Conversation with Gordon Burn
Exerpt 1 : Exerpt 2
: Exerpt 3 : Exerpt
4 : Exerpt 5 : Exerpt 6
 Listen to the audio (2 mins 30 secs)
GB: When did you start to make it into a whole room installation
as opposed to just a one-off piece?
DH: I think when I realised that an art gallery is like a shop.
I said before once 'the difference between an art gallery and a
car showroom and art and cars - an art dealer and a car salesman'
- you realise that all these rooms are just rooms and they're all
the same - they have a similar function. You can clean out a hospital
and make it into an art gallery - you can clean out an art gallery
and make it into a doctor's surgery. I was doing installations with
the butterflies - kind of whole room environments - and I just thought
that would be a great one to do.
But also - just that directness - just to confuse people - if people
are looking at art in one way and medicine in an another way and
art has got the possibility to jump from one thing to another and
to constantly surprise, whereas medicine doesn't - it's got to constantly
deliver something which is going to heal you and there's a lot of
rules -whereas in art there's no rules. And then to be able to turn
an art gallery into a pharmacy, you get that surrealism.
GB: You said, in New York, when you put Pharmacy up for the first
time, you loved the fact that lots of people walked out of the lift,
walked into the room, went like sort of it's the wrong floor, got
back into the lift, went down to the ground floor, came back up
and went 'oh yeah this is the sortie[?] of the show then'. Well,
why did you like that? Why did you like that ambiguity and blurring?
DH: Because I think that's what's brilliant about art - it's to
take the world as you know it and change it and represent it to
you in a way you that you don't expect it - I think that's what
art's greatest function is. Art always has that power to make you
think twice, to think again, to not know where you are, to loose
your bearings.
Again what we were saying at the beginning - there's two things
- I keep trying to leap back to two things. One is the confidence
that it had, the simple confidence of it and the other was the confidence
of the medicine cabinets in their own right.
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