Lawrence Bradby & Suzanna Cullen: It’s a week before the opening and the gallery is empty apart from a black moulded pond lining and a pump. You’ve avoided the words ‘installation’ and ‘performance’ in the press release, and called your show a ‘scenario’ – what sort of freedom does this word offer you as you assemble the elements of the show?

Simon Davenport: It’s not really about the freedom it offers me, more about the freedom it offers the audience. People associate ‘performance’ and ‘installation’ with all the shit ‘performances’ and ‘installations’ they’ve seen or heard about. They are two very sick and tired words – however, the word ‘scenario’ invites fewer pre-judgements, because although we all know what it means, it is alien in this context.

LB & SC: Why do you think that people would associate ‘performance’ and ‘installation’ with the worst stuff they’ve seen, rather than the best? Or do you feel that it’s not just the titles, but the genres themselves that are sick and tired?

SD: Either through fear, or I suspect through rational thoughts, a large percentage of people avoid contemporary art like the plague. That’s not to say it’s ill and tired, but the inaccessible majority of it makes the thought-provoking minority of it (the stuff that speaks truths) redundant. So through wording I’m trying my best to escape those associations. 

LB & SC: Some of your previous work uses precisely the opposite tactic: instead of pushing to open up a distance from other art practices, it climbs right into the sticky mess of pre-existing associations. We were thinking of the way you fictionalised the escapades of some of contemporary art’s Brigadier-Generals (like Andrew Hunt) for ‘AH HA Army’ at Voewood in North Norfolk. Also ‘Guerrilla Performance for Robert Mapplethorpe’ which you did in New York in the spring.

SD: Thanks for name-checking those projects. Sometimes when your audience is destined to be full of art fans (Voewood), rather than escape those associations you might as well embrace them. The Mapplethorpe performance was just a means of creating a talking point amongst other artists. Both those projects were more about playing the art world.

LB & SC: So what world are you playing, or playing to, with this show?

SD: A while ago I was boggled with a craze of sci-fi referencing in a lot of exhibitions, particularly around a fit of referencing and name-dropping JG Ballard. There was a successful band around the time that liked to reference him a lot in their lyrics. They had close connections with an art collective that those ‘Ballardians’ kept hiring. At the same time I was reading some Ruskin. I was interested in his reading of the gothic and its obvious confliction with industrialisation. Then I read Vonnegut's Player Piano, which is a sci-fi that features some Ruskin-like characters called the ‘Ghost Shirt Society’. Out of that came a scenario, which I don’t expect people to read into, because within the scenario are enough base objects for an adequate interpretation. But I’m not sure if I’m playing here.

LB & SC: That’s exactly what we were after: a glimpse into the foul rag and bone shop of the artist’s mind. Since the interview began some objects have appeared in the gallery, including a towering plinth (which might in fact be a precarious stage) and a huge black logo/war insignia. We were going to say there’s an edge of menace, but obviously ‘dystopian’ would be a better word. There seem to be connections and antagonisms between your show and Kaavous Clayton’s (which was here in the spring). Kaavous’s show enabled people to use the gallery as a social space; it had a sense of utopian possibility. With its description as ‘a series of projected events’ and the presence of a stage in the gallery, your show hints at some events being carried out by the visitors, but the way they might do this remains uncertain. 

SD: The stage (less precarious than hurried) and the insignia are really tools that enable one to imagine what might have happened, rather than to allow for happenings. Any sequence of events is either imagined by the audience, or if actually takes place, it’ll be vetted: heavily, absolutely and despotically.

LB & SC: Oh yeah, the universal drive to increase one’s own power and the rise of the artist-dictator, which takes us back to Nietzsche and the title. Who’s your money on, by the way?

Artist's Website // Publication by Simon Davenport & Lawrence Leaman // Press Release