SSB: Black and/or White was your masters submission at the Elam School of Fine Arts in 1982. What kinds of artwork were you making prior to this?
MLB: I began to be drawn away from the pictorial by throwing myself into installation at art school. I used to set up big low lying installations on pallet like floors with plants emerging out of them or sand gardens, and then give the audience a hint of what I was up to through the titles. I remember one title distinctly “Lucian did not plant the accidental rose”. I engraved this on a small white marble plaque and put it in the gully outside Elam and told people where to find it. It looked quite funereal and I think people thought I had buried a pet. I have always liked these misinterpretations.
The installation work I did was about making people wade their way through at knee level, for instance the foyer outside the library at Elam – the work spread out from the front door of the building to the front door of the library to the door to the corridor to the teachers tea room. It wasn’t intimidating so much as irritating. I didn’t want to make single perpendicular sculptures, I was interested in making works more supine, the difference between male and female art.
SBB: What led you to using text?
MLB: I started to think about how the title of the work might just be enough to get people thinking about the concept, picturing the work and that perhaps the actual work wasn’t necessary, just the proposition. I am still interested in this notion, in fact my most recent exhibition Picturing is a good example of this. The plaques could well be labels.
Then of course I got interested in performance because of its temporal nature and in those days any work that actually existed as an object was seen to be too commercial and that didn’t interest us in the sculpture department at Elam. After all we were being taught by Phil Dadson. These performances whose residues became installations, (as you can see in those photos from 100m2), were still temporal and the content was political, or gender political.
However in spite of this I know that I still liked the ‘thinginess of things’ and these handset letterpress texts are permanent works on paper which satisfies this urge to make ‘things’ and have a document of what was going on at the time. The late Philippe Hamilton described these texts in a review in Craccum as a kind of ‘navel gazing’ however, and I am sure many people agreed.
SBB: How does it feel to revisit this work, over 30 years later?
MLB: When I look back at the work I feel exactly the same way I did then, and given the kinds of responses I got back then, I must have had repressed memory syndrome which has now ‘recovered’. This mainly because the the situation hasn’t really changed for me personally but I do think that the situation has changed for some women artists, especially women who do not make overtly political work. Moving image as a medium has certainly helped women artists exist on a more level playing field. Photography has shifted from a predominantly male domain too.
smallborebooks.com 