In the Guest Room with Michael Pybus
Image Credit: Faris Mustafa
Michael Pybus (born 1982, Darlington UK) remixes visual sources and phrases from all corners of modern culture, using the language of contemporary society as a means of commentary on consumerism and the icons of our era. He processes this iconography through collage and painting to create new meanings, readings and narratives.
Pybus earned his BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London in 2004 and subsequently completed his MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2008. He has been an active exhibitor of his work in locations around the world. Recent solo exhibitions include Hive Mind at Jonathan Hopson Gallery in Houston, Texas, and Pretend the world is funny and forever at Amor in Mexico City, Mexico (2017); soft play at Lungley in London, United Kingdom (2018); and Reality Apathy at Tatjana Pieters in Ghent, Belgium (2019). His work is included in the collections of Takashi Murakami (JP), Anita Zabludowicz (UK), Philippos Tsangrides (GR), Popov (RUS) and can be found in private collections in the USA, UK, Brazil, Ireland, Sweden, Netherlands, Malta, Belgium, Greece, Germany, Spain, Taiwan, France, Switzerland, Italy, Canada, Australia & China.
In an in-person studio visit, Guest Work Agency Director Alana Kushnir asked the artist about living in his studio, low-fi rip offs of pop culture and the influence of social media on his practice.
The first thing I noticed when arriving at your studio was its surrounds – Hackney Wick. It’s quite a pleasant neighbourhood these days, isn’t it? Why do you think that is and how does it differ to the Hackney Wick of 2008?
When I first moved here 11 years ago it felt like the end of the world, a dusty barren neighbourhood with a Mad Max feel to it. Not in a threatening way, more so in that it was just so unpopulated and rough around the edges. It was probably one of the last places in London a kid like me, fresh out of art school, could move to and be able to afford to live in a warehouse with a studio.
I am 1 minute from the Olympic Park, that brought with it a huge regeneration of this area with a huge Westfield mall. New developments have spread all over and this area has transformed from a sleepy hub of artists warehouses to a bourgeois yuppieville of overpriced condos. I am now sandwiched between a 20th Century luxury vintage furniture store and Cornerstone – an expensive restaurant run by Chef Tom Brown. It’s a far cry from the days of just having the Wick greasy spoon to dine in (still my favourite place to eat in the Wick, English breakfast for £5!).
Gentrification is what it is. It’s futile to moan about it. This is London, it’s happening everywhere and will continue to do so. Most of us creative people will probably end up pushed out to the far edges or to another city all together. London is becoming a victim of its financial success. It’s drying out and becoming a museum for tourists and a playground for the rich, much like what has happened to Manhattan. These cities will probably be relevant in a business sense to the art world for many decades to come, but in regard to creativity and nurturing new artists, movements and ideas, they are becoming deserts with a hell of a lot of luxury amenities and entertainment.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the work/life distinction and whether it is possible to make that distinction anymore, particularly in the art industry where so much work actually takes place online. You live in your studio, and at some stage you even ran a gallery from the space. Does that work/life distinction apply to you? Do you ever (want to) switch off?
I’ll switch off when I’m dead, until that point I want to keep going. I love what I do so much. I have never drawn a distinction between my art making and my life in general. They are co-dependant. I don’t like to not be working. My brain naturally leans towards a depressive/anxious thought cycle when it’s not being actively engaged. Staying busy keeps my mind from going there. My career in a professional sense didn’t start for quite some years after graduating. I’ve spent long enough in the art wilderness having to work crap dead end jobs to be aware that it’s a privilege (that I’ve earned) to be busy making art as a full time career. I have no intention to slow down!
I’ve been following your work for a couple of years now, but it actually feels like a lot longer than that. I think it's because the characters that you depict in your paintings are often already familiar, and deliberately so. Can you tell me a little more about your lo-fi rip-offs of everything from Ikea to Pikachu?
I graduated in 2008 just as the recession hit. In the proceeding years despite continually making work, barely anything happened for me career-wise. In January 2014 I had reached a point where I accepted there was zero interest in my work and I was ok with that. Acknowledging this harsh reality surprisingly resulted in discovering my creative freedom. If no one was paying attention to me then I was free to make whatever I wanted!
I had been focusing on taming my creative approach in order to mould it into what I thought the art world wanted. I subdued my ideas and references in the vain hope of being taken seriously as an artist by the establishment. To quote Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman ‘Big mistake. Big! Huge!’
From that point on I trusted my instincts and gave myself permission to creatively and intellectually go where I felt drawn to. Worrying about your potential audience before you have even made the work is a shortcut to failure. I stopped giving a fuck about what anyone would think about what I was making. Ironically it was this work that people wanted to buy, leading to my career as a full-time artist beginning.
I started working with sources and imagery that I loved and were relevant to my background and development. I grew up during the 80s and 90s in a rural, single parent working class family in Northern England. There was no travel, no books, no magazines, no trips to museums and cinemas. We didn’t have the internet and the nearest city was way too far and expensive for me to go to. My adolescent world was extremely small but I had a hunger for more and made do with what I had to hand. The IKEA catalogue would arrive at our home once a year and I would fawn over the pages full of weird and wonderful bright coloured furniture that looked like it was from another planet. It sounds crazy to say this in today’s image abundant world, but those 90s IKEA catalogues really did form a crucial foundation for my aesthetic understanding and development as did the flat graphic Nintendo games I would lose myself in obsessively.
I previously worried that these inspirations were too ‘cheap’ for the art world but now I felt confident that I could work with them in a way which was relevant not only to my personal narrative but also to the world we inhabit today. I had so little money that I couldn’t afford to go to the art shop for stretchers so instead I went to the £1 shop and bought canvases there. I painted with the cheapest student paint I could find. During the next few months I made so many paintings. A weight had been lifted from me. My sister suggested I join Instagram to post the paintings there. Within a month I had started to get attention from a few collectors, a gallery and began to make sales.
Another key component of your practice is your commentary on artists and the art market. This occurs in the work itself (for example, your appropriation of the work of quintessential (male) appropriation artists like Richard Prince, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Marcel Duchamp) and in hastily written texts that you photograph and post on your social media accounts. Is it important to you that viewers ‘get’ these art historical references? Yes, you don’t need to have studied art history or been a long-term collector to know these names, but to understand the true ironies of these references you would need to have done your homework.
Viewers can enjoy the works on a surface level of ‘look there’s Pikachu’ and that’s fine, but that’s not enough to keep me as an artist engaged or what I want to be able to offer to and explore in culture. The layered references operate as a vehicle to construct more complex narratives behind the pure aesthetics of the work in question. Each painting is a visual amalgamation of experiences, sources and processes that have somehow had an affect on me and my development as an artist. Each painting is a code to decipher, should you wish.
My early exploration into cheap ‘lo’ imagery eventually led me to start looking for something to bounce it off so I began to introduce expensive ‘high’ art historical references like the artists you mentioned. This painterly blending of cultural hierarchies leaked into the installations I began constructing for the commercial galleries I was now exhibiting in. I used these spaces which typically exist to display expensive ‘high’ art to install installations of cheap IKEA furniture for my paintings to hang amongst. In a sense this mixing of high and low is autobiographical in regard to how I feel about my position and experiences as an artist in in the art world.
As a teen when I moved to London to study and then in the years after working at galleries I became astutely aware that the art world at all levels from artist through to gallerists, curators and collectors is predominantly made up of and run by the very wealthy upper middle class. I’m constantly hearing about calls for diversity in the art world but I never hear anyone seriously question or address why there are so few working class people who operate in it.
I recently had a conversation with a collector who is the son of first generation working class immigrants. He works in finance, and spoke about how he also found himself in a profession dominated by the privately educated upper middle class and like the art world his profession never questioned why this is the case or attempted to address it. There’s no victim narrative here on my part, or calls for special treatment. I just find my position of being able to shift between two very different social environments pretty stimulating. It has inspired me to introduce my mass market ‘lo’ background as a means to reflect upon my position as a working class artist working in a predominantly exclusive ‘high’ cultural economic space, whilst also having a wider conversation about the mechanics behind the various hierarchical systems we place on people, images, places, opinions, values and objects.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that you are as outspoken as artists get today. You don’t only use social media as a marketing tool for your work, do you? For example, recently you posted on Instagram that “SOCIAL MEDIA IS THE COLONISATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL THROUGH TECHNOLOGICAL ENCROACHMENT OFFERED TO US AS FREEDOM.” Do you think speaking your mind is part of your role as an artist? Why not just stick to making art?
I would fiercely argue that speaking your mind is the fundamental role of the artist! Otherwise why bother? If an artist is going to commit to not speaking their mind I see no reason why they should be rewarded with attention. If an artist is not using their true voice to make their work then at best they are making nice decorations. I would consider them to have a lack of creative integrity. They are cultural clutter.
One of my favourite artists Ed Ruscha asks a simple question to separate the good art from the bad stating, “Bad art makes you say 'Wow! Huh?' Good art makes you say 'Huh? Wow!’ - I think social media has delivered us to a very Wow! Huh? moment in that we are bombarded with attention grabbing content that is designed to be easily forgotten in order to scroll onto the next thing.
We live in a culture drowning in accelerated information. We are encouraged by social media to create and post images and ideas that look and feel good. We are supposed to try to engage the maximum amount of viewers for a couple of seconds to get a like. A strange temporal yet eternal present.
This has resulted in many people primarily being concerned with getting as much virtual validation in the moment as possible. I don’t believe this will make for important art or a career that’ll last more than a few years at best. One of the greatest things about getting older is you see these cycles of super-hot attention on particular artists/styles/approaches peak and then just evaporate. I’ve seen enough people and styles go through that treadmill to know not to concern myself with altering my expression for short term gain. Wow! Huh? No thanks!
This recent text of mine pretty much sums up the sentiment:
BROADLY SPEAKING THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF ARTI–TS - THE DECORATORS AND THE AGITATORS.
THE DECORATORS AIM TO MAKE A CAREER OUT OF PROVIDING AN ENTERTAINING YET NON THREATENING BACKDROP FOR THE STATUS QUO TO PLAY OUT AGAINST. COMFORT IS GOSPEL IN THIS ZONE.
THE AGITATORS AIM TO MAKE A CAREER BY QUESTIONING AND DISSECTING THE STATUS QUO TO OFFER CULTURE SOMETHING NEW AND CHALLENGING. DISCOMFORT IS FUEL IN THIS ZONE
DECORATORS STAGNATE CULTURE.
AGITATORS STIMULATE MORE CULTURE.
Where do you see your practice heading in the next decade? Where would you like to be in 2029?
When I was younger I used to be very specific in how I wanted my life and career to pan out. As I have gotten older I realised naive that was. Life has a way of steering you to places, people and opportunities you hadn’t considered - sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst. That’s not an excuse for me to approach life as a passive nihilist though, instead I focus on doing what I can in the present that I believe will stack the odds in my favour for a healthier and productive future.
I’m approaching 40 in a couple of years and as I and those around me have aged I have become increasingly aware of the importance of my physical health. When I think about the future I know I want to be healthy so I can continue to work and cope with the physical demands that are demanded of an art career which requires you to paint, construct, travel globally, install shows etc. This has led me to eat much more healthier and swim every day. No matter how much I enjoy it, sitting down painting 7 days a week is not conductive to my physical health. I can’t specifically state where I would like to be in 2029 beyond saying that I would hope my family and I are still alive and well and that I am still able to make work and earn a living from making the art I want to make.
On a wider societal level going forward I hope we are able to maintain a culture of freedom of expression in the West. It’s becoming normalised in the public and private sphere to weaponise peoples’ thoughts and ideas against them. This is leading to a culture of self-censorship, witch hunts and mob group think - it is making us dumber, angrier and more tribal.
People are being forced into censoring themselves, performing the virtues of the mainstream media and vocal minority in order to feel safe. It’s like we are all participating in some perverse Soviet Communist LARP game?! Normalising this behaviour does not end well. It empowers the most selfish and destructive amongst us. It is a cancer to knowledge, interpersonal relationships and creativity.
Where I definitely don’t want to be in 2029 is trapped in a culture of state, mob and self-censorship. The only way we can stop this from happening is speaking up, educating ourselves and not allowing the collective trolls and bullies to scare us from doing so. I hope more people feel emboldened to support and engage in open free conversation and expression. Art ceases to exist if artists are forced to operate in an environment where voicing the ‘wrong’ expression is a sure fire way to be professionally and personally destroyed.