Interview with Harry Holland, 15 February 2012.
RW: I’m talking to Harry Holland, who’s been a working artist in Cardiff for fifty years. I’m talking to him about the gendering of women in art. His art and the art of two artists Sarah Lucas and Kiki Smith.
Harry Holland, Exchange, —-. Sarah Lucas, Au Naturel, 1994. Kiki Smith, Pee Body, 1992.
RW: First of all I was going to ask you about your work. Mainly you’re work seems very figurative, based around the same sort of figures and representations of women. So I was wondering where you feel that you fit in the way that women are represented in art and how you feel female viewers are supposed to feel when they are looking at your work.
HH: I consider myself part of a very long tradition in art, going back 5 or 6 centauries. That is the tradition of Western painting. And within that there are various categories of painting up to the 19th centaury there used to be a number of various categories based on hierarchy with history painting at the top and landscape painting at the bottom. These had various moral connotations. So somebody who painted history painting they were at the top of the moral tree because they made moral comments through exercises in history. Landscape painting didn’t come in until probably the late 18th century and it was always regarded as being a bit naff. Representations of women however occurred across all these categories except still life which is down there with landscape painting as a moral thing, although Momento Mori of course is a reminder that we are mortal. And it usually involves a bell, book, candle, a skull and all the usual sort of stuff. So they are still lives that have a moral content but they weren’t about consumption, like most still lives are mostly about how good things are to either eat, look at, or have.
Anyway representations of women, apart from those two bottom categories occur through all the various categories and they are variously represented. Usually ideally, except in portraiture which is nearly down there with landscape painting and still life. They were nearly all represented idealistically as mostly were men largely because of the renaissance tradition which grew out of the discoveries of Greek art. So there has grown up in western art an ideal typical woman in our heads and it’s with us today. I think in our world that is so photographic in ability we’re still holding onto these ideals of how women should look. I do them all the time and the reason I do them is because, if I was to represent, in some of the things that I do, some of the compositions that I make of women or involving women. If I were to make real women, the wrong questions would be asked of the painting. The question would be who is that woman and what the hell is she doing there, rather than a visual view of rhythms in other words the abstract values in the painting.
RW: so where do you place yourself in your hierarchy of painting?
HH: Oh I’m about second or third from the top.(laughs). Well I’m not history, its difficult really because I would have been called a painter of mythologies some time ago but not anymore. First of all not many people are a) interested and b) knowledgeable in Greek mythology I suppose the nearest thing to what I do now would be science fiction.
RW: So coming back to the viewing of your painting. How do you want your paintings to be viewed by the people their representing?
RW: well their not representing anybody-
RW: The ideals their representing-
HH: Their not representing anybody. Their representing womanhood if their representing anything. I absolutely love female bodies – well and male bodies- their gorgeous and I can’t think of anything better than spending my time looking at them and making pictures of them.
Harry Holland, Laze, 2010. Harry Holland, Pillow, 2010. Harry Holland, Twist, 2011.
RW: Ok so you’ve had a look through the images I’ve brought, what do you think of them?
HH: I can see the intent, I can be critical I take it, can I?
RW: Yes
HH: Well its so fucking obvious I can hardly bring myself to comment on it. They are various illustrations of rather ugly aspects of some feminine view of the world. This one this one is so bloody obvious it could have been done by some 6th former almost anywhere – I’m referring to Bitch by Sarah Lucas, its just a t-shirt and a table with saggy boobs and a smelly crotch. I mean frankly I’d rather not view women in that way. Although, simply illustrating the way things are is not necessarily very good art in fact it’s usually very bad art. A classic example of course is Tracey Emins’ bed which is I think an illustration of a certain kind of lifestyle.
Sarah Lucas, Bitch, 1995. Sarah Lucas, Bitch, 1995. Tracey Emin, My Bed, 1998.
RW: The way I’ve been discussing these is as portrayals of projections onto women.
HH: Well I don’t see it like that. I think this is, well let me personalise it a bit, I don’t see women in this way and I spend my life looking at women. I think that this is one woman being very critical of aspects of her own sex and maybe her own sexuality.
RW: Do you see any need for that criticism?
HH: Yes, anything that adds to a view of the world other than, any metaphor and I don’t think these are really metaphors but lets say. Any metaphor that helps people to take a view of the world other than this kind of naive one where people look at the world and make their own judgements about it. We make judgements about the world based on what other people say as well as what we ourselves think and art is of course a co-operative activity we are where we are because we are standing on the shoulders of forty generations of artists who’ve gone before us. All of whom have made comments and this is I’ve seen this sort of stuff around since the 60’s which is when I started looking at art.
RW: I think this artist (Kiki Smith) would have started around the 60s, or not long after as well, she’s just still going.
Kiki Smith, Tale, 1992. Kiki Smith, Virgin, 1993. kiki smith, Untitled (Train), 1994
HH: Well jolly good for her it’s just that it doesn’t have some of the things that I value in art. One thing it doesn’t have physical limitations which help you to understand its place as a metaphor. Like for example the physical limitation of a painting is the fact that you’ve got four edges and within that lets say if your treating it as a easel painting, within that there’s a window space and everything happens behind that space not all painting, but generally speaking in easel painting- not just painting done on an easel but its window space painting, because you have that limitation what you’re allowed to do is make compositions in it so that the composition can direct your eye towards the things, or around the things or between the things that you actually want to make a comment about.
RW: How do you feel about renaissance sculpture?
HH: Love it to death. Precisely because, well it’s got to stand up, it also has to create a space around it. Which stuff like this doesn’t, it also has to concentrate your attention on the roundness of the form and make you actually want to move around it. There’s a picture there of a Bernini sculpture (Apollo and Daphne). It is absolutely stunning and its all carved out of one block of stone, not that you care about that so much because you could make it out of fibreglass, but the plain fact is that because of the rhythms and because of the way the figures are distorted it evokes a real sense of lightness of chase which is totally offset by the tragedy of what’s happening to the girl. She’s being turned into a tree and that contradiction is one of the great things that art can do. The other great contradiction of course is that you’ve got a completely immovable material representing movement, fantastic. Those contradictions are what artists use to do two things one of them is to make you look, so a thing has poignancy but also to aid with the storytelling whatever it is.
Bernini, Appollo and Daphne, c.1622-1625.
RW: Is it the aesthetics of a piece of art which you look for?
HH: Usually yes. Well you can’t really divorce that from any content, not content, but from what the painting is trying to say. I have to tell you I don’t actually regard myself as a great painter so I don’t make great stories, I don’t have a great moral view on the world. I know artists that do and I admire them. The things that interest and excite me are evoking a certain lightness of heart and also a certain density in the world. I try and get that and I do it in various ways, often in paintings which depict numbers of women, I mean for example, there is to my mind something fundamentally ironical about having a group of pretty hefty objects floating around in the ether as though not only do they have no care in the world but they have no weight in the world and I think the ability to do that is so delightful I just can’t help myself. (Harry Holland’s Caprice paintings)
Harry Holland, Falling, 2011. Harry Holland, Boat, 2008. Harry Holland, Skyfly, 2008.
Rebecca Lois 