what interested me here was not to make political art, but how political art was possible at all? That's why I started looking at Brecht, Rowlandson, and Gillray. That's where the politics began to seep into my work, without actually being a political artist.
DS: In some ways it sounds quite isolating, working in an environment that doesn't seem very receptive to what you're doing, yet you're working away in the studio. Were there any peers or other artists that you looked to, who were influential (whether you knew them or not?) your contemporaries, people who were working around you? I mean, were you alone doing this?
MRR: (Long pause) Well, yes.
DS: What about your peers at the Slade? Did you feel that you were ploughing your own furrow somewhat?
MRR: I did feel that, yes. We were all allowed to get on very much as we liked. So, some people did give up art and did start making posters and photographs. Someone who was working at that time I was interested in was R. B. Kitaj, but I couldn't really think of any other people whose work I was really taken by. It sounds weird. Actually that still applies now. I really don't know of anyone – contemporary, working today – whose work I would travel to Berlin to see. I just don't have anyone about whose work I think, this is absolutely central to what I should be doing.
DS: It seems to me, and forgive me if this oversteps, but it seems to me that your work is very much not concerned with the cycles of fashion, or stuff that comes and goes relatively quickly. It's quite elemental.
MRR: Well, I take that as a huge compliment!
DS: It's meant to be one.
MRR: I don't want to be contemporary. It seems to me, to be a slightly empty description to say that a piece of work is contemporary. Other activities where ‘contemporary’ is applied are fashion and interior design. And I don't want to join that cycle of fast turnover, of looks, of passing styles.
DS: But, to return to the studio, maybe that's one of the aspects that you found in print making? This is my medium because it has such elemental, fundamental, universal qualities to it… it has what I want from drawing, it has what I want from painting, it has what I want from reproduction. It has all of these things.
MRR: Yes, I think that's right.
DS: It gets right to the heart of the issue.
MRR: Yes, absolutely.
DS: So, you then began teaching at Slade. And then, relatively soon after that, went to teach at Edinburgh?
MRR: That's right. It was a very junior teaching post at the Slade. And then I went to Edinburgh.
DS: You’ve said that having a paid teaching job was really beneficial to your practice. Was working with the students also…?
MRR: Yes, absolutely. I learn more from students than from anyone else.
DS: Then there was a period studying in the United States.
MRR: I was a visiting Professor in Orlando, Florida, at the University of Central Florida. At first, I just thought, what on earth am I doing here?
DS: I can’t picture you in Florida.
MRR: It was as if I took myself aside… at Cambridge, I was always looking for some sort of personal happiness. And obviously, it's a ridiculous thing to be searching for. So in Florida, I remembered that, and said to myself, "Why don’t you just enjoy the circus of it?” Just the ridiculousness, you know, the bizarre characters, the absurdity of the lifestyle. I wish I had done that in Cambridge as an undergraduate. So now, in Florida, I embraced it. If I was invited to something, I would always go. I remember the furniture never had the plastic taken off it, so you were sitting squeaking on these sofas with their protective plastic, holding your drink in a large polystyrene sleeve over your little glass. I came to really enjoy it!
DS: We were talking before we started about the impact of one's environment on the work that you make, whether or how any of it seeps in, maybe explicitly or implicitly. You were saying how you’d recently moved to a new studio, a new urban environment and whether that might become present in the work. Did your work change when you were in Florida?
MRR: No, it didn't. I had begun a series of work that I wanted to continue. I didn't start making… prints of Disney World, and palm trees, no.
DS: I suppose I mean the tenor of the satire.
MRR Oh, yes, I think that might be right. Maybe it was more light-hearted…
DS: I suppose I've got someone like George Grosz in mind, who was doing all these savage caricatures of stuff in Germany and then goes to America and does the same over there… skewers ‘em.
MRR: Yes.
DS: And I suppose also that makes me think about the presence of humour in the work. Because you're a funny character, I think. You make me laugh a lot. But looking for humour in the work is a very different question.
MRR: I'd love it to be like Dickens, with incredible humour, but also a seriousness inside it. But I just can't do it.
DS: Going back to the use of text and poetry, one of the things that struck me when I was looking at this show (and other works as well) was that I was thinking about Ezra Pound. I admire his poetry whilst knowing that he's a dubious character in many respects. But one of the things his poetic project might be described as, particularly the Cantos, is a very long project, developed over decades and never really finished, that includes a similarly collagist method involving lots of fragments of other people's writings, different languages. And which continued to grow. I was wondering whether, because you work in series and perhaps despite the fact that they're quite clearly demarcated with titles and things like that, do you see this as one work as well?
MRR: That's a very good insight. I do see it as one. But with different titles across the years. And he [Pound], as you say, was probably one of the most unpleasant people ever to draw breath, but he has been a huge influence on me, exactly in the way you were talking about - the fragmentation, the collage, the sudden juxtaposition of tone, the references and so on. I think it's wonderful work.
DS: One of the things… the experience of reading him, as it were, is perhaps similar to looking at work like this, in that you go through different phases of being puzzled by it, it being quite obscure… There's quite a lot of stuff under erasure here, for example. There's a lot of texts that are crossed out – not wanting to want to get all Continental Philosophy on you! – under erasure, obscured, cancelled, wiped out. But there are also little moments of beauty, little crystalline moments that you probably wouldn't get the same response from if it wasn't shrouded in darkness.
MRR: Yes, yes.
DS: It seems an interesting way to think about how to read these images.
MRR: Yes. The relation between image and text is, I think, a very difficult one, partly because if an image is too dominant, then the text simply becomes a caption. And if it's the other way round, if the text is dominant, the image becomes an illustration and simply duplicates what is in the words. So in my work I want it to be a more troubled relationship. With, as you say, words, or perhaps even just letters, suddenly appearing. They’re not just random words plucked out of the ether. There was a meaning there, but I don't want the meaning of that fragment of text to be primary. I want it to be secondary, to be just hinted at. Whispered.
DS: Do you work quickly?
MRR: I do work quite quickly, yes. Although I go over and over some images. Some prints I get quite quickly. With others, there might be ten states before I've got it as I want it.
DS: And when you're working quickly, there seems to be a sense of there being a sweet spot when it starts to do something that you want to keep and don't want to touch it anymore. Does it not happen? How often do they fail?
MRR: Often it just doesn't work. I would think maybe one in ten just does not work and I have to just throw up my arms and admit defeat. It's just one of those things. But I will work really hard to prevent that happening. I always think there must be something here that I can get out of this plate.
DS: As well as having this sort of overall project, as it were, there are smaller phases of projects in-between, a nested body of work that has a parameter around it. How do you decide that? Do you give yourself a time period in which to make work, or is it a certain thing that's happening in the wider world or in politics? Images you've seen?
MRR: That's a good question. It's very… I imagine we all ask this: where does an idea come from? I'm just never quite sure. The important thing is always to be ready for an idea. I remember T. S. Eliot writing about this. Keep working, keep working, keep working, and although it's not of much value, you will be ready when an idea comes. No, I never give myself a time limit or to say, right, this is going to be six prints, this is going to be ten prints. I just let it come, and then at some point, one says, Right, that's it. I can't do any more with this particular series. But where the idea for the series comes from… it's just so ephemeral. It might just be a word, it might be seeing a picture by someone else. It might be a shadow on a wall. It might be something out in the world, something that is happening. But it's very difficult to say I think that this piece of work is about that. I think it's very difficult to say a work of art is about anything, actually. I can be of something, but to say something being about… I really don't think art can say much about things. I think you can hint, you can evoke, you can create an atmosphere... But I don't know that a work of art can say anything of value about Identity. Or Gender. I think that's a job for language. Not for art. And that's not to say that a work of art is banal or simple. It can be very deep, but I don't think it has the same ability that language has to discuss complex issues.
DS: Do you think that's another one of the reasons why working in series is important for you? Because in some ways, it takes the pressure off any one image being… or there being an accumulative meaning?
MRR: Exactly. Yes. But they will also work with each other. They will develop from each other. And as you look at a series, you can remember, say, two images before. And to an extent, you can play with memory and anticipation. And you don't have to put everything in to one image. Actually, that was a great lesson for me – my very early work was too complicated. It was like a crossword puzzle. There was so much in there, and it was just too complicated. It was a lesson to make things simple. You don't have to put everything into one image.
DS: I'd like to talk about process because you were speaking earlier about etching being very important, but you were also talking about more recently having to move away from it, having to move away from more toxic processes, and using more drypoint and chine collé.
MRR: It was partly circumstances, to give up etching. It was because of Covid. I used to go to Kent to make etchings, but that became impossible. So, I started making work at home. I started using plastic sheets rather than copper. All of these prints are two plastic plates. By using two plates, I find I can get a richness that one plate won’t give me. And then the chine collé gives a further richness, a depth, a different texture, another weight to the image. But essentially my technique is pretty simple. There's nothing difficult or complicated.
DS: I'm not sure I agree. (laughter) If anyone's got any questions, it's a good time to do that.
Question: Can you tell us about your painting practice and in particular about the paintings in the show?
MRR: I think of the paintings almost as drawings. I don't think of myself really as a proper painter. And some images one can do in painting, that one can't in print. I was talking about this to someone earlier. In order to choose these paintings [on the wall] I went through a lot of older paintings, and there were some I really liked. I thought, they’ll make beautiful prints. So, after the show was hung, I started to make prints of those paintings. But interestingly, they just didn’t work. They are some of those that I've just had to abandon. Something like that [pointing at painting], I would have guessed would work perfectly well as a print, but it just won't. And I’m not completely sure why. It's not the scale, it’s not the composition. I really don't know what it is. So, there are some things that will work as paintings and some that won't - and some will work as prints but not as paintings.
Question: Given your interest in film, I noted how these prints were displayed almost like a sequence of film stills, so I just wondered about you going into filmmaking.
MRR: I do make little films. They're more like little inconsequential poems, four or five minutes long. But I hadn't thought of these prints as stills from a film. I hadn't seen them as filmic at all. So, that’s very interesting that you say that.
DS: I did want to ask about the presence of the face and the head, which is quite frequent. Is there any sense – and we've talked about elemental feelings and the existential side to these images – that there's self-portraiture going on here? Would you accept or deny that?
MRR: Well, it's a cliché, but nevertheless it's a cliche because it's true – I think almost all works of art are self-portraits to an extent. But I never actually deliberately set out to say, this is a self-portrait. I did describe those (Dust Whisper) to Julian as an autumnal self-portrait. And I'm not completely sure why. Well, I think I do know why. They were based on drawings I did a while ago, and I never quite knew what to do with them. They were drawings I made at the time I was diagnosed with leukaemia. And the feeling the diagnosis provoked in me was confusion, helplessness, hopelessness, anger… And I think all that is in these drawings. I never been sure what to do with them. But then it came to me t- I can make prints with them. And so that's why... yes, they’re a self-portrait.
JP: That was a great place to end. Thank you all very much for coming. Thank you in particularly to David for the questions and to Marcus for the answers. Thank you. If you have any more questions, feel free to continue this informally. Thank you very much.
Edited for clarity
David Stent is an artist, writer, curator and performer and the Fine Art Subject Leader at West Dean College.
The solo show of new and recent works by Marcus Rees Roberts, comprising a selection of paintings, prints and artist's books, ran from
11 September - 1 November