Did You Like Denholm Elliott?

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Ghosts

Recently I saw some photographs, by the British artist Sam Taylor-Wood, of the moors around Haworth, in Yorkshire. The scenes were inspired by Wuthering Heights and shot within a four-mile radius of Haworth parsonage. It was here that all three Brontë sisters were brought up, wrote their novels, and died. The place is now preserved as a museum, and the photos, collectively titled Ghosts, were a commission for it. Installed among Brontë memorabilia, they looked both appropriate, because they showed nature, and out of place, because they had an expensive, high-tech glowing impact, like so many plasma TV screens in a world of lace and bonnets.

Taylor-Wood says she was looking for a "redemptive quality" in the moor landscape, the background to the unremitting psychological darkness of Emily Brontë’s novel. Reading this, I recognized a structural model — I realized that this is exactly how I see art and the artworld. That is, art and its entire history on the one hand, and artworld behavior, its current fashions and language, on the other: the first good, the second bad. But the second is unavoidable. In not avoiding it, which I do constantly, there’s always a voice asking: What am I doing here?

I enjoyed the unreality of the photos. Outside the Brontë Parsonage Museum, reality could be seen perfectly clearly through an upstairs window, the lonely moors unchanged since the 19th century. But it was clear too, thinking of the seductive advertising gloss that Taylor-Wood gives to all her work, that as an artist she has the right general idea. Nothing is real, and everything is not only subject to interpretation but actually has to be interpreted. As I contemplated the interesting processed textures of Ghosts, spirits of a more recent past crowded my mind.

Pixies

I used to work on a BBC TV program called The Late Show. It was a magazine program, shown four nights a week at 11 pm. A typical Late Show would consist of a live interview with a playwright or author; a prefilmed item about some aspect of European literature or cinema; a live act by Ry Cooder, the Pixies, or the Dixie Chicks, and an item researched, written, and presented by me about a current art star, maybe Jeff Koons or Martin Kippenberger. My duties also extended to occasionally presenting the whole program, which was always done live. And when the likable British actor Denholm Elliott died, in 1992, and the great British playwright Dennis Potter, Elliott’s friend, who himself was dying a slow public death from cancer, was invited onto The Late Show to pay his respects, it was me who did the interview. I somehow got the instructions from the producers about what kinds of things to say tangled up, so that instead of getting Potter to sum up Elliott’s likability, for an audience of a million or so cultured, educated viewers, my words came out as: "What was he like? Did you like him?"

Potter

Potter was shortly to be the subject of a lengthy interview on UK TV’s Channel 4 by Melvyn Bragg (front man of the long-lived and widely respected South Bank Show, which is often aired in the US on PBS), in which he spoke nobly about the high values of art and their threat from the increasing crassness of TV, all the while taking painkillers in front of the camera, so that the interview entered the mythology of British TV culture as the most moving, tragic, noble, and elevating event that any right-minded, educated, and sensitive viewer had ever seen. Potter said to me, at this Late Show live TV event, that he thought "Did you like him?" was an odd question to ask the close friend and colleague of someone who had just died.

Wrong

What was I doing on TV anyway? Before, I’d edited an art magazine, and before that I’d been an art student. At art school I was a painter. When I left I was a painter, too, and still am today. I never got very far with it until 10 years ago, when I changed my practice so it was no longer a solo act, and this solved my painting problem. Now with my painting partner I turn out regular shows for a gallery in London. The work is very straightforward: we hardly ever do anything intellectual. We just go straight for beauty. Abstract paintings about color relationships. We sell them and get good reviews. We’re also asked to do projects outside the gallery. There’s one on currently in a church, in the city of York, and we’re planning another one for next year, this time for the Brontë Parsonage Museum. This coincidence came about because I’d been invited to give a talk about Ghosts. Afterward I showed such an interest in the permanent contents of the museum that the bosses proposed the new project. I think we’re going to do something with the colors of the moors, but we haven’t worked it out yet.