Conversation with Gordon Burn
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GB: Let's go back to basics really - the whole thing about being
in a chemist shop with your mum - her believing in medicine and
the effects of medicine and not believing in art and thinking art
was crap but believing whatever a doctor told her or whatever the
packaging or medicines told her. How did you go from that kind of
recognition to it becoming a ready-made or found art - isn't that
what Pharmacy is - I mean the medicine cabinets are ready-mades?
DH: Yeah. They are.
GB: Out of the whole of life, the whole of everything in life that
you see and experience, why did you pick on a chemist shop as a
thing to pick?
DH: For that very reason. I mean I suppose out of confidence, because
people have confidence in [medicine]. Because I had a confidence
in art that comes from God knows where - I was thinking I like this
and I like the way it works, I like the way it brightens people's
lives up, the way that people believe in it, but I was having difficulty
in convincing the people around me that it was worth believing in.
And then I noticed that they were believing in medicine in exactly
the same way that I wanted them to believe in art and they weren't
doing it.
GB: What without any proof or backup at all for why they should
believe in medicine?
DH: Well, obviously there's backup except they weren't reading
the side-effects - they weren't looking at it logically. They were
looking at shiny colors and bright shapes and nice white coats and
cleanliness and they were going right - this is going to be my saviour.
And it didn't ring true - it didn't seem believable. It seemed that
art had a lot more going for it in terms of something that was going
to heal you - it just seemed much more believable. It seemed to
encompass more. I mean they don't have cancer pills with a picture
of a cancer victim on the front so that you know that's for you
because that's the way that you look in the morning - they don't
sell it like that - they remove all the death when that's basically
what they're all about. And it seems to me that you've got to face
up to things.
GB: I think the basic question is why in the arena of life, sickness,
death - why was that the first place that you settled on to take
a ready-made from?
DH: I just think it's so strong. It's about confidence - it had
such a strong confidence. I mean it's about trickery - there seems
to be a lot of trickery going on - it seems like there's less trickery
in art then there is in medicine. I think art is a hell of a lot
better for you than medicine, in the long run. You don't get a great
long list of side-effects - or maybe you do!
GB: You've also talked about the formal reasons for doing it -
that the packaging was incredibly minimal and wasn't sort of polluted
by commerce. You have to have it - you can't decide whether to pick
it - you're prescribed it - you don't make a choice, you're told
that you've got to have it not that you want to have it.
DH: In the supermarket there's a massive battle going between brands
- Coca Cola fighting KP Crisps - a big battle for attention and
it's very messy, it's very ugly. Whereas in the chemist, they all
harmonise with each other in a much more beautiful way, which is
kind of what goes in artwork, so all the drug companies - they're
not fighting each other, there's a kind of unwritten law.
GB: When you're in the back room of the chemist - not on the shelves.
DH: That is on the shelves - you can see it - when you go to the
pharmacist, they're always open because they're always using them
all the while. And I was looking behind the chemist, over his shoulder
and seeing all these packages on the shelves.
GB: By and large you've got the commercial stuff in the front and
the other stuff in the back.
DH: Yeah in the chemist, it's fighting like it is in the supermarket
to a much lesser extent.
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