Art
A noted psychoanalyst puts the Freud-obsessed young artist on her couch, then mines the unconscious underpinnings of his thriving career
Psychoanalysis is much stranger than even the strangest of popular clichés that abound in popular culture. For Freud, the unconscious is a puppet master that you only get to meet in the sleep between one day and the next. One of Freud’s discoveries was something he called transference, an unconscious fantasy that suddenly arises when asked by another to speak about yourself. So I wasn’t too surprised when the artist, Oliver Clegg, found it difficult to come talk to me (even though a pivotal moment in his artistic career took place in relation to a series of stunning works on Freud at the Freud Museum in London). His work often directly engages with themes that are ripe for psychoanalytic exploration: childhood, rebellion, authority, melancholia.
Oliver and I met at my office and almost immediately he wanted to go downstairs to have tea. “It’s just not going to go well in there,” he said. “Can we sit by the water? Or just somewhere outside?” He then added, after a long pause, “I want to be outside so I always have an exit right? That’s what you are thinking?” I answered with the proverbial “Hmm.” In the end I met Oliver at his studio to finish the interview. I congratulate him for the well-engineered reversal of roles. This transference-induced escape from the psychoanalyst’s lair is the backdrop for what you are about to read.
Clegg’s workbench in his Williamsburg studio.
Clegg with “Melancholy Is My Default Emotional State,” a hand-engraved saw.
“Eating Is Greater Than Thinking,” a hand-engraved metal plate.
An assortment of toys that Clegg has used in his work rest in a pile on his studio floor, surrounded by paintings.
“The End,” a film-style “end title” laser cut into Clegg’s original birth certificate.
Jamieson Webster: You emerged as an artist through Freud, but I don’t think we should talk about psychoanalysis.
Oliver Clegg: I don’t want to limit my work to a topic. I don’t think that it’s driven by psychoanalysis, or even a basic awareness of it. This projection onto my work is other people’s interpretation. I think it is a limited overview of my development.
JW: It’s ironic that your use of psychoanalysis constrains or limits your work. Psychoanalysis is supposed to open interpretation.
OC: I think you are talking about starting points. The analysis of the psyche is of course interesting in any piece of art, but I’d be interested in what are the perceived psychological foundations of an artist in his or her creative infancy.
JW: And now you are here, having moved from London to Cornwall to New York City, and place has certainly affected your work.
"Freud showed that everyone is a genius in his or her unconscious."
OC: When you get somewhere and are responding to the new vibrations, then the progress, or lack of progress, is very dependent on the specific environment. Cornwall was a rural existence, and the inspirations were more reflexive and internal. It was a context in relation to my father’s death, and the reason we decided to leave London. When I was in Cornwall, I was trying to deal with loss and bereavement over the three-year period. I was thinking more, but in my work there was more of a technical development: because I had so much more time, I focused on the use of oil paint. Here in New York, there is always some kind of tempting social engagement, and there is so much I want to do. It is sometimes hard to spend so much time on individual paintings. I have a huge studio, and the work is spread out, and I can see their relation to one another. New York is a fast-paced environment, and you have to be ruthless with your process; you are forced to understand your tastes much more efficiently. I’m not Machiavellian, trying to get to a perfect state. I’m trying to find a balance. Being an artist means never being satisfied, and part of that means cultivating a temperament where there is always an error that needs to be resolved. The infinite goal of the artist is inspired by the fact that nothing can ever be right.
JW: You talk about your work as if it progresses in a way where you see something that you don’t like. You talk about how you wanted to get rid of how structured your work felt or how precious it was under glass. And then you made a correction.
OC: In my work, taking off the frames and glass relates to a personal confidence. I once felt like I had to frame and condition everything because I expected that “they” expected to see two-dimensional work. I was framing, putting glass, putting text, all on one piece. And people would say, “Are you sure you want to load so much information?” And I was like, “Yes, of course. Completely necessary.” But, perhaps it was a lack of confidence. I came from a very traditional artistic upbringing, studying art history in university. Then I lived in Italy studying oil painting for two years, painting a live model for three hours a day. I wasn’t born from a very contemporary starting point. So the progression is very incremental.
JW: I know that your father’s death plays a central role in your career over the past five years.
OC: He died three years ago, and I graduated two years before he died.
JW: I was thinking about that and your relationship to authority and institutions. And the question in Freud is always a question about fathers. Part of the strange truth in Freud is that you have to kill your father, that we are always already guilty of having killed our fathers in some way, even the minute we are born, as if that is the definition of what it means to be a son.
OC: So is your question did I get along with my father? What are you really getting at? To answer something like that, I feel I might need 10 sessions on the couch, or more, depending on how much you cost. And maybe that’s one of the reasons I’ve never been to speak to a psychoanalyst because I feared that it is something that subverts my position. But, perhaps you are inferring this relationship to patricide in my work, like the chessboard I made [which is a replica of Freud’s entire desk and desk chair]. A chess master called Jonathan Rowson saw the piece at the Saatchi Gallery in London, and the first thing he said was that Marcel Duchamp had outlined chess as the ultimate form of patricide. When you have this particular conditioned upbringing of private school and the church up until the age of 18 and then you leave, suddenly the world gets much broader. With the rapid evolution of technology, globalized media and the access they provide to the opinions of the whole world, childhood expectations can change so suddenly. In my work, I wasn’t necessarily thinking about my father, but a problem that characterizes my generation. My work is driven by nostalgia. It’s not necessarily a negative thing. Looking at my childhood that is expressed in these paintings — the toys feel neglected, and there is a sense of longing and loss. I think the nostalgia works to remind me of good times and not just bad times.
JW: I’m curious about the toys. I don’t know if you know the psychoanalyst in England (D.W. Winnicott) who talked about the toys little kids get really attached to, like the blanket or stuffed animal that they hold onto for years, sometimes until it is in tatters. His thought was that it wasn’t just that the child needed the object for security, but that the child also needs to destroy the object. They create it, love it and bring it to life, but they are also ruthless with it.
“Ja/Nein,” one of 100 letter-carved wooden children’s arks.
OC: I would agree with that. These pictures have this feeling of wanting to move on without regret. You don’t want to be sucking from a beaker all your life. There’s that realization that “I’m too old for that.” The toys are metaphors for change — objects loved by the child that were let go and put through a process of destruction. But the child learns so much from that relationship. In your family you don’t ask to be fathered, you don’t ask to be governed. You aren’t governed by choice. Do we put the institution on a pedestal, or do we consider the fallacy?
JW: You were playing with the puppet in the photo shoot, and you have a lot of paintings with puppets, whether they are animated or unanimated and lying on the ground. Freud said that the unconscious is a puppet master and that we are puppets. That was his great inversion: we are not masters in our own house.
OC: Again we are talking about authority, and who is in charge. And I am imposing my control on everything. As any artist, the individual process of creating means that I make all of the choices, including choosing the puppets and having them walking or not walking.
JW: What I love about the puppet paintings is that it’s hard to show in the relationship to toys what it means to play. With the puppet, you can see what it means to bring something to life, or put it back down as a thing in the world, a discarded object, and then pick it up and give it life again.
OC: Freud wrote this essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming. He talks about role-play with a child and suggests that it is the artists and the writers who continue this sense of fantasy of role-play and playfulness. I don’t see my work as just melancholic statements.
JW: No, you are quite funny.
OC: Even the toys that are neglected, they aren’t being used but they aren’t unused toys. You don’t have pity for an unused toy. I want to perhaps re-invest in the playfulness of youth, something that comes directly from the luxury of being able to exist in an imaginative world.
"The infinite goal of the artist is inspired by the fact that nothing can ever be right."
JW: You are lucky.
OC: Definitely. Definitely lucky. Maybe there is a limitation in Freud’s theory because I don’t think that it is only the artist who gets to be creative. There are many ways to continue being playful and imaginative
JW: Maybe your work reminds the viewer that play is not only for the artist. The great democratic spirit in psychoanalysis for me is the fact that Freud showed that everyone is a genius in his or her unconscious. Every dream is brilliant, perfect, a work of art.
OC: I think that’s my point. I don’t have any more taste than someone who is not an artist, I’m just lucky to be in the position where I can buy junk and paint shit on it. There’s a lot of luck in that. So, anyone who is unhappy in what they are doing should make every effort to put himself or herself in another position. You only live in this world for a short time, and the explanation of life is basically impossible. Even if you think you have found a definition, there is nothing to justify its correctness, so if you are unhappy with one thing, you should try to do another, create new experiences. I think this is why I have moved around the world as much as I have.
JW: The work I do is trying to get people to move if they aren’t happy, which is hard.
OC: I’m lucky to have been able to get into a position to make the decisions I make, and you’ll have to cut that out because I sound like an arrogant shit.
JW: No.
OC: Yes.
JW: Is there anything else you want to say?
OC: No.
JW: Good. It’s time to stop.
Credits:
Makeup: Nobuo Kawabata
Assistant: Jesper Justesen
Retoucher: Soomin Kim
LC4 Chaise Longue from Design Within Reach
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