INTERVIEW WITH Bor Simms
Published by Galerie R, January 2019, updated 2024
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 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 in London to study Photography, and then to Farnham 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, Duchamp. Picasso was still 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, 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, 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 but when I was cutting up bits of card I found the left over bits more interesting than the artwork. It became a big theme in my work, things that are discarded but which you couldn’t ignore, assemblages falling the way they did wouldn’t be rearranged. It took me out of the need to structure things aesthetically, a whole approach to Art where the artist is making the form. For me it meant something else, to realise that you couldn’t do better than the forms that create themselves.
There was also something where I found abstraction in particular didn’t seem to mean what it did. While starting from very profound intentions it is easy for abstraction to become decorative. Leftovers seemed to have a sense. The chute sculptures are waste paper and offcuts taken from bins outside printers. They create stereotypical geometric abstraction but they are about waste, modernity, communication and consumption. They could be just aesthetic but the appearance is not the point, it’s what they are, as well as removing the artist from aesthetics choices and subjectivity.
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 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.
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. 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 Bridget Riley and Roy Lichtenstein’s ways of merging graphic forms with fine art history. Lichtenstein is associated with comics but so much of his work is about perception, representation, and Art. Impressionism was a lot about techniques, materiality, and how processes of representation and interpretation work.
But at a time of computers, video and installations, I increasingly turned to drawing and painting because 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 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?
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’ has felt outmoded.
Some of these works do go back to something aesthetic rather than idea-based. Impressionism wasn’t about being pretty, it was about painting, perception and materiality. About 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 and the techniques of the Impressionists. The looseness of ‘Impression Sunrise’ paved the way for a lot of modern art.
I wanted to see if you could approach abstraction in the way Stella often talked about, something like trying to replicate the structure of representational painting while being abstract. Some of my graphic landscapes are abstract-looking, but come from a subject, usually a landscape photograph, which I still take a lot of.
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.
Q. When did you start writing about Art?
After leaving college. If I couldn’t make work I spent time in libraries. Most discussions around modern art would turn to 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 kind of 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.
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.
Q. Don’t you think that the ‘great artist’ is a worn out concept?
We often fall back to the argument that ‘everything is art’, that ‘everyone is an artist’ 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. That means just one or two artists per year create work which stays to build art history in the five centuries since the Renaissance, and that is quite a dramatic statement, but I think it’s true. It therefore begs the question of how today there can be tens of thousands of artists, and what exactly it is they are doing.
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, Captain Beefheart, The Birthday Party, The Fall, Dylan. 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, 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. Do you think you might stay unknown? Did you try to be represented by galleries?
I came out of college in the early 1980s when the market was exloding. People talking about art’s financial value seemed antithetic to its nature. It seemed to matter more that you sold than what it was you were doing. If you sell your work there is no guarantee it will be available to the public. Once I’d decided not to sell work conventionally I was on a path that I’ve continued until now, hoping that, if my work deserves it, it will go to collections available to the public.