Richard Hamilton
By HANS ULRICH OBRIST and REM KOOLHAAS
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: We are trying to map different aspects of London, so I wanted to know why you actually left London in the ’70s and if London is still a source of inspiration for you now.
RICHARD HAMILTON: I’ve been asked the question before. Some months after the move I met Bill Turnbull at an opening and he said, “What’s this I hear about you leaving London? You are supposed to be a devotee of the city, a sort of prophet of urbanization, and now you’ve gone rural.” He saw it as a betrayal. I had to find an explanation then, so I’m ready for your question now. [laughs] The reason was that I felt that there wasn’t really much difference in being an hour to the West of London and being in Highgate. It took me an hour to get to the center of London when I lived in Highgate and, if I choose my time, it takes me an hour to get into town now that I am near the M40 between London and Oxford. I can get to Heathrow in half an hour, half the time it takes by car from London. The main reason for leaving was that I needed more space. I had been living in the same place for 25 years and when it became obvious that it would be good to have a bigger studio I began a long search. In my research I realized that an hour is just the right distance to be from the center of London. I had friends who had done the same thing; Marcel Duchamp’s wife, Teeny, moved to a beautiful village near Fontainebleau, an hour south of Paris; that was perfect; Jasper Johns was living an hour north of New York at Stony Point. IBM’s eastern headquarters was about an hour upstate from New York. A sleek black building viewed through the trees from an expressway.
OBRIST: That is a very interesting new statistic for our lists.
To my surprise I found that there were unexpected advantages. I was able to buy a derelict building described in the auction particulars as an “18th-century farmhouse awaiting the restoration of which it is conspicuously deserving.” It went with eighteen acres of land and outbuildings that I have spent thirty years converting to exactly what I need for working purposes: it’s a pretty good location. The remarkable thing is that some facilities are more widely available, in High Wycombe or Reading or even Marlow. A week or two ago I accompanied my wife Rita, whom I love, to get her neon problem resolved. Neon is not a medium favored by artists these days so she had to search around on the Internet and found a place in Bray, which is about a fifteen-minute drive from home. We discovered a very good craftsman working alone in a shed in his garden. If I want computer parts I can get them more easily on the Internet than in Reading or London. I needed a sound proof cabinet for an Apple network server and a raid, a big storage device with lots of hard discs, recently. We sourced only two manufacturers on the net. One was in the US and their only competitor was a small company in Marlow making a similar product. Now that the Internet exists there is not much difference in the availability of services anywhere and I don’t miss the social and cultural life. It’s easy to get into London when I want to: which is not that often.
OBRIST: Do you feel that London has changed its identity to a more global city? Do you feel that there is a strong change?
It has become less pleasant than it was. [laughs] If that means more global, I must say yes.
OBRIST: We have had a lot of discussions about art and architecture, actually mostly about dialogues, about collaboration; we are interested also in conflict which may exist, maybe collision. I remember a couple of years ago that you were very, very upset about certain aspects of the Venturi building in London.
I wasn’t upset by the Venturi building. I rather admire it in a way. But some very perverse effects emerge in that building. It’s an interesting question for me because I went to the States in the ’70s and found myself sitting next to somebody before dinner at Yale. It was a very academic kind of evening, and this person said, “How does it feel to be one of the fathers of postmodernism?” I didn’t know what postmodernism was. I felt a bit stupid to be a father of something I’d never heard of – like a donor to a sperm bank being confronted by a dysfunctional offspring on his doorstep, I went into denial. Postmodernism? I was blamed for it and I didn’t even know what it was. It’s not like Cubism or Futurism, you know what they stand for, but postmodernism is a bit like saying post-contemporary, it’s a conflict of terms. It took me ages to work out what it meant. I have architect friends and I am interested in what they do; I am also fascinated by industrial design. I wanted to find out why the work of a designer like Dieter Rams should have the ability to move me. Why were his creations more interesting than a hamburger? All these things were going round in my mind. What is Pop Art? Did Pop Art have to be about vulgar things exclusively or could something more high-style be thought of as Pop? It became a problem for me in the sense that on the one hand I was sometimes painting figurative subjects and at other times trying to do something that I thought of as a product. These products could be very close to being artworks. Even a table I made for myself raised interesting questions; “I have devoted to this object the kind of technical skills and mental effort that I would give to a painting, so is it a work of art? How do these things relate?”
REM KOOLHAAS: The first time I knew about you and saw your work was in connection with the Smithsons and it was particularly one collage with a body-builder that established your connection to architecture Just What Is It That Makes Homes So Different, So Appealing? To what extent were you an ally and to what extent did you have a collective aim with them?
We had rather opposed aims. When I look back at the 1956 exhibition and think of the so-called Fun House I did with John Voelcker and John McHale and compare it with the contribution of the Smithsons, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Nigel Henderson. I ask myself, “Why did they do something so archaic?” Their idea was, “We will make a fence around our space to mark out our territory, and we will put a shed inside the fenced area.” It was a simplistic philosophical statement about architecture: they defined a space and put a shed in it, an expression of the Smithson’s naked light bulb doctrine. The shed was inhabited by Nigel Henderson’s wonderful photo/collage symbolizing man and Eduardo filled the garden with pseudo fossils. It was an elegant solution. But I still think, “What is the point? How far back do you have to go to be modern?” I was not at the meeting when the decision was made to call the show “This is Tomorrow.” If I had been there I might have argued against it but I was commuting to Newcastle and didn’t attend all the meetings that were held. When I came back from Newcastle one weekend and heard that the exhibition was to be called “This is Tomorrow” I thought, “How can we do anything about tomorrow? Shouldn’t we at least find out what is going on today?” My whole concern was the present, yet some of the so-called groups were doing things that were rather passé to my way of thinking – a belated version of constructivism or a distinctly modernist program. They hadn’t caught up with today so why should we claim to be representing tomorrow?
KOOLHAAS: I probably recognize this absurdity of architecture that it is always claiming, excluding, defining, and therefore closing. Do you think that is inevitable, or not necessarily?
I don’t think it is inevitable because I have always been interested in something more inclusive than architecture and the area of art that I have chosen, that is to say painting. My interests lie in a pretty wide range of objects, not so much objects as subjects. In fact my concern has been to look at subject matter and to find the right pictorial solutions for that subject. I began to feel that what was needed was a kind of aesthetic general theory of relativity. Looking for a theory that tied everything together. That sounds a little pretentious.
OBRIST: You have talked about the present and I wanted to ask you about the future. We exchanged e-mails about that earlier …
At the age of 84 there is hardly any point in talking about the future. [laughs] My future is somewhat limited. My friends are dying like flies around me, Marcel Broodthaers, Dieter Roth, John Latham to name a few. I feel somewhat alone. When I began to assemble the group of paintings that I hope to bring to completion I was amused to think of them as “the late paintings.” They are in some ways absurd, retro rather than late. I have become interested in the idea of beauty. The creatures I am painting, I call them angels, are inspired by Fra Angelico. They are pictures of stripped-off young women. Angels are famously unsexed but my angels are women because I am more interested in painting girls than in painting young men. I also know that Fra Angelico wouldn’t have dreamt of painting a naked woman. My compositions are contrived from the outcome of sessions with a camera and they are completely self-indulgent. I find that I get so much pleasure from working in my studio these days. I am past any thought of sex, my subjects are purposefully chaste and beautiful – not at all erotic. It is, in some ways, an eccentric group of paintings, but when friends come to my studio, they manage to express some interest in what is going on. [laughs]
