THE ARTIST IN CONVERSATION WITH STEPHANIE WILTSHIRE

It is unusual for a painter of such originality and accomplishment to be proficient in another discipline, outside his or her own specialist area. We assume all those hours spent in the studio mean there’s little time left for anything else. But Brixton-based Kieran Crowder is as skilled with words as he is with pictures, and easily could have had a career as a professional philosopher, if the pull of art had not been so strong.

“The philosophy grew out of the work I was doing as a painter, and to this day is inseparable from it. My first degree [University of York, 1991] was embarked upon after I’d already been exhibiting for several years, and reflects how I was pushing my most experimental work into a territory that was literally unthinkable to me at that time. It was also unthinkable to everyone else, especially my peers, who really couldn’t get it at all. It was easier for them to say painting was dead than it was to test either the fact or the proposition that asserted it. I have tested both, and more besides. But I don’t think I was ever really going to end up as an academic, however long I spent in that world. Philosophy, by which I mean critical thought, is a tool, not a job; something you apply, not merely reproduce or teach. The analogy is loose, but its like having an extra set of colours in the box.”

The colours include PhD research - and a period as visiting lecturer - at the Royal College of Art, where he was Nawiasky Memorial prize winner in 1995, for that year’s most significant contribution to the Humanities research programme. They also include the more obviously conceptual aspects of Kieran’s practise: his writing, both for live performance and recording; his photography, especially the montage form; even his trademark puns-as-titles, as meticulously composed as any of his finished canvases. But above all they show in Kieran’s singular approach: what the writer and critic Malcolm Quinn has identified as making “art that thinks”.

“At one level, this is opposed to not-thinking - that is, poor or careless thinking - in so much contemporary art, especially that labelled conceptual, in which category I include much of my own work. Any art of ideas which rests on bad ones can never be significant conceptually, and on its own terms condemns itself to being poor art. Often the only meaning discoverable in works of this kind is to do with their self-image as radical, relevant and superior to other ways of artmaking - which is at least intelligible, even if it is not true. One of the most important freedoms an artist has is to decide his or her media according to his or her aesthetic objectives. To deny oneself such freedoms for the sake of being cool or fitting in is not behaviour artists should be proud of, and reveals nothing more interesting about the world than the fact that as a class, artists feel pressure to conform just like everyone else.”

More than any other contemporary artist, Kieran’s entire career has been spent resisting that pressure. The pattern was set early on with the work that was to become “Here Lies”, a project that combines his together painting, photography, music and the spoken word into a single, rule-governed event: “philosophy made concrete” as the artist termed it. This project had its beginnings in the mid 1980s when - with permission - he obtained a quantity of human remains from a crematorium in the North of England, specifically for use in art. Never done before, it was the sort of opportunity any young artist would kill for, and easy fame and fortune beckoned temptingly.

“I had not long left the military, radicalised by my experiences in the South Atlantic and the violent chauvinism of service life. Now painting again, I was looking for a way to make my mark, as it were: specifically, a way to register my disquiet about what I’d been part of, and its human costs. At first, the bones I had acquired seemed perfect, so well did they mesh with ideas about art’s mission to challenge and subvert. But the more I thought about it, the more questionable these ideas became, and it struck me that just because something new or shocking was brought into the frame, there was no guarantee that what resulted was going to be especially radical, or any good, or even art at all. What I proposed could make headlines all right - but how could it help people see things differently if it was just the same old predictable move? This to me was the important question, and the chance to address it the real nature of the opportunity I had been given. So the bones are not and never could be just some gimmick or novelty, but were catalyst for a serious rethinking - not just of art, but also of its publics, its orthodoxies, and its promise - a rethinking that goes on to this day.”

It is apparent in every one of his canvases, from the huge field paintings at the heart of “Here Lies”, to the smallest conventional study or sketch. There is nothing quite like a Kieran Crowder, either on the contemporary scene or from the long history of painting. Deliberately obsessive, given up to unconscious drives, passionate movement, and the delirium of surface and colour space, each one is in simultaneous contact with the most infantile and the most elevated, in art and in the viewer, and makes manifest a compulsive, almost unnatural beauty.

“This is why people touch them, a gesture which for me is the point the real work of art begins. Reaching out despite feeling they shouldn’t, the viewer confirms the painting as an especially privileged site of communication, principally with the inner self where the art is doing its work. For this is the place that meaning is found, or rather made - not in the object, nor in the discourses which surround it, as the Modernist and Postmodernist myths would have us believe - but through interiority and reciprocity. And it is terms of its relation to the individual that my art is a departure, both from the shouty narcissism of Britart and the directionlessness of much contemporary painting. Of course, in the immersion environment of “Here Lies” this relation is at its most intense: the dream of community is stripped away and the corporeal individual addressed directly. The nature of this encounter is of immense concern because within it, in primordial form, is the changed social relation modern art fails to understand, let alone encourage, contrary to what it claims on the wrapper.”

With Kieran Crowder, what you see is what you get, with a little bit more besides. Radical beauty is always like that: something not bargained for, provoking rare feelings. But then these are rare works: the best supremely so. Some may even be great.

Stephanie Wiltshire, London