Waste Man: Antony Gormley
Portrait: Courtesy of Artangel

Michael Morris is Co-Director of Artangel and Founder-Director of his own production company, Cultural Industry. Since the early 1980s Michael has found ways to realise the role of the producer in the arts more fully than perhaps anyone else of his generation in the UK.

After working at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) as Director of Performing Arts for three years, he established Cultural Industry in 1987. It has been responsible for the on-going presentation of work in the UK by celebrated international artists such as Pina Bausch and Robert Lepage/Ex Machina, and the creation of special projects by others such as Laurie Anderson and Robert Wilson. As producer, he initiated the collaboration that created Shockheaded Peter, which Cultural Industry then toured around the world, produced in the West End, and is currently developing into a film.

In 1992, Morris teamed up with James Lingwood to become Co-Director of Artangel. Together they have built it up to become one of the pre-eminent producing structures in the UK, working with artists across the full spectrum of the visual and performing arts, and forging innovative collaborations with film and TV.

Michael has collaborated with artist, composer and producer Brian Eno on several occasions since their first joint project, Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan, at the ICA in 1985. Since then they have worked on various plans and schemes, including an idea for a theme park in Barcelona (with Peter Gabriel), a one-off concert with Eno, Caetano Veloso and Arto Lindsay at the South Bank Centre in 1994, and an Artangel installation, Self-Storage, in collaboration with Laurie Anderson in 1995 for a former foil factory in Wembley Industrial Estate.

B:I want to start off at school. Were you into the arts then, in a general sense?

M:No, not really. Only music. I booked rock groups for the hall. It meant that I could get out of boarding school and see bands at the Roundhouse once a term. I don't remember knowing anything about the visual arts. A bit about theatre, but I found -and continue to find -most live narrative drama somewhat antiquated as an experience. It often looked like bad TV.

B:Then did you do something similar at university?

M:I did a lot of acting but was never very good, and I wanted to do something that I stood a chance of being good at. To be honest, I had no career plan, no sense of what I was going to do. I still don't.

B:No, nor do I, funnily enough. What did you do immediately after university?

M:I didn't really know what to do. I enrolled on a course at City University, which taught you something about arts management, and got a secondment at the ICA. I asked why they weren't putting on bands: they just had no-one interested, it seemed. So I left the course and produced the ICA Rock Weeks.

B:Were you just booking the bands or finding fuller relationships with them?

M:I began as a booker but then looked for a more pro-active relationship. There's something predictable about how a rock concert usually unfolds. So I did build relationships with some of the artists to push at the boundaries, like Einsturzende Neubauten in 1984. With them, I commissioned and produced the grandiosely titled Concerto for Voice and Machinery, hiring construction plant and mixing industrial sounds with instruments. It became a bit of an urban myth that they tried to drill through the floor to the Queen's nuclear bunker beneath the ICA. But gradually I lost interest in the Rock Weeks. I was more compelled by the borders between other artforms, the potential for different kinds of expression meeting together as equal partners: sound, image, text, action. At that point, I was much more interested in creating things at the edge of recognised artforms, rather than at the centre. The ICA taught me a lot that I never knew was possible.

B: Why did you leave the ICA?

M: I left in 1987 when my first child Edith was born. I couldn't continue with the total commitment required, being there almost every night. It's the producer's job to be the bridge between the work and the world, the artist and the audience, and you have to be present when they come together. And I also realised I was getting much less interested in what might work in a small black box studio on The Mall (there was nothing we hadn't tried) and much more keen to see how the ICA's programme could extend beyond its walls; seep out into the rest of London. We had put on events such as Laurie Anderson's 8 hour marathon United States in the Dominion Theatre in 1982, Jan Fabre's The Power of Theatrical Madness at the Albert Hall and La Fura dels Baus on the Isle of Dogs in 1983. The ICA stopped making sense to me as a location, so I realised I oughtn't to do the job any more and I should look at the broader canvas of the city as a place to make things happen. My final production was the ICA's 40th anniversary benefit. Special one-off events featuring David Bowie with La La La Human Steps and David Byrne with Les Miserables Brass Band at two different West End theatres in 1988. Leaving felt right.

B: So those projects at the ICA were the beginning of your collaborations with artists, how you become involved in helping artists think their projects out and realise them in an active way. This seems to me a new role, or at least something that hasn't been admitted to in contemporary culture. And it brings us to Cultural Industry and Artangel.

M: One of the first discussions I had, having set up my own office, was with Jenny Waldman at the South Bank Centre, who seed-funded a series of collaborative one-offs that I called Now You See It for the Queen Elizabeth Hall, something of a forerunner to the Meltdown festivals. The series crossed borders and artforms in incongruous, bespoke events in three week-long editions in the early 1990s. At the same time, in 1991, James Lingwood and I came together to try to make sense of something called The Artangel Trust. Set up 4 years previously, the Artangel of the 1980s had pioneered a number of urban interventions and billboard works. The founder was leaving, the cash had run out, and James and I had the opportunity to build up something new. We expanded the board of trustees, began a dialogue with the funding bodies, and started to commission and produce in 1992. With Cultural Industry, I had always sought to stretch the institutional framework of mainstream cultural buildings, while at Artangel we animated public space and used locations where you would least expect to find art.

B: I imagine you had been watching these things develop, the work you had been doing at the ICA and Cultural Industry, noticing there was some new kind of public art beginning to appear, a new way of making art that was interdisciplinary and somehow more integrated with real life, and that there was a public for it.

M: Yes, the word we used a lot was 'immersive'. Experiences where you're not quite sure where the work begins and ends, and where the world starts. That is very compelling for the audience. You discover the city animated through an artist's vision, and you can't quite separate the work from the place. You have a big hand in shaping it. Now that we've been doing it for 15 years or so, it seems an obvious process.

B: Things always come to seem obvious. But what you may have overlooked is that you have a lot of experience of doing it, and this is what makes it obvious. Part of the problem - you could say the downside - of the seepage of the work into the world is that you have to deal with the world a lot.

M: I like to think the majority of my time is spent with artists, but a great deal of time is also spent with people for whom the arts are not a central priority. You have to make working relationships with people who've never really thought about contemporary culture, who don't speak that language naturally. You have to communicate with them, gain their trust, and ask them to help you do things that appear quite mad, actually. And you've got to position the whole project so that it has credibility with all of its constituents. It can take a very long time. At Artangel we give each project the time it has to take. If it needs another year, we give it another year. Patience is one of our most important commodities.

B:A lot of your work is in cultivating a community around a piece of work.

M:Yes, not only in terms of the teams of people who will bring it to fruition, but also the community who will cluster around the work and give it purpose and meaning and impact. There are many different strands of the work we do. Some projects, like Margate Exodus or The Battle of Orgreave have tried to rethink what used to be called community art: how a disenfranchised or deprived group of people can view itself differently with the collaboration of an exceptional artist. Equally, there are projects we've made happen that have got nothing to do with communities. Gregor Schneider's Die Familie Schneider in Whitechapel or Rachel Whiteread's House in Bow: the absence of community is perhaps what they addressed.

B:What were Artangel's earliest projects?

M: In 1992 the first project I did was with Michael Clark in an old sugar drop warehouse behind Kings Cross. At the same time, James initiated sculptural projects in and around the Thames
with Stephan Balkenhol and the late Juan Muñoz. The Clark event was very successful, but it could have worked in many different warehouses, and now we'd look for a more particular fit between the work and the place. But there was a frisson for the audience getting lost in the hinterlands of Kings Cross, an adventure before you even got there. The project that you and I made together in Wembley, Self Storage - there was something extraordinary about journeying out there too.

B:Yes, the crumminess of the surroundings very much flattered the project. You suddenly came across a concentration of thought, of visual material, like a collection of jewel cases.

M:The ordinariness of the setting was the first time we'd produced something in such a prosaic situation. Its atmosphere became extraordinary only by virtue of the interventions we made.

B:When we worked together, I became very aware of and grateful for your input, your contribution. I would say it was very much your work as well.

M:You know, that's something I could never say. In the end, in an effective collaboration you can't quite remember whose idea was what, and it doesn't matter actually.

B:Yes, but it's a bad thing to forget who was involved, too, I think.

M:You and I know how that came to be, the details we don't remember, but, like all of Artangel's projects, it was a collaboration. Sometimes I wonder whether certain artists might find that close way of working too interventionist. Not everyone wants the kind of collaborative journey we can offer. We hope that producer and artist can venture together into uncharted territory where neither is within their comfort zone; you're in it together, with separate but quite shared responsibilities. One of the things we don't expect close collaboration on is the fundraising and the budgets. You and I, we never really talked about budgets very much. It's not something I want to trouble an artist with necessarily. We'll go off and find a way of doing it. When people talk to me about producing, they're too quick to ask about fundraising and money, and actually I don't see that as the central part of the job.

In many ways, I think it's more difficult to spend a pound than raise it; to choose what to spend that pound on. Money is just energy, after all. What we do changes from project to project. We start from the ground up each time, and I have to say that, though I've been doing this kind of thing for a while
now, I still don't feel very experienced.

B: Yes, I was talking about exactly this - about being a producer - with a band recently

M: It's an important thing. I don't often talk about these aspects, and I'm not sure there's much to say, but a lot of it is to do with two linked feelings - faith and doubt. And I have a lot of both.

B:Yes, as one should I think. That's what creates the passion. If you doubt enough, when you find something that you don't doubt, you put everything into it.

M:There comes a point in a project where it's unstoppable, even if you do harbour hidden doubts. I doubted in Margate whether we could build and burn the Waste Man; I doubted that a lot. But you can't reveal it. You can know it, but you can't reveal it to the team you are leading forward.

B:It's interesting because probably a lot of other people doubt it as well, and so you are creating a communal act of faith.

M:One of our production managers said to me in an email: " If I were the producer of this event, Michael, I would be a trifle worried: do you think it might be prudent to delay this one a bit?" But there comes a point where there is no going back, a point of no return, and you need everybody to know there is no going back. You have to know where that point is.

B:Working with artists in the way that you do, have you sometimes found yourself a bit ahead of the artist in terms of understanding what the project is doing, where it is heading?

M:I think that this can happen from time to time, but I am probably too polite to mention it.

B:I don't think anyone would be upset. You're a specialist in something which they aren't necessarily. You've a great deal of experience, dealing with big sprawling projects.

M:It is my job to have all the elements in mind. There are times when artists need to have something very particular, quite minute, in mind and I don't want to disturb that particular engagement by reminding an artist of something else they're not thinking about. So in a way I will keep it in mind for them, and for the project, and put it on the table when it feels right.

B:It seems very similar to what I do when I work as a record-producer. I'm very aware that there is notion of pacing involved: that there are times when we should be looking at the big picture and others when we should be concentrating on details. Studios encourage you to get lost in the details, whereas clarifying the big picture automatically answers many of the detail questions. That must be something you've got a lot of experience in.

M:Yes, I think so, and it does influence the kind of artists that I approach. There are certain artists, however much I might admire them, whom I may not approach simply because they are their own producers. This collaborative process we're talking about is not something they require.

B:Have you ever started out projects that just didn't pan out?

M:Yes, one or two. As you know from our experience of Self Storage, you and I and Laurie talked for a couple of years before we decided on anything specific. And sometimes you can get stuck in that talking mode. One of my jobs is to know when to change gear. Obviously to be very patient, but also to know when to become a bit impatient. There is a feeling you get with some artists that we could be in this wonderful, luxurious development mode forever.

B: Yes, development time is luxurious.

M: And it's not very risky. There has to be a point where you do get a diary out, and think about what you're going to put where and when. Though some artists can develop something in conversation to the extent that for them it's no longer worth doing. It's not a bad thing that some projects don't see the light of day. I guess eighty per cent of the conversations we begin turn into projects that happen. We're not such promiscuous talkers.

B: OK, so here's a difficult question. I was giving a lecture in Berlin, and I said I spent 5 years at art school, but nobody ever asked the question, and nobody ever attempted to answer the question, what do we think art does for people anyway. What actually are we doing it all for? Why do we get excited about doing it or going to see it? Why don't we just stay at home and cook? What is it that makes people want to have these kinds of experiences? And is that a permanent thing or is it changing? Do you think there's a new kind of art evolving, and I suspect you probably do, because over the years that I've known you, I've watched you develop what I see as a stronger and stronger picture of a new kind of art, a new role for art in the world.

M: If we look back 50 years, the role of art was quite easy to define. It was clear what art was and where you'd look for it. You'd see it in a museum or sometimes in a park, and it had a very defined place in a more ordered world. Now the world is different. It's congested in every kind of way, fragmented and confusing. There are artists who through a particular kind of immersive expression can gather people together and provide a sense of integration that is otherwise difficult to feel. And, if you do that in a public context, it can give an opportunity for people to congregate, an opportunity to come together for a common purpose in a public place.

B:Do you think that's sometimes the strongest single importance of a work of art - the celebration of some kind of temporary community? Maybe the important thing is to know that we are capable of -and enjoy - making those communities. I think a lot of what art is doing is rehearsing this in some way, the emotional complexity, the human talents that need to be kept oiled because they are actually the key to our survival, our future. Why does the myth of Sisyphus resonate so much with you?

M:There's something about being a producer that condemns you to being either at the top of the hill, or the bottom of the hill or half way up the hill. And I don't know what it is that makes you start again, makes you have to start again, with the rolling rock.

B:Maybe it's success, which wipes out the pain of the process.

M:I'm not overly seduced by success really. I feel it in a very momentary way. It passes very quickly.

B:Yes, for me it lasts for about 20 minutes.

M:I'm interested to know you feel the same. And then a kind of depression hits, I think. I remember during the process of Margate Exodus waking up in the middle of the night yet again and thinking I will never again allow myself to be in this position, where it feels so difficult. However good this thing might prove to be, I don't want to do it again. I remember saying that many times.

B:It's my constant refrain: how did I end up agreeing to this? The word NO should be written all around the studio in big letters to help me remember.

M:It's interesting, the balance of things you respond to that other people propose and things that you decide you want to do yourself. For an artist and a producer this is a shared issue.

B:It's difficult because, as you get better known, there's a huge momentum to do more of the things you've done before. It's very difficult to retain a firm enough hold on the rudder to navigate towards something that isn't nearly as well formed. New ideas, though they're exciting, always look clumsy by comparison to things now in the past which have gathered a rosy cloud of historical approval. I find it a very difficult problem. Probably the projects that you ought to be thinking of no-one is going to encourage you to do. Only you will raise the stamina to do them.

M:Yes, I think you have summed it up. I guess I am the kind of producer that wants to enable and encourage artists to do that difficult thing -the unknown thing -to help share in that raising of stamina, as you put it. To will into life something yet to be tried or tested.....