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 Mark Pulsford

Mark Pulsford was born in Edinburgh in 1951. He met RAP Director Carole Robb as her student in 1972.  In 2009/10 he worked as founding faculty for the first two years of RAP.   His current practice includes In Presenza di Tintoretto (2013-present) and Paintings by Moonlight (2015-present).

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

Mark Pulsford: Art exists as the exigency of the human condition; it is the outcome of our impulse to reflect upon our existence and to give voice to our passions. The knowledge we have concerning who we are relies heavily on the act of creative expression, both our own and that of others.

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

Mark: The nature of art is organic. When art ceases to inspire other, newer art, it ceases to exist as art. Artists make their contribution to the human project in the currency of creative expression and are accorded priestly status, said the film-maker David Cronenberg. No dogma but the lack of dogma, no magic without the investment of belief. If we look beyond art to its crucible, the creative life, we recognise an essential to the progress of ideas.

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

Mark: The child of artists has no need to discover what to be, just how to be it. Art for me was as primal as milk or oxygen. I never was without.

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?

Mark: Joseph Beuys; Philip Guston; Cy Twombly; Frank Auerbach: the towering figures of the generations immediately preceding my own are the ones who have taught me how to think rather than how to paint or draw or make. Beuys has emerged, since his death, as the great precursor of our current field of awareness as artists. Contemporary art without Beuys is unimaginable. As for the role of art, it is an open theatre of possibility, where none is excluded and all may participate, with the lines between consumer and maker indistinct. The last sentence refers to the living art of the streets and of the people. Nicholas Serota as director of the Tate made it his business to bridge the gap between the people and grand institutional art.

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

Mark: Art patronage and the way it changes as culture shifts determine so much about what is made and what survives. Art as an investment commodity is perhaps the most negative element there has ever been in all history regarding the creative life and its energy and vitality. Who benefits from the sale of a Basquiat for $110M? Only the profiteers. And yet we all need human scale collectors and patrons just to put food in our mouths.

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

Mark: Art always must be of the now: there is no wishing it otherwise. Individuality has been exchanged for polyp-status receiving/feeding information from/to the super-massive AI to which we have already ceded most of what previously defined us. Or so it may soon be understood.

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?

Mark: All over the world the question is asked “What did I do in lockdown?”. Many artists will answer that they filled the time with work, embraced world stasis as a gift of pressure-free studio time. I think we shall see (and are already seeing) a great outpouring of creativity from that time.

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

Mark: Artists attempt all three. We teach our students the fundamentals of critical thinking: how to apply universal principles of analysis to their own work and to work they encounter elsewhere.

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

Mark: Kafka wrote that education is a brutalising process, from which those who are subjected to it are lucky to emerge with anything undamaged. Yet it is essential that we artists understand it to be part of our duty to transmit precious knowledge to those hungry for it. All would-be teachers should memorise that passage from Kafka before wielding influence over the young and unspoilt.

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?

Mark: It may be said that the Zeitgeist confers upon us an inescapable eclecticism. Most of us know too much to be able to remain authentic and genuine in the purist sense, although we have the choice to embrace ‘inauthenticity’ as a virtue (Fischli & Weiss, Koons, etc) or to re-invent ourselves as genuine.

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

Mark: Critical courage is rarely found among gallerists and curators. Most are too worried about peer-group ridicule, commercial missteps and other things they fear might damage their professional reputations. More positively, two 19-year-old students of mine made their first gallery trip to London (as independent adults) this spring and encountered Hew Locke’s ‘The Procession’ at Tate Britain. As mixed-race young artists, variously with Caribbean and Nigerian histories, their excitement at witnessing such powerful affirmation of their own cultural potential was marvellous.

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

Mark: Fascination with The Abstract was a mid-20 th C preoccupation. Then, quite suddenly, it became ‘passé’. Such critical absolutism is absurd. Abstraction aligns itself with the musical, the verbally inexpressible, the numinous. Figuration accounts for most of the visual art that has ever been made: the narrative, the political, the allegorical, etc., etc. Both are indispensable, neither is subordinate.

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

Mark: I try to teach them the concept of integrity, of truth to oneself; also how to recognise that integrity and truth in others.

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

Mark: The Scots medieval ballad ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ relates that the Queen of Elfland offers the poet (Thomas) a choice between three paths: the righteous, the profane, and a third path, neither good nor bad; the poet chooses the last. Art is not virtuous. It provides markers for all shades of human experience. Art may not save us, but without it we assume indifference to our fate.

www.markpulsford.com