It's a rare thing to be able to say that you are best friends with one of your favourite artists, and know that not even the tiniest bit of nepotism has played a part in your judgement. Luckily I'm surrounded by a very talented and creative bunch of people. Dave Hilliard is one of those people. Anyone who has been paying close attention to this blog since its inception will remember I had a day dedicated to some of his work, in February. I feel happy to say that even if I didn't know Dave on a personal level, then I would remain a huge fan of the art that he produces. Uncompromising assaults on the notions of hierarchy and "normal" life, and other sacred cows so often taken for granted - Hilliard takes his material from the everyday, removes the surface and holds it back up to show how brutal and cynical things sometimes are. This is not all done out of spite though, because within his work there is a playful sense - as well as a dark strain of humour - that draws upon comic books, and pop art for inspiration. I spoke to Dave about his current practices.
Could give a run through of your recent activity? From an outsiders point of view it seems like the last year has been quite important in terms of the evolution of your work. How would you say your work has changed recently?
Well, the last year or so I would say I got serious about what I do. Its not like I wasn’t before, but I was drifting a bit, doing odd things here and there without really knowing why. It’s easy to feel isolated as an artist, maybe more particularly somewhere like Wolverhampton, which isn’t always the most encouraging place for creative types to live. Then about this time last year I was lucky enough to get accepted on a course in Birmingham, kind of a professional development thing for artists with a group show at the end. I created an installation for that in June 06, which was pretty well received, I followed that with a group show at the Whitechapel Gallery in November of that year, then a show of paintings in Wolverhampton in February of this year, and I’ve just finished another installation in Birmingham. So maybe it’s not so much the work that has changed but my work ethic.
What themes do you feel are central to your work at the moment? You seem to have contempt for the idea of institutions, whether they be in the art world, the academic world, and this seems to be working its way into your stuff more recently …
Yeah, I think you are probably right about that. I’ve always had something of an uneasy relationship to institutions. School, Church, College, University, I struggled to fit into any of them really. Institutions can just become big, lumpen blocks of dogmatic thinking, which roll forwards carried by their own momentum, steamrollering over any true creative thought or individualism. So for instance the school system becomes about maintaining its own order rather than allowing children to truly learn. I’m also quite interested in contradicting the idea that art, science, technology etc, are naturally progressive and improving for us-the idea that humanity is naturally becoming more ‘civilised’. A few years ago I saw a talk by Jake Chapman, and he said that the Nazis considered themselves to be cultured people; they had art, cinema, music etc, and yet they were simultaneously engaged in murdering people on an industrial scale. I like to scratch below society’s veneer and see what’s bubbling up from below.
We were talking last night about taking ideas from pornography, and this has come out in your most recent work. Could you discuss this a little bit …
Ha! Ok…I think the slightly obsessive compulsive part of me that makes art is also periodically driven to pornography. Making art is frankly, the pursuit of outsiders, so perhaps we have a natural affinity with masturbators...I’ve been aware of pornography since before I was old enough to know its purpose. When its depersonalised, just the animal act of sex, minimal context, when the male ego is allowed full reign in a fantasy world, there is no perceived problem. Its like a war movie where no one really gets hurt, its all just a game. When the personal breaks through, though, it can be horrific. Small comments by the performers reveal the high cost of our culture’s voracious appetite for visual stimulus of all types. I recently made a text piece about a movie I saw where some drunken frat boys fuck a girl who is so drunk she is virtually unconscious. To trawl through stuff and then find something that far from being arousing, actually makes you hate your fellow man, that’s quite something.
I know you’re a big fan of Mark E. Smith and The Fall, and I know his work has a big influence on your stuff. Could you talk a bit about what it is about MES that you admire, and what you think you’ve taken from his work?
He seems to have a bit of an awkward, outsiders perspective, and his music often makes very incisive, cynical commentaries about society and popular culture, so that strikes a bit of a chord with me. The music can be awkward and jarring, and there’s often a sense of playfulness with his use of language, combining words, inventing new ones, letting a stream of consciousness lose-that’s been a big influence in my use of text. Although he’s very good at observing the minutiae of life, such as buying cans of lager from the corner shop, it’s just as often incredibly ambitious in scope. It’s like when you wake up from a dream, and you think if you could only remember it then you would understand the meaning of life. Apart from anything else, he’s plainly an awkward bugger who refuses to compromise his art, and that’s no bad thing in my book.
Who else inspires you? Artists, writers, friends, whatever … Who do you see as your peers? Do you feel a particular kinship with anyone currently working? What motivates you at the moment?
You starting your daily writing blog was a pretty big influence. What I was talking about before, about scratching at the surface, I think I see that in your writing. Since then I started my daily drawings on my blog, though they are not always daily. I’ve recently enjoyed work by a couple of artists I found on Myspace who call themselves Sardine and Tobleroni (http://www.myspace.com/themonkeyintheboxcompany). Their paintings of ‘Animal Love’ are quite something…the other day I saw a fun show in Northampton, my original home town, called ‘It Takes Two’, which included collaborative work by Billy Childish, a guy called Harry Pye who seems to be something of a self-defined underground hero, and Stella Vine amongst others. I think Stella Vine’s paintings are growing on me recently. In terms of what motivates me, it’s trying to be accountable to myself, trying to get something useful done everyday. Since my present employment isn’t exactly stretching my intellectual capacities to the limit, I know that as soon as I get home I want to remind myself I’m an artist by actually making some art. Its either that or drink a lot of beer and in my heart of hearts I know which one is better for me.
Since I’ve know you, you’ve always used text in your art. It seems that more and more, you’ve been introducing fragmented elements and cut-up style techniques into your work. What is that appeals to you about non-linear narratives?
I think it partly comes from the fact that I’ve always been interested in comics, though I discovered fairly early on that I could draw but not write. I want to tell stories, and I want them to be quite grand. I get so excited about all the things that happen in the world that I want to somehow jam it all into one drawing-an impossibility. I think one of the things I like about art, is that it’s always bound to fail somewhat - that’s why I keep making more. A few years ago I made a piece which included the text ‘There are so many things I want to tell you and this is such an inadequate way to do it’, which kind of sums up how I feel about working in the fairly traditional medium of drawing on paper. So you are right, recently the use of text has become more fragmented. Lately I’ve been deliberately miss-spelling, using phonetics and stream of consciousness when I include words. It’s kind of more direct and yet more obscure at the same time. It’s like peeking through the curtains at some mirror world; maybe there is something interesting to be seen there or maybe not, but its still fun to take a look. Freeing oneself from the self conscious restrictions of language is quite liberating, and one of my real issues with art is its unnecessary use of ridiculously pompous language. Just because something contains intelligent ideas doesn’t mean it has to be explained in a grand way.
Another thing your work has always made me think of, is advertising gone wrong. It looks like you’ve taken images from popular/mass mediated culture and made them grotesque, like you’re trying to show people the kind of horror that they are naturally surrounded by in society (Western society, at least). I know you were thinking about taking this to its logical conclusion and having some kind of display in a shop window …
Yes, I was making a body of work for that idea earlier this year-I have a space in mind and I just need to do a proposal for it. It kind of got inspired with me travelling to Birmingham more often for various work and art related things. Birmingham’s an interesting city right now, because the centre has seen some major reconstruction over the last few years-I think the new Bullring is now supposed to be the largest shopping centre in Europe. Its absolutely imposing and I think very anti-human. Enormous promotional images of eternally smiling people with perfect skin dwarf the reality of the citizens below hurrying and worrying and stressing to buy things they don’t need. What really made think about the obscenity of all this was seeing two soldiers in desert camouflage-they must have been either going to or returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. And to me, the two worlds are inseparable, capitalism and war-its all part of the same picture. And so these drawings are again about dark stuff bubbling up from below the surface. There’s one in particular, of a guy in a white dinner jacket that appears to be covered in blood, that a couple of people commented that it reminded them of ‘American Psycho’ by Brett Easton Ellis. This is appropriate, because I think it had an influence on the work without me being consciously aware of it. And watching the movie is just like ‘The Apprentice’ TV show, but with more of an emphasis on murdering prostitutes. ‘Sir Alan, my team mate murdered fewer prostitutes than anyone else during the challenge, so they should be fired, not me…’
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