Stuart Semple Interview on Indechs.org

One branch of the Cultural Avenue is indechs.org; an online platform for contemporary culture.    Biweekly Theme Weeks are created, which operate around one specific topic that feels relevant in the current cultural production. Each week starts off with an interview between Indechs and a protagonist of the particular subject, initiating a debate underlined by related posts during the week.    The eighth Theme Week is orientating around consumer culture, commercial collaborations and pop art in today's contemporary art scene. Art has become much more than just a collectible canvas on our walls - new relations, cooperate collaborations or mass media influences have been shaping its production for some decades now. Lately the magnitude of the Internet accelerated the access to art and established new medias of producing, selling and collecting it. One of the most celebrated and acclaimed of today's British painters, Stuart Semple, starts the debate for this week with a discussion between him and Indechs.  Could tell us a little bit about your practise, please?   I'm a painter. I paint pictures and the word pictures is important to me. I don't just do that with paint sometimes I do it with film or sculpture or illustrations, maybe with text. I make pictures. I'm interested in lots of stuff, but what tends to re-emerge is an obsession with childhood, the loss of youth. Nostalgia, and then anxiety. It comes down to a dialogue with noise and silence, the individual within the culture.    How do you define Pop art today? To what extent has the understanding and perception of 'Pop' changed in today's society and would you see yourself in the domain (if there is one) of Pop?   Pop is tricky to define I think it fluctuates and it moves, I think over the years it has expanded and grown to encompass almost everything within our lived experience. All the arts have been swallowed by it now. We live in one big pop world. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing what I am focusing on is our humanity inside that, who we are in comparison. Yes I live in Pop, we all live there, I don't have a choice the histories were there before I started. If you are talking about Pop Art as a movement, I don't identify with that. Yes of course there was a British and interestingly Spanish element to that but really for me Pop is about post war America, that was 70 years ago, I can't identify with that. We are in a global time, an interconnected time, yes there are I suppose dominant ideologies in groups of people that make things but there's no fixed movement like that any more. I don't want to be penned into a narrow box like that. I'm just interested and confused by the world I live in.  You have an art piece on iTunes (a music platform) you have worked on some music videos, you are seeing each major exhibition of yours as an album and the works as the tracks, you name your works: ”Would the Real Stuart Semple Please Stand Up?” or ”Killing me softly (with her sound)”;", you recently started a collaboration with a music band of which your are an official part as an artist. Are music and art equally important to you? What influence does music have on the outcome of your work?  Music is vital to me, growing up it was really the only accessible form of contemporary art I had, the work of musical artists. I identified with that. I think the act of writing a song or composing a picture are similar processes in a way. Music is very powerful in conveying emotion and transporting us back to a feeling of a time or a place. If anything I am jealous of the power it has and I wish visual things had that direct cerebral impact. Painting in a way is like a recording of a moment, a live moment, where you were what you did, how you physically moved your body. A music recording is the same. I can think of a series of paintings that go together like an album, that make thematic sense that sit together, that's useful for me. I can get a little phrase, or a hook or a melody in my mind. It's an image idea though and I live with that and churn it over, I might draw it or just remember, then I'll get in the studio and put it down. Sometimes I make a little study, I guess that's like a musicians demo of a song. Then I work them into bigger finished things. Collaging is the same as musical sampling. Layers in a painting are like layers in a mix.   Do you listen to music while working in the studio? And if so what is on your play list?  All the time, it's vital and it's everything. From jungle to pop, rock, electronic, classical. Across all genres really. I use music like a fuel to get me into the feeling I need for a particular passage of work which I find I can channel into what I'm making. I've been collecting music for decades, there's everything. Besides your music collaborations, you have entered the corporate sphere many times. You have installed and directed the gallery for the fashion label Aubin & Wills, for who you even designed a cardigan lately,  you have designed a football boot for Umbro, worked with the retail store Selfrides on projects, you have your works across the stores of the fashion brand Moncler and introduced your own accessory line. Do you use these channels to make your art accessible to the masses or is it purely about a creative exchange between art and other industries? It's both really. I'm always into new challenges and pushing the edges of things so the opportunity to explore these places is exciting. I think that artists should engage with the wider culture, we don't need to be narrow we can contribute and discuss and collaborate and share. I really believe in collaboration, there's a lot of it going on right now, it's almost a trend in itself. I'm not into that I'm talking about a genuine meeting of minds where both people bring something and both leave with more than they started with and often the most valuable thing I take a way is an education I learn something. However, accessibility is vital for me, I believe art should be available and democratic. I don't believe that by crossing over into the mainstream it needs to be dumbed down, I think it can thrive in other contexts, I think quite often those contexts can give new perspectives that enhance it. Plus life is very short and I like to say yes to doing things if I can. I'm keen on taking risks, moving forward creatively. I'm not bothered about covering the same familiar safe ground in some kind of perpetual loop. Click here to read the complete interview on Indechs.org