Making art out of experience – London Fieldworks

Associated media

Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson talk to Barnaby Norman

London Fieldworks is a collaborative partnership formed in 2000 by the artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson.  Based near London Fields in East London, they work at the intersection of art, science and technology, producing installations and performance-based works. In 2012 they worked on a project entitled Null Object in which they asked Gustav Metzger (who made his name in the 1960s for his auto-destructive artworks) to think about ‘nothing’ while they recorded his brain output with an EEG scanner. The data were subsequently ‘translated’ into a three-dimensional shape which was then carved out of a piece of Portland Roach, leaving a void in the stone, which is Null Object.

Barnaby Norman caught up with them in their studio to talk about this work and how their practice relates to science and technology.

Barnaby Norman: How did London Fieldworks come about?

Jo Joelson:I was working as a light artist – I did foundation art then trained as a lighting designer. I met Bruce in the mid-90s while we were both working for a performance outfit, and we decided to make some collaborative work. It started from there.

Bruce Gilchrist: I started off as a scientific research person, working for Unilever. It was big, dirty, industrial science, which has coloured a lot of my attitudes.

BN: There seems to be a scientific aspect to many of your projects...

BG:I was doing the science thing and was being groomed, for want of a better word, to go into animal research – I didn’t have the stomach for that, quit and eventually ended up in art school. I should have been experimenting on animals and I ended up with a fine art practice. In the late 1980s I was in Texas, hanging around the clinical psychology lab in Austin where they were doing communication experiments between the waking and the sleeping. I was fascinated by that whole philosophical conundrum  – can you go between these two states of consciousness? The piece that came out of that was Divided by Resistance. It wasn’t about technology per se, I’m not the one in the lab – but I’ve been inspired by that and I’m trying to make something poetic out of it.

JJ: I would say that the human is at the centre of all our projects, but technology is a way of capturing an experience and making an artwork out of that. Polaria was a way of exploring whether it is possible to translate an experience for somebody else in another part of the world. We went to North East Greenland and spent a month on the tundra collecting 24-hour daylight, and the human experience of it, using physiological kit, and we brought that data back. We posed as a scientific party in order to get access, and followed a very rigorous schedule. We borrowed the methodology and instruments from science. When we returned with the data we used it to create a virtual daylight installation, the idea being that the user could inhabit it and call up the light state that we had experienced.

BG: The point when people came out of the installation is where the interest in data stops and the interest in subjectivity begins.

BN: Null Object is the project you worked on with Gustav Metzger. How much London Fieldworks and how much Metzger is there in this project?

BGThere has been a bit of confusion around this. It’s a London Fieldworksproject with the participation of Gustav. We wanted the context that he brought. We’re interested in notions around nihilism, extinction, and nothingness – the void. And we said, ‘Gustav, we don’t want you to do anything’, and he said ‘I’m perfectly happy with that’. So we had these recording sessions with him over a year or so, just struggling with the idea of trying not to think, and Null Object is the residue of that process.It might have been anybody, but Gustav brought thecontext of destruction. He’s part of the avant-garde and he’s very much concerned with the dematerialization of the object. That’s a perfect foil for what we wanted to do – we wanted to take nothing and materialize it.

BN: Is this idea of nihilism and destruction present in any of your other work?

BG With Super Kingdom we became interested in the whole Enlightenment thing, and specifically the dialectics of Enlightenment from the Frankfurt school [of philosophy], and the question coming out of it: if we’re enlightened why are we committing such barbaric acts? And of course Gustav lived through that. It’s human creativity and ingenuity industrializing slaughter. So that’s his experience of technology, and partly out of that comes his interest in the void and in extinction and in nihilism. It’s the culmination of Enlightenment thinking in the 20th century, but it’s barbaric. So with the Super Kingdom structures it’s about using the language of real estate to create homes for displaced animals, but they’re all based on palaces of despots, theoretically informed by what’s coming out of the Frankfurt School.

BN: You seem to want to maintain some critical distance from the mainstream technological context...

JJ: We would only use a technology if we thought we could make something poetic out of it.

BG: Herbert Marcuse from the Frankfurt School talks about how rationality is being transformed ‘from a critical force into one of adjustment and compliance’. For example, a lot of artists now are making work that can only be experienced through smartphones. That worries me because it’s exactly as this guy says – you’re no longer a critical force - you’re absorbed, you’re compliant. Years ago we were invited to become part of this thing called New Tools. There were tech companies trying to get artists on board to tinker with their toys and we thought: they’re getting artists to do their R and D for free!

JJ: The idea is: we’ve got all this technology you can come and work with, come into our sexy gadget shop, choose what you like and off you go, have your lovely experiments – and we were very turned off by that.

BG: There’s this obsession at the moment with projecting imagined technological futures. Everybody’s doing it. We think that in the future it’s going to be very cool for people, for kids, to disengage, to disconnect, and there’s going to be a lot of cache in switching off.

JJ: In fact, we’ve made a project in the Highlands about that, Outlandia. It’s a completely unplugged space. There’s no electricity and no Internet. It’s a quite remotely sited artists’ studio, in a forest. Robert Macfarlane is the patron. He’s a wonderful writer, and certainly he doesn’t need technology to access the environment.

BG: Outlandia correlates with what has come out of Null Object, this whole idea of trying to stop thinking, trying to quiet the mind.

BN: Thank you for talking to Cassone

More information about London Fieldworks projects discussed in this interview can be found on their website at http://www.londonfieldworks.com/. Until 23 January 2014 Null Object will be at the Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge.