The following conversation with Kevin Hunt took place as part of his participation in the Critical Perspectives at Teesside University Fine Art. He is an artist and curator based in Liverpool and was a director of The Royal Standard, Liverpool between 2007 and 2011, currently co-curates MODEL, a flexible, experimental and research based platform for artist- led activity, development and sales in Liverpool and recently curated good things come… a group exhibition featuring sculpture by seventeen artists tackling scale and time at The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth. You can read the interview in its entirety here.
Critical Perspectives Teesside: You mentioned a bit about your role as both an artist and a curator, as well as about your approach to artist run initiatives—could you talk a bit about how you approach this and a bit of background?
Kevin Hunt: I guess I fell into the curatorial side of things, becoming part of and subsequently running The Royal Standard for three and a half years, and relocating it meant me (and a group of 5 other young artists) were suddenly in charge of a brand new gallery complex, and the programming was up to us, I relished in that task. I used to see making art and organising exhibitions separately but eventually found this to be quite unhealthy. I think the two straddle my interests as an artist and I wouldn’t really know what to do without the other, I need both now. Aside from curating the more recent artist-led projects and initiatives that I’ve been involved in, they have mostly centred around providing much needed advocacy and agency for artists practicing in Liverpool and strengthening professional development opportunities, but still my curatorial interests play out through everything I do, even making sculpture.
CPT: What are the strengths to this sort of approach? Or pitfalls?
KH: I guess its easier to talk about the pitfalls, spreading yourself too thin, never having much time, easily running yourself into the ground, opening up room for un-useful criticism (‘oh he curated himself into his own show’) and often getting yourself involved in things that are (at times unknowingly) distracting to your main agenda. I think it’s a very careful balance you have to straddle and more recently especially I’ve learnt to say no quite a lot. Turning down opportunities I think is vital to really understanding what it is you want to do.
CPT: As you said you have been instrumental with the gallery Royal Standard, what do you see your role in relationship to this and also what might it mean with a project like that and especially as it moves to a new site and developed?
KH: The Royal Standard is the place I’ve had my studio just about the entire time I’ve lived in Liverpool as an artist (since graduating in North Wales in 2005). It was set up in an old pub by four recent graduates looking to fill a gap in the Liverpool scene dominated by institutional activity and very young DIY projects in 2006. I was the first artist to take a studio there. In 2007 I became a director of the organisation and over the next 3 years it changed my life even more. It was my masters programme that I didn’t even know I was on, it was my peer group of artists that constantly grew and changed and that I was able to decide upon, it was the space for me to experiment as an artist with the critical support of others around me but with a professional and increasing reputation of support from outside too. Since I stepped down as a director in 2011 I’ve kept a studio there and watch the place grow and grow, taking on totally independent project spaces (like CACTUS) along the way. For the last year I’ve been part of a ‘relocation steering committee’ made up of current and former directors to enable the next phase of the organisations transition. It’s tricky, I have no real desire to programme exhibitions or manage studios anymore, but still being part of the organisation you can never really step back fully and the last year has been tricky financially, legally and logistically and needed several of us to come back and assist with that. We finally got keys this week and today I’m moving my stuff into my freshly painted and heated studio so all the blood sweat and tears (there has been some) now seem worth it!
CPT: Yes, this fits in a lot with what we have been trying to foster with the Practicum projects that are now part of the course at Teesside. It is this sort of learning by doing and exploratory learning that comes to the forefront when you take on the challenge of running a gallery or developing artist run initiatives as you said. It’s hard to teach in a traditional environment, so something more is needed and this is exactly what we are talking about. A lot of your work also seems to approach the relationship between sculpture and painting, as you said, or sculpture behaving like painting. This idea of one approach or discipline behaving as another is intriguing. What appeals about this tactic?
KH: Hmmm, It’s totally difficult to try and sum this up fully, I guess the making of works like this is part of the process of learning why I’m interested in it (does that sound like a cop out!?) but I suppose there is a realisation that every ‘thing’ in the world makes us think of something, something often outside of what the thing itself is, so for instance if we look at a plastic necklace, we don’t just see it for what it is now in front of us, we relate to that object on so many levels, our past connections to similar objects, our projections of what that kind of object might mean etc. this becomes more complex when something like a necklace, or a plastic puzzle or something like that is deconstructed, so smaller parts of a greater thing are only there to talk to us. We don’t recognise these parts as their bigger whole anymore and something else comes into play, our brain conjures images in our head as to what these things might be and I guess I’m really interested in that, especially playing with it with myself and the works work best for me when I look at them and struggle to have a clear understanding of what image/object I’m looking at anymore. I also feel a bit like this when I look at abstract paintings!
CPT: One of the ideas we have been trying to untangle through this Critical Perspectives series is an idea or assumptions about what contemporary art is or means. There’s a quote from theorist Simon Critchley, and it has to do with the idea of contemporary referring to something very specific when it has instead become a catchall for many practices. He observes, ‘The problem with contemporary art is that we all think we know what it means and we don’t.’ You spoke a bit about time in relation to your work, or even a slowness, or in terms of contemporary, but how do you see this?
KH: I think currently, like right now (and its important I emphasise the right now part!) we digest the world at such a speed and we don’t even realise it that we don’t really understand things anymore like we used to. This is at once liberating and terrifying I think. Instagram is a strange beast, I think it offers an instant platform for anybody to tell you anything and seemingly everything about themselves. But what in fact is happening is mediated totally by all kinds of processes and we actually curate our lives on there. In terms of the impact on art, Instagram is FULL of art, and full of thousands of images of the same art again and again. I think this becomes some kind of secret validation that something is great by the amount of images strangers post of it or how many ‘likes’ or views it gets and the who is who of who is doing those things. It seems to validate the work on a level of time, if an image is posted and isn’t likable much, pretty soon it may be taken down (I know people who’ve done this!). I think I’m going off on a tangent here but maybe that’s useful in terms of the question because the tangents are far more accessible these days because of the internet and procrastination is not only more available at our finger tips, it’s endorsed. I don’t think we really know or understand how things in the world are made anymore because we often never encounter them in the flesh, but we feel we know or understand how things in the world are made because we can look at them at 3am in the morning under the duvet on our phones… I find that idea quite unnerving and liberating all at once, I’m confused by it.
It’s funny, I often find myself not having enough time to post on Instagram. Is that some kind of post-internet oxymoron? Probably not…
CPT: Yeah exactly, but in that sense, what is contemporary when it comes to art? Do we need to understand this or is it more of a portmanteau for convenience sake? I was even reading an article that was referring now to post-contemporary art?
KH: In terms of Instagram what is contemporary is only what is posted today (like I said above ‘right now’). What somebody was talking about last week is gone, it’s passed, it’s history and in terms of art making its very odd to suddenly be thinking of ‘art history’ as something that was made last week. There isn’t the time anymore for gestation and to allow art to make more sense in the world as the world runs by around it. Imagine now making a painting and not really wanting to show it for 10 years or so until you really knew how you felt about it, nobody would allow it.
CPT: Interesting. Not sure if you want to talk about this, but we spoke briefly about a recent Hito Steyerl interview where she was discussing an idea of contemporary being about a flattening out of the moment and stuck in a perpetual present, but that she used the example of how people are always on their phones, disengaged or somewhere else, and how this idea is a myth—looking at trying to sync technologies or new apps or even a phone with a different computer and how it is not in sync ever or we disengage from the moment to look at a feed from an hour ago. So that if anything, the contemporary is more of a fracturing of the moment?
KH: Maybe I’ve answered this above? I’m reading (or trying to read) the e-flux journal at the moment called The Internet Does Not Exist that Hito writes in, it’s a good if bamboozling read, maybe you should suggest this to the students too?
CPT: So what are you excited about at the moment? In the world? In art?
KH: Haha abstract paintings and painters I find at 3am under the duvet on Instagram!
An unsettling exhibition I saw last week in Cardiff in an amazing unused part of a still functioning casino in the city centre by a Czech artist called Roman Stetina has also been on my mind a lot. Also recently discovering yoga! (but I’m not sure how much that has to do with my practice)
CPT: Do you have any advice you would give art students in general or for artists just starting out?
KH: Think big, believe in yourself, take advice (even if it is difficult to hear) from those you respect and travel! You have to see the world to know how to respond to it…
CPT: I’ve also been talking with a lot of artists about the idea of art school or art education in general—I see it as at a bit of a crossroads, but in the positive sense. As someone who has come through art education, I wonder what are your thoughts or what exactly art school is for or what do you see as the opportunity that this presents in the current situation?
KH: I think it’s kinda means to an end really, especially when you are so young (thinking of most undergrad students being between 18-22 etc) IF you know you are creatively inclined what else would you do? I think going to art school is really important, it changed my life in so many ways but of course these days it’s a gigantic financial implication that will also have lasting effects on your life in the future (more so than it did for me…) I think with post graduate education and wider life long learning there is more scope to think outside the typical educational frameworks to further your learning, especially now with so many alternative programmes. This is something I am currently looking at developing in Liverpool, watch this space!
CPT: If we were to think about what is essential or necessary about art school (or art for that matter), what would that be?
KH: I think its defiantly not the qualification as such. Yeah I got a first class honours when I graduated but really not one thing has happened to me in my career because of this grade as far as I’m aware, it was just a nice thing (especially for my family). I think the longer period to understand the world and how you feel about it whilst being immersed in three years of critical dialogue is amazing though, that’s the point of it!
CPT: Where do we go from here?
KH: Umm… I’m going to Marrakech on Friday, I’ll probably post some images on Instagram. :/
CPT: Thanks again for being a part of Critical Perspectives. It was lovely to meet you and talk a bit about all this and I heard positive things about your tutorials and the conversations that came out of them.
The Critical Perspectives series presents artists and thinkers from across disciplines, offering artist talks, mentoring, lectures, workshops, and tutorials at Teesside University. Simon Critchley observed, ‘The problem with contemporary art is that we all think we know what it means and we don’t,’ and that has been our jumping off point. With an international focus and interdisciplinary approach, Teesside University Fine Art’s Critical Perspectives challenges us to rethink our location within an ever-evolving community of artists in the twenty-first century.
