Marc Quinn has stopped making work about himself and started focusing on other lives. Our correspondent meets the once Young British Artist who grew up
Marc Quinn with one of the bright flower paintings from his White Cube show
When, in the early 1980s, Marc Quinn was still a reluctant art and art-history undergraduate at Cambridge, his contemporaries called him Mad Marc behind his back, an allusion to his intense stare and long flowing hair – the hair of an aspirant Viking, a fellow student told me.
Since then, the man, the stare and the hair have altered radically. The more cemented his reputation, the more subdued, confident – perhaps more grown-up – the artist has become. He has agreed to talk toThe Times about his show, Evolution, which opens this week, and, perhaps tellingly, also to Tatler, which has photographed the artist in aHello!-style portrait with his wife Georgia Byng (sister of the Canongate Books founder, Jamie, and daughter of “a successful Establishment figure” – Thomas Byng, the Eighth Earl of Strafford). We also learn that Quinn attended the boarding school Millfield and that prices for his forthcoming work are expected to reach £700,000. “It is what it is,” Quinn says, and later: “Obviously we live in a media world.”
Those who knew him in the late 1980s will remember a man crazy for drinking. But since 1993 alcohol and, subsequently, cigarettes have been banished; the hair has been cropped short at the sides and razed by a baldness gene on top; he goes to the gym. The temperament, too, has changed – although he denies this. A journalist interviewing him in 2000 describes him as “paranoid”, and, in the years between “mad” and “paranoid”, the word most often used to sum him up was “self-obsessed”. How could he not be, it was reasoned – all he ever did was sculpt images of himself: an imprint of his body in latex; his naked form in lead.
The breakthrough piece, shown at Young British Artists II, and later sold by Charles Saatchi for £1.5 million, was called Self, a cast of his head in nine pints of his own blood. “Outlandishness can’t make up for witlessness,” was the art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon’s verdict at the time. “The head-shaped plasma ice-lolly has novelty appeal, and that is about it.”
He made self-portraits with his own excrement, and of his own erect penis. In retrospect Quinn says of that period: “I find it slightly embarrassing to have used myself as a model, because people inevitably think it’s some kind of egotism or that it’s about confession or self-analysis, and that wasn’t really what it was about. It was about having yourself as the most available model and also as a starting point.”
Of the YBAs – if we can still call them that now that they’re in their forties – Quinn is reputedly the least obnoxious and the most self-contained, still churning out the work and raking in the accolades but no longer living the stereo-typical artist’s life at full tilt – “a gossip-free zone” one curator told me.
He doesn’t seem remotely self-obsessed to me. Nor creepily intense. Serious and focused would be more suitable adjectives, as well as unshakably confident (he’s all for allowing oneself the possibility of failure as an artist but “I don’t think I’ve ever failed”. ). He arrives at his immaculate white studio from the foundry in a bright red boiler suit and promptly changes into fresh clothes to give me the tour of his work for his White Cube show.
Another Times journalist once described Quinn as emanating the aura of a web or graphic-designer and I think that’s accurate. He’s 43 and wears combat trousers, the badge of all men over a certain age in creative industries; his fingernails are clean. Patiently he answers my questions. On why he gave up alcohol in 1993: “Because I wanted to live rather than die, I suppose.” On Brian Sewell: “It would be terrifying to get a good review from him, wouldn’t it?” On having failed his art O Level (for which he submitted two shoes and an airplane sick bag filled with concrete): “I just think art is not something you can put through an exam because anything interesting is exactly what they wouldn’t want in an exam.”
He never graduated from Cambridge because by the time he’d been accepted he’d worked with the sculptor Barry Flanagan and knew that he wanted to be an artist. Two years later he met the gallery owner Jay Jopling and within a decade he’d made his mark.
After the self-portraits, Quinn produced an eclectic, predominantly figurative body of work that some critics say has been inconsistent in quality – a giant sculpture of Darth Vader’s head and casts of dead animals were received lukewarmly. And the kindest thing I can think to say about his chocolate sculpture of Delia Smith’s head is that at least it was biodegradable.
But then he’s back with a strangely lovely frozen garden consisting of plants that could never grow together in nature. His cast of his own son Lucas’s head caused ripples because Quinn had made it with his son’s Magimixed afterbirth. He claims to be surprised that his work with blood or faeces or placenta has been described as unsettling or macabre. “We’re so alienated from the biological reality of our insides, we’re very happy that the cultural reality we’ve formed is the only reality, and sometimes things that make you question that are uncomfortable, and they go ugggh.
“I don’t make things to shock people,” he insists. “I didn’t make it to get a reaction, I made it to have an emotional contact with people, and everybody’s going to have a personal reaction.”
Quinn’s most famous work is his sculpture of the pregnant Alison Lapper, a woman with no arms and shortened legs due to a chromosomal condition, which stood in Trafalgar Square for 20 months. It delighted the disabled lobby and dismayed traditionalists, who accused Quinn of left-wing sentimentality, didactism or exploitation. One critic compared it unflatteringly to a bar of soap on the Today programme, but the public seemed to like it. “Even people who were sceptical came round to it,” Quinn says. “It did all the things I wanted it to do.”
This piece, in turn, inspired his sculptures of Kate Moss in knotted yoga poses. “Kate Moss is this image of what’s supposedly the perfect looking person and yet the image that’s multiplied everywhere is one that not even she can live up to, let alone everybody else.” This year he will unveil Siren at the British Museum, a solid gold version of one of the Kate Moss sculptures, which will cost £1.5 million to make. Most tellingly, while Kate Moss is selling, the Lapper has yet to find a home and is due to go on tour, possibly to India. “It just shows, whatever people say, they prefer a more beautiful image to a more challenging one.”
I think it’s impossible to enjoy Quinn’s work in isolation, and that’s why I’ve left what is in his new show until last. There are huge, bright paintings of flowers that in nature could never grow together; more flowers, this time cast in bronze, strange hybrid plants, from which dangle orchid flowers, tomatoes and apples, and then finished to resemble something plucked out of an oil slick. “They’re all flowers bought in the shop on the same day,” he explains. “So it’s this idea that seasons don’t exist, that human desire has made things available at all times of the year.”
At home Quinn eats organic and GM-free food. Is his work intended as a warning? “No, I don’t want to be moral,” he says. “I’m anxious for humans but not for nature. Because I think nature will always work out in some way.”
The show’s centrepiece are nine enormous pink marble statues of the human embryo as it charts its course from conception to birth. “I was interested in the whole morphology of all our bodies and having made sculptures of people like Alison Lapper, and people looking at it and thinking she’s got a very different sort of a body, I was thinking, well, every single person who’s looking at that has looked much stranger and more different.
“What’s interesting to me is when matter becomes alive. In a way it’s the opposite of death, where somebody dies, they go wherever they go and you don’t know. In the beginning you’ve got the sperm and the egg and suddenly, nine months later, there’s a human being. That evolution of life from matter is what I’ve always found fascinating.”
I’m not sure if they work on their own but these pieces are part of a natural progression. If you’ve seen Quinn’s genomic portrait of the genetic scientist Sir John Sulston, for example, or if you’ve looked at the blood heads and the Alison Lappers, you’ll see a strong pattern emerging. Then you might start to disagree with the Graham-Dixons of this world or the people at Cambridge who wrote him off as insane.
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