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 Pola Wickham
Pola Wickham was born in London. She studied painting in Aix-en- Provence at the Leo Marchutz School, at the New York Studio School, and won her MA at Yale. She has exhibited her work in the USA, the UK, Holland, Italy and Spain.
In 1997 she received a fellowship to paint for six months, in the north tower of the World Trade Centre. One of her primary interests is making murals, which she has had placed in various public and private locations, including the European Space Agency, in the Netherlands. Pola Wickham lived in Spain from 1999 to 2006, painting and teaching in the city of Barcelona.
Now living in Rome, she has been involved in a drawing project to help Parkinson’s patients, about which she made a documentary, “Connect/Disconnect”, with the film maker Elisabetta Lodoli. Wickham continues to teach at university level and is fully engaged in a rigourous private studio practice.
RomeArtProgram: What is your definition of “art” today?
Pola Wickham: Something is art when it is more than just the sum of its parts. And because of this undefinable and yet integral element a piece of art shifts my understanding and creates new “realities”.
RAP: Art is dynamic and regenerates itself; how does it change, and how did it change us?
Pola: The boundaries of what we call “art” have been moved, and are still moving, and this is an amazing and inspiring thing. And this boundary moving has a power, as a collective act as well as an individual act, to transform. It is rarely an avalanche or a lightning bolt, although it can be. It is more a kind of nourishment, creeping into our metaphorical and metaphysical diet, that makes each successive generation grow stronger, and see further and more clearly the panorama before us. But it doesn’t leave the previous generation behind, it offers a hand and pulls those who came before up, if they want to and can. And it is inevitable, and uncontrollable.
RAP: When (and how) did you understand that art was becoming very important in your life?
Pola: Growing up I had been constantly surrounded by art of all kinds, I was shown it and made to pay attention to it and initially, when I was little, I looked at art mostly in order to see how it was done, what is was made of. I was intensely curious about why it was that some things seemed to speak to me and others didn’t. I remember looking at things as diverse as sculptures by Naum Gabo, pastel drawings by Degas, whale bone polar bears carved by the Inuit and the choreography of Michael Clark, the English contemporary dancer.
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?
Pola: When I first saw the quilts of Gees Bend it was huge. I had always loved quilts, and pondered over them, and admired them, and a close friend of my parents, who lived in a large house with many enormous walls, had hung those walls with incredible old quilts which I can remember being completely fascinated by. And then I came across some quilts from Gees Bend, and I started to search them out as I found them so beautiful and moving and important. And those quilts, often made by unknown authors, using what they could find in their immediate environment, tell stories, in a completely non literal way, full of grace and pathos and quiet courage and necessity, about experiences that are very far from my own, but bring me close with their visual poetry.”.
RAP: Are there still traditional figures such as collectors, muses, mecenate and patrons, in today’s art and society interaction model?
Pola: Art patronage has in some ways changed its modus operandi. Because there is now much institutional collecting and exhibiting, and the audience is much wider and more generally educated than in days gone by, art has a much wider reach and potential to touch individuals. And this can only be a positive. Economics and capitalism play their part in both a positive and a negative way, but the outcome of the new models of patronage are in the end that more artists can exhibit their work and more people can view it and take it in.
RAP: How have the new technologies and media culture changed art today, improving or worsening it…? What do you feel are your biggest challenges?
Pola: Technology and new mediums give opportunities for different voices to be heard, different contexts to be created and recognised. There will always be empty and negative stuff as well as beautiful and inspiring stuff. Perhaps it is sometimes initially difficult to incorporate voices in new media because we don’t understand the language, we need to learn new vocabulary and syntax, we need to become familiar with media we haven’t experienced previously. So initially there may be interference in meaning by unfamiliarity with language.
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?
Pola: I don’t think art is a panacea, although it certainly has healing power. And it strikes me that if you are busy creating something: making a play, constructing a poem, designing and implementing a painting, there isn’t time and space to be destroying.
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?
Pola: Art teaching is very different in the contemporary world. When I was a student we worked within disciplines and were given the space and time to practice and experiment in a protected environment, without the pressure of being professional artists. Schools now are very results based and goal orientated and a new trust, which is non transactional, will have to be requested and claimed by students in order for them to carve out a real place to make mistakes and experiment. Otherwise the art academies and schools of today will cease to exist.
RAP: Which is the real role of Academies and Art schools today? What can artists learn from these institutions today?
Pola: A world wide change in suffrage and property and labour laws, amongst other things, have significantly affected who (and what) is “included”. This in turn has awakened the powers that be, slowly slowly, to an awareness of the relevance of stories, histories, view points that previously were overlooked. And art and art makers have had a quietly persistent and vital hand in this work.
RAP: How do Art Galleries and Museums position themselves today, and, in your opinion, how should they?
Pola: Galleries and museums are a conduit that brings art out of the private creative spaces of the artists and into the open. Since they came into existence they have always done this.
Museums and galleries have an important responsibility to make space for both the new and the old, to allow discourse and to provide the possibility for artists to be both commercial and non commercial.
One of the most exciting things I have experienced in museums, of recent times, is the new ways that they are curating their permanent collections. In both the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the permanent collections have been rehung with a focus that isn’t chronological. Either the significant juxtaposition of diverse works of art with the idea of highlighting similarities and differences has been implemented, as in Rome. Or varied themes and contexts have been chosen as ways to collect diverse works together, as in Amsterdam. These different visions and focus allow both the public and artists to see what has been made before anew.
#RAP: “Figuration” vs “Abstraction”: Which of the two is better descriptive of the period we live in? Which one will have a better future?
Pola: It is possible to recognise that all painting is abstract to some extent, in that it is brush strokes on a surface. And the artist is at liberty to emphasise or ignore figuration apropos their own needs, propensities and abilities. I think past rigid definitions are dissolving, thereby liberating painting from polarised positions like abstract or figurative.
RAP: Today we often speak of “emerging artists”; what advice based on your experience do you feel you can give to young artists?
Pola: I think that young artists, emerging artists, are blessed with a freedom not experienced previously. This liberation has a flip side to it, as it means the possibilities are infinite, and that can be a daunting prospect. My advice would be to start to make things, as many things as possible. Follow your instincts and impulses and make as much work as you can. Just make stuff. There will always be times when life will force the artist to stand still and take stock so the best thing to do is to be always be working and making.
RAP: Art as a lens for reading the present, can it modify the space and time we pass through? …will art save us?
Pola: It seems very clear that artists, by which I mean all artists, including poets, novelists, composers, dancers, painters, photographers etc. have always been the part of society, which stands a little apart from the rest, and which signals and describes and iterates and foretells the sea changes in society. One thing that is for certain is that there is so much more included, so many previously unheard voices and traditions and processes. And this can only be an enriching thing for all artists and art lovers. It does carry with it certain problematics, but it carries so many more pros than cons, that the cons eventually dissolve.
@polawickham