- Venue
- Edited by Joshua Sofaer and designed by Phil Baines
- Location
- London
My immediate response to Cream Pages, a new publication featuring the dialogues of Tania Koswycz and Richard Layzell, was that of familiarity. Conversations of the two artists are recorded, as far back as 2002, in no particular order. Disagreements, colourful debates and idle chit-chat humorously expose the banality and obsessiveness of the artists thought processes. Forget notions of the mystical process of divine inspiration. Here we have two artists discussing the right type of suit to wear to their private view.
Except Koswycz doesn’t exist. Responding to a commission from the firstsite gallery in Colchester to create an installation that would ‘reveal artists’ practices’, artist Richard Layzell invented a group of four artists and made their work for them. In this way Layzell deconstructed the creative process through the creative process, a kind of making while being detached. Back in his studio after the exhibition had closed, Layzell found himself missing the method and ease of producing the work of one of those artists in particular, Tania Koswycz.
This process of assuming different personas has been central to Layzell’s work in the past. In 1989 he adopted the persona of a self-promoting businessman for several weeks and in The Radiant Curve he became ‘Ivan Curtin’ in order to concentrate on the exactitude of performed behaviour. This culminated in a sequence of separations between Layzell as artist, performer, director and worker.
The adoption of persona is obviously rife within visual art circles. I avoid private views for just this reason. There’s a lot of people who look like artists, talk like artists and sure as hell act like artists. Yet there is often a feeling of fabrication, of skirting around issues and context. ‘I may be talking absolute jibberish but who cares, I have a damn fine pair of winkle pickers’ is the general feel.
Layzell’s projects may be a vessel for channelling his creativity but it is the wider implications that are more interesting. The press release claims Cream Pages is often esoteric. This is true but for what reasons? Is it because Layzell is exposing elements of visual practice that we do not understand or are instead slightly embarrassed about? Cream Pages is a contrived dramatisation of a contrived dramatisation – the working life of an artist. I began to wonder if I adopt different characters to suite the context I find myself. When I write an article is it a case of, now what would Sally O’ Reilly do next?
This is not new understanding. Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, in interviews with Jacques Ranciere, approach the terrain of art from the position of writers and thinkers. In order to operate within the supposed right context they engage with it in a certain way. They speak at an art fair or address the cultural ascendancy of the artist persona by means of a novel. As Bettina Funcke has suggested, a writer becomes an ‘artist’ (a ‘symbol manager,’ as Kelsey puts it) because that role offers an open space of practice, not simply an opportunity for theoretical modeling.
I find this tension between sincerity and fraudulence rewarding as it makes me feel slightly exposed. Layzell’s informative and knowing practice disects a key facet in the system of visual arts. Not necessarily a flaw yet problematical in its inevitable self-limitation, this construction of the individual needs to be further examined. I look forward to further dialogues between Layzell and Koswycz.