Alex Hoda in conversation with John Richardson, New York, 13th March 2009

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1 Alex Hoda in conversation with John Richardson, New York, 13th March 2009 John Richardson: What strikes me about your sculpture is the way you have plugged yourself into the enormous energy psychic as well as sexual of fetishism and exploited it in an eye-opening way. This is of special interest to me in that one hundred and one years ago, Picasso drew on fetishism tribal fetishism as opposed to the kinky kind that is so prevalent today in his development of what came to be known as cubism. You ve done something similar in using the fetishistic potential of masks and other rubber artefacts to generate enormous visual as well as sexual energy. Amazingly you have managed to endow Halloween and sex shop paraphernalia with neo-classical gravitas as well as the pop music of the Whoopee cushion. Alex Hoda: I always saw the masks, dildos etc as things that had been used or that were pre- sculpted beforehand. I suppose the same is true with the classical forms it was to try and bring some gravitas to these redundant masks or objects and maybe try and look at them anew. Not as frivolous throw-away things but as objects that have had a lot of time and energy put into their making. I m interested in the idea that these dildos and sex objects had a function beforehand and by transposing them on to the sculpture they could carry on but with a different meaning, in a different context. JR: That certainly explains your use of gas masks. They seem to serve a double purpose: constricting and gagging yet enabling the wearer to breathe. This brings us back to the feeling that there is air inside your sculptures; they are startlingly full of life. I m also fascinated by the way your figures look like animals but behave like humans, thus partaking both. You were wise to give up playing around with life-like human beings too literal and too obvious. Your rubber beasts are all the better for being non-specific. AH: I suppose I wanted to create a sort of generic animal something that felt like a bear but wasn t but had the same kind of feeling as a bear, or a dog. So you could still engage with them in the way you would with a cat or a teddy bear. JR: Yes, these beasts have enabled you to address so many basic human instincts: suckling, rutting, sniffing, mating.... Had you used humans, they would look embarrassingly anecdotal and... AH:... pornographic! I don t want to get into that role at all. By making them animalistic you can discuss human desires and human existence without being pornographic... JR:... or explicit. Nor is your work at all allegorical you ve found a whole other imagery. Sentimentality is every bit as much of a threat as pornography. I find

2 Renoir s pretty paintings of a baby suckling on a wet nurse nurse s breast nauseatingly pretty-pretty. Why sentimentalize this supremely natural, bestial act? AH: I ve always found the process of suckling fascinating. In Jawbreaker you sense this. There s something sexual about passing fluids between human beings. The animals in my work enable me to explore these sexual links with the mother without being literal. JR: Human beings involve a lot of other luggage not to mention charges of obscenity which would taint the meaning of the piece. In Jawbreaker, which I feel is one of the most moving and intensely felt of the sculptures, you feel that these newly born babies or cubs are still coated in the primeval ooze of the placenta. This is what makes Jawbreaker so haunting. AH: The last thing I want is to have my sculptures perceived as offensive or vulgar. I want to come up with a fresh response to the idea of suckling and motherhood. I feel an incredible emotional attachment to newborn creatures; at the same time there is something incredibly basic and horrific about it. I am drawn to this contradiction to the way something is disgusting but is also alive. JR: Now tell me a bit about the nature and appearance of your creatures. Is it true they are partly inspired by 19th century ceramics, the Martyn Brothers? AH: I ve always been very interested in the Martyn Brothers they again used a kind of animal motif but in some ways found a way to humanise them which is what drew me to their work. JR: Without being cute... AH: Without being cute exactly. I think the small world of the collectible or the ceramic seem to me like miniature sculptures. The Martyn Brothers seem to have had a fascination with the multiple, and that is what I found intriguing. With a piece like gobstopper you have two Staffordshire dogs which you find in middle class houses everywhere when I was a kid. They were taking over the world hundreds of them, all on mantelpieces! And the sheer number of them made them so redundant that they don t have any impact anymore. They become blunt. JR: I know what you mean. Sculptors want a cast to be as sharp and faithful as possible. And yet there is an undeniable attraction in watching a cast get blunter and blunter and blunter and the image gets more, not exactly abstract, but it turns back into some sort of foetal blob which I think you catch in certain sculptures. It all gets smoothed down and its identity becomes more dubious. AH: I suppose the act of pouring the rubber over the surface of the sculptures binds it on the one hand but to also smudges it on the other. I often see this in drawings:

3 when you make a mark and then rub it out and change it and alter it and I think what you get is that idea of layering. The image may not end up as very clear, but it allows for multiple readings to emerge. JR: This is very much what Matisse taught Picasso to do: draw with an eraser. When you ve got your drawing smothered in, you can use the eraser to make a new set of contours and highlights, and suggest the all-important layering. AH: Layering is also something I am hugely drawn to in Giacometti s paintings his lines upon lines upon lines; layering upon layering. In putting more stuff on it you re getting more information out of it. And it s very applicable to my sculpture. By collaging more elements on top of one another and then covering them with the rubber, you allow more meaning to come out of the piece without having to be too specific. JR: Given your Persian heritage, might those great Persian rock reliefs at the tomb of Darius have played any role in the monumentality of your work, for example, Piledriver, the massive piece in my collection? AH: I haven t ever really looked into my past. My feelings for classical figurative sculpture definitely comes from being frog marched around the V & A when I was a kid and it was very much this is really good art this is Michelangelo. But I was always more interested in going to the museum shop and finding the rubber models or the trinkets of the sculptures. I was as interested in the rubber Michelangelo as I was the real thing and, looking back on it now, I suppose I want to see if you can have both of them at the same time. JR: As Andy Warhol did in his great late variants on Leonardo s Last Supper. He did not work from an accurate reproduction of this all too familiar masterpiece, but from a cheap china figurine of it that he found in a street market hideously crude and kitschy. There was much more energy and shock to be derived from this garish objet trouvé. In doing so Warhol exorcised the sentimental aura that over the centuries has transformed this great work into a monumental cliché. AH: I always found the cheap ceramic replicas of things much more engaging than the grandiose original. If you go around the Ufizi or the plaster casts in the Victoria and Albert museum, and come upon David, there s no room for negotiation it s there and it s overwhelming. However if you go into a shop and look at the rubbers or the other miniature reproductions, you realize that it s still triggering things. JR: And that there s life inside it. AH: There s life inside it, exactly. But it s also purporting to be something else. You can capture the feel of David with a small rubber. That, I suppose, is what I try to bring about in my sculpture: achieving a feeling of classical sculpture without reproducing

4 it. JR: Another crucial element in your work is humor: kinky, perverse, bizarre, and mostly a bit black. Because humorless academics take Picasso too seriously, they usually overlook or ignore the ironical wit and black comedy that give otherwise innocent images a seemingly subversive edge. There are some wonderfully terrible jokes in your work: the potty filled with plastic brains from the asshole of one of the animals in my relief is a case in point; it gives many of my friends a well- deserved jolt. AH: I have always been very interested in how humor can comment on matters that are in fact very serious. And I think it prevents them from becoming sentimental. A lot of art that depicts violence or war takes itself too seriously and misses the point. JR: Yes. I love it when comedy steals up on somebody and makes him shudder rather that laugh. AH: I agree. Comedy doesn t have to be just funny; a lot of really good comedy is horrific. How often people laugh at things they don t understand or are scared of. JR: How do you see your sculpture in the whole tradition of 19th and 20th century sculpture? For example, does Rodin interest you? AH: Yes, I suppose I am interested in the motifs of other sculptors, but what really drives the work is whether you can replicate the feel of another sculptor the feel of a Rodin or the over- muscularity of Michelangelo and come up with an alternative. These are the things I can just use like I use the masks. Playing around with other peoples styles allows you a lot of freedom. In so far as they relate to the tradition of sculpture, I see my sculptures as allowing for alternatives. They are handmade in terms of collage, but at the same time they are not physically sculpted by my hand. Someone else has made this stuff and I am just trying to reuse it and put it together and find alternative meanings and contexts for these things. But really I identify with all sculpture primarily because sculptures are objects with the same sort of mass as us. Painting has to do with image and surfaces; sculpture has to do with heft and you usually have to walk around it. Sculpture is very in your face, and that s what draws me to it. JR: That brings us back to the nature of the material you favor material that allows you much more freedom than bronze or terracotta, stone or wood. Rubber is such a fantastic medium given its elasticity and polymorphic qualities; it can contain air and water, indeed almost as many elements as a skin. It opens up so many new ways for you to endeavor your sculptures with a shockingly physical reality. AH: What I also like about rubber is you can use it to cast things, especially silicone and you can replicate surfaces. So the rubber can look like glass or it can look like

5 stone and simulate any surface you can think of. JR: Yes, and it can veil surfaces, replicate the smoothness of skin but you can sense the heart throbbing and the lungs contracting, something no other matiè re can. Quite often there s an inside- out feeling to the sculptures. When you were showing me the Halloween masks you d just bought, you constantly pulled them inside out. The inside possibilities seemed to interest you more than the outside ones. The opening up of the inside is a petrifying idea - petrifying but intriguing. AH: I think there is definitely a fascination with the inside of things. When you kiss someone your tongue wants to explore inside their mouth or when you have sex with someone you want to penetrate inside them. That for me is fundamental to most animals. It s fascinating but it seems quite repellent, the inside of things. With a lot of the sculptures I want you to feel that you re looking at the insides but it s on the outside. JR: Fascinating. So what you show us is often inside out. AH: Reversing the mask is a way to get that. You know there is a face inside but you can t get at it. It s trying to reveal something through concealment I suppose. There is something on the inside that is un-reachable. Sculpture has nearly always been about the outside. JR: Yes your work certainly suggests that the inside is more provocative than the outside. In this respect, your piece, Pipeline, is very revelatory. It is an important part of the impression one gets from the work and in particular the mask that you re looking at something that has been turned inside out something intestinal. AH: The title of this turd-shaped piece derives from the idea of turning a natural process inside-out: excretion turning into ingestion: excrement into increment. JR: Talk about re-processing! JR: I would like to make one last comment on the great relief, Piledriver, that dominates the studio in my apartment. At first sight it looks like a monumental bronze, and yet it turns out to be made of Styrofoam coated in industrial rubber whose forms appear to be filled with air. Piledriver s wonderfully bloated shapes remind me of those buffalo skins you see floating across the Euphrates or some other river, which look inflated but are in fact filled with water. One s eyes and senses are fooled into seeing these forms as air-filled, and therefore alive. AH: Yes, I want my sculptures to appear to breathe, expand and contract like a human being or an animal. I like the idea that they can pop up and collapse again, that there is a kind of temporality to them. By comparison with the lifelessness of so much figurative sculpture, I want to breathe life into my pieces.