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Interview with Will Mottson |
Omagiu, Summer 2004 |
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“It’s not the many refracted images of the self my work explores. It’s the idea of un-self. I love that – exploring something that isn’t really there until you invent it.” Will Mottson, June 2004. |
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I find Mottson knocking back Fruittini’s at 10:30 in the morning at the hotel bar, looking as though he hasn’t slept for two or three nights. I suspect he hasn’t. He’s that kind of person – a head on collision between two bullet trains; one called art, the other called life. And there aint no sleeping wagon on either of them. |
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| He spots me immediately, bounding over. “You’re here for the interview, yeah?” |
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| We exchange handshakes. He seems incredibly affable in person, dressed in a faded t-shirt bearing the slogan “Sex Cells” and a pair of low-slung jeans with loads of bits of oil paint on them. There’s no trace of the Prima Donna so famed for throwing live lobsters at journalists, or flicking faecal matter at the Telegraph’s art correspondent in the Ivy restaurant. We’ve barely sat down, and he’s straight to business, squirting ideas like some gushing fountain of zeitgeist; a creative black hole, dragging all ideas that pass within a three mile radius straight into its pulsating centre only to be shat out somewhere in a parallel universe: that’s what spending a morning with Mottson feels like – being shat out into a world that isn’t our own. |
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He’s already enthusing about his latest project that he was working on when I interrupted him. That’s the first thing you learn about Mottson. He’s like a 24-hour car-park attendant, in artist-form – he’s never off-duty. Except it’s not cars he’s looking after. It’s art.
Even when he’s knocking back Fruittini’s at a rate of knots, he’s still at work, always in the gallery – because for him, the gallery exists where and when he wants it to. “I destroyed my last solo exhibition, just like that”, he indicates, clicking his fingers and staring at them intensely for several seconds afterwards with an iron glare. “It’s part of my series of works on constructing and de-constructing spaces. These works will only exist for as long as I conceive of them – and when I’m done with them, I’ll simply destroy them. It’s the ultimate in consumerist trash ethic,” he tells me. |
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| Mottson has already developed – and destroyed – three such ‘unconventional’ spaces, all of them exuberant acts of decadent generosity, none of them existing beyond the confines of his own mind. His art is about the self because, quite simply, without his full and active participation, the spaces in which his works are exhibited don’t even exist. |
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| “When I stop thinking about my exhibitions then… POW!, it’s like WOW! Where’d they go? They’re not there any more. Like they never ex-fucking-isted,” he exclaims, smashing his fist into my leg. “I’m not just the artist. I’m the curator, the visitors, the man who turns the lights off when every fucker goes home in the evening.” |
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The first such gallery attracted little media attention – Mottson claims he ‘created’ it for a few seconds while waiting for a bus on the Kingsland Road on his way to Goldsmiths College of Art. “The second time, when it all took off, was when I got a commission off Jay Joplin to do one inside his house. It was the middle of a party. All of us were pretty fucking head-bombed. He told me to ‘do it’, and I said, what the fuck, and so I did it, there and then.”
As well as creating zero-dimensional space-installations, Mottson also works in more conventional media. A lot of his recent ‘physically existent’ works are based around his sometimes-home, Romania. “Yeah, I’m fascinated by the place,” he tells me. “I’m reading a lot about their Velvet Revolution, all that kind of shit that happened.” One of his most celebrated works takes the Mici, the traditional spicy Romanian sausage, using them to create the image of a spurting erect penis. Peeling away the layers of meaning involved in such a piece is precisely what makes Mottson’s work so rewarding. |
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| When he’s not out causing havoc with his drinking buddies Charles Saatchi and Robbie Williams, he’s also got both feet on the ground. Mottson recently saw a successful collaboration with Vivienne Westwood, producing a limited edition of 456 felt cases embossed with the gnomic maxim “THINK LESS.” “I came up with that,” he tells me. “The slogan I mean. I didn’t make the cases. Some work experience boy did that.” |
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| Mottson certainly hasn’t been resting on his laurels recently. As well as working on numerous new zero-dimensional space-installations, he’s been laying down the vocals for electro-noise pioneers, “Windermere Rape Audition”. “It’s a bit of fun, innit?” he explains. “I mean, why not? Warhol couldn’t fucking sing, and it never stopped him from fronting the Velvets, did it?” |
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| I ask him of his plans for the future. Does he plan any more unconventional space experiments? “’Course,” he replies, rubbing his groin. “I could do it at any time. In fact, I just did one then. Right then! And you missed it, you fucking prick-hole,” he shouts, slapping my cheeks and laughing like a half-crazed existential genius. |
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