Anri Sala: Part II
II. Orientation, This
Anri Sala discusses the choreograpy of perception in time and space.
Exhibition view of "Anri Sala" at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2011, with Doldrums (2008) in foreground and the two-channel video projection After Three Minutes (2007) in background. Photo Guy L'Heureux, collection of the Media Centre, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.
ART iT: We were just discussing Albania in the 1990s when parts of society there followed the law of the streets, and how your video Promises (2001) deals with young men being tugged between the desire to emulate gangster culture on the one hand, and to push beyond the limitations of machismo on the other. This reminds me of the way you've recently started installing your works such that they alternately phase on and off across the exhibition space, as in the exhibition "Purchase Not by Moonlight," held in 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. The complex dynamic you achieved among the different works becomes a metaphor for group dynamics and individual displays of sympathy with or withdrawal from the group mentality.
AS: Yes, I think that's there. The idea behind the phasing of the installation is to let a third person - the audience - create their own position between the different works. We often find ourselves in the position of being a third point between difference references, between weak and strong, mainstream and periphery.
In that sense the phasing is related in another way to the same period of life in Albania in the 1990s, in terms of rupture: rupture in meaning, rupture in syntax, rupture in narrative, rupture in beliefs. Of course, I am able to call it "rupture" because, having lived in a place like France where there has been more relative stability over the past decades, I have an understanding of continuity that I can use to compare with the situation in Albania. But for the generation who came after me, who were born in what we call the transition period, how do they know that rupture is not its own continuity? In order to see that your rupture is not everybody's rupture, you have to step inside someone else's continuity.
There is a lot of this in the process of how I think and experience things. In setting up the exhibitions I strive for continuity in the overall timeline but there are ruptures that happen at a given time or in a given part of the gallery, where one work switches on or off and the viewer is led in a new direction. But I also include an underlying cohesive element, like the orchestration of sound, so that concurrently everything is held together.
There is a project I did two years ago, Why the Lion Roars (2009), for which different films were projected in a cinema corresponding to shifts in temperature. The weather became the editor of the film program. Some days when the weather was constant there would be more continuity, but on other days, when the weather moved further into a new season, for example, there would be bigger rifts in the different films that were projected. This kind of rupture created new meanings and narratives, sometimes more articulated and sometimes less so through the collage of films. I also worked out a rule based on conventional viewing habits, whereby if the same temperature recurred within the space of 90 minutes then the same film would pick up where it left off, but if the same temperature recurred at, say, the start and the end of the day - which is quite common - then the film would start over from the beginning. I was trying to find a balance between the pleasures and frustrations one has in the surprise of rupture and of finding continuity again.
Top: Color photograph from Why the Lion Roars (2009), 41 x 52 cm. © Anri Sala, courtesy the artist and Chantal Crousel, Paris. Bottom: Installation view of publication (foreground) and digital prints (background) from Why the Lion Roars at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2011. Photo © 2011 Kazuo Fukunaga.
ART iT: Regarding your orchestration of works across an exhibition space, is this articulation of the continuities and ruptures in your own practice something that has become possible only now that you have accumulated enough material over the course of your career?
AS: Obviously over time I can articulate more in the relations between the works. At first you can only advance from work to work, but then there's a point where you begin to find articulation in the gaps between each work, not only in what each work expresses on its own. Of course it also has to do with the singularities of the exhibition space, and the budget, and knowing better the syntax of making exhibitions. When I'm producing a new work I get very wrapped up in its internal logic. In making a film, I will follow a strict film practice, but then once it's done I place it into a landscape of different works and I switch to more of a sculptural practice.
I think every work can be thought of in sound terms as having both high and low frequencies, with the high frequency corresponding to meaning and content, and the low frequency corresponding to more ambient, but no less significant, characteristics. Like many other artists I am frustrated that in group exhibitions my works are often included on the basis of their high frequencies: what they shout. When I do my own exhibitions I try to articulate my works - metaphorically speaking - based on their low frequencies, but also literally in the case of the Doldrums (2008) installation, in which standing snare drums respond to the low frequencies of the soundtracks of the other works on view. I look for alternative connections between my works by turning what seems to be the background into the foreground.
I explored this further in a project I did with my friend, the Albanian politician and former practicing artist Edi Rama, called Inversion - Creating Space Where There Appears to be None (2010). The project was based on Edi's practice of doodling on email printouts and other political documents that he happens to have at hand during meetings. Swapping foreground and background necessarily changes perspective, which we all know, but what I found interesting aside from the visual qualities of Edi's drawings is that they show how the foreground of the eye does not always match the foreground of the mind. Edi's eye and hand may be concentrated on the drawing on the paper, but the background of the drawing, which is the political text, is at the foreground of his mind. Exploring this gap between the foreground of the mind and the foreground of the eye was the main emphasis of the project.
Top: Installation view of Inversion - Creating Space Where There Appears to be None (2010) at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2011. Bottom: Exhibition view of "Anri Sala" at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2011, with the single-channel projection Answer Me (2008) visible at right and Doldrum (2008) visible at left. Both: Photo Guy L'Heureux, collection of the Media Centre, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.
ART iT: And of course politics constantly switches between background and foreground: the social injustices in Tunisia were in the background of world consciousness until the street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire.
AS: Exactly. And this background incident - not incident, because it was a real political act - might never have come to the foreground if other people also in the background were not ready to amplify that political act across different contexts. My starting point for the Edi Rama project was this painting by Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (c 1648). The title of the painting is beautiful because it's not just indicating a man, it's indicating a landscape with a man. The man is only one part of the landscape, all the more so when you consider the view from the citadel in the background, which is the foreground of the political system: the man would not be seen.
The project developed from a conversation about how the history of painting would be if we swapped background and foreground, as well as how politics in general is conceived as the relation between center and periphery, and how the system of values that are dictated from centers such as Brussels or Washington get corrupted by the time they reach the periphery. Then when you have people on the periphery who are committed to giving real meaning to those same values, it's the politicians in Brussels or Washington who care more about whether the message arrived in the correct syntax or not, as opposed to whether it actually delivered the right content.
Exhibition view of "Anri Sala" at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2011,
with Doldrums (2008) in foreground and digital prints from
Why the Lion Roars (2009) in background. Photo © 2011 Kazuo Fukunaga.
ART iT: You've spoken about high and low frequencies, foreground and background, and syntax. Is it this conceptual language that informs your attraction to music? Are you interested in music because it is so syntactical in the way it's performed and appreciated, or does music predate your interest in syntax?
AS: I think it's both. I find music is an interesting way to share a narrative, because it carries the low and the high frequencies together, both literally and figuratively. The content of high frequencies is more related to memory, while the ambience of low frequencies is about experience. For example, melodies are usually in mid-high frequencies, but if you go to a concert, what you cannot translate the next day when you talk to your friends is the low frequencies, what you felt in your body.
Sound and music have this in a much more interesting and broad way than language, which I feel is necessarily based in high frequencies because you are able to say it again and again and again; language is not an experience, it's already a translation of experience. Music is both at the same time, in the way maybe that Intervista or Dammi i colori are documentaries in becoming, or documentaries that will never become.
To put it simply, I'm interested in setting up, recording, directing these situations in which emotions go through the unspeakable, in things that cannot be summarized in a narration the next day, something that has to be experienced one-to-one. Few of my films ever have iconic images that encapsulate the whole material. I like to make works that must be experienced as a whole. It's this lack of efficiency that, for me, advances the articulation even further.
Anri Sala is the subject of solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, through December 11, and the Serpentine Gallery, London, through November 20. An exhibition at Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo, was held from October 14 to November 10.
Part I
Anri Sala: In and Out of Articulation
Anri Sala discusses the choreograpy of perception in time and space.
Exhibition view of "Anri Sala" at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2011, with Doldrums (2008) in foreground and the two-channel video projection After Three Minutes (2007) in background. Photo Guy L'Heureux, collection of the Media Centre, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.
ART iT: We were just discussing Albania in the 1990s when parts of society there followed the law of the streets, and how your video Promises (2001) deals with young men being tugged between the desire to emulate gangster culture on the one hand, and to push beyond the limitations of machismo on the other. This reminds me of the way you've recently started installing your works such that they alternately phase on and off across the exhibition space, as in the exhibition "Purchase Not by Moonlight," held in 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. The complex dynamic you achieved among the different works becomes a metaphor for group dynamics and individual displays of sympathy with or withdrawal from the group mentality.
AS: Yes, I think that's there. The idea behind the phasing of the installation is to let a third person - the audience - create their own position between the different works. We often find ourselves in the position of being a third point between difference references, between weak and strong, mainstream and periphery.
In that sense the phasing is related in another way to the same period of life in Albania in the 1990s, in terms of rupture: rupture in meaning, rupture in syntax, rupture in narrative, rupture in beliefs. Of course, I am able to call it "rupture" because, having lived in a place like France where there has been more relative stability over the past decades, I have an understanding of continuity that I can use to compare with the situation in Albania. But for the generation who came after me, who were born in what we call the transition period, how do they know that rupture is not its own continuity? In order to see that your rupture is not everybody's rupture, you have to step inside someone else's continuity.
There is a lot of this in the process of how I think and experience things. In setting up the exhibitions I strive for continuity in the overall timeline but there are ruptures that happen at a given time or in a given part of the gallery, where one work switches on or off and the viewer is led in a new direction. But I also include an underlying cohesive element, like the orchestration of sound, so that concurrently everything is held together.
There is a project I did two years ago, Why the Lion Roars (2009), for which different films were projected in a cinema corresponding to shifts in temperature. The weather became the editor of the film program. Some days when the weather was constant there would be more continuity, but on other days, when the weather moved further into a new season, for example, there would be bigger rifts in the different films that were projected. This kind of rupture created new meanings and narratives, sometimes more articulated and sometimes less so through the collage of films. I also worked out a rule based on conventional viewing habits, whereby if the same temperature recurred within the space of 90 minutes then the same film would pick up where it left off, but if the same temperature recurred at, say, the start and the end of the day - which is quite common - then the film would start over from the beginning. I was trying to find a balance between the pleasures and frustrations one has in the surprise of rupture and of finding continuity again.
Top: Color photograph from Why the Lion Roars (2009), 41 x 52 cm. © Anri Sala, courtesy the artist and Chantal Crousel, Paris. Bottom: Installation view of publication (foreground) and digital prints (background) from Why the Lion Roars at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2011. Photo © 2011 Kazuo Fukunaga.
ART iT: Regarding your orchestration of works across an exhibition space, is this articulation of the continuities and ruptures in your own practice something that has become possible only now that you have accumulated enough material over the course of your career?
AS: Obviously over time I can articulate more in the relations between the works. At first you can only advance from work to work, but then there's a point where you begin to find articulation in the gaps between each work, not only in what each work expresses on its own. Of course it also has to do with the singularities of the exhibition space, and the budget, and knowing better the syntax of making exhibitions. When I'm producing a new work I get very wrapped up in its internal logic. In making a film, I will follow a strict film practice, but then once it's done I place it into a landscape of different works and I switch to more of a sculptural practice.
I think every work can be thought of in sound terms as having both high and low frequencies, with the high frequency corresponding to meaning and content, and the low frequency corresponding to more ambient, but no less significant, characteristics. Like many other artists I am frustrated that in group exhibitions my works are often included on the basis of their high frequencies: what they shout. When I do my own exhibitions I try to articulate my works - metaphorically speaking - based on their low frequencies, but also literally in the case of the Doldrums (2008) installation, in which standing snare drums respond to the low frequencies of the soundtracks of the other works on view. I look for alternative connections between my works by turning what seems to be the background into the foreground.
I explored this further in a project I did with my friend, the Albanian politician and former practicing artist Edi Rama, called Inversion - Creating Space Where There Appears to be None (2010). The project was based on Edi's practice of doodling on email printouts and other political documents that he happens to have at hand during meetings. Swapping foreground and background necessarily changes perspective, which we all know, but what I found interesting aside from the visual qualities of Edi's drawings is that they show how the foreground of the eye does not always match the foreground of the mind. Edi's eye and hand may be concentrated on the drawing on the paper, but the background of the drawing, which is the political text, is at the foreground of his mind. Exploring this gap between the foreground of the mind and the foreground of the eye was the main emphasis of the project.
Top: Installation view of Inversion - Creating Space Where There Appears to be None (2010) at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2011. Bottom: Exhibition view of "Anri Sala" at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 2011, with the single-channel projection Answer Me (2008) visible at right and Doldrum (2008) visible at left. Both: Photo Guy L'Heureux, collection of the Media Centre, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.
ART iT: And of course politics constantly switches between background and foreground: the social injustices in Tunisia were in the background of world consciousness until the street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire.
AS: Exactly. And this background incident - not incident, because it was a real political act - might never have come to the foreground if other people also in the background were not ready to amplify that political act across different contexts. My starting point for the Edi Rama project was this painting by Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (c 1648). The title of the painting is beautiful because it's not just indicating a man, it's indicating a landscape with a man. The man is only one part of the landscape, all the more so when you consider the view from the citadel in the background, which is the foreground of the political system: the man would not be seen.
The project developed from a conversation about how the history of painting would be if we swapped background and foreground, as well as how politics in general is conceived as the relation between center and periphery, and how the system of values that are dictated from centers such as Brussels or Washington get corrupted by the time they reach the periphery. Then when you have people on the periphery who are committed to giving real meaning to those same values, it's the politicians in Brussels or Washington who care more about whether the message arrived in the correct syntax or not, as opposed to whether it actually delivered the right content.
Exhibition view of "Anri Sala" at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2011,
with Doldrums (2008) in foreground and digital prints from
Why the Lion Roars (2009) in background. Photo © 2011 Kazuo Fukunaga.
ART iT: You've spoken about high and low frequencies, foreground and background, and syntax. Is it this conceptual language that informs your attraction to music? Are you interested in music because it is so syntactical in the way it's performed and appreciated, or does music predate your interest in syntax?
AS: I think it's both. I find music is an interesting way to share a narrative, because it carries the low and the high frequencies together, both literally and figuratively. The content of high frequencies is more related to memory, while the ambience of low frequencies is about experience. For example, melodies are usually in mid-high frequencies, but if you go to a concert, what you cannot translate the next day when you talk to your friends is the low frequencies, what you felt in your body.
Sound and music have this in a much more interesting and broad way than language, which I feel is necessarily based in high frequencies because you are able to say it again and again and again; language is not an experience, it's already a translation of experience. Music is both at the same time, in the way maybe that Intervista or Dammi i colori are documentaries in becoming, or documentaries that will never become.
To put it simply, I'm interested in setting up, recording, directing these situations in which emotions go through the unspeakable, in things that cannot be summarized in a narration the next day, something that has to be experienced one-to-one. Few of my films ever have iconic images that encapsulate the whole material. I like to make works that must be experienced as a whole. It's this lack of efficiency that, for me, advances the articulation even further.
Anri Sala is the subject of solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, through December 11, and the Serpentine Gallery, London, through November 20. An exhibition at Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo, was held from October 14 to November 10.
Part I
Anri Sala: In and Out of Articulation
Anri Sala: Part I
IN AND OUT OF ARTICULATION
By Andrew Maerkle
Still from Answer Me (2008). © 2011 Anri Sala, courtesy the artist; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Marian Goodman, New York; Hauser & Wirth, London, Zurich; Johnen/Schöttle, Berlin, Cologne, Munich.
Anri Sala first came to widespread international attention through his short film Intervista (1998), in which the artist discovers old 16mm newsreel footage of his mother giving a speech and an interview at the 1977 Albanian Communist Party Youth Congress, and then attempts to reconstruct his mother's words from the soundless images. In its investigation of language and syntax, its attentiveness to the dynamics between absence and presence, past and present, and its ambivalence toward the possibility of conclusive meaning, Intervista established a number of creative threads that have unspooled in different directions over the course of Sala's career. In particular, recent films such as Air Cushioned Ride (2007), in which a car circling a row of freight trucks in a parking lot finds itself receiving different radio signals at different points along the course of its circuit, and Answer Me (2008), in which the acoustics of a geodesic dome influence a conversation between estranged lovers, combine image and sound to underscore the physical subjectivity of our intellectual experience of space, and the body's constantly moving position in processes of communication.
ART iT met with Sala at his studio in Berlin, where he was preparing for concurrent exhibitions in Japan at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and the Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo, respectively, to learn more about the relations of articulation that drive his works.
I. Phases/Gradations - Light/Dark; Violent/Peaceful - and Rupture
Anri Sala on the dynamics between syntax, form and content in his films.
Still from Intervista (1998), color video with sound. © Anri Sala, courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
ART iT: I imagine many of your interviews start with this work, but what strikes me about Intervista (1998) is that it revisits a specific historical moment in Albania's Enver Hoxha regime (c 1943-85) through an almost abstract interest in language and modes of communication, with the history structuring the language in the film and the language providing a filmic structure from which to view the history. Your subsequent works have seemed to engage in varying degrees of specificity and formal experimentation, alternately moving more toward one extreme or the other. Is this balance something that you approach conscientiously?
AS: I think Intervista is a good place to start because of these two directions present in the work, or more specifically, because there is an intersection of two interests that are both important for me, one being content and the other being syntax. We tend to take syntax for granted or forget about it because it appears to be transparent, and it's only when you consciously think about it that you realize in this transparency there is also a rigid structure. Intervista is about a moment in Albania when, due to its ideological responsibilities, language became so stiff that it could not adapt to political and social changes. Instead of getting massaged into a new state of mind, language simply broke down, in the process revealing its mechanics.
For many people, what is interesting and touching is the narrative aspect of Intervista, but this can obscure the role of syntax in the film. For example, there's a moment when my mother questions whether she really said everything that we reconstructed from the found footage. She's not trying to deny any political agenda, because at the time it was clear to everybody what one could and could not say, and also because in a way she still believes in what she said. Rather, what she is unable to recall is the syntax of the language at the time, because she can no longer accept it as a given.
This interest in how the structure of language can reflect structures of power has remained important in my work. Syntax also became important because of my desire to avoid getting trapped in the transparent syntax of artistic convention. In the works that followed Intervista, I concentrated more on dealing with syntax rather than content, which was also a way to create room to escape the fixed expectations of other people. Since then, I have alternated between combining the two to varying degrees.
I would say there are four films in which I've explicitly worked with language: Intervista; Nocturnes (1999) [which juxtaposes interviews with two insomniac recluses, a fish enthusiast and a former soldier]; Dammi i colori (2003), in which language plays a surrealistic role because it describes the future, or a political conviction of how the future should be, such that the reality of what is being said cannot be proven, which is similar to Intervista; and Overthinking (2007), in which I interview the spirit of the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros through the aid of a medium. In this last instance the result was straightforward in that it's just a filmed conversation and the work does not have the complex structure that I have used for other videos, but here again language has the potential to both open up inaccessible worlds and to deceive.
Still from Lakkat (2004), color video with sound, duration 9 min 44 sec. © Anri Sala, courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
ART iT: The works you mention deal with language strictly in terms of discourse, but you also have works that further explore the limitations of semantics, such as Lakkat (2004), in which children are taught Wolof words related to lightness and darkness, and Promises (2001), in which four young Albanian men each attempt to repeat the line, "Nobody puts a price on my head and lives," attributed to the American gangster Al Capone.
AS: That's true. Promises has to do with the impossibility of saying something, when the last of the four men struggles with the idea of even speaking the sentence, and it also addresses syntax because the men are not native English speakers, so another guy plays with the ambiguities between "lives" and "leaves," which reflects the social context in Albania at a time when many people were intent on leaving the country to seek better livelihoods elsewhere.
Lakkat is also related to syntax because it produces content by association - not directly, because the words are presented one-by-one; and not taken out of context, because the words come with a lot of context already, but rather because you gradually realize the children don't understand the full significance of the words they are being taught. For example, in the beginning of the video one boy has trouble saying a word correctly and, with his mispronunciation of just one consonant, the meaning shifts between "very light" and "eating." And what I found fascinating during my research was that because of the racial politics of colonization, and the visualization of the social hierarchy along gradations of lightness, Wolof has many words for the differences between white and black, yet all the other basic colors are named with French loan words.
The actual shooting of the film was only one part of the project, which continued for several years with the translation of the audio into different languages for subtitling. Ultimately I produced a UK English version and a US English version in addition to a French version, purposely working with people who are not professional translators: the cultural theorist Stuart Hall in the UK; the post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha in the US; and the Chadian poet Nimrod in France. I did this because I wanted to underscore the awkwardness of languages in regard to translation. For example, the Wolof word toubab is almost untranslatable into French because its counterpart has such a racist connotation, while in UK English it was translated as "whitey," and for the US version as "Great White Hope." So instead of only translating the language of Lakkat, the project is also a translation of different relations to colonization.
Interestingly, in the US the phrase "Great White Hope" originates from attempts by the white establishment to produce a new white boxing champion after Jack Johnson became the first black man to win the world heavyweight title in 1908. A former champion, James Jefferies, came out of retirement to challenge Johnson, and lost. So the phrase was first associated with racist enterprise, then with white shame, and this ambivalence of meaning is analogous to the shifts over time in the connotation of the word toubab in Senegal, which otherwise is such a difficult concept to translate. For me, the subtitling was not just the usual process of bringing a film to an international audience. If subtitling is usually an exteriorization of the film, in this case it became a kind of interiorization.
Still from Promises (2001), color video with sound and English subtitles. © Anri Sala, courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
ART iT: You talk about the deceptive transparency of syntax, but you also seem to employ varying degrees of opacity in your works. For example, in Lakkat this aspect of working with poets and critical thinkers on the subtitling, as opposed to translators, is not evident to the average viewer. With Promises, too, the vital difference between "live" and "leave" in the context of post-Communist Albania is not so apparent, since the men are all filmed in the same nondescript interior setting.
AS: Certainly. Life in Albania at the time was very violent because there was a vacuum of law and order: everyone was welcome to be violent in a way. It was almost like a cowboy film, except that there was always a very real threatening presence. What happened with the last of the four men was that he refused to succumb to the virtuality of the cinema-style language. He took the whole thing very seriously. He was not worried about whether his accent would be good or whether he would sound dangerous or believable. For him, saying the line was an almost philosophical question: Do I believe in violence? It's not that everything was black-and-white - it's not like you were risking your life everyday - but if you were a young male going out to bars or going to school and so on, you had to choose how to engage with that violence. And at that point in life when your philosophical syntax is not fully developed, you can incline more toward one way, or the other. We all had these fantasies of becoming wilder or tougher or more threatening, but we were also reading books and exploring new ideas, so we knew there was an alternative. For him it was a philosophical statement not to play the game of violence in the street, and that carried over into the virtual realm of the video. The work ultimately crosses all these levels in the relations between identity and language.
ART iT: In the 1990s I was a student in Washington, DC, when it was known as the "Murder Capital of the US," and had a similar experience. I remember balancing an intellectual curiosity that I wanted to pursue further - but which could also be perceived as being unmanly - with a desire to be considered as tough as the next man, even though I was far on the periphery of any actual violence.
AS: Exactly. In Albania it depended on who was around you, although there were also people who could combine both the curiosity and the toughness - I mean, we necessarily had to be able to combine the two.
Part II. Orientation, This
Anri Sala discusses the choreograpy of perception in time and space.
Anri Sala: In and Out of Articulation
By Andrew Maerkle
Still from Answer Me (2008). © 2011 Anri Sala, courtesy the artist; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Marian Goodman, New York; Hauser & Wirth, London, Zurich; Johnen/Schöttle, Berlin, Cologne, Munich.
Anri Sala first came to widespread international attention through his short film Intervista (1998), in which the artist discovers old 16mm newsreel footage of his mother giving a speech and an interview at the 1977 Albanian Communist Party Youth Congress, and then attempts to reconstruct his mother's words from the soundless images. In its investigation of language and syntax, its attentiveness to the dynamics between absence and presence, past and present, and its ambivalence toward the possibility of conclusive meaning, Intervista established a number of creative threads that have unspooled in different directions over the course of Sala's career. In particular, recent films such as Air Cushioned Ride (2007), in which a car circling a row of freight trucks in a parking lot finds itself receiving different radio signals at different points along the course of its circuit, and Answer Me (2008), in which the acoustics of a geodesic dome influence a conversation between estranged lovers, combine image and sound to underscore the physical subjectivity of our intellectual experience of space, and the body's constantly moving position in processes of communication.
ART iT met with Sala at his studio in Berlin, where he was preparing for concurrent exhibitions in Japan at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and the Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo, respectively, to learn more about the relations of articulation that drive his works.
I. Phases/Gradations - Light/Dark; Violent/Peaceful - and Rupture
Anri Sala on the dynamics between syntax, form and content in his films.
Still from Intervista (1998), color video with sound. © Anri Sala, courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
ART iT: I imagine many of your interviews start with this work, but what strikes me about Intervista (1998) is that it revisits a specific historical moment in Albania's Enver Hoxha regime (c 1943-85) through an almost abstract interest in language and modes of communication, with the history structuring the language in the film and the language providing a filmic structure from which to view the history. Your subsequent works have seemed to engage in varying degrees of specificity and formal experimentation, alternately moving more toward one extreme or the other. Is this balance something that you approach conscientiously?
AS: I think Intervista is a good place to start because of these two directions present in the work, or more specifically, because there is an intersection of two interests that are both important for me, one being content and the other being syntax. We tend to take syntax for granted or forget about it because it appears to be transparent, and it's only when you consciously think about it that you realize in this transparency there is also a rigid structure. Intervista is about a moment in Albania when, due to its ideological responsibilities, language became so stiff that it could not adapt to political and social changes. Instead of getting massaged into a new state of mind, language simply broke down, in the process revealing its mechanics.
For many people, what is interesting and touching is the narrative aspect of Intervista, but this can obscure the role of syntax in the film. For example, there's a moment when my mother questions whether she really said everything that we reconstructed from the found footage. She's not trying to deny any political agenda, because at the time it was clear to everybody what one could and could not say, and also because in a way she still believes in what she said. Rather, what she is unable to recall is the syntax of the language at the time, because she can no longer accept it as a given.
This interest in how the structure of language can reflect structures of power has remained important in my work. Syntax also became important because of my desire to avoid getting trapped in the transparent syntax of artistic convention. In the works that followed Intervista, I concentrated more on dealing with syntax rather than content, which was also a way to create room to escape the fixed expectations of other people. Since then, I have alternated between combining the two to varying degrees.
I would say there are four films in which I've explicitly worked with language: Intervista; Nocturnes (1999) [which juxtaposes interviews with two insomniac recluses, a fish enthusiast and a former soldier]; Dammi i colori (2003), in which language plays a surrealistic role because it describes the future, or a political conviction of how the future should be, such that the reality of what is being said cannot be proven, which is similar to Intervista; and Overthinking (2007), in which I interview the spirit of the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros through the aid of a medium. In this last instance the result was straightforward in that it's just a filmed conversation and the work does not have the complex structure that I have used for other videos, but here again language has the potential to both open up inaccessible worlds and to deceive.
Still from Lakkat (2004), color video with sound, duration 9 min 44 sec. © Anri Sala, courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
ART iT: The works you mention deal with language strictly in terms of discourse, but you also have works that further explore the limitations of semantics, such as Lakkat (2004), in which children are taught Wolof words related to lightness and darkness, and Promises (2001), in which four young Albanian men each attempt to repeat the line, "Nobody puts a price on my head and lives," attributed to the American gangster Al Capone.
AS: That's true. Promises has to do with the impossibility of saying something, when the last of the four men struggles with the idea of even speaking the sentence, and it also addresses syntax because the men are not native English speakers, so another guy plays with the ambiguities between "lives" and "leaves," which reflects the social context in Albania at a time when many people were intent on leaving the country to seek better livelihoods elsewhere.
Lakkat is also related to syntax because it produces content by association - not directly, because the words are presented one-by-one; and not taken out of context, because the words come with a lot of context already, but rather because you gradually realize the children don't understand the full significance of the words they are being taught. For example, in the beginning of the video one boy has trouble saying a word correctly and, with his mispronunciation of just one consonant, the meaning shifts between "very light" and "eating." And what I found fascinating during my research was that because of the racial politics of colonization, and the visualization of the social hierarchy along gradations of lightness, Wolof has many words for the differences between white and black, yet all the other basic colors are named with French loan words.
The actual shooting of the film was only one part of the project, which continued for several years with the translation of the audio into different languages for subtitling. Ultimately I produced a UK English version and a US English version in addition to a French version, purposely working with people who are not professional translators: the cultural theorist Stuart Hall in the UK; the post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha in the US; and the Chadian poet Nimrod in France. I did this because I wanted to underscore the awkwardness of languages in regard to translation. For example, the Wolof word toubab is almost untranslatable into French because its counterpart has such a racist connotation, while in UK English it was translated as "whitey," and for the US version as "Great White Hope." So instead of only translating the language of Lakkat, the project is also a translation of different relations to colonization.
Interestingly, in the US the phrase "Great White Hope" originates from attempts by the white establishment to produce a new white boxing champion after Jack Johnson became the first black man to win the world heavyweight title in 1908. A former champion, James Jefferies, came out of retirement to challenge Johnson, and lost. So the phrase was first associated with racist enterprise, then with white shame, and this ambivalence of meaning is analogous to the shifts over time in the connotation of the word toubab in Senegal, which otherwise is such a difficult concept to translate. For me, the subtitling was not just the usual process of bringing a film to an international audience. If subtitling is usually an exteriorization of the film, in this case it became a kind of interiorization.
Still from Promises (2001), color video with sound and English subtitles. © Anri Sala, courtesy the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
ART iT: You talk about the deceptive transparency of syntax, but you also seem to employ varying degrees of opacity in your works. For example, in Lakkat this aspect of working with poets and critical thinkers on the subtitling, as opposed to translators, is not evident to the average viewer. With Promises, too, the vital difference between "live" and "leave" in the context of post-Communist Albania is not so apparent, since the men are all filmed in the same nondescript interior setting.
AS: Certainly. Life in Albania at the time was very violent because there was a vacuum of law and order: everyone was welcome to be violent in a way. It was almost like a cowboy film, except that there was always a very real threatening presence. What happened with the last of the four men was that he refused to succumb to the virtuality of the cinema-style language. He took the whole thing very seriously. He was not worried about whether his accent would be good or whether he would sound dangerous or believable. For him, saying the line was an almost philosophical question: Do I believe in violence? It's not that everything was black-and-white - it's not like you were risking your life everyday - but if you were a young male going out to bars or going to school and so on, you had to choose how to engage with that violence. And at that point in life when your philosophical syntax is not fully developed, you can incline more toward one way, or the other. We all had these fantasies of becoming wilder or tougher or more threatening, but we were also reading books and exploring new ideas, so we knew there was an alternative. For him it was a philosophical statement not to play the game of violence in the street, and that carried over into the virtual realm of the video. The work ultimately crosses all these levels in the relations between identity and language.
ART iT: In the 1990s I was a student in Washington, DC, when it was known as the "Murder Capital of the US," and had a similar experience. I remember balancing an intellectual curiosity that I wanted to pursue further - but which could also be perceived as being unmanly - with a desire to be considered as tough as the next man, even though I was far on the periphery of any actual violence.
AS: Exactly. In Albania it depended on who was around you, although there were also people who could combine both the curiosity and the toughness - I mean, we necessarily had to be able to combine the two.
Part II. Orientation, This
Anri Sala discusses the choreograpy of perception in time and space.
Anri Sala: In and Out of Articulation
Tadashi Kawamata
THE RADIUS OF ACTION
By Andrew Maerkle
Working Progress (1996-99), work in situ, Alkmaar, The Netherlands, wood. Photo Leo van der Kleij. All images: © Tadashi Kawamata, courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris.
One of Japan's most distinguished artists, Tadashi Kawamata is known for projects that radically redefine individual relations to built space. Sometimes taking the form of walkways or raised concourses that alter the circulation or scale of public space, and at other times possessed of more sculptural dynamics, his interventions constructed from materials like scrap lumber and old chairs often develop with the involvement of the local community, and Kawamata is also active as a teacher and frequent participant in public workshops. Without necessarily being about anything, then, Kawamata's practice embodies the discursive potential of art - its ability to set bodies and ideas in motion.
As Japan continues to confront the catastrophe of the March 11 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami and ensuing, ongoing nuclear crisis, ART iT met with Kawamata in Paris to ask for his views on art's role in responding to such events, beginning with a frank assessment of the potential of the large-scale urban revitalization art project - a concept strongly associated in Japan with festivals held in rural areas like the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial and Setouchi International Art Festival, but also implemented to varying degrees in other localities - to serve as a platform for social contribution.
Interview:
ART iT: Since the March 11 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, many in the art community in Japan have been searching for a way to respond to the catastrophe. One possible model for response is the urban revitalization art project, but such projects cannot be approached uncritically, if the integrity of art is tied to the integrity of its social benefit. Your own works often develop out of collaboration with local communities, so against this backdrop, I'd like to know what you think of art's potential to contribute to post-3/11 reconstruction efforts.
TK: Over the years I have contributed my works to various charity causes, and I have already received several requests for donations since 3/11. However, I hesitate to rush into a direct artistic response to the catastrophe. I have no problem with those who choose to do so, but my work has always been predicated on building relations with municipalities and regions and their residents, so I am uneasy about the idea of exploiting this approach on account of the earthquake. It's natural for people to see images from the disaster zone and feel an urgent need to contribute in some way. But often in such cases everybody rushes in one direction, addressing immediate concerns of aid and recovery without necessarily facilitating lasting exchange. This mass reaction also puts undue pressure on all people to contribute, which I feel is the situation in Japan right now, and quite disturbing in its implications. For me, now is the time to reflect on my own, and then once everyone has moved on to the next issue, it will be my turn to act.
ART iT: Can you go into greater detail about your thoughts on the concept of urban revitalization as it has been deployed in the Japanese art scene in recent years?
TK: I dislike the term "urban revitalization," and have absolutely no interest in participating in such projects. A town cannot so simply be "revitalized." There are many cases of pursuing revitalization for revitalization's sake that fail to bring about any revitalization at all. Because these events are motivated by economic and other concerns, they lack a strong concept that can bring people together. They really need to be planned from much more of a long-term outlook. For example, there was a period when a number of urban revitalization art projects sprang up in various localities in Japan, but the problem was that these were completely event-based initiatives, organized with the hope that large numbers of visitors would draw attention to the region and deliver positive changes. As such, they were not sustainable, because exchange between people and the environment needs to happen on a much more fundamental level before there can be any results. This is not just about economics, but also education, or questions of how far to actually get local residents involved, or concerns over even more ambiguous connections with the community. Current urban revitalization art projects tend to be results-oriented, and this is precisely their biggest drawback.
Working Progress (1996-99), work in situ, Alkmaar, The Netherlands, wood. Photo Leo van der Kleij.
ART iT: Then do you not consider any of your projects to be related to urban revitalization?
TK: That is correct. I have never once done anything under the premise of urban revitalization. In my projects I have always been open to the participation of locals, but not with any idea that I would be herding them around. I am happy even if only one person wants to get involved, and then as our relationship grows that might lead to connections with other people, creating a special significance for each project as it unfolds. I couldn't say whether this leads to urban revitalization or not, but if my projects can affect in even the slightest way the awareness of the local populace, then that's enough for me.
Maybe what I do could be called "micro revitalization" - personal revitalization. I'm not looking to bring about drastic reform. Some of my projects last several years in the same location, so these are certainly not one-off events, and in various ways they develop on a case-by-case basis, extending into the present. But I would never go so far as to believe that I could ever help revitalize an entire town.
ART iT: For example, how do you distinguish a project such as Working Progress (1996-99), commissioned by the Brijder Clinic in Alkmaar, from urban revitalization?
TK: Rather than urban revitalization, the Brijder Clinic project was an attempt to make art in a place that had not had any involvement with art until that point, and where art's power had largely been unknown until that point. The Brijder Clinic is an addiction treatment center. I was initially approached by the clinic director to make a sculpture for the central courtyard of a new building that was being added to the complex, but I felt it would be far more interesting to do a project with the patients. At first there was resistance from the clinic, with staff voicing concerns that I could have a bad influence on the patients, or questioning what art had to do with their treatment. But I continued returning there every year to work with the patients, everybody outdoors building the walkway together, and there was a remarkable change in the patients' attitudes over that period. For example, as recognition for the project spread, reporters started to visit. At first the patients refused to be photographed, always turning their backs to the camera such that only my face would be visible in the images that were published in the media. Yet three years later, everyone was happy to face the camera, and we could all be photographed together. After all that time working together, the patients could take pride in their involvement with the project. This was a major change for them, and I think it was possible because of the way that art engages people.
Since then, I have received numerous requests from hospitals and clinics to conduct workshops and to speak about the relations between medical care, communities and art. Of course art therapy has a long history, but I think at Alkmaar we showed that it is also possible to engage patients in an even more physical way through collaborating on an activity and making an artwork. For me, the relations between art and medical treatment, since Alkmaar, have become closely integrated. That has nothing to do with urban revitalization. What I feel was interesting about Alkmaar was the idea that there could be room in medicine to accommodate art. The town hasn't changed at all, but I hear that people occasionally visit the clinic to see the work, and learn about how it came about.
I think that in Japan as soon as urban revitalization became consolidated as a methodology, everything became very constricted. Now, when artists go to the provinces in Japan, they are obliged to interact with the residents and cannot simply go out and make their own projects. This is particularly so in the case of large-scale events, at which community care inevitably goes hand-in-hand with urban revitalization. My concern is that this could reduce art to being nothing more than a tool for other purposes. As more obligations become attached to the commissions, artists are the ones who end up getting used. There should be room for more approaches.
Top: Destroyed Church (1987), work in situ, Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany, wood. Photo Leo van der Kleij. Bottom: Project on Roosevelt Island (1992), installation in situ, Smallpox Hospital, Roosevelt Island, New York, USA. Photo Hisayasu Kashiwagi.
ART iT: What about your projects like the Destroyed Church (1987) from Documenta 8 or Project on Roosevelt Island (1992), which made use of abandoned structures? Do these have some kind of regenerative impetus?
TK: At the time of those projects I was interested in archaeology, and approached them with the idea of excavating the historical background of the sites where they were carried out, or in another sense activating their existing characteristics to transform these sites into something entirely different. In the case of Destroyed Church, until I started working with it the site had all but disappeared from local consciousness. I started researching its history and in speaking with people found that it used to be a church, and had been destroyed during the war. Project on Roosevelt Island was the same. Some 100-odd years ago Roosevelt Island was home to an isolation ward for smallpox, and the island itself has its own historical significance. In a way these relations could only be revealed to a broader public through art. Indeed, what was interesting to see was how the project changed locals' perceptions of the site. Art can be applied to these places that everybody has forgotten, or no longer encounters in their daily lives. Without discounting the respective methodologies of researchers and academics, art has room for all kinds of potentialities.
ART iT: As with Working Progress in Alkmaar, for both Project on Roosevelt Island and Destroyed Church you collaborated with volunteers on the production. Was there any difference between these experiences?
TK: Yes. For Destroyed Church we worked with scrap lumber to build the structure, but scrap lumber is usually not something that can be easily found. I had five assistants, all of whom were immigrants from outside of Germany, and yet working together we were able to connect with different communities to find what we needed. For instance, through the mediation of a Turkish assistant we were able to find scrap lumber from the local Turkish community.
In that sense, my assistants were not simply laborers; they were interlocutors with different communities. For the work People's Garden (1992) for Documenta 9, I wanted to make an outdoor installation of favela-style huts, and this time had a Brazilian assistant who had actually grown up in a favela but was living in Kassel after marrying a German woman. He taught me how to build actual favela huts, and was deeply involved in realizing the work. When a work develops from the connections between locality, people and place, it is most interesting when you can achieve that kind of tight bonding or communication.
People's Garden (1992), work in situ, Documenta 9, Kassel, Germany, wood and steel. Photo Leo van der Kleij.
ART iT: But in contrast with Working Progress in Alkmaar, there was no particular therapeutic element to the collaboration involved in the other works, nor were the unique relations that you had with your assistants necessarily apparent to visitors who saw these works.
TK: The average visitor to Alkmaar might not know that the walkway we constructed there is an artwork, or that it was made by people seeking treatment for drug and alcohol addiction. But if even one out of every 100 visitors takes an interest in learning more about what it actually is, then that's enough for me. There are people with an intuitive curiosity who get it, but even those who do not realize what it is have other sensitivities that can be applied elsewhere - and it's partly thanks to those other people that I am able to produce my works. I don't need every single person to understand my process and methodology. I don't need to force my work on others, or have masses of people come to see it, as long as the minimum number of people who were involved can derive some sense of satisfaction from it, and spread word about it in a grassroots fashion. I'm not doing this out of ambition. I proceed one project at a time, and enjoy a continuous stream of new commissions, each one pushing me to develop new approaches and providing me with new challenges, so I'm appreciative that I can make a living doing what I want to be doing, all while receiving some measure of recognition from others.
ART iT: In that sense I'm also curious to know more about how you conceive the temporality of your works. What kind of existence do your works have in time?
TK: I think of everything I have done over the past few decades as one continuous project. Even if the site is different, and the people involved are different, or the circumstances of the involvement are different, or there are differences in scale and material, everything is still part of one project for me. It could be Switzerland this time, Belgium the next, or a different kind of town, or a different community, but I feel my methodology does not really change. I am pursuing one continuous, ongoing project that is still in progress.
ART iT: So whether the structures themselves are still standing or no longer extant does not affect the status of the work?
TK: It's the same. There are projects that are still standing, and those that have been destroyed, whether by accident or by design. But I can always make it again elsewhere, which is what I actually do. That's why I feel as though it's one continuous project that simply assumes different forms at different times. Rather than building an ever-growing body of works, it's more like their number always remains more or less constant, because it's all a continuation of the same project.
Promontoire sur la Loire (2011), work in situ, Chaumont-sur-Loire, wood.
ART iT: Do you think such a mentality imparts a degree of political agency to your works?
TK: The other day I was asked about Japan's prospects for recovery from 3/11. I replied earthquakes are a natural phenomenon, and have occurred numerous times throughout history. Moreover, Japanese history has always been distinguished by transience. One segment of Japanese history develops in a specific time and place, and when that comes to an end then another segment develops in a different time and place, in contrast to Europe where there's been a continuous historical development since Greek and Roman times, with the gradual formation of cities and nations. The cultural outlook itself in Japan is very provisional - quite similar in fact to how I approach my own practice. Some artists might have the idea of working toward making a masterpiece that will be collected by a museum and saved for posterity, but for me, as long as there is a memory of an action that has taken place, then it's fine if the work itself no longer survives. I think such a mentality is not only provisional, it is also opposed to accumulation, and it is actually because it is anti-accumulative that it is sustainable. I have no ambition to make the perfect work. My only motivation is to continuously pursue the action of making works.
ART iT: If that's the case, then what is worth preserving?
TK: It's not material. It's connections. It's memories. It's experiences. Things will eventually disappear, just as radiation disappears over time, even if it takes decades or, as with uranium, millennia. I have more faith in connections than in materials. Working together and developing camaraderie with others is what most interests me, and it's fine if the completed work is almost a byproduct of that process. Ultimately, it's not so much about simply saying that there's a finished product, and that we did all this just for the sake of production; rather, I'm using art for the sake of building connections. So if one of my works gets destroyed, it's not such a tragedy, because I will make more works. I like this idea of continuously rolling onward.
Tadashi Kawamata: The Radius of Action
By Andrew Maerkle
Working Progress (1996-99), work in situ, Alkmaar, The Netherlands, wood. Photo Leo van der Kleij. All images: © Tadashi Kawamata, courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris.
One of Japan's most distinguished artists, Tadashi Kawamata is known for projects that radically redefine individual relations to built space. Sometimes taking the form of walkways or raised concourses that alter the circulation or scale of public space, and at other times possessed of more sculptural dynamics, his interventions constructed from materials like scrap lumber and old chairs often develop with the involvement of the local community, and Kawamata is also active as a teacher and frequent participant in public workshops. Without necessarily being about anything, then, Kawamata's practice embodies the discursive potential of art - its ability to set bodies and ideas in motion.
As Japan continues to confront the catastrophe of the March 11 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami and ensuing, ongoing nuclear crisis, ART iT met with Kawamata in Paris to ask for his views on art's role in responding to such events, beginning with a frank assessment of the potential of the large-scale urban revitalization art project - a concept strongly associated in Japan with festivals held in rural areas like the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial and Setouchi International Art Festival, but also implemented to varying degrees in other localities - to serve as a platform for social contribution.
Interview:
ART iT: Since the March 11 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami, many in the art community in Japan have been searching for a way to respond to the catastrophe. One possible model for response is the urban revitalization art project, but such projects cannot be approached uncritically, if the integrity of art is tied to the integrity of its social benefit. Your own works often develop out of collaboration with local communities, so against this backdrop, I'd like to know what you think of art's potential to contribute to post-3/11 reconstruction efforts.
TK: Over the years I have contributed my works to various charity causes, and I have already received several requests for donations since 3/11. However, I hesitate to rush into a direct artistic response to the catastrophe. I have no problem with those who choose to do so, but my work has always been predicated on building relations with municipalities and regions and their residents, so I am uneasy about the idea of exploiting this approach on account of the earthquake. It's natural for people to see images from the disaster zone and feel an urgent need to contribute in some way. But often in such cases everybody rushes in one direction, addressing immediate concerns of aid and recovery without necessarily facilitating lasting exchange. This mass reaction also puts undue pressure on all people to contribute, which I feel is the situation in Japan right now, and quite disturbing in its implications. For me, now is the time to reflect on my own, and then once everyone has moved on to the next issue, it will be my turn to act.
ART iT: Can you go into greater detail about your thoughts on the concept of urban revitalization as it has been deployed in the Japanese art scene in recent years?
TK: I dislike the term "urban revitalization," and have absolutely no interest in participating in such projects. A town cannot so simply be "revitalized." There are many cases of pursuing revitalization for revitalization's sake that fail to bring about any revitalization at all. Because these events are motivated by economic and other concerns, they lack a strong concept that can bring people together. They really need to be planned from much more of a long-term outlook. For example, there was a period when a number of urban revitalization art projects sprang up in various localities in Japan, but the problem was that these were completely event-based initiatives, organized with the hope that large numbers of visitors would draw attention to the region and deliver positive changes. As such, they were not sustainable, because exchange between people and the environment needs to happen on a much more fundamental level before there can be any results. This is not just about economics, but also education, or questions of how far to actually get local residents involved, or concerns over even more ambiguous connections with the community. Current urban revitalization art projects tend to be results-oriented, and this is precisely their biggest drawback.
Working Progress (1996-99), work in situ, Alkmaar, The Netherlands, wood. Photo Leo van der Kleij.
ART iT: Then do you not consider any of your projects to be related to urban revitalization?
TK: That is correct. I have never once done anything under the premise of urban revitalization. In my projects I have always been open to the participation of locals, but not with any idea that I would be herding them around. I am happy even if only one person wants to get involved, and then as our relationship grows that might lead to connections with other people, creating a special significance for each project as it unfolds. I couldn't say whether this leads to urban revitalization or not, but if my projects can affect in even the slightest way the awareness of the local populace, then that's enough for me.
Maybe what I do could be called "micro revitalization" - personal revitalization. I'm not looking to bring about drastic reform. Some of my projects last several years in the same location, so these are certainly not one-off events, and in various ways they develop on a case-by-case basis, extending into the present. But I would never go so far as to believe that I could ever help revitalize an entire town.
ART iT: For example, how do you distinguish a project such as Working Progress (1996-99), commissioned by the Brijder Clinic in Alkmaar, from urban revitalization?
TK: Rather than urban revitalization, the Brijder Clinic project was an attempt to make art in a place that had not had any involvement with art until that point, and where art's power had largely been unknown until that point. The Brijder Clinic is an addiction treatment center. I was initially approached by the clinic director to make a sculpture for the central courtyard of a new building that was being added to the complex, but I felt it would be far more interesting to do a project with the patients. At first there was resistance from the clinic, with staff voicing concerns that I could have a bad influence on the patients, or questioning what art had to do with their treatment. But I continued returning there every year to work with the patients, everybody outdoors building the walkway together, and there was a remarkable change in the patients' attitudes over that period. For example, as recognition for the project spread, reporters started to visit. At first the patients refused to be photographed, always turning their backs to the camera such that only my face would be visible in the images that were published in the media. Yet three years later, everyone was happy to face the camera, and we could all be photographed together. After all that time working together, the patients could take pride in their involvement with the project. This was a major change for them, and I think it was possible because of the way that art engages people.
Since then, I have received numerous requests from hospitals and clinics to conduct workshops and to speak about the relations between medical care, communities and art. Of course art therapy has a long history, but I think at Alkmaar we showed that it is also possible to engage patients in an even more physical way through collaborating on an activity and making an artwork. For me, the relations between art and medical treatment, since Alkmaar, have become closely integrated. That has nothing to do with urban revitalization. What I feel was interesting about Alkmaar was the idea that there could be room in medicine to accommodate art. The town hasn't changed at all, but I hear that people occasionally visit the clinic to see the work, and learn about how it came about.
I think that in Japan as soon as urban revitalization became consolidated as a methodology, everything became very constricted. Now, when artists go to the provinces in Japan, they are obliged to interact with the residents and cannot simply go out and make their own projects. This is particularly so in the case of large-scale events, at which community care inevitably goes hand-in-hand with urban revitalization. My concern is that this could reduce art to being nothing more than a tool for other purposes. As more obligations become attached to the commissions, artists are the ones who end up getting used. There should be room for more approaches.
Top: Destroyed Church (1987), work in situ, Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany, wood. Photo Leo van der Kleij. Bottom: Project on Roosevelt Island (1992), installation in situ, Smallpox Hospital, Roosevelt Island, New York, USA. Photo Hisayasu Kashiwagi.
ART iT: What about your projects like the Destroyed Church (1987) from Documenta 8 or Project on Roosevelt Island (1992), which made use of abandoned structures? Do these have some kind of regenerative impetus?
TK: At the time of those projects I was interested in archaeology, and approached them with the idea of excavating the historical background of the sites where they were carried out, or in another sense activating their existing characteristics to transform these sites into something entirely different. In the case of Destroyed Church, until I started working with it the site had all but disappeared from local consciousness. I started researching its history and in speaking with people found that it used to be a church, and had been destroyed during the war. Project on Roosevelt Island was the same. Some 100-odd years ago Roosevelt Island was home to an isolation ward for smallpox, and the island itself has its own historical significance. In a way these relations could only be revealed to a broader public through art. Indeed, what was interesting to see was how the project changed locals' perceptions of the site. Art can be applied to these places that everybody has forgotten, or no longer encounters in their daily lives. Without discounting the respective methodologies of researchers and academics, art has room for all kinds of potentialities.
ART iT: As with Working Progress in Alkmaar, for both Project on Roosevelt Island and Destroyed Church you collaborated with volunteers on the production. Was there any difference between these experiences?
TK: Yes. For Destroyed Church we worked with scrap lumber to build the structure, but scrap lumber is usually not something that can be easily found. I had five assistants, all of whom were immigrants from outside of Germany, and yet working together we were able to connect with different communities to find what we needed. For instance, through the mediation of a Turkish assistant we were able to find scrap lumber from the local Turkish community.
In that sense, my assistants were not simply laborers; they were interlocutors with different communities. For the work People's Garden (1992) for Documenta 9, I wanted to make an outdoor installation of favela-style huts, and this time had a Brazilian assistant who had actually grown up in a favela but was living in Kassel after marrying a German woman. He taught me how to build actual favela huts, and was deeply involved in realizing the work. When a work develops from the connections between locality, people and place, it is most interesting when you can achieve that kind of tight bonding or communication.
People's Garden (1992), work in situ, Documenta 9, Kassel, Germany, wood and steel. Photo Leo van der Kleij.
ART iT: But in contrast with Working Progress in Alkmaar, there was no particular therapeutic element to the collaboration involved in the other works, nor were the unique relations that you had with your assistants necessarily apparent to visitors who saw these works.
TK: The average visitor to Alkmaar might not know that the walkway we constructed there is an artwork, or that it was made by people seeking treatment for drug and alcohol addiction. But if even one out of every 100 visitors takes an interest in learning more about what it actually is, then that's enough for me. There are people with an intuitive curiosity who get it, but even those who do not realize what it is have other sensitivities that can be applied elsewhere - and it's partly thanks to those other people that I am able to produce my works. I don't need every single person to understand my process and methodology. I don't need to force my work on others, or have masses of people come to see it, as long as the minimum number of people who were involved can derive some sense of satisfaction from it, and spread word about it in a grassroots fashion. I'm not doing this out of ambition. I proceed one project at a time, and enjoy a continuous stream of new commissions, each one pushing me to develop new approaches and providing me with new challenges, so I'm appreciative that I can make a living doing what I want to be doing, all while receiving some measure of recognition from others.
ART iT: In that sense I'm also curious to know more about how you conceive the temporality of your works. What kind of existence do your works have in time?
TK: I think of everything I have done over the past few decades as one continuous project. Even if the site is different, and the people involved are different, or the circumstances of the involvement are different, or there are differences in scale and material, everything is still part of one project for me. It could be Switzerland this time, Belgium the next, or a different kind of town, or a different community, but I feel my methodology does not really change. I am pursuing one continuous, ongoing project that is still in progress.
ART iT: So whether the structures themselves are still standing or no longer extant does not affect the status of the work?
TK: It's the same. There are projects that are still standing, and those that have been destroyed, whether by accident or by design. But I can always make it again elsewhere, which is what I actually do. That's why I feel as though it's one continuous project that simply assumes different forms at different times. Rather than building an ever-growing body of works, it's more like their number always remains more or less constant, because it's all a continuation of the same project.
Promontoire sur la Loire (2011), work in situ, Chaumont-sur-Loire, wood.
ART iT: Do you think such a mentality imparts a degree of political agency to your works?
TK: The other day I was asked about Japan's prospects for recovery from 3/11. I replied earthquakes are a natural phenomenon, and have occurred numerous times throughout history. Moreover, Japanese history has always been distinguished by transience. One segment of Japanese history develops in a specific time and place, and when that comes to an end then another segment develops in a different time and place, in contrast to Europe where there's been a continuous historical development since Greek and Roman times, with the gradual formation of cities and nations. The cultural outlook itself in Japan is very provisional - quite similar in fact to how I approach my own practice. Some artists might have the idea of working toward making a masterpiece that will be collected by a museum and saved for posterity, but for me, as long as there is a memory of an action that has taken place, then it's fine if the work itself no longer survives. I think such a mentality is not only provisional, it is also opposed to accumulation, and it is actually because it is anti-accumulative that it is sustainable. I have no ambition to make the perfect work. My only motivation is to continuously pursue the action of making works.
ART iT: If that's the case, then what is worth preserving?
TK: It's not material. It's connections. It's memories. It's experiences. Things will eventually disappear, just as radiation disappears over time, even if it takes decades or, as with uranium, millennia. I have more faith in connections than in materials. Working together and developing camaraderie with others is what most interests me, and it's fine if the completed work is almost a byproduct of that process. Ultimately, it's not so much about simply saying that there's a finished product, and that we did all this just for the sake of production; rather, I'm using art for the sake of building connections. So if one of my works gets destroyed, it's not such a tragedy, because I will make more works. I like this idea of continuously rolling onward.
Tadashi Kawamata: The Radius of Action
Bill Viola
BEYOND HORIZON
By Andrew Maerkle
Tempest (Study for The Raft) (2005), color high-definition video on flat panel display mounted on wall, duration 16 min 50 sec, screen 109 x 66 x 10.2 cm. Performers: Sheryl Arenson, Robin Bonaccorsi, Rocky Capella, Cathy Chang, Liisa Cohen, Tad Coughenour, Tom Ficke, James Ford, Michael Irby, Simon Karimian, John Kim, Tanya Little, Mike Martinez, Petro Martirosian, Jeff Mosley, Gladys Peters, Maria Victoria, Kaye Wade, Kim Weild, Ellis Williams. Photo Kira Perov. All images: Courtesy Bill Viola Studio.
A pioneer of video art and multimedia installations, Bill Viola was recognized this year with one of the world's most prestigious cultural distinctions, the Japan Art Association's Praemium Imperiale culture prize. Although Viola's works are often described as "moving paintings," they engage with a broad set of concerns developing from both an interest in what motivates human behavior and expression, as well as from a consideration of the specifics of medium and place, and the relations between artwork and viewer. As much as they create memorable or even iconic images - images that could be paintings - Viola's recent videos move in and out of time, extending an on-screen action for what can feel like an eternity through the use of slow motion, or dramatically redefining what at first appears to be an eternal image through the introduction of sudden, fleeting action, and it is often this aspect of the works - their use of images to facilitate a deep experience of time - that leaves the strongest impression on the viewer.
ART iT met with Viola to discuss his approach to art making in greater detail.
Interview:
ART iT: Your recent works seem to all follow a simple structure, with a single camera shooting from a fixed position in a continuous take. At the same time the consistency of your approach suggests that you are thinking about essential concerns of how images are constructed, and the relations between camera and subject. Is this a conscientious part of your recent practice?
BV: No, I'm not thinking at all about how images are constructed. What I'm most interested in is how human beings are constructed. I'm interested in how we perceive things in the world, how we interact with the world and how we are part of a larger whole that includes not only our own position in the world but also the mental states that we experience when we are confronted with things that we don't exactly understand. Most of my work is about self-knowledge or self-awareness, and not so much about the outside point of view or the position of observation, which I consider to be a scientific position - going back to Descartes - that has no interest for me. I'm interested in what's inside the self and how that manifests.
Certainly, if you look at my recent works - especially series like Ocean Without a Shore (2007), and "The Passions" from around 2000 - they seem to have a scientific basis. They are focused studies observing people behave in certain ways in controlled situations, which is in fact what I thought I was making at the time. But what I actually was doing was trying to understand the nature of our emotional selves.
For me, the best way to deal with that was to slow everything down so I could look carefully at what was happening, not with the idea of drawing any logical conclusions or making a statement the way Darwin did with his studies of human emotions [as in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)], but rather so I could understand it from the point of view of performance, from the point of view of an internal motivation. What makes us act a certain way? What makes you assume the posture that you do now, which obviously must be comfortable for you but is not at all comfortable for me? This unconscious or subconscious sense of order, which is very different from a mental or intellectual order, greatly interests me.
I should add that from the beginning of 2000 all my work came out of the fact that I had just lost my father, while my mother passed away at the beginning of 1992. That changed everything, because I was so distraught. My work could no longer be about intellectual processes; it was about trying to stay alive.
Left: Isolde's Ascension (The Shape of Light in Space After Death) (2005), color high-definition video on plasma display mounted on wall, duration 10 min 30 sec, stereo sound, screen 155.5 x 92.5 x 12.7 cm. Performer: Sarah Steben. Photo Kira Perov. Right: Installation view of Ocean Without a Shore (2007) at San Gallo, Venice, high-definition color video triptych, two 65-in plasma screens, one 103-in screen mounted vertically, continuous running, six loudspeakers (three pairs stereo sound), room dimensions variable. Performers: Luis Accinelli, Helena Ballant, Melina Bielefelt, Eugenia Care, Liisa Cohen, Darrow Igus, Page Leong, Oguri, Larry Omaha, Jean Rhodes, Chuck Roseberry, Lenny Steinburg, Julia Vera, Blake Viola, Ellis Williams. Photo Mike Bruce.
ART iT: But works such as Isolde's Ascension (The Shape of Light After Death) (2005) seem to engage in complex ways with elements of theatricality. Isolde's Ascension begins with the illusory image of a blue, watery surface at the bottom of the monitor and a shifting, atmospheric expanse above. At first you're not sure where the setting is. It could be outdoors, maybe by the sea, since there are indications of natural phenomena such as what appear to be mist and a horizon line, for example. Then the woman's body splashes into the composition from below, sinking upward, and the orientation and scale of the image are radically inverted and compressed, everything moving in opposition to the laws of physics. It is this very moment when the illusion reaches its climax that the construction of the work is also revealed. We can piece together that it's been filmed indoors, with a tank of water, and the camera has been placed upside down.
BV: Yes. I've been doing that most of my career. I have always been interested in doing the minimum manipulation possible to achieve the maximum effect. In that piece all I did was to turn the camera upside down, but because it's in a pool and because it was lit a certain way, you think all sorts of things when it starts: is this the cosmos, or the sky? You don't know what it is, and then you gradually learn as it unfolds, getting clues until you see the woman appear, and even then you're not sure. I can't tell you how many people have told me they didn't realize the bubbles are going the wrong way, upside down. It shows how much we don't see, or how much we take for granted in images.
I like that piece because it's mysterious and you don't really know where you are. Even when she enters the frame and she starts floating up, you still don't understand that she's actually sinking. All you have to do is take the monitor and turn it upside down, and then you'll see what the real orientation is. I was doing that for quite a while, trying to challenge myself to make the smallest change for the maximum result. It was a little game I played with myself for quite a number of years. I don't do it so much anymore.
ART iT: In contrast, your earliest works and installations seem to engage more directly with the technological aspects of video and its display. I'm sure being part of the first generation to use the medium necessitated a degree of reflexivity in terms of how you used it.
BV: That's all I was after: reflexivity. The very first video I made that I considered a success was about understanding the nature of the self. The work is titled Tape I (1972), with the "I" in the title not referring to the Roman numeral, but rather I, as in myself. I set up a simple situation, placing a camera in a room with a mirror on the wall and a door behind, and I entered. At this point viewers of the video see a person entering a room and moving forward, but then something strange happens: all of a sudden the person appears in front of the screen and you realize you were seeing a mirror image the whole time. Then I sat down in a chair, looked straight ahead at the camera, and tried to focus my concentration on myself for as long as possible, until I could gather a scream as loud and as strong as I could, while trying to restrain it at the same time. So this video, the very first I ever made, combines this idea of reflexivity and self-knowledge with a complete release, a complete breaking and crashing through this image of the self in the mirror.
Top: Tape I (1972), videotape, black-and-white, mono sound, duration 6 min 50 sec. Produced at Synapse Video Center, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York. Bottom: The Reflecting Pool (1977-79), videotape, color, mono sound, duration 7 min. Both: Photo Kira Perov.
ART iT: And this interest was intricately tied to exploring the medium itself?
BV: Yes. What video gave artists that we never really had before - more so than photography, even though video emerges from photography - was to make possible a real-time, simultaneous image of the self. You could see yourself not as a past image, as in photography, but as a present-tense image.
For many people that effect is very disturbing. Some of the pieces I made when I was younger could be very disturbing to people because they don't like to look at themselves. They can do it with a photograph because it's a fixed representation, but when they see themselves in video - in the moment - they might laugh, but it would be a nervous laughter. It isn't a nice experience. Then they start to analyze themselves, thinking, "Do I really look like that?" Instead of becoming a nice document of one's self, video introduces a disturbing, out-of-balance element.
ART iT: In terms of the relationship between technology and effect, another work that intrigues me is The Reflecting Pool (1977-79), for which in editing the video you manipulated different layers of time.
BV: The whole scene at that time with video was all about experimentation. People were constantly breaking new ground, which was both challenging and exciting. I participated in that, and wanted to contribute to it. In a way my early works were about portraiture: many of them were framed tight around head and shoulders, very clear and confrontational. I don't like analyzing my own work, but you can't help it as you get older and remember things, and the power of The Reflecting Pool was that it was the first piece that moved away from concerns of self-image by shifting the setting into nature.
At the time I didn't even understand what I was doing. I'm telling you this now, but when it was happening, when I saw the pond in the woods and saw the reflections, I immediately knew that I wanted to work with it, without thinking it through at all. There was no intellectual process. I simply took the camera, found the right position, and knew I had to keep it fixed while shooting these scenes across two days, with views of the pond in the daytime and afternoon and evening light. It was an important breakthrough for me because it got me out of this narcissistic mode, which I think most young artists experience. This work moved me into nature, which hadn't interested me to that point because to me nature was the classical landscape - the Dutch painters - and so old-fashioned that I wanted nothing to do with it. This piece also led me to work more with water, which has been a very important part of my life. So it was a starting point for a new way of working.
ART iT: Yet as you've come to look more at people as opposed to your self, it seems you've shifted back into the studio environment. What you mention about the controlled environments of "The Passions" struck me when I saw your work Tempest (Study for The Raft) (2005), in which you spray a group of people with powerful jets of water and film their reactions, many of which evoke historical depictions of anguish and supplication. Why couldn't these people act out their responses, why was it necessary for them to be induced by the water? There's no easy resolution to this question, because if you had them act, it might not be as convincing - although it would in a sense be a real performance - whereas spraying them with water produces strong reactions, but in a controlled environment such expressions become disingenuous. Which is more "genuine," and which more referential?
BV: You're opening up a real interesting set of issues, because who's to say that even right now we are not acting? I think you and I are acting. If you leave and I stay here on my own, in a way I would still be acting, because I would be remembering what we were just discussing, and I would know where I am: I would be in a kind of scene.
This aspect of self-knowledge goes back to the myth of Narcissus, although in the Greek tradition it's treated as a cautionary tale, in that he falls into the water and drowns. And the French theorists in recent years have been strongly concerned with questions of how real is real, what is reality and what is an illusion, what is pretend and what is truth. On the other hand, I wasn't so interested in trying to resolve these issues as they manifest in post-modernist critique, which to me is analogous to police interrogation. When the police interrogate someone, they shine a light on the subject and demand to know all its secrets. For me, that's not a valid way to create art. I'm not after anybody's secrets. I'm involved in nature, in the world, in this moment, and I believe strongly in temporality and time-form.
People look at my work and see that I use slow motion, see these connections with historical representation, but I do not consider myself to be a visual artist. I'm a time artist. I developed my own version of time-form, creating graphs that are not about the visual part of the works at all but about the temporality of the works, which I used in making "The Passions." That's what I discovered in dealing with my father's death, which was the end of time as I knew it, as a son. I realized that we live in time the way fish live in water: we can't see it, we can't taste or touch it, but it's an integral part of our lives. Most people are not aware of this, just as a fish does not know what water is. Instead of going deeper into the visual, which I had done previously, I started to focus on time.
Top: The Quintet of the Astonished (2000), color-video rear projection on screen mounted on wall in dark room, projected image size 1.4 x 2.4 m, room dimensions variable, duration 15 min 20 sec. Performers: John Malpede, Weba Garretson, Tom Fitzpatrick, John Fleck, Dan Gerrity. Bottom: I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986), videotape, color, stereo sound, duration 89 minutes. Produced in association with the Contemporary Art Television Fund, Boston, and ZDF, Germany. Both: Photo Kira Perov.
ART iT: How does that relate to the expressions playing out in the images you create, which in may cases are very essential human expressions?
BV: Yes, they are archetypes. If without warning I suddenly clap my hands in front of your face - clap! - I can scare the shit out of you. And if I did it again - clap! - it's not as strong, but I can still scare you. My Zen teacher used to do that. If he sensed the slightest bit of self-awareness in me, he would slap me right in the head - bang! - while we were talking, and I would be in shock, wondering what it was I had done.
This is an entirely other discussion and I don't want to go too far, but Japan has given the world an amazing gift with Zen practice. The point of Zen practice, as I understand it, is to get the mind out of the way. The archer pulls the arrow and fires it, but if you ask him, he would say he hasn't done anything; the arrow shoots itself. This intricate system that exists in practices like swordsmanship and archery is unified by the idea of getting rid of the mind - not in general, but the conscious mind, the one that's right now calculating and assessing its situation. That's the one that thinks, "Oh, I can do this, I can make a piece that will impress everybody." If you get that out of the way, then you attain what Zen masters call emptiness, "no mind," and that's when you can be most pure in your actions.
The Japanese more than any other culture figured out a way to do that. Why? It comes from the samurai swordsman, the play between life and death. You make one false move and you're dead, there's no second chance. They had to develop this incredible system for bringing everything down to a fine edge of reality so they could defeat their opponents.
The relationship between time and expression follows. You can actually do something without doing it. The essential point is to get the conscious self out of the picture, so there's no thinking involved.
ART iT: We had talked at the beginning about constructing images, or thinking about constructing images, so is this interest in time-form a different line of investigation from the works that deal more explicitly with human expression?
BV: I don't know. At a certain point the works I was making became deeply connected with people, with humanity. As I mentioned, I lost my mother at the beginning of the 1990s and my father at the end of the 1990s, and those two events were disturbing and difficult to deal with. I realized how serious everything is. I realized that the life force is very fragile, and it changed my whole awareness of my experience in the world and what I can expect in the future - which is death - and my work came to be about people dealing with experience and what that means.
After The Reflecting Pool, there was also a body of work that focused on nature. I did a major, hour-and-a-half long piece on animal consciousness, I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986), for which I spent time with a herd of buffalo in Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. I was trying to figure out what sentience is. When I started those works with myself or other people sitting in front of the camera and looking, I was actually exploring that without realizing what I was doing. What is consciousness? How can you experience the world? How do you reflect on it? How do you process it?
All that built up to recognizing that animals can think and see and have primitive emotions, which got me interested in animals and what they might be seeing and thinking. That was very important to do because it brought me out of the human mode and into visualizing or comprehending what life might be for other sentient beings. The Buddhists say that anything that has a life force is sentient, while the ancient Greeks thought stones could be alive. The question they asked was, what is alive and what is not alive? Whereas later Western culture comes along and asks, what has a mind? But then what is awareness? What is that point where you enter awareness, and what is that point where it disappears? When does something become an object? Sometimes it's not so clear.
Bill Viola: Beyond Horizon
By Andrew Maerkle
Tempest (Study for The Raft) (2005), color high-definition video on flat panel display mounted on wall, duration 16 min 50 sec, screen 109 x 66 x 10.2 cm. Performers: Sheryl Arenson, Robin Bonaccorsi, Rocky Capella, Cathy Chang, Liisa Cohen, Tad Coughenour, Tom Ficke, James Ford, Michael Irby, Simon Karimian, John Kim, Tanya Little, Mike Martinez, Petro Martirosian, Jeff Mosley, Gladys Peters, Maria Victoria, Kaye Wade, Kim Weild, Ellis Williams. Photo Kira Perov. All images: Courtesy Bill Viola Studio.
A pioneer of video art and multimedia installations, Bill Viola was recognized this year with one of the world's most prestigious cultural distinctions, the Japan Art Association's Praemium Imperiale culture prize. Although Viola's works are often described as "moving paintings," they engage with a broad set of concerns developing from both an interest in what motivates human behavior and expression, as well as from a consideration of the specifics of medium and place, and the relations between artwork and viewer. As much as they create memorable or even iconic images - images that could be paintings - Viola's recent videos move in and out of time, extending an on-screen action for what can feel like an eternity through the use of slow motion, or dramatically redefining what at first appears to be an eternal image through the introduction of sudden, fleeting action, and it is often this aspect of the works - their use of images to facilitate a deep experience of time - that leaves the strongest impression on the viewer.
ART iT met with Viola to discuss his approach to art making in greater detail.
Interview:
ART iT: Your recent works seem to all follow a simple structure, with a single camera shooting from a fixed position in a continuous take. At the same time the consistency of your approach suggests that you are thinking about essential concerns of how images are constructed, and the relations between camera and subject. Is this a conscientious part of your recent practice?
BV: No, I'm not thinking at all about how images are constructed. What I'm most interested in is how human beings are constructed. I'm interested in how we perceive things in the world, how we interact with the world and how we are part of a larger whole that includes not only our own position in the world but also the mental states that we experience when we are confronted with things that we don't exactly understand. Most of my work is about self-knowledge or self-awareness, and not so much about the outside point of view or the position of observation, which I consider to be a scientific position - going back to Descartes - that has no interest for me. I'm interested in what's inside the self and how that manifests.
Certainly, if you look at my recent works - especially series like Ocean Without a Shore (2007), and "The Passions" from around 2000 - they seem to have a scientific basis. They are focused studies observing people behave in certain ways in controlled situations, which is in fact what I thought I was making at the time. But what I actually was doing was trying to understand the nature of our emotional selves.
For me, the best way to deal with that was to slow everything down so I could look carefully at what was happening, not with the idea of drawing any logical conclusions or making a statement the way Darwin did with his studies of human emotions [as in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)], but rather so I could understand it from the point of view of performance, from the point of view of an internal motivation. What makes us act a certain way? What makes you assume the posture that you do now, which obviously must be comfortable for you but is not at all comfortable for me? This unconscious or subconscious sense of order, which is very different from a mental or intellectual order, greatly interests me.
I should add that from the beginning of 2000 all my work came out of the fact that I had just lost my father, while my mother passed away at the beginning of 1992. That changed everything, because I was so distraught. My work could no longer be about intellectual processes; it was about trying to stay alive.
Left: Isolde's Ascension (The Shape of Light in Space After Death) (2005), color high-definition video on plasma display mounted on wall, duration 10 min 30 sec, stereo sound, screen 155.5 x 92.5 x 12.7 cm. Performer: Sarah Steben. Photo Kira Perov. Right: Installation view of Ocean Without a Shore (2007) at San Gallo, Venice, high-definition color video triptych, two 65-in plasma screens, one 103-in screen mounted vertically, continuous running, six loudspeakers (three pairs stereo sound), room dimensions variable. Performers: Luis Accinelli, Helena Ballant, Melina Bielefelt, Eugenia Care, Liisa Cohen, Darrow Igus, Page Leong, Oguri, Larry Omaha, Jean Rhodes, Chuck Roseberry, Lenny Steinburg, Julia Vera, Blake Viola, Ellis Williams. Photo Mike Bruce.
ART iT: But works such as Isolde's Ascension (The Shape of Light After Death) (2005) seem to engage in complex ways with elements of theatricality. Isolde's Ascension begins with the illusory image of a blue, watery surface at the bottom of the monitor and a shifting, atmospheric expanse above. At first you're not sure where the setting is. It could be outdoors, maybe by the sea, since there are indications of natural phenomena such as what appear to be mist and a horizon line, for example. Then the woman's body splashes into the composition from below, sinking upward, and the orientation and scale of the image are radically inverted and compressed, everything moving in opposition to the laws of physics. It is this very moment when the illusion reaches its climax that the construction of the work is also revealed. We can piece together that it's been filmed indoors, with a tank of water, and the camera has been placed upside down.
BV: Yes. I've been doing that most of my career. I have always been interested in doing the minimum manipulation possible to achieve the maximum effect. In that piece all I did was to turn the camera upside down, but because it's in a pool and because it was lit a certain way, you think all sorts of things when it starts: is this the cosmos, or the sky? You don't know what it is, and then you gradually learn as it unfolds, getting clues until you see the woman appear, and even then you're not sure. I can't tell you how many people have told me they didn't realize the bubbles are going the wrong way, upside down. It shows how much we don't see, or how much we take for granted in images.
I like that piece because it's mysterious and you don't really know where you are. Even when she enters the frame and she starts floating up, you still don't understand that she's actually sinking. All you have to do is take the monitor and turn it upside down, and then you'll see what the real orientation is. I was doing that for quite a while, trying to challenge myself to make the smallest change for the maximum result. It was a little game I played with myself for quite a number of years. I don't do it so much anymore.
ART iT: In contrast, your earliest works and installations seem to engage more directly with the technological aspects of video and its display. I'm sure being part of the first generation to use the medium necessitated a degree of reflexivity in terms of how you used it.
BV: That's all I was after: reflexivity. The very first video I made that I considered a success was about understanding the nature of the self. The work is titled Tape I (1972), with the "I" in the title not referring to the Roman numeral, but rather I, as in myself. I set up a simple situation, placing a camera in a room with a mirror on the wall and a door behind, and I entered. At this point viewers of the video see a person entering a room and moving forward, but then something strange happens: all of a sudden the person appears in front of the screen and you realize you were seeing a mirror image the whole time. Then I sat down in a chair, looked straight ahead at the camera, and tried to focus my concentration on myself for as long as possible, until I could gather a scream as loud and as strong as I could, while trying to restrain it at the same time. So this video, the very first I ever made, combines this idea of reflexivity and self-knowledge with a complete release, a complete breaking and crashing through this image of the self in the mirror.
Top: Tape I (1972), videotape, black-and-white, mono sound, duration 6 min 50 sec. Produced at Synapse Video Center, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York. Bottom: The Reflecting Pool (1977-79), videotape, color, mono sound, duration 7 min. Both: Photo Kira Perov.
ART iT: And this interest was intricately tied to exploring the medium itself?
BV: Yes. What video gave artists that we never really had before - more so than photography, even though video emerges from photography - was to make possible a real-time, simultaneous image of the self. You could see yourself not as a past image, as in photography, but as a present-tense image.
For many people that effect is very disturbing. Some of the pieces I made when I was younger could be very disturbing to people because they don't like to look at themselves. They can do it with a photograph because it's a fixed representation, but when they see themselves in video - in the moment - they might laugh, but it would be a nervous laughter. It isn't a nice experience. Then they start to analyze themselves, thinking, "Do I really look like that?" Instead of becoming a nice document of one's self, video introduces a disturbing, out-of-balance element.
ART iT: In terms of the relationship between technology and effect, another work that intrigues me is The Reflecting Pool (1977-79), for which in editing the video you manipulated different layers of time.
BV: The whole scene at that time with video was all about experimentation. People were constantly breaking new ground, which was both challenging and exciting. I participated in that, and wanted to contribute to it. In a way my early works were about portraiture: many of them were framed tight around head and shoulders, very clear and confrontational. I don't like analyzing my own work, but you can't help it as you get older and remember things, and the power of The Reflecting Pool was that it was the first piece that moved away from concerns of self-image by shifting the setting into nature.
At the time I didn't even understand what I was doing. I'm telling you this now, but when it was happening, when I saw the pond in the woods and saw the reflections, I immediately knew that I wanted to work with it, without thinking it through at all. There was no intellectual process. I simply took the camera, found the right position, and knew I had to keep it fixed while shooting these scenes across two days, with views of the pond in the daytime and afternoon and evening light. It was an important breakthrough for me because it got me out of this narcissistic mode, which I think most young artists experience. This work moved me into nature, which hadn't interested me to that point because to me nature was the classical landscape - the Dutch painters - and so old-fashioned that I wanted nothing to do with it. This piece also led me to work more with water, which has been a very important part of my life. So it was a starting point for a new way of working.
ART iT: Yet as you've come to look more at people as opposed to your self, it seems you've shifted back into the studio environment. What you mention about the controlled environments of "The Passions" struck me when I saw your work Tempest (Study for The Raft) (2005), in which you spray a group of people with powerful jets of water and film their reactions, many of which evoke historical depictions of anguish and supplication. Why couldn't these people act out their responses, why was it necessary for them to be induced by the water? There's no easy resolution to this question, because if you had them act, it might not be as convincing - although it would in a sense be a real performance - whereas spraying them with water produces strong reactions, but in a controlled environment such expressions become disingenuous. Which is more "genuine," and which more referential?
BV: You're opening up a real interesting set of issues, because who's to say that even right now we are not acting? I think you and I are acting. If you leave and I stay here on my own, in a way I would still be acting, because I would be remembering what we were just discussing, and I would know where I am: I would be in a kind of scene.
This aspect of self-knowledge goes back to the myth of Narcissus, although in the Greek tradition it's treated as a cautionary tale, in that he falls into the water and drowns. And the French theorists in recent years have been strongly concerned with questions of how real is real, what is reality and what is an illusion, what is pretend and what is truth. On the other hand, I wasn't so interested in trying to resolve these issues as they manifest in post-modernist critique, which to me is analogous to police interrogation. When the police interrogate someone, they shine a light on the subject and demand to know all its secrets. For me, that's not a valid way to create art. I'm not after anybody's secrets. I'm involved in nature, in the world, in this moment, and I believe strongly in temporality and time-form.
People look at my work and see that I use slow motion, see these connections with historical representation, but I do not consider myself to be a visual artist. I'm a time artist. I developed my own version of time-form, creating graphs that are not about the visual part of the works at all but about the temporality of the works, which I used in making "The Passions." That's what I discovered in dealing with my father's death, which was the end of time as I knew it, as a son. I realized that we live in time the way fish live in water: we can't see it, we can't taste or touch it, but it's an integral part of our lives. Most people are not aware of this, just as a fish does not know what water is. Instead of going deeper into the visual, which I had done previously, I started to focus on time.
Top: The Quintet of the Astonished (2000), color-video rear projection on screen mounted on wall in dark room, projected image size 1.4 x 2.4 m, room dimensions variable, duration 15 min 20 sec. Performers: John Malpede, Weba Garretson, Tom Fitzpatrick, John Fleck, Dan Gerrity. Bottom: I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986), videotape, color, stereo sound, duration 89 minutes. Produced in association with the Contemporary Art Television Fund, Boston, and ZDF, Germany. Both: Photo Kira Perov.
ART iT: How does that relate to the expressions playing out in the images you create, which in may cases are very essential human expressions?
BV: Yes, they are archetypes. If without warning I suddenly clap my hands in front of your face - clap! - I can scare the shit out of you. And if I did it again - clap! - it's not as strong, but I can still scare you. My Zen teacher used to do that. If he sensed the slightest bit of self-awareness in me, he would slap me right in the head - bang! - while we were talking, and I would be in shock, wondering what it was I had done.
This is an entirely other discussion and I don't want to go too far, but Japan has given the world an amazing gift with Zen practice. The point of Zen practice, as I understand it, is to get the mind out of the way. The archer pulls the arrow and fires it, but if you ask him, he would say he hasn't done anything; the arrow shoots itself. This intricate system that exists in practices like swordsmanship and archery is unified by the idea of getting rid of the mind - not in general, but the conscious mind, the one that's right now calculating and assessing its situation. That's the one that thinks, "Oh, I can do this, I can make a piece that will impress everybody." If you get that out of the way, then you attain what Zen masters call emptiness, "no mind," and that's when you can be most pure in your actions.
The Japanese more than any other culture figured out a way to do that. Why? It comes from the samurai swordsman, the play between life and death. You make one false move and you're dead, there's no second chance. They had to develop this incredible system for bringing everything down to a fine edge of reality so they could defeat their opponents.
The relationship between time and expression follows. You can actually do something without doing it. The essential point is to get the conscious self out of the picture, so there's no thinking involved.
ART iT: We had talked at the beginning about constructing images, or thinking about constructing images, so is this interest in time-form a different line of investigation from the works that deal more explicitly with human expression?
BV: I don't know. At a certain point the works I was making became deeply connected with people, with humanity. As I mentioned, I lost my mother at the beginning of the 1990s and my father at the end of the 1990s, and those two events were disturbing and difficult to deal with. I realized how serious everything is. I realized that the life force is very fragile, and it changed my whole awareness of my experience in the world and what I can expect in the future - which is death - and my work came to be about people dealing with experience and what that means.
After The Reflecting Pool, there was also a body of work that focused on nature. I did a major, hour-and-a-half long piece on animal consciousness, I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986), for which I spent time with a herd of buffalo in Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. I was trying to figure out what sentience is. When I started those works with myself or other people sitting in front of the camera and looking, I was actually exploring that without realizing what I was doing. What is consciousness? How can you experience the world? How do you reflect on it? How do you process it?
All that built up to recognizing that animals can think and see and have primitive emotions, which got me interested in animals and what they might be seeing and thinking. That was very important to do because it brought me out of the human mode and into visualizing or comprehending what life might be for other sentient beings. The Buddhists say that anything that has a life force is sentient, while the ancient Greeks thought stones could be alive. The question they asked was, what is alive and what is not alive? Whereas later Western culture comes along and asks, what has a mind? But then what is awareness? What is that point where you enter awareness, and what is that point where it disappears? When does something become an object? Sometimes it's not so clear.
Bill Viola: Beyond Horizon
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