Lisa Armstrong interview for the Critical Fine Art Practice Grad Show 2013 at Brighton University

1. Sam, your work clearly engages quite heavily with topics surrounding labour and everyday creativity. What was it that initially led you to look at these topics in your practice?

I've mostly enjoyed the non-art related jobs I've worked to support myself throughout my years spent in education. For over 10 years I've been working in wide variety of roles that have supported me from A-levels to Masters. Working with other people for a period of time means that you begin to find out things about them and I enjoy discovering how colleagues inject creativity or individuality into their daily work. As I became more aware of my interests and their place within my practice, I began to encourage colleagues to develop their creativity. This was partly for my own enjoyment, making the job more interesting and easing the mundanity. But also partly to help me with my internal battle between two ideas; the romantic idea that everyone would benefit from being more creative and autonomous and the idea that some people just don't desire creativity and are happy following orders. I have encouraged creativity and autonomy in service sector contexts, where it can cause tension between the want for self-fulfilment and the rigid structures of employment, as well as in my current employment context in teaching. Generally creativity and autonomy are championed in the education sector but tensions still exist, just in different and more subtle ways.

My practice has developed partly from my own and my friend's struggles as young artists or creatives. The reality of trying to progress your practice as an art graduate during a recession and without financial backing is a harsh one. The culture of unpaid internships and free labour in the creative industries bears a weight down on those who are struggling to survive. With the increasing professionalisation of the arts sector, many artists are now unable to access a job market that they could have done 15-20 years earlier, before higher education courses in subjects like arts administration or even curating became common place. So I think a lot of people, like me, have turned to other job sectors to support their practices. Without experience or a specific skill, the likely place to end up is in the service sector where wages are low and hours worked are high, thus squeezing any attempts to sustain an art practice. This process adds to the overall funnel effect of the art market and valorisation mechanisms of the art world that maintain the current regime. That is the regime whereby a small percentage of artists at the top get most of the opportunities and funding and the remaining bulk of artists, whether trained or untrained, get a much smaller share of the pie.

Like many artists, I have a resistance to the art world; a love/hate relationship. I'm talking very generally about the 'art world' as there are many art worlds that one can operate within. I can sometimes feel uncomfortable with spending so much time thinking about art, talking about art or making art and feel like none of it is actually of any use to anyone. Being at Goldsmiths, things could sometimes feel very object orientated with work made market-ready. Spending time away from art, in other contexts, is a kind of self-healing strategy or a therapy in order to cope with the contradictions involved in being an artist who has socio-political interests.

2. Are their any key texts or artists that have informed your work?

There are loads. Some of the people that have and continue to inform my work are Seth Siegelaub, Hans Haacke, The Artists Placement Group, Allan Kaprow, Clare Bishop, Andrea Fraser, Roman Ondak, Chris Evans, Cees Krijnen, Roberto Cuoghi, Pilvi Takala, Jeremy Hutchison...and the list goes on.

Stephen Wright curated an exhibition in 2004 called 'The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade
(The use-value of art)' which had quite an effect on my practice, even though I was unable to go to NYC to see it, he has written some interesting texts around it that can be found online.


There is a great combining of Beuys and Kaprow quotes in an article on Carey Young's work, written by John Slyce:

“Everywhere as playground + Everyone an artist”

Part of my practice has involved developing the ability to carry an art frame around in my head, ready to apply to situations or events in my life. This isn't announced or formalised but is more of a mental exercise or a game that informs my current ideas. I see this activity as part of a group of activities that address the need for workers to create distractions or extra challenges to keep them from going mad and relieve the boredom and repetition of working every day. Whether thats talking about the Premier League with colleagues, secretly playing Angry Birds or imagining that someone gutting fish is a performance about the human desire to conquerer the natural world; these activities are all valid forms of escapism, crucial to the survival of the contemporary worker.

3. In quite a few of your previous projects you have undertaken artist-residences in order to produce work. This instantly draws some reference to the work created by the artist placement group in the 1960s. Yet in your residences you have often gone ‘undercover’ as an artist, or as you like to call it, conducted ‘stealth residences’. What were your original motivations for keeping your artist identity a secret and to what extent do you think this has shaped the outcome of your work?

Firstly I think that the idea of initiating a stealth or un-invited residency came about due to the difficult situation I found myself in whilst studying at Goldsmiths. I was spending half the week working as a fishmonger at Harrods to support myself whilst on the part-time MFA programme. It was pretty tiring and I was under pressure to produce a body of work so I decided to solve the problem by attempting to merge artistic labour with wage labour and start using my job as a space to be an artist. I say 'be' because I was operating and thinking as an artist, developing how I used the art frame in my head and then retold or surfaced what I was doing in the art context of Goldsmiths studios. Secrecy was integral to my existence as both someone who was surviving off a part-time job and as an artist with little time and space to make art. This tension was, to some extent, the currency of some of the work I've produced and shown about my time at Harrods. Harrods is a very strict and controlled environment. Everyday when walking through the underground tunnel to work in the food halls you have to put all your personal possessions into a transparent plastic bag in front of security guards. On the way out of work you can be searched. My contract of employment had many clauses that were designed to prevent staff from divulging any personal information about the Al-Fayed family or the celebrities that regularly visited the store. It was not easy to operate as an artist but that is also part of the attraction; the un-documentable aspect. So the secrecy also added an excitement to the work that was real and this came across when I presented artworks over my two years there.

I would say that the need for secrecy has definitely shaped the work I present. For me, the concept of operating in stealth mode has two functions. Firstly, it's a tool used for getting into a place or gaining access to an institution under the guise of someone else i.e. not an artist. Declare you are an artist in a given situation and certain doors may open but others will shut. Secondly, working in this way can offer a space to question or subvert an institution from within, as opposed to firing off critique from afar. Working in stealth allows a parasitic practice to grow, a practice that feeds off of the institution hosting it. My residency at Harrods was parasitic, but arguably, the exploitation was two-way.

4. Sam, like many other artists, you often locate your practice so heavily in non-art contexts that it could become hard to decipher where your artwork is for others – especially with your artist identity hidden. This was essentially Kaprow’s problem in the 1960s. You could say that he occurred a pyrrhic victory in his attempt to blur art and life – his happenings becoming somewhat invisible after the 1960s, only read about in art history. I’ve noticed that you’ve adopted the technique of summarizing your residency by revealing your identity and producing video artworks. How do you think these video works compare to the day-to-day experience of the residences?

How do you go about filtering what the art is? I've used video in a few ways, either purely in a documentary way or as a way to create layers of fiction to tell a story a particular way. Video is a very quick to use and consumable medium to work with and I've favoured it as a way to package up, what can seem quite complex ideas or larger scale projects, into smaller consumable units to be shown in different contexts. This might be bowing down to market and art world pressures but I'd say that is has helped me get my work seen in a variety of contexts and has possibly allowed me to take up opportunities where I can initiate larger scale and more complex projects.

Video representations of an artist-in-residence will never fully live up to their day-to-day experiences, but they can go some of the way to fleshing out part of a reality. The video I made whilst working on Harrods fish counter is now part of a talk I give that includes more of the details and background on the residency. I think that my filtering process, deciding where the art is, changes over time and as I continue to develop a language around my practice.

The richness of the experience of a residency, whether official or not, can be very indulgent for the artist. During an official residency in a fishmongers in Penzance, organised in collaboration with CAZ project space, I spent the day working with the fishmonger to develop some new ways of displaying fish. The residency was not advertised or marked out as art with signs, it was just communicated to his regular customers verbally upon entry to the shop. In a way, the residency and art made was in collaboration with the fishmonger but he was also the audience. There are secondary audiences who hear and see documentation of the residency, but I'm interested in the idea of participatory practice that is really bespoke and aimed at just one person.

5. What do you think the most important thing is to do an artist?

Spend some time in a variety of contexts and get out of the art world occasionally.

6. What advice would you give to a recent art graduate!

Get a job. Or more precisely, get a job and then turn it into your stealth studio. Contact the artists, writers, curators etc you're interested in and make some connections. If you are genuinely interested in what other people do, then you'll make relationships that will help you later on.