Steven Campbell

Peter Hill

The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993

Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)

Steven Campbell

I never thought I would hear the quintessentially English phrase ‘What Ho!’
spoken with a Glasgow accent, and even less did I expect to hear it in New
York, but in conversation with Steven Campbell one grows to expect the surreal
juxtaposition of opposing cultural signs. This interview took place in Watts
Bar somewhere in the lower reaches of Manhattan in December 1983, at the time of Campbell’s double header shows at the Barbara Toll and John Weber galleries.

Peter Hill: The writings of P. G. Wodehouse are only one of many sources
upon which your work draws. Was he a discovery made after moving to America?

Steven Campbell: That’s right, I don’t really take much directly from
Wodehouse at all, except perhaps in ‘Wee Nook Cottage’. Indirectly his humour has been a great influence. He was a real accident, an amazing one. Riding the subway back and forth in New York it’s impossible to read the Russians – I mean Wodehouse is perfection for the subway because it takes an hour to get from where I live in Soho to my studio in Brooklyn, and an hour to get back. And Brooklyn is such a strange place to go to. Reading Wodehouse, all these strange things become connected. I’ll give you an example. I used to read Beckett and found him heavy and depressing awful things – and then I saw ‘Waiting for Godot’, with Max Wall, and he turned it into a fabulously humorous play, great punning, great wonderful humour. And when I saw that, and read Wodehouse I could understand the contrast. Beckett made some of Wodehouse’s imagery seem strangely serious when looked at with a slightly
‘off’ attitude. That’s not over-intellectualising about Wodehouse – it just
depends upon what sort of world you are involved in, and when looked at in a certain way some of it can be kind of off-beat great imagery. There is a story about Gussie
Finknottle dressed as Mephistopheles, wearing a green beard and a red suit. He’s
running about London having left his keys somewhere and he has no money for a cab, and he’s been dumped in the centre of London running about with his suit on. It’s
impossible to use something like that in a painting, but his imagery is written in such a way that you are not expected to take it seriously. It depends on the situation, but when you read it in the subway going back and forth to Brooklyn you suddenly start noticing odd relationships.

PH: One American reviewer erroneously compared the floorboards in ‘Wee Nook
Cottage’ to those in a Jorg Immendorff painting whereas they are probably
more evocative of de Chirico or Longhi. Do you feel a strong sympathy with any of
those artists?

SC: I identify with Pietro Longhi as I do with the tapestry paintings of Goya. Pietro Longhi was more metaphysical than de Chirico ever was. His metaphysical interiors seem much more modern than de Chirico’s. De Chirico’s are so stylised that you can’t reach them any more. It’s not so much that one’s seen them so often as it is that he describes everything so forcefully that it is hard to enter into it.
Pietro Longhi paints in the accepted way of his period. But you look at his paintings now and they have a feeling of something that is completely 20th century. I’ve no idea
how he does it. They have the same feeling as that great period of Magritte’s around.
The same immobility and the same feeling not of people as puppets so much as
people really involved in something. This is what I try to aim at in my paintings.
Longhi describes the incident but it doesn’t have to mean anything. He uses the
image as a masquerade towards something else. He painted the same paintings five or six times, and was a fashionable painter like Tiepolo. But to me Tiepolo doesn’t mean as much to me as Longhi.

SC: Well, you can’t ignore Rubens, if you are a painter. There’s a fabulous book in the Metropolitan which analyses Rubens’ landscapes as opposed to his figure paintings. And the landscapes are the most fabulous things. He has a marvellous way of directing space in his paintings. So these landscapes have been an influence on part of my paintings. As a more literary influence I think Jarre’s work is great. There’s one piece about the invention of a new rifle. He describes a rifle that has never been made and will probably never be made. He supposes the design and then he supposes something else. That’s what I like – supposing a problem, supposing a situation, and then keeping up that supposition the whole time. Keeping the same standard of ridiculousness throughout. In my paintings when I start with a gesture – and I always do – I start with an odd gesture and try to keep the same standard of stupidity going through the whole thing. The gesture and the first figure are done in one day, then if there is another figure that is done the next day. The rest of the time is spent filling the picture. The figures are the most important elements in the paintings, but if they are too obvious then it just doesn’t work. But if the picture is filled with all these unimportant details, you see the most obvious thing, and then the least obvious thing, and because the latter are the most surprising things in the paintings they take on great importance – chickens, eggs, plants etc. The
image becomes a completely ridiculous vehicle for something else. Hide as much as
possible with the image and all these little things come out the cupboard.

PH: One of your paintings in the current shows is titled ‘The Humeans
Debating the Wild Ferns’. How did this develop?

SC: Okay, the reason I picked the Humean images was the same reason I picked
the hiker and the gardener images. I didn’t know a thing about them, but I kept
coming in contact with them. I don’t know if you have ever woken up really early in
the morning and can’t get back to sleep, and turned on the television and been
faced with an Open University programme. This happened to me several mornings in a row, and always it was a discussion between a group of Humeans and a group of
Cartesians, and I kept getting this word ‘Humeans’, ‘Humeans’, ‘Humeans’ coming back at me all the time. It was like an army of people’s attitudes advancing towards me.
Another ridiculous connection was that of the 369 Gallery from Edinburgh who
showed work in Chicago at the same time mine was being shown there by the
Barbara Toll Gallery. Andrew Brown built a kind of Greek semi-Temple thing, playin on the idea of Edinburgh and the Enlightenment, and I thought oh, ho, ho, this is a good one here, a bit of hard sell. And to me it was like getting something placed in my lap. So I read up about the enlightenment and this word ‘Humean’ kept springing out at me again – this half past five in the morning word on the attack. The TV programme was presented by this American woman who tried to speak with an Oxford accent, and she always wore these full-length trousers that were too short for her and came down between the knee and the ankle, and it was never less than agonising to listen to her every morning. So that’s where the ‘Humeans’ came from. It’s not about Hume, it’s about people forcing Humeanism onto everyone else, through television and art-world opportunism.

PH: In this painting two ferns are seen arguing on a table while two of
Hume’s disciples debate the spectacle before them. Behind them hangs a portrait of
Hume. How did this originate?

SC: This started with a drawing I did called ‘Taming the Wild Fern’. In it
the Napoleonic gardener is seen grasping a fern and staring at it sternly.
Behind him other ferns fight but he is trying to tame this particular one. The ferns
are fighting because one lot belong to the house variety while the others are wild, and it is the division of ferns that the Humeans are debating.

SC: No, that comes from P.G.Wodehouse’s phrase ‘Flapping like an Aspen’ and
the painting of the same name. First I did the drawings for the ‘Hiker’s Ballet’
and I thought it was a marvellous idea of a guy chasing a fern across a stage.
Every art ‘performance’ I’ve ever seen has always been boring. I get bored at all
these things. So that’s why I put a yawning child in it, to represent the way most people must feel who go along to these things. So the guy chases the fern across the stage, trying to flatten it with his knapsack.

SC: I better not, not after what I’ve just said, or I’d be as bad as the rest
of them. I wouldn’t mind putting it on with a large group of friends in a place where
everyone could go – oho, oho, oho....whatever.

SC: Exactly, something like that. You see, Carol really enjoys ballet, and
I hate all the graceful movements. All the people I paint tend to be clumsy movers. My ‘Hiker’s Ballet’ was the opposite of graceful ballet. Falling and tipping up
was an art, you know, not moving gracefully. The ridiculous gesture between people, the exaggerated gesture.

SC: Exactly. Everything is exaggerated, like the word ‘What!’ When they
say ‘What!’ they knock a plant off the wall, or something, whatever.

SC: This came from a painting I did using a portrait of John Buchan. I was
trying to use, or semi-abuse, Scottish ideas. One builds up a large idea of how people
use things, and how things are understood. When I come across an aspect of
Scotland that has never been exploited properly, well to me it’s like getting it
handed on a plate. As with the ‘Thirty-Nine Steps’. But I’ve only painted one using
Buchan as it seems a bit obvious.

PH: How do you feel about all the American reviews you have had with their
oatmeal and tweed connotations?

SC: I don’t think it’s too bad – not the later ones. Some of the earlier
ones misunderstood what I was doing and made it all sound too serious – talking
about catastrophes and things.

SC: Yes, doom and gloom round every corner. One junior league commercial
gallery from London came to look at the work, but in Britain a Scottish way
of looking at things doesn’t seem to be taken seriously – harking back to the
haggis and things tartan – an attitude which is totally ridiculous. Every other
painting nation uses its natural heritage and identity these days as a fair part of the mark, and Scotland has a right to do exactly the same. Scotland has an untapped history which is known, but not widely known, outside the country. Scottish scientists, mathematicians, and physicists are automatically owned by Britain – whereas the English are always English. The is a Scottish identity that is worthy of being understood.

PH: So you see yourself as a Scot living abroad as part of the international
art world?

SC: That’s exactly what I am. I mean, completely. There’s no point trying
to be German, and there’s no point trying to be Italian or French. If you’re
Scottish, you’re Scottish.

PH: Let’s turn to your art education. Although you didn’t go to art school
until you were into your twenties, after years in the steel industry as a maintenance
engineer, had you always painted?
SC: No, no, I hadn’t, not at all. My grandmother gave me a book on Lautrec
when I was about twenty-two. What’s his famous book, his biography, the Moulin
Rouge or something like that? One of those ridiculous romantic things. I was totally
captivated by it. Totally bowled over, side-swiped, destroyed – everything. So I raced off to Kelvingrove art galleries and saw the Degas and the Van Goghs and that was it. This whole world appeared. So it’s all due to my grandmother. Everything I do in my paintings has a sense of romanticism about it. A sense of loss. Cheap
romanticism taken to the grand level. But to me it’s not cheap because I haven’t allowed myself to get cynical yet. When I eventually went to art school, after studying at night school to get the qualifications, I loved every minute of it. Loved the place, loved the people. But all those who had done art at school were bored to tears and really pissed off when tutors told them to shade like this, or use colour like that. It was all new to me and I loved it. The governing thing in everything I do seems to be naivety. Part of me is dying to jump in at the deep end, but another part is saying, oh no, not again, don’t do it, remember what happened the last time.

PH: At the moment you are living in Manhattan and painting in Brooklyn.
Does this influence you?

SC: Living in New York has nothing to do with it, as far as my paintings are
concerned. I could probably paint just the same at the North Pole. What I
paint has to do with Scotland, if anywhere, and could be painted anywhere. If you told me my paintings were about New York I would be disgusted and would hate them. The rawness in them comes from being a Glaswegian, and being a canny Glaswegian, because the Glasgow people are the most able in the world at working anything out. People talk of the ancient Greeks as being ‘of a type’, but to me the
Glaswegians are so ‘of a type’ that it is like something classic, and good, and unusual, and is something painters should be using if they can. The excitability and humour
of the Glaswegians, and the Scottish people, is welcomed with open arms in New York, it really is.

PH: Bram Stoker’s Dracula stories have cropped up in your work, and again it
is a chance influence. In your final year at Glasgow School of Art – where you
have said your greatest influence came from the tutor Roger Hoare – you won the Bram Stoker Medal. How did Bram Stoker come to leave a medal to Glasgow School of Art?

SC: Nobody knows, it’s a ghost, a complete mystery. After I won it and
moved to New York, I wrote to Bill Buchanan, the head of Fine Art, asking if I could
get a copy of the medal. He wrote back and said they only had one copy of the medal and that he always sent a rubbing of it to the winner. Imagine sending rubbings of
Bram Stoker medals across the Atlantic! It’s the most wonderful thing.

PH: In one of the paintings you show the character Van Helsing being bitten
by a snake rather than a vampire bat. Why was that?

SC: Partly because I didn’t want to attempt to paint a vampire bat flying
out of the painting, but also because the snake venom causes paralysis and the figure
stands forever frozen in the same space – as at the end of Don Giovani when the
father of what’s-her-name turns into a statue.

SC: I don’t listen to anything except opera. I paint to opera. Particularly
Mozart and particularly Handel. Also Puccini and Purcell. Never to Verdi, I never
paint to Verdi.

SC: I’ve always done that. I can’t work any other way – faster or slower.
Things change so quickly within the space of, say, five hours in a painting. It’s
like talking to someone or walking down a street – it becomes a living thing with a life of its own. It’s almost a way of being.