Jeremy Millar: A Portrait of the Artist as a Drowned Man

Jeremy Millar likes the idea that art can have an effect, can bring about a change in the world. At a time when contemporary art seems under ever more pressure to rationalise the world, he prefers to see the artist as a kind of mystic.

Magic, rituals and transformations, Cabinets of Curiosities and shrunken heads fascinate him. “It’s interesting how an object can become activated, and how it becomes deactivated by being placed in a museum,” he says. “What’s its state when it’s not performing in that ritual? Before the priest or the shaman chants on it? Nothing changes, but during these rituals people treat it in a completely different way.”

For his show at Glasgow’s CCA Millar is presenting a combination of new and existing works, including sculpture, photography and video. Formally quite disparate, his works evolve through a process he tries to have as little control over as possible. Instead, he lets himself be guided by others who have gone before him.

One such work is the photographic series A Firework for WG Sebald, a paean to the late German author, whose genre-defying novels are semi-autobiographical meanders through obscure histories and English countryside, and someone Millar hugely admires. Following a chain of random connections, he paid tribute by lighting a firework at the site where Sebald died. Upon inspecting the documentation of his memorial act, Millar claimed that Sebald’s face was visible in the smoke.

Meeting the artist to chat about the show, I was keen to find out more. Surely he doesn’t actually believe he has captured an apparition of Sebald. And more importantly, does he seek to persuade the viewer of the presence of supernatural phenomena in the work?

“It really sent a shiver down my spine,” he says. “I took that as an acknowledgement – I mean, I know it isn’t him coming back from the dead, but it feels like he’s acknowledging the gesture that I made. Everyone who’s seen him says it really does look like his face, so I know it isn’t just me projecting because I want it to be true.”

It’s something of a relief to find that he doesn’t claim to imbue his pieces with any kind of ritualistic power. On the contrary, he identifies connections that already exist in the world, rejecting accusations that he attempts to do otherwise. “When you say you’re ‘making connections’, stretching them – well, that’s not good enough. It feels like you’re forcing it and it never works. You have to be patient, because work needs time to develop.”

This patience is evidenced in the show’s centrepiece, a newly commissioned and suitably dramatic life-size cast of the artist lying face down on the floor. Self-Portrait of a Drowned Man (The Willows) has emerged from a journey of literary and historical links that are each as developed as the sources themselves.

“I don’t have a rich imagination at all,” Millar claims, “but the world is so rich that I don’t need one. There are so many amazing things out there, and if you allow them to start joining together in unexpected ways, they sort of amplify each other in unexpected ways, too.”

Nothing could have been more unexpected, he says, than making a sculpture of himself dead. On seeing it finished, he had an out-of-body experience and needed a stiff drink. Viewers of a nervous disposition beware. For everyone else, the prospect of encountering something shocking and repulsive on the CCA floor couldn’t be more a welcoming surprise.