Darren Waterston interview | V&A, London | 22 January 2020

Darren Waterston – interview: ‘My normal studio practice is quite monastic … in so many ways I feel this (Filthy Lucre) is a shared collaboration’

Studio International spoke to Waterston ahead of the opening of his installation Filthy Lucre: Whistler’s Peacock Room Reimagined, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Waterston says: “I set out to recreate Whistler’s fabled Peacock Room in a state of decadent demolition.” At the same time, he infuses this work with many elements of his own palette and dark imaginings. There are two key pieces in the room: a menacing but palely beautiful evocation of the Whistler painting Rose and Silver: The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863-65) and a cartoon of two fighting peacocks which Whistler painted to represent himself and his patron. Waterston says: “Whistler’s peacocks were very beautiful, but were also representing him and his patron. With mine, they are eviscerating each other, but it’s all an elegant dance. It is playing with the grotesque and the beautiful.”

Waterston was intensely aware of having to “step lightly … creating something that was a reimagining of another artist’s masterwork is tricky for an artist to do. I had to create something that was a homage to Whistler but also do it on my own terms.” What he evokes, he hopes, is “almost the ghost or the underbelly of this narrative”, an atmosphere which captures the “emotional gravity” of what happened. To help with this dark evocation, New York trio BETTY were commissioned to create a soundscape that comprises snatches of mournful strings with quotes and comments taken from Whistler’s writings. Waterston says this work “represents the time and period in which it was made”, but also resonates with the excess and inequality that prevails today, and the decadence and frenzy around art collecting. He says: “We are in our own gilded age.”

Filthy Lucre: Whistler’s Peacock Room Reimagined
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
25 January – 3 May 2020

Filthy Lucre will tour to The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, for Whistler: Art and Legacy, 11 June - 4 October 2020

Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY