Interview with Bor Simms
Published by Galerie R, January 2019, updated 2024/5
Q. How did your interest in Art begin?
RS : My mother got me interested in art. She didn’t have an art background but she’d seen an exhibition of the Abstract Expressionists in Sydney in the 1960s and couldn’t stop saying how fantastic it was. She taught me to draw and I liked art as a subject at school. I did a foundation course but didn’t get a place at art college. I worked in a warehouse and went travelling to France and Africa before going to Sir John Cass School of Art in London to study Photography, and then to Farnham Art College (W.S.C.A.D. at that time) in Surrey to study Photography, Film and Television in 1983.
At John Cass we were all mature students with completely different interests and it was a great, diverse environment. When I went to Farnham I found it oriented towards journalistic photography when I was interested in photography as fine art and left at the end of the first year.
Q. What were your early influences?
Graphic design, the Bauhaus, the New Topographics, Roy Lichtenstein, Kline, Pollock, Judd, Bridget Riley, Warhol and Duchamp. Picasso was really intense but I felt you still had to go through him in a way. Anthony Caro’s ‘Early One Morning’ made me sure I wanted to be an artist. I later got into Turner, Manet, van Gogh, Monet and Delacroix.
Q. Did you exhibit at this time?
I did a few exhibitions at Cass and Farnham and in a group show at Camerawork in Bethnal Green. I couldn’t afford to make large photographic prints which was what I wanted to do at the time. I was living in bedsits making small paintings, models, A4 drawings and conceptual works. I tried to get a studio but I didn’t need a studio like a painter. I think you can generally say what you want to say in miniature.
I’d make models of works, small prints and photocopies and so on, but when I was sticking photocopies on bits of card I found the left over bits of card more interesting than my artwork. It became a theme in my work, things which are discarded but which you couldn’t ignore, objects falling the way they did in piles instead of being arranged. It took me out of the need to structure things aesthetically, and a different approach to Art, where normally the artist is consciously arranging and ordering forms to suit their taste and intention. It was interesting to realise that maybe you couldn’t do better than forms which create themselves. The colours of most of my sculptures are also arbitrary, as I would get my paint from tips and rarely bought paint or varnish. I would collect everyday objects like toys from car boot sales and not arrange them but just fix them as I found them with paint, glue or varnish. It wasn’t the aesthetic that was important but rather the thing itself, and what these things say about the way we live.
The “chute” (leftovers in French) sculptures are waste paper and offcuts taken from bins outside printers. They create stereotypical geometric abstractions but they are about waste, modernity, today’s media, printing, packaging and consumption. Printers also often sell art supplies and I was taken by the names of van Gogh, Rembrandt, da Vinci pastels and so on. Likewise receipts, both of art materials but also postcards from museums. Commodification, in short.
Q. You’ve never been represented by a gallery. Did you apply to galleries?
I’d make submissions from time to time. I thought my work was okay but it wasn’t very coherent and it wasn’t obvious what I was trying to do. That said, a lot of the ideas and the work from that time I’m still doing. I think it generally helps galleries if you have a single recognisable aesthetic. My work doesn’t look very unified, even though there are usually connections between the different themes.
In the eighties, if you were interested in photography, you weren’t really an artist. All that was just beginning to change with artists such as Cindy Sherman. I was living with Jacqui Ham (musician with Ut and Dial) and we were moving a lot. We ended up moving to St. Ives in Cornwall but it was still difficult to find time and space to work and I moved to France around 2000, leaving my belongings in a friend’s basement and hitch-hiking to France with two suitcases.
Q. You use computers a lot in your work.
I learned to use basic graphics software in the 1990s. It was the beginning of a lot of work, receipts, scanned objects and graphic works. With computers I could still work even if I didn’t have any money. I was interested in work that could be diffused or reproduced, challenging the unique object idea of Art. I also liked how an image changes depending on the process used. It’s a reminder that the image isn’t reality. I liked the way Bridget Riley and Roy Lichtenstein merged graphic forms and processes with fine art history. Lichtenstein is associated with comics but so much of his work is about representation and Art. Impressionism was a lot about materiality, and how processes of representation and interpretation work. I liked Riley for transposing the perception of nature into formal geometric structures while staying in the tradition of painting.
I eventually came to feel that Art essentially was about the handmade, and Walter Benjamin’s idea of aura. At a time of video and installations, I increasingly turned to drawing and painting because I felt there’s only so much you can do with virtual media.
Q. Were you drawing at this time?
I’d started drawing in London in the late nineties. I just tried things out, walking through London, constantly drawing on the same sheet of paper but the results were very chaotic. I made a few A4 drawings, walking and on buses, but couldn’t work out what I was doing. I wanted to keep drawing on top of the drawing because that’s what happens when we keep moving, seeing different things, you only take in a fraction of what you see. I wanted to represent the experience of constant change, something between a drawing, a film, and a photograph. I saw the ‘Drawing the Line’ exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery curated by Michael Craig-Martin, ‘old master’ drawings mixed with modern works on paper. It was a great exhibition, it had a big effect on me and helped me think about the possibilities of drawing.
When I moved to France I made a drawing board that would fit under my arm so that I could walk and draw at the same time. It took a lot of different approaches, and hundreds of drawings, before I realised that a scribble is all I wanted the drawing to look like, something chaotic and close to instantaneous, but based on observed reality. The kind of freedom Pollock had but where the lines were depicting something observed, while also being the most meaningless, least aesthetically contrived mark-making possible. I felt that if you were an artist you had to be able to say what you wanted with a minimum of materials.
Q. Do you think an artist should be able to draw?
I don’t think there’s any obligation, it depends what kind of work an artist does, but drawing is interesting because it’s so direct.
Q. What were the origins of the ‘Line’ artworks?
When I was at Farnham a friend, Tim Hutton, and I, were both interested in human intervention in the landscape and wondered how we could take the New Topographics further but I think we realised you can’t. Tim was very into the Greenwich meridian and the idea of a single line defining the world. I was making conceptual photographic works, lines and rectangles projected onto thick sheets of glass painted with light-sensitive emulsion. I went back to the line idea later and saw it more from a fine art perspective - a drawn line. But I was also interested in the graphic references, the need to define and delineate areas, territories, borders and graphs. It could also be seen as an end of Modernism.
Q. There are references to art history in a number of works.
I was staying near Paris around 2012 and Auvers-sur-Oise was nearby. I drew the sites of van Gogh’s paintings and others. It led to work mixing art history with drawings and computer graphics.
Q. Isn’t much of your work just decorative, and out of place in today’s conceptually based art world?
Some of these works do go back to something aesthetic rather than the trend of installations and concepts. Impressionism was only partly about aesthetics. The looseness of ‘Impression Sunrise’ paved the way for a lot of modern art. It was about painting and materiality, image, surface and light. The computer programmes I use allow you to go into the image and break it apart into tiny vectors which for me is an echo of the materiality, brushstrokes, and the techniques of the Impressionists. I also wanted to approach abstraction in the way Stella seemed to talk about, trying to replicate the structure and dynamics of representational painting while remaining abstract. Some of my graphic landscapes are abstract-looking, but always come from a subject, usually a landscape photograph, which I still take a lot of. Conceptual forms have dominated art practice for several decades, but no one has gone beyond, or come anywhere near, Duchamp, in my opinion. There’s a conceptual element to parts of my work, which I’m calling theoretical art as the word ‘conceptual’ doesn’t seem to mean anything any more. All art contains ideas.
Q. Do social media have a place in today’s art world?
Technology may be useful as a means of communication but the experience of art is usually dependent on its physical presence, and the relationship the viewer has with an artwork in a space. Social media are playing havoc with materiality. AI and NFTs are just ridiculous.
Q. When did you start writing about Art?
After leaving college. If I couldn’t make work I spent time in libraries. Most discussions with friends and others around modern art would finish with the idea that talking was pointless because art is whatever a person thinks it is. But that doesn’t explain the consensual nature and coherence of art history. I felt that the most basic question - what is art? - hadn’t really been answered adequately - what makes a work of art, Art. I started trying to answer those basic questions in essay form in Penzance library around 2000. They had an unusually good art section, lots of monographs where you can often find what an artist says about their own work rather than interpretations by critics and historians. Finding what artists actually say about their work isn’t always easy. I decided not to publish them because my conclusion was that Art is basically over, I’m with Hegel, but it just depresses everybody.
Q. Don’t you think that the canon and the ‘great’ artist are worn out concepts?
We often fall back to the argument that ‘everything is art’ and that ‘everyone is an artist’, that you can throw away history, remake history, but we need greater nuance in those kind of discussions. The number of core artists in any history book is only a few hundred over several centuries, but they’re who we mean when we talk about art and art history, in the western, modern tradition. That means just one or two artists per year create work which stays to build the core of art history in the five centuries since the Renaissance, and that is quite a dramatic statement, but I think it’s true. It begs the question of how today there can be tens of thousands of artists, and what exactly it is they are doing. Conversely, the range and breadth of creative practice in all its forms throughout history, and in so many different cultures, is enormous and endlessly fascinating.
So many artists, almost everyone from Manet and Courbet to Pollock and Lichtenstein, have been so unfairly treated. Even highly knowledgeable critics like Robert Hughes didn’t understand or appreciate Warhol and Basquiat and that is such a terrible failing, and typical of our failure to properly appreciate art and culture. We need to be careful not to destroy our notions of artistic value just because it is fashionable.
Q. Don’t you think subjectivity plays a role in deciding what art is?
Not really. In the sense of what one likes, yes, but not what constitutes art, which is decided over time by consensus and is remarkably reliable over time, with very few exceptions.
Q. You were also playing music while studying art.
I was in a group at foundation course when I was 17. I started playing more when I moved to London and started an electronic project with a maths teacher friend, David Harper. I got into noisy, experimental rock at the end of the eighties and started Dial with Jacqui Ham from Ut and Dom Weeks from Furious Pig in 1991 .
Q. What are your musical influences?
The Velvet Underground, Television, Captain Beefheart, The Birthday Party, The Fall, I think for musicians there are a lot of basic references. Early blues, quite a bit of jazz, especially Coltrane, Miles, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and field recordings.
Q. Is it easy to be both a visual artist and a musician?
They’re different and use different energies. Both are very intense, full time occupations and require time, resources and infrastructure of one kind or another. It’s a very under appreciated part of cultural production.
Q. You stayed outside the gallery system. Did you think you might stay unknown?
Once I’d decided not to sell work conventionally I was on a path that I’ve continued until now. I kind of painted myself into a corner, so to speak, hoping that one day, if my work deserves it, it will go to collections open to the public, which is what art is supposed to be about.
Today it seems to matter more that you sell, more than what it is you are doing. If you sell your work there is no guarantee it will be available to the public, but artists, like musicians, have either accepted this or have had no choice but to lose control over their work. Historically, talking about art’s financial value seemed antithetical to art’s essence, but today it seems the opposite. We talk more about art’s financial value than its cultural value. Any serious inquiry into what art is today seems unwelcome. Gallerists and dealers from Durand-Ruel to Peggy Guggenheim and Arne Glimcher weren’t involved in Art as an object of speculation, but because of their love for Art.