Hope & Dread Extra: Issy Wood

Hope & Dread Extra: Issy Wood brings you a conversation with the talented young artist Issy Wood. 

Hope & Dread Extra is a series of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring your season favorites from Hope & Dread. Our guests were brimming with additional ideas and extra insights that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting room floor. Join hosts Charlotte Burns and Allan Schwartzman for new Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday.

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Transcript:

Charlotte Burns:

This is Hope & Dread Extra. I’m Charlotte Burns.

Allan Schwartzman:

And I’m Allan Schwartzman. 

Charlotte Burns:

Hope & Dread was a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art. We’ve heard from people who are making change and from people who are resisting change.

Our guests were brimming with ideas and off-topic thoughts that we just didn’t have room for within the documentary series. But we didn’t want to leave them on the cutting-room floor. So now, we’re bringing you a set of short, sharp bonus episodes featuring some of your season favorites, which we’ll be dropping twice a week.

Today we’re bringing you more from the young British painter Issy Wood.  Here she is on the flip side of artistic fame, on failing to be cool–and how the music industry makes the art world seem nice. 

So, what does it feel like to watch your work go to auction? 

Issy Wood:

Horrible, horrible. I guess my kink is that I find it horrible and yet I still like to watch the auctions.

To see work made during school, when I was still feeling my way through what it was to make paintings, kind of blindly. One came up recently and all I see is who I'm trying to emulate and the struggles and how broke I was because the paint is so shitty, and to see that monetized five years after the fact, it feels really grotesque.

And in fact, one work that came up, the auction house were complaining that it wasn't signed on the back and they say, "It says a name, but it doesn't seem to say Issy, does it say the title or something?" And we looked and they sent a photo and it said some boy's name. And I realized because you know, in art school you share canvases, and what this guy who was working in my studio, who was also a painter didn't need, I was more than happy to use for my own painting, never imagining that there would need to be certificates of authenticity attached to it. And it kind of makes me laugh, but not for long. But then, you know I think that's what you get for agreeing to work with a commercial gallery aged 23, while still technically being on an MFA program.

Issy Wood:

Goldsmiths [University of London] at the time was the kind of place that thought painting was trash, trash for greedy people, and we were always sort of, warned against… We were encouraged to become artists, but not to make money from our art.

I always felt very self-conscious in my very cool group of friends who were all making things that didn't need a studio to be made, and 4-channel video installations, and performative sculpture, and experiential works. And I was laughed out of most of the extracurricular crits that they organized at this guy's house in Tulse Hill because I was a painter.

And the project of trying to be cool and also a painter, began there. And it's still this ongoing project. And that it doesn't really matter that I'm the only person from that group of people, maybe 10 of us, who has made a living from their work, that I still feel embarrassed in a way for making money, in that very British way, and investing time in a medium that has been pronounced dead several times. Occasionally I just make nice pictures and I make a living from the nice pictures.

And I think it's just some internalized agenda that Goldsmiths had at the time, a mix of Goldsmiths' history, but also the tutors that were operating at that time, the Mark Leckeys, the Ed Akins, the Philip Lais, the Simon Bedwells of it all. And it never occurred to me that was just incredibly male apart from anything. But it was a really good litmus test for whether I wanted to keep painting or not because it made it feel like a very embarrassing enterprise. 

Charlotte Burns:

Do you feel embarrassed still, or do you feel like you sort of got the last laugh on that?

Issy Wood:

Whenever I see, and it's rare that I do, but whenever I see anyone from that period, it's like I'm transported back to that embarrassment where I would almost trade in all of the monetary success just to be able to describe my work as a 4-channel video installation.

Charlotte Burns:

Are you tempted to make a 4-channel video installation?

Issy Wood:

Oh, I tried. I tried and I failed, it was terrible. And that's the one comfort I offer myself is that I know what I'm good at, I know what I suck at. And I tried, I tried to release my inner Ed Atkins and I tried to make sculpture, and it was garbage.

Charlotte Burns:

So tell me about the music. You have also said that the art world is more ethical than the music world. 

Issy Wood:

Yeah. And that, that's kind of a concerning thing to admit. The whole music experience, the brief experience I've had with it has really had me turning back to the art world and falling gratefully into its arms because I realize how good I have it.

I sort of managed to both sign a record deal and also terminate that same record deal within the pandemic. Not even as an act of social justice to protest what are truly unfair systems at play in terms of an artist in a label versus an artist in a gallery. But mainly because I'm a relationships gal and I couldn't have the kind of relationship I wanted to have with the people I was working with in music. Either because they were the wrong people or because all of those people are born of a very different way of doing things that I'm just not used to. And I don't think I'll ever get used to, that feels so exploitative.

And it's something you hear about constantly. I feel like musical artists of enormous stature are constantly talking about how screwed they've been. You sort of hear this kind of thing, and it's sort of at the tail end of an award's acceptance speech or something where they'll say, "This world is bullshit." And now I feel like I understand more than ever quite how much they meant that, even with all the leverage that Taylor Swift has, that it's still abusive. Abusive. And I knew I was never going to get that Taylor Swift clout or money or fame, and neither did I want it. But I realized that the only thing a label could offer me was a little bit of money up front, and that I didn't need that money. And therefore I had no reason to be working with a label.

Issy Wood:

I'm free, and I'm still going to release the full-length album. And so I'm just trying to get videos together, music videos. 

Charlotte Burns:

So in a funny way, you are going to be making video installations after all.

Issy Wood:

Yeah, the irony is not lost on me. 

Charlotte Burns:

My question for you is a question we ask all of our guests at the end, which, the show is called Hope & Dread. When you look ahead, do you feel hope? Do you feel dread?

Issy Wood:

I mean, given Putin's current geopolitical antics, it feels really irresponsible to say hope, but I think I just know too many amazing people not to say hope. Of all shapes and sizes, it's just, they're weird and thrilling. I mean, the dread inside me is sort of baked in whether I like it or not, so I'm going to say hope, a very, very sort of shapeless hope.

Charlotte Burns:

For more from Issy, tune into episode nine of Hope & Dread, “Artists: Players or Pawns?” and 10 “The Business of Art”. 

Listen to Hope & Dread Extra every Tuesday and Thursday and subscribe wherever it is you find your podcasts. 

Hope & Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. 

The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Robert Bound is our associate editor. 

Holly Fisher mixes and edits the sound. 

Additional research has been provided by Julia Hernandez. 

And our theme music is by the inimitable Philip Glass.