Luke Fowler

LEADER AS GUTTER
By Andrew Maerkle


Luke Fowler & Toshiya Tsunoda – Leader As Gutter, installation view at Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, 2013. Photo Kenji Takahashi, courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.

Based in Glasgow, Luke Fowler maintains a diverse practice that spans documentary films, collaborative multimedia installations and music. Incorporating both found and original footage, Fowler’s films challenge the ideology informing the narrative conventions of mainstream documentary film, while his multimedia installations with sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda explore the physical mechanics of how sound, film and environment interact. One such collaboration, Composition for Flutter Screen, was presented in Japan at the Yokohama Triennale in 2008. The pair presented their latest collaboration, Leader As Gutter, in an exhibition at Taka Ishii Gallery that concluded October 12.

ART iT met with Fowler while he was in Tokyo installing the exhibition to discuss his broader practice, his collaboration with Tsunoda and their new work.

Interview:


Luke Fowler – What You See Is Where You’re At (2001), film still, DVD, color and b/w, sound, 24 min. Courtesy the artist and the Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow.

ART iT: You’ve made a series of what could loosely be described as documentary films, and you’ve also made multimedia installations that explore the material aspects of how film is presented. Notably, the Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing has been a recurring figure in your documentary films. To begin with, could you talk about RD Laing and how he and his ideas have fed into your practice? Does his influence extend to other projects, like your collaborations with Toshiya Tsunoda?

LF: I first came to Laing when I was at art school in the late 1990s through books like The Politics of Experience, but it wasn’t until I had my own personal experiences with psychiatry that I began to measure his work against life and the experiences that life throws up. At that point I realized I wanted to work with these texts somehow.
Actually, before Laing I was interested generally in psychological experiments, like the Stanford Prison Experiment. When I came to Laing it was through an interest in the community he set up in London in the late 1960s called Kingsley Hall, which was a social experiment cum therapeutic community. I went there and made interviews for a film that is ostensibly a documentary film, What You See is Where You’re At (2001). I interviewed people who had worked with Laing including the therapist Leon Redler, who gave me archival material. Some of it was on videotape and the videotape had no picture; some of it was on film. I interspersed this archival material with footage I had shot and also archival television footage that I got through a friend who worked at the BBC. Also, a producer who had made a more official documentary allowed me to use some of her material. It was when I put these materials together that I became interested in the ruptures in these different modes of information. One of them was a DIY archive that was made by the patients and residents of Kingsley Hall with no structure or pretenses to being broadcast. Then there was my own filming, which had a purpose, and this television footage, which had a purpose. Seeing this stark contrast, I recognized the ideological differences between the materials. This got me interested in making films that in some way criticized the prevailing norms of how documentary film is structured.
That was the first project using Laing. Then I made another film, called Bogman Palmjaguar (2007), with the therapist Redler, so it was a continuation of our relationship, and it didn’t use any archival material. It was more influenced by structural film and experimental film in Britain. It was also the first time I used a 16mm camera to shoot my own footage rather than recycling other people’s footage. That threw up its own set of problems, namely, dealing with a real individual who is alive, rather than someone who is dead and can no longer speak back. I made another work, The Nine Monads of David Bell (2006), about one of the residents of Kingsley Hall who interested me, and then the final work about Laing is the hour-and-a-half film, All Divided Selves (2011), which I call a non-feature film because the length is just arbitrary – it was the length it needed to be.
But whether the Laingian influence extends to the work with Toshiya is maybe not for me to say, it’s for other people to judge. I wouldn’t say there’s any conscious influence.

ART iT: You’ve done films on the musicians Xentos Jones – The Way Out (2003) – and also Cornelius Cardew – Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006) – but unlike Laing, they don’t seem to have had this metastasizing effect of leading to other works. They seem to be more contained projects.

LF: I’d say there’s a thread running through why I choose to make portraits of certain people, but Laing as a thinker has perhaps been more penetrating. Although I definitely think Cardew has a resonance. You never know when these things will bear fruit or play out in other works. It’s certainly not conscious. I don’t set out to make a set of works about one person or one figure. The Laing thing was really a set of happy accidents because of the energies of other people who were propelling me forward to make more work on the subject and the feeling that there was still work to be done. I think there is also work to be done on Cardew, but it feels like other people are taking on that baton and there are a lot of other projects about him already.


Luke Fowler – Top: The Way Out (with Kosten Koper) (2003), film still, DVD, color and b/w, sound, 33 min. Bottom: Pilgrimage From Scattered Points (2006), film still, DVD, color and b/w, sound, 45 min. Both: Courtesy the artist and the Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow.

ART iT: With the three figures of Laing, Jones and Cardew, was there some kind of motivation for bringing them back into the present?

LF: I don’t think they ever went away. There isn’t any overarching plan behind my work. I’m not trying to rehabilitate what someone has said to be “repudiated figures” who have been dishonored or are outsiders. I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I think it’s a combination of what’s happening outside of my artwork in my own life and how it reverberates with my own life and my own thinking, and then thinking that perhaps the popular representation of those figures leaves something to be desired and that there’s work to be done in reconsidering their legacies.

ART iT: What led you from making documentary films to installations like A Composition for Flutter Screen (2008), which was displayed at the 2008 Yokohama Triennale?

LF: In the case of Composition for Flutter Screen, it was simply meeting Toshiya. In a way you could say the turning point in certain works has been the work itself. Perhaps the thread that binds all my work is that I often collaborate with other people, and do not just work in isolation. Although I have ideas of my own, they’re challenged by the ideas of the people I work with.
When it came to Flutter Screen I had made shorter works without documentary subjects before, but this was the most expansive and successful of those early 16mm studies. The reason why it was such a big work for Toshiya and I was that we took what we knew from our disciplines and applied it to another discipline. He was taking his ideas from field recording and applying it to film, and I was taking ideas from film and applying it to sound. You can see it as well in the trilogy, A Grammar For Listening (2009), for which I worked with the sound artists Lee Patterson and Eric La Casa as well as Toshiya. Although I’m the lynchpin behind those collaborations, they’re all quite different in their formal approaches and that comes from me being amenable to the desires and directions of what my collaborators wanted to achieve.

ART iT: In that sense, where RD Laing has been a recurring subject in the documentary side of your practice, Toshiya has been a constant collaborator. What is it about working with Toshiya that keeps you producing together?

LF: I enjoy Toshiya’s thinking first and foremost. I was drawn to him through his recording work. I met him in Argyle while he was making some sound installations there, and realized how much of a personality he was. He’s a very funny guy, interested in cinema. We talked about Tarkovsky and Ozu, and then later we talked about conceptual art and realized we had a lot of overlap and that he was interested in artists like Hanne Darboven. In fact, he introduced me to conceptual and minimal artists I wasn’t aware of.
It’s really Toshiya’s attitude to making work that I find refreshing because it’s so completely outside of the art world, yet he’s very much aware that there’s an end result that’s manifest in an exhibition. He’s aware of the sculptural properties of a work. It’s a fruitful collaboration both in terms of our personalities and stretching each other artistically and intellectually.


Top: Luke Fowler – Composition for Flutter Screen (w. Toshiya Tsunoda) (2008), installation with 16mm color film and projector, homemade screen, timer, wire, fans, lights. Installation view Yokohama Triennale 2008. Photo Veno Norihiro, courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitan, Cologne, and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow. Bottom: Luke Fowler & Toshiya Tsunoda – Ridges on the Horizontal Plane (2011). Photo Lothar Schnepf, courtesy of the artists, Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

ART iT: You mention Toshiya’s sculptural sensibility. The new piece for Taka Ishii Gallery, Leader as Gutter (2013), has a strong sculptural presence, with 16mm film being projected into a rectangular stack of translucent plates that both captures and distorts the images. Were you exploring the sculptural properties of film in this project?

LF: From Flutter Screen, the first idea was the problem of film’s presentation, the passive consumption of the film environment of the cinema. With that project we were trying to make a crack into this older structure of what cinema is and we did that by creating a live, dynamic composition where there was a complex of different objects that interacted with each other without resolution. It was like a never-ending puzzle. There’s an introduction of characters in the form of objects, but there’s no argument or plot pushing the film forward. What’s pushing it forward is your own mind and awareness of what’s happening and the links you make between your body and your experience of the space, and the holistic interaction between images and sound and the environment.
That then led to Ridges on the Horizontal Plane (2011). In these first two pieces, film certainly wasn’t the sole motivator of the work, and neither was the sound aspect, musical or otherwise. We wanted to make films without prerecorded soundtracks, so that the sound had to be produced in the space by objects, and then we wanted them to have a dynamic energy, so in Ridges we used wind that touches a string to dampen a continually sustained note, or in Flutter Screen there’s a wire that’s being vibrated by a motor that’s on a timer, and there are several other things on timers including fans and lights, and all these objects interrupt the pleasure of watching a classic, cinematic film.
I see the current film as a continuation of that concern, but the way Toshiya suggested the stack came from his looking at minerals and the quality of rocks, and the idea of phantom crystals that are historical markers in the layers of a crystal. So the film becomes a “phantom crystal” trapped within the layers of the stack.
Toshiya was talking about how static Japanese history has been since the 1930s, how it’s been repressed for a new embrace of the capitalist, Western view of what Japanese culture is, and he’s interested in looking back at Japanese history in the same way that I am also interested in looking back at historical ideas and asking questions in the future. So the book I chose to use in the film is about mapping, which had resonances with Toshiya’s work, and the book’s pages also have a material quality that suggests a stack, and obviously when one is writing a book there’s a progression of ideas, so there’s this feedback cycle going on between the book’s pages and the glimpsing of words within the book and light being trapped within the layers of this object.


Luke Fowler & Toshiya Tsunoda – Leader as Gutter, installation view at Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, 2013. Photo Kenji Takahashi, courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.

ART iT: For me it was almost like a conundrum. There’s no way to experience the work in its entirety from one position. You have the light hitting the wall as a fragment of the projection, and you can look into the stack to see the rest of the projection, but you can also look from above or from the side of the stack, and each view has its own quality. One of the things it underscores for me is our anxiety to see the whole image. You end up looking at the image in the stack first to try to put the whole thing back together again, but as you let go of that, you can experience other aspects of the work.

LF: When we made Grammar for Listening, I remember asking questions – Why are we doing this? – and a lot of the time Toshiya didn’t know the answer, he just followed a desire. In this case, we’re not the breed of artist where there’s a foreclosure on how to read the work. It’s an open-ended possibility. We’re following desires and directions that are not conclusive as to what they might mean, but there’s something in there that resonates within our selves and our ideas, and we hope that won’t dictate how the viewer experiences the work or what the work means. For me, that is the ideal artwork, where there are intrinsic qualities, but it doesn’t trap you into one reading. It’s not like this whodunit quality that you need someone to unpick the work for you or you need a press release to tell you what the work is about. It’s an invitation to the viewer to speculate and experience the work from multiple perspectives and from all its resonances within the world of ideas.

Luke Fowler: Leader As Gutter

Copyrighted Image