Andy Holden Interview: Seven Wonders

Andy Holden's artistic output is eclectic. His band The Grubby Mitts recently played alongside the Johnny Parry Chamber Orchestra and he is freshly returned from Performa13, where he performed A Lecture on Nesting with his father, ornithologist Peter Holden. We met up to discuss a new work he will perform with a string quartet at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath.

Tell us a bit about the work you'll be performing at Hospitalfield.

The work is a piece that has been ongoing for four years. Initially it was called Two Short Works in Time and every time it's performed I add a new piece. This work will be called Seven Short Works in Time. It's a mixture of projections/live soundtracks that connect to different bodies of previous works. In a way the piece is a sort of musical Jenga where by adding a new piece you have to ensure that the pieces beneath it remain intact. It's suited to the environment of Hospitalfield as it's quite a formal work in terms of its presentation, involving a string quartet with a conductor.

One piece in the programme is called A Quartet for Thingly Time, which was written for Kettles Yard gallery. It transcribes the sounds of empty arcades on the east coast, using the techniques Messiaen designed to transcribe birdsong. I recorded different arcade machines as if they were a giant flock all trying to communicate with each other. It takes the structure of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, which is seven movements and within each movement there are snippets of familiar tunes which arcade games parody.

One whole movement is based on a machine, [a claw] which plays a midi version of Push the Button by the Sugababes. Another movement emulates the sound of air hockey pucks moving around. One movement relates to Rockall, the island off the west coast of Scotland which is mentioned in the shipping forecast. It's the smallest island in the world because only one person can stand on it at a time. In the 1980s, Britain put someone on it for 40 days to claim it and it became much more about the land around it than the land itself.

In the piece, one person reads out the political history of the rock, one person reads out the geological history of the rock, one person reads about biological diversity and one person speaks about its appearances in culture. It is about what point does language become the 'thing,' and it ends up relating to a particular kind of sound. A texture like the rock itself and a sense of the waves, somehow.

These pieces are performed with musicians who are local to Arbroath. Collaboration with non-artistic spheres seems important to you. How do you deal with the issue of authorship in these shared productions?

It applies to a lot of my works. I recently did a lecture about nesting, which is a collaboration with my father. It's something I've become much more interested in recently: the productive space of these long, built-up relationships around a certain idea. These days I am more and more drawn to projects where I learn something through meeting someone and how these questions might feed back and revitalize my own practice, or find different ways of what work is.

In a previous work, The Dan Cox Library of Thingly Time, you refer to Flaubert's novel Bouvard and Pécuchet. It seems those characters compare to your own polymathic model of artistic practice, where you assume a variety of different roles. How do you manage this task of forever throwing yourself in the deep end? 

There have been weeks where I seem to have had a box of different hats. I would turn up one week and lecture about art and craft and the next minute I’d be designing a small stage at Latitude. In the same week I’d deliver a lecture on cartoons and then travel to put on a string quartet. I don’t think anyone’s Transit van would look quite as nuts as mine did at the time: a box of nests in one corner, power tools in the other.

I used to think about it in terms of schizophrenia, but now I look at it in terms of the impurity of a particular area. I suppose it’s coming after this great body of research that’s happened where people have mined individual things. It's like all the elements of the periodic table have separated and I can’t really think of anything more to do then to think of different ways to reassemble them productively. I’m thinking of it more as an almost ecological idea. Particularly something like the lecture on nesting, where you can use the simplicity of things you have found and a kind of shared dialogue to look at the bigger dialogue. Firstly, the relationship between art and science but also, ideas of material structures, site and breeding, which open up some quite difficult questions to do with social housing, architecture etc.

So maybe this one [Seven Short Works in Time] is in some ways quieter, in terms of the way you think about chord changes and textures of music in relation to the material of sculpture. It's looking at the impassivity of objects and the way objects may contribute to a sonic space.

Your current exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection is based on a manifesto you wrote as a teenager in 2003. In another work, Pyramid Piece, you revisit a particularly guilty moment of your youth and while there is a recurring theme of nostalgia – which you treat quite humorously – it seems that in both works the idea of re-enactment is more important. How do you use re-enactment as a strategy?

I wouldn’t say re-enact, so much as reinvest or just completely mine what seems to be a very arbitrary moment, which then opens up to dictate something of your present world view. Looking at these moments where subjectivity seems to have been formed and really come to affect the way you look at the world now. Those moments, which you can trace back to being formative, but can subject them to a kind of ridiculous interrogation. Looking at them from all different angles, both for their comic potential and for their emotional impact.

Something I learned is about how they hopefully open all sorts of bigger questions. The pyramid piece was about that first encounter with material. About being overwhelmed by the sculptural material of the pyramids and wanting something more authentic rather than a simple facsimile. As a kid it became this kind of guilt object, because when you get it home it has no relation to the pyramid. It’s just an amorphous lump. You end up making this scenario about something, which is potentially quite hard to talk about. You’re looking at making this monument to a tiny piece of a monument, which is then monumental in terms of how I think conceptually about objects now.