press release
The John
Hansard Gallery is proud to present the first showing
of Record Keeping, an international
touring exhibition by the Toronto-based visual artist Sarindar
Dhaliwal. This is her first solo exhibition in the
UK, and surveys the artist’s work over the last fifteen
years.
Sarindar Dhaliwal was born in Punjab and educated
in England. She draws on her complex cultural background to
make sense of her personal here and now. The work reflects this
through Dhaliwal’s use of abstract and material symbols
(such as turbans, coal, ash, spices and stones). The work combines
storytelling, painting and textile installations with print,
media and video, resulting in a vibrant, lush and exotic exhibition
that is both visually compelling and poetically evocative.
Record Keeping was curated and organised
by OVA™ in collaboration with the John
Hansard Gallery and Agnes Etherington Art Centre,
Ontario. An audiovisual DVD piece made about the artist and
her work supports this exhibition and it is intended that a
catalogue will be published to coincide with its tour.
artist interview
SD: Sarindar Dhaliwal
BB: Bernadette Buckley, John Hansard Gallery
BB: Sarindar, thank you very much for agreeing
to do this interview. I think we’ll start out by talking
in general terms about your work. Some of the words that critics
have used most often to describe your work are: ‘beautiful’,
‘luscious’, ‘dazzling’, ‘shimmering’…Do
you yourself think that these qualities are over-riding features
of your work?
SD: I suppose it is an over-riding feature.
But I think that, if we’re going to talk about beauty,
for me a lot of my work has been about translating experiences
that have been traumatic or not beautiful, into beauty. So I
could speak about a previous work, which is called Portrait
of a Dutch Bulb Factory. I worked in a Dutch bulb factory and
it was a very nasty experience, because, you know, the shifts
were long and factory work isn’t very stimulating. And
I realised that there I was packing things that become beautiful
and yet that experience wasn’t very nice at all, so I
suppose that I’ve used the painting, or the drawing to
take a part of my life that hadn’t been fabulous and create
something good out of it. So I think that beauty sometimes is
really about a psychological translation…
BB: Or ‘transformation’ to you
think…?
SD: Or transformation, yes. So I could say
that it was worth having that horrible experience in a factory
because something good came out of it.
BB: Do you think, just incidentally, that
this is the purpose of art inevitably…to take the mundane,
or the everyday, or the ephemeral perhaps and to transform it
into something that exceeds itself?
SD: I don’t know if I can answer that
question. I think, for me, what’s really important when
I look at other people’s work, is I want to see the connection
between the thing that they made, and who they are, or what
they are or what their life is. I personally don’t really
appreciate work that’s completely cerebral.
BB: That’s interesting because one of
the words that Richard Fung uses in his essay about your work,
is this word ‘transcendental’ or he refers to ‘transcendence’
and I wondered if there’s an active allegiance to some
form of transcendence at work there?
SD: No, I don’t think it’s at
the top of my sub-consciousness. I think for me, its always
about some aspect of my life that I’m try to think about
or bring into the future. And again, I can speak about an early
work that also is in this show… and that work is about
growing up in Britain and not having a garden and being jealous
of all the British families who had stayed in the same house
for twenty years and every year, the same perennials came up.
For me, that meant stability and I felt that I was never going
to have a garden because I was an artist and I don’t own
a house. And so, I thought that I would paint my perfect garden
and somehow that would become a reason not to desire a garden
any more. But of course I still want a garden. I painted the
flowers that I would like in my real garden into the picture.
BB: I would say that that experience of longing
comes across in your work – in Peonies 2 and also in The
Shipping Forecast as well. And also at the same time, that it
plays off against the order of the ‘colonial’ I
suppose, the self-confidence of the colonial which is also presented
with in so many ways in your work.
SD: What do you mean by the ‘self-confidence’
of the colonial?
BB: The self-assuredness of , say, the red
telephone box – which is, you know, implacable and resolute
and ordered. Or the self-assuredness of the English garden,
which, as you describe it, has its perennials coming back year
after year after year. And there’s a contrast perhaps,
between that kind of self-assuredness and the feeling that something’s
perhaps lacking in your life – something that you’re
having to make up for?
SD: I think also, the other thing is that
in my travels, I notice all those vestiges of things left behind.
For example, in The Shipping Forecast, the telephone boxes are
green and that’s the colour that they are in Cyprus. And
their post-boxes are yellow, even though the shape is exactly
the same as British telephone boxes and post-boxes. So I think
that, as an artist, I’m always noticing things and perhaps
I do look for the samenesses in places.
BB: Hélène Cixous’ –
I don’t know if you know her work – but she had
a phrase which I find useful in this context – ‘life-writing’.
And she wrote a wonderful essay called ‘Albums and Legends’,
which was very much about her own background. And yet at the
same time, it was about her background in such a way that it
became a much larger, more public object of study. This seems
to me to have something of what your work is doing as well.
There’s an intersection between the private and the public
such that, it’s not self-obsessed and one finds larger
themes at play and wonder at them.
SD: It may be that growing up as an immigrant
in two different countries – it sometimes makes you feel
that you don’t really have any significance…that
your life doesn’t have any significance. I would say that
the Britain that I grew up in, which was Enoch Powell’s
Britain, there definitely was this feeling that you didn’t
belong and that you weren’t going to be allowed to do
a lot of things. So over the last thirty years, the county has
really changed, but when I was here, it was made very, very
clear to me that I would not ever be able to do this –
and it might be working in a bank. It was also teaching English…I
was told I could never teach English. So I think that part of
the work is probably about trying to establish significance.
You know, we all live a life and we’re all going to die,
and how do you make your life – especially if you don’t
have children – how do you render it significant? So it
could be that psychologically that’s what the work is
trying to do. It’s trying to say, you know, ‘I was
here.’
BB: This is very interesting to me again also
in the context of exhibitions shown recently at the Hansard
Gallery. I interviewed Breda Beban and one of things that pre-occupied
us in our conversation then was this fact of flight, of dislocation.
But also, she was willing to talk about this, not in a ‘theoretical’
way, but in a very emotional way – in a very personal
way. And she felt strongly that it was difficult to talk about
the emotions in the world of art – that the emotions are
all the time having to be presented in a ‘respectable’
way. And talking to you, it sounds as if there’s a similar
concern – that we don’t cover up the emotional and
that we admit to its being there.
SD: I think that my work has never come out
of theory. It’s always come out of the life-experience.
And I’m always genuinely shocked when someone writes about
me in a very academic or theoretical way. They’ll say,
for example the egg piece [Punjabi Sheets no. 3 Birbansian 1953,
1991] is about a matrifocal household and its about women going
back to the countries where they’re from and it’s
about how, you know the healing process, the stories, the narratives
…I’m not being very articulate here…
BB: No, please go on…
SD: …and I think, ‘Oh! I thought
I was just telling that story about the egg and I did not realise
I was re-writing black women’s matrifocal histories. And
I know that one of the works you have in the gallery –
Triple Self-portrait – was made for two reasons. One was
that I was auditing an art history course, and the professor
showed a painting from the early 17th century and said that
no-one had painted a triple-portrait since then. I remember
being horrified at this and thinking, ‘How can he say
that? How can you make a blanket statement lie that?’
So I wanted to actually paint a triple portrait, so that at
least I knew that he was wrong. And my work had been called
“decorative” in a disparaging way, and I suppose
that I decided, ‘Well if you think that’s decorative,
I’ll show you what decorative really is’. So it
was super-decorative. And then it was written about and the
writer said that I was deconstructing decoration and I thought
that I was you know, what’s the word…cocking a snook
at the art-world.
BB: Well this is one of the questions that
comes up in relation to your work – this question of in-betweenness…people
describe it as being somehow in-between ‘fine’ art
and ‘craft’ – a distinction which I think
is very flimsy and doesn’t hold up at all – and
yet it’s one that traditional ‘Art History’
does seem to return to. And of course, there’s a relationship
of power between these things as well; ‘craft’ is
not on a par with ‘fine art’ but is on a rung that
is somehow a lot ‘lower’ than it. Sarat Maharaj,
if you know his work, has written about this quite a bit. But
surely we’re not still encountering this kind of duality
today?
SD: Well the reason that I went to art school
was because of that kind of duality. My background is in textiles
and I lived in a house where there were painters who were doing
their BFAs. And I remember that they would bring home paintings
that I thought were, you know, very ugly paintings. But they
insisted that even an ugly painting was much better than a weaving
– that it was more important, it more serious. And I suppose
I decided to go to art school to find out, ‘What is that
difference?’ And I suppose, now with Grayson Perry –
the man who just won the Turner Prize – now finally there’s
a real break-through. But for me it’s been a struggle,
because when I finally did go to art-school I I couldn’t
paint because somehow they decided that I had no talent. So
I ended up majoring in sculpture and the abundance, the lusciousness,
the materiality of the work, was just never was accepted. So
the professors were often saying to me, ‘Instead of doing
these intricate, hand-dyed, hand-spun concoctions, why don’t
you just take a rope and stretch it across the room?’
And I would think ‘I don’t want to do that.’
So I think that I have always been outside of the centre. And
perhaps at the same time, because my work is so personal, it’s
very hard for a lot of people to enter it. And sometimes the
stories behind the work are only available if I’m there
to…
BB: …to elaborate or to tell them?…
SD: …yes. But I think that the work
is always made on two levels. There’s the level that is
made for myself – the knowledge, the history of the idea
and the story of the collections – and there’s the
other level, which is a purely aesthetic one. And so, even if,
for example, in the Turban piece [Punjabi Sheets #1 Turbans],
I realise that a lot of people have no idea why that would be
made, but I would hope that they could appreciate it for form
and colour.
BB: And it matters to you how the viewer reads
the work, does it?
SD: No. I don’t think so. I suppose
that some people would say that ‘This is just a bunch
of turbans and so, what’s the point?’ I think that,
the general public tends to like my paintings and the artworld
tends not to like them. And the artworld likes the installations
while the general public is perhaps, mystified by them, because
they want to find meaning in everything and connections. And
so for example when I installed the curtains before, people
would say, ‘Why is Japan yellow?’ And it’s
accidental. I mean, at the Hansard Gallery, I think Japan is
green.
BB: Yes that’s interesting because you
use a range…I suppose you’d have to use this word
‘media’ although it seems perhaps an oddly old-fashioned
word to use …and yet it seems to me that there is a narrative
thread that runs through all of the work – whether it
be painting or installation. Could you perhaps say something
about your commitment to narrative and in particular to the
story-telling that is intertwined with so many of your work?
SD: Basically, I think that both the installations
and the paintings come from exactly the same place. And one
of the difficulties for me as an artist, has been that the work
looks like it’s made by two different people. But I think
in this show, you’ll see that the connections between
the paintings and the installations are always there. For example,
you might say that the lozenges of colour in the curtains are
mirrored in the painting of the peonies, where there’s
little doors and things. When I was in art school, a number
of people said that they liked my writing much better than they
liked my visual art. And they were suggesting that I stopped
making visual art and that I write. But I never been able to
sustain a narrative for much longer than a paragraph or a few
pages. I’m not a novelist. And I think that I like to
re-write those bits of narrative in a very poetic and evocative
way. So for me it’s also about language. It’s very
much about words. Using words is a bit like using colour. I
tend to, if I’m painting, I want the very perfect purple.
It can’t be the wrong colour. And sometimes when I do
installations and I actually have to buy fabric, then I don’t
have as much control. So ‘narrative’ for me is about
the craft of writing.
BB: Yes but I suppose I was also thinking
about ‘narrative’ in the very broadest sense of
the term. It seems to me that you are ‘narrating’
details to us about your life – details that we can only
perceive in fragments to be pieced together. And the larger
feel of the exhibition is that of collage. There are explicitly
some ‘collage’ works of course, but you could also
say that there are recurring images which appear in the body
of work as a whole, and that these are put together such that
some kind of ‘narrative’ starts to emerge –
albeit one which is fragmented, displaced.
SD: I don’t know if I’m going
to be able to answer your question perhaps the way that you
need me to, but…For example, many people say to me, ‘Well
why don’t you just paint little things? If you took just
took this tiny bit out of this painting, it would just be so
perfect.’ And I can’t do that. I can’t paint
8 x 10 inch watercolours because they don’t have any meaning
as single images. You know, one of the things I enjoy about
making the paintings, is that nothing is really mapped out ahead
of time. It’s like a journey. So I will start with one
image. I may know that two or three images are going to exist
in that piece but the decisions about what is added always comes
step by step by step. So it’s a bit like knitting a sweater,
but not knowing how long the sleeves are going to be.
BB: I think one gets the sense, in looking
at the work, that there is something almost magical about this
process. And to come back to that word ‘transformation’
again, or ‘translation’ – that in the movement
between one image and another, there is a transformation at
work which is a source of wonder to the beholder and to the
maker.
SD: In The Shipping Forecast, I knew that
that piece was going to be about Cyprus and England. And that’s
all I really knew. I knew that there would be two images of
the two islands and perhaps the piece started because ‘two
islands’ sounds like two nice words put together. But
once those two images were there, and then the post-boxes and
the telephone boxes (which were very much to do with the colonial
history of Cyprus), then I realised that I was thinking about
things I remembered about my mother. I have very, very clear
memories of being at her knee and being fascinated by the fabric
of her dresses. You know, I remember them really clearly. And
so I wanted to paint one of those and the only place I could
think of doing it was behind the island of Cyprus. The narrative
that’s in that piece was written during my first trip
to India. So the piece started off being about Cyprus and England,
but it really began to be about this history of, you know, memories
of my mother, memories of growing up in England listening to
the shipping forecast… which I always think of as being
a sort of lullaby – very comforting – because you
know it’s going to happen every few hours and usually
the person speaking it has a beautiful voice. But then the piece
also was about that journey back to India. It was the first
time I had returned, because I never wanted to go back as a
child. And about finally realising during that trip (and we’re
talking about the mid seventies here) that in fact, there were
very few people like me. Because in India everyone had this
kind of channel that you existed in and you almost couldn’t
leave. So it’s very possible to look at someone in India
and to know immediately what social class they are, what religion
they are…a number of things. And I felt that I was in
this channel sort of all by myself. I wasn’t a hippy going
to back to India. And neither was I a well-heeled tourist. Neither
was I a returning-to-my-homeland person. So it was sort of a
shock realising that there were so few people that are like
me. And of course, now it’s quite different because there
are many, many more westernised Indians going back there.
BB: We do seem to be talking a lot about journeys
a lot of the time here – and not just geographical journeys,
but intellectual and emotional journeys that occur in the discovery
of ‘identity’. And one gets the sense in talking
to you also, that there is an incredible amount of labour in
this journey – that identity is something that has to
be constructed and that one has to work hard at it. Or that
it’s hard work trying to think all this through such that
it can begin to make sense. And yet, there is a sense in your
work also, that these are journeys, which if not completed,
have at least got some kind of resolution – that you’ve
arrived at a place where there is joy, there is celebration.
Of course, there’s a darker edge to some of the works,
but certainly the immediate feeling one has in walking into
the gallery is of exuberance - the joy of the work and it seems
as there is almost a redemptive element at play in the work.
Is that fair to say?
SD: When I say that my work has never come
out of theory, I think it’s fair to say that it’s
always been made for me. I am the first viewer. So that’s
why I would never be able to make work that fitted into broad
themes…even though you could say that this work coming
from post-colonialism. And I think that perhaps when we’re
speaking about the narrative in the broader sense, you could
say that it is like fiction, it is like writing auto-biographical
fiction. And whenever you read books you realise that the author
has this private world which is reflective of the real world
and reflective of their own histories, but then it’s also
sort of made up. So I think that for me, it’s just very
creative. It’s my primary activity.
BB: But is that activity…is it redemptive
somehow? Or is that to over-state the case?
SD: Yes I think so – for me it is because
I can’t really imagine not doing it or not having that
outlet. It would be very hard for me to imagine doing a full-time
job. You know, I have lots of part time jobs all the time, but
if somebody said, ‘stop making art, now what do you want
to do?’, I would have a lot of difficulty to find a career.
BB: Yes I suppose, it’s just interesting
to me to try to puzzle out what it is that art is and what it
is that artist’s do exactly. What is it that would make
an artist return again and again to this position of not knowing
what is next – which seems like quite an uncomfortable
thing…
SD: Well I used to think that the fun thing
about being an artist – and this was an artist who wasn’t
like myself – was to be able to wake up in the morning
and to go into the studio and say, ‘Okay, what will I
do today?’ And I couldn’t be that kind of artist,
because of the nature of the way I work. I’ll often get
an idea and I don’t do anything about it for years because
I’m working on other things. I might start collecting
information photographically and then when I do start that work,
because of the labour involved, it takes a long time to finish
a piece. So often there’s this period of about five years
between conception and execution and then exhibition. And that
wasn’t my idea of what was fun. My idea of fun was to
do with the immediate – the immediate deciding to, you
know, paint that glass…And the only time I have been able
to do that was when I did some installations that were made
of papiêr maché. And so today I was able to say,
‘Today I’ll make red patty shapes’. Or ‘Today
I’ll make eight hundred little grey blobs.’ ‘Today
I’ll make orange bricks.’ So I think I’ve
always longed for that, but my work doesn’t allow me to
achieve that.
BB: But the evidence of that making, of your
being able to just get up and make something, is still there
isn’t it? In the Hansard’s last two shows, have
been about something called ‘New British Painting’
– a title which we used somewhat ironically…
SD: Why ironically?
BB: Because so few of the painters were ‘British’
in the first place, and we weren’t entirely sure that
we believed in a strong notion of British painting. But some
of the painters then were saying that one of the things that
they liked about painting was the control they had over their
medium. Without having to organise events, or plan expensive
installations, they could go into their studios and must make
it happen. There was a kind of immediacy about it. And it seems
to me that there are aspects of this in your work too. Even
though you describe in terms of a long, protracted journey.
SD: I think it’s because it’s so pleasurable to
paint. It’s really a pleasure to dip the brush in paint.
I think that maybe the joy comes from the act, so the evidence
of the joy of the act is reflected in the work.
BB: I asked some of these painters –
rather to their exacerbation – what it was that painting
was for? And I’d like to ask you this question of your
work also. What is it that your work is for?
SD: What is it for? Well I think it’s
for me. I think it’s a reason to stay alive or something.
For example, recently I did make a return trip to India and
of course, the first question that anyone asks you, if you’re
in a taxi is, ‘How many children do you have? And if you
say none, then the next question is, ‘Are you married?’
So when I would answer ‘No’ to both those questions,
the response would be ‘Well what’s the point of
your being alive then? What’s the point of your making
money, having a job, doing anything if it’s not to feed
your children. So one could say that for many artists, the work
is the child and you have to keep on creating it in order to
keep feeding this imaginary soul.
BB: And this attitude also seems to me to
be there in your approach to exhibiting also…in that similar
works are ‘born’ again, or recreated again. …
SD: Yes.
BB: They’re not products – they
have a life of their own.
SD: Are you speaking about the installations?
BB: Yes. Could you perhaps say something about
this re-creating of the work again and again?
SD: Well I can address the curtain piece [curtains
for babel, x.y,z, 2003]. Basically it was conceived for a very
specific site. And it was a porch – a glassed-in porch
with lots of tiny panes. And a friend of mine asked me to design
something for that space. So it was very informal. And so I
designed those curtains for that porch. The curtains were made
in India and so I exhibited them on a wall in India, because
I didn’t have the porch – the porch was in Canada.
And when I did exhibit them in the porch – the place it
was meant to be – instead of there being dead or dying
languages, the text was of female hurricanes. And then they
were chronological as well, so I think it started with Olive
in 1952, and there was Doris and Dot and Carol. Hazel was a
very famous hurricane in 1954…
BB: Are they always called after female names?
SD: Not any longer, but the history of naming
hurricanes goes back a long way. The scientific way to decide
where a hurricane is by longitude and latitude, but while that’s
very exact, it means nothing to call a hurricane ‘52 Degrees’.
And there was a novel, which was written in the forties I believe,
which was all about how a hurricane came to be. It started off
being a little tiny wind somewhere. The novel was about a man
who was tracking hurricanes and it showed how this hurricane
effected different things all over the world. Like, a road would
get icy, then there would be a car crash etc. etc. And that
hurricane was called Mariah and then it became a musical called
The Wind of Mariah. So for me it’s interesting to be able
to play around with different elements in my installations.
BB: Well you’re telling stories again
aren’t you? It’s the story of the hurricane. And
it seems to me that each piece – it’s not just your
own stories that you’re telling. Each piece of work has
its own history. Something like curtains of babel has its own
story in which it reincarnates itself in different ways, coming
back again as something different to that which it was when
it was ‘born’ (to come back to that analogy again).
That again seems interesting to me – that within any of
your works – they’re always stressing how they’re
different from themselves. That seems to be something that is
of importance in your work.
SD: Yes, but you know, a lot of people don’t
look very closely. They’ll say’ ‘But that
work is the same as the one you had last year’ and in
fact, it’s not at all. There is a sibling similarity to
the works but sometimes people think it’s just the same
work again and again. Sometimes, this has to do with the way
I collect works on paper also. For example, I think there’s
a stargazer lily in at least two of the works. If I paint something
I particularly enjoy painting, I’ll repaint it in the
next painting. It may be that it might begin the next painting.
BB: But here again, it seems that there’s
echoes of this journey – that there are places you’re
going back to again, and that you’re seeing again with
new eyes – that things are revealing themselves again
in a different way, to be something other than what you thought
they were to begin with. And this revisiting seems to me to
be very interesting in your work.
SD: Yes. What I realised recently is that
in some ways, I’m a photographer, because that’s
how I collect the information. And when I was in Cyprus, I took
so many slides of oranges. They’re not in any of the works
you have, but in the end, it became a motif in another series
of works. And recently I actually did some gicle prints of doors
because I had so many pictures of doors. And I have hundreds
of pictures of windows. And so, when I do go on journeys and
travelling, people say ‘Did you take pictures?’
and I say, ‘Well yes, but I’ve got a hundred and
thirty pictures of oranges and doors.’ So I’ve got
a huge repository of things that I’ve been collecting
and it is about collecting. And so we can make a lot of analogies
in terms of what drives me as an artist and what drives collectors.
BB: It seems to me that your life is an archive
– that you’re mining your life all the time to find
bits of it that can be used and reused. Your life is the ultimate
repository and then that comes out in the photographs or whatever.
SD: Yes, I think that a big influence for
me was when I first came across Frieda Kahlo and it would have
been in the early eighties, and there was a biography by Hayden
Herrera that was published. And I remember being really taken
by this woman Frieda Kahlo. It seemed to me that she was one
of the first artists who actually did use her own life as the
subject for her artworks. And in the history of art this always
seems to be suppressed. You know, when I was at school, you
weren’t supposed to make work about yourself. You were
supposed to make work that looked like some famous artist’s
work and then they liked your work. And I think especially for
women, this is particularly difficult for women students. Women
often want to try this…they might want to make ceramics
and then they’ll want to paint and they might want to
do some sewing. And it’s always frowned upon – like
it’s better if you make ten things that look the same.
BB: And in terms of art schools, and in terms
of the influence of art schools, could you perhaps say something
about the whole drive towards postcolonial studies and how influential
that has been in your life.
SD: I can speak about my two different experiences
of art school. I think there’s about thirty years between
the BFA and the MFA. During my BFA, I really wanted to paint.
I was told that my paintings were ‘wrong’ and that
I was defying two thousand years of western traditions. And
it never occurred to anyone at that art school to say ‘Maybe
her painting is flat, because she’s used to the tradition
of the miniature, where the perspective is flattened’.
But I find that some students now – in the last few years
that I’ve spoken to, who have diverse backgrounds –
have said to me that they feel over-encouraged to make work
about their backgrounds and they don’t like that always.
The other thing is that, ten years ago I was at Banff and the
residency was about people with diverse backgrounds. And there
was a man there who was a ceramist, who wasn’t in our
residency, who was in a ceramic residency. And he said that
he felt so boring, surrounded by all of these people. He said,
‘But I just come from High River and I make pots’.
And I think what I’ve noticed, looking at contemporary
art over the last few years, is that even people who are ‘non-visible’
(is that the right word?) minorities are, in their work, going
back to their roots – be it Polish or Lithuanian or the
American deep south. And so I think that the strategies that
were used by artists of colour in the seventies and early eighties
have now been adopted by a wider group of artists. So it’s
actually become theorised now in a way that it wasn’t.
BB: Does that lead to homogeneity do you think,
in terms of the work that’s being produced?
SD: I think that it could. I know that for
example, when there are major, or large group exhibitions looking
at artists with Indian backgrounds or South Asian backgrounds,
I often have studio visits from curators researching which artists
they will include and invariably, I never am included. And I
think it’s because it’s hard to pigeon-hole my work.
Often the work that they’ll pick will have a much more
overt political take. Or it’ll be about repressed sexuality.
Or it’ll be about some kind of manifesto. And it’s
really hard for my work to operate in that kind of regime. Because
it’s just to quirky and too personal and perhaps too beautiful.
BB: So in a sense, are you saying that it
doesn’t fit within the, I supposed, established stereotypical
response of post-colonial studies courses, even though ostensibly
it seems to be working in that area.
SD: Yes and I know that sometimes I read proposals
by students – and by this I mean PhD students, people
who are studying to be curators – and I find the language
very much the same. It’s as if they’re trying to
put a template over the work and the issues and I don’t
this is very useful. But I have to say that on the other hand,
in both the visual arts and also in terms of literature, there’s
a number of writers and artists who I think are…I don’t
want to use the word ‘envious’. Perhaps the word
would be angry. You know I’ve had people say to me, ‘It’s
very trendy to be a person of colour today.’ And well
I think, you know, not in Moscow, not in those places where
people put petrol bombs in the letter box…
BB: In Northern Ireland?
SD: Because I think it’s really insane
to mind because for hundreds of years, people didn’t get
things because of what and who they were. And now if because
in the last ten years, a few people are being able to play on
a level playing field, why should you get so angry about it?
And there’s a subtext there. And the subtext is that people
of colour who are successful must have got it through this means
where in fact, they don’t have any talent and it’s
all because of political correctness. And I think it’s
really unfortunate that there’s that kind of backlash.
On the other hand, I know that sometimes people do get things
because the mandate of the organisation is to show diversity.
BB: What do you think that the future of postcolonial
studies is in art schools in particular? You talk about this
ten year period in which we’ve had, you know, Homi K Bhabha
and Stuart Hall and Trinh-t-Minh-ha … one can recite the
obvious influences in terms of that theoretical strand for example.
SD: Well I would hope that it means that it
doesn’t really matter whether you’re black or white
or brown or yellow – that you just make work that’s
really good. For yourself. Work will always be made from theory
because unfortunately I think that it’s easier for a lot
of people who teach to respond to work that they can discuss
because they’ve seen it in the artworld. And I know that
when I teach, I really like to encourage the individual. And
I think its really important to elevate the student to the next
level and not try to make them make work that looks like someone
else’s. Because my experience of art school is that the
students who were most appreciated by the professors, were the
ones whose work was like Pop Art. So you know you did work that
looked like Peter Blake’s or you did work that looked
like Donald Judd’s. But one thing that I would like to
add about work being made from a post-colonial perspective is
that sometimes, I’ll come across a very young student
in their early twenties, and they’re making a video about
going back to China or a video about wanting to look like a
Barbie doll when they don’t. And it’s really unfortunate
because I find that often those students aren’t even looking
at the post-colonial practices of the last ten years. It’s
like they forget that somebody made a video about going back
to China…
BB: Or it’s not that they’ve forgotten,
so much as that they didn’t know in the first place.
SD: Well they should know. I mean if you’re
going to make work about those things, you can’t pretend
that you’re the first person. That’s something that
irritates me, so I think that, one of the things that has to
happen is that if people are teaching are teaching around postcolonial
issues, they have to show work that was made fifteen or twenty
years ago…so that students can then develop rather than
regurgitate.
BB: Okay Sarindar, so we’ve touched
on Frida Kahlo and on her influence on you. What about other
influences, such as that of Minimalism?
SD: I think that Frida’s probably touched
me more in terms of the style of my painting. But as a student,
even though I was perhaps a bit disparaging earlier about Minimalism,
I think that some of my installation practice is very influenced
by people like Mary Kelly and Tony Cragg. That’s why it’s
easy for me to put things on the floor and also, in terms of
the idea of serialisation. So the slate piece [Punjabi Sheets
#2: Family Tree, 1989] is in fact, influenced by Mary Kelly’s
Post Partum Document. Because when I saw that piece, I thought,
‘Oh great,you can write on slate! and I think that you
know that that practice of placing things on the floor, it’s
very much in the tradition of Carl André and also Tony
Cragg.
BB: And I was thinking also of Robert Smithson
and even to a lesser extent of Richard Long, but perhaps in
a beautifully scaled-down and feminised way I suppose..
SD: Yes both of those artists, I was very
influenced by also
BB: And you mentioned Kapoor also earlier
too.
SD: Yes and I suppose that the pigments that
are in the coconut shells…one can I was influenced by
Kapoor. But one of the difficult things about installation art
is that if whenever someone uses a technique or a certain kind
of material, it becomes associated with them. But with painting,
if somebody paints in a certain way, a whole bunch of people
can paint that way. But I’ve found that, sometime with
text for example, when I’ve wanted to use text, I think
‘Oh but I could embroider it’, but then I think
‘No, no that artist embroidered text on the back of chairs,
so I can’t do that’. Or I think, ‘Oh I could
sand-blast it’ and then I think ‘No no, that other
artist sand-blasted words’. And I think the same thing
about sound. It’s very difficult now to think about how
to put sound into your work because it just somehow starts to
belong to people in a way that painting techniques don’t.
BB: We were talking earlier as well about
the West and the expectations of the Western art world. And
of course, the demand that seems to be placed on artists all
the time, is that they not only express some original view,
but also that they do it in a highly original way. And the demand
for originality is always there. You have to almost brand your
artwork in such a way that you can show that you’re an
original maker. Is that something that you’ve come up
against?
SD: Well often, I mean especially in North
America… I don’t think Mary Kelly’s work is
known as well there as it is here. She was producing the work
when she lived in England. So it’s usually me who tells
people that the slate piece was influenced by her – they
don’t often make the connection. But the other thing about
Kapoor’s use of pigment, is that I realised when I was
in India and in seeing powdered pigment, and being attracted
to it, ever since that first time when I came across it…so
it’s also that it really shouldn’t belong to him
because it belongs to a nation.
BB: One could look in your work also to the
influence of the Indian miniature, which is so much outside
of the tradition western perspective. I think a little also
of some of the religious scrolls also and the tradition of the
picture showmen, which I’m particularly interested in
because that has an illustrative, textual and visual side to
it. And that seems to be to be as much in evidence in your work
as the contemporary western or post-Renaissance influences.
SD: When I go to museums like the National
Galleries, where there are rooms from 1200 to 2004, there are
certain rooms that I feel I belong in and there are certain
rooms that I’m not interested in at all. So I find that
medieval art I feel very comfortable with. I feel very comfortable
with those deep greens and the pinks that are in religious paintings
and also the flattened perspective. And I love Vermeer and genre
painting. And I love pre-Raphaelite Victorian narrative painting.
I’m not really sure which era it is, but I hate those
huge history paintings, with drowning battles and I don’t
like the abstraction of the fifties.
BB: Okay I think we’ve got time for
just one more question and what I wanted to ask you, in closing,
was about your curatorial practice.
SD: It’s very small.
BB: But it’s very there. You’ve
talked about being a collector and being a photographer and
it seems to me that the curating of your life is something that
goes on in your work. So then to see you stand back from your
work and act as ‘a curator’ as well seems very interesting.
SD: But I wouldn’t actually label myself
as a curator, because I’ve only curated two shows. And
there’s one artist who I’d like to curate but the
years drag on and I don’t get around to it. But, what
I’m really interested in, in curatorial terms is…it’s
very important to me that the artist is deeply connected to
their work. So the first show that I curated, I was doing a
turban installation and I wanted to do turbans that were worn
by white Seikhs. They’re quite different to the turbans
that you see in this exhibition – they’re sort of
tall and the women wear them as well. And I was given the name
of someone who could help me and I was given the name of someone
who could help me organise the tying of the turbans. And I went
to see this man and we spoke about this piece and he told me
that he had done a four-year course in experimental photography.
He showed me his work and a piece that he had, which was a photograph
of his wife when she was eight months pregnant and he had made
thirty-six prints of these. And then when that baby was born,
as soon as the baby could hold a pencil, he had the baby draw
on the photograph of basically itself in his mother’s
tummy. So that gave me the idea to do a piece…to do a
show where the artist has collaborated with a non-artist to
produce this work. And then the next show was called Of Mudlarkers
and Measurers and it was about people who are quite obsessive
– whose work has elements of obsession…
BB: I wonder if your curating perhaps echoes
an interest that appears in your own work as well…that
is with classification and systems of classification and I wondered
if these things were coming together. And we have about one
minute in which to say.
SD: You know I think it’s all about
ordering and keeping…. I think I’d like to end this
interview by saying I don’t know.
BB: That’s absolutely fine! So thank
you so much Sarindar Dhaliwal for a most interesting interview…
SD: And thank you, Bernadette.
