Omer Fast: Pt III

III.


Video still from Looking Pretty for God (After GW) (2008), single-channel video, color, sound, 27 min. All images: Unless otherwise noted, © Omer Fast; courtesy the artist, gb agency, Paris; and Taro Nasu, Tokyo.

ART iT: Speaking of Everything That Rises Must Converge brings to mind another special industry in Southern California, child actors, many of whom are unwittingly pushed into show business by their parents. You worked with child actors in Looking Pretty for God (After GW) (2008), having them pose for photo shoots and lip-synch interviews with funeral home directors; perhaps it was heavy material for them to take on. How was it working with child actors?

OF: The kids had no clue what they were saying. They were too young to understand what these morticians whom I interviewed, and whose voices they were channeling, were saying. They were in a sense parrots, or ventriloquist’s dummies. Their relationship to the information was very superficial, and that’s something I like, because the moment you remove knowledge from the equation, you begin to destabilize who the conveyor of the information is and what his or her relationship to the information is about. You strip away the ideology. If you were to give the lyrics of the “Star-Spangled Banner” to Japanese kids who do not know English, and ask them to sing it in front of a camera, you would get something different from what an English speaker could produce, if he or she even understood the lyrics…
You asked me before about references. The Israeli artist Roee Rosen made a wonderful work with the migrant laborers who are now everywhere in Israel, many of whom come from Asian countries. He gave them texts that he wrote in Hebrew, written so that they could read them phonetically, and had them sit in front of the camera and recite those texts. Some of the texts were extremely personal and perverse, but these people had no idea what they were saying, and their pronunciation was also off because of that. In a sense the work highjacks somebody’s body, and uses that body in order to convey information, but also to examine the dynamics that happen when the body that speaks is not necessarily aware of what it’s saying. And that again highlights role-playing, and performance, and power, of course. So I think that work is a good analog for what it is I try to do.

ART iT: Does that dynamic apply even to a work like The Casting, in which you have an actor interpret a preexisting interview text?

OF: Maybe it does in the sense that the text is not yours, so you’re at least one level removed from it. But with an adult who is speaking in his own language and who comes from the shared cultural context of the text, you can’t really strip away as much of the ideology and performance as you can when you take a foreigner or a child and ask them to read and perform a text about which they have no clue. That’s not to say that’s the method that needs to happen every time. But it creates dissonance, and I’m interested in dissonance.

ART iT: On the other hand, in Her Face Was Covered (2011) you seem to be exploring the idea of over-literally interpreting a text.

OF: In this work, I’m using Google as the proxy, the virtual body to infect, to possess, and to channel. The words come from this narrative about a drone mission. What I did, just to recount, is that after the interview I fed the sentences one by one into Google’s image search, and then the machine–or the algorithm–returned a selection of images. In a way, the machine was filling in for the missing body, giving language and the sentences in the work a particular appearance. Because of the misunderstanding that is built into that process–the dissonance, as I mentioned before–the relationship is a jarring one or an absurd one. It can go anywhere from being completely illustrative to completely dissonant, with all the stops in between. The work is trying to see how language connects to images, not just on the Internet, but also in our heads.

ART iT: For me the work also has an aspect of paranoia informing it, whereby an innocuous word or image is suddenly infused with an alternate meaning that can be sinister or threatening. How does a woman suddenly become a combatant? There could be any number of motivations for picking up a gun on the roadside. So the work is not just about creating funny juxtapositions of nonsensical images.

OF: I guess in a nutshell the work is concerned with the way that appearances motivate actions and justify them. In the case of the drone operators, once a decision was made that this person was a combatant, a chain of events ensued that led to her death. What the work is trying to do is outline that whole nexus of appearances. We know that appearances are deceiving and we know that the process is complicated, so the work is not necessarily trying to announce that, but certainly it’s a process that is not without its problems. Even the voice we hear in the work tries to pin down whether this combatant was a man or woman, and why, since obviously he didn’t have a DNA test at his disposal. Those are the limits of the technology, which is all-powerful and all-seeing but also has its errors: flying overhead and then trying in retrospect to justify a murder because a person appeared to have been entering into combat.


Both: Installation view of Her Face Was Covered (2011) at Taro Nasu, Tokyo, 2015. Two-part multimedia installation with single-channel digital video, 6 min; and slide projector with 80 slides playing at four-second intervals. Photo Keizo Kioku. © Omer Fast, courtesy Taro Nasu, Tokyo.

ART iT: Both Her Face Was Covered and 5000 Feet were produced at the same time?

OF: Yes. If you look at the footage for the first part of Her Face Was Covered, it shows the crew preparing the set for a scene from 5000 Feet. We have the cars that are overturned, and the crater that was just dug; they’re scattering fake body parts and debris around, spray painting things and beginning to torch things with fire. From enough distance, the crewmembers appear to be scavengers after an attack. But when the camera zooms in, you see that they are actually involved in preparing a scene for filming.
In order to make 5000 Feet, I had to speak with several military people who were involved in the drone industry. I had this particular story that I ultimately didn’t use, which I decided to spin off into a small work. The voice you hear in Her Face Was Covered is that of a friend of the actual interview subject who was a drone pilot. The guy wouldn’t speak to me directly, whether on Skype or by phone. He didn’t want to reveal anything about himself, so he had his friend speak on his behalf, again like a ventriloquist or somebody channeling a voice. These are things that are always reappearing in the work–this notion of possession and the work being an exorcism of a sort. So his friend is answering the questions I direct at him, and there is a delay in the responses because the friend gets the information from the subject and then conveys it to me.
I had that as an audio file and I decided to give it the following treatment: You have a couple layers of representation. You have the voice, of course, which is not that of the actual subject–it’s someone else speaking–and then you have the image of these people who appear to be scavengers but are actually working on a film set, preparing something that appears to relate to this story about the aftermath of a rocket attack. On top of that, the work is taking the narrative verbatim and feeding it into the image search–another technology–in order to get another perspective on the narrative. Each sentence brings back an image, and the story exists as a slideshow alongside a video projection.

ART iT: How did you get in touch with the people who agreed to speak about being drone pilots for 5000 Feet and Her Face Was Covered?

OF: I have a producer in Los Angeles with whom I have made works like The Casting and 5000 Feet, and he’s very smart. We knew the base where the military drones are controlled from is just outside Las Vegas, so we put an ad on Craig’s List and asked for active-duty soldiers in the program to get in touch with us. We got quite a few responses, although it was obvious, at least superficially, that some of the respondents were just crazy, or liars, or both. Liars are interesting to me anyways, so I met with the some of the more crazy ones just to see what they would say, but we also had a few people who were involved in the drone program.

ART iT: It’s amazing you were able to get responses through posting on Craigslist.

OF: Yes. We started out by contacting the military and the CIA. It was not the first time I have tried to go through official channels to get meetings, and I didn’t expect the answer to be yes. Actually, I didn’t even get a response. I don’t represent something that is of any interest to these organizations. They are very careful about how and when they put their resources and people in front of a camera–and all the more so regarding the drone program, which again has this shadow or liminal status of being quasi-officially recognized. Going through a backchannel of an online classified page turned out to connect me with at least a couple of people, one of whom appears in the work.

ART iT: You have just completed your first feature film, Remainder (2015). How was it working on a feature film, and adapting a novel? Was it appreciably different from what you’ve done so far?

OF: It’s very different. There’s a different process in developing the script and producing it. I mentioned before that typically art institutions and curators who commission works are not involved in the development or production, even if they are involved in how the artwork is presented and distributed. That is very much not the case in filmmaking. And then adapting a novel, coming up with a script of a certain length, the length of the shoot, the budget–everything is different. But it’s the way that the commissioning parties involve themselves in the production that is most different from what I normally do.


Above: 5000 Feet is the Best (2011), single-channel, HD video, color, sound, English spoken, 30 min. Below: Installation view of 5000 Feet is the Best (2011) at Taro Nasu, Tokyo, 2015. Photo Keizo Kioku. © Omer Fast, courtesy Taro Nasu, Tokyo.

ART iT: I enjoy the actors in your works. I’m not sure if it’s about the performances or the direction, but, for example, the actor who plays the interview subject in 5000 Feet has this uniquely prickly yet deadpan air about him. Another memorable character is the woman who plays the immigration official in Nostalgia. What’s your approach to dealing with actors, or choosing them, even?

OF: For me, the process of choosing an actor is very tedious. I try to get help from the casting professionals in recommending people and in having them read for the part. It might be something as dry as watching clips of people perform pieces of text that I’ve written, or having them do it live and seeing how they respond if I try to direct them differently. Or in the case of people who are better known, I might offer them a part and see if they’re interested.
With Denis O’Hare, the actor in 5000 Feet, it was an offer only, and he had time and was interested, and was very generous and accommodating. We filmed all his scenes over one very, very long day. I had a script, but I didn’t have a shooting plan and I wasn’t very organized about things, and that means you end up spending more time working than you planned. The work in itself was accommodating of that, because it is very much about repetition. He’s playing the same scene over and over again, and I think some of the exasperation in the performance is very authentic, because it was the eighth or 12th hour of filming, and I’m sure he was asking himself, “What the fuck am I doing here, saying these lines again for the 200th time?”

ART iT: Would you say the repetition is really what drives the performances then?

OF: I think repetition is inherent to the process of filmmaking. It’s extremely important, because often on the first take the actors are nervous, the crew isn’t sure what’s going on, the camera’s not completely trained on things, and so you have to repeat things for technical reasons.
But one thing that’s very interesting to me–and I do this also in my interviews–-is what happens when you simply ask someone to repeat something. That’s one of the tools I try to use. In the case of actors, it’s asking them to repeat scenes or lines or actions, while in the case of interviews, it’s asking the same question again and again and again. What happens with the actors, and also with the people being interviewed, is that at some point you’ve given the information as well as you can, or have repeated it several times over as requested. By the fourth or fifth time, you begin to gain some distance from what you’re saying, and how you’re saying it, and there’s a kind of self-consciousness that enters the equation. That’s when things can get very interesting.

I | II | III

Omer Fast: View Finder

Copyrighted Image