Turner pieces
Turner nomination
His recent installations
On the ephemeral aspect of his work
The difference between sculpture and installation
The future
It's quite a strange situation to react to. My main criticism of the Turner Prize is that the exhibition itself seems to be symbolic of the artists' work, as opposed to actually being a show. Most of my past shows have been in artist-run or outside spaces. It will be interesting to see whether I can still make something that can transcend and transform those circumstances, that's got its own life and that hasn't been institutionally killed.
The Turner Prize is a very difficult thing to refuse. You have to make a decision either way, so you can't just ignore the nomination. When I was deciding whether or not to do it, I thought of someone I know accusing me of being a bit of a tart if I said yes and holier than thou if I said no. I think I'll have to disappear for a while once it's over. Perhaps it's a bit like when you were a youth and have your favourite obscure band. When they became well known, you feel a bit disappointed. There's a worry that those who have always supported you will become estranged through the blanket of media coverage.
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An earlier work such as Taylor, for example, was like a prop for a non-existent film. The Coral Reef was a continuation of that – it was like a set. The viewer becomes the protagonist within that set and there are various different options for moving around the piece and reading it.
The piece I made at the Camden Arts Centre during a residency in 1998 was part of a good experience, but I found the idea of being viewed, making work in a studio situation, very problematic. At the time I didn't have a studio, so to set one up in this public space seemed absurd. Instead I created a parody of a studio. The piece, which was called Studio Apparatus for Camden Arts Centre, had a relation to Kafka's The Burrow, where a character is in such a state of paranoia about people getting into his burrow that he escapes purely to watch the entrance to see if anyone will try to break in. The first section was a fake corridor: when you came in it was as if you had accidentally wandered into the bowels of the building. From this, a small room led to a structure I'd made from objects in previous works, except their references were mixed. It was based on a piece of text by Stanislaw Lem, called Future Linguistics, where he predicts that the future of the world will be dictated by the invention of new words. So I was taking my own history, and its associative references, to combine and predict the future of my own making. It has actually worked because the fake corridor has become the strain of recent work, such as The Coral Reef and The Deliverance and the Patience, which use this structure. It felt as if people were trespassing in Camden; that's partly why I built that corridor, to throw them off the trail. Maybe it's pertinent that these later pieces still have that sense of trespass.
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On the ephemeral aspect of his work
Some of my installations still exist in storage. I like the fact that the piece in Venice Biennale will cease to exist. It will only exist disseminated across the world in people's fragmented memories. If you're asking me if I refuse to sell the installations and rebuild them in a museum context, although it's not a particularly commercially viable medium, I don't think the idea of making installation as an attack against the commercial system is that valid. It's not high on my agenda to make things to sell. If someone wanted to buy one of my pieces, I'd probably think about who it was and all the circumstances around how it was going to be shown. I don't think I'd refuse, but it's not something that's happened yet. Commercialisation becomes a problem if it means that all you do is churn stuff out to be flogged.
The one thing I enjoy about keeping an old piece, such as Lionheart, which I made for the British Art Show, is revisiting the objects and seeing how fast age changes how they look. The works are built to look old in the first place. I deliberately choose objects that are on the peripheries of acceptance, the sort of things which would not normally be valued, such as an old fan or an enamel light fitting. But, beyond this, I find it incredibly interesting how time changes the reading of something like, for example, the design of a coke can.
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On the difference between sculpture and installation
There's an experiential distinction between walking round a sculpture and entering a built structure that encompasses you. With the works I've been making recently, you know logically that when you look at things they're fake, because you know the space is not what it's purporting to be. Yet to all intents and purposes your eye tells you that it's real, so you enter a pact with this space, as to whether to believe it or not. It's like when you read the first few pages of a book. You know it's not real, it's a fiction, but you agree somewhere along the line to go along with it and enter this fictive realm. I also think it can be a lot more enjoyable, less dry. You can almost start to read things subconsciously; you become interested in the spaces, doors and the objects within that space, as opposed to thinking constantly: 'I'm in a piece of art.' Your mind is allowed to wander a little more. I think, perhaps, it's something painting usually does more successfully than sculpture.
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It would be nice to have something that lasted longer. Sometimes I find I don't have enough time because as soon as I've built an environment there's a timescale on its existence. I'm very jealous of painters who can have time with what they are making.
A few years ago, I made a proposal to set up a longer-term project that was constantly changing, like a studio, but one that was continually being renewed with objects from old shows and ideas for new shows. It would have been like the Camden piece, but more ongoing, longer term. It's something you can imagine Dieter Roth doing in the late 1970s – more of a living scenario than an exhibition. It was for a funding application that I didn't get in the end.
The corridor installations, which are made from a series of rooms sealed off from the gallery space, operate differently from works such as Taylor, which are free-standing and, perhaps, closer to sculpture.
Interview by Chloe Kinsman. For a full transcript see the current issue of tate: the art magazine
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