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When I see the way ahead I have already been there. To work on
variations would seem like a betrayal of the original. Most of the
time I am in a state of utter confusion as to what I want to do
next, in spite of the fact that the same aesthetic concerns will
be there, reviewed and redefined all the time, or recreated into
new relationships. Many one image artists (according to your definition)
have reduced the formal inventive process deliberately holding certain
values above all else. In the post-abstract expressionists, colour
becomes the direct spokesman for feeling. Decisions about shape
are presuggested by given limits and the method of working. Those
pop artists are most admired who recreate the urban imagery without
change, the meaning of the art lies in the act of transposing.
Qualitative thinking
The terms of thinking I use in my work are never terribly defined.
Feeling, colour, surface, space, volume, contour, are terms I tend
to use but their boundaries remain blurred and their values are
relative.
I like to think of them in qualitative terms. At the back of my
mind the idea that these terms are only adopted for convenience
never leaves me, this allows me greater freedom of movement in dealing
with them.
If making art is involved with making decisions about shapes and
interpreting relationships of these decisions, then to my mind they
must open out in the end into a meaningful order.
Thoughts about meaning of shape and colour, in the most general
sense, thoughts about formal relationships, etc., are ideas that
form the basis of one's aesthetic attitude, but which cannot help
being expressed in the manufactured object in particular terms.
They reflect only indirectly the general concepts through 'particularness'
(Mondrian was very conscious of the problem). Perhaps the very nature
of being means 'particularness.' Similarly (for me) the general
characteristics that apply to .imagery, the relations between form
and emotions, must in the object find a particular expression. So
one moves from the general to the particular and back to the general,
in both form and content.
Elements of the particular
The preconceived idea for a work of mine already contains elements
of the particular, so the process of actualizing is straightforward,
decisions about proportion and position that occur during the making
are secondary. I don't have to be involved at a fundamental level
with deciding whether something should be half an inch more this
way or that way. Sometimes however the idea may undergo a change
in the making but it generally turns out to be a considerable one,
changing the meaning of the sculpture.
Q: Are you concerned with material as a thing in itself? What
influence has material on your shapes?
KING: I would say matter rather than material. By that I mean I
am much more concerned with the general properties of materials
than with individual differences. I tend to impose the properties
of materials on my shape, changing them at will, rather than uncovering
them in their particular form. In the same sculpture the materials
will change from having the appearance of fluid softness to brittleness,
sometimes owing to the fact that the shape imposes character on
the material, sometimes conversely a formal problem may be inspired
by some physical property of a material, for instance, when a crinkly
thin form has been inspired by the properties of materials like
paper, but would in the end be made in a rigid material like resin.
Other instances would be in splitting, unfolding, etc.
The limits of matter
I do not wish to draw benefit from the heroic struggle of man versus
material (even though it is a bloody battle) in which sculpture
has so long been trapped. Hence the freedom of approach to materials,
but I do want to be aware of the limits that matter is imposing
on me. To use a collage technique or even weld an impossible joint
would seem like cheating.
Much of the power of Brancusi comes from the simple constructional
principles he uses, objects lying on top of each other in a believable
balance. The struggle of matter towards expansion, movement and
change is set against an awareness of the static controlling forces
of inert matter. Hence the often recurring use of the cone as a
very large, very much earth-bound shape that will provide maximum
challenge in an effort towards expansion.
Q: Your pieces are basically symmetrical, but there seem to
be deliberate discrepancies which appear to be carefully balanced.
In other words, you seem to be concerned with balance. Is this so,
and why?
KING: I use symmetry because I do not hold particular value in
asymmetry, like some artists have held. To adopt symmetry seems
a natural part of the effort to arrive at the most direct expression
of an idea. It is after all one of the simplest forms of order.
I do not try to achieve a direct and ordered structure I value order,
but to me order leads to structure and structure to character or
expression (a need for expression is a first cause and not reason
why I am an artist).
The conflicting forces in a work are created by a multitude of
factors. To name one, the effort of the parts to retain their autonomy
creates a balancing problem made all the more difficult because
sculpture with a main front has optical forces operating as in painting.
The same movement to the right or left will have different forces,
all resulting in the discrepancies you mention. There is then a
balancing problem of controlling local forces and interpreting them.
Also an effort to assist these conflicting forces in order that
the balance in the end will be al) the more evident.
Surface not texture
Q: Although there are many examples, take Giacometti as one
extreme of the range and Brancusi as the other. Both have an extraordinary
concern for surface. What is your concern in this direction?
KING: I would say surface as the outside of volume and not texture.
Shape thought of in terms of volume and surface covers more ground
and is more flexible than let us say thinking of it in terms of
matter, quantity and quality, producing mass and volume.
In the first proposition surface becomes an aspect of volume or
the outside of volume and takes on an identity of its own, outside
the quality of volume, working with or against it, making a thin
volume seem heavy or a large volume seem light.
I make my surface smooth because smoothness seems to express much
better the variable quality of surface, texture would get in the
way, being loaded with information about the history of the material
and revealing all sorts of facts about how long it took to make
the work, with what tool, etc.
Qualities of surfaces react with qualities of volume, outline,
weight, space and especially colour (colour that is put onto shape
as opposed to natural colour often has the appearance of a skin,
this effect is particularly pronounced on textured surfaces, the
smoother the surface the greater the integration between colour
as skin and surface. (I shall expand on this more fully in another
question on colour.)
The permanency of work
Q: Are you concerned with the permanency of your work? If so,
to what extent? What makes you feel different from Caro, for example
(who seems unconcerned with the permanence of his paint and colour)
and why?
KING: This is a question of time and money. If I could have my work
cast in a light stainless steel or aluminium I would do it and paint
it afterwards. If I worried too much about permanency, I would take
even longer than I do over each piece. I do my best in the present
circumstances. An outdoor static life would preserve my sculptures
indefinitely.
Q: Do you make editions of sculpture? If not, why not?
KING: I sometimes make editions up to a maximum of three depending
on the ease of reproduction of the pieces. This is largely a matter
of time. A large complex work would demand a lot of my time to be
reproduced, even if I give the work to be done by someone else,
and I would rather get on with new work.
Q: What process did you use in your latest pieces?
KING: In my last piece I have used polystyrene. A very light expanded
foam plastic, that can be carved like butter and covered with a
hard layer of resin and fibreglass after shaping. I also used wood
then coloured the lot. The time before that I cast sheets of fibreglass
and resin on the ground, on top of linoleum and then when they were
not quite set (after gelling) I shaped them around particular forms
and let them go hard. This method has its limitations, however,
and could only work with very simple or large curves. Before that
I made a shape in plaster, covered it in resin and fibreglass, smoothed
the surfaces and broke the inside plaster.
Various influences
Q: Do you think many of the images used by you and your Whitechapel
colleagues, in part or in whole, have been influenced, in one manner
or another, by packaging, industrial or advertising design?
KING: Not consciously. I get as much of a kick going to Kew Gardens
as I do going to London Airport. I am in sympathy with the new shapes
of our urban environment and therefore must integrate them into
my work somehow. (But then a visit to the National Gallery is even
better for me.)
Use of colour
Q: What is your approach to the colour of your sculpture? (There
are obviously two aspects (1) Your technical approach to colour,
for example, do you paint on top of the finished work, bond it into
the resin, do both, etc. (2) What is your philosophical approach
to colour, for example in what way do you think colour extends the
meaning of your work or do you use it purely decoratively? Or to
deny form, or render it unstable, or ambiguous? If so, in what manner?
Do you have difficulties in using certain colours within your material,
why and so on?)
KING: I always paint on top of the finished work. The reason for
this is that it is a much more flexible method of arriving at the
right colour (I may change a colour 10 times or more in a single
work). The range is wider and the colours are brighter. But the
disadvantages are that the paint surface is vulnerable, and the
paint can look like a skin rather than an integrated surface.
Sculptors in the past were little interested in using colour as
they tended to emphasize the quality of the material. Surface texture
portrayed the character of the material and the working tools of
the artist rather like brushmark in a painting. To paint on top
seemed to be giving a concealing skin to all this.
Removing texture and history
The answer to using colour for me, then, was to remove surface
texture, work within a more neutral and smoother surface. Working
in materials that had no history and were intractable like plastics
helped. There was no temptation getting in the way. Smoother surfaces
tend to fuse the colour into them rather than the colour staying
on as skin. What interest existed in textural terms has been reinterpreted
in only colour and space. For instance the mark of the hand giving
an account of the artist's struggle with the matter, becomes a concern
for shape evolving out of the working limits. Gravity, the ground,
one's own physical make-up, such as one's reach, eyelevel, etc.,
are used as gauges. Unconscious decisions about size, distance from
the ground and many others are related to physical and felt experiences.
These decisions are still really about matter within the physical
world of man. Colour and shape instead of material quality take
over the task of deciding what weight a part may have. Colour then
comes in to extend this dialogue not to reduce it. Its shininess
or mattness will have different meaning according to different shapes.
Colour sometimes can even stand for shape. Sometimes it may only
emphasize or reduce it. It can give a volume greater or lesser mass,
clarify shapes or confuse them. Colour comes in towards the end
of making a work, but I feel it is subconsciously carried in one's
mind throughout the working process, as stored up experience, and
is a definite affecting force-(rather like it seems possible to
model in clay and yet be aware of the looks of the work in bronze,
and make decisions accordingly).
Colour also plays an important role in extending the symbolic meaning
of the shapes and clarifying imagery. I find mauves difficult because
they fade, and I have found difficulty in getting a matt paint that
will not shine on rubbing.
Formalizing the idea
Q: Do you deliberately seek some kind of geobiomorphic form
or imagery, some kind of a segmental view of nature or perhaps something
similar. If so, what kind and why?
KING: I would say formal themes run through my mind for long periods
at a time. In their general characteristics they relate to formal
problems, but in the working out of an individual piece, associations
to natural forms, phenomenal events or contemporary imagery do crop
up, they remain of secondary importance and their main value lies
in the fact that they help to formalize an idea which seems to exist
in the mind mostly in term of feeling and shapes based around a
formal event For instance, when I made Genghis Khan I did
not think of mountains and clouds, but the idea was based around
a bursting event using flowing forms, bounded in by side walls and
the ground.
Associations tend to be more about general human symbolic gestures
or phenomenal events than about particular objects. As far as a
segmental view of nature is concerned. The fact that the total unity
is so evident in my work would perhaps make the parts seem like
segments of the whole. I am concerned however with giving the parts
an individual character. The changes and variations of these parts
are made through simple directions like distance from ground, or
away from the centre, or directions to the right or the left from
a frontal position, positions of parts in the zones of verticality,
horizontality or obliqueness. A parallel in nature would be the
refraction of an object between air and water. Shape changes as
a new zone is entered.
Q: Some writers have connected your work with surrealism. (There
are obviously many different aspects: a lot depends on what they
mean by surrealism). Do you have any particular view? If so, what?
KING: I would say that one could count on the fingers of one hand
the artists of the 20th century that could be said not to have some
sort of connection with surrealism, in its broadest sense. I don't
think I am amongst those few.
The known size of objects
Q: What does scale mean to you? Do you deliberately distort
the size of familiar forms? Is the size of your image critical in
anyway? How do you know?
KING: Associations with objects of known size from the outside
world helps. For example the rope at the top of Tra-la-la and my
own physical size is the standard gauge adopted and I may move up
or down from these according to the pull of associations. But it
is not just a matter of eye level. My own skin area or shape complexity,
or volume, will also be a guide to determine size. Proportions may
be gauged this way too. It is a matter of accommodating all these
factors together.
Q: Why the preoccupation with a cone shape?
KING: First of all I started making elements stand up by their
mutual pressure at the top, thus forming a triangle. This seemed
a way of getting out of the standing piling up idea, without losing
anything. In an attempt to make mass less a question of weight in
the material, I started using the split cone, and the elements became
sheets in the shape of semi-cones. More recently I have come to
use the cone more because it is such an extremely stable shape,
that has maximum mass for its volume and can allow maximum manoeuvrability
in an effort to make mass controllable in terms of shape, volume,
surface, colour, contour, space.
Ways and means
Q: You seem to be uninterested in using engineering processes
in your work. True?
KING: Yes.
Q: If you had unlimited money would your working processes change
much? Are you impeded at all by not having the ideal amount of money
to work with? How do you think money affects a sculptor's work?
(For example, could you do a lot more work not from the point of
view of producing more objects for sale, but of realizing your ideas
with greater intensity, getting further along and deeper.)
KING: No-money would mean more time to work. Possibly casting work
in harder materials but I would still work in polyester resin as
I find it a very flexible medium.
An absence of myth
Q: There appears to be rather vague mythological overtones to
your work. True? Why, and what is your attitude towards the whole
question of mythology?
KING: None.
Q: Comment: The majority of your images appear to be basically
frontal (at least, in comparison to Caro). Have you anything specific
to say about this, for example, the question of emblemism, etc.
KING: I do not want my sculpture to have a main viewing point or
front, but to be a front. Because once a sculpture is given
a front or main viewing point, there is a danger that the rest may
become a matter of design and elaboration only. Where sides and
back follow cleverly the general impetus given by the front.
I want to avoid having to make my secondary decisions other than
the initial ones that contain the meaning of the sculpture. These
initial and fundamental decisions however take place in three dimensional
pace. Frontal sculpture perhaps, but not flat sculpture. Two dimensional
elements exist but they play against three dimensional ones and
articulate the objects according to its needs. Outside contour can
work with or against inside shape, making it more or less tangible.
The use of simple horizontal vertical co-ordinates, tend to make
points along the sculpture more measurable to the viewer. The manner
in which the sculpture occupies the ground may be manifestly clear
also. The ground contour will be regular or perhaps areas of common
ground to the viewer may be visible inside the sculpture. But these
tangible factors may disappear or be reduced in relation to other
factors. For instance, the all round contour of Genghis Khan
has more formal entity than the ground contour and it also echoes
it and dominates it, thereby helping to make the sculpture float
off the ground.
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