J.G.     You were talking about set, prescriptive architectural rules –

A.D.C.     Yeah, in this particular town – it was a historic town – there was a certain set of colours that were invented by Benjamin Franklin or introduced to the Americas by Benjamin Franklin. And so these are the colours that people had to paint their houses in. Purple, supposedly, was not part of this system. And so people were really upset by the colour purple. But then of course, purple has a history of being a marker for a marginal group of people. It is inherently queer. And I remember thinking in terms of – not even having these words to describe it in this way – but understanding that a colour can polarise, a colour can be radical, and a colour can provoke in ways that maybe, at the time that I was seeing this, I wasn’t aware of. That colour could be a spectacle, and colour could be a point of view. But then I was also thinking about the power of a painter. I’ve worked for my brother for many years, and we would always talk about what the colour that someone chose for their house or for their home, anywhere inside of their home, what that revealed about the person, you know? And we would have these micro conversations about someone’s passion for the colour taupe versus another off-white of some kind, and how interesting that was.

S.d.B.     Do you think people are really passionate about off-white or they just feel safe with it?

A.D.C.     Oh, people are very passionate about certain off-white shades. You could have a whole chart of 20 neutral colours and they would really push towards something warmer or something cooler. Not that they necessarily have a language that Albers, say, would have about colour or colour theory. But there’s a certain passion. I find that people, or young people, are educated to name their favourite colour and then that favourite colour becomes a way to identify their personality. Your favourite colour might be related to a sports team or to X, Y or Z. But after years of trying to find words to describe the ways that you feel – and some of those words are ascribed to the colour, for example, or a piece of clothing or something like that. This is my favourite hat or this is my favourite X, Y or Z. I think people develop real passions for identifying themselves in the world. And seeing things in the world as mirrors to their taste and how they embody themselves. We need those things to understand ourselves. Not necessarily a material thing, but we need to see ourselves in other things, I think, to reflect back on who we are and how we occupy space.

S.d.B.     Just an anecdote: when the artist Dor Guez visited A4, he said – he was talking about languages – that English has a pretence of being a neutral language whereas, in fact, it's not neutral, it's white.

J.G.     Alex, you said something before, and you’ve alluded to it now: this question of taste and how you resist taste in some way or challenge your own taste buds. Can you speak to that?

A.D.C.     I guess I just never wanted to be someone who saw… This is maybe my hope to be positive always, to say I have the capacity to love everything and everyone. And so by saying I love purple or saying I don’t love green, it cancels out all avenues that I could learn from green. When you have a particular taste, it’s about marking a clear vision.

That’s how I feel about taste – tastes change. And I don’t know if people generally are open to their taste changing. I think of many people in my life who say, Oh, I never eat coleslaw or whatever, that they just refuse things. I don’t understand that kind of opinion. I think it’s boring to be so resolute.

P.S.     Don’t you find, Alex, that working with colour...you’re a multidisciplinary artist, but you work a lot with colour as colour. Looking at your work, at least on the screen, I’m always very aware that it’s a reflected colour, it comes from light, from a screen. But it’s also set in relation to the colour that your brother is painting physically on the outside of the box that holds the screen. There’s a relationship between colour as tactile surface and as screen, between intimacy and distance. You’re simultaneously intimate but you also have a kind of distance to it. And that dynamic, for me, registers as a very open disposition. When you say you can be open to other colours or to varieties of colours, it’s not because you’re indiscriminate. There’s an openness that allows that all those colours are somehow related, and they come through different surface forms, reflective or embodied or whatever. And that feeds the flux that I feel looking at your work.

A.D.C.     You make a great point there, which is related to time. It’s about a mindset. Say I have to paint a house a colour – orange or something that I just totally despise – but I still have to do it and it’s going to take me days to do it. Why not learn to enjoy the time spent with that thing that I hate doing? It’s just a mindset. It’s not that there’s going to be all good days – I don’t believe that. But I think there’s a way to live through and work through the time spent with whatever it is that you’re doing. That you can absorb it or learn from it. The invisible transfer of X to Y is important to catch and notice.

J.G.     I’ve always really appreciated the John Cage approach, which is a derivative or expansion or some kind of iteration on Duchamp, of taking the attention you give to the artwork and deflecting it to the everyday. So Duchamp does the first piece: he brings the everyday in and helps us deal with it. But Cage says, OK, now we’ve got this capacity, we know what it takes to give care to things in art institutions, you can actually apply that anywhere. And when you do, the world is opened up, explicitly. That’s what resonates. You have a choice as to how you’re going to approach the colouring of that orange house and you can frame that time at your discretion.

A.D.C.     It’s funny to think about it in terms of performance because my brother is not performing. He’s doing this job, and that’s what he does and it’s his life. It’s not even proposing that his life is some kind of theatrical space that is full of privilege and ease. It’s actually hard work. But it’s valuable in the same way that one might see performance on a stage or in a public realm as having value. I think that that’s the thing that I’ve always noticed about my brother and his work. And he’s said this – if you open a closet in someone’s home or look behind the toilet in a bathroom, if that’s painted with care, with the real care that you’d have if it was your mother’s house, you do it with pride and you walk away knowing that you did your best, knowing that you put your best self into it. There’s a real joy in that. This invisible performance is what I always go back to. What I was interested in doing when I brought Americo into the space of that museum was to say, Here is this invisible labour that’s all around us, all of the time. See it, see it happen, and respect it.

J.G.     To segue from there into something we’ve touched already – to my mind, you are distinct from some of these other actors like Duchamp and others. There is a magical world that emanates out of your space and there’s a mundane world. That movement, from the mundane to the magical, is astonishing in both directions. There’s a sense that makes the real magical, it animates the mundane. It’s almost like being lost in some confusion between those two poles. Can you play out this idea of the magical space a little? The world of The Kiss’ characters, as you backpedal into them, it’s like an explosion into some unbelievable, untethered imagination. And yet, at the same time, your brother’s busy painting the structure, bringing that absolute mundanity to bear. How do those two things sit for you? How do you play between them?

A.D.C.     That’s a great question. I don’t really think about magic – I don’t think of my work in terms of psychedelics or anything. Because they’re all physical and quite analogue – like, I sweated through that costume and those performances and rehearsed and worked. And maybe there’s something interesting to find here about the banality of labour in general – the banality of just being. And that can be as wild as dressing up as a puppet and giving life to a statue that has long lived, fixed, for some 100 years. It can be as wild as that or it can be as seemingly mundane as painting a wall red. You could also say, Wow, what joy or what kind of magic lies in painting a wall red. There can be a real alchemical change in the most banal thing. The magic and mundane live on a scale. They’re not different, they’re both of this world. This makes me recall a lecture that I’ve been giving all year about glass and thinking about the body as a home and being inside the home and our relationship to the street – which is the outside world or everything outside of our bodies. And how, for me, the most exquisite place to be would be the pane of glass or the window between the two because it’s a space where you can participate in both. When I was making ROY G BIV, I rewrote that acronym to stand for – instead of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet – I made it say Rose Out of Your Garden Because I’m Vines, because I realised that the vines or this idea of vines is the same as glass or the window because vines are this thing that exist in a magic space, both inside and outside of this world. They can take you further. And so I think for this whole project – and for me in the world – it’s constantly a negotiation between this and that, taste or no taste, inside or outside, love or hate. This is to say that I’m constantly trying to find a balance between the two. That could be the ‘all work, no play’ that’s present and apparent even in this moment when someone’s painting a wall – and then there seems to be magic on the screen.

William Pym [Alex Da Corte manager]     If I may, the phrase Rose Out of Your Garden Because I’m Vines, the modified acronym of ROY G BIV, is the final line in the film. It’s not something that you pick up unless you listen very closely. But Alex got a singer to seamlessly record an extra line that’s not in the song – the final triumphant line of Blue, in the final minutes of the film, Blue sings the last line of the Etta James song, “Rose out of your garden because I’m vines.” It’s a final declaration of the title. This is something Alex never tells anyone. And I’ve been in this position before where I have to say that it’s actually the last line in the film. It’s so seamlessly integrated. The sound has been mastered in such a way that it sounds like it’s being sung by Etta James in Montreux in 1974, but it was actually recorded two years ago in Philadelphia.

A.D.C.     But also to add that there are several additional lines before that also speak to this thing about inside and outside. Blue, the character Blue says – I’m going to paraphrase but it’s something like – A red brick building / A black and white horizon / I walk across your rooftops / I rose out of your gardens because I’m vines. Which is to say, there is a structure which is fixed, this red brick building. You could call that a keystone, you could call that the ground. There is a black and white horizon that’s speaking to all things related to colour, black being the sum total of all colour in matter, and the sum total of all colour in light being white, and the reverse is true. And then there’s this notion of being in and out and beyond that, which is this thing about vines, which we could also call glass or prisms. There’s a lot in there, I think.

J.G.     Penny, something you noted in one of our conversations was how so many of the processes we were engaging – yours included, specifically Will – are about negotiating a threshold. In the case of Will, it exists in this world and prepares for another. And so many of the works included in this exhibition, whether it’s Shilpa Gupta’s book or Ane Hjort Guttu’s film, or the cases Alex just offered, engage this threshold space, which is neither one nor the other. How does that play out for you? How do you see Will in relation to it, as well as other aspects of your practice? Are you curious about that interstitial space between the known and unknown, lived and not lived.

P.S.     Going back to this idea of flux – because flux is movement or change, constantly embracing and engaging change – and, I think, Alex, you’ve spoken about it with your objects as well, like your Mouse Museum and the sense of their being tangible. But they are also on the move, in terms of memory and imagination. The threshold is not only physical. I’m not saying that the prism or the glass is only physical, but it’s the physical means by which ‘to catch’ movement. And as a consequence of movement, or recognising movement, you recognise that thresholds are not fixed. Colour interests me because colour, by its nature, is sensation. It is something that we will never agree on, and that we don’t agree on, generally speaking. So there are Will’s objects, which is inheritance, the objects that I collect. But they are also, as a larger corpus, constantly being expanded or growing. Recently, I took another little Félix Gonzaléz-Torres candy from The Whitney, which is going to be added to Will, that already includes the piece of candy that I took many years ago. It grows as one’s life grows. But, of course, the threshold comes when I die. A threshold is crossed and then the work continues. Each object gets sent off to a beneficiary; can take root again and make another little growth. There is a rhizomatic attitude, which implies that the threshold of my death is not really an end.

That’s what I think. It’s a very roundabout way of talking about it. As soon as you have simultaneity, you also have the sense that borders are open. To feel them as open, you need to have something particular – an edge, maybe.

J.G.     It's interesting thinking about the case, Alex, of The Kiss sculpture that you replicated pretty accurately, as I understand, except in purple, right?

A.D.C.     We replicated it the way it was made by Brancusi and we replicated it again with an added colour to it.

J.G.     That’s a very interesting experience because, as you said Penny, it’s almost like colour is the thing. You know the object already – what’s different is the colour. And so you read it as a colour. It’s quite disarming and beautiful. Was the first replica you made conceived of as a sculpture that went into the world independently or did it reside as a prop?

A.D.C.     The black-and-white one and the colour one ended up being objects in the world. But in the same way that adding a colour was kind of naughty in the realm of that film and in relationship to art history – putting a colour on an old painting is sort of taboo, but it’s no crazier than, say, turning a urinal on its head or, you know, this notion of slippage or change being not an option. The reception of these Brancusi sculptures being orange, green, purple and yellow was to say, They can’t do that because they just aren’t that. People think it’s insane, but it’s not insane – it’s just a colour. But the resistance to change even now in the 21st century proposes such complicated emotions about why people are so pressed to not change, to stay fixed. You want everything to be the same because maybe that will ground you or allow you to process your own complicated emotions or complicated life if everything just stays the same.

J.G.     Do you think the curve, the social curve, is edging towards a reduced inclination to change? It’s a pretty pessimistic view. I think I have that. Or do you think that – if you had to aggregate an attitude towards change all over the world – that number would be the same today as it was ten years ago?

A.D.C.     I think it’s like a little bit of both. It’s hurry up and change always, you know, be forever changing, more is more, etc. It’s the theatricality of change; which is to say, I think people don’t actually always want to change but they want to think they’re changing.

J.G.     That’s really interesting because you can sell the proposition, and a good portion of the art world is actually actively doing that. Selling the ruse of adventure or change in the face of stagnation.

A.D.C.     Like Penny was saying, real change involves real beginnings. It involves real death, real ends. And if there is never really a markedly true end, how can there be a true beginning? Aversion to change is an aversion to risk, I think. And there’s an aversion to loss because when there is change, there is ostensibly loss too. Loss is loss.

J.G.     The need for real ends is very interesting.

S.d.B.     On the other hand, we’ve also been working in this exhibition with ends or loss or death as a different state of presence rather than one of absence – where, for example, Penny’s husband Colin is here in the exhibition all the time and in a more metaphysical way. But also because the imprint of Colin on the ecology that we work in is profound and continues to be so. The exhibition gives us a way to talk about Penny and Colin, not necessarily as ‘Penny the artist’ and ‘Colin the artist’, with two separate artistic identities, but as a power couple in the arts who have impact on generations of artists, many of whom were also their students. There’s a sense of something running through this – of death also just being allowed to be death, but still being allowed to be very present rather than ‘gone’. Death as a different sort of presence. Thinking about relationships, I was wondering, Alex, your brother seems to sometimes be playing the Duchamp character. Americo’s ‘Duchamping’ and you’re ‘Brancusiing’. I don’t know if that’s a valid interpretation or not. Having your brother play that role, the very potency and strength of Americo’s figure in the space painting the cube brings a foundational person in the environment. His presence...does this allows you to push at a whole lot of edges and openness because there’s someone structural present? Because I do wonder if there are limits, if there are things that we maybe shouldn’t allow in. Are there experiences that we maybe should limit or not allow? I don’t really know, I don’t have an answer to that. But it’s really nice to be able to push at and allow everything in while the foundations and the people that we love and know are so clearly defined in an environment and so clearly present, almost like guardians of that openness, to a degree.

A.D.C.     You could say that through the relationships that I was outlining in ROY G BIV, be it familial or social, our relationship to history, our relationship to things, our intimate relationship with each other, that all of these are outlined so clearly in this film. The one perhaps invisible sort of familial relationship, the one that I have with my brother, is then made very clear on the outside of the box, but not necessarily within the video. That’s to say, the kind of invisible labour of loving someone and caring for someone and lifting them up, that daily ritual of loving someone from even afar, matters so much and to make that plain – to just show that and clearly lock that in and around the video that you’re watching – is to give back. And to say that none of this within the screen would be able to be without the kind of structure, this invisible structure of love, that is always around me, which you could call familial love or brotherly love or whatever it might be. When you have a relationship, be it a brother or a friend or whomever, that cares in that way about you, there’re more love hours than can ever be repaid. You can never thank anyone properly for that kind of relationship because it goes without thanks. It’s just what human beings, at their best, should do for each other. But if you have an opportunity to say thank you, then say it, I guess. Maybe that’s what that relationship with my brother outside of this box is for me, a way of saying it.

S.d.B.     It really did make me think, What are the conditions that allow us to reach for continual openness? And to really touch and love and experiment with and embrace? Does having such solid, loving foundations allow this movement forward? We talked about the red as a keystone, but there’s also the foundation stone of painting’s labour.

A.D.C.     That kind of invisible labour allows for that which is visible to be free. We’re covering a lot of ground within the space of the video ROY G BIV and all of the complex ways that we see a body being a body or a person loving or a person just being. It’s transhuman, it’s out of body, it’s beyond the body. And all of that is able to be fostered and grown. And that only happens with care, with invisible care, and that’s the same as a plant. The plant necessarily doesn’t thank you back – unless it bears fruit and you eat it. But there is something to be said about tending to a garden and growing it for nothing other than for it to grow.

P.S.     It’s interesting in this respect because that kind of intimacy that you have through the distance of your making and the characters that you are in – in a sense, your body is those characters that we see. There’s something so caring in the relationship of enactment in those characters that comes through, that is not directly saying, This is what I do, I care. But the way you do it says that. There’s such an intimacy in touch – and even in the Art21 film where you’re talking about and showing your making – there’s such intimacy to materials and to the people you work with. This is the very substance, I think, of the work in the end. So it’s not always necessarily a narrative relationship. It’s an embodied, emblematic one.

A.D.C.     And I think that that for me was born out of a simple question. It is a simple question that I asked – not just of Brancusi’s The Kiss – Why is it fixed in such a way that it’ll never change? But of all things again, to say, Why is history fixed? Why do we not stay open to questioning things? And not in the way that, say, I question this because it is wrong. But as a way to say, How do I, in this world as a body, relate to the things I don’t know? And can I learn to love these things that I do not know, and spend time with them? What do they mean to me and what do I learn from them?

J.G.     Alex, can I pick up on something you said earlier and something you said previously? It’s about screens and bodies, and is also connected to the glass conversation. I just want to pull in something that Kathryn Smith was asking after earlier. Kathryn is another artist on the project. She was a student of Penny’s and of Colin’s, and is a remarkable academic thinker, artist, teacher, etc. She’s showing a work titled The Phantom Interlocutor, part of a big, elaborate forensic art process and project that involves the scanning, in this instance, of over 2000 micro CT scans of a skull belonging to an unidentified person that Colin had in his possession because he was also an medical illustrator. So he had come into possession of these skulls. Penny has subsequently made a filmic work about taking the skulls back to the earth, if that’s an appropriate framing of it, and Kathryn, whose practice intersects with art and forensics, has done a reconstruction of the skull with these frames. The image spins and you look through the skull – it’s quite astonishing. One thing she was reflecting on was this idea of a distributed self. I’ll get back to screens and bodies in a moment. What she was saying is, Here’s this person who lived, whose skull has been reconfigured in this digital landscape showing in this space. There is something about them, the person, that is replicated here. Yet it’s not them. It’s living on the cloud – this picture of a self is distributed in the digital world. This work is one of a distributed self – bits and bytes of us in every direction – relative to the expression of a body in space being the comprehension or totality of self. It was a very curious idea, the idea of a distributed self. And it made me think about artists that put things in the world – those things go on outside of their lives into other people’s worlds. Can we think through that a little and maybe contextualise the screens-and-bodies question that you have because I have a suspicion that there’s something dynamic in there, between all those elements.

A.D.C.     If I think about that and I think about my interest in working with all of these historical characters and things that I don’t know or that I’ve only experienced – mostly in books, less on screens, but screens are the way we experience books now – there will always be a gap between these histories, present and past, me and you, us and them. This is the thing about glass that I’m talking about – how do you deal with that gap? We can call it many things: we can call it a physical prism, we can call it vines, we can call it the screen. The work is always in service of bridging that gap. And so there is an emphasis on the physical, the textural, the things that we were talking about previously, Penny. About materiality. How do you insist on touch? How do we break through the screen? If I turned around, that would be one way to break through the screen because I’d show you more of what it means to be three-dimensional and physical. And so I think the videos are in service of that and that kind of touch. The skin that is being painted around the cube physically – you experience a kind of pressing and touching and thinking about skins and costume and layers of light and colour being applied to the objects in the film while being made physical on the outside of the cube. This is another way of being this bridge; of being a body in being many bodies.

P.S.     That’s in the work itself, however one defines it. But what strikes me with your work is that there’s a distributed self that goes to the viewers, to the spectators, who are engaging and breaking that boundary of the screen. In one of the videos documenting your work, I saw how people responded. In a sense, they become part of the work. It’s a beautiful relationship. And there’s something about humour as well, or affection, coming from the spectators – a recognition that there’s this beautiful colour, or something relatable There’s this very magical relationship, as Josh was talking about, the sense that anything is possible in this world. And whilst it’s your world, produced from all these different distributed selves, it is also the world of the people who are engaging with it. That’s what I love so much – the love and the affection is extraordinary in your works.

A.D.C.     Thank you, Penny. I feel like I didn’t come to that naturally, but actually quite unnaturally. When I was quite young, I had this terrible illness. It broke my body down. I was very, very ill and had to kind of be born again physically. In my early twenties, when this happened, I felt I physically had to restructure my body. I realised that the body that I had known, the body that I had agency over, the body I lived in, was mine and mine to be fixed and mine to live in and through. And when that rejected me, I realised my body can be anybody. It opened up this notion that my body could be many things. And it’s what drew me into the very early ways in which I would perform outside of my body as another person or character. I think about Félix Gonzaléz-Torres’ candies you mentioned earlier – they were a very formative work for me where I could understand that he was both a body and, in this sort of religious way, in the candy that you touch and embody as you carry it with you. And I think I do that in my work where my body as it was is no longer, and I can occupy many spaces and wear different hats – not in a colonial way – but in a way that’s a true embodiment or a true lived-in, empathetic way of being in the world where I am outside of my taste, but I’m at the will of other tastes, I’m at the will of other people’s bodies, and trying to understand myself through that lens. I think that’s sort of what you’re speaking to. Even if it’s not explicitly said in the work, it is how I understand being in the world, which was not a choice, it was a violence that I experienced and which shaped the life that I have.

J.G.     What was so interesting to me visiting the studio was how present you are, which is astonishing in the context of what you just said, that you released your body from the expectations of being the only body with the possibility of inhabiting anybody. But the experience is grounded. Time is slower, and patient. I felt very present, and I tend not to – I live in the idea realm. But you manage to straddle the realm of idea and the world, the realm of the thing in front of you, in a way that is amazing. It was a dynamic I was left with: an imagination that is just running wild but explicitly present. How do those two things fully align? I suppose that’s what the work does – the work tries to figure that out.

A.D.C.     I know there’s all of this – the talk of progress and change is always related to technologies and things that are out of body. But I still have to eat a sandwich, and I’m never not going to eat that sandwich, you can take your AI or whatever, but I’m hungry and that matters.

J.G.     I think it’s interesting for us to probe the body in the show at large – Will as this ultimately decentralised body, and Penny’s paintings coming together as one coherent framework.

P.S.     With shocks, whether they are shocks to the health status of your body or the shock of grief, there’s a kind of dissolution of the self in that moment. And because there’s a dissolution, it also means a new beginning – or constantly new beginnings because I’ve certainly experienced that. It’s not one thing, it’s not one death and one new beginning, it’s this sort of multiplicity of these experiences that work with the idea of potential and future. And I think, Alex, you’ve spoken about the idea of the future as not something you try to pin down because that’s impossible – even the present you don’t pin down, even the past one doesn’t pin down. But the sense is there’s always some sort of movement towards it, some kind of desire.

A.D.C.     It just made me think: if you begin at the end, then everything after is exciting. As with ROY G BIV – it begins at the end. And so everything is possible after that. And I think that’s a wholly good way to be.

P.S.     And when I see Americo painting with the roller, I see there’s a matte surface and a shiny surface, and the shiny surface is about to get dry. There’s always this sense of change even in the simplest surfaces because the simple things are never really without massive complexity.