‘I Don’t Know Anything About Art’: An Interview with Ali Smith

By Freya Wooding

Freya Wooding (FW). Your work draws upon sources from a wide range of the arts: other literature, music, visual art, and so on, and I’d like to start by talking about the continual presence of visual art in your work. What is it that attracts you to keep going back to write about art and artists, as well as writers and other creators?

Ali Smith (AS). It’s funny because I wouldn’t have thought I did. You don’t really know what you’re doing, and you end up doing something and then, and then, after How to be both I got asked by so many people to start to write for them about art. So to me, that was like, great! I was pleased, genuinely pleased, because I don’t know anything about art. I know nothing, except my own responses. So when someone writes to you, out of the blue, and says would you write an essay on Giorgione, it’s to me the best excuse ever to go online and buy every single Giorgione book you can find and spend two months just with those books. And, everything changes when you do that, it’s exciting. I mean, for me, that’s been like an added bonus to the fact that the link, and I think this is a fact, the links between the arts open everything to each of the arts if you put them together. I think I’ve always been interested in that, I think I’ve always been interested in the thing which means that a novel is more than a novel, and a poem is more than a poem, and a picture is more than a picture, because they do all sorts of things. And if you apply notions of poetry to prose something wonderful happens, likewise vice versa. And then, with How to be both, particularly, it was the first time I had tried to apply aesthetic structures which were visual to prose. So I wanted a fresco structure. I wanted to be able to, I thought that was true to the novel, I thought that the ways that structure sits on top of structure and makes one structure as it does in fresco and in sinopia, I thought that was very true to what the novel does.

FW. You have talked before about applying the formal workings of one art to another and seeing what effects that has. You seem to often be drawn to artists who are also writers, or use and manipulate language in their work, so people like Tracey Emin, Mona Hatoum and her titles, Leonora Carrington’s titles, and so on.

AS. And her writing!

FW. And her writing?

AS. Have you read Carrington?

FW. No, I haven’t.

AS. Okay, you have got such a treat waiting for you. She’s a really underrated, really great storyteller. She wrote one of the early century environmental visions of the future which we are now living. When you read The Hearing Trumpet you know that she’s talking about climate breakdown and the totalitarianism that says that we’re not allowed to do anything about climate breakdown, as it were. The argument that is happening now between… massively across the world. And also she’s just a great eye. Her short stories are just, you know [mimes an explosion]. She’s a wonderful writer.

FW. What is it about the interplay between visual art and verbal art that interests you? And what do you feel you gain in your writing from looking at art?

AS. What do I gain? I never think I gain anything from… except to pay the mortgage. But I find visual art endlessly inspiring, by which I mean inspiring as the opposite of expiring. In other words, it really lives. Something about the communication and connection, the contact that happens when you’re in front of something, simply, sensually responding, and it to you, as if there is a current, an electric life, an energy happens between the presence of a person and the presence of a work of art. Which you get with all works of art, but maybe never quite so head on.

FW. There’s something about the immediate presence of it, all at one moment.

AS. Yeah, it’s about presence in the moment, for definite. Which of course is what all living art forms aspire to.

FW. I’m thinking particularly now of ‘Green’, the creative-critical essay, and the moment when you write about looking at the Cézanne painting being like being shot through with an arrow. In that essay the Cézanne painting, to me, becomes almost a shared space for the narrator and her companion to tentatively explore their new relationship, as well as describing and analysing the painting. I think so often in your work looking at art becomes this process of shared intimacy. Why do you think you have so often turned to art as a way to develop or illuminate relationships?

AS. I don’t know. It just is, it just is a fact. When, when… Okay, so, setting out to do How to be both, for instance, I understood that I wanted something about fresco structure because on the first Monday of every month I used to work in the Amnesty second-hand bookshop, and in came multiple copies, at one particular time, of this 1960s catalogue for the frescoes from Florence which were travelling around the world because they had been taken off the wall. And first of all I was fascinated that you could take a structure apart, and then, a piece of wall, several pieces of wall, could be bussed around the world, while the wall still stayed where it was, and then there were these original versions underneath. So that fascinated me, number one, structurally. So I was looking at these pictures in the book, you know just sitting at the counter, looking at these pictures in the book and thinking ‘It is amazing that there are things underneath that are there but we can’t see them.’ When the frescoes are back on the surface, when they’ve reattached the actual fresco, the finished fresco to the wall, you can’t see the things which are underneath even though they are there. So I was interested in that equation of the said and the unsaid, which happens in every sentence that you write, or say. And it was a brilliant… it’s not a metaphor, it’s actual, it was a brilliant actuality of the notion, of the symbolic notion or the conceptual notion. So I thought okay, well I’ll try and do fresco structure, but I know nothing about the Renaissance, nothing. So, I started to think well maybe it’ll be… somehow it’ll feature someone like della Francesca because I’ve seen some of those and I know what they’re like, you know I can maybe, again knowing nothing about the Renaissance, and I did simply stumble on a picture by an artist I had never heard of. Which when I looked at the dates I knew was ridiculously early, even though I don’t know much about the Renaissance, and ridiculously secular for that early… and those two things fascinated me, but not as much as the actual figure in the painting, which was one of the Schifanoia figures from the decens [the informal name for the frescoes – decens because they are divided into months]. And it was an image of such virility and shabbiness, and power and supposed visible lack of power while actually power shone through it that I was astonished by it, and went to find it. And almost didn’t find it, because there had been earthquakes. I called upstairs to Sarah, let’s go to Ferrara, and she said okay, and then I looked it up and found that the palace was shut. But it opened two months later and we went. We went twice, once then, and once after I had drafted the novel, to check on things. And, that chance discovery in the magazine of a painting so… I mean, I’ve got my mouth open going [mimes shock and awe] because there is, there is actually, it’s almost impossible to describe in words. And then you’ve got the question of how you describe anything in words, anything. That kicks in at the back of whatever that response is to us remembering we have eyes, and being re-seen ourselves by our own seeing.

FW. You’re a writer who is very aware of, and often uses, the slipperiness of language – puns, wordplay – you are interested in the multiplicity of meaning, and one of the difficulties about writing about visual art is the inherent impossibility of fully rendering a visual object in words. How do you approach the tension between the need to establish, or attempt to establish, a kind of concrete piece of work, with an awareness that language is so tricksy and difficult?

AS. I couldn’t answer that question, all you do is write until you think you’ve got it right. If I was to think of a question like that, how to reconcile those tensions, then I wouldn’t be able to write anything. We just end up working towards equivalence, towards a meeting of understanding, between one thing and another, between more than one thing, to all the things that make more than one thing.

FW. Just keep going.

AS. Yes, it’s much more instinctual than that. And then, technique kicks in, and you just make sure that what the instinctual thing is that you’ve written down makes rhythmic and syntactic and meaningful, in all meanings, in all the meanings of meaning, sense. So, that’s an impossible question to answer.

FW. Sorry! [laughter]

AS. It’s okay, it’s okay. [laughter]

FW. How much influence and choice have you had in choosing the artwork for the covers of your books? I’m thinking of the inside covers of How to be both, and the Hockneys for the quartet.

AS. I’m really lucky, I do get to choose. I get to choose because the first book I did with the publisher I’m still with – Hamish Hamilton and my editor there, Simon Prosser – they brought out a proof of Hotel World, the first book I did with them, and the proof had a terrible horror picture on the front of a kind of shaking squint hotel. To which I wrote back and said, I don’t want this, it’s horrible, it’s not like my book, we have to change it, and they said no. They said this is the cover the book is going to have. And I had wanted the Sophie Calle picture, and they said no, because they were just going to do their thing that they did. And it looked like an Ian Rankin novel, it was ridiculous, so they sent it out to booksellers and booksellers at Waterstones said we can’t sell this book, it’s not the same book as is on the cover. At which point there was almost no time left, so I sent again the pink image that’s on the cover, and said let’s ask Sophie Calle will she let us have this and so they did and she said yes, and bang! something worked. Lucky for me, because since then, now those factors at a publishers would like to choose the cover and think it ought to have a woman the back of whose head you can see and nothing else, they’ve given in. And my editor Simon, I’ve heard him hold the floor in a room of ten other people going ‘No, we’re having an artwork on the cover.’ Also, I want an artwork on the cover, I want there to be a point at which the book and the visual arts meet, and enhance each other, or state a relationship.

FW. There’s something really amazing about reading about Pauline Boty in Autumn and then being able to go and see the pictures at the beginning.

AS. I’m interested in the workings of… hang on, I’ve got a copy of Winter here, I’ll show you what I mean… so, before I started writing the seasonal books and I told Simon what I wanted to do, he said we’re going to ask David Hockney to do pictures for them. And I was like ‘David Hockney, what do you mean?!’ Anyway, they did ask him, and that afternoon he faxed back four pictures of the same lane, and said you can have them all. So before any of the books were written they had covers, and the pressure of that has been really interesting. First of all that I have to write books that don’t exist; at one point I was at a Penguin conference talking for five minutes about it, and I looked behind me, I had only written Autumn, and there were all the other three and I felt my own smallness. Anyway, interestingly the Hockneys have meant that the books are there and I have to find them. They mean that the books already exist, and I have to fill the… I have to just do the work. I love the Hockneys, and the pictures of the artists who form as it were the spines of these novels, who happen to be female, I think there’s something about the internal and the external I wish I could reverse. That’s the one thing I wish about this, because the Hockneys are such a gift, and they’re so beautiful, and they look so, just, stunning. But there is something about, maybe if we bring all four out together into one book, maybe I can get images by the women on the covers and the Hockneys can be inside, that’s what I’d like to do. I don’t know if I’ll get away with quite that, because it’s an ask, and because people have already decided that’s what these books look like now, and that’s the series, and how bloody lucky that that happened at all, but I want to bring those inside pictures outside. I want them all to be on the cover. It’s the same with Leonora Carrington, whose Hearing Trumpet I introduced at one point, for Penguin Classics, and they put some stupid cartoon by someone else on the cover and I’m like would you put an image by Picasso… Would you not put an image by Picasso on a novel by Picasso? Why would you? But, no, they wouldn’t do it… It was too difficult rights-wise. It wasn’t. It shouldn’t be this, it has to have an image by Carrington on the cover of a book by Carrington. Why does that happen to women? So, I have a question always at the back of these, which is that you open them to the artists who happen to be women, but I would like them to be on the cover.

FW. That would be amazing.

AS. That would be good, wouldn’t it? If we changed the line up, as it were, and the inside was Hockney and on the outside was those amazing images.

FW. How did you go about finding the artists for the quartet?

AS. Okay, that’s been an interesting experience because it’s been a series. And because it’s asked me to, not to be formulaic, but to have a sequence. With the Boty thing, I had no idea that she would even be anywhere near Autumn. I thought Autumn would be about Keats, and about Keatsian richness and shortness of life. And then I stumbled on a picture of her as a tiny reproduction of Colour Her Gone, and thought I’ve never seen anything like that, I don’t know this artist, why don’t I? Oh, she died. And then I was left with this terrible sadness of her life and the afterlife of her family, and thinking I can’t write about this it’s too much, too sad. Meanwhile, seeing reproductions of pictures that she’d done, because I didn’t see a real Boty until after I’d written the book. I didn’t actually see The Only Blonde in the World in person, until after I’d written the book. And it’s stunning. Have you seen it?

FW. Not in real life, only in photos.

AS. It’s in the Tate St Ives at the moment, and it’s placed in a really fantastic place alongside other works which are wonderful. And it’s worth going just to see it. Something really marvellous happens when you see that painting. She’s so young painting this painting, she’s 21, maybe 22, and she knows how to clean your eyes completely, just by use of red and green. And something blanks your brain so that you can see again. I mean, plus all the things that are happening in the construction of the abstract and the figurative, it’s just fantastic. Anyway, I’d seen this one tiny reproduction and thought looking at the whole story of her dying and the sadnesses that it was too sad to go near, but I’d found myself thinking about Christine Keeler because of one of the reproductions and then I was like, oh this isn’t anything to do with what I’m writing, this isn’t anything to do with this book. What have lies in Parliament to do with writing about Brexit? And then, I knew that actually Boty was a given, she was a gift that had arrived on my desk in the way that I should be glad for, and thankful for, and I was, and I am. So that happened. Bang. With Winter, and there was a question now of would there be an accompaniment again by an artist, the first image I had was of a floating circle, and whether it was a head or an opening or a window or a boulder or… it looked like Hepworth. So I went for that with Winter, and it was fruitful as anything. With Spring I knew I was now onto a sequence, so therefore, who was going to be… what was going to be the gift or the spirit of Spring? And I didn’t know, and I faffed about with turn-of-the-century filmmakers and early modernist painters, while going to see Tacita Dean at the Royal Academy. At which point I was like, if you ask about that thing that clears your brain again so you have to see again, I came out of there thinking, why am I not allowing this to happen? And so it was obvious then that those works and that artist, something about that trajectory… plus the trajectory of lost presence and authority. I mean if you look at Tacita Dean last year, she’s everywhere, three exhibitions in London, plus two exhibitions elsewhere in the world, and I thought look at Ethel Walker, look at some man in the States who didn’t even know who Hepworth was. What happens to us? Doesn’t matter how much noise we make in our lives, is that endemic, is that just what happens? And for Summer, I’m not going to tell you, but it’s also been a real question of shifting between who or what it is which is the spine… And I think of them as the spine, I think of each of those artists as forming a spine, a kind of spirit spine for each of the books. I think I’m there. I think I’ve got it. But now I understand that, and I also understand that I want those pictures, those artists to feature on the fronts, rather than on the insides. Never mind the loveliness of, and thank God for the loveliness of, Hockney.

FW. They do look beautiful altogether as well. But it would be so nice to have the colours on the outside.

AS. I agree. I think I’m going to try and suggest that. But I have been really lucky with my publishers, who have let me get away with murder really. Well, what they think is murder.

FW. Not real murder.

AS. What I think is life.

FW. I’ve been collecting and printing off lots of photos of the artworks that recur in your work. The common thread that I keep coming back to when looking at them all together is the colour, the absolute vivid colour in them, and the real joy, sense of joy, that seems to fill most of the artworks. How important is that sense of joy to you in being attracted to artwork?

AS. I’m sure it’s everything. I’m sure it’s everything. I think of my initial dismay at Boty’s trajectory and then I think about the way her work is the opposite. That’s, I think, the answer to that question is that it doesn’t matter how short and how foul and how difficult, when you are near those works something just vibrant and vital happens and always will. That I think is the pay-off. When we are in foul times, art will tell us we are. It will show us where we are, and at the same time it will pass us on through those times to whoever is going to be beyond them. I remember going upstairs when there was a Charlotte Salomon exhibition. She’s a young Jewish artist who died in one of the camps. She got picked up in the south of France and she died in one of the camps, but she left a huge book called Life? Or Theatre?, Leben? Oder Theater?, and it is full of the most… it’s like a graphic novel to some extent, but it’s also just painting after painting after painting full of language and pictures. I remember going upstairs in the National Portrait Gallery, or the National Gallery, and seeing some of these in a little room, and not being able to stay in the room because the life in it, the force in it, it was like being deafened, and what the art was saying was everything about the terribleness, and the life, and the loss, all of it. I couldn’t stay in the room. I mean, that’s the life force that comes through.

FW. Your work often turns to the life of the artist, as well as the artworks they produced, for example constructing a story for Francesco del Cossa in How to be both. What is it that attracts you to finding out more about the people as well as the art?

AS. Well, the great thing about del Cossa was that there was almost nothing known. It was a real gift to anyone who wants to write a novel because the tiny tiny details that you have – his mother’s name, his father’s job, what the family left behind, the actual bricks that are still there in the buildings of Ferrara, the notions that he must have travelled here and here to get this and that – was enough, it was all I needed. I’ve said this in other places so you may have read it, but as I said I know nothing about the Renaissance, so I was at a dinner party sitting next to Tom Stoppard. Amazingly, thinking oh my God I’m sitting next to Tom Stoppard, and said something to him about doing research. He was researching some Pink Floyd thing he was doing, and I said to him ‘Oh, are you going back into the archive?’ and he said, ‘No, no if you’re ever going to be doing research don’t be going back to an archive. If there’s an object, like a letter on the table, just peek into the envelope, don’t open the whole thing you don’t need to. It’s already there, it doesn’t need you.’ That was the most freeing thing that anyone could have said to me at that point, because I knew then I could just coast on the details. Which were, I mean, what’s left of us afterwards, the details that are left of us, if we unpack them, as if we dropped one of those flowers than open in water, then it does all the work.

FW. You can just run with it.

AS. It’s the point at which imagination meets life.

FW. Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte and Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura are both referenced by your character del Cossa in How to be both. I went away and read those after I finished the novel, to try and get a better sense of the writing about art in del Cossa’s period.

AS. Ah yes! What did you think?

FW. They were amazing. They made me want to learn how to use an eggwash and mix pigments and paint.

AS. Are you a painter?

FW. No, not really.

AS. Right, so, exactly. I’m not a painter, and I would be a terrible one, but oh God it made me want to know how to do that thing.

FW. Yes, and the moment in the Alberti which you pick out in How to be both when Alberti writes about every single part of the body in a painting needing to be alive, or all the parts of the body needing to be dead, down to the hairs, is beautiful.

AS. I think there is, and this is unrecorded, but I think there is a direct quotation in del Cossa from Alberti which is the eyes on the stem in St Lucy. When Alberti talks about eyes opening as if flowers, I think del Cossa, who had read Alberti backwards, knew exactly what to do with St Lucy’s eyes, at that point. It’s obvious he had read Alberti.

FW. How did you come across those texts?

AS. Oh, well, the Cennino Cennini I came across again by luck because Tove Jansson talks about it. She thought it was one of the most wonderful books that existed so a couple of times, I even bought it because Tove Jansson had talked about it. Then, when I was writing How to be both I thought I wonder what books about art I’ve got on the shelves or in piles of books, and pulled it out. And the Alberti I went to because I knew I had to. If I was going to try and approximate the life of a painter I needed to know about perspective from that point of view, and absolutely, just slightly pre-del Cossa but pretty much contemporary really.

FW. They were amazing to read. It really felt like I was learning how to be a Renaissance painter.

AS. Much more so than any other ‘how to’. I know, really, the Cennini – I mean, just what an amazing book it is.

FW. When I was reading Autumn, John Berger and Ways of Seeing came to mind a lot. The line from Ways of Seeing – ‘We never look at just one thing, we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves’ – reminded me a lot of when Elisabeth is describing the pictures that Daniel has described to her to her mother. You realise that we are now three steps removed from the picture…

AS. Which hasn’t even been seen!

FW. Which hasn’t even been seen. How do you think that distance is useful or interesting in terms of what it does to the art, and what it says about the people, talking about the art?

AS. Okay, what’s the, hm… How do we… How do we get past the idea that art isn’t for people?

I think in my own upbringing and my sister coming home with a book of A. A. Milne’s poetry and giving it to me, and my mother going, Poetry, you’re giving her poetry? Like it was unthought-of, you know, unthinkable. I grew up in a small town in the north of Scotland which had an art gallery, but we didn’t really go to the art gallery, we tended to go to the museum. The museum and art gallery were together, as if the two things are the same, and we treated those stuffed creatures in the museum as if they were art. But, what… I’m trying to think what the point is, where the point of ignition was, or is. I think it’s simply that when I was a student and I knew people who were at art school, I saw other lives be possible. While I was reading literature, I saw that verisimilitude wasn’t always the answer, and I saw that all sorts of techniques could be used to create realities. I think that the discussion that comes when you stand in front… and then it makes me think of my Dad and I, having an argument. So one of my short stories, almost verbatim, where we stand in front of Picasso’s version of Lee Miller that’s in the Edinburgh Modern Art Gallery and he says that’s not a woman, a 4-year old child could do that. And I’m like, no they couldn’t it’s brilliant, it’s really like Lee Miller. And the kind of, his enjoyment of making me furious by saying the things, and at the same time his fury that someone would suggest to him that this was a reality. And the triangular question that happens when we are faced with versions of things, that are not our version but ask our version to either become authentic or not. So it’s about that, it’s about the ways in which we understand what… where we live, how we’ve always lived, whether that’s museum fodder or not. How our families exist, how we understand our realities, and also how notions of philosophical and quotidian things in our lives are represented, are being represented by others, or we might want to represent ourselves.

FW. When you set out to write about Emin, or Kusama, or another visual artist, how does that differ from the way you would prepare for writing a fiction piece?

AS. Fiction is utterly other. If I’m writing about a person then I just sit down with all the books and I steep myself in them, and then I look at the notes I’ve made afterwards, and look at the pictures again. And then something of a correspondence happens. It’s about correspondence, about writing to something, and it, in correspondence with you, produces that correspondence. The correspondence in fiction is different. It’s… how can I even describe it… it’s spatial. It’s about what happened. It’s about what happened the first time I saw Mona Hatoum’s wheelchair with knives, which is that I needed to leave the room, again, and I had to ask myself, What was the thing that made me not able to stay in the same room as that? And then something narrative happens. So the correspondence is different. It’s spatial, it doesn’t move sequentially in the same way, it moves into something which is a spatial character, understanding, or narrative concept/understanding. Something else happens, something differently shaped happens when it’s fiction. Whereas if I was writing about an artist, when I was writing about Hatoum, a whole other possibility of thinking happened.

FW. Absolutely. I’ve found so many new artists and writers through your writing, most recently Sonia Delaunay.

AS. Isn’t she fantastic! Total joy.

FW. The colours are just explosive. From someone like del Cossa through to Pauline Boty, your work often picks up on artists who have been forgotten, or under-appreciated. Is this a deliberate choice, do you set out to try and bring these people, now perhaps you have more influence, bring these people into the consciousness again, or is it more just that they are surprising?

AS. So, it isn’t a case of educating. It’s a case of surprise, actually, your last word there, which is exactly the response when I saw a picture by Boty and thought, But I should have known about this person and why didn’t I? That kicked in, and that’s a feeling of unfairness at having missed the thing, and then unfairness at the system which decides what we get to see having missed, or chosen to miss, the thing. And then, as I said, when I was talking about the trajectory of an artist like Tacita Dean, or an artist like Hepworth, it really is the case, and I couldn’t say it in Winter, that the man who found the picture really had no idea who Barbara Hepworth was. It said on the back of the picture ‘Portrait of Miss Hepworth’, he looked up Miss Hepworth, and up came Hepworth Wakefield. He wondered if Hepworth Wakefield was something to do with Miss Hepworth who might have been a rich lady who left money for a museum. He had no idea, and he was a picture collector, on eBay, that Hepworth had been an artist, a sculptor, and a writer in her own right. And so, that shocked me, because Hepworth means the century to us, we know what she means. Is Hepworth going? Are we even going to lose Hepworth? So that’s my question. Coming from a time, as well, where writers like Angela Carter, and I could name almost anyone on the Virago Green List, who were re-found for us in the second half of the century, having been lost. And then, Angela Carter every ten years has to be re-found. And like, it’s Carter, get a grip.

FW. She’s here now, sorry.

AS. Yes, that’s it. The notion, the thing that Elisabeth says somewhere in Autumn, where it’s like ‘rediscovered lost rediscovered found again ad infinitum’, that cycle by which the canon just loses or drops people off it. That thing is serious, and central to the ways in which we live in the western world. Partly I am glad I’m addressing it, and you know, partly I can’t not address it. I have to address it. It means everything to every thing that I do, in exactly the way that I’ve known that when I rediscovered those writers I felt again the gross unfairness of the loss. It’s about legacy, it’s all about legacy. It makes me think of Woolf writing A Room of One’s Own, which looks like a book about money but actually is a book about legacy, and the legacy that gets left to us is the space in which to work, and what we can work with. And everybody who leaves us anything good for that space, and useful to us to work with, let’s honour them, let’s know that they did, let’s see the trajectories again that happened and mean that the space either gets smaller or we push back and make it bigger. Does that answer the question?

FW. Absolutely, yes.

AS. It’s really funny, it’s really hard. The reasons for the losses of people, they preoccupy me because they are not simple. They are immensely power-based and complex. They are massive. And if a writer addresses a structure at all, a writer has to address the ways in which those structures work.

FW. Yes, absolutely. Were you thinking of the shapes and structures of Hepworth’s sculpture when structuring Winter?

AS. Definitely. I wanted to write a book with a hole in it. And it has. I’m glad it has because I had no idea how to go about it. I think actually Hepworth just made it possible. There has to be a massive, not a void, but a window or a question or something where you’re not sure what you’re seeing into or through, but that makes you re-see in Winter. Definitely.

Curated from The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 49, Issue 2, June 2020, Pages 142–155.