Omer Fast: Pt II

II.


CNN Concatenated (2002), video, monitor, color and sound, 18 min 17 sec. All images: Unless otherwise noted, © Omer Fast; courtesy the artist; gb agency, Paris; and Taro Nasu, Tokyo.

ART iT: I think you’ve said in previous interviews that your work should not necessarily be taken as a political statement for or against war, or whatever topical subject it seems to be addressing, but if not politics per se, would you say your work attempts to deal with ideology as such?

OF: Of course. And if we think about identity, then the notion of ideology has to come into play. Whether it’s a family or a nation, we exist as units, and these structures are very much endowed with ideologies that help us function and direct us in certain ways. To some degree, the work tries to unpack that dynamic between the ideological and the performative and how the two connect across structures, whether in the case of a family, or actors appearing on a stage, or soldiers. The work is a way for me to understand how things are put together. But rather than try to explain something or critique it, I try to create analogs of representation. I literally try to disassemble and reassemble things to see how they fit.

ART iT: Was there any other artist or filmmaker who influenced you or pointed you in the direction you’ve taken?

OF: Yes, but I’m not very good at this. I don’t have a list of names. But certainly, since we’re in Japan, Rashomon was huge for me. What can I say–of course it was! With regard to the cannibalistic notion of narrative–this idea that the characters are not to be trusted, and you’re pretty much on your own to figure out what happened–it was huge for me! That would be one example. It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but I remember the cataclysmic effect it had on me the first time I saw it.

ART iT: What’s impressive about your work is that so much production goes into something that might be just 20 or 30 minutes long, or even six minutes long. You have a location, film crew, props: a microcosm of what a major film production would entail. How do you manage this kind of practice, which requires so much production for realizing relatively concise ideas?

OF: I don’t manage it very well. I didn’t go to film school, so a lot of it was learning on my own, and I think the work reflects that. In the sense of role-playing, there’s always me playing the role of the artist, trying to figure things out, not just socially or structurally as I mentioned before, but also, how the hell are we going to make this movie? I need to cobble together a budget in order to produce the works, and the money usually comes from several institutions, and I have to wait, and when I put it together it’s never enough, and it’s a big mess. But there’s a lot of freedom in the arts, in that, responsibly or not, there’s not a lot of oversight. When people give you money in the art world, they don’t call two weeks later to see what you’re filming and look at rushes. So that leaves a lot of space to try things out.

ART iT: So when you made CNN Concatenated (2002), was that one of your first times working with editing programs?

OF: I didn’t have any budget for making works during my first years as an artist. There were no commissions. So I tended to give myself long, open-ended assignments, of which CNN Concatenated was one. I started work on it in late 2000 and finished sometime around 2002. At the time, I was working at a news corporation in New York, and news was very much on my mind, so I started collecting things. That is often the origin of all my works–even in meeting people and talking to them, I am a collector of information.
For CNN Concatenated, I collected words rather than stories, but the words come with baggage. They’re not free. They’re not abstract. They’re not dictionary entries. They are words spoken by news anchors and journalists who are looking directly at the camera, so there is a body physically saying the word, and behind that body there is often a picture, or a graphic, or both, as well as a caption. There’s a lot of information in that picture. So the words and the pictures were in a sense conjoined in the archive I was collecting, and I was interested in refashioning that collection of words into a narrative, and so I started to write things. It was very similar to learning a language. In fact, I was learning German at the time, after moving to Germany, so life imitated the work and the work imitated life.
In the end I used the words I collected similarly to how I use the interviews that I collect: as a way of reflecting on a particular situation in time. While I was making the work, the September 11 attacks happened, and it became part of the images, part of the narrative behind the speakers in the footage I collected. The work used that information to reflect on that situation and also to build a character or proxy–a hyper-sensitized viewer who becomes a producer of content.
Looking back at it now, the work is certainly dated, but in a good way. You can look at the work and listen to what it’s saying, which is not necessarily so time specific, but as time passes, the graphics, the look of the news, the things people are wearing and their haircuts begin to look funny, like things out of a time capsule. I like for the work to have that function, to reflect on a particular moment in time and also to try to emerge from that specificity somehow.


Above: Production still from Godville (2005), two-channel video projection, color, sound, 50 min. Below: Footage still from The Casting (2007), four-channel video installation, color, sound, 14 min.

ART iT: Would you say that CNN Concatenated provided a foundation for later works like Godville (2005) and The Casting (2007)?

OF: Yes. But this is something which is basic to any kind of editing, no matter whether you’re making a documentary or fiction or whatever: you take the information and you cut and splice it. The degree to which the cuts are apparent is an aesthetic decision, and even an ideological decision. These are things that are very much on the mind of the person making the work, and they can also be on the mind of the person seeing the work, depending on how transparent, or irritating, or strange a cut can be. CNN Concatenated is all about that. You get that within the first second of seeing the work.
Godville was made in 2004 and finished in 2005. I applied the same process of cutting up the stories I was collecting–in this case, from people who work as “character interpreters” at the living history museum of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, which of course has the ideological function of narrating America’s history to its visitors. I asked a number of character interpreters to answer questions both in character, as their 18th-century selves, and also out of character, as their 21st-century selves. I then used the editing as a way of welding those two voices and identities together.
There were some strange parallels that emerged from that. The 18th-century characters are of course concerned with war–the War of Independence–and at the time, in 2004, it was the beginning of the US invasion of Iraq, so the 21st-century selves were also concerned with war. Bringing those two into some kind of strange alignment allowed me to create a schizophrenic portrait.
I often see my work as portraiture. My works are portraits of people speaking about their work. Whether they are soldiers or living-history interpreters or adult film performers, I’m interested in creating portraits of work and workers. But as we just discussed, I also make portraits of a particular situation that involves an artist sitting in front of another person–the worker, the interviewee. This is where the work gets its energy and where the situation depicted in the interviews can become relational, political, psychological and tense.

ART iT: In your work with the adult film performers, Everything That Rises Must Converge (2013), you use a fly-on-the-wall approach, following the four performers as they wake up and go through their daily routines, including a film shoot. But everything is not quite what it seems. Pornography becomes a metaphor for doing something representationally that is also real at the same time. They’re having sex, and it’s real sex, but it’s not.

OF: Exactly.

ART iT: One moment that unsettles the whole premise of the film for me is when the performers are all in bed, getting ready for sleep, and then one of the men calls his ex-wife and asks to speak to their children. After he hangs up, he pauses for a moment of reflection and you wonder: is he feeling sad about not being able to live with his kids? Is he feeling remorseful about some choice that he made in the past that led to this situation? But that also begs the question, if he’s doing this for the camera, then why would he “act” this particular moment of reflection as part of his routine? On the other hand, if it is a real moment of reflection, then what does that mean for the “pornographic” simulacrum?

OF: Precisely. That’s the contradiction that’s central to having the camera in a space where people are ostensibly living their lives. At the start, the work tries to sell you the story that you can watch a slice of these people’s lives–24 hours in an adult film performer’s life. I think, and I hope, that the footage is compelling enough that you suspend your disbelief and say, “OK, I’m watching four people wake up and clean their privates in the shower and do all sorts of things as they prepare for work.” And in a sense they are, because they actually are going to work. And so the work is playing with this notion that you can watch these people behind the scenes. But if you spend anytime thinking about it, you realize that it’s all baloney. Even the smallest camera crew cannot insinuate itself into somebody’s bedroom without that person letting us in. We didn’t break into four people’s homes to film them while they were sleeping, and then they woke up and comfortably ignored us. There is a presentation of self that’s happening here, and the performing of one’s life. These are the issues that are extremely interesting to me.
What tends to be misunderstood about the work is that the reality of the performers is something that exists always as a function of the camera, and yet is also always beyond what the camera is able to show. No amount of filming or chasing them around and interviewing them is going to pin down the essence of who they are. That has to remain a mystery. But it doesn’t mean we can’t wake up in the morning and knock on somebody’s door with a camera, and ask to see what they do, because we still learn something from that.


All: Production still from Everything That Rises Must Converge (2013), four-channel digital film, color, sound, 56 min.

ART iT: So the work is a commentary on not just pornography itself, but all camera-based representation?

OF: I wouldn’t go that far. But I think that the dynamic you’re seeing is very much involved with role-playing. What becomes dangerous is when we forget that we, too, are constantly performing, and that performance–the pretence–is the reality of what we do. People tend to think that the adult film performers are bad actors, but they’re not. They are acting in a particular genre that requires them to behave and speak in a certain way. I ultimately decided not to include the conversations in the work, but I spoke to them off camera, and they’re very smart about what it is they are doing. They are aware of who their audience is and what that audience needs.
The work tries to take that and build these layers around it. One of the layers, as you point out, is tantalizing. It’s playing with voyeurism, because that’s what pornography is about. The premise of pornography, and the reason it’s so tantalizing, is that you kind of think you’re seeing something real, but you know it’s not. That flip-flop that happens there is what I think gives pornography its heat, and the work just tries to extrapolate that dynamic to these people’s lives.

ART iT: The pornographic camera elicits a certain kind of performance. What about the drone or surveillance camera, which essentially operates beyond the awareness of the people it films? Are we performing for the drone as well?

OF: The prevalence of surveillance and CCTV cameras everywhere obviously changes the fabric of our public space, and our private space as well, since we have these cameras with us all the time. I’m old enough to remember a time when cameras were not as prevalent and penetrating.
It’s funny because the camera, which is the main tool of the pornography industry, is also the source of its undoing now. This pornographic contract that says, “look, we’re going to sell you something that’s real, but is also not,” has been superseded by so-called amateurs who have their own cameras at home and are selling you something that is “more authentic” than what you’re seeing when you watch studio-produced porn. We like the heat of seeing somebody having sex with his girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever, where the codes of representation tell us that they are real people–whatever that means–when in fact these people made the decision to turn on the camera and are very much involved in a performance for that camera.
We know that cameras are everywhere. We know that things change when a camera shows up. My work is not revealing a big truth. It’s not saying, presto, look how the world has changed around us! It’s trying to look at that tangle of representation and performance in order to understand how we are composed individually and collectively. That’s it, pretty much.

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