Collection Study
Charles Avery, Untitled (the Ninth Resort), 2010

Text by Tom Morton
January 2017

Untitled (The Ninth Resort) is a pencil and ink drawing on paper made in 2010 by British artist Charles Avery (b. 1973, Oban, UK). Unframed the work measures 175 x 236 cm. It depicts a dock scene on the outskirts of Onomatopeia, the capital of the fictional world ‘the Island’ to which Avery has devoted his practice since 2004. 'The Ninth Resort' at the centre of the scene is a popular café, named after the ninth, local eels that are central to the Island’s diet, economy and culture.

The work was acquired for the David and Indrė Roberts Collection from Pilar Corrias (London, UK) on 27th July 2010. It went on loan to EX3 Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea (Florence, Italy) for the exhibition Onomatopeia Part 1 (19 Nov 2010-9 Jan 2011) and on this occasion the work was framed, and its dimensions are 196 x 237 x 9cm. It was then borrowed by Folkestone Triennial (Folkestone, UK) which took place from 23 June until 25 September 2011. Most recently, the work was loaned to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Edinburgh, UK) for the exhibition Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland (26 June 2014-25 Jan 2015). Untitled (The Ninth Resort) is the first work by Charles Avery acquired for the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, London.

Inspired by his own upbringing on the Scottish island Mull, Avery has developed an entire geography, anthropology and cosmology for his fictional Island through different philosophical and mathematical systems. The project includes large-scale drawings, sculptures, installations, books, posters, moving images, furniture and jewellery.

Untitled (The Ninth Resort) is displayed at DRAF alongside a selection of works by Charles Avery from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection and works on loan.

For this Collection Study, DRAF has commissioned a text by curator and writer Tom Morton.

Fairly Immutable

Charles Avery interviewed by Tom Morton

TOM MORTON: Let’s begin with the specific work that is the subject of DRAF’s Collection Study, your drawing Untitled (The Ninth Resort) (2010). Here, we wash up at the twilit quayside of Onomatopoeia, capital city of your fictional Island, where a couple of boys are bringing in their day’s catch of ‘ninth’ (the word rhymes, I believe, with ‘plinth’) – eel-like or perhaps line-like creatures that are central to the Island’s economy. Up on the quay, the patrons of a rather unsalubrious bar named ‘The Ninth Resort’ are already getting stuck into the local firewater, while on hills above a drover guides his herd home.

A few details feel particularly telling: the fact that the boys’ boat is named ‘Subsistence’, the transparent vessel (almost but not quite a Klein bottle) that bobs in the foreground, the beaky ‘kepews’ that scavenge on the quayside like wingless gulls. Why choose Untitled (The Ninth Resort) as the focal point for your exhibition at DRAF? Do this work’s themes of labour and a kind of threadbare survival echo elsewhere in the show?

CHARLES AVERY: I think this drawing contains many key emblems of the Island, with several clues to the type of existence the inhabitants live out. That existence is bare-boned but not necessarily impoverished. I have been spending a great deal of time on my native island (Mull, off the west coast of Scotland) in recent years, becoming re-acquainted with a place that I left as a child, but which has a firm grip on my subconscious. In doing so I have enjoyed a much more direct relationship with the world, such as catching our supper, augmented by the very thin selection of groceries available at the local SPAR, and changing my own tyres rather than calling the AA. Being an island, with a small population (around 3000) the economies are simple, and quite internal. Trade with the outside world is mainly through the conduit of Caledonian MacBrayne, the ferry service. Monopolies are rife, and able to exist unregulated. Every death and birth is significant. The local school has fewer than 10 pupils, so if a family moves to the village, or leaves, it has a huge impact. This microcosm enables one to observe and understand very fundamental economic principles, because the cause to effect is so evident. I have to confess to being attracted to the simplicity of the transactions that occur in such a situation. A longing that is magnified by the perverse economy of the art-world.

TM: So this drawing, in a sense, is a petri dish, where the basic forms of economic life might be isolated, and hence better observed?

CA: The depiction of a transparent, very tangible existence is echoed not only through the show, but also through the Islanders project as a whole. I think the whole Island, and certainly the work contained in this show, has a pared down, ascetic quality. Partly that’s because I prefer not to draw what I don’t understand, or that which is concealed. Take transport for example. Technologically, the Island is car-less, and its inhabitants mostly get about on bicycles. This form of transport is completely egalitarian, both affordable and transparent. Without any prior knowledge one could look at a bike, identify the function of its few mechanisms, and given a very simple toolbox take it apart and put it back together.

TM: Rather than your signature and instantly recognisable pencil drawings, the first room of your DRAF exhibition features a pair of murky watercolours, and a couple of buckets containing glass eels. Was it important to you to kick off the show with a cluster of works that didn’t immediately scream ‘Charles Avery!’? Were you attempting a kind a defamiliarisation?

CA: I never prepare a show in the expectation that people know my work.

TM: Sure, but even for somebody like me, who knows your work pretty well, this room was a bit of a surprise.

CA: I think I’m permanently trying to distance myself from myself. Spending so much time on my own and on my work, inevitably I tire of it.

Given that the show is part of a series of ‘Studies’ intended to provide a particular focus on an artist’s practice, Vincent Honoré (the curator) and I felt that the first room should provide precisely that: focus. We chose two works, one on the wall, one on the floor, which encapsulate and embody the essence of the project (I hope that doesn’t sound too wooly). The left hand panel of the two watercolours depicts the archetype of the Hunter (discoverer of the Island and namer of all things, or so he thinks) dragging his boat ashore the terra incognita. The right hand image represents the dark and foreboding interior of the Island, pregnant with possibility but revealing nothing.

The eel work on the floor also establishes some fundamentals. Throughout, I have attempted to achieve a tension between the subjective space of the Island, and the real world of galleries and things; to assert the ossification that occurs when an idea is given substance. An eel is a most vital, primitive, and directional being. I used to catch them on the shore when I was a boy, simply by lifting a rock and wrestling the eel that would generally be beneath, into a bucket. Often they would wriggle free and glide off between the rocks into the muddy shallows of the Loch. In doing so, there is apparently a form of decision-making going on, but this seems to be on the cusp of what me might regard as will. Does the eel take the easiest path, and if so is this apparent will no more than that of water?

TM: A formal question, which might glean a philosophical answer. Looking across your drawings from the last decade or so, their depth of field is strikingly consistent. After your pre-Islanders series The Life and Lineage of Nancy Haselswon (1999), there isn’t a single mug shot, and cropping only really re- emerges (beyond the odd lopped-off foot) as a pictorial strategy in very recent works such as Untitled (Fishermen Returning from the Memory of Consciousness) (2016). Were you consciously avoiding photographic conventions? Is the penumbra of white space (complete with scribbled notes to self) that surrounds many of your drawings a way of insisting on their ‘drawing-ness’?

CA: I have often insisted on the incomplete status of the drawings, and their diagrammatic nature. I have asserted that they may never be finished, there just comes a point at which I will stop doing them, and that this point often comes when it is time to show them, or some other equally quotidian event puts an end to it. By diagrammatic I mean to say that the drawings are not about themselves: they are not asserting their object-hood or ‘Artness’, but refer to another realm: the Island.

Over recent years I have sought to obscure the philosophical paradigm of the Island by trying to enhance the texture and substance of the place. I can’t say why this has been my inclination. I have recently been seeking to emancipate the inhabitants from their society, from the structural confines of the Island. I guess I felt that structure was becoming too overbearing – and it has been leading to too many questions (What form does education take on the Island? What happens in that building? What’s the Islanders favourite sport? Does Mr. Impossible have only one hat?)

TM: Unusually, the DRAF show features a partial (is this the right term?) mock-up your studio. Your work, here, is displayed alongside the various objects and images that you surround yourself with in daily life, with no curatorial privileging of any single element, whether it’s a preliminary sketch, or a heavy hole punch, or photographs of your wife and daughters. Unlike, say, the Mary Celeste –like reconstruction of Francis Bacon’s studio at The Hugh Lane, Dublin, the mock-up at DRAF is a clearly an approximation – it doesn’t encourage us to imagine that you’ve just put down your pencil to pop out for a coffee! Can you tell me a bit more about this element of the show? What exactly are we being asked to engage with, here?

CA: I wouldn’t go as far as to describe it as a mock-up of the studio, but more as a research room, in which residues of my process have been brought into the show for the enjoyment of the viewer, and to

make the point that the separation of exhibition and studio is not so defined. I think I’m for a certain amount of openness – I’m not putting on a magic show, and I don’t uphold the idea that some artists have that it destroys the mystique, quite the opposite. It was in fact the curator’s idea to have this element, and I thought ‘Why Not?’ and so went along with it! I think it’s appropriate – it symbolises the intended honesty and earnestness of the project. It was done in quite a light way: we just went around the studio hoovering up bits and bobs and arranging them decorously in the allotted space.

TM: A perhaps related question, or set of questions. Something that’s always interested me is the status of the object within your work. While drawings such as Untitled (Place de la Révolution) (2011) give us access to a fictional world through the ‘proscenium arch’ of its frame, a bronze sculpture such as Untitled (Duculi) (2013) inhabits the same space as the viewer, although in the DRAF exhibition this is the notional ‘nowhere’ of the white-walled gallery. Another layer of complexity is added by your presentation of ‘found objects’ at DRAF, such as the whorl of rope sitting atop a wooden palette, which also reappears in a drawing elsewhere in the show (one of the few you have made, I gather, by sketching from ‘still life’ rather than your imagination). This is not to mention your public sculptures such as Tree no.5 (from the Jadindagadendar) (2015), which was sited on Platform 2 of Edinburgh Waverley Station, or the fact that specific objects from ‘our’ world sometimes appear on the Island, such as the Arne Jacobsen Egg chairs we can glimpse through the windows of the Universal University in Untitled (Place de la Révolution). Is the (art) object an essentially unstable category, as far as you’re concerned?

CA: There is quite a fundamental distinction between these very opposite terms of the work, but when you write it down is can look a bit crassly obvious! The objects are precisely that, and their physicality is very tangible, particularly the ones I choose/ design / make: an old iron hole punch, its raison

d’être industrially obvious and obsolete, the muscular Duculi with its binary (at most) meaning, a tetrahedron (the simplest Euclidean form), a pile of rope, or eels (most physical embodiments of the line). They are all fairly immutable, not likely to change their nature, and what you see is what you get. We can make clever accounts of them, but of and unto themselves they are robustly platonic. The objects tend to be underwritten by some mathematical principle or idea, and mathematics is after

all an attempt to provide an objective account of the world, an attempt that many of the Islanders themselves deride. But we are not on the Island. We are in Triangland, planning our trip there.

The drawings provide an insight into the subjective realm. They have none of the certitude of that class of things we are referring to as objects. They are, to repeat, ‘diagrammatic’, which means there is no pretension to them being the thing-in-itself. They are unreliable, unfinished, taught by their striving and scarred by their failure to adequately describe the people and places of the Island. For all that they’re not bad (I don’t want to sound like I’m slagging them off!). They come with a sense of continuation: the sense that they are a frame of a larger event, but also that sense of incompletion, that I might at some point take up the pencil and have another crack at them. This redolence of possibility keeps them alive.

My relationship with the objects is what I would call ‘healthy’. I don’t agonise over them, probably because they are mostly fabricated by others, and so I have a much more stable opinion of them. My drawings cause me great anxiety.

TM: The DRAF show also contains a table and chairs of your own design, where visitors might sit and leaf through a copy of the journal Drawing Room Confessions, devoted to your work. Where do your furniture designs (which also featured in your 2015 solo at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh) fit into the Islanders project? What distinctions do you see – if any – between making an artwork, and the functional stuff of chairs, tables and lamps?

CA: The gallery represents a space between the mind (that of the artist) and the world. As a territory it is always in dispute. Of course, the (commercial) gallery is ultimately a bourgeois institution that exists with the purpose of purveying material goods. Museums have striven to occupy a different role and to distance themselves from petty materialism, establishing themselves as churches of Artness, and nothing is more telling of this than the scale at which they manifest. Whatever the pretensions however, the inescapable fact is that the major museums are quite in the hold of this new class, the globally operative super-rich, and increasingly a function of the art-market.

Where museum goers may think they are, in good faith, genuflecting at the alter of Artness (I don’t think they would understand it in those terms, but for the benefit of analogy let’s allow it), they are in fact worshipping the God of Shopping, even though the experience may feel physically and mentally far removed from the sphere of consumerism.

TM: And you see this as inescapable?

CA: I’m far for being a Trotskyite, but philosophically I believe that every artist is implicated and is a variable in the market, however much they may deny it, protest it, or disguise it. Take the extreme example of artist whose work amounts to the declaration ‘I will never make another work again’.

As soon as they, or anybody else does a lecture in which they allude to this gesture, that artist is implicated in the market. If nobody talks of it they are not relevant to the discussion. This is an (my) understanding of the market as a place of exchange – you’re wondering what this has to do with chairs, and I will come back to that – rather than a place where profit is garnered.

The problem arises a) from the confusion of the terms ‘Artwork’ and ‘ Art’. In imagining the artwork simply as the physical evidence of the artist’s pursuit of the art-ghost in the subjective, unshared (it is only truly subjective in its un-sharedness), immaterial realm, rather than the totality of objects and events and other emissions hitherto regarded as art, we give ourselves a freedom. We put to bed the tiresome objective argument as to the art status of such and such an object or action, and we understand the art-object not as a fragment of the true cross, but as something which exists primarily for the market, a bounty that the artist has wrought from the metaphysical world, in order to sell to fund their existence so that they may return to that realm, go further and make greater discoveries. Such is the relationship between artists and their collectors, as with the terrestrial metaphor of old-world explorer and patron.

Putting furniture in the shows is an attempt to take back the gallery space for the humanist cause. To think of the work on the scale of the human is to domesticate it, to offer it as a seat to the weary art- traveller, or as a collectible for the amateur.

TM: There’s a poster in the DRAF show for a bar/restaurant/salon inviting one to ‘JOIN THE SQUARE CIRCLE’. For the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, you fly-posted a very real Indian city with hundreds of copies of this and other posters, advertising different philosophical positions in your fictional Island’s ongoing dialectic, and the various pubs, eateries and other spots in Onomatopoeia where they’re given voice. I’m reminded of the clergyman George Macleod’s description of Iona (which neighbours your childhood home of Mull) as a ‘thin place’, where ‘only tissue paper separates’ the physical and metaphysical realms. How do you conceptualise the incursion of your fictional world into Kochi?

Could you imagine reprising this project in other real-world locales?

CA: Indeed. The Eternal Dialectic, the beginning-less festival of philosophy on The Island, will find expression in a poster campaign this summer around the East End of London as part of Art Night.

I see this as being an ongoing project. As I add to the diversity and depth of the Dialectic with the addition of new schools, factions, salons and positions – each publicised by a new poster – the project gains more depth and texture.

I wouldn’t want to go as far as to conceptualise something that intuitively feels quite right for fear that the rational might forbid it. In a world that is so replete with marketing and advertising, where merchants are trying to flog you things at every moment through every medium, there is something I find delightfully free about this endeavour: an illusory clamouring for mental profit, where every chuckle that is raised, every person’s day that is even momentarily enlivened, does not result in a corresponding debit from somebody else’s account, through the most egalitarian and modest of means.

I never try to bring the Island ‘to life’, rather find those areas of life that are shared with the Island, those zones where the subjective and objective realm meets, like an encounter with a ghost.

TM: Recently, you’ve told me that you want to spend more of your working life writing. To what degree is text the driver of the Islanders project? Who are the writers – literary, philosophical – who you feel at your elbow when you put pen to paper?

CA: That resolution starts here, now. I feel like I have the clarity of vision now to be able to compose the written part freely, after this lengthy period of research. I have always had a literary destination in mind for the project, although the magnitude of that book is still undecided. I have always seen words as simply another term of the work. Those aspects of the Island that require clarity (the facts, the structure) need to be written. I hope the writing will be cohesive but not didactic. It’s easier said that done, though, especially in terms of discovering and retaining one’s voice, when there are so many writers one might defer to, in order to have a way of writing. Maybe it will be to my advantage that I haven’t read so much in some respects. Not trying too hard will be key. Trying not to compose a work of literature but simply writing it down. (Again, this is perversely difficult). I would invoke Herman Melville or Ernest Hemmingway in terms of style, with a dash of PG Wodehouse, of course.

TM: You’ve been working on the Islanders since at least 2005 (and, without naming the project as such, perhaps for many years before then). The Islanders is many things, but one of these, surely, is a path to knowledge – not only of the Island, but also of the ‘real’ world you inhabit. What have you learned during this period of exploration? What remains to be found out? I seem to recall you mentioning to me recently that invention and discovery, in this project, are becoming increasingly difficult to tell apart.

CA: The comment that invention and discovery are one and the same has a couple of ends. There is the fact that, having once established the axioms of any system and following through logically on the corollaries, it will have its own trajectory, so one is simply discovering the consequences of that which has been put in motion. However the logical beginnings of the fiction have become obscured under the layers of complexity, and the texture with which I have imbued the scene, so it would be hard to distinguish a posteriori its first terms: hence the feeling of discovering, rather than inventing.

On the other end I have the definite sense that all new ideas are mutations of old ones. This is again a deterministic argument, and one that I adhere to. Speaking as a true Islander I do not hold that ‘new’ ideas are generated by the mind, but simply sprout from the rents of the old.