Back to School: Maz Murray on Britney Spears, Showbiz and Filmmaking

What does success mean in the creative industries today? Once upon a time, financial and artistic success was wholly subservient to one another, intertwined to such an extent they were seen as synonymous. Not anymore. In the latest edition of our newly-revived Back to School series, we speak to professionals from across fashion, film, theatre, art and design to build a transparent profile of what success and failure looks like in 2024, while seeking out the answers to every creative’s burning questions along the way.

One artist who knows this space better than most is filmmaker Maz Murray, whose CV includes group and solo exhibitions at the Turner Contemporary, ICA and more recently Focal Point Gallery, where their latest film Principal Boy is currently on show. Murray's power as an artist lies in their cunning use of satire, surrealism, melodrama and humour to address class, queer and trans identity, themes laid bare in their latest work.

Seven years after graduating and one year after benefitting from the Loewe Foundation Studio Voltaire Award - a grant to increase opportunities for under-represented artists via two years of support through rent-free studio space, professional development opportunities and a bursary - the Chelsea College of Arts graduate takes us from breakdown to breakthrough of their career thus far and so it’s time to get pen to paper: here are the lessons you need to learn.

Christina Donoghue: Tell me a little bit about yourself and your career so far?

Maz Murray: I’ve been working mainly with film/artist moving images for the last few years, and have just put up my first institutional solo exhibition. I’m interested in combining narrative and comedy with experimental film, and I usually make the sets and visuals for the film work. For this show, I’ve brought some of that out into the gallery space by returning to the collage and textile side of my practice. I collaborate a lot with other trans artists, performers, and creative workers.

Tonally, I play with satire, surrealism, and melodrama by appropriating pop cultural images and techniques. I enjoy shifting expectations throughout a durational work such as film. I’m usually thinking about queer and trans identity, class, and how these intersections play out in public life. Before this show, I’d mainly shown my work around various group exhibitions and screenings, including at Turner Contemporary, Margate, 2023; Outfest, LA, 2022; KinoKraat, Amsterdam, 2022; Mascara Film Club, London, 2021; QueerCircles TV, London, 2020; Short Film Festival and Artists’ Film Club, ICA, London, 2018. I normally only ever produce work shown in the context of film festivals, one-off events and special screenings. So it’s exciting to get the chance to spread across a whole gallery space and enjoy the scope it allows me. I also recently made a short film through the BFI Network. I’m trying to work out how I can potentially keep a foot in the film world and a foot in the art world. I graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 2017 and everything i've done since is on my website mazmurray.com

CD: The ‘naffness of English showbiz’ is a really great theme to play on. What made you want to centre this specific piece of work around such a concept?

MM: I think a lot of naff forms of entertainment don’t necessarily get examined as bellwethers of culture - we look back at key moments of pop culture in hindsight, forgetting that anything slightly avant garde or weird or radical that broke through was often outnumbered by an industry that backed stuff like…Cliff Richard. It maybe gives this false sense of meritocracy, or allows industry figures to pretend they were taste-makers all along. Using the tropes of pantomime was really what made me want to centre this idea. It’s maybe the most archetypal and oldest living form of naff English showbiz. I’m interested in how it keeps theatres afloat financially. Most money for the year is made at the Panto, and not even from ticket sales but from merchandise - those flashing deely-boppers and wands. It’s a very mainstream form of entertainment - it’s theatre that people who don’t otherwise go to the theatre watch - but it’s also viewed as somewhat marginal for that same reason. The best pantos are always local - they’re adapted to have hyper specific regional references like slagging off the town or borough 3 miles away or name checking a local pub, which feels somewhat unchanged since pre nationstate times when people would’ve been from East Anglia slagging off Wessex.

This, in contrast, to the official showbiz of America, of Hollywood etc, where even regional place names mean something to people who’ve never been there. I have a vision of Oklahoma, of New York, of L.A. through mass culture (and Lana Del Rey) which can’t really be mapped onto references to Rochdale in a regional panto. But England was once too the colonial metropole, and false visions of it were projected out to the world while English identity came to be forged in relation to its colonised states, it just all happened way before mass entertainment forms like cinema and pop music came of age. So I feel like a lot of English entertainment has this theatrical, music hall, variety show, end of the pier, pantomime vibe because that’s really the root of our mass culture. And in some ways I find that endearing and potentially subversive - in that the roots of some of these forms can in turn be traced to pre-capitalist pagan feasts and celebrations - but in other ways it all feels very stilted and a touch dumbed down. I think I found it all a bit bizarre growing up because despite being born here and my parents born here, the rest of my family are from Ireland and it creates a slightly different cultural relation to kids whose families were Cockneys all the way back, and seemed fluent in this particular brand of Englishness. Which to me seems exceedingly camp. And I haven’t even mentioned all the crossdressing.

CD: How did your university experience prepare you for the art industry?

MM: The hands-off approach instilled this sense that "I have to make things off my own back, generate my own ideas, and not feed off external validation" - something I still struggle with from time to time. In terms of the industry side of things, I didn’t feel super prepared - like, you don’t really get taught how you’re going to make a living outside of art school and I still had a fairly naive and outdated view of the industry when I graduated. Some of this lack-of-industry-focus was positive - I think our tutors wanted to foster a safe environment that didn’t just reinforce the pitfalls of the outside art world, to allow creativity and risk without the looming presence of market forces. But it also meant that students who don’t have a financial safety net can fall through the cracks pretty quickly after leaving.

However, there’s only so much that lectures and workshops on artist CVs and grant applications and the gallery system can do when faced with the reality of scarcity and a highly unequal playing field. I also remember that some lectures we did have on the realities of the art industry were not received very well - it was hard for people to let their dreams of being the one genius artist who would ‘make it’ shatter! One huge thing that art school did for me was encourage collaboration - throw me in with a bunch of people and get us to put on shows together. I was lucky to work with likeminded people who wanted to experiment and have fun putting on shows, rather than try to recreate a White Cube commercial gallery experience.

CD: Can you talk a little about the jump between being a student and artist? Do you think the two are synonymous or distinctly separate?

MM: I used my degree show as a chance to be fairly ambitious - I made this installation and did a big performance with 10 backing dancers (lovely first and second year students). It was called ‘Maz Vegas’ and I’ve probably been trying to make the same thing on some level since graduating, except I haven’t had the chance to work on that scale again until this solo show at Focal Point Gallery. It was quite a jolt to go from putting on this big show that seemed so important and high pressure, to being back out in the real world, getting a job, finding somewhere to live, not having a student loan anymore. I just didn’t have the same time I did as a student to engage with the broader art world, let alone work on my own stuff, because I’d be working day jobs (I still am, just slightly less).

As a student I had time and energy to take things quite seriously. Everything felt really imbued and bogged down with meaning in a way that I don’t really feel now - I’ve kind of de-institutionalised myself. I can just go to a gallery and see a painting and be like ‘Oh I like the colour’, ‘Oh I don’t really like it’ instead of needing a grand thesis. It’s quite nice to come back round to a more child-like mode of engaging with art after attempting a more rigorous approach. I think you need both, really. In terms of being a student and then being an artist, it took me a long time to say ‘I am an artist’ - I always felt a bit poncy which is ridiculous since at this point I’ve committed a large portion of my life to it. I enjoyed the freedom of being a student - to not be expected to be professional or have anything worked out. And the maintenance grant! The term artist felt too self-actualised, but now, I’ve tried to internalise the belief that anyone can be an artist and it’s not that deep. And that being ‘an artist’ doesn’t mean you’ve reached some endpoint, rather it should be that you’re always learning. I wish education and training was more accessible in this country so the dichotomy of artist and student or student and worker didn’t exist.

CD: What would be your advice to young aspiring artists from similar backgrounds?

MM: I’ve done a bit of visiting tutor work now and my advice in these sessions has usually been depressingly practical - find some kind of day job that can help you sustain your practice, don’t run yourself ragged trying to succeed, and don’t feel disheartened when you get rejections. It’s advice I wish I’d gotten or followed when I was younger. I think there’s a lack of honesty around how most artists (who don’t come from money) have day jobs. Actually, nowadays, even the artists who do come from money often have day jobs! For me, it’s always been a mix of customer service, teaching, workshops and freelance creative side hustles. When I was younger, I felt the pressure to narrow my field of vision and really settle down in one arena or field, but the reality is that specialising doesn’t really seem to help your career. Unless, perhaps, you make paintings or photography in a specific style that sells - I’m unfamiliar with the commercial world.

To be cynical for a moment, I think artists who do well at selling their work often have other things going on which makes them seem more bankable. On the one hand, if you’re used to not having much money, you’ll be used to the precarious nature of navigating the art world - maybe getting little pots of money, stretching a project grant to last you a whole year, working a bit, getting benefits, ducking and diving a little. But on the other hand, becoming an artist - probably even becoming what looks from the outside to be a ‘successful artist’ - doesn’t provide the kind of social mobility you’d expect. The art world is rarefied and full of posh people, but the money doesn’t really match up. I think it’s possible, and always has been possible, to be a working class artist, or maybe if you’re lucky, a petit bourgeois artist, but when I was younger, I had illusions that excelling at art would be my ticket out of financial precarity and this hasn’t been the case at all. So there’s got to be enough other reasons to want to do it.

CD: Do you feel as though art is slowly becoming less elitist?

MM: In my experience, I would hesitate to say yes. But I suppose it depends what you’re comparing it to. I think there’s a weird situation where art has become more inclusive and accessible on a surface level, but the material conditions are worse, so it renders a lot of that work insufficient. There might be more gallery shows and reviews of work by artists from an oppressed group, less outright obvious bigotry, and a focus on identity and diversity in relation to the arts, but there’s no real infrastructure or egalitarian financial solutions. It’s just awards and schemes and pretend meritocracy, often set up by the same axes of power and wealth that have consistently controlled the art world. This framework pits marginalised people against each other and reinforces the dynamic of marginalisation - why should people from certain backgrounds or from certain identity groups need schemes? I’m saying this as someone who probably only has a career because of said schemes.

It’s also been my experience that some artists from oppressed groups who’ve benefited from an increased awareness of diversity may well have gone to private school and have wealthy or at least middle class professional parents. To put aside my cynicism for a moment, even this shows how bad things must be because why are relatively class-privileged people still marginalised due to their identity? And how much harder is it for people who are multiply marginalised and also working class or underclass? I also try to take declarations of progress or ‘firsts’ with a big pinch of salt, because I’m always finding out about artists and events and movements that have been suppressed through history, which again makes it difficult to draw any tidy lines showing improvements from the past.

I think art may well have been more elitist in the past, but there was greater scope for making alternative art scenes. It’s almost a cliche to say it now but yeah, there used to be mass squatting, council housing was available, university was free, living on benefits wasn’t so Kafkaesque, there were more public sector jobs, you could live better on a part time salary, there was more of an expectation of a work/life balance. The conditions meant that perhaps you could lead an ok life just getting on with your artistic practise without needing institutional backing.

On the plus side, I do feel like the old hallowed halls of power in the art world don’t conjure as much respect as they used to - people resent their relationships to these institutions, it’s a much more clear economic relation of worker/employer than I think it was a few years ago. Especially with the genocide against Palestinians, we’ve seen the veil lifted on some of the financial interests of art collectors and galleries, and people have put their livelihoods on the line to challenge that. Really what’s more elitist than elevating some people due to perceived talent (and the capital it generates you) while condemning other people to death? I think the spirit of collectivity and recognising our power and interests as art workers can challenge the elitism still at the structural level of art.

CD: As an artist, what is it about the medium of film that appeals to you and your work?

MM: I like that film can encompass lots of other art forms - writing, performance, set design, costume, makeup, music. Film also demands collaboration, which can be a nice counter to the notion of the singular artist and the isolation of the writing process.The durational element allows for surprises and tone shifts that aren’t as feasible in a collage or a textile work. When I started at art school I’d make a collage, turn that into a fabric piece, turn that into a costume, film something with the costume. Then I got into the habit of imagining my artistic ideas as films, and turning fanciful concepts into film plots. Which also felt very grounded in all the pop cultural stuff I was inspired by, and a way to transform political ideas into something less didactic. I’m really interested in music videos as a popular form of experimental film, and enjoy the semi abstract narratives that are featured in the more melodramatic examples - like many of Britney’s best videos have these overwrought hints at a wider narrative. They were one of my routes into learning about film history and technique as many early music videos ripped directly from specific film movements and early cinema. They also employ the language of advertising - of desire, of pleasure, of fantasy - in a way I find interesting because the product is the song, which you’re already hearing by the time you’re watching the video.

CD: What has been the general reaction to your work, past and present?

MM: I’ve been quite lucky that people who like my work seem to have a genuine fondness for it and appreciate what I’m trying to do, so they keep up with things I’m making. I’ve had a lot of wonderful support through the years. Making work that has elements of humour, playfulness, where you can tell a lot of care went into it (even if it’s a bit scrappy) is quite welcoming for a viewer, I think. Also, there’s still a dearth of media featuring trans people and that’s been central to my film work for the last few years. This has helped me reach an audience beyond the relatively small world of artist moving image, and it’s been really positive to see people watch something in the hopes of feeling represented, and end up with something a bit weirder.

Knowing there’s a trans audience out there who are interested in seeing trans people in moving image work means I don’t have to dumb down or explain any of the trans stuff in my films. That’s also a positive for the cis people who watch my films as they have to get on board and appreciate the work on an artistic, not an educational level. It would be stifling to feel the duty to explain or change hearts and minds in relation to trans issues, so I’m very glad to not feel compelled to make work in that register. However, it can also be a bit daunting knowing there’s a lot of sophisticated trans cinephiles out there who could actually critique my work for its thematic and stylistic merit - it keeps me on my toes and stops me from falling back on tired cliches or pandering to an outside audience.