I sit down with Jonathan Holden to discuss rescinding responsibility, design vs. art, and being brutally bourgeois.
We order a first round of drinks and I sputter out something about what it might be like to be an artist in Barcelona.
jdh: Barcelona is a great place to be an artist. The streets are full of shit to reappropriate. Take for example my Last Supper piece. As well being able to find materials cheaply, it’s also a relatively affordable place to live and I’ve figured out a way to survive here and not work too much, so I have time to make work. The hard part is selling your work.
TW: Why do you suppose it is hard to sell work here?
jdh: Because Catalans want work by Catalan artists.
TW: Petty nationalism?
jdh: I’m not going to say that. It seems to me that there is a strong emphasis on safety here, in terms of the work being produced. A lot of the art being made in Barcelona falls into one of two categories: perfectly competent modern art or design/illustration.
TW: It seems that you take particular issue with illustration, why is that?
jdh: So much of it is glorified Hello Kitty, there’s not even anything to sell-out. It’s merchandising.
TW: How would you define the difference between design and art?
jdh: Design is about solving problems for others. It always already has the audience in mind. Art, on the
other hand, is about solving problems for yourself. You can say what you want about my work, but I don’t make decoration.
TW: Recently, you’ve been working out of a studio space in L’Hospitalet, how’s that?
jdh: One of the things I like about the studio where I work is that the other people are carpenters, sound engineers, theater people, which means that I have access to all kinds of tools and equipment, but more importantly, I don’t feel any pressure to conform.
TW: Do you think L’Hospitalet could become the Brooklyn of Barcelona?
jdh: No.
TW: How do you see your work within the context of the Barcelona art scene that you’ve described?
jdh: In a lot of ways I feel like something of an outsider. Both in terms of the art scene and the city in general, it’s the feeling of being part of the city, but at the same time, apart from it. I don’t understand why anyone would consider being an artist in their own city.
TW: Are you ever embarrassed when you look back at older work?
jdh: No. Some of the work in this show goes back to 2007-2008 and I’m just as excited to show it now as I was in January 2009 at Gracia Arts Project. I like to see the story of trying, asking questions, attempting to answer them. If all we show are finished projects, we’re saying that we’ve achieved what we want. One of the messages of this show should be that I still have thousands of questions about abstract heads. It’s been 6 years now and I still haven’t gotten tired of the problem of abstract heads. In fact, it was my earliest problem and I’ll probably be dealing with it until I die.
TW: What is the problem of abstract heads?
jdh: Well, there are three rules that govern the abstract heads. Rule number 1 is that they must be from life. Rule number 2 is that they must be a triptych. The third rule is that they must be 40cm2, which is partly due to the canvases I was able to find when I started, but I also like some of the biblical/spiritual notions that this number indexes. It’s a big number, think 40 days and nights, yet for a canvas, it is actually quite small.
TW: Those are the rules, but what is the problem?
jdh: Why do I have to put the problem in words? If I could describe that to you in a lucid way, I wouldn’t be making art about it.
TW: Do you think we could sort of circumnavigate it?
jdh: I’m the problem. I guess the problem of the abstract heads is entangled with my desire to be an artist.
TW: Why do you want to be an artist?
jdh: To rescind responsibility. You need to know who you are to be an artist and knowing who you are requires the availability of a clear mirror. The work of the artist is to find out who you are.
TW: Are you saying that making art is a process of self-discovery?
jdh: That sounds wanky, but yeah.
TW: Why should people be interested in someone else’s self-discovery?
jdh: Good art should not only function as a mirror for the artist to hold up to him or herself, but can be used by others as well.
TW: What do you hope that the viewer takes away from your work?
jdh: I hope they feel something. But if at the end of the day my work doesn’t speak to some people, I don’t care.
TW: It seems that your work has an ambivalent relationship with modernism, would it be fair to call it a love/hate relationship?
jdh: They just got it wrong. It became nothing but an intellectual exercise. I’d like to put the spiritual back into modern art. God is dead doesn’t cut it. I don’t believe in god, but the god I believe in isn’t dead. I’d like to look at what would have happened if modernism had gone in a different direction. I totally dismiss its supposed forward motion.
TW: Does sincerity matter to you?
jdh: My wife would say no. And it’s not a word I would use either, though I do like to think that I’m trying to tell the truth.
TW: Although your relationship with modernism is strained, it would seem that you would be equally dismissive of the postmodern fascination with low-brow or pop culture?
jdh: Yes. I don’t watch the news, TV, or otherwise participate in what you would call mass culture. When I go back to the U.K. it is even harder to avoid and it’s trash. I don’t like laugh-out-loud paintings, they don’t last.
TW: Would it be fair to say that you are brutally bourgeois?
jdh: I’m bourgeois without the money. I think we should all be middle class.
TW: How do you feel about using artists assistants? Would you ever do that?
jdh: I already do have an artist’s assistant, my mom. She sewed the banner outside the gallery. Would I get assistants to draw forms on canvas? Sure, but I wouldn’t relinquish control. I’m not sure if that’s a contradiction, but I don’t care. I don’t mind contradictions in my life or my work. But I do think that authorship matters. My main problem with artists assistants is that they don’t get the recognition that they deserve. That, and I guess I’m still very much a product of the Protestant work ethic.
TW: Let’s talk more about the abstract heads. You said earlier that you’ve been making them for about 6 years, how have they evolved since you first started?
jdh: Recently, they have become more physical, more architectural. They are less concerned with personality and emotion than my earlier heads. I’m also using fewer forms and colors and less contrast. Still, I need to feel like drawing somebody, they’re less successful when I don’t know the person as well. I’m not particularly interested in color. Lately, the abstract heads have been driven largely by thinking about how much I can take away.
TW: Would you say that composition is gaining importance at the expense of a certain fidelity to representation in earlier abstract heads?
jdh: I don’t normally think of these questions, but if you look at the early ones, you can find features, whereas now you might not be able to put them right side up. Now, if you take your time, you will see that all 3 canvases within the triptychs are more integrated, rather than each standing alone, there’s more coherence between the canvases now. The game for the viewer is what the whole thing would look like together. In this way, the viewer is asked to participate in a process of reconstruction, not deconstruction.
TW: And what about the plaster heads, would you say that they make similar demands of the viewer?
jdh: Perhaps to an even greater extent. I like to think of the plaster heads in terms of a cityscape, a skyline to be played with by the viewer. They can be moved everyday, for example, allowing light to play on them in the same way that light changes in an urban landscape over the course of hours or days.
TW: Why is it that architecture seems so prominent in your work?
jdh: Perhaps it’s growing up with Lincoln Cathedral, one of the best in the world. Architecture can change how you feel. Even though it is in some ways quite utilitarian, architecture can make you feel beyond your most basic needs and that’s integral to what it means to be human.
TW: What’s your favorite building in Barcelona?
jdh: That’s easy, the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion. It’s brilliant. Even though the art scene may play it safe, Barcelona is a city that has a tradition of taking a fair bit of architectural risk.
TW: What do you think of the new design museum?
jdh: I think it’s fantastic. It uses forms that I tend to use a lot in my work. I like that evolutionary notion of two totally unrelated animals in different places evolving similar features based on similar evolutionary pressures. I like these kinds of serendipities with my work. I like how it doesn’t fit into the skyline, how it seems to be sticking its elbow out into Torre Agbar. There’s nothing natural about it.