Meet the Artist // Marcus Miller

Can you give us an introduction about yourself and about your artistic background?

I’m 50, but I’m also what they call an emerging artist. So I’m a bit late to the party, I think. I started my practice in 2018 and was essentially just daubing away at the bottom of my garden in my shed, producing these pieces. A couple of years ago, I thought to myself, that I need to take this seriously. It was going very well, people saying my work is pretty good, and I decided to go to an art school. I thought if I’m going to go to one, I’ll go to a good one. So I applied to the Royal College of Art, and they gave me a scholarship. I thought that’s a good sign. Since then, this is my second residency. I did a print residency in Barcelona last autumn. I chose Barcelona, because I’d never been there before and I wanted to experience it. And then also I wanted to experience Berlin, because I’d never been to Berlin before.  What I didn’t know, which I thought was quite interesting, was that the founder of GlogauAIR residency came from Barcelona. That really appealed to me. I thought, that’s spooky, but in a good way.  So I’m here now.

I think in terms of my practice, a good starting point is Paul Klee’s famous quote that a line is a dot that went for a walk. I really like that phrase. It’s suggestive of the dynamic and fluid nature of the line and the possibilities that it offers. It’s also suggestive of the wanderer around the city, or the flaneur, to use Walter Benjamin’s term. And that’s very much at the heart of my practice. I’m very interested in the city as the overarching structural metaphor, in terms of representing society and community, but also notions of culture and justice.

I think probably my biggest influence is not an artist, but a poet. He’s British, but moved to America in 1939, called W.H. Auden. The possibilities of the city and all it engenders is at the heart of his work. There’s a great quote from him that really resonated with me. “We rebuild our cities, not dream of islands”.  What that suggests to me is you need to engage in the messiness and chaos, and wonder of city life and everything it can offer, and not be drawn into romantic fantasies of rural idols. I’m very much a city boy, and being here in Berlin at the heart of an amazing city is really core to my practice. I think the first big influence for me here and some of my earlier work was New York City. It’s just an incredibly dynamic and energetic place.  One thing I really liked was the gridiron system. It’s a way of imposing order on chaos, trying to make sense of this incredible throbbing urban mess and sprawl, but actually drawing it together into a cohesive pattern. The drawings and paintings I’ve been doing, that wandering, loose sort of grid structure is the formative aspect of my work. In terms of process, that’s where I start with. I just have a loose, wandering line and then just take it from there. I should point out as well I’m not a representational artist. There’s another famous quote, which is from Philip Guston, he said “I paint what I want to see”. And that’s exactly what I do. I’m interested in the possibilities of the more dynamic and unconscious forms of representation.

Another aspect I think is important to talk about, I have a background in psychoanalysis. I was at one point doing a doctorate, which was attempting a Lacanian reading of a post-war epic poem by American poet John Berryman called The Dream Songs. I abandoned my PhD in frustration halfway through and moved on in my life. But I think it is very true that nothing is wasted in life. Once I started practicing art seriously, I realised that psychoanalysis was also at the heart of my practice because what I’m trying to do in my work, is to map desire in the city. Essentially, unconscious drive and unconscious desire lie at the heart of psychoanalysis. I’m trying to map in a loose way those unconscious drives in my artwork and exploring ways in which creative and destructive elements are represented across the cityscape. Another thing I was very much attracted to was Lacans’ notion of desire and how desire is manifested in my wanderings around the city. For Lacan, desire is something that is ultimately unsatisfiable. We’re searching for something, but it’s always beyond the reach.

Can you tell us about your recent work and your plans for the residency?

Last year I started a series of works with the title City Fix.  I quite like that title because it’s playful, it suggests my fixation on cities, but also a fix is a gesture of addiction and I’ve definitely struggled with elements of addiction in my life and the city as a spur and an aid to addiction is clearly, if you look at my work, part of what I’m aiming to get at. I started off by doing a series of prints which were loosely working with New York City, and then I moved, and developed my print residency in Barcelona. It was a natural development to use the cityscape of Barcelona. I wasn’t sure what I was going to make of it, but it’s incredible how different cities have different energies. In Barcelona there’s beauty on every corner. It’s just the most ridiculously beautiful city I’ve ever been to.  You can sense the artistic energy of the place. Picasso, Gaudi and all the modernist movement.  I did a series of works there and then, as I said, I wanted to come to Berlin because I was interested in the differences. I deliberately wanted to come to a cold northern European city in winter to challenge myself with a completely different dynamic and Berlin certainly delivered that.

What I’ve been doing here is just walking around and getting a sense of the energy and dynamism of this incredible city. What immediately strikes you with Berlin is the overwhelming sense of history and division and the war. You can sense that tension between creation and destruction. I’ve been doing a series of drawings, trying to get that loosely representational Berlin vibe, elements just riffing, the TV tower and the bridge near GlogauAir, seeking to get the sense of the place. I’ve done a series of paintings, using different materials like cardboard, which was nice. I like the textures that were provided by  painting directly onto unprimed wooden boards. I am exploring different processes. For instance, my works have gotten bigger and I think that actually suits my art. The pieces I was doing last year were relatively small. I think because I was learning my craft more than anything, especially with printmaking, so I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. I needed to make sure I was within my capabilities. But I’m feeling more comfortable now and I’m happy to expand again. I might hang a canvas from a ceiling and then weigh it down, paint directly onto that. Suzy suggested painting onto a shower curtain. I’m going to continue the experimentation. Being here it’s a great opportunity to do things like that. So I’m very much looking forward to it.

How do you like your experience at GlogauAir so far?

It’s a fantastic residency. It really appeals to me because its location is great. It’s right at the heart of the city. You can walk to places and pick up on the energy really nicely. It’s pretty as well, it’s by the canal and that’s lovely. Even in winter, it’s just lovely to walk along there. Kreuzberg is just a mad, bad, wonderful, exciting place.

GlogauAIR is also interesting because I think it’s clearly great stuff. Hugely experienced and very supportive and a fantastic support network there. But equally, it’s just as important meeting and talking to other artists. Since I’ve concentrated on my art I’ve realised how important it is to engage creatively with other people. It’s great to talk to another artist. I love my wife and kids, but they don’t quite understand the process and techniques and the underlying motivations for what we’re trying to do in the same way that other artists do.

Just getting ideas and inspiration and talking about each other’s work and going to galleries, going to shows together, for me, is hugely thrilling and exciting.