This interview took place in Edinburgh on the eve of the exhibition, in September 2023.

Louise Milne: Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration for this work, Figure Study in Light?

Paul Holmes: I’m quite interested in identity, but not necessarily the way that a lot of artists nowadays are interested in identity. So not in terms of how we see ourselves as belonging, but in the sense that we are distinguished as unique individuals.They’re the same word for almost the opposite thing –

LM: I remember the video piece you made in our automated photograph booth –

PH: – These Measures are for Your Protection. Thatpiece was about a kind of identitythat we possess, that we can surrender to others, or that people can steal from us. How is this kind of identity articulated? Often through some sort of index, semiotically. So a photograph, most commonly a fingerprint, and also this interesting thing: vital statistics. You get arrested. And these things are recorded. And literally indexed. 

LM: What the structuralists would call a metonymic way of creating the sign, where the part stands for the whole. The fingerprint stands for the body. There is something in Figure Study inLight. And in These Measures Are for Your Protection, which is to do with a kind of formal disassembly of the part for the whole. So, Figure Study in Light is essentially a set of tailor’s measurements, for a suit. So they are measurements, not simply of the body, like perhaps the vital statistics of the criminal, but measures for an encasement of the body in a particular form.

PH: Yes. When I was conceptualising, this work I had been extremely ill and in hospital.

Originally, I thought, I’ll get all of these measures, we’ll createthe tubes, and then we’ll stick it in the middle of the room. And you’ll make out a sketch figure that’s quite fun and interesting. And then I thought, hang on a minute, what happens if we explode this out into the room? I suppose perhaps I was inspired by Cornelia Parker…

LM: Yes…

PH: And exploding it related to this idea of medical intervention. When you go into hospital, the experience is a bit like being exploded and put back together again. Doctors and nurses carry out acts of violence on your person: They stick needles into you, they stick chemicals into you, they suck out bits of you, and they chop off bits of you. And then they put you back together again.

LM: There’s something interesting there too, about the representation of the body. Susan Stewart talks about the difference between the body seen from the outside and the body perceived from the inside, as associated with two main traditions in Western visual thinking. The first one being the way the Greeks initially conceptualised the body corresponding to various Euclidean and Pythagorean ideas about proportion and so on. The other one is the grotesque body, the kind that Rabelais and Bruegel, are interested in. And that is the body that is perceived in terms of a set of functions: ingesting, excreting; the stomach, the genitalia –feeling. So there’s a sort of oscillation or tension set up between the two.

PH: It’s interesting, this duality between the ideal and the reality or between beauty and disgust, orbetween the body as an aesthetic construct, and its reality as a biological entity. When I was making the video work Time Machine, John Coplans was an influence.  Coplans didn’t attempt to make himself beautiful. He just wanted to find the essence of what his body was like, as an ageing gentleman. And its inherent beauty.

Obviously, in terms of the function of the suit, partly because of its debt to the tradition of Beau Brummell, and also partly because of its debt to the world of athleticism, its function is to take somebody who’s not remotely athletic and make them look like they maybe are.  Or to make somebody who really looks like John Coplans, and actually make them look like a Greek god.

And that is to do with the tension that exists for everybody in terms of the way they view their body as an expression of their successfulness as a person. In a perhaps rather old-fashioned discourse, vital statistics used to be a slang term for the desirability of another person. We all see ourselves as being desirable or not desirable, and a lot of the way in which I think people use, for instance, social media is an attempt to put something out therethat’s a bit like the function of the suit – to create an idealised version of themselves that other people will see.

But I’m also very interested specifically in dualism. And that’s a lot of what that what Time Machine was about. It’s the inspiration for a lot of my thinking about the body. For anybody who’s experienced the grotesque somehow and felt disgusted by that, there’s the duality between the ideal and the reality.  But there’s also the dualism between what we feel we would like our bodies to do as machines and the reality of what they actually do for us, and that interests me a great deal and the way in which that relates to the inevitability unfortunately, of our extinction.

LM: Yes.  One thing I really like about this piece is the way in which movement is instilled into it on a number of different levels.

PH: This idea of exploding something is interesting. When you look at a scientific manual, it’s full of diagrams, and they’re literally called exploded diagrams. Now, my background academically, originally, many years ago was as a physicist. So that sort of thing sort of appealed to me, I suppose.

It means that the, the spectator has to move around the room, and interact with the work in order to create the figure in their head, through memory. They see a piece that maybe looks like the top of your head, a piece that looks like an arm. And as they move around the room, they see other pieces and they assemble the whole thing together.

At no point when you’re in this room, can you see that figure.  You have to see it in your own head, throughthe filter of your own perceptions and prejudices and everything else. Because it’s about body image. And actually, our perception of our body as an entirety is a fabrication from our imaginations or our received ideas.

LM: The movement here also makes me think of Etienne Jules Marey and Edweard Muybridge. And they’re very much to do with light too, because the way that they had to light these things in order to make this marvellous stop motion shows. Marey, for example, precisely painted white paint on a guy wearing a black body stocking. And then, of course, there are lights all around, it’s all very staged carefully staged.

PH: What Marey and Muybridge were doing, obviously was studying the body.  They were particularly interested in motion, which is the essence of what I do, too. The motion here, in fact, is the motion of the tailor introducing the tape to the arm or the chest or whatever. But the study of motion is important to all my work.  Studying motion was picked up by Bruce Nauman in the famous piece where he walks around a square, and in the works that Vito Acconci did round about 1970. They do something very simple. And let you see it. And that’s that. And for me, all my video work, in a sense has as its origins, the spirit of the work that these people were doing, all the way back to Marey and Muybridge as well.

It is all about studying some essential kind of thing that the body is doing. Usually, that takes the form of what we broadly would consider to be a performance, but it wouldn’t work if I were just doing it in front of an audience. The mechanism of cinematography and editing in video art, or the mechanism here of sculpturally producing these light tubes, is important to the articulation of the idea.

LM: When you were talking about the phenomenological experience of the of the spectator – the audience able to move in and out in the piece, to inhabit it, to perceive it both physically and in the imagination – I was reminded of something the psychologist Daniel Stern said. He saidthat there are some experiences of the self which one can only have in the presence of others. That addresses the issue which Merleau Ponty and others address, which is the nature of the self and its relationship with the physical world. Phenomenology is a way out ofthe solipsistic traps of dualism or the apparently irreconcilable contradiction between the Greek statue of the nude, and the lazy and grotesque body embedded in the flesh.

PH: This also relates a little bit to my video work as well. I think that there’s a very important question here, a phenomenological question, to do with the way in which the artist relates to the spectator. It comes back to this whole business about minimalism. When you look at a sculptural object in a room, what’s your relationship to that object? When I instal video in a gallery, I’d much rather do it in a big CRT monitor right in the middle of the room, because it has a sculptural value. And people can wander about it and enjoy the physicality of the object, which they can’t really do if it’s stuck on a wall on a flat screen. There is this theatricality, as Michael Fried calls it, in the way in which a viewer is reminded of their own participation in the creation of the work. Unlike Fried, I think that’s a good thing. But his use of the word theatricality is important there because it also relates to performance art.

If I’m doing something that’s effectively a performance, but because the nature of the work is that it’s not live – it’s filmed and edited in a cinematographic way -you do lose something, which is the interaction between the performer and the spectator. And that mode of installation in which the spectator has this more phenomenological spatial relationship with the work is important to me. That’s, I suppose, at the root of the way in which this work is installed here.  I could be standing there with an audience watching me being measured, and that’s a performance of a simple act of the sort that I’m interested.  But a live performance isn’t appropriate here. That isn’t the right way of propagating the idea to the viewer, the spectator. In this case it is, through these minimalist, light shapes. But the fact that the viewer has to interact with it introduces a level of intersubjectivity. At least between the viewer and the work, because obviously I’m not present, except through these ghostly shapes.

Professor Louise Milne is a writer and film-maker.  She teaches critical theory and visual anthropology at the Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh Napier University.