Pablo Bronstein by Charles Moriarty

Pablo Bronstein is interested in architecture. Which makes you think – what is architecture? Man-made (sorry for the sexism) spaces and structures. Which brings out a larger question – how do we move? How do we perform – as we all perform in spaces – we are all dancers and catwalk models in our own theatre, our own set. I met Pablo (born in Argentina in 1977) at the Rambert dance company head quarters where he is talking to Stevie Stewart, of Bodymap and Leigh Bowery and Michael Clarke fame. They are talking about design. What follows is a lot of talk about design.

What I love about Pablo is his honesty. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I agree with how he says it. I’m reminded about a lecture I received as a 25-year-old – the artist’s job is to make you uncomfortable. Mr Bronstein is uncomfortable company, thank god.

All images are courtesy the artist; Herald St, London and Franco Noero, Turin.

Darren Flook: What was your work like when you were at Goldsmiths?
Pablo Bronstein: Goldsmiths was a weird hiatus. What I do now is what I’ve always done, which is to draw buildings and dance around a bit. I’ve always been into that. When I was at the Slade [Art School] I did painting, and I was really trying to become a serious painter for a bit.

To make art?
To make painting. I was really worried about the human figure and all these things that are actually quite important when you’re at the Slade – they still had a life room then. Then I just thought, “Fuck it.” I started doing paintings that were like the drawings I’m doing now. Then I went to Goldsmiths and made some really bad conceptual films and some posters. It was just a fucking disaster. Then at some point I said, “Fuck it” again and went back to drawings.

Goldsmiths represented this bullying, bland, pseudo-intellectual art world that I rejected quite early on. They’d go and they do lame pseudo-intellectual group shows where someone would leave a glove on the floor, and there’d be a bit of text about the supposed owner. It was so annoying, you’d have to be in with them and suck their cocks. I’m a real sucker for my generation. I think we’re weird and interesting and different to that.

Who else do you consider part of your generation?
Lally, Spartacus, Marvin whatever, Matt Darbyshire, Ryan Gander, Emily Wardill, David Noonan, Daria Martin, Seb Patane.

The people that were successful at the time we were coming up weren’t the YBAs, they were these very, very worthy, extremely nice people that plant community vegetable gardens and write about it. I think we were just desperate to express something else, and make work that felt a bit more personal to us. It was less socially engaged in a way, but we still problematised the art market; we still felt guilty about the idea of making work and selling it. It’s a far cry from the kids now…

They have no issue with making money.
They come pre-packaged – born with press releases. Very few of our generation have been in the Turner Prize or had things in the Venice Biennale, unlike people before and after us. So I celebrate us, but we’re not destined to go down in history.

In terms of the art market, some of your work, the small framed drawings of beautiful buildings, is very desirable, in a purely “I like that” kind of way. But then you’ve got other things, like the bus tour you did for Frieze where you’re driving around describing buildings. You’ve found a way on operating on both levels.
One of the things that happened with me is that because I’m a bit obsessive with it, I’ve made architecture my theme. So whether it’s telling people about architecture, or drawing it, or doing a performance about it… it’s a very generous subject but also quite specific. Not everyone’s interested in it, but at least you recognise that it’s its own thing.

There is also a problem with our generation. We’ve fucked up, because when you speak to someone like Ryan Gander and ask what his work is about he’ll be like, “Well it’s about shoe design” or I’ll say mine’s about “18th century architecture.” But actually it’s not only about that – it’s about something bigger and more complicated.

But if you ask one of these very hip kids, who has essentially made a boring expanded sculpture, they’ll say, “It’s about post-contextualised deconstruction of neo-queer identities in the beyond digital era…”

I’ll take three! It’s depends what we mean by about: if someone said, “What’s Heart of Darkness about?” you wouldn’t say that it’s about a bloke going up a river.
It’s complicated, precisely. But nonetheless an overly complicated explanation of a perhaps simple thing feels like fraud to me. It leaves a lot of people behind, deliberately.

All images are courtesy the artist; Herald St, London and Franco Noero, Turin.

In other interviews you’ve spoken about public space in terms of architecture. Do you think of the private gallery or museum as a public space? Do you think about the audience and how they pass through?
Yeah, I do, but I also think that the audience at a certain point doesn’t care that much about these things. The endless faff that the art world goes to about whether galleries like the Serpentine take commission for shows, or whether so-and-so museum sells work on the side, or how things are fundraised, or who supports what – the public don’t really give a fuck, do they? They just go and see art. So I think you can over-politicise all of that stuff as an artist or a curator, but essentially you might just end up losing your audience.

My personal theory is I think the old-fashioned definition between the museum, the private gallery, the critical magazine and the promotional magazine has gone.
I agree, when I’m looking at the newer art magazines, I don’t really know what I’m looking at. The edges have become really blurred.

I think 90% of everything has always been shite. If you look at a copy of Artforum from 1982, and it’s just bad abstract painting.
Really rubbish, and the 80s is almost un-openable. You buy it for kitsch value. The back issues of AD Magazine have retained their appeal longer than serious art magazines.

How have you changed in relation to your work?
My feeling with my work is that as I’ve got older a lot of the things that I was very easy-going with at the beginning – “Oh I’m just doing some baroque drawing of churches or whatever” – I’m realising they’re weirder and weirder. There wasn’t another person doing them. Some twats occasionally come in and copy you but then they get bored and copy someone else. So in a way I’m quite grateful for my oddness. I didn’t recognise it at the time, but I certainly recognise it now, because I just don’t see other work like mine around, which is a good thing.

I think that’s, again, a generational thing as well. I think we were allowed to be quite weird. I don’t think art students are allowed to play around as much any more – too much market pressure. Do you know what I mean?

I don’t know. It’s like how buildings have value when they become representative of their age. Those buildings around Columbia Road in east London, because they weren’t knocked down in the 1960s to make way for other blocks, become valorised. I think it’s the same with art – its survival is often out of the artist or critic’s control.
It definitely applies to architecture – and I think that’s a brilliant example. One thing I’d say is in the art context it’s very easy to surround yourself with a lot of press that tells you that you are representative of your age. So sometimes being too representative of your age, if you genuinely do represent it in some sense, is very bad for you in the long-run. It depends what aspects of your age you represent.

Bernard Buffet is a perfect representative of all the pretentious nonsense, existential guff that was coming out of Europe in the late 1940s and 50s. He’s rubbish now – people hang him above ironic 60s sofas because he’s that bad and they don’t actually take it seriously on an emotional or intellectual level. So I think in a way a certain kind of ambiguity is probably quite good, and that’s Marcel Duchamp’s trick: you never really knew what he was talking about.

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