DUNCAN WOOLDRIDGE

> Metronom: Reading about your professional experiences, your versatility immediately emerges. How do you combine your work as artist, curator, critic and researcher? How does one aspect influence the others?

Duncan Wooldridge: One thing began the process for me: I realised that in my artwork I was interested in the work of other artists. I have made artwork that thinks a lot about its contexts and histories – for more than 10 years I worked with photographs of works of art – but I also liked to think about and write about what I saw. A lot of artists I admired early in my career also took writing seriously – by which I mean they participated in criticism and critical debates and didn’t accept critics deciding the work for them. Artists like Donald Judd or Daniel Buren.

I think it is necessary to participate and shape a discourse, not wait for it happen to you. Contemporary photographic art, for example – one of my specialist areas – is a mixture of traditional sentiments and old conventions alongside new technologies and radical experiments. There are lots of well-meaning critics and curators who have power, but who ultimately make conservative judgements, where the consequence of their claims or actions maintains the normal order. I want to instead to make bolder claims, to make different exhibitions, and draw attention to work that will matter in the long term. For me, that necessarily is work that does not reproduce existing visual strategies, but neither is it new for the sake of newness – it is work that finds a productive friction between new forms and the moment in which the work is made.

I try to work rigorously in each space I work in. I don’t try to curate or write ‘as an artist’ – as if being an artist produces some strange licence to write erratically or without being precise – but I think that making my own work means that I can begin to understand the limits, freedoms and frictions in each area from multiple angles. I am interested in curating in a way that generates complex and sophisticated meanings. You can build up to complexity, but the work and the world are complex – so an answer that is reductive or vague is not helpful. My criticism and theoretical work is similar: I am interested in writing producing a serious, but also fluid encounter with an artwork and its ideas. I want to seek out what the potential and consequences of an artwork might be – not to use it to make my argument

> M: As insider, could you tell us about the London artistic context today, even about recent realities like Peckham 24?

London is conservative right now, but as a response, artists are starting to self-organise and work on alternative projects, and that is exciting. There are actually a lot of artists making very interesting work, who so far have had to find audiences elsewhere. Platforms for showing that work are gradually emerging. Peckham 24 is a contemporary festival in South London that showcases – mostly – contemporary and experimental work, at the weekend of the Photo London and Offprint fairs in May. Often some of the best work of the weekend is here. Melinda Gibson and I organised a public programme for last year’s festival, based upon hospitality and generosity, bringing together an approach to working generously that we will develop further, and announce soon. Pic.London also began last year, and started an ambitious programme mixing major and emerging artists. Alongside this, projects such as Fields Forum, set up by Thom Bridge, has started to look at how artists keep in dialogue in such a large city. Some of the key organisers of Slovenia’s Fotopub festival are in London too. Foam Talent has also come to the city regularly now, and I’m working with some of this year’s artists to build platforms for them.

Photo London has become a useful focus, but it does disguise a need for more support for emerging photography. London has a large number of galleries and museums, but it’s take on contemporary photographic practices is still quite cautious, likely to fall into spectacle or convenience, especially in larger spaces. There are only 3 or 4 commercial galleries that have a strong focus on photography that support emerging work, and many of those spaces are economically precarious, and find it hard to survive. At the moment there are not many truly contemporary collectors, and much of the power exists in old hierarchies. I think London will have to think of alternative ecosystems, as the city has a large number of people dedicated to contemporary art and photography, but few of those can afford to buy it and pay for housing.

Here, I think that how the artworld works with photography is often more interesting than how the photography world works with it. The best recent photo exhibitions – Amie Siegel at South London Gallery, Lawrence Abu Hamdan at Chisenhale, Christopher Williams at The Whitechapel, and displays of work by Zoe Leonard and James Welling at Tate (curated by the contemporary art curator Mark Godfrey) have been outside of photography spaces, whilst most photography curators put on shows with little real resonance to the present. Katrina Sluis’ curatorial project – All I Know Is What’s On The Internet, at The Photographer’s Gallery – was a great proposition and exception, but it was given a small space and second billing to a documentary exhibition that had little to say about our experiences right now. When that happens, I spend a lot of time looking at the other arts instead.

> M: Talking about photography in a digital context, how do all the infinite potentialities offered by new technologies, as sharing, editing in million ways or linking contents, affect, if it happens, the image “value”?
 
D: To answer your question, we must highlight the need for a conversation about value that is properly critical. What do we want from value, and do we understand each others conceptions of that term? I won’t start there, but maybe we can return to it once I’ve qualified a few points quickly.

It’s true that the digital image produces almost infinite possibilities, but I do not value that quantity in itself. Many of those choices are small or intentionally conservative, such as automated filters which reproduce old aesthetics. They’re part of a cultural programming encouraging us to seek quick solutions and remain in familiar territories. So too, digital distribution: so far, the only change to how digital images are shared is a matter of speed: a digital image moves faster than its analogue precursor. It becomes redundant more quickly too. But this movement – it’s rapid redundancy – does take us to an interesting possibility, which is to seek out how the image moves in all of its complexity, beyond the rhetorics of ‘sharing’. I’m working on an exhibition on this very subject, which will open in April in London. The exhibition is called ‘Moving The Image’, a play on the traditional description for cinema as ‘the moving image’, a kind of moving photography. I propose to look at all of the ways that photography moves: how it is distributed, by whom and for whom, through familiar and unexpected circuits, in compressed and expanded formats, and as an object. Because the digital image moves so fast, it has left us without an understanding. How we can reclaim an understanding of that technology will matter.

Because the digital image appears to be ethereal, easily replicated as a jpeg, et cetera, perhaps there appears a question about it’s economic exchange value, and whether that diminishes. I’m not sure this distinction between the analogue and digital is an accurate one: the analogue is also repeatable. It too was once perceived as being a threat to the artwork, but as we can see after Walter Benjamin, the aura of the work of art does not fully disappear as might be hypothesised. So it does not aid us to suggest that the digital technology we have right now is categorically different from before: the digital is not so different, and we have promised that such technologies will free us before!  Instead, what we should turn to are our ‘values’ – not exchange values, but ethical values – to ask how we want images to interact with viewers, the cultures of the present and future, and the ecologies of the time. This question about value – about the ethical ‘values’ in our everyday society, and especially in the world of technology – are I think very important right now.

> M: In a very interesting essay you wrote on the occasion of the solo show by Taisuke Koyama, Generated X(2017), you say: “A more complex and interesting image is possible and emerging: as many writers on the expanded field of photography suggest, we might find a real sense of the world in new and uncommon domains and technologies”. Could you clarify or contextualize this phrase?

D: In Taisuke Koyama’s strategies for working with photography, we see how he uses photography, and this might give us incentives or encouragement to act in similar ways out in the world. Let’s start with the idea of generation: Koyama’s work with photography involves a pushing and pulling what the camera and image can do. He zooms in and out, reusing the same image, re-photographing it and finding new potential there. He shows us how one image effectively generates another, like a biological engine creating further experiences. In doing this, he goes to the heart of digital technology – it’s noise, and interference, and an infinite variance that isn’t ‘choice’, but the heart of something much bigger – ‘complexity’, a complex universe of events and positions. Less abstractly, what also interests me so much about his process is how it could be a model for how we should question the position that technology has within our lives. He does not use the technology in a fashion that is socially prescribed for him, but finds his own uses. In this, and in the way that all good artists use photography, there is the beginnings of the possibility to find a different way to act, think and see.

•

Duncan Wooldridge is an artist, writer, and curator, and the Course Director of Fine Art Photography at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. He writes regularly for 1000 Words, Foam, Elephant, Art Monthly, and Artforum. His next curatorial project, ‘Moving The Image’, includes work by Lou Cantor, Liz Deschenes, Discipula, Kensuke Koike, Taisuke Koyama, Louise Lawler, John MacLean, Sarah Pickering, Clare Strand, Dayanita Singh, Dafna Talmor, Edouard Taufenbach, Corinne Vionnet, and others, and opens at Camberwell Space from 23rd April – 1st June 2019.

6/03/2019