Photo by Michael Schmelling

Matthew Collings

Frieze Art Fair 2007

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I know a lot about art and want to talk about it. But knowing about it isn’t the same as feeling you have to mindlessly support it and say the accepted things about it to show you’re in a creepy club, or that you can intimidate people who don’t know about it. That’s the theme of all my books and programs. The new series is about how we might understand “civilization” today (that is, if we think we’ve still got it). It goes from the Greeks to now, but it’s all from the perspective of now. The book that comes out of the series is more diaristic and confessional; it’s about my tragic parents and so on, what I thought yesterday, etc., as in Blimey. There’s also some stuff about Clark and the whole idea of TV arts programs. But the true focus of both the book and the TV series is the anxieties and uncertainties of art now, taking “art” as a kind of culture or constant, ongoing discussion, not just a collection of individual objects or shows.

I understand that you are also a painter.

Until I went to art school at 19 I always thought that painting and drawing, etc., was something I did quite naturally, that people admired me for it, and that I’d always be saved by it. I thought my talent would provide me with a living. However, it turned out that as an adult I had to make a living working as a critic. For 20 years I convinced myself that I did this other activity, being a writer, in order to pay for my studio and materials. Then I finally had to admit my writing had developed and matured over the years while my painting was mostly mud. 

Ten years ago I began an artistic collaboration with my wife, who is a professional mosaicist. We started turning out abstract paintings. She has a very developed eye for color relationships and is a tough arranger of forms. She thinks up the shapes and colors and I paint them. It seems to work OK. We found a gallery to take us on and now we sell our paintings.

Why couldn’t I do this on my own? I don’t know. It’s not that art doesn’t mean a lot to me. It does. But not in a way that means I can paint successfully on my own. Not in a way that makes me an artist. It’s very painful to admit this. I wish I could say it’s liberating at the same time, but I’m afraid I actually find it disappointing and feel angry about it. I still fantasize about branching out on my own one day. I sometimes try it. It never works. My wife will be working on a mosaic commission for Cherie Blair or Posh Spice, or a museum somewhere—I go in the studio full of energy, the honeymoon is delicious for a few days, but then the rows start. They are with art: “Why won’t you come? Why do you hold back? What’s so special about you? Who are you saving yourself for? I hate you, you mud monster! Why did you lure me back here with your siren song? Cursed world of profundity and depth—why did I ever fall for you?”

This is a true story but it has elements of myth, that is, truth that is beyond mere facts. The main myth of course is art itself, this capital-A world of high ideals, a bit like religion. Another mythic element is the artist, a being accidentally elevated beyond the norm, in touch with a certain mystic goo as rare as gold—What the hell is it? Talent—the third mythic element. It’s a marvelous substance, the possession of which solves the riddle of existence: Why was I born at all? 

Is Britain still an “Art Crazy Nation?”

Yes, it’s the same as everywhere else in the makeup of the art scene, but different in that there’s a huge popular audience that wants to see sensational stuff about art in the media all the time. But it’s painful for me to remember that book, because the pages fall out. I pick it up at a bookstore and the pages really do start falling out—like your teeth falling out in a bad dream. The next book is going to be printed by a different firm and it’s going to be much tougher!