Page 50 - Studio International - December 1965

Phillip King

Q: What do you feel about the idea of a single image
in sculpture, for example, as in Giacometti?
The single image approach (very central to many
American painters for example, Rothko, Newman,
Stella, Noland, Reinhart, Albers, Gottlieb to name a
few) seems very foreign to all of the Whitechapel
group of sculptors-is there any real reason for this?
A: I am not interested in working in series because to
me a series implies a directed effort in only one direction,
with the result that one's work is bound to reach a
point of greater achievement at some time-this point
I want to achieve as soon as possible. When I see the
way ahead I have already been there. To work on
variations would seem like a betrayal of the original
Most of the time I am in a state of utter confusion
as to what I want to do next, in spite of the fact that
the same aesthetic concerns will be there, reviewed and
redefined all the time, or recreated into new relation­
ships. Many one image artists (according to your
definition) have reduced the formal inventive process
deliberately holding certain values above all else. In
the post-abstract expressionists, colour becomes the
direct spokesman for feeling. Decisions about shape
are presuggested by given limits and the method of
working. Those pop artists are most admired who re­
create the urban imagery without change; the meaning
of the art lies in the act of transposing.
The terms of thinking I use in my work are never
terribly defined. Feeling, colour, surface, space, volume,
contour, are terms I tend to use but their boundaries
remain blurred and their values are relative.
I like to think of them in qualitative terms. At the
back of my mind the idea that these terms are only
adopted for convenience never leaves me, this allows
me greater freedom of movement in dealing with them.
If making art is involved with making decisions about
shapes and interpreting relationships of these decisions,
then to my mind they must open out in the end into a
meaningful order.
Phi//1p Kmg Phillip King, young British sculptor Thoughts about meaning of shape and colour, in the
Photographed by Graham Kirk
working mainly in plastic, answers some most general sense, thoughts about formal relation­
questions by John Coplans ships, etc., are ideas that form the basis of one's
aesthetic attitude, but which cannot help being
expressed in the manufactured object in particular
terms. They reflect only indirectly the general concepts
through 'particularness' (Mondrian was very conscious
of the problem). Perhaps the very nature of being
means 'particularness.' Similarly (for me) the general
characteristics that apply to- imagery, the relations
between form and emotions, must in the object find
a particular expression. So one moves from the general
to the particular and back to the general, in both form
and content.
The preconceived idea for a work of mine already
contains elements of the particular, so the process of
actualizing is straightforward, decisions about pro­
portion and position that occur during the making are
secondary. I don't have to be involved at a fundamental
level with deciding whether something should be half
an inch more this way or that way. Sometimes however
the idea may undergo a change in the making but it
generally turns out to be a considerable one, changing
the meaning of the sculpture.

Q: Are you concerned with material as a thing in
itself? What influence has material on your shapes?
A: I would say matter rather than material. By that I
mean I am much more concerned with the general
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