FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

One of Many Possible Art Issues

God Is Pissing From A Great Height

by Milène Larsson, Jonnie Craig

November 1, 2010, 12:00am

BY MILÈNE LARSSON, PORTRAIT BY JONNIE CRAIG

Images copyright of the artist. Images courtesy of the Wilkinson Gallery, London

Photo by Jonnie Craig

A couple of months ago I walked into the Wilkinson Gallery in London, expecting to potter around as usual, rubbing my chin at mediocre art as if I was definitely going to buy a piece for five trillion pounds. However, on this rare occasion I was met with the large-scale, meticulously detailed oil paintings of Ged Quinn. I looked left, I saw Adolf Hitler with tits surrounded by flying dick-clouds. I looked right, I saw a moody still life of a crack pipe. I got in touch with Ged and he invited us down to his Cornish studio in the middle of a windy meadow near the sea. He was pretty nervous about a painting of his being sold at an upcoming auction at Sotheby’s, but it went for such an astronomical amount it recently made international headlines. We sorely wish we’d bought a piece back at the show when they were still £20,000.

Vice: Did you move to Cornwall to be a part of its art scene?

Ged Quinn:

No. Cornwall’s art scene is very abstract, that’s why the Tate opened here. I hitchhiked here with a girlfriend when I was 17 and always wanted to come back. I had an architect design and fix this barn into a studio for me, and he put in these really strong lamps so that I can have daylight in here even at night. But then the neighbours started complaining about light pollution.

Light pollution?

Yeah. They thought a spaceship had landed, or something.

How did you find your style?

Before 2002, 2003 I made abstract paintings that took a day to make. If you’re making paintings that take a day you’re making hundreds. It’s too much. You can’t store them. So I thought, “How can I restrict that?” and started thinking about making a painting so packed with information it would take me a year instead. Then I happened to be leafing through some books about American landscape, and thought, “These probably would take one year to make.”

You spend a year on each painting?

No, not any more. I spend between four to six weeks on them, working 12-hour days.

That’s still a lot of time. What motivates you to finish them?

Well, unfortunately, it’s usually external deadlines. I think Francis Bacon was the same. You had to take the paintings away from him, or he would’ve just carried on working and working until they were destroyed.

Is there a story behind your paintings?

Yes, but not one that makes sense in a linear way. It’s more like a sort of formalist experiment in literature, like

Finnegans Wake

, in which all these languages are mixed up together but still form a coherent understanding. You have a sense that you understand it at some point, but I’m not sure whether it’s conscious or not.

Do you study the old masters in order to paint like this?

Only their cultural significance interests me. Their paintings are so established nobody questions them any more. Because of that they’re potent to work around; if you let them travel through time by introducing modern elements, and slipping in some strangeness or subversion to them, it works like a Trojan horse. Suddenly, you have a critical debate around these classic works people are otherwise unquestionably warm towards.

So you use actual paintings, but give them a twist?

I use works that interest me and start building a story from that. Claude Lorrain is ideal because his paintings are idealised versions of an idea that didn’t really exist. With his visions of idealised civilisation he created spaces that I can work in. The area he painted outside Rome was a mosquito-infested swamp, but he made it look like Arcadia, the home of the gods. There was this great essay I read about him suggesting that the notion of the sunset and golden light of the West didn’t exist until Claude Lorrain. He developed that romantic notion of the sunset and that poetic message it has about endings. I think it brought a lot of interesting metaphors into art. I’m also drawn to the Hudson River School, because their landscape paintings look astonishing but, really, they’re incredibly sad: Native American Indian hunting lands painted by Europeans, there’s violation there. It’s visual colonialism. I used two Hudson River School backdrops in my latest show.

The Anxious Attempt of Art to Mourn the Silence of Melancholy Over Everything, 2010, oil on canvas, 61.5 x 49.5 cm.

Does it annoy you when people try to interpret your work?

No. For 20 years there’s been a great emphasis placed on interpretation and making sure people leave galleries with a coherent understanding of what they’ve just seen. But now, the visual literacy of the public is getting so advanced people are happy to not be completely resolving what they’ve seen, or drawing their own conclusions.

OK then, while we’re at it, is that God pissing in a toilet from the sky in The Great Art of Light and Shadow painting?

[

laughs

] That’s a really good interpretation. The original idea was dealing with beliefs and using imagery of communication with the dead, and the death of the hippie. The ray is something called a spirit uplink. If you look closely at the painting you’ll see that there are little spirits up there in the clouds, and the uplink is through the toilet of Andreas Baader’s prison cell. It’s fashioned like a camera obscura, so these rays are suggesting the image is actually somewhere else. But I prefer going with God pissing from a great height, now that you’ve said it.

What about the crack pipe?

That’s a play on simple Spanish still life, painted like a valuable glass. The historical place of the still life was to celebrate your belongings or your wealth, and people would hang them in their dining rooms.

You’ve also made a portrait series, painting people like Hitler with tits and flying cock-clouds in the background.

Yes, I was looking at authority, social acceptance and messages and notions of status. For example, statues of generals make them seem important because 1) there’s a statue of them, and 2) it’s on a plinth so you’re looking up at them. I think that language reinforces a lot of depressing things about society. I used some Freudian notion of the carnivalesque, using humour to undermine the seriousness of the most powerful and wickedest figures of the 19th and 20th centuries. According to Freud, humour is an expression of the repressed self.

I guess it works. I laughed when looking at some of them because they’re so absurdly disarming.

Then there’s also the anatomical bit, like the exposed open arm in the Hitler portrait. It’s an expression of the idea of where evil resides—you can’t analyse it, you couldn’t make an autopsy on it. It’d be impossible to find. I was raised a Catholic with that notion of good and evil.

Is it a big taboo to paint Hitler and swastikas?

Well, I thought it was. But that painting has gone to a private collector in Germany, which I thought was illegal. I think the use of such symbols is disarming. It’s important to refer back to the political disasters of the 20th century. Even where we are now it’s still relevant because, for example, there is a slippage into a similar thing with the English Defence League.

The Great Art of Light and Shadow, 2007, oil on canvas, 183 x 234 cm.

True. It’s better to discuss these things, and your work is obviously not celebratory of Nazism. Have you ever had any bad reactions, though?

At Art Basel in Miami someone almost attacked my gallerist, Anthony Wilkinson. “You’re not allowed to show this here!” they said. “You can’t do this!” Ironically, a wealthy Jewish collector bought that very same piece.

You also played in some 80s new-wave bands when you lived in Liverpool.

That was also just by chance. I was working as a dishwasher at a café opposite the punk club, called Eric’s. All the bands used to come in and I got to know them, and particularly this one band, Teardrop Explodes. The keyboard player was leaving the band and he wanted my job. I’d been playing the piano since I was a child, so we swapped jobs. I didn’t stay with them for very long, though. I ended up starting a band with the guy who’d taken my job instead.

Was that when you started Lotus Eaters and Wild Swans?

Yes. But I could only ever do one thing at a time and if I was doing music I wasn’t painting. I much prefer painting because you’re more in control. I found it difficult to achieve what I wanted to with music.

I mean, I started doing it because I wanted to sound like the Velvet Underground, but everything just seemed to get diluted. I think at the time in Liverpool everybody was quite poor and just wanted to make money, so everything was geared towards getting on

Top of the Pops

and signing a major record deal so that you could get on a wage. Although there were some great people doing some interesting stuff there was an awful lot of really bland pop music.

That’s a nice picture of Varg Vikernes on your working table. Have you heard any of Burzum’s music?

No, I haven’t. But he’s the one who went to prison for killing his mate, right?

Yes. He killed the guitarist in his former band, Mayhem.

My friend Ricky, who’s in the Brian Jonestown Massacre, went to Norway about two years ago and thought he was going to get killed by some of those black-metal guys, because he was off his head a lot and felt threatened.

Well, they seem pretty harmless to me, starting fashion labels and whatnot. What about this skull, are you going to use it?

It’s a real skull and you’re not allowed to show human remains. You’d need a licence. There was a scandal with some guy who showed human bones ten to 15 years ago and went to prison for it. I’m using the skull to do a semi-recreation of an image I saw in a book by W.G. Sebalt, showing a skull on a pile of books. It’s a memento mori thing that symbolises the ultimate futility of thought. In classical painting, skulls sometimes symbolised that there’s no point thinking that you’re flattering yourself if you think your ideas are important.

Depressing. But didn’t that Chinese artist who ate a baby get away with it?

Zhu Yu? I don’t know, maybe, but he didn’t exhibit any remains, I think.