ELEPHANT INTERVIEWS

These are version of my interviews for the excellent ELEPHANT website...

Liv Fontaine  2019

Young Glasgow-based artist Liv Fontaine imposes her sharply feminist perspective on audiences through anger-driven performances: expect a manic vocal style, cutting sarcasm and confrontational bodily exposure. She often adopts alter egos as a means of exposing absurdity, inequality and the unrealistic depiction of women by the male-controlled media—for example Treacle Fuckface, of whom Liv says “She is a lusty busty exhibitionist. She is militant in her agenda. She feels no shame… She is my role model.” Liv Fontaine isn’t her real name, either, but her uncomfortably hilarious material is evidently personal as well as political—so much so that she created the character Viv Insane “to say the things I felt I couldn’t as Liv Fontaine”. Recently Liv has confronted a challenge rather different from the patriarchy: illness. Yet in a typically positive manner, being bedridden facilitated an expansion into drawings which carry through her character-led diatribes in new ways—and she’s now back performing, too. 

'Still Stella' 

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How did you arrive at your name?

I chose Liv Fontaine as a teenager for pure glamour, expecting to become an actress or a topless model. Everyone knows that a performer’s body is public property and I have often promoted this, laying my body in the pig trough and dragging myself by my own hair through the audience and onto the stage. A fake name was one of my wiser decisions, allowing the vital separation between personal life and public work—after all, I’m not always an artist and the last thing I want is Pervey Pete in HR accessing the crotch shots online.

Treacle Fuckface towards the end, 2014

Are you an exhibitionist or just pretending?

Just pretending. I am quite shy actually. At this point I’m in the market to settle down, become impregnated by a man of maybe 6ft 2, medium build, with a job. I want to buy a Citroen Picasso, and would like to live in the country.

Your performances are often angry. What riles you most?

Political injustice, polarizations of wealth, gender inequalities, bad shoes, bad breath, bad health, bad hair, bad sex, tax avoidance, empathy deficits, wicked men not calling me back, strident stereotypes, impossible expectations, inappropriate appropriations—all the usual total nightmares.

Untitled, 2018

You published your “rules for a good love life”. What’s the most important one?

Do not discriminate! Except on age. If your lover is too young to remember Diana’s death, they know nothing of real pain, collective pain, pain of a nation—and let’s face it, if you haven’t felt that you’re probably bad in bed. 

Do you have any other advice for our male readers?

Sit down and shut up.

You once diagnosed yourself as an attention seeker. Is there anything in that?

In a performance I scream: “You say I am an attention seeker! I thought I was just a public speaker! You say I am preoccupied and I live for drama! OH MY GOD! I was just trying to eat a banana!” 

Performing as Treacle Fuckface, 2014

What’s that about?

A woman is given a hard time because she loves eating bananas in public. She stands up for herself, calling out and debunking the myths of “female hysteria”, “histrionic behaviour” and the empty expression “psycho bitch”. She won’t stop, and subsequently ends up in a mental institution abused and alone. It’s an awful yet familiar tale of shame equivalency, sexual expectation and exploitation.  

What chance did she have?

Not much. She talks in the language of trauma because she is traumatized. She behaves in an antisocial way because she is being constantly de-socialized. On dating apps you see so many men saying “no psychos please” in their bios… It really brings out the online troll in me. 

Self Portrait (in the Gym), 2015

How do your characters operate, as opposed to “yourself”?

I would like to think the characters live without consequence and responsibility. This obviously isn’t true, though, as my work is autobiographical and I am very complicit in constructing the orgy of depravity in which they live and take inspiration. My primary incentive is to subvert stereotypes, but I’m also aware of the contribution I make to them. The characters are the extremes of my behaviour, a reduction that leaves just the raw emotion—raw enough to comment critically, perform sexually, perhaps entertain comically and often fail spectacularly.  

Self Portrait, 2018

You’re not like that, then?

The characters will never compromise, which is in great contrast to my own personality. I’m an absolute pushover. You can get me to do anything by either making me feel guilty or buying me gifts. And I’m not even talking about anything decent—two Kinder eggs, a white wine spritzer or a ride in an Uber Exec and I’m yours. 

You have recently produced drawings and paintings. How come?

I wanted to document my existence as an artist and also to make everything less finished. It takes great control to look so out of control. There’s a lot of pressure when performing to get everything right, to make sense, to remember the words, to not be too nervous or too drunk, to be offensive but not too offensive. The pleasure I take from performing is euphoric and orgasmic but it often seems like there’s nothing to show for all this showmanship! With the drawings I felt freedom in all my fuck-ups. I liked being calm in the studio, focusing on just one thing.

Once I sat down, though, in a cruel twist of fate, I couldn’t get back up. I got sick like Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective. My relationships fell apart, my skin fell off, I couldn’t walk. I had to stay in bed for months, so I just got really into drawing and watching Dragons’ Den. I am performing again now but have continued drawing the beginnings of stories that I am writing as performances. It’s a great thought process. And people decorate their homes with colourful physical objects, so from a capitalist view it seems like a good idea too! 

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• Left: Cold Whore Crisis (Narrcisis), 2018; Right: Still from Cold Whore Crisis, 2018

One of your drawings jokes that male ladybugs must be secure in their masculinity… Do you think men in general are insecure these days?  

I do not joke about such serious matters. Masculine insecurities can become critically dangerous, not just to women but to men, and to the environment too. Pride seems to be the problem. Pride and shame and dignity is a toxic triangle protected by privilege. But what if you never had the privilege in the first place? And you were forced to live a life as a shameful, heinous, undignified monster? Masculine pride may be damaged or dented but with the help of mothers and whores it will be restored. But the monster however, will be damaged goods forever. 

Finally, any advice on Brexit?

Campaign for a second referendum—freedom of movement is fundamental for a good fuck.

EMMA COUSIN 2018 

(showing some of the images in her Edel Assanti show - for a fuller range of studio shots, see Elephant).

Hot Ribena, 2018

When I visit Emma Cousin’s small studio in Peckham ahead of her exhibition at Edel Assanti in London (5 July–15 August), it’s crowded with big paintings of precariously grouped figures. The show is titled Mardy—a Yorkshire term for ‘moody’ that catches the assertive and rather irreverent nature of the work. There’s also an echo of the Mardi Gras, which suits Cousin’s carnival of colourful figures acting out what she calls “the comedy of how the body works”. Cousin loves words: typically her works emerge from a colloquial phrase or saying which she explores through multiple drawings until she finds the form for a painting. The last step is to seek out a title which might, she says, “change the temperature” in the same way as a palette or gesture can.

How did you get into art? 

I drew incessantly as a kid. Attending a law conference at Oxford University whilst assessing my options, I accidentally found myself in the Ruskin. The prospectus included so much drawing, theory and anatomy lessons, I was hooked. When I got home I told my mum I’d decided to be an artist not a lawyer!

So you went to Ruskin School of Art? 

I was there from 2004 until 2007. Then I spent a year across a painting residency in Rome, Hungary and a job in Venice before moving to London to work for John Adams Fine Art, followed by the Robin Katz Gallery.

That was eight years’ involvement in the secondary art market through to 2016. Did that help you?  

Yes, it immersed me in things—like lots of Bridget Riley, or Bomberg’s explosive flower paintings—that I might not have gravitated towards or been able to research in such depth. All that knowledge simmers somewhere in the back of my mind.

So you were painting through those years, but very much part-time? 

I was always painting, but it could feel a struggle. Eventually, I got shortlisted for some prizes and that helped. I went down to three days a week at work, found a “proper” studio, and met fellow “struggling” artists at different ages and stages with whom to share critical dialogues.

And you filled your house with art?  

We got the chance to buy a large but dilapidated house in Brockley. We were shopping for a bed to put in the spare room when it struck me that we could use the space more communally and usefully. That led to Bread and Jam—seven exhibitions with the brilliant Emily Austin and Rebecca Glover during 2015 and 2016, featuring one hundred artists, and taking over everywhere except our bedroom. Even the loo and the airing cupboard hosted installations. I found I loved collaborating, and that gave me the energy and confidence to focus on what I needed to make.

How do you start a painting? 

I draw all the time, and I also write poetry: my ideas often begin from words triggering drawings. I’m really interested in line and how to bring the life of the drawing into the painting, like combining two languages.

What’s behind Hot Ribena, for example? 

I thought about how a character might be turned on and off emotionally, physically and psychologically… and might malfunction in some way, like a washing machine which responds automatically for years then suddenly doesn’t. How much can we control our functions? Where would those buttons be? Between legs, but also the belly button, the boobs, the eyes as goggles… suddenly you have a body full of buttons. The title takes me back to sensations: warming up after freezing in the snow, being sick as a kid—as well as arguments over how strong to make the Ribena!

People and their bodies seem to be your subject? 

I use the body, or groups of bodies, to build a structure, to present “status changes”: like mobility, clothes and aging. The groups might fail—are they going to topple over or fall apart? There’s an implicit danger, a relationship between the figures which could go either way—to provide a support system, or to pull each other to pieces. I’m curious about our expectations of our bodies and judgements of other bodies. I’m testing their limits and interested in putting the bodies at risk. They exist in a liminal space which is a place of discomfort, an edge or a boundary. A space between us and not us.

Are they self-portraits of a sort? 

No, they may be the same person recurring, or different elements of a self, and they’re from my perspective—but they’re not me. I see these bodies as universal, starting from the idea of identity as unstable. That’s why the spaces have no props or information—the figures have no coordinates in the space, their only anchor is the structure of themselves or possibly an overstretched forefinger groping for the edge of the canvas.

Why do your figures tend to be naked? 

Skin is great to paint. It enables them to wear the “same uniform”. And I’m alert to the information it can hold—age, health, gender, genetics. It is also the source of much of the tension in the work, pulled, stretched or squashed to produce a feeling. These bodies are awkward, uncomfortable, stacked, stretched.

Bracken and Brown Adders, 2018, oil on canvas, 190 x 190 cm

But there are skirts in Bracken and Brown Adders—why? 

Clothes aren’t off limits! The original thought for this painting was the difficulty of wearing a skirt—sitting down, cycling, etc. Then whilst I was making it “upskirting” was in the news. I thought how young girls in a more innocent context will lift their skirt up to gain attention, or just show you their tummy. The irony is the skirts here are not concealing anything. The title refers to bristling undergrowth and the danger of adders (I walked a lot as a kid on the Moors and this was a clear and present danger to the naked arse!).  But you don’t need to know that—I’m more interested in how the words make the viewer feel.

Why the small hands of one figure? 

That felt right as a way to emphasize the pincer action. I’m not after realism, no one poses for the paintings. Though I sometimes make drawings from life to get it to read right. It’s more about how things feel from the inside than how they look from the outside.

Black Marigolds, 2018

What’s going on in Black Marigolds?  

That came from the phrase “the blind leading the blind”, the idea of trying to help someone I care deeply about when neither of us were sure how to or what to do. These figures are trying to assist each other but going nowhere—pulling against one another as they are stuck. But supporting each other too. The dark background suggests they can’t see. I was thinking of three blind mice, so it’s particularly pinkish flesh and their nipples become beady eyes.

What’s next for you?  

I’m spending nine weeks at an intensive residency programme in Skowhegan, Maine. It was established in 1946 and alumni include Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly and Peter Saul—a great opportunity even if I’ll miss my own opening at Edel Assanti! While away, I plan to work towards the Jerwood Survey Exhibition, which runs from 3 October until 16 December.