The Dirt Factory

This interview was conducted on Wednesday 9th March, 2005, between Dominic Redfern, (Video Artist and Academic in School of Art, RMIT) and the artist.

Dom: In this particular exhibition you have focused on the dirtiest of dirt: shit, why do you think shit remains a really strong social taboo?

Ian: Is it a social taboo? I don't think it is, perhaps in the art world people have hang ups about shit.... The strange thing with shit is everyone is intimately familiar with it; everyone does it. My own interest in shit really stems from this ongoing pre-occupation with the human body and shit is one of those things that one has to deal with when engaging with ideas of the body. So often when artists do deal with the body in whatever shape or form, they deny shit, they deny genitalia, they deny the everyday reality of what it's like to inhabit a body and all the messy stuff that goes with it.

Dom: The relationship between the body and technology is a strand of thought or an area of thinking that has occupied artists for the last twenty years. And of course one thinks of Stelarc and among theorists people like Saddie Plant. Your way of approaching this area of work is really different, how would you characterise that difference ?

Ian: The fundamental difference I think is cynicism towards different technological narratives, instead of using technology the right way I am far more interested in using it the wrong way, transforming a useful object into a useless object for example. There is also a perception I think that technology is seen as a sophisticated system, I find this kind of thinking pretty banal.   I am more focused on those ubiquitous forms of technology, which we don't think as being technological systems, everyday things like toilets, plumbing, sex toys etc. I am interested in the idea of the body as a form of technology, the notion of the brain as a form of electricity or the gastrointestinal system as plumbing for example. So it's really more of a lateral or poetic interpretation of the body opposed to the   ideas that some of these people you mentioned have,   which is more about an implicitly utopian and romantic relationship of technology and the body. For me it's really more about the general weirdness and strangeness of the human body.

Dom:   Can you explain that a bit more? why does weird come to mind when you think about the body? as it's something lots of people take for granted...

Ian: Absolutey. Over the last few years my work has been fairly autobiographical, with an interest in my own body, having gone through a fairly major episode with a nasty stomach parasite. Also becoming aware of the idea of an inner body and an outer body, the notion of a body we present to the world, but within we are harbouring another kind of body which others don't necessarily see. This fascinates me, the idea of multiple personalities of bodies that we have. It's also the notion that we are technologicalised through things like our environment, our head's are mobile phone antennas, sex toys that function as weird prosthetic extensions of our genitals, the bowel as an interface...these kinds of things.

Dom: The dirt factory is being used as an analogy for the body but you are clearly interested in the notion of 'dirtiness' more generally, you love to make a mess and your control of a messy or dirty aesthetic is really in evidence in looking at the work. Where does this interest come form, and are you interested in broader social connotations of 'dirtiness' and cleanliness'?

Ian: The dirt factory itself came about from an article I was reading about bacteria, and the way in which the human body is made up of so many different strains of bacteria, so it got be thinking its an apt metaphor, this kind of 'dirty factory'. On another level I was interested in how Americans call toilets bathrooms, which is like this denial of shit, which is an obvious reading, but if you uncover it further it's like shitting is a reminder of our own organic mortality. Its all about decomposition, organic matter rotting, it's what we will become when we die, so the denial of shit is like the denial of death, shit becomes this metaphor for death and dying.

Dom: Just to stay with the shit and the dirt for a minute, it's not the first time you have worked with bodily waste systems, most notably The Excelsior 3000, bowel technology project, which people saw around Australia and Internationally, what kind of reaction do you get working in this territory, what do you get from the average punter as compared to a more informed art audience?

Ian: I guess toilets are the great equaliser, so everyone can relate to them I think on some level, the average punter instantly gets the humour level of it. Its an unfortunate thing however, that because the work is dealing with toilets or shit, it's   perceived simply as a gag, a cheap shot, which is not my intention at all. On one hand, it allows for an entry point into the work, and then hopefully audiences will uncover some of the other stuff bubbling beneath the surface there. The humour thing is weird though, it almost becomes a safety mechanism in a way, its like 'my brain can't possibly contemplate this as serious so I will interpret it as comedy' and it gets left at that.

Dom: Another dichotomy that comes up repeatedly in your work is the notion of the healthy and the unhealthy, I am thinking of your Pamela Anderson installation, in the obsessive ravings on the web site that is attached to the installation. With lots of references to 'good for health' and a 'healthy breeding specimen' and things like that and your inversion of ergonomics in your 'Anti Ergonomic hump machine' installation. Why does problematising these sort of values appeal to you?

Ian: That kind of binary that you speak, of cleanliness and dirt and also healthy and unhealthy has all sorts of connections with the notion of high culture and low culture, but really what we are talking about here are ideas of fanaticism which I am interested in. Whereby something is so intensely fanatical and extreme it becomes totally confused as to what its real purpose is and the original message or intention is completely perverted.

Dom: Given your subject matter does the issue of high and low culture remain a loaded one for you?

Ian: The low/high thing certainly runs through all my work, however I am not trying to make some profound political high culture/low culture point. In some ways this also relates to notions of taste and distaste which my work explores both with untasteful themes, untasteful materials. As much as galleries, institutions and curators love to talk up pop culture, they do have serious problems when presented with the kind of work I am doing. Nothing is more base level or low than a toilet and shitting, its so low, we can't even begin to speak of it in the same context of serious art, which is ridiculous as there is an enormous history of artists working with these themes from the last thirty years or so, often in quite complex and intriguing ways.

Dom: To continue the theme of lowness, there is a low-fi aspect to your work. Even though paradoxically your earlier work utilised and was associated with 'high' technology, there is now a real rejection of that in your work, such as in this show where you are utilising scraps of old building materials and kindergarten media such as cornflakes and cardboard. Why does your science take this amateur form?

Ian: I don't give mediums any kind of hierarchy, whether it's drawings, or computers, or video or whatever, it's all about what services the idea at the time. These days I am far more interested in an expanded view of what new media and hybrid media potentially can be.   With the low-fi aesthetic both in the sculptures, animations and drawings it's more about works that look like they are made , opposed to something that looks like it's digitally manufactured. This comes back to the idea of fanaticism and the work having a desperate tone to it. I didn't really want them to be perceived as if they were art installations, which of course they are, but I wanted them to operate on some other level and to use materials that were more remedial, more base level. The works no longer really explore interactive art,   they are more about implicating the audience in different kinds of ways, whether it is sitting on a toilet or fantasising about futuristic sex machines, (as in my futurotica works).

Dom: That's brings us back to abject subject matter, bodily material. I guess if you do seek to implicate people, those very base level themes are shared by everyone, one could call it a form of humanism, shit and sex being truly universal themes.

Ian: I actually cringe at the idea of humanism in art, which is rife in contemporary art in Australia and I feel really functions as subtle emotional pornography, a cheap form of emotional   manipulation of the audience...But yes my works are about the human condition ultimately so instead of ignoring this my work seeks to explore it in more lateral ways.

Dom: We touched before on the obsessive and it reflected in that the works in this show appear out of control, is this a difficult aesthetic to achieve?

Ian: It's one thing to make something that just looks like crap and another to make something that is consistently and thematically focused as crap. I am very critical of contemporary art that functions as hip décor or interior design, therefore I sometimes try and make works as ugly as possible to negate this idea of it being pleasing. One thing I have enjoyed with these pieces in this show, is the idea of the mistake - something I have found completely missing when working in digital media.

Dom: Mental illness is another reoccurring theme of yours, in appearance these objects and drawings could have been done in a back shed by someone with OCD, you then populate them with historical, personal and psuedo-scientific elements re-configured into new paranoiac narratives, why?

Ian: Yes, the works are very much like they have been produced in a sheltered workshop. They function as mutant technological folk art in a way,   depicting forms of technology or machines that clearly don't work or look technological, they are simply the product of someones mind. Also this idea of psychopathology and fanaticism and its relationship historically to different forms of technology interests me. Many of my works including ones in this show have weird forms of antennas or aerial, the idea of transmitting messages, or picking up secret messages. But more to the point the works are really about revealing a psychopathology of the Cornflakes empire and the de-tox, health industry. The idea of the iconic image of cornflakes as one of wholesomeness and healthiness and the perverse reality of what was bubbling beneath the surface there in the form of John Harvey Kellogg and his own fanatical ideas about health, the bowel and cornflakes.

Dom: Why is Dr Kellogg so central to this story?

Ian: The Kellogg story is fairly well known...He was a Seventh day adventist and was a health fanatic, believing that constipation was the evil of society, the idea that a constipated body was harbouring all sorts of toxins that would be absorbed back into ones system, this was the basic theory of autointoxication. Kellogg went a step further though in being a big believer in colonic irrigation and bowel surgery and was a staunch anti masturbator, he believed roughage in the diet in the form of cornflakes would not only alleviate constipation but would also stop masturbation, as he felt masturbation was a direct result of relieving pressure built up from the impacted bowels. The sculptural works in the show are meant to appear as strange devices which seek to distil Kellogg's fanaticism of cleansing the inner body, while equating cornflakes with bodily waste.

Dom:   So it actually operates really clearly as an example of your previous point regarding the psychological extensions of 'good health' and 'cleanliness', ie: get rid of the shit and you can cut out the 'dirty' thoughts leading to masturbation...you can eliminate one with the other, healthy mind, healthy body sort of thing. The unhealthy takes its ultimate form in mutation, product of the ultimate poison - Nuclear radiation, a dirt we can never clean. How do the mutant bodies we see in your drawings relate to your broader themes?

Ian: Its that notion of the body as a malleable form, a recombinant form that can be combined with other bodies or of bodies having multiple personalities. In a sense the drawings are all about that idea of the destruction of the body, broken down and mutated into something else altogether. So in this sense I see the drawings as central to the themes of the show. I've always drawn, either in the forms of   comics, sketches, this show is also more about bringing this to the foreground. For me It all begins with drawing, that's the way in which you get stuff out of your brain. In this sense the drawings function as diagrams, instructions, working sketches of ideas in progress and ideas that are yet to be realised.