Interview with Susan Collins

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.

Susan Collins is an artist and Professor of Fine Art at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Her works employ transmission, networks and time as primary materials. She studied at the Slade and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a Fulbright Scholar.

RAP: What is your definition of “Art” today? Art is dynamic and regenerates itself… how does it change, and how did it change us?

Susan Collins: Art has always held up a mirror to our lives, challenged accepted conventions and overturned assumptions. Today is no different. Art takes many forms, it’s a shape shifter reflecting the time we live in. We get the art that we deserve.

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

Susan: When I was around 16 I had a rich inner life. I spent hours living in my head, often in trouble for daydreaming. I was good at Maths and writing but not drawing particularly. Then I was introduced to conceptual art by an enlightened Art Teacher and discovered that the ideas in my head could find form through images and making. One of my earliest memories at around five years old is of being spellbound by St Francis and The Birds (1935) a painting by Stanley Spencer in the Tate, but it was an eclectic combination of influences later as a teenager including Mondrian and Classical Antiquity, and yes that teacher, that were my ‘gateway’ drugs.

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?

Susan: There are many artists, individuals and collectives addressing urgent issues of our time. This includes Art collectives such as Liberate Tate who staged a successful campaign of art interventions calling on Tate to divest from sponsorship by BP as well as artists such as Katie Paterson, the artist who initiated Future Library, whose scientifically rigorous yet poetic explorations of deep time and the cosmos make real our fragile planetary existence.

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

Susan: These roles may appear different in today’s climate but these figures – with the exception of the ‘muse’ – are still very present and also hugely influential gatekeepers in controlling an increasingly market-driven artworld.

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

Susan: I have worked with technology since the 1980’s. An early adopter. It has been my medium and my form of expression. When I first used computers it was my private space, pre-world wide web, before I and anyone I knew was on email. I could spend many uninterrupted hours completely absorbed in my virtual studio. Now it is a space of continuous distraction – so crowded with alerts and multiple functions. I miss the deep concentration of those early days.

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?

Susan: Well it should be reflecting the climate emergency and so many of the urgent issues that our planet is now facing. Some of it is.

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?

Susan: To spend time with it. On your own. Really looking.

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

Susan: Art School is a community. It allows space and time for artists to explore investigate, invent, make mistakes, learn, move on, and discover. Students learn from each other and the artists/lecturers. The artists/lecturers learn from the students. The best students challenge orthodoxies, ask difficult questions and shift the dial. It may sound cliched but it is a complete privilege to be part of this ongoing conversation.

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?

Susan: I’m not sure I understand the question. For artists the only thing one can do is make the work we need to make and continually challenge ourselves. If not to be authentic and genuine then what?

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

Susan: We are lucky in the UK that most of our public collections held in Museums and Galleries are free to visitors. You can pop into the National Gallery or the Tate whenever you like if only to see a single artwork. The move now is not only to make Museums and Galleries accessible to visitors but to ensure their contents are also inclusive and fully reflective of the diversity of both the population, and of historic and contemporary art. A long term project.

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

Susan: This is a false binary. My own interest probably lies in where these two ideas, or descriptors meet. It is something I have explored in my work – most obviously in my Seascape works. Artists make the work they need to make and it will find the form it is meant to have. In future there may be other forms, other descriptors we can’t imagine now. I hope so.

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

Susan: Everyone’s path is different. Work out what kind of artist you want to be and have the courage of your convictions to give yourself the time and space to make the work you want to make. Be true to yourself while making the most of opportunities that come your way. Keep making the work that you believe in.

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

Susan: The best art can change the way we see the world. My own work explores space and time and includes an ongoing series which is engaged with – quite literally – visually encoding the world around us, live, in real time. I’m not sure art can modify the space and time we pass through – or indeed ‘save’ us. But some art can provide a lens for us to take a long hard look at ourselves. The rest is up to us.

www.susan-collins.net