Name: Alice Channer
Age: 35
Occupation: Artist
City: London
Current Exhibition: “Cold Blood” at Lisa Cooley, 107 Norfolk Street, New York, through December 23, 2012.
“Cold Blood” at Lisa Cooley is your first solo exhibition in the United States. Does this show represent a new direction for you in any other ways?
I really like the period just after an exhibition is installed, when for the first time I can actually see and experience what I’ve been working on all those months. The objects that make up “Cold Blood” are new things in the world; they only started existing at 6 p.m. on Sunday the 11th of November 2012 when the show officially opened at Lisa Cooley, so I’m still working out what they are. Can you ask me this question again in a year or so when I might be able to give you a better answer?
You are known for making flat things no longer flat, like pleating paper or curving sheet metal or turning aluminum and digital prints into “gills” for a gallery wall. What interests you about making your art — and by extension the gallery space — strange and deceptive?
I imagine my work as first and foremost realistic. It’s me saying what it’s like to exist in and with the post-industrial, late capitalist environment that I am a part of. But my experience of the work is only a very small part of the picture — if you see it as strange and deceptive, that’s the beginning of another version of events.
The metal fingers that point out from the walls in “Cold Blood” got their nails painted at a salon on the Lower East Side. How did the salon react when you brought them in? Why did you want them to have a real manicure?
Like any other of the fabricators I work with, the manicurist at Le Chic Nail Spa, a block away from the gallery at 128 Rivington Street, was very practical. She looked at my six bronze and aluminium cast fingers, proposed a price — $6 — asked if I also wanted the cuticles done, and then made a great manicure.
In March 2012, your work “Hard Metal Body” was installed along the escalator of the Notting Hill Gate station on the London Underground as part of the Art on the Underground project. [Click here for Modern Painters’ interview with Channer on the project.] What was different about working in a public, heavily trafficked place, and how did your process of dressing a space change with the utilitarian location?
“Hard Metal Body” is installed in a very sexy metal-walled escalator tunnel at Notting Hill tube station in London. I imagine the London Underground as a machine, similar to any of the other vast industrial and post-industrial machines that we become part of every day, and it was different to work with a context this specific. The “Hard Metal Body” of the title is me addressing the body of the tunnel, and of the machine. It was also a pleasure to work with very strict limitations, which I usually have to invent for myself. In this case the rules were made for me — the artwork had to consist of a digital image printed onto sticky-backed vinyl, and installed on a very specific section of the hard metal body of the tunnel.
I don’t see “Hard Metal Body” as a “public” artwork, because I don’t imagine the London Underground as a “public” place. The escalator tunnel that the work is a part of is a commercial place; the sides of the tunnel are usually used for advertising, but what I put there doesn’t operate like commercial communication, it’s much weirder than that. The result is something deeply awkward and uncomfortable; emotions that I’ve been thinking more and more lately are a legitimate response to have to an artwork.
You’ve been known to plant people at your openings wearing dresses that relate to your art in an effort to subtly incorporate the audience into the exhibition. Why do you do this, and when did you start? What does it suggest about how you want your audience to relate to your work?
The first time I showed in New York was as part of “Took My Hands Off Your Eyes Too Soon,” a group show at Tanya Bonakdar, curated by Ryan Gander, in 2007. I got a grant from the British Council to travel to New York for the show, and brought with me a beautiful sixties Op-Art dress that I hired from a costume archive. I’d been fascinated by the reception of Bridget Riley’s early work, and her first trip to New York, where she saw dresses apparently made from prints taken from her paintings in the department store windows. An actor wore the dress to the opening of the group show, but I saw this as very much about objects — about trying to locate an object right at the edges of the exhibition, wanting the objects I make to behave in certain ways, rather than as a way of asking an audience to behave in a particular way. I wouldn’t say that my work is made in ignorance of the fact that other people will come and see it — I see myself as an exhibition maker as much as a maker of individual objects — but at the same time there isn’t a specific “response” I am looking for. The work is just me talking to myself.
What’s the last show that you saw?
Rosemarie Trockel’s “A Cosmos” at the New Museum.
What’s the last show that surprised you? Why?
See above. Because she managed to make a “retrospective” that doesn’t fix or solidify her work, and for a large part of the exhibition it’s impossible to tell which objects are her work and which are the works of others. Wow.
What’s your favorite place to see art?
There isn’t one. I love art because it continually surprises me.
What’s the most indispensable item in your studio?
At this time of year, my heaters, and thermal underwear.
Where are you finding ideas for your work these days?
In details.
Do you collect anything?
Yes, lots of stuff that I cannot categorize. Starting to work out what it is, how I feel about it, and what it means is my work as an artist.
What’s the last artwork you purchased?
I’ve never bought an artwork, but I’ve done some great swaps and trades.
What’s the first artwork you ever sold?
Goldsmiths College bought a work from my degree show when I graduated. It paid for my first month’s studio rent in “The Real World.”
What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw happen in a museum or gallery?
People unconsciously tipping their heads to one side when looking at Brâncuși’s “Sleeping Muse.”
What’s your favorite post-gallery watering hole or restaurant?
The Approach pub, below The Approach gallery in London.
What’s the last great book you read?
Andrew Hodges’ biography of Alan Turing.
What under-appreciated artist, gallery, or work do you think people should know about?
Lucy Clout’s 2010 video work, “Manual, Non-Manual, Manual.”
Click here to view a slideshow of work by Alice Channer