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In the beginning of the 90’s, a group of young artists who will soon change the contemporary art scene were on the rise and worldwide known artist Marc Quinn was one of them. Quinn’s works that drew the immediate attention of the audience with their flawless beauty, investigating the emotions hidden in human soul and different forms of the “being” while conversing with art history. With Bob Dylan’s ‘Forever Young’ in the back of my head, we are talking with Marc who lightly hints the passing time to his audience, about his recent works, art history, his production process via his first solo exhibition at ARTER.

Your exhibition “The Sleep of Reason” that opened at ARTER this February, gives the audience a pretty comprehensive idea about your works. One of the themes of the exhibition is a concept that also occupied our social agenda. Can you explain your works in the context of this theme?

In the exhibition curated by Selen Ansen, my old and recent works are presented all together. “Creation of History” is a series of carpets that I’ve been working on in the last couple of years and they are exhibited for the very first time at ARTER as a series. I made one of the first carpets back at 2011 after the riots at London. Even though I’ve been producing new ones since then, I could only exhibit one in London and another one in Venice. When we think about the period we’re passing through, it’s interesting for them to be exhibited here altogether.

At first I checked if there was Turkey amongst the carpets, but then I thought it doesn’t matter if it’s from Brazil, India, England or Greece...

Turkey is not a part of this series for various reasons, but since the starting points are pretty much the same it doesn’t matter where the scene on the carpet takes place. Before I started this series, I was looking at the carpets and thinking how the individual threads that made the carpet came together and formed an image or an object. This made me think that the riots pictured on the carpets were born with individuals uniting using the social media platforms and reminded me that rising from the bottom, not the opposite way, formed history. I believe that “Creation of History” series states this change in how the world works with the production form of the object. There will be additions to the series as the world changes.

What’s the relation between the series and memory?

It’s also of course about making a memory. People who visit the exhibition can walk on the carpets, due to this the threads fray and the images can totally fade and vanish. I wonder how the carpets will look like at the end of this exhibition at ARTER… It’s connected to the fact that people’s memories change after capturing a perfect moment, just like their history. At “Creation of History”, the object itself is also changing like history, it’s not like “Self” where the moment will stay the same forever.

In this case, you must be reproducing the carpets for every exhibition.

Yes. After the exhibition is over, the carpets are cleaned and taken to storage. For example, the carpet that was exhibited in Venice was pretty faded after thousands of people walked on it. Eventually I get the old carpets framed, they are exhibited on walls after being on the ground. When a new exhibition is in question I reproduce that carpet. When looked back in history, this process goes back to the castles where kings decorated their walls with carpets, telling stories of wars as a picture of the history. It can be seen as an ironic approach to these pictures being seen as the highest form of art. Keeping them on the ground seems democratic to me. Within the ‘Creation of History’ series there is also the idea of magic carpet with which you can change the world.

As we can see from this exhibition there are many references to art history in your works. “The Sleep of Reason” is a reference to Goya’s work. Can you tell us about this connection?

I’m interested in art history, it’s a natural process due to the fact I follow other people’s work. I think that art is only a reoccurrence. When we say contemporary art, we should remind ourselves that once, everything was “contemporary”. If you ask me, even though art has a “timeless” side to it, it first reflects its time that it was produced. If it’s a good piece, it will still mean something to people after all those times. I’m interested in every period of time. Goya, Rembrandt, Classical Ancient period with it’s marble sculptures, Asian art in Bonzai sculptures, 17th century meat paintings are people and periods that I was inspired in this exhibition. I believe that some themes should be reconstructed in different ways throughout history.

So, what gives you the urge to use unwonted materials such as blood, bread and ice?

The reason I feel the urge to work with these materials is to produce “alive” things. For example, lets think about “Self”, a self-portrait made with my own blood. When looked from far, that sculpture looks like it’s alive, tied to a life support unit. Whereas when you get closer to it, you realize it isn’t. When you realize the size of the difference between a live object and a lifeless object, you find out that you cannot create something that’s “alive”. That’s the ironic part of it. Imagine people who freeze themselves, hoping they will be alive again someday. Even at first, it looks like the situation shortens the distance between alive and lifeless things; it actually emphasizes the complete opposite. Also, I like to produce an object that exists in the current time while working with these materials. If something is frozen, it means that it’s stuck in a moment filled with possibilities and carries the danger of losing its “existence” in its being. This way, this makes it somehow tied to the current time. “The Origin of the World” in the exhibition is like the map of time. While the circles on a seashell is a sign that the animal made it and the passing time and history, the shiny and reflective surface of the shell is a reference to the current time. I feel like the circles on the shell and surface reflecting the opposite part is an embodied manifesto that can be almost used to explain that in fact today is the past.

This interest you have in nature, body and history makes me think that it’s somewhat connected to philosophy.

For me, art is the material form of philosophy. Nowadays, people do not have much time to read, that’s why they are mostly looking at things and feeding themselves from what they see. Philosophy also needs to relate to the real world. In this context, I think that art is where philosophy connects to the world.

Do you read philosophy?

Sometimes, but mostly I’m busy thinking about how I will produce my work. We can also talk about a philosophy that function unconsciously in the process of expressing. For instance, I can’t produce a work the moment the idea sparks in my mind, I do a lot of things with that idea and when it’s starts to get interesting, it naturally starts to become a whole with it’s final form. It’s more like; I understand the world while I’m making something with my hands. When it comes to the production process, I find myself at a point where I couldn’t have imagined at the beginning. The other way around would be boring anyway.

The overload of information we experience today should also be related to your production process…

Yes, this is the world we live in and I reflect it in my works. The “eye” pictures at ARTER that have maps on them actually reflect our paranoia. We are incessantly bombarded with information and we carry whatever’s going on around the world in our brains with us wherever we go. This also affects the way we look at things. It’s almost as if like there is no way out. At this point, I want my works to ask questions. Because philosophy asks questions, the one who answers is religion.

So what does Baroque mean to you?

I like the enthusiasm of Baroque. To me, the delightful darkness inside Baroque is an attempt to make a connection between the real world and an art object. Baroque is like a vibration that a drop makes on water… It is as if it carries a desire to settle in the truth. Even though in a way it’s perceived as an artificial art movement, it extends its every piece to connect with the real world.

The most dominant emotion I had while I was going around “The Sleep of Reason” was “violence”. Why do you have so much violence in your works?

I feel like beauty and violence has a connection with sincerity. Also, the world we live in is full of violence; you know that something can happen to you any time when you’re walking on the street. For instance, even though the sculptures in the exhibition look beautiful, they shelter a violent memory and the disengagement of an organ. Even though this is hidden in that beautiful marble, it’s not possible to feel it while you’re looking at the sculpture. My concern is to bring real life into art.

Talking about marble sculptures, when I was going around at Veronai in 2009, the gigantic Alison Lapper sculpture I came across made me feel complicated and heavy emotions. I wonder how this group of works started.

This series started by watching people looking at Classical Era sculptures at the British Museum and Louvre. While they were talking to each other about these works as “the most beautiful sculptures on earth”, I wondered what if one of the sculptures came alive and just join in their group, what would be their reaction. It would probably be completely different from what they have said and thought about it. They wouldn’t know how to look at that figure and they would be ashamed. I can say that I started this series to investigate things that are accepted in art, but not in real life. First of all, I made contact with British Paralympics Association and with that contact I first made Peter Hull’s sculpture. It got easier after that, once you have a sample in hand, you can easily tell people what you’re trying to do.

Can you tell us about the abstractions you made on the figures on your meat paintings at the exhibition?

At the meat paintings we see an abstract image that reminds us De Kooing’s paintings. In fact when you look at it, it’s not an abstraction, because it’s made out of meat. For some it’s beautiful and for some it’s disgusting. It catches my attention when something looks paradoxical; I like things that cannot be solved.

I wonder what feeds your production process… Is travelling one of them?

Traveling is one of them but it happens without me realizing it. It may happen when I’m watching TV, surfing on the internet or talking to someone. You’ll never know where an idea will spark. For instance, while I was walking at Chelsea Floral show I saw the real version of the bonsai tree, which was exhibited at ARTER’s exhibition “Held by Desire”, and I thought it was a perfect example of our relation with nature. There was suppression to make “beauty”, but when you grow it that way, it felt like it comes back to you monstrously. We can say that bonsai tree is the beginning of the manipulation of humans did on nature. There is also a misleading side to this beauty. There are psychological reasons underneath making the bonsai, even though they are not real; to feel that you can control the world.

I know that you also have a collection. Since we are wrapping up, do you wanna tell us about artists you find interesting lately?

There are many artists whose work I find interesting. For instance, I like Taner Ceylan’s paintings here.

This interview is published on March 2014 issue of XOXO The Mag. The translation from Turkish to English is by Ayşegül Papila.

Marc Quinn’s prints from ‘Labyrinth’, ‘Irises’ and ‘Flower Painting’ series were exhibited at Printed’15.

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