Art Changes: Eddie Peake

Eddie Peake's south London studio is a very organised space: wall works are hung, and the files are ordered – I've seen galleries that are more disorganised; but when you're as busy as this 34-year-old artist, organisation is needed. When you first meet Peake, what strikes you is his sense of style. Today is a Know-Wave T-shirt and very graphic black and white trousers – it's a sort of club-casual style that works perfectly for him, but which would make me look like an idiot. This sums up Eddie Peake: he stands out and applies rules that work for him. Exhibiting for over a decade he's organising performances and exhibiting all over the city. What I have always loved about Eddie, and the group of friends he collaborates with, is their energy. At a time when it felt like every talented graduate art student was running to Berlin, Eddie was a shot in the arm for London and it paid off.

We chat after he has just had his biggest show so far – a multifaceted solo show at the Barbican that involved naked dancers, roller-bladers, structures and music. As I mentioned – he certainly has energy.

Darren Flook: You have many different mediums: performance pieces, a club night, a social group and standalone artworks. At your Barbican show there were also wall-based works and sculpture. When you're thinking about these exhibitions do you start with the space or do you start by thinking about what you want in it?
Eddie Peake: It's a conflation of all those things. So I think very much about the spaces that I exhibit in – to the extent that it's the first thing I need to start generating an idea. In my view, the singular discipline that I do work in is exhibitions. That's the way that I reconcile the different things that I do and how they all fit together.

I'm very often asked, "How do the mirror paintings, say, relate to the performances with a group of dancers and musicians?" And there isn't a link that I know of. There isn't one I can reel off.

Well, you're the link.
Exactly. And in the context of exhibitions, that's where it all makes sense to me as well.

I often think it's more like a mood or a sensibility that connects your different artworks.
I'm glad to hear you say that. I think of it as an attitude, an atmosphere, a mood. To return to the original question about how I plan exhibitions, and this applies to the Barbican show as well, I tend to let my brain just go like a machine gun, fire off in all directions, and have loads and loads of ideas.

There might be a core thread that stays right from the beginning of that idea all the way through to the end. But the amount of times I wake up in the middle of the night with a new idea like, "There has to be an inflatable flock of sheep running through the gallery constantly. In fact, they shouldn't be inflatable. Let's get a real flock of sheep that need to be in the show." Then, a week later, I realise that actually, no, we shouldn't do it that way.

The first time I came across your website, it had a particular image – of an erect penis, your penis – on the opening page. It was quite startling, really.
I took those pictures in a funny period when I was an undergraduate at the Slade in about 2004. I was in a phase at that moment where I was trying to leave painting. Not the painting department but I was trying to, like, stop painting.

Did you start off painting at the Slade?
Yeah, almost to the extent of harbouring disdain for anything that was not painting. Like, I was that kind of painter. I was a painter as opposed to an artist.

Just to make that distinction. Then I went 180 degrees the other direction and came to hate painting. I didn't really know what to do but I had instincts for what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do something with the body because it's available; I can easily do it and I shot those pictures you're talking about in the photography studio with the help of my then girlfriend. The shoot became quite sexualised and that was one of the resulting images. That was when I was about 23.

The shoot set in motion a lot of the things that are recurrent in my work. I remember looking at the pictures and I thought they were beautiful. I thought they were really vain and in that sense they were, kind of, ugly. Like, It's difficult to come to terms with your own vanity, do you know what I mean?

Now it's commonplace: this was pre-Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and all of that. Now I think culturally we're very comfortable with our own vanity.

It's also interesting because the erect male penis has for quite a while existed in a lot of work that is to do with homosexual identity and pornography.
I genuinely did not set out to say, "Oh I wanna play with gender." To me that would be totally cringe and something wrong in a way – at an ethical level. The thing I like about my work is that I don't try and force that position.

Also, people don't live in a Robert Mapplethorpe world of cocks and pornography. They live in a more fluid middle zone.
Yeah. It implies there's a particular aesthetic code attached to the male sexualised body. There's this feeling that I've had from the responses to my work that that thing, the male naked sexualised body, very much belongs to particular sets of demographics and the heterosexual male is not one of them.

Being a man who sleeps with women – I don't like to call myself heterosexual because actually I don't think that I am – it's quite odd for me to meet that response to the work where some people have felt like, "What are you doing? You can't do that. That's not your aesthetic." I feel like, "Really? But it's my dick."

Other people's discomfort is interesting too. "Well why is this making me feel like this?" I mean the amount of times I've told people I'm going to the club night you run with George Henry Longly and Prem Sahib – Anal House Meltdown – and they're like, "What?"
The name actually came from a friend of ours. George sent him a track. This friend of ours heard the track and wrote back and went, "Oh my god. It's an Anal House Meltdown." George was like, "Whoa, that's the name of the club."

I think it's a very British instinct to be interested but also to be appalled. It's that classic tabloid culture of desperately wanting, in fact loving to be offended.

I remember hearing Sara Cox, the radio DJ, talking about how a tabloid had topless pictures of her on a beach – she took them to court and everything. She was saying one of the many things she hated about, say, the Daily Mail or whatever, is how they would run a story saying: "Depraved behaviour of topless celebrity. Read our exclusive story with pictures on page two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven."

And if you put on a show at the Barbican or White Cube you see that reaction all the time.

Because the audience isn't just the art elite.
Yeah it's normal people. It includes a large swath of people for whom that'll be their only visit to an art gallery that year. There are people pushing prams and with their shopping from Borough Market or who've just been to the London Dungeon.

They've seen it in Time Out or something.
Yeah. So when I did that show a couple of years ago featuring naked performers, I'd see the audience's faces and they would do that appalled expression. "I'm appalled, I hate it but I'm gonna stay here and let you know with my facial expressions and my passive aggressive whispered commentary that I hate you and I hate your soul. You're disgusting and depraved."

Do you play with taste in your work? The acid colour combinations or the graphic iconography that isn't traditionally considered pretty. Do you like that jarring quality of bad taste?
It's an accurate observation. I think it's a weird nuance to balance because I respond to a lot of contemporary art that does that but only when it's doing it as a natural accident. I actually do want the work to be beautiful, that's the problem. I am trying my hardest but it just ends up being something that teeters on that knife-edge, one side of which is kitsch or bad taste.

But I don't set out for it to be like that. A lot of the reference points for me are things I consider really beautiful. Like, old rave flyers where there are all these flashing colours and weird semi-psychedelic, semi-urban, street type aesthetics all piled on top of each other.

One role for contemporary art is not simply to be a beautiful background to our domestic living spaces. I think it should be there to prod and probe and take a more aggressive role in our lives.

You know, that, role of art to be kind of disruptive like that and more things from, drug culture or pornography or whatever and just put them in the wrong place that makes you look at them differently. It's, kind of, 'Oh, right. Okay. I now have to reassess it because this is in an art gallery.' You know, taste I think is the enemy.
I completely agree but I think that I arrive at that aesthetic somewhat by accident. I'm not aiming for it, and that's what I consider to be its saving grace.

But the follow up question is when you recognise what your work is doing, then where do you go? Because if you do it consciously it becomes contrived. I have an anxiety about that.

When you're working do you focus on one project at a time, or flip in and out of different ones?
I'm definitely a flipper inner outer. I find it quite difficult actually. I'll have a paintbrush in my hand thinking, "Oh have we written those ten emails to the performers? Have we got them to sign the release forms? Have I spoken to the fabricator about the sculpture…?"

What are you working on now?
Well, I'm preparing the new performance work in Tuscany.

Is that using other performers?
It's actually all performers that I've worked with before. I've got a core group of people – really amazing people that I work with.

Hopefully it will be all new material, but it will follow on from a body of work that I've developed recently; It's devised work with dancers. It's got a sort of nuanced narrative. There's a live soundtrack. The musicians are very much part of the performance ensemble.

Do you compose the music?
No, in short, but it's not as simple as that. The whole thing, the whole of the pieces - the sound, music, movement, choreography, dialogue, scenography, makeup and anything else - is improvised into existence with the whole ensemble, including me, during the rehearsals. So it's quite a collaborative process in which all the performers – musicians and dancers - will get involved creatively to greater or lesser extents. My role is to direct improvisations, and to edit and piece together all the good content we generate into a cohesive whole, whilst ruthlessly chucking away all the bad content, of which we generate a lot! I might sometimes bring specific motifs that I want everyone to work on, but by and large they are devised from scratch in the rehearsal period. What it isn't a case of, for example, is me doing a choreography and saying to a composer, "Okay, go and compose a thing and bring it back tomorrow."

I want to acknowledge the properly amazing contribution all the performers bring to it. I'm more of the captain of the ship steering it rather than the silent writer in the background, writing every single element in solitude.

Photography: Charles Moriarty

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