ART, WHATEVER IT TAKES

Since the early pandemic in 2020, Rome Art Program has conducted a series of interviews, “Art, Whatever It Takes.”
Artists, Art Critics, and Art Historians living in Italy, the U.S., and U.K., share their insights during these powerful times.

Interview with Lewis Biggs

Lewis Biggs is a British Curator: Folkestone Triennial 2014, 2017, 2021; Land Art Mongolia 2018; Aichi Triennial 2013; Chairman, Institute for Public Art www.instituteforpublicart.org; Trustee, John Moores Painting Prize; International Awards for Art Criticism (IAAC).

RAP: What is your definition of “art” today?

Lewis Biggs: Art is a social activity, so whatever threatens the way we function socially also challenges art. The definition of art doesn’t change but we value it more when we are threatened. The big threat to humanity today is climate change and the shifts in migration and geopolitics it produces.

RAP: Art is dynamic and regenerates itself… how does it change, and how did it change us?

Lewis: The opportunity to spend more static, solitary time, and less time being sociable and travelling this past while has provoked new interest in our homes, our locality, our neighbours, our daily habits – all of which are sources of value, and valid subjects for art. It’s also been wonderful to see the community of artists supporting each other during the pandemic, exchanging work and raising funds.

RAP: When (and how) did you understand that art was becoming very important in your life?

Lewis: As a young person, poetry was available to me in a way that art was not, so it was poetry, particularly ‘concrete poetry’, that led me to visual art – art was a way to concretise poetry. In my twenties I began to realise that there was a community of people I could join who were thinking about the world through making objects. The tension and interchange between thinking materially and verbally has remained a focus for me always.

RAP: What role does art play today? What are the “great figures” who have recently changed it? Do you feel close to any of these figures?

Lewis: There’s good and bad, as usual: art is supremely effective in drawing people together across cultural and economic barriers, acting as a medium of exchange for hopes and fears, helping people to come to an understanding of themselves and other people. Then again, art acts all too well as a meaningless cash nexus, fungible and non-fungible tokens for gamblers and narcissists to lay waste to the planet’s resources, just another crypto-currency.

RAP: Are there still traditional figures such as collectors, muses, mecenate and patrons, in today’s art and society interaction model?

Lewis: Yes, neither society nor human nature have changed very much since Rome was built. We still seek these roles for ourselves and we still need to project them onto other people.

RAP: How have the new technologies and media culture changed art today, improving or worsening it…? What do you feel are your biggest challenges?

Lewis: Technology is wonderful if you know what you want, and a wasteful, sometimes debilitating distraction if you don’t. I remember how in the 1960s, colour printing and photography suddenly turned the Sistine Chapel ceiling from black and white to colour. We are so fortunate today to have digital access to huge reservoirs of cultural production from the past, but of course it is an experience that lacks materiality. It also massively increases the ‘burden of art history’ on young artists looking for their own voice.

RAP: Art as a mirror of man, in this moment of emergency seems to be shattered …what do these fragments reflect now?… Shadow or light of the moment?

Lewis: If you study the output of artists in time of war, waiting for the bombs to fall or whiling away time as a prisoner of war or in concentration camps, often you would not know the actual circumstances of the artist from the artwork.

RAP: Understanding, interpreting, and then possibly judging the work of art; which is the right path when we are in front of a piece of art?

Lewis: As humans, our greatest skills and resources are available to us when we try to get to know another person. That is the way to approach an artwork, as if it were a person. That may or may not include judging them.

RAP: Which is the real role of Academies and Art schools today? What can artists learn from these institutions today?

Lewis: For the 2017 Folkestone Triennial, the artist Bob and Roberta Smith declared that FOLKESTONE IS AN ART SCHOOL. The town used to have an art school, but now young people have to go to a city for art school. Bob and Roberta researched the facilities available in the town and understood that everything needed for an education was there – it was only the diploma that was unavailable. As a curator, I have never asked to see an artist’s diploma. Now that education everywhere has become a business, the ‘school of life’ again becomes the real pedagogy.

RAP: Art too has undergone a complex process of globalization; can having an authentic and genuine style be an advantage or a drag for an artist?

Lewis: It does now look as if new nationalisms will counteract the globalisation of the last 30 years, so it’s good to remember that trans-cultural exchanges have always taken place regardless of where the centre of empire has been – Athens , Babylon, Beijing, Benin, Byzantium, Isfahan, London, Tenochtitlán, Tokyo, Rome, Washington. Appropriation and miscegenation have always been fundamental to culture, whilst notions of the authentic and the genuine are attributes given by the beliefs of the moment (underpinned by the politicisation of money and power).

RAP: How do Art Galleries and Museums position themselves today, and, in your opinion, how should they?

Lewis: Museums are expensive to create and to run, and they inevitably express the values of those who supply the money. Fortunately, many of the people who have a great deal of money believe in the value of culture, and this is unlikely to change, since it’s as old as civilisation. Unfortunately, the kind of social solidarity that can pay for museums directly associated with, and reflective of, a community does not seem to be so healthy.

RAP: “Figuration” vs “Abstraction”. Which of the two is better descriptive of the period we live in? Which one will have a better future?

Lewis: These are not terms that mean much to me as regards art. As for the future, we all want to figure, no-one wants to be an abstraction.

RAP: Today we often speak of “emerging artists”; what advice based on your experience do you feel you can give to young artists?

Lewis: The task seems simple, but of course it’s extremely hard: find out what it is you want to say, and then make sure that there are at least some people (your community) that understand the significance of saying it. More ambitiously, as Gilbert and George said so memorably in 1969, The Laws of Sculptors no. 2 – “Make the world believe in you and to pay heavily for this privilege”.

RAP: Art as a lens for reading the present, can it modify the space and time we pass through? …will art save us?

Lewis: Yes, art is both a lens and an instrument for thinking, for understanding ourselves and our world. As an instrument it can be very effective at changing people. But art does nothing in itself – it’s not art but people that will save us (or not).

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