Behind the beautiful, graceful film installations that won this year’s Turner Prize, hides an unassuming, bear-likeman. And, surprise, surprise, he hates talking about his art. Sabine Durrant reports
To reach Steve McQueen’s Turner Prize- winning entries at the Tate, you have to walk through the rest of the shortlist first. Past Tracy Emin’s bed, onlookers with ears cocked for the rude bits in her confessional movie next door; through the Wilson twins’ wraparound Las Vegas, fruit machines clanking, roulette wheels humming; across the space given over to Steven Pippin’s fish-eye washing machines, past the guard to three dark, empty rooms.
In one of them, you can see Deadpan, a film installation in which a barn wall collapses, again and again, around an impassive man. Next door, in Current, a bike lies under imperceptibly shifting water. In Prey, a tape recorder is lifted up above a field by a white balloon. They’re beautiful to look at, and funny, and it would be quite peaceful standing there watching them if it wasn’t for Emin shouting “Slag, slag, slag” in the distance.
McQueen is the cool, quiet man of this year’s Turner. He doesn’t seem the sort to push himself forward. No Japanese performance artists have spread-eagled themselves across his projection screens. No fish or cattle have died for his art. He is the outsider. He lives in Amsterdam where he knows nobody and “I can walk down the street in my flipflops without anybody caring”. He has few friends in the art world: “I don’t like it. I don’t like groups. I just get bored.”
He doesn’t like “being pushed” into having shows. He disapproves of the cult of personality. “I believe in evidence,” he says.
He rarely gives interviews, but here he is in a caf in Soho, a stocky, diffident man of 30 with a bear-like hunch to his anoraked back and a beetly expression across his eyebrows.
He is all anxiety at first. What kind of croissant, he’s asking himself, what kind of croissant? He’ll have plain. Plain. No, almond. Almond. Black tea. No, not black, with milk. Ordinary tea. Ordinary tea, please.
He’s very polite, but he’s on edge, he’s on edge. He says everything twice. He has a repertoire of inarticulate noises: a click, click, click with his tongue on the roof of his mouth when he’s thinking hard; a “brr” with his lips, to accompany a shake of the head; a lot of “da, di, da, di, das” for etcetera, and a “n’yuh n’yuh” which seems to express approval.
He clicks his fingers a lot too. “Let’s start. Okay. How do we start this thing? Brr.” He claps his hands. He pours some tea with a lot of clattering of pots. “Okay,” he says. “It just takes time. Like everything else you have to warm up.” He sweeps his hand over his head. “This is desperate: ‘Steve’s not very talkative.’ Okay. It happens. It just takes time. Don’t worry. What was the question again?”
It turns out he doesn’t like talking about his work. He likes reading about it even less. “When you read something in the papers it’s like, what is that like? But when you go to see it, it’s like, oh.” He relates how the tape recorder in Prey was the type used by the FBI and the CIA – “hm, hm, hm, hum” he hums conspiratorially; how a stunt co-ordinator trained him to stand still for Deadpan; and about the day he found the bike at the bottom of a river in Zurich. “And I knew it was right. It just hit me: boom!”
But try and pin down what he does with it all, he says, and you end up chasing abstractions. So descriptions of his films sound loopy? “Totally. Totally,” he says. “N’yuh, n’yuh.”
He is often described as a black artist, which irritates him. “I’m not interested in this, this or this,” he says, pointing at his skin, his nose, his hair. “To make art from a black perspective that’s what you focus on. When you don’t, people scratch their heads. If he or she is not illustrating themselves, what are they doing? It must be the media. It must be film about film. Or painting about painting. Well, people wouldn’t say Miles Davis makes jazz about jazz. It ain’t there. If I film certain things in a certain stereotypical way, they say it’s irony. They love that shit! I’m not interested. It bores me. It’s, like, next!”
His mind is spinning all the time with the ordinary matter that makes up his art. “I plant things in my brain and what happens is certain answers that are coming out are to questions that I asked myself, like a year, two years, ago. So basically I’m in ’97 right now in my head.”
So what questions is he busy asking himself at the moment? “Well, I’m looking at this chair now and if I look at it again in two years’ time, it’s like, oh yeah! ”
And what answers? “Phew,” he says, and thinks. Then he makes a clicking noise as if to say, okay, let’s go for it. “One question just got answered the other day that was about sex basically. There are the obvious images of sex, but how do you represent that? Not just the in-and-out business because put that in a film that’s not interesting at all. It’s the circularity of … of sex. It’s a ball, it’s complete in some way and how do you go from that realisation to make something interesting?”
And how do you? “That is what is so damned difficult,” he says. There’s a silence. “I should be generous. I should be generous,” he says. “It’s just more talk …”
Oh, tell me, I say. “Alright,” he says. “I have a lazy eye. I was the guy in the class with the patch over his eye! That was me, remember? That was me. Anyway, the sex situation and the lazy eye situation, they’re two of the ingredients in my new work …” Later, he tells me James Joyce’s Ulysses comes into it too.
School was terrible, but he could draw and that got him into Goldsmith’s. But it was only when he got to New York, with a place at Jim Jarmusch’s University Graduate Film School, that things “really exploded” for him. “Over here, there’s a choice: yes or no. Over there, there’s yes, no, possibly, maybe, I don’t know, could be … A big mixture that’s just wonderful, of people, cultures, ideas, situations; things coming together to make something else, which is the key to all this stuff.”
He knew he had “to get out” of Britain, “a place for happy amateurs”, but he ended up in Amsterdam because he fell in love with a Dutch woman he met at a football match. They have a 16-month-old daughter. He doesn’t have a studio, spends a lot of his time at home, Hoovering, washing-up, “having it all in your head and just looking”.
He sells about three pieces a year. He describes himself as “comfortably off”. “I’m not a domestic artist. I am not an interior designer.” He doesn’t like having things on his walls, though his girlfriend has some stuff, “including one Man Ray thing”.
He recently took part in a book-reading club. “I’d rather just get on with things,” he says, re-arranging a daffodil that he’d just knocked out of its vase. “All the candyfloss that comes with it, it’s nice but what I’m interested in is … evidence. I mean, Miles Davis he was a right womaniser, bisexual, all kinds of stuff he denied. What a wanker. But the music! What I’m saying is interviews, biographies, the talk … fuck that. It’s the work. It’s the work.”
And he frowns down at the remains of his pastry as if seeing it for the first time.