Richard Hamilton

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 6, Number 1, 1983

Transcript

Richard Hamilton: There was a problem very early on in the 1950s, when I began to use mass-media subject matter, in that people didn't know whether it satirised or glorified the objects represented. Both these attitudes would come at me rather aggressively. For example, the cultural attaché at the American Embassy came to my home one evening and put the question, 'Why do you attack America in this way?' I had to argue with him for half an hour to persuade him that was not the case. On other occasions I had to argue with people who thought of it as a glorification of American culture if the slightest glimpse of stars and stripes appeared in a painting. I had equally to fight this attitude, saying that I saw America as a kind of prototype of what we were all to become. As it was inevitable that any industrialised society would go in that direction, it was sociologically interesting to examine what was going on there.
I had a clear-cut theoretical model for this in that among the things being discussed at the Independent Group was Aristotelian logic, and I was very taken with the idea that you could go about your business without saying whether something was good or bad. I consciously tried to avoid value judgements, so I was able to answer these people by saying, 'No, it's not glorification; it's not satirical; it is Aristotelian.'
I have written a good deal, and it has tended to subvert what critics have written about me. I have always been rather disappointed that it was very rare that a critic came up with an original thought about what I was doing. The likelihood was that they would quote from what I had written. Another drawback to writing was that people felt that it showed my inadequacy as a painter. One evening there was a discussion at the Whitechapel, and one of the Young Contemporary painters exhibiting there said rather pointedly, 'I'm in the painting business not the information business.' And I thought that he was looking my way. It did hit me rather hard, but it didn't deter me completely.
One of the reasons that I persisted was that writing about my own work did prove very successful, in the sense that it got results in a way that the paintings didn't. I had a show in 1955 which was moderately successful critically but not from any other point of view, and for the subsequent eight years I went practically every six months to Hanover Gallery, where I'd had the show, and said, 'Would you like to come up and see my paintings again?' I always got cold-shouldered. Nobody was willing to go from Bond Street to Highgate to look at things. And I thought that I'd gone beyond the stage where I walked around the Bond Street galleries with paintings under my arms. Then in 1963 the ICA did the Living Arts Magazine, and I did the cover and produced a very serious piece of writing trying to express what I had been doing in painting. And I used collage, pastiche and all the other devices that were applicable to paintings, which seemed to be easily converted to the written word. And within a week of that being published I met Erica Brausen in the gallery on Bond Street: 'Say, what about coming up to Highgate?' And she said, 'Well, I won't bother coming up to Highgate but I saw that piece in the magazine and let's fix up a show.' And then Robert Fraser, whom I'd been trying to persuade to come up that same evening, said, 'Can I come up and talk to you about a show?' And I said, 'I've just committed myself to a show at Hanover.' A week or so later one of the people I admired most as a collector, Ted Power, whom I'd known for ten years, bought a picture. He didn't pay for it for six months. I rang him up and he said, 'I didn't know you wanted the money!' He raised the pen and his cheque book, looked me in the eye and said, 'I can write a cheque for three hundred pounds - which was the price of the picture - or I can write a cheque for two thousand pounds. If I write a cheque for two thousand pounds, I would like to have pictures from you at this price, which I will select from you over the years.' So, I said, 'Well, I think I'd better take my three hundred,' because suddenly I thought it was a bit odd. I said to him, 'Why are you suddenly showing this kind of commitment to my paintings?' And he said, 'Well, before I saw that article in Living Arts I didn't know you were serious.' It struck me then that the power of the word is greater than the power of the brush.
Having written about things in a way that makes people think they're serious and reasoned, I had almost come to the conclusion that perhaps the paintings were reasoned and serious. And it takes a long time before the thought begins to come back that maybe you don't know what you're doing. And now I'm thoroughly convinced that I don't know what I'm doing and that writing is a way of finding out. Very often, the writing occurs after the event or partway through it. It's not like writing a program, although I have done that. Understanding begins to come back to the work from the need to think about it. For example, in my picture of a blanket-man in the H-Block, there was shit all over the place - rather more than the discrete little elements that were combined with glamour in my older pictures. I was invited to Cambridge about a year ago by Sandy Wilson, who is a professor there. I had to talk about the difference between the good old days and the present, and I came to the conclusion that a vast change had taken place. We had all been excited by the prospects of the post-war years - the future of the consumer society in which everything was going to be given. I realised that current preoccupations were likely to be much more pessimistic, and I began to pinpoint it. I thought, when did shit first appear in my paintings, combined, maybe, with fashion models or with flowers? And it turned out to be 1973. So I then thought, 1973 is the petrol crisis, and I'm sure now, having given it a lot of consideration, that the decline in the Western economy is really the reason for my having brought in - very, very surreptitiously in the first place, and now dramatically with this H-Block picture - the kind of excremental vision that I think psychologists discuss much more easily than art critics. Art critics are liable to pass it off as a sexual aberration of a senile painter. But I've learned from having Freud thrust under my nose that,perhaps what I was doing had some psychological significance, which I didn't understand at all. It seems to me that a good deal of what an artist does is outside his understanding.

Michael Compton: A lot of your work seems episodic. In those paintings of the late 1950s the white surface remains continuous, and then there are episodes within the picture which belong to different stylistic languages. Is this something you do as a deliberate semiotic game?

RH: Yes, it's very deliberate, and I got the method from other models. Joyce was the primary one. He writes with tremendous stylistic changes - one chapter can be in girlie magazine style, and another can be in newspaper style, even with headlines. He'll go from one thing to another, but you don't ever think that this is not pure Joyce. That seemed to me to be a very useful model, and one that I hadn't seen used by painters.

MC: I was thinking also of the fact that your pictures tend to be discontinuous. There are gaps between the quotations. Do you think that people are somehow filling in the gaps?

RH: Well, there are gaps between the quotations so that they'll stay clear, in the same way that each chapter of Ulysses stays clear.

MC: Most painting depends on a degree of assent from the audience. For example, to react rightly, as it were, to a painting of a Madonna and Child, you have to know a certain amount of Christian theology. Are you expecting a learned audience able to bring to the picture this equivalent apparatus of modern mythology replacing religion?

RH: It's demanding rather a lot of an audience to put together all these rather esoteric references. I don't feel it was necessary to understand all the complex references, but it would have been nice to think that somebody might have sleuthed it, though.

MC: Would people like to ask about anything that Richard has said?

Questioner 1: Do you support the Labour Party?

RH: Yes, I was surprised read in a book that my political attitude was 'non-party, but vociferous'. About a week before I read that I had joined the Labour Party for the first time in my life, because I thought that Michael Foot needed support.

Q1: Do you still maintain your a-moral position, then?

RH: I would say that I still maintain the same kind of attitude, but I have had to recognise that non-Aristotelian logic doesn't go all the way. There's good and bad in the world. War is bad. Unemployment is bad. So I can make moral judgements which are quite divorced from the kind of judgements I would make when I say, 'Can I produce a picture which is about the American automobile industry?'

MC: You said that there were certain things that you found wrong. Would you find it possible for a picture to be 'wrong' in some way, to the extent that it should not be shown?

RH: No, only if it was deadly dull and boring.

MC: You don't think the painting actually could do damage? You believe, presumably, that paintings can do some good, otherwise, unless you were painting out of pure obsession you wouldn't do it, or would you?

RH: No, I can't envisage a situation where somebody would paint a picture that shouldn't be exhibited from a moral standpoint.

Questioner 2: So you would hold on to some kind of transcendental values that are beyond culture?

RH: Yes, I think so. I do see a tremendous relevance in Duchamp's attitude to art, which he expressed very well in what he headed 'A General Note' in The Green Box. He says,' Always give a reason for a decision. And the tool that you will use to make that choice is ironical causality.' He goes on to say that the irony that he would use is an irony of affirmation, rather than negative irony, which depends solely on laughter. I would like to believe that my paintings were ironic in that sense - an affirmative irony rather than a negative irony.