Papercity

Born in the U.K. in 1963, Richard Patterson graduated from the seminal British art school Goldsmiths College, where his contemporaries included fellow YBA Damien Hirst, who co-curated Patterson into one of the most influential exhibitions of the 1980s, “Freeze.” This internationally renowned painter and sculptor inaugurates our monthly Collector’s Conversation series. Represented by astute tastemaker Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, the outspoken Patterson currently lives and works in Dallas.

Chris Byrne: Richard, what did you think of this past year’s Dallas Art Fair?
Richard Patterson: Last year’s art fair, in the words of Alec Baldwin doing Tony Bennett singing on Saturday Night Live, was “Just great. I like things that are great. Great things are fantastic ...”

CB: Anyway ... We’ve been talking about different projects for the 2011 event. Can you share your ideas for the window installations at Neiman Marcus’ downtown store? We’ve noted the historical legacy connected to window displays, beginning in 1945 with Marcel Duchamp’s for Brentano’s bookstore in New York promoting his friend André Breton’s volume Le Surréalisme et la Peinture.
RP: I’ve asked Neiman’s to consider their windows as contemporary vitrines for the public exhibiting of art by some major artists in the heart of downtown Dallas. Neiman’s has a history of supporting art — it’s great that they’re prepared to do it. Other cities, such as London and New York, pride themselves on public or corporate art that appears on the street. It signifies progress and cultural inquisitiveness as well as just a flashy way of advocating ideas about philanthropy.

CB: What will the actual installation entail?
RP: The windows will be used to display art by eight or more artists. Not window dressing, but art in windows. Public art, at street level for everyone’s delectation, totally free to the public, no obligation to buy, to like or even to look. It is just there as art, which is “just great,” fantastic even. But I think it’s a statement. As Jaguar’s chief designer Ian Callum would say, “It’s a statement of intent,” and that’s good for Dallas and good that Neiman’s has stepped up and is prepared to do it. Excellent, in fact.

CB: Early in their careers, Rauschenberg, Johns and Warhol created windows for luxury retailers in New York. Is this the approach that you’re advocating?
RP: I’d stress that our project with Neiman’s is meant to be about art, not about window dressing. I won’t be asking anyone to dress a window — I’ll be asking them to use a window to make art inside it.

CB: Let’s try to clarify this distinction: In 1961, Warhol placed some of his now acclaimed hand-painted Pop works — currently part of the Dia Art Foundation — in department-store windows. Using your criteria, we might describe his installation as “window dressing with artworks.”
RP: The artists you mention may have all been natural window dressers. Warhol in particular, since he’d had a commercial background. The work of Johns and Rauschenberg had a theatrical element in there, which mixed objects and imagery that lent itself well to a store-window context. Some of the people I will/may be asking are hopefully people who make work sympathetic to this idea. 

If you think about it, the window vitrine is very similar to art — for example, a Damien Hirst vitrine. On the one hand, it is a showcase to sell a product or an idea. In Hirst’s example, you are being sold the idea of a memento mori on a giant scale. Or a slice of nature for the viewer to muse upon science and art, life and death, order and chaos — all the usual giant polarities. It’s meaning with a capital “M” displayed as glamorously as possible.    

Window dressing borrows back from art all the time. In London in the past, you’d see Hirst-inspired spots in the background of many store windows, in the same way that in the ’60s, you couldn’t pass a window without seeing a Bridget Riley–inspired background or fabric print on a garment. Fashion borrows back/steals from art all the time. For some reason, this is seen as entirely permissible. When it happens the other way around, i.e. artists using design to comment on the world, there is often an instant lawsuit.
CB: When Jeff Koons introduced his series “The New” (1979), he acknowledged commercial window design as a primary inspiration. In Koons’ case, fine art seemed to “borrow back” from window displays …

CB: You’re currently preparing for an exhibition of paintings at Timothy Taylor’s gallery in London. When is the show?
RP: June 2011.

CB: Also, you are planning to preview one work with Abby and Wlodek [Malowanczyk] at Collage Classics during the 2011 Dallas Art Fair.
RP: It’s a secret that I am showing with Abby and Wlodek. So keep it quiet, for God’s sake. How do I relate my paintings to functional objects? Art already is “functional objects.” Art’s function is to be art. It’s that simple. A car — the new Jaguar XJ, for example — is also art, but of course most people think of it as a functional object. It’s both. I once made a sculpture in my studio that was a seven-foot by two-foot baby-blue canvas with small casters. It lay on the floor. It was deliberately the same proportions as my 1968 BSA Spitfire motorcycle — which I also considered art. I tied the painting to the back of the motorcycle in order to tow it around Hoxton Square outside my studio. It would have been a low-key Evel Knievel sort of stunt. I also had a white-leather racing suit made with my name on it (not a copy of Knievel’s suit, but of the ’60s Triumph race team). Knievel got the idea for his suit from Triumph, not the other way around, and Elvis Presley got his white suit idea from Evel Knievel — a bit of exquisite corpse right there. Get it?   

So the painting’s function was to be towed in order to make it into art. Not very good art, but art. I was simply hyperbolically demonstrating the function of art, which is that its use, function and meaning are interrelated and never fixed. Similarly, just hanging the same blue painting on the wall would have activated its function, whether or not it was intended as a motorcycle-stunt painting.

CB: With your knowledge of mid-century design, how do you relate your paintings to functional objects?
RP: Good design is inspiring to me. Good design relates to bigger issues, broader aesthetic issues that relate to politics and the way in which we live our lives. A Mies Van der Rohe chair may be invisible to many people because it seems so ubiquitous now, but he was an important architect that changed the way we not only think about buildings but how people interact within cities. The results and effects of design are incalculable, but people tend to forget the effect that the creators of such things have or have had on their societies. It’s not just the design/art objects — it’s the social authority that the creators bring to bear in the execution of their work and their projects. Think of the effect Sir Norman Foster, for example, has had on London. It is a very significant effect. The notion that van der Rohe believed in an economy of means, lightness, transparency and so on, are all ideas that impact on our lives. His chairs are more than just seating structures, since they are part of a whole philosophy of what the world might look like, how we integrate with architecture and what effect this has on how we act as people.   

So design (and of course at the planning and political stage) is extremely important. The difference between this more complete description of design and the casual perception of designer-ness — i.e. “I see you’re wearing ‘designer jeans’” as opposed to “Levis” — is fairly obvious. Contained within the broadest terms of art and design are ideas that greatly impact on all of our lives, whether or not the individual cares to engage with it.

CB: With these precedents in mind, is your intention to blur the distinction between fine art and design? Will you address this during the panel discussion that you’ll be moderating during the Fair?
RP: No, it’s not my intention, but I will address the idea in the panel discussion. It’s a complicated question. Firstly, the distinction was blurred, or possibly discarded, a long time ago in the Bauhaus. Secondly, much great design is art. By design, I mean all design, from architecture to Bladon Jets' micro gas turbines, to clothes, to teapots. Much bad art is really just design. There are elements of one in the other. I’ll go out on a limb — Dallas seemed to be overly influenced by the designs of Philippe Starck some while back. It seems to have caught grip like St. Augustine grass with a root system that keeps spreading everywhere. Leaving aside the fact that Starck never trained as designer, I personally very much dislike his designs. But every Dallas hotel lobby seems to have one of those hideous seven-feet-high upholstered chairs that make you feel ridiculous to sit on or look at. This is meant to “signify” attention to design and therefore signify an expensive or swanky hotel or restaurant. It’s a horrible design cliché that is a bad throwback to the ’80s. I keep expecting the aging Duran Duran to pop up from underneath the furniture. My point here is that this is “designer-ness,” and not true design. And it has become a Dallas cliché.    

By contrast, every time someone makes any physical intervention, there is a component of design therein. In comparison, look at the lobby of the Royal Hotel in Copenhagen with furniture designed specifically for it by Arne Jacobsen, or Finn Juhl’s contributions to various major buildings. Even improvising the reservation of a car-park space in the street with a pair of buckets and a ladder is a form of visual communication with a physical reordering of the world, which also has a function. This is a form of design; it may also be a form of art. Richard Wentworth will be speaking at the Nasher next year on precisely how we affect our physical surroundings constantly and sometimes unconsciously as a form of decodable communication.   

Design and art can be seen as intelligent or not, beautiful or not — and so on. Farming is a form of design. Banking is a form of design. Everything we touch that is not nature is a form of design. It’s not just about having an Italian coffee pot with an exceptionally geometric handle.

CB: To shift gears, you moved from London — where you were included in Damien Hirst’s seminal exhibition entitled “Freeze” (1988) — to Dallas. We’ve discussed the opportunities that exist in our city that may not be present elsewhere. What would you personally like to see happen here? 
RP: I’d like to see a top-rate art school. The assumption here is that our kids need to go to New York or Europe in order to finish their educations, so Dallas neglects education in the arts very badly. My point is that by building a top-rank art school, we would attract exceptional students from elsewhere. This isn’t necessarily about Dallas students, it’s about everyone else.

CB: Can you expound?
RP: Well, it’s simple. Given the ambition level Dallas seems to have set for itself, there is a lot of catching up to do. As soon as you set out to, for example, to build a contemporary art museum, you set yourself up for direct comparison with other cities. Denver recently built a very good one that is very well programmed and run. It seems to function extremely well. So the argument runs that people look to these cultural markers as signs of sophistication before relocating to Dallas: opera, art museum, etc.   

Mainly, though, in the short term, I’d like to see more integration of businesses and functionality in downtown Dallas. I think the separation of businesses into themed zones is counterproductive — i.e., all the car dealerships on Lemmon, all the culture in the Arts District. Mix it up. A boutique Jaguar dealership next to the theater with the Jeremy King restaurant integrated into it is the obvious move. Sex it up. Liven it up. Dallas has all of this in its genes, but it’s been repressing it for about 10 years now for some weird reason. Art is not all about being pious and worthy; it’s about the total celebration of existence.

CB: What public or private collection do you most identify with?
RP: If you mean in Dallas, then Marguerite Hoffman’s. I think the manner in which the Menil family has collected and operates is really fantastic. I don’t really have a favorite. I love to visit places such as the Sir John Soanes Museum or the Wallace Collection in London. It’s hard to beat the V&A or the British Museum for bang for your buck. Elgin Marbles, anyone? The Louvre is not bad. Obviously some of the most exciting collections of contemporary art are private ones, like the Rubell or the De La Cruz private collections in Miami (haven’t seen the latter one yet, but it looks to be great). Although, even the dynamic private ones seem to be becoming increasingly homogenized these days. Now you have Russian oligarchs buying up stuff wholesale, and even David and Posh Beckham are getting in on the collecting game — so everyone’s at it. I suspect David Beckham’s wardrobe outclasses his art collection, but that doesn’t mean his wardrobe shouldn’t be shown at the Nasher at some point.

CB: Which type of collections are the most important to you?
RP: I tend to prefer slightly eccentric collections to broad and historically “measured” ones. I think the latter is having a bad effect on contemporary art, because there is a new academia that has evolved to ensure that all major collections have new acquisitions that are in sync with everyone else’s. This leads to an over-reliance on a small number of individuals. Look at New York — you still have far too much attention being paid to a very small number of critics like Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith. Just like [in] the financial industry, there is no regulator above Saltz and Smith making them accountable. What if they’re talking shit or are just plain wrong? Certainly Jerry’s come out with some corkers from time to time. I have said many times that like presidents, they should only be allowed to run for eight years maximum, and then they should all be forced to go and live in a nudist colony (the critics, not the presidents) in Wales run by Sarah Kent, the old arts editor of Time Out London, where they would all sunbathe naked with slices of cucumber over their eyes. I think this would be only fair to us and to them.

CB: Do you collect work or trade with your contemporaries?
RP: I prefer cash. It’s more useful right now. As hard as I’ve tried, Overseas Motors won’t accept a painting in trade for a new XKR. I have a bit of stuff. I bought quite a few pieces from my wife’s gallery [Christina Rees’ Road Agent], because I think some of the artists are great. I wish I had traded more earlier on, but I have a low output compared to many of my contemporaries, so I generally need to get my stuff out there and sold. It’s not just about the economics; it’s about the visibility. I’ve bought some fantastic pieces of furniture from Collage. I consider that art.

CB: Thanks, Richard — good luck with the paintings. 


Dallas Art Fair:
April 8 – 10, 2011
Preview Gala April 7
dallasartfair.com
Collector’s Conversation Brought to You by Dallas Art Fair 

Image: Painter Richard Patterson dishes art, design and his plans for Neiman Marcus’ windows with Dallas Art Fair co-founder Chris Byrne at the Murray Street Coffee Shop. Photo by Harrison Evans.