ResCen is pleased to announce the publication Cream Pages: The dialogues of Tania Koswycz and Richard Layzell

Cream Pages prints edited transcripts of the conversations between artist Richard Layzell and his (invented) interlocutor and collaborator, Tania Koswycz. It is edited by Joshua Sofaer.

Responding to a commission from the firstsite gallery in Colchester to create an installation that would ‘reveal artists’ practices’, Richard Layzell invented a group of four artists and made their work for them. In this way Richard deconstructed the creative process through the creative process, a kind of making while being detached. Back in his studio after the exhibition had closed, Richard found himself missing the method and ease of producing the work of one in particular of those four invented artists: Tania Koswycz. He decided to continue fabricating work as Tania. This process gave rise to a relationship of creative provocation in which Richard and Tania sparked each other precisely because they had differing points of view. Richard would ask Tania what she thought about something and found her advice useful. These ‘process’ conversations eventually became an integral part of Richard’s ‘product’. In performances Richard began to speak directly to Tania, later their conversations were published.

One of the solutions that Richard found to answer the challenge of making artistic decisions was to dramatise his creative thought through the creation of a dialogue with his invented collaborator, Tania. The dialogues published in Cream Pages give us a glimpse of the working life of an artist. Sometimes it is humorous and poetic, sometimes esoteric, often refreshingly banal – enabling us to see the role of the artist as one constrained by diurnal practicalities, rather than some mystical process of divine inspiration.

RL: You know I'm deliberately exploring borderline territory. It's art and not art.

TK: It's important to me to see it as art.

RL: Why?

TK: To keep your feet on the ground. Stop you drifting off into a la-la land of vague social worthiness that's hard to comprehend.

RL: But don't you think it's difficult for people to accept this work as just art?

TK: No I don't. You invite them. You set the tone. You make the thing happen. Of course it overlaps with daily life events, but it's your job to demarcate not obfuscate. This seems crucial or they won't know what they've been to or why.

Cream Pages shows that Tania is more than a foil to bounce ideas off and these dialogues are more than an account of an artistic process. She has enabled the possibility for the everyday to become art; a world where a flat tyre emerges as The Day of the Moped. She has become the very stuff which the decision making process he engineered was set up to answer. Which is to say, they have become the artwork.

ISBN 9780955059148
Cream Pages is published by ResCen Publications.

Cream Pages is now available by mail order from ResCen at a cost of £5.97 plus postage & packing (please contact ResCen directly for orders over five copies).

To order, please click here to visit the Middlesex University Online Store