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IQ.
You've been called a Renaissance Man in an age of specialists.
You don't fit a narrow groove. Your interests seem to range
widely. You seem, if I may use the expression, too bloomin'
alive to be confined to one thing. This bodes badly in an era
of niche marketing. I think Bono has the same problem, and has
simply decided to use his name and fame to further his causes.
So, what’s going on here? How do you do what no one else seems
able to do?
A:
This `no one else’ is flattering, but I can think of plenty of
people who work across genres and media. Art school in
UK from the 60s on bred that kind of mindset. Early 60s Art
school, of course, is better known for people who got into the
blues and rock music and stuff. Mid 60s on it was all
alternative, psychedelic, mixed media. In the late 60s I used
to hang out at Jim Haynes Arts Laboratory in the center of
London…this was combination gallery, wholefood
restaurant, theater, movie house and all points
in-between , poetry readings, experimental drama, underground
film and experimental mixed media events. I saw
Mark Boyle’s liquid theater at the arts lab (he did lights for
the Soft Machine) and on into other hybrid mixed media
art events.
In
68, I saw the Bread and Puppet theater at London’s Royal court
theater, and I also to hang out at bookstores like
Betterbooks, Indica and then, later, Compendium. All this to
say that transmedia/ transgenre was very much in the
atmosphere, and on into the 70s when the influences of
conceptual and performance art entered the mix, also keep in
mind that stuff in the early to mid
70s channeled some of the more aggressive and
adversarial aspects of the social theory fueling much of art
mix into something that came to be known as `punk rock',
but by now (mid 70s on) the artist was someone with an idea or
an attitude who chased that idea and attitude (sometimes
via a persona) through all kinds of media. David Bowie. He’s a
good example. Steve Fairnie is another.
Fairnie
was someone who would turn up on children’s TV as a Charlie
Chaplin look-alike, turn up in the club and pop charts with
his wife Bev as `the Technos’ and turn up in the offices at
Virgin punting a board game he was working on based on
the ins and outs of the record business. All this from a guy
who I think was studying painting and sculpture at the
Royal College of Art. Bev was a photographer, but she was out
and about doing voice overs and rap on some of the early club
and house stuff. It helps (maybe) if we look at the shift
between modern and postmodern culture. If we can associate
`classic’ modern art, painting sculpture etc as being
concerned with the exploration of `formal’ (design and
material) relations, then we can look at genre bending post
modernists like Steve Fairnie as making art by
exploiting pop culture public relations. In fact, since his
untimely demise in the early 90s, his influence has continued
to grow. Dave Tomlinson dedicated `The Post Evangelical’ to
him. There are websites up about him now. He may not have been
a household name as a rock star, but I understand that
Bono was at his funeral.
Q:
OK, so you came to the states, because?
A:
Well, Larry Norman had expressed interest in my songs and
we were seriously talking record deal. And as I say
in the interview in Crying for A vision, there’s someone
else who is a pioneer. I think he is due a lot more than
he’s currently getting. Also, let's keep in mind that it
was his initial interest in my work and the generous
support of him and Randy Stonehill that made it
possible for me to come here in the first place, just as
the ongoing support and generosity from Louis and Mary
Neely and Warehouse Christian Ministries made it possible
to remain here.
BUT
I also came to USA for the ART. Many of the artists I
liked were living and working here. Robert Rauschenberg
for example. Film makers like (the late ) Stan Brakhage. I
was in New York in the early 1980s, and attended a free in
person appearance by Brakhage at the museum of Modern Art
, and a retrospective screening of his hand painted films.
Unbelievable. Amazing to be in a San Francisco hall in the
late 1970s and hear poets Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan
read, or to run into Duncan in a vegetarian restaurant and
ask him where I could find a copy of one of his earlier
poems, or seeing Kenneth Rexroth read poems accompanied by
a Japanese Koto player. Unbelievable to be in a San
Francisco church hall twenty or more years ago and
shake hands with the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.
When
I was finishing up at art school in UK , I was talking
with faculty and we were discussing `what next?’ and one
of them said `Well, you could go on to another
college and write a Graduate thesis about the work
of (German Performance artist) Joseph Beuys, or you could
go to Berlin and have a drink with him. So, in a manner of
speaking, I chose door number two.
Q:
And came to US.
A:
Yes, in some ways, I keep going through door number 2. The
travels in Asia and stuff.
Q:
The stuff you’ve written about in The Boundaries?
A.
Well yes, that’s an ongoing writing project that spilled
over into some of my recorded work. When I left art school
and came to US I was still trying to think what to make
art `about’, in addition to the songs I was writing for
the early recording projects. As I began to travel
for different reasons, I began to write stuff down, and
the resulting little chapbooks consisted of a mix of
poetry, travel journals and so on. And then I began to
record some of the poems over sound loops and put them out
on albums, then I’d travel to promote the albums, and keep
journals about the traveling to promote the records. So
the work spilled across the boundaries of poetry and
prose, across the printed page and the CD, and the work
kind of looped back on itself and incorporated
commentary on its own processes. As well as a record of my
own writing exploration, it served as a kind of
mirror of my own spiritual exploration.
Q:
Would you call that an emerging liquid ancient- future?
A:
Don’t even go there.
Q:
Well all this sounds a bit inward and arty. But isn’t it
in your travels that you met other artists in other
cultures and got involved with CANA (Christian Artists'
Networking Association)?
A
Well, yes, I got involved with the arts organization that
I now direct (CANA). We run conferences in Asia and
Eastern Europe . I also got to collaborate with
other artists. While speaking at the afore mentioned
Cornerstone, I hooked up with painter and mixed media
artist Gaylen Stewart, and we did a mixed media
collaboration using his paintings, my soundloops and
poems, all centered on the theme of nature and natural
processes. It went to several galleries in the US, and I
took a slide lecture based on the project to arts events
in the Netherlands , Eastern Europe and also the People’s
Republic of China.
Q:
You provide a detailed description of your ideas and
working process during this project in Crying for a Vision
and Other Essays, and I think you and Gaylen talk about
the collaborative process in the new version of `It Was
Good: Making art to the Glory of God’.
A:
Absolutely. Hunt those books down.
Q:
Earlier, Bono’s name came up. Cross paths back in the day?
A:
Nope. Never met him, probably never will. The only thing
we remotely have in common is that we both knew Steve
Fairnie.
Q:
But you’d like to…
A:
We might yuk it up for a couple of minutes over my
collection of Balinese and Javanese shadow puppets, but
after that I’m not sure what we’d find to talk about.
Q:
Only everything.
A:
OK, five minutes with the lad? I’d fire up my laptop and
spend 2.5 minutes cycling thru images of artwork, painting
and sculpture by Claudia Alvarez. I’d spend the other 2.5
discussing the work of Malawi Gospel recording artist and
activist Chimwemwe Mizaya.
Q:
Thank you, Steve. And there's our five minutes with Steve
Scott.
©
Gord Wilson, 2007.
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teve
Scott with Balines
