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SR Both? I didn't know. I'm sorry.
H They didn't really have the opportunity to see it happen, no.
OK. So, you're a telephone engineer. What happened next?
H Well, I left that and I moved to Bristol; and then I decided to do some part time art classes and I started a life drawing class as well. A friend suggested I should do life drawing. And I really enjoy doing that, although it's incredibly difficult. I find it very compelling. And then I met some friends who were setting up a pottery, and asked me if I wanted to set up the pottery with them. So we got a pottery together. And that was great. But I made no money with that. Then I did some stained glass and then I did some screen-printing, I just sort of tried lots of different things really and,I had a studio and I started a life drawing class at my studio. I suppose from the initial change of direction things followed on. But I never really ö I suppose I clearly had an idea of what I wanted to do or what I felt I'd like to do, but without a clear visualisation of how that would work in real life, as it were.
SR So how did HAYVEND start?
H I originally found HAYVEND in a skip in Bristol. I was with a friend who had a car and I said, Oooh, look; there are some vending machines in this skip! They could be interesting. And because I was very indecisive, because quite often you get things out of skips and they don't work or it's a nice idea,you know, you find half a ton of offset litho printing equipment and you don't know how to use it or it's broken or something,
SR Which is why it's in the skip,
H Mmm. So, originally I thought I would put little bits of my own art in this vending machine and then it occurred to me it would be nice to put other peoples in it too. So I worked out how the box fitted into the machine, how big the box needed to be and then I made a template, printed it on photocopy card and then invited people to cut the cardboard out, glue together and put their art work in it. And it just kind of slowly grew from doing one box at a time, to doing ten boxes, to doing 100 boxes at a time.
SR And where was it? Could people access it?
H Originally I did it as part of an open studio in the studios that we had in Bristol, in Jamaica Street and it was at the bottom of the stairs and it was quite popular, 50p a go,
SR What year was this?
H 1995. But I think part of the driving force behind it was my feeling that ö well, certainly in Bristol it was very difficult to find a market to sell one's work and whenever I had an open studio, you know, or an exhibition, I would get out my drawings, and I would have hundreds of drawings, and people would look through them. And people would buy a drawing, £50 or £60 and I just felt, well, people like these drawings and they want to buy them, but the moment I approached a gallery or an outlet for the drawings either the gallery wouldn't be interested or they would take the work and it would sit in the corner and nobody would but it. Or they would, despite my saying, well, look, sell it for £100, don't sell it for £500, sell it for £100, sell 10 and give me £20 for each. Rather than not selling one for £500. But you know it's very difficult to go into places begging, begging for them to sell your work and then explain to them how they're actually going to sell the work. So, at the same time I knew there was a market there and yet nobody seemed interested in helping to develop that market or address it. So I kind of knew, I kind of felt that the vending machine would allow me to access to some extent that market, to bypass the people who I felt were, not necessarily obstructive, but just,indifferent, I suppose. Or not prepared to sell work at a cheaper price.
SR So HAYVEND filled the gap?
H I see it intrinsically as an alternative in the sense that what, I mean there have been other alternatives certainly in the past 10 years, but simply they're alternatives that emulate existing methods of mediation and sale. I suppose I see it as an alternative in the sense that it doesn't emulate any other form of sale and it creates an alternative market. It has already generated an alternative market in terms of sales that simply didn't exist in the first place. That doesn't make it any better or worse. It's just simply different. And it's simply that was part of its original brief to kind of provide me an alternative outlet. And in so doing it's provided hundreds of people with an alternative outlet. It's equally provided hundreds of people with an alternative way of buying art in the first place, a way of collecting and accessing art, which isn't there otherwise, as I see it.
SR How do you see HAYVEND fitting into the artworld?
H Well, it isn't outside of the artworld. It fits in, in the sense that it buys and sells art, so it's there. It just that it doesn't occupy a massive part of the market and so it doesn't have the sort of massive profile that Saatchi or that kind of thing would. But it's, it's part of that ö the art world is a market and so it has to be a part of that, that market place, intrinsically. But the art world, what did I say before, the art world is a ,um, A highly visual private market. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's.. visually, it's highly visual, but it's in fact invisible. That market itself is unseen. The prices for Hirst's shark and these exchanges aren't part of it and yet they're the essential part of what makes it work.
SR So do you like making art highly visible?
H Well, yeah, it's inherently a part of it. It's that £1 in the machine is completely tied in with what it's about.
SR So that actual act of putting a coin in the machine is also part of the artistic act? Is this what you're saying?
H To some extent, yeah. In, in that,... it's, it's,... the person, the person accessing that art is playing a part in it rather than buying a ticket and walking around at somebody else's act of purchase and appropriation.
SR They're doing it themselves?
H Yeah, yeah. When I go to the machine in the ICA which has been there 2 and half years and it's empty I kind of think, well, if people didn't want to appropriate and take part then it wouldn't be empty. So there's, you know, the content, varied as it is, is, is still appealing. It's exactly the same as with modern art that, you know, people complain about it but they still queue outside the Royal Academy when there's an exhibition of it and pay to go in. Except that they're not the ones deciding the content.
SR Do you consider yourself an artist? Do you call yourself an artist?
Well, yeah. I always have for many years. And well, I suppose because I make art. And I feel that I steer the project with artistic considerations as well as commercial, profit motivated considerations. There's a desire to make content, for no other reason than making that content, that bit of work. And behind that there may be a desire to make profit, which is obviously necessary to keep the thing alive, grow, working. And I think to a greater extent that's what motivates people to put the work in. On the one hand they're making their work and they're putting work out and on the other hand they're getting payment for it. So, you know, it's a mixture of those two things. So, I suppose, yes, I'm an artist.
SR Is the business side of it part of how you see yourself as an artist?
H Well, I think businesses are creative as well. I mean, I think businessmen are actually creative people. And if you think of big boys in suits and cigars as not being creative but they do, they do create with their wealth, their wealth creates architecture and they have visions often like the Tate gallery to create a richer culture which is perhaps motivated by the fact that their wealth is borne out of oppression and slavery so with that profit they desire a sort of cultural clean up. But there are situations where businessmen aren't completely profit motivated. There are other considerations and you can argue that they are creative. I mean business is a creative thing. The idea of being an artist and being creative, it's kind of narrow really, people who put paint on a canvas, I mean, Einstein was clearly a creative genius but you could say he was an artist too. And so I think to limit the perception of what an artist is,
SR Is the whole commercial and organisational side of HAYVEND part of the artistic act?
H Yeah. I think it's subsumed within it. It's debatable, I mean something for example. A couple of days ago I was talking with a friend who is a sculptor ö ha does a lot of casting and stuff and he's going to help me, he's going to work on a project that I've had for ages which is making a rubber funnel, a funnel made out of thin floppy rubber. Conceptually behind that it's a piece of art, an artwork, an art object, but if I was one particular kind of artist I would make a small rubber funnel, rub it in Johnson's Baby Powder and I would display it on a plinth with a little perspex cover, but this rubber funnel is going to, I'm going to make a hundred of them and put them in the vending machine. And so, beyond the original conception and idea and artistic statement, behind that comes the business of plaster moulds, of talking quantity and how to do it the easiest and most pragmatic way, of setting up a little production line to make rubber funnels. So, yeah, in a sense that isn't creative, well, it is creative, it's somewhere slightly different in the sense that your stickers are just stickers now but they're based on,they're the manufactured, produced, multiplied result of one concise idea. But what goes after it is creative. How you evolve it, how you move it into other spaces,sorry, am I just burbling?
SR No, this is good.
Tell us about your panties?
H Well, panties have been an ongoing theme in my work. I did some work in Bristol with some young girls panties where I made a red buttonhole in the front of the panties ö caused quite a lot of upset in people for some reason ö but the work was intrinsically about the transition form purity, or childhood into adulthood, and the idea of underwear being a sort of wishful thinking disguise over what everybody knows ö or what everybody doesn't know ö is underneath. The idea of making explicit what normally you prefer to keep hidden. It's to do with intimacy and secrecy. I find that quite fascinating.
SR And panties today?
H They're just, what's the word?..They're almost sensational. The photo shoot I did for I-D magazine. I wouldn't have been at all an interesting spectacle but to turn up with a pair of bright yellow size 146 panties with a great big H stitched to the front kind of,this is photographic! And it turned out to be so. They're an interesting prop. I don't think a tea towel would've worked in the same way at all,
SR Who influences you're work?
H Certainly Warhol. I think Warhol trained and worked out side of the artworld like me and found it impossible to get in and found that the art world ridiculed him and his ideas and he basically had to generate his own, he had to recreate it.
And I love his sense of ordinary things being art. I was looking at a little tin of Nivea the other day, you know the little round tin of Nivea and that is such a perfect colour blue, perfect lettering and the way it's fitted in ö what a work! And we say, in our vernacular, "oh, it's a work of art". And it's true. And so often these beautiful designs just go unnoticed ö well, not unnoticed, but unregarded. I know in the world of marketing and advertising people are given awards and get slapped on the back but it's never regarded in quite the same way,
And I certainly feel with my CD project, the idea of recording conversation and tape that happening for 24 hours continuously is certainly something Warhol would've done. And certainly something he would've done with technology: he would've asked, how many megabytes are there on a CD? How many hours could you record? What could,? You know,
And I think the idea of making his 24-hour film of the Empire State into a 24 hour CD ROM which would playback on a computer, if he was alive now he would be doing that. He would've been the first person to do it. He would've done it right at the start. And it's that sense that his mind was not so much to do with what was fashionable at the time, his mind was to do with exploiting the media and using it exactly and completely for what it was. Which I find incredibly inspiring or very practical but very lateral at the same time. He would've loved the Internet. He would've loved the idea of ordinary people on the other side of the planet from him collecting stickers and making websites out of them. He would've bee, Hey, isn't that cool? And doing all their own weird shit in their own ways.
SR How do you see the relationship between art and advertising, if there is one?
H It could be jealousy on the artworld's part that advertising reaches all the people that the artworld finds so difficult to reach.
Also because it's really explicit about what it does. An artist does it implicitly.
Artists invariably fear that nobody understands them so they create their own language in order to express what nobody else understands but they inherently create a language which nobody understands, so continually compounding their dilemma. Whereas advertising keys into a language that everybody understands, getting the point across very quickly. I don't think that's true of all artists. I think great artists always get there in the end, which is when art is stolen by advertising,
SR Any other influences?
H I want to go and see Picasso's photography. There's a load of pictures at the Barbican that he did with torches. His drawings with torches. I mean what interests me about that is were people doing that before, did he do it first or did he see somebody else do it and then that gets accredited to him because he's a big boy. I think Picasso's a very interesting character in the way he grew into his own fame,promoted his trademark. He was able to use the Picasso marketing tool.
SR So, Warhol. Picasso. Any others?
H Yeah, I suppose there are others. Oh, Bill Viola. Oh very much. I went to see his exhibition at the Whitechapel. I was completely shocked by that Triptych. I think it is a monumental piece of work. And that's what artworks should strive to be: utterly shocking, but profoundly moving as well. For me that's the ultimate deal. When I first moved to London I did a couple of performances and the last one I had in mind of doing was a performance where I would go to Trafalgar Square and douse myself in petrol and set light too myself and the idea of the performance was to see whether somebody in the middle of this capital city could set fire to themselves and whether the people would be there to save you. You know, just how injured you would be come. I decided not to do it. I kind of felt that the mechanisms in your mind that drive you towards making art are perhaps,I feel very strongly about doing things absolutely and I was confronted by that, that I couldn't do it.
SR It strikes me as a terribly angry work. Because its challenging people to help you in a time of great distress.
H Yeah, I was maybe feeling a bit unhappy at the time.
SR What was your childhood like?
H It was alright. Running around in daisy fields.
SR What were your parents like?
H I think my father's view, my parents view was.. I would leave school and get a job and it was really rather academic what sort of job I got. Being a telephone engineer was a good job ö they'd heard it was a good job. There was all this talk of satellites, radar stations, big dishes, which I found very exciting really. At my interview I talked about pulse code modulation and fibre optic cable developments. You know, I was a 17 year old boy and they were very impressed and said there's a great future for you and I said can I work on satellites? Please? And little did I know, I wouldn't be doing that.
SR What's it like being an artist in London?
H I imagine there's a number of different impressions you can have. One is people isolated in a studio, painting away, not knowing who to talk to, where to go. It could be very dark and horrible. I mean. I'm very happy because I have ideas and possibilities and methods of realising these ideas which I think is so, really I'm fantastically happy.
SR So what else is going on at Hayvend?
H There's going to be new vending machines soon, selling floppy discs. Floppy discs with art. Basically it's the same format, the same idea but extending it to different formats. So they'll be floppy discs in boxes. And then hopefully there'll be a little book, the same size as the boxes so hopefully people can make writing, can make book stuff. And then there's the magazine, Just apply the same principles but take on different restrictions, different formats, but formats that relate to fitting into a machine.