Behaviour

Stuart Morgan: How did your first sculptures look?

Nayland Blake: Mundane, small-scale. By 1986, when I began showing, they simply juxtaposed a found object and a plaque, for example, or a text and an object. A pair of bongos with 'Vanity of Vanities' written on the drumskins. A pair of men's black shoes chained together, and on the toes plaques that read LAP and DOG. What interested me was how objects could contain narrative.

And the theme?

Unspoken power relationships in everyday life.

Why did you begin using puppets?

As the next stage of that control metaphor. But they also have to do with the space between the prop and the actor; they are clearly characters but they are not active.

In your work, control always includes sexual control, and sex is constantly reduced to S&M.

Not S&M as much as bondage. S&M involves two people enacting scenes for each other's sexual gratification, scenes of domination or submission. It is a game they agree to play by certain rules which are successfully fulfilled, with variations introduced as sources of pleasure. Bondage is about the sexual satisfaction of being maintained physically in a position and the sexual attraction of seeing someone in such a position. For the person in that position, the satisfaction is that of being immobilised, not of being in pain.

For years now you have been making imaginary instruments of restraint - leather or cloth harnesses and stainless steel paraphernalia - and including these in displays of your work as a constant undertone. I'm beginning to see how this engages with the puppet motif. Except that puppets don't have a sex.

You mean they don't have sex. Mr Punch is very phallic; he has a phallic nose, a phallic chin, a phallic pot belly and a phallic back. In a catalogue for my Punch Agonistes in Los Angeles in 1990, Richard Hawkins described how putting your hand up a glove-puppet's butt is the only way it can get an erection. Perhaps we do know how puppets have sex!

For viewers your work involves less physical methods of activating the props you provide. Three historically based installations, for example - The Trotsky Suite, The Schreber Suite and The Philosopher's Suite - have prompted revisions of historical reputations.

The most recent, which is ongoing, was The Philosopher's Suite, displaying materials for a marionette production of Philosophy in the Bedroom by the Marquis de Sade. You came from the back to find a large, free-standing marionette stage made out of scaffolding, and by the time you'd walked to the front you'd registered what it was. Puppets hung around the room. So there was no other option: the viewer had to decide either to be audience or puppeteer. There's a certain frustration about everything in the performance being there. So the piece started to be about our desire to see that text acted out, to watch that writing happen, which returns to the idea of what a revolutionary or utopian language might be. Years before, I'd made pieces burning de Sade or using photography (the actual pages), about the difference between the mental image of de Sade and the actuality; ink on paper. In fact, The Philosopher's Suite was first shown in Orange County, California, a place so conservative that visitors to the gallery couldn't buy or even order books by de Sade.

Why did you choose Schreber?

Because his case contained the most overt references to homosexuality in the whole of Freud, and I wanted to produce what was almost a commentary on the text.

How did you disagree with Freud?

With where he claimed Schreber's delusions were coming from. In fact, there were places closer to home. Schreber's father was an early champion of physical culture. He also had theories of childrearing and developed metal armatures to correct children's posture. Schreber developed delusions about his body being manipulated and organs replaced, removed or switched. But Freud never discusses the possible impact of the father on his son's delusions. And Schreber's paranoia centred on the fear that his doctor was engaged in an attempt to turn him into a woman in order to bear the child of God. In fact, that doctor had prescribed castration for manic depression, and this was common knowledge among his patients. Freud knew this. So Freud's reading of Schreber's book is tortured and circuitous, if not exactly invalid. My aim was to return to the text and offer a reading which was more indicative of the circumstances and which tried to situate it historically, repositioning Schreber's writing in the flow of late Decadent/ early Modernist/ proto-Surrealist figures like Raymond Roussel or Felicien Rops. When the installation was shown at the museum in Berkeley, part of it consisted of works from their collection by artists who were Schreber's contemporaries - a Puvis de Chavannes, for example, and a Schiele drawing - with their labels replaced by paragraphs from Schreber.

Here and elsewhere you see your role as critical, revisionary.

That was evident first in 1988 with The Trotsky Suite, which consisted of records of myself reading Trotsky's autobiography, divided into six sections, with the tapes subjected to editing systems derived from the manipulation of Richard Nixon's memoirs. So positions would be omitted or overlapped. The whole piece was about the process of erasure or editing of history.

What do Trotsky, Schreber and de Sade have in common?

All three had systems, visions of the world, Utopian projects that were flawed...

And all three have a potentially saintly side. But you followed them with Punch Agonistes, and Punch lacks this totally. Was this a wild card, meant to undo any conclusions derived from your previous, historically-based thinking?

The way Punch appeared was as a kind of phallic aggression, so it's not Punch but Punch's head, without the body and without the stick. That image of a severed head has cropped up any number of times since then.

Punch is a kind of psychopath, isn't he? He attacks everyone and everything.

And without provocation. He's pure ego. He's very much like a Sadean hero: a libertine. There's no reasoning with him because all the things you would have recourse to, like the Church or the family or any kind of social contract, are just disregarded. I think that's why he is a hero. He appears in my work in castrated form because I don't think that position is possible. Punch Agonistes wasn't about Punch; it used Punch. Because it is so easily encapsulated, the Punch figure became a key to how, say, de Sade functions. And because a series of miniature puppet stages gave viewers the option to be in front of or behind them, people were given a way of addressing the notion of theatricality. Punch takes us by storm, demanding rather than asking politely, works that involve him deal with pleasure. Punch is not about 'desire', as in commedia dell'arte, where Harlequin moons after Columbine; it's about immediate, infantile pleasure-taking. This serves as an almost talismanic background to the way the work is looked at, always reappearing as a reminder. After The Philosopher's Suite I realised that much of what I'd been doing had been a type of theatre, like Camillo's memory-theatre. A motif would keep appearing in the work or there would be a body of text or imagery that would intrigue me. My pieces would be stabs at that idea, attempts to explain my fascination with it.

Do you regard the Punch work as a reply to the de Sade piece?

A variant, perhaps. One thing to do now is to decide what it would mean if it was a reply. Much of the experience of the de Sade suite involved the desire to see that revolutionary text acted. You could argue that Punch is the way to do that, after a time when it has been safely bracketed in order not to disturb our idea of what the world is.

Not all of the works in Punch Agonistes featured Punch.

That's true. There were restraint pieces that referred to the armature of puppetry. Others used texts from horror novels about people being menaced by various forces - a grand piano, a herd of swine... These are all castration stories in the hyper-hysterical style of horror novels. One thing about Punch is that his universe is not sublimated; what we work so diligently to decode in other texts becomes the baseline narrative.

You made a horror video.

I re-edited a sequence from John Carpenter's version of The Thing, in which a person's head pulls itself off a body, uses its tongue to pull itself across the floor, sprouts legs and scuttles off, only to be burned up by a flamethrower. The sequence continues endlessly. Perhaps television is the severed head par excellence; it's in your home, talking to you, keeping you company. In a way, the title of Dennis Nilsen's Killing for Company is about that: having a relationship to the outside world where the only way you can feel safe to interact with an emotion, is to keep it acquiescent by killing it.

Presumably the Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer cases relate to the edible heads you're making for the London installation.

The chocolate heads - for the 14 victims of Nilsen and of Dahmer - are cast from a bust of Wagner I found in a music store. Then a group of bronze heads of Wagner will be made, with mallets attached. Then there will be an amended poster of a photograph by Herb Ritts, a series of three paintings and a large poster to go up around London and also be available from the gallery. The aim is to figure out what these severed heads mean to me and why they keep surfacing in my work. The poster is the same one that Dahmer had in his apartment: of a worker holding two tyres, a very phallic image which cropping will emphasise. Probably a CD will be fixed to it, by The Pixies, who made an album to do with decapitation. And there may be something from horror movies.

What relation did the two murderers have to the world around them?

Unlike Nilsen, Dahmer continually denied his homosexuality. But both men seem to have had one thing in common; at the moment when they needed some emotional connection with another person, it became a problem if that person was either conscious or living. Some argue that this was a fear of rejection. Dahmer's men were mostly Black or Asian. He would bore holes in their skulls in an attempt to lobotomise them and turn them into emotional slaves, just to have around. Nilsen kept their skulls as shrines. Sometimes he decorated them.

So you are dealing with a set of parallels between loving and killing, eating and 'consumption' in life as well as art.

Plus a self-portrait. I identify with the image of a detached, wandering intellect, the Odilon Redon eyeball-as-balloon idea. Then there are the images of racial difference.

For the first time you use an image of Black people. Why? And why now?

Because my father is Black. And because I never found a way to address that.

How does Wagner fit in?

He's the artist as proponent of racial purity, the millennial figure who is going to reorganise and somehow escape history by returning us to a state of myth, something I disagree with.

Wagner becomes hollow.

There is a dichotomy between marble and bronze in the history of sculpture, between what it means to carve something instead of moulding it. To me, carving is about mastering something from nature, while moulding is playing with your own shit.

He also turns Black.

Our notion of transcendent sculpture is based on the idea of White Greek sculpture which, as we know, was not White. Posited as a White. ultimate form, it was divorced - in history's reading of it - from the physicality of the people who made it: people who were dark. Another art-historical anomaly is the divorce of public sculpture from domestic, interior sculpture: votive bronzes in darkened places. One of my influences for this was a series of small, 17th Century bronze lamps in the Victoria & Albert Museum, combinations of a human head and, at the base, a bird's foot with entwined entrails. The labels say 'grotesque'. In fact, the features are completely negroid. The idea of the decorative blackamoor slave returns us to Dahmer's skulls.

Are you punishing Wagner?

He's beyond punishment. But I like the idea of turning him into shit. Supremely edible shit. Or resonant shit, in the case of the gongs.

Beheading, Punch, The Thing, cannibalism, slavery, chocolate... You keep moving sideways, rather than forwards.

Proceeding horizontally rather than vertically; tending to move in a number of directions at once, so that particular tropes stop for a while then begin again, reinforced by what has happened; the use of different media in the same show,form part of a larger project in which my work is engaged: making the case for a different definition of a gay sensibility.

I can see that specific readings seek to alter preconceptions about homosexuality - to divorce it from a clinical notion of paranoia in the Schreber piece, for example - but what is a 'new gay sensibility' moving from and to?

Traditional views of gay male sensibility propose a standard idea of male gaze and male object. Politically and ideologically, this is regressive. At this point a greater number of possibilities exist for what a gay reading could be: a blurring of gender, the idea of the pathetic or decadent, a formal preference for the fragment over the masterpiece, working against the grain of accepted readings... There is a way in which my methodology is about asserting the pleasure of the anus. To me, talking about chocolate means something different if it is approached from a gay position. But we should be past the point of asking 'Is it gay or not?' That is a question which continually privileges the mainstream, ghettoises gay people and trivialises what they do. It means much more to ask 'What do Black people think about this?' It's really about interrogating material rather than about measuring the degree of gayness in any particular case.

So it's not a culture within a culture.

It's a position among positions.

And essentially it opposes the unitary.

In the 80s a lot of art demanded an understanding of the entirety of the project every time you saw a piece. I see my own work as the snail trail of the journey. Objects are residue. Their meaning tends to grow and become richer as more objects are made. But making is an experience that's not an end in itself; it's about thinking out loud how to get to the next idea. I don't know the ultimate point to which it's tending. That's why I keep doing it.

'Bleep', an installation by Nayland Blake, is at Milch, London, 26th May-11th July.