17.01.25
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Multidisciplinary artist Richie Culver and gallerist Vanessa Carlos discuss the importance of carving out your own seat at the table, and the freedom and restrictions that come with creating art on your own terms

Richie Culver’s sprawling, text-based paintings barely contain the words inside each canvas. Composed of tongue-in-cheek statements poking fun at the art world – like “I wanna do as little as possible but still get that mad money,” and “I am happy to see other artists doing well (but not too well)” – they’re delivered with the knowing wink of an artist who’s acutely aware that his uncompromising approach is not exactly a money-spinner. Now, Culver is choosing to move away from the niche he’s carved out in the visual art space. Lately, he’s found more freedom in music, taking his abstract industrial sounds to dancefloors everywhere from squat parties to Berghain. 

This year, the Hull-born artist has released two confrontational yet open-hearted albums. First came Hostile Environments, under his own name, and then, dispatched into the world last month under his Quiet Husband alias, Religious Equipment – an uncontainable noise experiment fusing abrasive TV static soundscapes and murky textures with industrial techno beats at speeding, frenetic BPMs. It’s sonically aggressive and emotionally raw. And it’s entirely uncommercial. 

It’s this genuinely multidisciplinary approach that originally drew gallerist Vanessa Carlos to Culver’s work. She champions artists who work across mediums, making it harder for them to be commodified by the art market. At her east London gallery, Carlos/Ishikawa, Carlos aims to provide a space for experimentation rather than perfection, showcasing painting, performance, film, noise and whatever other creative impulses her artists wish to follow. 

In a world where creative output is now so often informed by the appetite of algorithms and the pressure to ride the latest trends, the instinctive curiosity shaping both Carlos’ and Culver’s work feels both timely and refreshing. We brought together these two proponents of doing things on your own terms to discuss the creative freedom of making uncommercial art, carving out your own space at the table, and who is allowed to make art from a place of neutrality.

 

Richie, this year has seen you release two albums. Do you find a sense of freedom in music that you don’t find in the art world?

Richie Culver: A hundred percent. I feel like the art world is years behind anything that happens in the music world. There’s a certain freedom that I find in it, and a rawness. I don’t ever see electronic musicians looking at visual artists for guidance, but I constantly see visual artists looking at musicians for inspiration. In any artist’s studio, there’s always music playing and that subconsciously influences their practice.

Vanessa Carlos: I think the music world and the art world can be as constrictive, over-commercialised and insincere as each other. I’d even venture to say that the commercial music world is way worse than the commercial art world, from the little I’ve glimpsed of it. I can imagine that if you’re in a certain type of music scene, you might find it more liberating. Basically, if you don’t really care about making money, I think both can be very liberating.

Do you think working in lots of different mediums is a commercially fruitful approach, or is it more of an uncommercial impulse because you’re not niching down? 

VC: What people actually buy has never changed throughout time. You can go back 500 years. People just buy stuff that can go on their wall, so if you’re a video artist and you happen to also enjoy painting, then that’ll help you commercially. If you’re a painter who wants to make music, that’s not going to help you commercially. It’s unfashionable to show paintings in an institution, so if you only paint, you’re not going to get a museum show. If you don’t get a museum show, you’re not going to increase the value of your work – so artists have to reverse engineer things sometimes. Richie, do you ever feel pressure to adapt your practice or medium to try and enter any kind of space?

RC: I always feel pressure, but I’m not sure what the pressure is. I’ve gone from being an outsider, self-taught artist to having an MA and realised nothing really changes. Now that I’m doing some music and sound work, things are slowly happening. Social media, of course, has helped with all this hugely – it’s a 24/7 window. It’s like a medium in a way. I treat my Instagram like a medium, which takes a bit of the pressure off, but it’s always there.

VC: My impression from the outside is that you’ve created lots of different communities through these different areas you operate in. You have a very sincere community you collaborate with. I think that’s the true definition of staying independent. If there isn’t a space for you, you create your own space with other people. Even if some of these underground things can be huge institutions, like Berghain. I always think the strongest way to escape these narrowings is to create your own space. From the things you’ve done, it feels like you’re always finding or creating your own community, and finding a space to make or show whatever it is that you want to create. It’s not waiting for a seat at the table – it’s shoving a chair in and building a table.

RC: I like that. I’ve always seen my DJ sets as like painting. I’m painting in my studio, on my own, in the zone, in proper flow. That translates straight into a Tresor dancefloor at 9am, when the whole crowd is locked in. It’s painting in a different way. That’s why I’ve never understood why the two are not closer – a set in a club environment and the painting. I’m trying to bridge those two things somehow, without a blueprint.

VC: I always think of painting as such a solitary thing, though.

RC: When my head’s down, my music is my colours, not that I paint in colours. It’s just a similar flow, but that’s probably why nobody puts the two together. I’ve always seen it as the absolute twin process of creating something – creating the perfect flow on the dancefloor and creating an image that’s good enough.

Do you think it’s becoming easier or harder for working-class artists to get recognition?

VC: In terms of the people opening galleries, I’ve noticed that we can now feel the trickle-down effect of education no longer being free. People can’t really afford the risk of going to art school. A lot of people who do go are people who have a certain amount of privilege, and I can now see the effect of that in the art world. It’s getting more boring and less diverse because only people who can privately afford to open galleries are the ones doing it. I think it might be the same with a lot of artists as well. I can only say anecdotally, but the art world in London has become a much more economically homogenous thing in the last five years. Richie, what did you observe when you were at the Royal College of Art?

RC: I made a deal with myself that I wasn’t going to mention class while I was there. I was just going to concentrate on learning and looking for guidance in my own practice. I succeeded in that. It’s not something I lent on as a crutch or anything, because that’s sometimes how it can feel when I hear the words. Some of the most fucked up people I’ve ever met are from the higher classes. I’ve heard darker stories from up there than down here, so it’s not that it means anything regarding creativity. Some of the stories I hear are all blended into one similar mental health struggle for the artist, and I’ve come across that from both ends [of the class spectrum].

Should educational institutions like art schools discuss the disparity of opportunities that can happen after graduation, depending on class and other social characteristics?

VC: The disparity starts way before graduation. It starts with whether you have the privilege or not to even go to art school. Beyond that, I don’t think people care about class when they’re trying to show an artist’s work. I think the disparity is real, but I think it precedes graduating.

RC: One of the questions I had from one of my tutors at the RCA was, if you look at a painting – like an Oscar Murillo, for instance, or David Ostrowski, some kind of abstract painting – how long can you look at it and have it remain a painting before the individual has to come into it? Or can it just be a beautiful painting? How much does the person’s story hold weight within the work? 

VC: There is this issue, though, where, for example, a white artist gets to start at the neutral position. Any other artist, whether they like it or not, is being read through their identity in this extremely reductive way. When you say you’ve always wanted to not talk about class at the RCA, have you found that your work was pushed through this lens, even when you were resisting it?

RC: There was something in me that was done with that topic. I’m in my 40s now. Nothing in my life is about class. I just want to make work. That’s why I’m leaning into the noise world, because that’s more about textures and making music. I could make music about nothing, so I find that freedom in the noise world. The work that I’ve made recently has nothing to do with class. It’s more like identity and facial disfigurement, and things that I’m into aesthetically. 

Vanessa, you said earlier that you work with a lot of working-class artists? Has this happened naturally?

VC: Completely naturally. Since I opened the gallery, I’ve always had a very wide range of economic classes, genders, races and nationalities, because I was curious to try and understand different perspectives. I noticed, post-2016, especially in America, that galleries were rushing to go, “Oh, shit. I’ve only shown straight white men,” and really performatively tried to fill gaps in their programme. If you’re curious about the world, you’re going to end up with a variety of perspectives. If you live in London or New York, you have no excuse. I didn’t consciously pursue that, it’s just where it’s taken me. If you’re curious and you engage with different parts of whatever city, that’s what you end up with. It’s interesting, because even within this conversation of class, I have artists who started off as extremely working class and today are millionaires. So what do we do with that? What do we do with that information? 

RC: Damien Hirst, for instance. He was a working-class artist, right? He’s done incredibly well. All I know are working-class people and artists, and they make work. I struggle to talk about it now, because I hate talking on the back foot. You’re either a good artist, or you’re not. If you’ve got the hustle, you might be 20 percent good, but if you’re a good hustler and you’re getting out there, you’ll make it.