An Interview with Goto

 

John Goto is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Derby, UK.  He is represented by Gallery On, Seoul, Korea, and galleries in Paris and Munich.

 

Bang Wang
 

 

Published by The Bund

12/04/201

 

 1: Is Goto your real name? Can you tell me something about your childhood in Stockport? What stimulated you to pick up your first camera? What was your first photo of?

​

JG: Ah-ha! This is a question I generally try to avoid. Lets say it has been my name throughout my career. If you are really interested checkoutGoto, l'île d'amour, a film byWalerian Borowczyk made in 1968.

​

Childhood memories of Stockport? Well, it’s an industrial town next to Manchester, famous in its day for hat making. My parents’ families had lived there for generations and this is one of my abiding memories, a sense of family and community. At the centre of my maternal family was my Grandmother, a beautifully kind woman and a very good cook.  My father and uncles would occasionally take me to see Manchester United play. This was the nineteen fifties whennearly everyone stood at football games as there were few seats.  So they were huge crowds. I also remember the rain - it was always drizzling! 

I was never really interested in photography, preferring the imaginative world of painting and drawing.  Strangely, I was going through some family snaps recently after my mother’s death and came across what was probably my first photo.  It’s an unremarkable shot of my parents standing by the back door.  You can tell it was made by a kid because of the low viewpoint.  My father is looking with concern towards the camera; maybe worried I would drop it.  But my mother happily smiles, proud of her little boy!

​

2: In your earlier work, you seemed to follow the tradition of European Realism, but your uniqueness has gradually emerged through your characteristic angles - why you were so attracted by a cemetery (Paris, 1977), a little fire in a stove (Prague 1978), or even just a piece of white paper...why were you mostly drawn to bleak, cold, gloomy images? What influenced you during that period?

​

JG: I guess as a young artist I was a romantic, as a viewing of Goto, l'île d'amour will demonstrate. But I was also serious and attentive to politics and art history. The Paris series was influenced by the turn of the twentieth century photographer Eugene Atget.  The next series was made in Prague where I studied in 1978.  The Cold War was still going strong and it was a strange and interesting experience being behind the Iron Curtain.  There I found the great tradition of Czech photography, especially through the work of Josef Sudek. So the still lives come out of a tradition I was trying to think about, a tradition of European photography as opposed to the American tradition that dominated the emerging UK photo scene.

3: In 1977 you made “Lovers Rock” in Lewisham. This presents itself as a very warm and moving piece, but 1977 was also the year of the Battle ofLewisham, an encounter in which anti-fascist groups attempted to stop a National Front march from New Cross to Lewisham. Could you explain a bit about the background of the piece? Were these young people in your work part of the anti-fascist groups? Why did you particularly choose black subjects? How has the feedback about this work from current audiences been recently?

​

JG: Initially these were rather simple and naiveportraits of young people at a youth centre I taught photography in to make a little extra money in the evenings. I was more or less the same age as the subjects, who were mostly of African Caribbean decent.  Britain has become increasingly multi-cultural in my lifetime, a change I have celebrated in my work.

The problem was how to show this work, how to contextualize it?  I felt the pictures belonged not only to myself, butto their community.  Well, as I couldn’t resolve this question of context,I haven’t shown these picturesin the thirty odd years since I made them - the negativeshave just sat in a box.  But the world has moved on and now there is considerable interest in them as socio-historical documents. Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers, is going to publish them as a book next year, entitled Lovers Rock.At last they have found their context.

​

I think the pictures stand in contrast to the documentary photos we have of the so-called “Battle of Lewisham”.  Mine are intimate portraits of fine young people.  Of course some would probably have been involved in anti-fascist activities, but in this setting,youthful love, friendship and style are emphasized.

​

4: Did you enjoy your experiments with cubism or expressionism in the early of 1980s? Were you worried about working in a voguish style which might sooner or later go out of fashion? 

​

JG: In the early ‘eighties I was still grappling with the recent history of European art and photography.  So the pictures reference cubist photography, but always declare a distance between now and then.  EventuallyI found my way to photomontage, a practice that reflects my thinking, which is non-linear, but rather lateral.

​

​

5: In "The Commissar of Space 1992/4,” you tell the story of Malevich - why him? What made you pick a collectivist story from the 1930s while you were in a capitalist society in the 1990s?

​

JG:KasimirMalevich was my first hero when I went to art school.  I loved his daring; he was the consummate Avant-Gardist, always refining the work towards its essence. But there had been rumors that hisdevelopment towards minimalist abstraction was reversed at the end of his life when he made figurative paintings again.  But during the Cold War we had no access to these pictures.  This was a mystery I wanted to solve.

 ​

 Once the Soviet Union collapsed the doors opened, and I was quick to go through them.  In 1994 I spent time in Perm, an ex-armaments city in the Urals built by order of Stalin. As well as studying Malevich, which I could now do in the UK, I wanted to experience a Soviet city.Well, it’s a long story but in his last years Malevich, and in fact all the Avant-Garde, was under a lot of political pressure, loosing their teaching jobs and state patronage.  Some even ended up in gulags.So again the question of how the past relates to the ever-changing present interested me.

​

 

  

6: In "Capital Arcade 1997/9", you make fun of those high street shops, do you shop in those shops? Do you only eat organic food? Do you refuse to buy any big brands? What is your daily life style like, in the face of this consumerism?

​

JG: Something fundamental changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is possibly the biggest event to happen in my lifetime.  With the discrediting of the left in Europe, all the political parties moved towards the centre-right.  I made this series in response to the election of Tony Blair as prime minister.  Blair hijacked the Labour Party and took it off in the direction of free market economics, consumerism, lower taxes for the rich, and a reduced role for the state.  Without a choice between left and right, we citizens had become politically impotent.  It was no longer possible to stand outside society, as the Avant-Garde haddone, we were now all inescapablyculpable.To show this I increasingly appear in the photographs myself.So yes, I’m a consumer, addicted to buying books and music, though I have never chased money, preferring to spend my life creatively, if poorer.

7: ”New World Circus 2004/6” attracted some accusations? What was the issue? Do you always get those negative comments each time you try to oppose war?

​

JG: “New World Circus” was in response to George Bush’s “new world order”, and the UK’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq.  Nearly two million people demonstrated in London against the coming war, but we were ignored. So this was my way of speaking out, of using my voice. The way criticism is normally dealt with in the West, especially from artists, is to ignore it. But this show toured widely and was popular.  I think this was because people were still very angry about the war. In this casethe audiencecomments were positive.

​

8: Do you think "an artist should also be a Public Intellectual"? Is "Critical Art" what you would call your own work?

​

JG:  I think the job of the artist is to tell as fully as they can how it was to be alive during their time.  Part of this witnessing is political and social, but there is also room to speak more personally about family, friends and love.

​

9: It seems collage started to become a significant element in your work in early 1990 - what inspired you at that time? Cinematic montage?Digital technology?

​

JG: Yes, the history of art and cinema both contributed, but the big change came with the advent of digital technology, which I started using in 1992.  The computer gave me much better control and opened new possibilities for a montagist – it was like a dream come true!

​

10: In many of your recent works, you are very much like a film-maker. Can you tell me something about the process of making these works? How do you gather so many people? Or do you take each object individually in front of a blue screen? Or like those community art works, do all the people perform together? Do you set everything up by yourself in your studio? Including costume and makeup? Do you also do all the CG work by yourself?

​

JG: Yes, I’m a one-man-band!  It is often said that new technologies makeeverything faster to achieve.  It’s true in some respects, but in my experience making a good picture is as time consuming and difficult as ever. I first plan the pictures through sketches. When I have the lighting and viewpoint worked out, and the figure composition, then I photograph all the elements separately in the studio or on location.  I then spend many weeks cutting out and assembling it all. It often strikes me how like the methods of painters in the past all this is.

​

I use non-professional actors, mostly family, neighbours, students and friends.

​

11: What's the newest technology/material in your work? iPhone? When you choose a material, would you choose a green attitude as well, what do you think about the relationship between new technology and the artist?

​

JG: Presently I’m working with a colleague at the University of Derby, Dr. Matthew Leach, who is an expert in virtual technologies.We are working with Augmented Reality, which is achieved by combining three functions of a smartphone – GPS reading, internet connection and camera – to create an image layer in front of the everyday scene observed through the camera. The specific image that appears is triggered either by the location, or through image recognition. Additional information can be supplied using text panels, sound samples and maps. For me it’s a way of montaging directly into the everyday world. It is potentially subversive as you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to place a virtual image into any location. So recently we made a piece about the financial crisis, “Gilt City,” which we placed outside the Bank of England.

​

12: Do you need to fight for budgets? Works like "High summer,"  "National Portrait Gallery Residence, Portraits 1999/2000,” "New World Circus 2004/6”...are they all the big budget productions? Any suggestions for young hopeful starving artists?

​

JG:  Funding is always a problem.  I have been lucky to work at the University of Derby, which has supported my research and helped with some of these expenses.I have also benefited from the support or public bodies like the Arts Council of England and British Council.

​

One advantage of working digitally is that images that look like big productions, can actually be made cheaply on a tabletop.The internet offers great opportunities for artists, young and old, to find new audiences and markets. But to survive as an artist you need steely determination.  The good news for young artists is that most of your contemporaries will give up making art soon after graduating from art school, so the competition gets less!

​

13: In "Dance to the Muzik of Time", were you the choreographer as well? Did you allow your actors to do whatever they thought they could do? How was the interaction between you and your actors?

​

JG:The series came about as a commission from the Arts Council East Midlands. The two things they wanted me to do was work with local dance groups, and show something of the region.  I had great fun working with the dancers who were all talented people.  I was thinking again about our multi-cultural society, and what sense national histories make to people whose ancestors maybe came from the other side of the globe?  I used a break-dancing group, a classical Indian Kathak troupe and young Bollywood dancers.  As usual I planned the pictures but left plenty of space for the dancers to improvise. Their creative contribution is a major part of the series.

​

14: Why did you choose "Dance to the Muzik of Time 2007/8" in this exhibition in China? Is there any particular allegory or profound message inside this work?  Would the audiences still be able to understand this message even without knowledge of European History?

​

JG: How to impart background knowledge of historical events is always a problem in exhibitions, whether in China or Europe.  I attach a brief text next to each picture to help the viewer in this respect. I also leave a lot of room for the viewer’s imagination to work in.

I chose this series because it is an approachable subject, which I thought would appeal to the mostly young audience in Chongqing.  I also wanted to show something of the fine countryside around Derby, and its rich history.

​

15: Have you been to China before? What are your impressions of China? Tell us a little about how the exhibition in Chongqing came about.

​

JG: I dislike being a tourist and find that I learn much more about a country when I go there to work. I had not been to China before so for me China is Chongqing, and Chongqing is mostly the Sichuan Fine Art Institute - all of which I’m mighty impressed by.

​

The exhibition“An Uncommon Past”,I curated of work by staff and PhD students at the University of Derby.  It concerns history, memory and time. It came about through a contact our Dean, Professor Huw Davies, who is a well-known video artist and curator, made with artist ZengTu when he was doing a residency at Quad Gallery in Derby. Tu also teaches new media at Sichuan Fine Art Institute in Chongqing.  Over the past couple of years the two Arts Faculties have developed a very productive dialogue and this exhibition is part of our growing collaboration.  The British Council incorporated the show into its UK Nowarts festival in China, which leads up to the London Olympics.  Art was always a part of the modern Olympic ethos, and so we follow in this tradition.

​

But you ask about my experience here, and I must say the art students who attended my workshop and helped me install the exhibition are such nice, hardworking young people. They are talented, informed and very modern in their outlook and style, twenty-first century citizens of whom any university would be proud.

​

16: What do you think about Chinese new medium art? Who is your favorite Chinese artist and why?

​

JG:In the UK, contemporary Chinese artists are less well known than they deserve to be. Ai Weiwei isthe most famous as his exhibition at Tate Modern was widely covered in the press, and subsequent events on his return to China. I noticed quite early on the work of Wang Qingsong, which I like very much for its intelligence, skill, theatricality and historical perspective.

​

But I am also impressed by the work of artists I met in Chongqing: Zhang Xiaotoa, ZengTu, and TianTaiquan, not to mention the students.

​

17: Have you ever thought about someday creating a work with a theme related to China?  If so, what might that be like?

​

JG: I am cautious about pronouncing on subjects until I have researched them, sometimes for years. Before I made my visit to Chongqing I read a heavy tome on the history of China from 1850. The experience of being at SCFAI has further wet my appetite.  It proudly declares itself a Fine Art Institute, and the kind of art education it offers is based in tradition as well as new technology, which I approve of.  I plan one day to make an allegorical series provisionally entitled ‘The Art School’, and SCFAI would be the perfect starting point.

​

 

​