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Can a book be an exhibition? Guest #2: Stephen Ellcock
0 Playsin 2 hours
We are thrilled to welcome Stephen Ellcock to the podcast during his press tour for the book Elements, which completes a trilogy with The Cosmic Dance (2022) and Underworlds (2023), all published by Thames and Hudson. This time, he has gathered images around the ancestral notion of “the elements”, seen through the contemporary lens of sustainability and the impending climate tragedy.
Is the book an exhibition? And if so, what kind? There is a mystery underlying these questions which is the statuts and power of images in their different spaces such as galleries or publications. However, this episode is also an opportunity to get to know the image alchemist Stephen Ellcock a bit more.
If you don't know Stephen Ellcock's instagram account yet, you should: @stephenellcock
Follow us for more images: @exhibitionistas_podcast
Support us on our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/c/exhibitionistaspodcast/membership
Music by Sarturn.
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Transcript
Introduction and Special Guest
00:00:07
Speaker
Hi there, Joanna here. This episode is a special one because we welcome our second guest in this second season of the podcast. As ever, the ideas to talk about exhibitions of all kinds, the ins and outs of the art world, were simply the pleasures of image gazing with someone who plays a very specific role in our constellation of art professionals and lovers.
Stephen Elcock's New Book & Passion for Images
00:00:34
Speaker
Our guest is image alchemist Stephen Elcock who talks about the book as exhibition, his passion for cuttings collages and images when he was a child and of course his new book Elements published by Thames & Hudson and available in bookshops worldwide.
Social Media Influence
00:00:54
Speaker
You probably know him from Facebook first and now from Instagram where he has more than half a million followers and devotees and where he posts sequences of images associated in the way that makes them sing to the senses and tickle our brains.
Unique Recording Experience
00:01:10
Speaker
a few notes about the sound. You may notice that it is different. This is because we recorded the episode in person for the first time and we're still playing with technology, figuring it out as we go. So this is all the better to entertain you and create an exciting, genuine, heartfelt and engaging episode. Also, we hope, without further ado, here we go.
Podcast's Virtual Exhibition Goal
00:01:45
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another special episode of exhibitionistas, the podcast where we visit exhibitions so that you have to or so that you experience them vicariously through us. This time we have our second guest on the podcast, the one and only Stephen Elcock.
00:02:04
Speaker
Yes, that's Steven Elcock, the one with the books. Yes, those books that make you wonder, dream, hope, escape and return to reality with a sparkle in your eye.
Exploring 'Elements': Alchemy and Science
00:02:19
Speaker
We invited Steven because he has a new book dedicated to the elements, a framing that seems quite scientific, although, as one might expect, alchemy mystery and myth will take over along with the impulse to better understand the universe. For us, it's a way to dedicate an episode to another kind of exhibition that can be more accessible to our listeners outside of London and the UK. But most of all, it is the pleasure of talking to Stephen and to bring some of his insights to you. So Stephen, thank you so much for being here.
00:02:55
Speaker
Well, thank you for inviting me. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you for that generous introduction, those kind words. Thank you. Ah, my pleasure. My pleasure. So I'll just briefly introduce you, if that's OK, to those listeners who may be living under a rock and not know
Career Shift from Music to Books
00:03:11
Speaker
you. So, um Stephen, you were a touring musician in the 80s and early 90s, but experienced the dissolution with the music industry, right? If my memory serves.
00:03:23
Speaker
That just about sums it up. Yes, that does. Yes, that's a good summary. Okay, let's not linger. Not linger, no. Let's not. Let's not dwell too long on that. So you started another career until you had a terrible breakdown that took you down a very dark path. Yes. Which culminated into a life-threatening disease, in fact, an undiagnosed pneumonia, which led you to being housebound, bedridden and quite unwell.
00:03:52
Speaker
and quite unwell for some time. Yes, I did. It was it was a culmination of some rather irresponsible, a several years irresponsible behaviour and some cumulative effect of sort of self-destructive impulses aligned with um sort of addictions and things. so And and it inevitably I crashed and burned after a few years. A sort of very irresponsible and self-destructive path.
00:04:20
Speaker
Yeah, which, you know, happens to so many of us, you know, it's such a human thing
The Facebook Transformation
00:04:24
Speaker
to go through. And it is also really human to have a sister who actually, as you were in your home bedridden, so luckily, Stephen's sister, luckily for you, but also for us, she um actually convinced you to open a Facebook account. My sister in alliance with some friends of hers and a couple of other people, they realised I was fairly isolated at the time and I didn't really have and i didn't really have much much access to the out the outer world. um And it was this this was in the infancy of Facebook when it still was quite
00:05:06
Speaker
genuinely groundbreaking and almost utopian and i resisted i resisted for ages it was the same well you should join every people on there you know and you know it's amazing amazing potential and blah blah blah and i didn't even have i didn't own a computer or but like a desktop or even a laptop i had a very very antiquated
00:05:29
Speaker
Secondhand, I believe, mobile phone, which is like a kind of prototype Blackberry thing that just that just didn't really work. And I remember, yeah, it didn't really work. So I had very little internet access at home.
00:05:45
Speaker
And I remember that that very phone, i remember taking I was living in Peckham at the time, and when it ceased to work, i took I remember taking it to a couple of phone shots on Peckham High Street, those sort of people, and the look of horror.
00:06:00
Speaker
and both played the part, what the hell is this? It's like some ancient artifact. so so And then when i when I was actually able to, so I did join, I signed up to Facebook, and so I spent i subsequently spent, I became quite obsessed with it. And when I was able to sort of you know maybe be well enough to leave the house and things, with my flat and things, I spent an inordinate amount of time in internet can spend a lot of money in the internet cafes of Peckham. I used to communicate with people in internet cafes. Really? Yeah, and I did have a job at the time, but I was off work for several months because I was I'm so ill. yeah And so I didn't really so and and so in that period where I could sort of nip down the road and live in an internet cafe, I'm basically building up my Facebook account
00:06:46
Speaker
And then that continued when i when I returned to work. I um spent but ah but most of my most of my time in the job I had at at that that point in in publishing. I wasn't in um sort sort of office space, but I did have a sort of office desk. so And I did spend far too much time. Well, actually, no, it was beneficial for me, but I spent a company time. They basically paid for me to be set up a Facebook account.
00:07:15
Speaker
Listen, thank you. Thank you, ex-employer, who we won't name, of Stevens. No, don't make, but they'll know who they are. But i did they did get their revenge in the end because they made me redundant. Well, you know, sometimes redundancy, which has happened to me as well, can kind of save your life.
Curating Online Exhibitions
00:07:34
Speaker
And um I must say that the way I see what you started doing at the time was that you started curating an exhibition online and you gathered followers and you built a community of people of now more than half a million people on Instagram. And I heard you say that, you know, as a joke that Mark Zuckerberg saved your life. It transformed my life. And I hate to, you know, if sometimes now, given given to all that's happened in the intervening years,
00:08:05
Speaker
it does now feel a bit like a sort of a Faustian pact that I've sort of almost sold my soul to the devil um in an incontrovertible fact that I do ah that this that what I do now I probably wouldn't I would not be doing this now I don't think without had it been based and on so and social media. Of course, of course. But I would also say that, you know, images seem to have saved your life, or more specifically, the flow of visual philosophy and the connection with living and long gone artists and creatives.
00:08:42
Speaker
you know I think that's really kind of the thing that really connects us to you and lots of people that have claimed to have been healed by your images and the flow of images and the very careful curation, which takes us to this
Publishing 'Elements': A Global Reach
00:09:00
Speaker
book. So you've just published a book called Elements.
00:09:04
Speaker
ah subtitle Chaos, Order and the Five Elemental Forces published by Thames & Hudson and it's in bookshops now I think. There are several editions, it's it's just been published it's published um a couple of weeks ago, this is beginning of December, so it's published a couple of weeks ago in America, the numerically US edition and it's there are French, German, Italian editions and theoretically it should be available worldwide.
00:09:30
Speaker
That's amazing, because we have listeners all over the world. So go ahead, go to your bookshops and have a look at this book and buy it if you can, because it is quite, I mean, it doesn't differ too much from, you know, the cosmic dance so or did you have a new approach to this one? Well, um this is actually, elements is actually the culmination of what was what was but what was initially and designed as a trilogy.
00:09:57
Speaker
so that So it is the third, it is the the culminating, but it's kind of a full stop. It's like an end of end of the end of a phase.
Trilogy of Human Imagination
00:10:05
Speaker
um So when I when i initially he was talking to James and Hudson, we thought I wanted to do, wanted to create a series of books that created a a kind of visual map of both the human imagination and the universe, which is the most but ludicrously ambitious aim. Elements follows on from the previous two volumes. The first volume was Cosmic Dance, which was released a couple of years ago, and they're followed by Underworlds, which was published last year.
00:10:38
Speaker
and it is deliberately designed and as ah as an all as um as a map of the universe. That was kind of ah the culmination of everything that felt like ah kind of um the natural the natural end point, the natural culmination of everything I've been doing on Facebook and Instagram. It was based on all things cosmological, on, and it was designed as ah as a, and I hate to use the word journey because people deb abuse that word as possible. A journey and curator are two of the most abused, poor, abused words. I am a curator, how do you mean that? I know people, you people describing themselves as curators. We'll talk about that, we'll talk
Themes of Previous Books
00:11:20
Speaker
about that, yes. um
00:11:22
Speaker
obviously genuine curators and real curators. as Cosmic dance was are designed as a journey from the from micro to the macro. So from yeah the smallest unit, infinitesimally small to the incomprehensibly vast. underworlds was was then it was everything that was underneath, underpinned, everything that was subterranean, everything that was subconscious, whether it be whether it be physical or geological underworlds, or whether it be psychological or fantastic underworlds. And then there was some, we did have some deliberate deliberated and discussed
00:12:02
Speaker
what form the the final volume would be. But it quickly came to a consensus, myself and editors, that elements was really it seemed like a really elegant way of rounding things off, because the elements are basically the stuff that holds everything together. So it's the they are the glue of, if you like, if they the thing the glue of the cosmos. And also they the elements are essentially a way of explaining the chaos of existence. of So it felt like a way of stitching everything together and really finding a way out of chaos. I would love to read the final two paragraphs of the preface cool yes because you frame it in a way that is most
00:12:48
Speaker
um encouraging and at the same time realistic and contemporary so you write and sorry to throw your own words at you but it's such a beautiful preface so quote the perpetually traumatized planet on which we are currently marooned is a world that is seriously out of balance a world in the grip of an apparent death wish Trapped in a feedback loop of doom, the ultimate lost cause. Every day we witness multiple unfolding catastrophes, a slow motion apocalypse. Watching in mute horror or black in blank indifference as everything degenerates. Most of us feel disorientated, disenchanted,
Personal and Universal Breakdown
00:13:34
Speaker
alienated from the rhythms of the dying world around us. Our connection with every living thing
00:13:41
Speaker
Brutally severed. unquote So this paragraph is incredible because um I somehow connected your personal breakdown with your very, very high sensitivity to the idea of the breakdown of the universe. And I thought it was so beautiful to see that here. And but did you feel that when when you choose your images, is it a subjective perspective? how How do you go about doing that?
00:14:12
Speaker
It's intuitive. It's difficult for me to articulate exactly why certain images appeal to me. It's a kind of, it's both, it's an abliminal level, but it's also a visceral level. It's something, there is something that will suddenly appeal to me. like So um it's not something that I can easily explain verbally, that that that I just know that image, if I come across images, I just know that they're right. Whether it be for a book or whether it be for, um whether ah whether whether it be for ah social media. The key to um how i how I put books together is is the is finding correspondences between different images and finding affinities and trying to find the best sequencing of them and putting images in ju juxtaposing with one another but one another to give meaning, so to do each reflect on and on the other. um and And that is the most time-consuming
00:15:08
Speaker
time-consuming process. i would if If I could, it's as most eager as of considering the the paragraph and and complete contradiction of the paragraph you've just read, if i if i if I felt I could get away with it and it wasn't such wanton destruction of scarce resources, I would happily, I'd love to have a vast warehouse and have and print out every single image i'd like considering a book and and just make a great plot and spend ages shifting them round. Because I don't have much and sophisticated programs or anything at home, so it was all in my head, the kind of working out sequences. and You know, in Paris, at the Palais de Tocquieu, this academic ah historian called Georges Didi-Uberman, he curated an exhibition at the Palais de Tocquieu where you had images projected on the on the on the on the floor of the museum and you entered this very dark room
00:16:04
Speaker
And you could see lots of images. And when you say that, I imagine you printing them and putting them on the floor and just walking around like sit like like citizen Kane, you know, in the film and just kind of looking at your image, shifting them around. That's the quickest route to another breakdown, I think.
00:16:27
Speaker
and because also that that me I to be outward looking. That sounds like I'm completely obsessed with with my own process, but i try it but everything I try and do and everything that ah that that's a key a key to to the images, I want them to reflect on They have to reflect both on um
Intuitive Image Curation
00:16:48
Speaker
ah on on the current world. ah I am commenting on the world and the current events. I am. whether people Whether people intuit that and discern that, whether whether that's overt or whether it's hidden. But I am. Everything to me has a social purpose, everything that I do. it's not i'm not just putting together I don't feel what I'm doing is putting together pretty images and a succession of beautiful images, just purely to enchant people and delight people. It's a communication device that is quite incredible because you are saying things across the book and it's really incredible to go over these images and to really start thinking and connecting through these images to so many things that you can think about the world and also to the undoing.
00:17:42
Speaker
of the world which is you know something that that's where my question was headed with this idea of the connection with the universe you know this idea of the breakdown and the chaos and then this idea that images are kind of an interface between possible worlds i think we are all fascinated with your brain steven that's the thing and that room that you you that you describe for me is your brain i can see that you have It's like an infinite library. It's the sort of the idea of an infinite archive. It's the an infinite number of chambers and rooms and things. I still try to be
Memory and Image Processing
00:18:19
Speaker
grounded, though. I don't try and I deliberately try and orient orientate myself. So I'm not lost in in that fantastic world. I try to be grounded and be and engage with the world. But the the thing that I find really fascinating is that I'm a fantastic, so I don't visualize things in my brain. And that's why I'm so fascinated with your project, your project because I think you do, don't you? Yes, I do. yeah And I'm really interested in knowing to what extent do you remember images? And when you get them and you get the image you're thinking about, are you surprised or is it exactly can you remember exactly the images as they are?
00:18:58
Speaker
uh... no i can't no actually i can't remember that group and and and it is that i can still look through the it is may sound implausible but i can look through this book or like previous books and i and i tend to think that i tend to look forward all the time my brain is all i'm always thinking two projects ahead so it's like this is that to me this is done and so i'm thinking about other things but uh... obviously for for for for sort of purposes of like an occasion like this and interviews like this and I have to and doing um public appearances I have to revisit the book and it it amazes me every time I look through this or other books that I didn't spot I didn't notice that before I will spot things in the images and I will spot things that um I didn't that when I that
00:19:47
Speaker
Actually, I'd spot details and think, well, that's why I decided to put that image next to that one. So and um ask it would be like in retrospect, there would be sometimes it will just be a shape or a pattern or some little incident or some little minor detail. I think, oh, actually that.
00:20:04
Speaker
That's why. There's a huge amount of thought put into it, but then I like to think that that that people can get, it's not just a book that you just flick through, and or my books are not just books you can just flick through, and they're disposable, and they're pretty coffee table books. I like to think that people can revisit them again and again, and and also they're a deliberate, I suppose that that the um the contemporary term for it is like Easter eggs, where you like things hidden in films and games. yeah where there were things there were there were there were images throughout the book there were there there were there were that the refer to book that the images earlier in the book or later in the book. So there were things that aren in there there are multiple pathways through the book.
00:20:48
Speaker
So to emphasize the importance that you attribute to the connection with the world, um do you mind if I read the last paragraph? No, great, Okay, so it's just to give our listeners like a real idea of this book.
00:21:03
Speaker
and the intent behind it. so you So after having written about this idea of a traumatized planet, the final paragraph says, quote only by recognizing that we are subject to the same elemental forces that control all creation And by learning to live in harmony with these forces, can we reestablish our relationship with a natural world, recover balance and equilibrium and avert blooming disaster? Our future welfare and probably our very survival depends upon our next move. Let's remember our place in the universe and try not to fall flat on our faces. And I i love this this kind of like harshness at the end, where you're like, let's get real. actually I'm going to be I'm going to be completely honest here now and I published it is that that is actually um that that's not that the final sentence uh was more extreme than that but I was it was it was considered to be too extreme my original paragraph so I had I did rewrite it they're very good they don't they don't tend to interfere at all very much at all but in this instance they I think they felt I was
00:22:16
Speaker
Maybe a bit too prescriptive and a bit too harsh. It is redacted and slightly bold, so the the language was bit slightly more explicit. I sort of sensed it. So this is really to say how important it is for you to really um communicate the power of images in that sense and that you you really feel it in a situation where you go back thousands and thousands of years. These images are across times. they You have the past speaking with the present, speaking with different times in the history of humanity. And it it's really beautiful to see that you make it
00:23:00
Speaker
kind of tunnel towards um something that is so contemporary and that it has been a question for so long but has become so prevalent now. But now I have another question that has nothing to do with this. I would love to know more about you and I'd love to know more about you as a child. Were you interested in art? Were you a bookish person? How did you visit exhibitions? how how did you what What was your relationship to art and visual art? I guess that I've always been a very bookish child and not quite introverted, I suppose, not not not solitary not solitary. I have a bunch of friends and things, but
00:23:45
Speaker
I tended to have sort of maybe one or two close friends rather than a large group of friends, but I was always immersed in books. um um Something that has always frustrated me, and maybe this is this is kind of a sort of displacement, this kind of collecting of images is a kind of displacement activity replacement, I was always frustrated, that um I was terrible, but actual art as a drawing painting things i yeah had i had i had I had very active imagination and there were things I wanted to, but even as a very young child, I wanted to draw and I wanted to paint and I just could not do them. And that was a great so source of great frustration and he and and went and and even when I was older.
00:24:33
Speaker
continued. I think that my imagination but was both verbal and visual and I used to i did use to collect images as a child and I used to vandalise and and cut up and destroy I mean this is this is a polling van this is some of this is a polling cultural van yes I used to cut up books I used to destroy books but more that but I used to sort of cut up in magazines and things like mail order cat my mum's mail order catalogs and I used to cut up comics and
00:25:09
Speaker
and just yeah I had actually accumulated. I ended up accumulating but the cat they were in boxes and carrier bags, thousands and thousands of images. which i which i sometimes would but What did you do with them? I create sometimes created collages, but more often i I just had them and I used to look at them and arrange them and that was it and then sort of put them in different sort of sift them around. I was completely obsessed with this, something I'd maybe do regret, which I should never done, although I'd never retained them.
00:25:43
Speaker
is that I had i had like incredibly, what would be now, priceless collection of things like old Marvel comics from like the sixties and things. Did you not cut them? Things that are now worth, and then it's not an exaggeration, thousands if not hundreds of pounds. They're so expensive, absolutely. I know, early, you know, early Spider-Man, Silver Surfer, fantastic. Early issues of those things that I just cut up and had and things like that. I could have retired years ago if I was somehow managed to keep those. And how about museums? Where did you grow up by the way? I you i i was born in i was born in Essex but my ah my because of my dad's job and moved around quite a lot, all in all in the UK though. ah So most of my but most of the so places like North, provincial places like Northampton and Litchfield in Staffordshire and Birmingham then places,
00:26:41
Speaker
I didn't really my my ah my parents were very good in terms of um sort of take the use to visit lots of and stately homes, castles, places like that and and but not really art museums, things like Natural History Museum or Science Museum in places, but not really. I think the first time that I ever went to, for example, the National Gallery was probably not until I went on my own.
00:27:14
Speaker
and But were you attracted to museums and contemporary art and art in general? ah but thick But also like appreciation of architecture and and but also i was I was obsessed with the sort of books that I was always immersed in books I was obsessed with but with a lot of fiction and things but I was also really obsessed with illustrated books in particular It was old encyclopedias, like my maternal grandfather had, who had quite a modest life. He was basically an agricultural laborer all his life, but he was one of those people.
00:27:55
Speaker
quite small, but a small library of like reference books and things. And these were absolutely fascinating, illustrated encyclopedias of natural history and science and technology that were, I suppose, published in the 1930s and 40s.
00:28:11
Speaker
and also this incredible multi-volume thing, it was I think it was called The History of the Peoples of the World, which were kind of which now would probably be incredibly offensive. They were they they were sort of produced probably in the 20s or 30s, so it was photographs of photograph ah every that that people from every indigenous people but this fact is fascinating but also as well as the photographs of the people and then and then and then where they lived it did feature like their artifact it may have been framed in a sort of imperialist and colonialist way but the images of that that to me i was absolutely fascinated so it's so interesting because it seems like
00:28:51
Speaker
The books led you to museums, but your first love was books, fiction.
Bookish Upbringing and Poetry
00:28:58
Speaker
Did you write? um I feel embarrassed whenever I do because... I would be good when i'm going I was a teenager I was I was sort of like a I used to write and I know everybody does this and it sounds like said the most appalling cliche but I did used to I wrote poetry and I thought I would end up being a poet and I was sort of being pushed towards that because when I went by your teachers or your parents by teachers and but ah yeah not by my parents by teachers and um
00:29:28
Speaker
I won competitions and things. That doesn't sound like a glitch. It sounds like a real career. Yeah, it was a real like a real career. And and like when um when I was still at school, there were like there was um ah documentaries about my poetry, like this teenage prodigy poet. And I assume that's what I would do.
00:29:48
Speaker
um now ah Now if I look back at that, it's horrendous. Maybe you should, because i mean ah in your so the are really interesting because i mean elements also correspond to this structure where you have an introduction about each section, so about each element in this case.
00:30:08
Speaker
and then you have really interesting quotes from all kinds of literature and from everything and including like um text science textbooks and things there's lots of things in here maybe in future books you can kind of like put some of your poetry well no i'm not putting it like that um i i actually i did there was for my second book um the book of change which was a bit of an orphan because it's not quite finished i had a sound like i'm most accident prone to but i did have quite a nasty accident we're doing it and it's doing also during covid.
00:30:46
Speaker
um So it's not and it's not quite finished and it's not quite perfect, but it's a sort but I regard it as a bit of a sort of unfinished and potentially my masterpiece. if i Oh God, I said masterpiece. It's potentially but my best book, but it's not quite finished. I did for the introduction of that, which i because I had an accident where I smashed my arm. I had to write the introduction again in bed.
00:31:12
Speaker
um using my phone because I couldn't type and and it's typed with just my thumb. And I did incorporate some of my poetry and I took it out before it was published. No. Why did you do that? I was slightly embarrassed.
00:31:28
Speaker
it didn't It seemed incongruous with the prose around it. It didn't quite work. I'm sure it will come back. So I was trying to frame, because of course our name is exhibitionist, and I was trying to frame this idea and and your interview in the sense that a book can be an exhibition.
Books as Exhibitions
00:31:48
Speaker
So I wonder if that's something that has brought up to you has been brought up to you, that if you think like that, or if there's a very, very crucial difference that kind of maybe undermines that idea.
00:32:03
Speaker
and that it's an exhibition. Yes. I think it is. I think it is. That's how i that's how i how i try how I try and frame it to myself and how I try and envisage it when I'm putting it together. And I do, and i do as I mentioned, that the thought the thought of having all the images and putting and putting them out on the floor. I also envisage them as or so at least certain sections of most books as as if they were on gallery walls.
00:32:29
Speaker
Yeah, because when you describe that, for me, that's the way a curator thinks. You know, you think of the images together, you think of relationships between the images. And I was even trying to look at them and thinking, oh, there's a lot of approaches through color, for example. yeah But then there's a lot of structural approaches. The image is structured in the same way and conveys a similar ah kind of not same message, but like a theme or approach. And then there's relationships between very different things. And and you can see that the the the way they're articulated together is much more is much deeper. And it's not only on the visual sense or kind of takes the visual to another realm completely. And that's where you know it kind of takes off and it's quite an incredible experience to leave through the book.
00:33:19
Speaker
because the associations are not basic you know they're not like they're really incredible connections so I was really kind of thinking about this idea of exhibition but then there's something that as a curator myself um is really funny because when I read the the captions of the images there's the title there's the date and there's the author or the artist but you don't have size or materials that's not that That's not my decision. that thats that is I see. yeah that's That's the house style of Thames and Hudson. Because I must say that um I have kind of a very similar experience to you when I was a kid. And being from Lisbon, from Portugal, obviously lots of those masterpieces that are in, you know, encyclopedias, you know, though they're in books. You don't have access to them. And I remember the first time I saw a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.
00:34:19
Speaker
so small and it changed the way I related to it because I thought it's a much more cerebral relationship, the landscape yeah than what I thought because it's so small and for me the dimensions and I keep thinking, oh my God, how big is this? What is it made of? And I'm really curious about that. And I'm interested to know that you're curious about that. And I always, so so so so on as far as so on social, if I post on Facebook or Instagram,
00:34:50
Speaker
i will always post that i I will always try and post the attributions and all the dimensions and media and things, where it's available. Sometimes it's not always available, or I don't have time to do spend hours and hours researching. But I know that's important. I know that's important. I know it's important both to the people that create it. It's out of respect to the artists, illustrators, the photographers.
00:35:16
Speaker
but um I think it's also important to think people appreciate that people who view it and it's important to me but it is i think i think it's because i'm a book of these this these kind of dimensions that if you put too much on that and it then it clutters the desire sort of clarity and.
00:35:34
Speaker
and cleanness of design. If I had my way, they would maybe, if you if it was if if if that was a concern, then I would have a dendum at the back with full credit. But that takes me to a deeper question, which is the status of images, which I find really interesting because ah you and I have a very similar experience of connecting with art through books.
00:36:00
Speaker
Yes. And it's a very, I think, common experience to a lot of people. And suddenly these very material things become images and become something else. And I'm really interested in that because in the curating world, it's kind of anathema. You kind of think, no, you have to respect the the work and what you do here. You know, for example, exhibition catalogs is really kind of shocking. Like you have to really carefully think about the scale and about materials.
00:36:30
Speaker
But at the same time, once you've absorbed the work or you've seen the work published, it still exists for you in some way. And that's the thing that I find really interesting with your projects. Suddenly, you're in another realm and you're in a different relationship with these images.
Respecting Creators and Forgotten Art
00:36:48
Speaker
um Can you talk a little bit about that?
00:36:51
Speaker
um I'm not sure. Yeah, it's I don't know. I think that I But I try and respect all the images. i do There are certain things where, and and I try and, but and and and i try and and i I do try to put myself into the mind but the mind of the person of the creator of these of all the images. But I do, and I don't, and I'm not um egotistical enough to think I give images new life, and although maybe in some cases where they are
00:37:31
Speaker
drawn from maybe illustrations from old encyclopedias or textbooks or 19th century illustrations or children's book illustrations. i may we do I'm giving them new life because have they the the they may be obscure or on all or now or currently aren or people that have been forgotten or unknown um and I hope that gives them new life and putting them in in in in juxtaposition with yeah better-known things. And I do think that they they images do take on a different life in a book than they do ah on on a wall or in or in a gallery. Yeah, let's say it, because I think the other the the the reverse is true as well, where suddenly you have a painting by Paul Nash, for example. yeah
00:38:20
Speaker
in relation with ah a detail of an illustration of an encyclopedia. To be honest, I don't know exactly what a page I'm talking about. And if it's true, it's Paul Nash or someone else. But it does also give a different kind of life to Paul Nash's painting. You have on page 219, an incredible um talismanic shirt.
00:38:45
Speaker
yeah with the whole Quran written inside which is already I think in the book it has that existence where you can't see it but you know it's there
Spiritual and Magical Dimensions in Art
00:38:55
Speaker
and then you have um the Paul Nash painting. Yeah so the sunflower.
00:39:02
Speaker
which is absolutely incredible in terms of relation because the the front of the talismanic shirt um has a sort of astral decoration, right? yeah um So it really is this ability for this specific medium to bring these images to So that's really incredible that you're touching upon that because there is now we're going through a phase some of us in the art world where we're looking at a very dry dogmatic history of abstraction for example of modernism for for example
00:39:42
Speaker
um and kind of detecting um all the spiritualism that went into it, all the power that was attributed to images that kind of was drained out of it in some cases. Even Mondrian was interested in Theosophy, for example, um and that has been somewhat hidden to us you know in our history, and you're kind of bringing that up again.
00:40:07
Speaker
that's hugely important to me. Spiritual dimensions, all the supernatural, magical dimensions and of art, i think i think we i think they ri I think they're hugely important. And I think that um we can i think in in the world that we inhabit, which is so gri it's so grim, and vo no there's no denying the fact that, you know, if you if you think objectively and you really look rationally about the world. It's absolutely terrifying. we We aren't living in miserable and very quite and and scary tumultuous times. And I do think that without being that without adhering to any kind of necessary a spiritual or religious belief system,
00:40:57
Speaker
the the The way that you can connect with the planet is via the spiritual strands, in whether not just but whether it be in art or whether it be in literature or poetry or cinema or music and anything or photography or fashioning. That's really important and that's not wishy-washy and it's not insipid.
00:41:17
Speaker
and and And it should be allied with a sort of pragmatic approach.
Art's Spiritual Connection to Global Issues
00:41:21
Speaker
I think there's a way, I think if if you're go if you're going to address things like climate breakdown and and and and the the kind of the the obvious implosion of Western hegemony, then you then to have a sort of of a feeling of a connection with a greater something greater than yourself,
00:41:43
Speaker
and that research which just doesn't have to be a a supernatural being but can be with with other people and with the people around the planet. That is the that is the way forward and that's the we have to establish those connections with people and I don't care if if that sounds hopelessly utopian and because I think that is the only way ah the only way forward because we're otherwise we're being let we're being driven off a cliff.
Diverse Cultures in Books
00:42:04
Speaker
I knew your book through an artist and the way they described the books was everything coming together and looking across the world of things that we have formerly in common. yes
00:42:18
Speaker
And I thought, that's terrifying to me because I love difference. I don't like the idea of sameness. It's great to change your mind, you know, and it's great to learn with other people yeah because I've changed my mind completely because your books are not about sameness. They're about these small connections that could be aligned, you know, say, worshipping the sun, for example.
00:42:41
Speaker
the Mayans did not worship the sun in the same way some other indigenous population did in the pacific islands and maybe this idea the connection that they have is that relationship to the sun but then there's a lot of difference yeah and i think your books respect that a lot that to me that that that is so important with with what i do is to try and represent as many different cultures and as many different traditions and as many different diverse ideas and and and and philosophical concepts as possible and it's not always easy to find to be truly representative and truly inclusive but it's actually becoming
00:43:26
Speaker
It's becoming, well, it was becoming easier, but until of big there were there were certain great certain a certain um corporations who are now making it more difficult to find things, because they're dependent actually on advertising, but it is becoming more it is becoming easier to find images from different sources.
Accessing Diverse Art in Western Institutions
00:43:44
Speaker
It's still ah frustrating to me that, for example, if I were, that it's still difficult to find, for example, a lot of African are online accessible.
00:43:57
Speaker
partly because it hasn't been digitized and it's not easily scanned and and don't have that and and it and it is also frustrating to me that there's a lot of indigenous art not just from Africa but maybe from Oceania or from the Pacific and and South America. A lot of the things you're constantly directed to American or European museums. If I want to use African art it's really disturbing for me that And then stuff that's been stolen by a Met, you know, it's in the Met or the British Museum or the Kunst Historical Museum in Vienna. But and that's the thing that that that's accessible to a non-expert like me, um and who doesn't have actually privileged access.
00:44:43
Speaker
But nevertheless, I hope that the fact that people may spot that those things are in European or American museums, that that makes people question what they're doing. yeah And obviously they don't see d ah deaccessioning and the whole thing of decolonizing the collective collections of ah for European and American.
00:45:03
Speaker
is hugely, institutions is hugely important and restitution and given due recognition to them the the people that created those things. But now shifting perspectives, what is your element? My element? Because there's five, right? There's water, fire,
00:45:23
Speaker
and ether. I would, if I say ether that's going to sound incredibly pretentious and self-regarding I think. Why? Why? I don't know, it makes it like I live on a, I'm not airy fairy and sort of above that I consider myself unworlded. I am perhaps slightly unworldly, but I do i do also have quite a but ah quiet ah down-to-earth nature and about certain and approach to certain things. But I do, possibly, I think fire maybe as well, which maybe be which may be slightly surprising, but um um um I'm incredibly
00:46:01
Speaker
driven and passionate about things and obsessive about things. But Easter as well, because I do think that because easter was the most east that actually do the chapter on Easter was the most challenging to compile, but also possibly the most interesting and satisfying because I could publish several volumes of images of water and fire but ey present what how do you represent ether? Because the ether is basically spirit, it's the stuff that holds everything together, it's it's thought forms, it's thought processes, it's it's basically it's inexplicable, it's something deliberately. must it So I had to think
00:46:41
Speaker
I had to think in creative ways of finding images that which to represent that. That wasn't, that weren't just sort of, although the chapter does include a sort of Victorian ghost and the great artists who, but but who who the channeled spirits like the Hilmarath Clint or Georgiana Howe and Emma Kuntz. I wanted to include other things as well that made, it to me, represented Listen, yeah I'm so happy you say that because that was going to be one the focus of one of my questions because I reread and relief and leaf through again the chapter on ether because I find it the most moving one and I'm really interested in the fact that the first full blown page image is Paul Clay's Dons of the Moth
00:47:38
Speaker
I was so surprised the first time I saw it. I thought, oh, why why is this painting here? And then, as you said before, you go back and you think, huh. okay and i find it really moving this chapter because ether represents at the end of the day and as far as i've gone in the book because as you say this book will accompany you and all your other books through your life it for me it represents the um obsessive
00:48:10
Speaker
almost hubris-like drive to know the universe and to look for answers and to look for a primordial thing that links everything together like a sort of ectoplasm that comes from the ears of people because in the other elements there's this really annoying thing of ah antiquity which is always the hierarchy which one is the best one which one is the creative one this is the way of bursting through that and transcending that, yeah but transcending hierarchy and transcending yeah fix transcending a fixed system. Yes, exactly. And it's absolutely difficult to tell what it is and your attempt to illustrate it and give us several answers in correspondence to the introductory texts that kind of gives a sort of overview of the different approaches to this notion.
Upcoming Book on Flora and Fauna
00:49:07
Speaker
is really, really incredible and it's so inspiring. It's really, absolutely remarkable. Like you have Paul Klee and Max Ernst, but then you have real images, scientific images. There were things like the the Russian bone music. but It's an x-ray that has been transformed into a record, a vinyl, or not vinyl, because it's not an x-ray.
00:49:32
Speaker
And this was, I found out about these completely by accident. Somebody interviewed me, ah like Stephen Coates, who does a program on Soho Radio. And he interviewed me about underworlds and then we started talking about general things and he mentioned these.
00:49:50
Speaker
and he has a whole website full of them. What these are, what what these are artefacts from Stalinist Russia and then sort of slightly later Khrushchev and Kosygin, where Western popular culture was prescribed and considered and and one was banned basically in in the Soviet Union.
00:50:12
Speaker
And so there was a huge underground scene where people would smuggle ah records ah it in into into into Russia and throughout Eastern Europe but of post Second World War.
00:50:27
Speaker
In particular, there was a huge appetite for jazz, particularly sort of modernist bebop jazz post-Second World War. and it this was This was a mark of rebellion, so there would there would be this underground where people would smuggle records in and they would be distributed widely, and people would but would they have underground clubs.
00:50:49
Speaker
But it this was highly dangerous, particularly in Stalin's era. for the Before the Second World War, there were records were smuggled in, particularly from from Europe and and and the States. But after Second World War, there was a terrible was this was complicated by the fact that there was complete shortage. There was no acetate.
00:51:09
Speaker
So people could not, they worked out how to, so what they they would reverse engineer record, they had cutting plant, sort of underground cutting plants where they would cut, but where they would but basically bootleg, fit with them, put them in and but covers and sell and distribute them throughout Soviet Union.
00:51:24
Speaker
um After the war, there was no they they couldn't get hold of acetates. There was nothing to make records from until somebody worked out that x-rays are basically acetates. And they and they tested it by and and they tested using x-rays and cutting records on them. And it worked.
00:51:43
Speaker
and so there became this thriving scene where people would they they did do deals with hospitals where they were discarded x-rays and they would they would actually break in and they would steal x-rays and then create records out of them. And this happened this lasted,
00:52:07
Speaker
ah until this from this is essentially, from the immediate post-Second World War till about 1965. So the the image that's in the book is is basically of a it's it's an-ray of somebody's neck, and I think it's and a broken neck.
00:52:23
Speaker
that has been transformed. This, I believe, is a Charlie Parker 78. The fidelity is not wonderful, but it sort of peters out, um sort of about 1965. But there are things like the early Beatles albums and Bob Dylan things that are on X, pressed on X-ray. X-rays of people's sort of tumors or the fractured legs, which are basically like a hard day's night or with the Beatles or It's just most extraordinary and they the kind of the the the ingenuity and the hum that just to just to do this is just extraordinary. And some of them are um ah just incredibly beautiful artifacts just to look at. It's so tragic at the same time because it's disease, you know, it's ill bodies trying to and bring music and joy to people and art in a very authoritarian
00:53:16
Speaker
context. It's so incredible. Do you find yourself more drawn to images when they have a history behind them? um Or do you have drawn to specific kinds of images? Do you notice a pattern in in your... I don't think no. i They don't necessarily have to have, they can be just a purely beautiful image and just pure abstract that maybe doesn't have any, that just appeals to me on a purely emotional or aesthetic level. I can plug your Instagram account, it's quite interesting because sometimes something happens, I go on Instagram and I see one of your images and I see tongue-in-cheek reaction to, you know, things that happen worldwide and... an oblique relationship with a sort of commenting oblique. Yeah, I do that, yeah. Most people probably don't get it, and that's perfectly, that's absolutely fine, I don't expect, but because it appeals to me. I do it for my own benefit primarily, but I hope that people see that I'm commenting on.
00:54:24
Speaker
current event. Sometimes that gets me into a lot of trouble but we won't. but it's um I think it brings connectivity and a sort of solace because at the moment we have such a hard time talking about what's going on for fear of are depressing the person in front of us or you know bringing even more sadness into people's lives so sometimes we try not to bring too much you know these subjects that are you know really worrying us and seeing images online that kind of hint at that situation and just they make you feel less alone in this
00:55:03
Speaker
collective sadness or worry or you know despondency that sometimes you can fall into so it really is there's a ah power of images that I think I don't know if you agree with this but sometimes I see images as if they're lying dormant and someone comes and wakes them wakes them up Yes, I do agree with that. Allied to that, there is there are images that may be very familiar, that have a different meaning and can be mined and used. It's interesting because we're talking on the very day, hopefully the last day, that
00:55:41
Speaker
storm dara is hitting the uk and i did notice jeff walls a sudden gust of wind after hokusai and i looked at it in a completely different way because i've always so this is an image of four men the fourth of which on the far left side is sort of scattering documents and papers that are flying about there's kind of a a tree that's also kind of bent by the wind And I've always focused on the foreground. I've always focused on the four men. And today I was looking at it and I was looking at the background and looking at the weird choice of background that seems so much of um kind of
00:56:28
Speaker
ah Urban, or near you know those those landscapes in the outskirts of cities? It's a fashionable way, it's liminal spaces, but also a sort of wasteland. There's something very apocalyptic about this image. Absolutely, and I had never seen it like that. I always saw it as a sort of prowess.
00:56:46
Speaker
of staged photography that's supposed not to look staged and all this discourse that was always surrounding Jeff Wall images for me, you know. um And then today I had a completely different relation to it and I focused much more on this background. I mean, it looks like a um still from about it a movie like The Road or something like that.
00:57:15
Speaker
and I think it's an extraordinary part. Again, this is but a very familiar image and an image that people that are over the last 20 or so, 30 years, I guess it is now. People have been familiar with, but I think it would praise constant, they there are depths to it. so Yes. yeah you said as you As you quickly pointed out.
00:57:36
Speaker
um And I was looking at it for not doing it for putting together like a PowerPoint presentation for talks. I look i was comparing it to to the actual hockey side, how he's kind yeah really clever way that he references it and and um and subverts it. But also, ah I also found a lot of the preparatory work and all the, because it was a product of, it's basically con arts, a product of a couple of years work and planning and just some of his preparatory piece, perhaps works and sketches and basically collage is putting things together to see individual small photographs to create what is basically a large, it's essentially a collage rather than, it's just extraordinary the process that's gone into this and the thought and I like to, yeah I think it's one of the most powerful images of the last 50 years.
00:58:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's incredibly powerful. And like you say, you know, it keeps changing and the relation to it keeps changing. And what's left for me, but to ask you, what would your dream exhibition be? Would it be in space? In a museum? Would it be in a book? Is it your next book? What what would your dream exhibition be? A film.
00:58:51
Speaker
Film or theatre, I think. That sounds, that's usually ambitious. I would like to do, and I'm talking to people about doing actual exhibitions in galleries, so there are things that are not quite confirmed, but are like 90% confirmed that will be happening in the next couple of years, I think, with people. My next The next book is hugely ambitious um and it's going to be slightly a different a different format and a different and entirely new approach. So it's getting and ne my next book but more explicitly addresses the the current state of the planet in in a more direct way because it's it's it's the title is an arc.
00:59:39
Speaker
So it's basically going to be, it's an attempt to, um Noah's ark in book four. What do we want to say? What do we say? From the living world. And my original discussions, Thames and Hudson were cheap. Well, why don't we include everything? That's too vast a subject we include.
00:59:55
Speaker
the products of human imagination, if you start trying to include art, music, literature, philosophy, science, e etc. It'll be a multi-volume series of books and an impossible task to do. So I'm focusing and just on flora and fauna, so it's the animals and plant life, so it's living things. So I want it to be...
01:00:15
Speaker
a celebration and also a call to, you know, an alarm call. And and my most hyperbolic and wanted to be a sort of manifesto for Better Planet. Amazing. That sounds absolutely incredible. i And I can't wait for it. Thank you so much. thanks And hopefully we'll have a chat again for about the new book in a few years. When is it going to come out? All being well, spring 2026.
01:00:44
Speaker
Good luck with this project. Thank you so much, Steven. Thank you. Thanks.