Artist Mark Jackson answers a few questions

MARK JACKSON
www.mrkjcksn.com

Can you describe your practice in a few words?

It's like a container for an expansive array of thoughts, conceptual and material experiments, conversations, speculations.

What is your earliest memory of art?

I have various memories from childhood making pictures for friends, but my earliest memory of art was different. I was 12 and we were staying with some family friends with older kids. One of them showed me a book on Francis Bacon and I was transfixed. I thnk that is where it all started for me.

Have you shown your work in a non-white cube space before?

Yes, I've shown in a rundown empty apartment in Manila in the Philippines, stripped of all its furnishings. It was called the Living Room Gallery. At the time I was collaborating and we made lamps from coloured bits of paper. The whole scene was very different to a white cube. There it was softly lit, it had a bowed wooden floor, scuffed walls, windows looking out onto the grey sea, flapping tarpaulin roofs of make-shift housing sat outside and created a patchwork of muddy colours that echoed back onto the lampshades. And the doors were open so people could just wander in. Interestingly all of the contemporary art discourse that I brought to it, that came from my specifically Western Art education, fell away and all we were left with were the lampshades. This was in 2005 around the time when Relational Aesthetics was quite prevalent, and the discourse of that seemed to have no place there. It was quite refreshing, and the non-white cube and the rest of the context made the work into something totally different.

What does this sort of space bring to your work?

Now my work is more autonomous. In general I think painting is - In that it tends to be less site-specific. It has a frame to keep it in. So my paintings now could be placed in a variety of settings and their language would be less augmented by place, although there of course would be subtle changes. As a heavy contextual change I suppose could easily shift them....

Does the envirnment in which you exhibit your work change how your work is percieved?

Yes, I think it changes everyone's work. Thanks to Duchamp we live in a world where an object is one situation is totally different from the same object in a different situation. This holds and has been developed over the last 100 years in such a rich and fascinating way. All I would say is that some objects have a more malleable status. Paintings are pretty stable in the scheme of things.

What is the future for art?

It will simply continue. It started when we scratched a zigzag shape on a bowl some half a million years ago, and will end when we go.

If you couldmeet one artist living or dead, who would that be and why?

Some artists remain an enigma. I'd want to watch them paint, and interview them about it. De Kooning would be top of my list as his method is so complex. Velasquez too. I recently met Anne Carson in a creative writing workshop and that was strange. As an introduction she pushed me on each shoulder in a performative greeting. In a way I didn't need to meet her. Her greatness is all there in her writing. Maybe because I'm not a writer her method is less important to me.

What is your greatest weakness?

A mixture of timidity and laziness in the studio is a killer.

What was the last exhibition you visited that unnerved you?

The Chapman's show last year at Blain Southern was striking. They showed bronze casts of suicide vests. I just stared for a long time at the hollow space at their centres, where the body would be. It was devastating. It took me by surprise.

What place does portraiture play in your work?

None at the moment. For me the faces I paint are kind of non-representational in that there is no absent subject or sitter as there would be in portraiture. Instead they 'present' the face, multiple faces or allusions to their forms.

Who have been your main influences over the years, both in historical and recent terms?

Anyone who has carved out a life as an artist and stuck with it. I get a kick from other people's determination. For sheer painterly ingenuity and imagination: Bacon, Picasso, De Kooning. Then at art school I was hugely inspired by Duchamp. Other interests then were the writings of Richard Brautigan, the sound of Sonic Youth and Albert Ayler - something to do with their expansiveness. More recently the books keeping me company in the studio are on Degas's prints, Munch's prints, Piero, Steven Aalders, Per Kirkeby, Anne Carson and Agnes Martin. I've been listening to the voyager recordings of the Planets, Carl Stone's tape loops, John Coltrane, and Liz Phair to sing along to.

What projects do you have coming up in the future?

I've just completed a series of monotype prints on a residency at Cove Park Scotland. So this year I'd like to exhibit them as a single unit somewhere. I'm really excited about how printmaking is impacting on my paintings. More print projects, group shows to come I hope. Although this year is all about producing larger, full-figure paintings towards a second solo show, wherever that may be.

www.mrkjcksn.com