Ken Okiishi: Pt III

III.


gesture/data (2015), oil paint on flat-screen television, mp4 file
(color, sound). All images: © Ken Okiishi; courtesy the artist
and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo.

ART iT: In addition to the multimedia piano performance Vorstellungsklavier, you also once did a more-or-less straightforward harpsichord recital at the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, but as an art performance. In artistic terms, it was a performance but a non-performance at the same time, perhaps in the manner of a readymade. It was an ordinary harpsichord recital, but it wasn’t just a harpsichord recital.

KO: It was both simultaneously. I like what you say, that it’s almost like a readymade. I think it was difficult for people to understand, but they felt it.

ART iT: This ties in to the idea of occupation in your work–not just how we occupy space or time, but also how we are “occupied” or possessed by the media around us. For example, early works like Death and the College Student (1999) and Telly and Casper (2000) have these characters whose behavior replicates lines and scenes from iconic movies. Do you think those early works still inform what you’re doing now?

KO: Yes. There is a funny anecdotal way of answering this, which is that my mother was a family therapist, and we had this particular, almost technological way of speaking about our feelings in complex systems. My mother had developed an expanded understanding of modern dance (she had been a dancer) and the then-new media as a way of working with clients, and other kinds of mixed systems like that–which of course also made its way into her approach to being a mother.
The other anecdote that helps is that I grew up in a university setting where the kids were used as experimental subjects for new teaching methods, and there was a television camera in our classroom with a live feed to the university, where the researchers would discuss our behavior, and then the teacher would feedback the researchers’ impressions to us, so she was talking to both them and us at the same time.
These kinds of feedback systems mixed up with affect and theoretical discussions all coming together were important for me, which is what Death and the College Student really enacts. With Telly and Casper, it’s a bit more removed because I’m playing the director and I have actors, sort of. It may sound conceptual, but it’s strange to say that these things came about very intuitively.

ART iT: So has your creative process always leaned more to the intuitive side of things?

KO: I think it’s a very writerly process. What does intuition mean when you’re writing? Sometimes you try free writing, or you just start writing things down. It really comes down to the question, where do ideas come from? There’s always a process of division and making sense and editing and forming, and then something resembling a coherent thought gets output in the end. So the real answer is that the processes for making each of the works are similar, and whether you call it intuitive or self-reflexive or conceptual or performative–to me it’s all related because they are different parts of the process. You could call it an extreme self-awareness that can also be not self-aware.
But I would resist saying something like in the current work I am inhabiting a particular character, because I don’t think that’s the case, whereas Death and the College Student really was about putting on different kinds of masks and channeling things through different vessels. I think those levels are less divided now.


Above: Still from Telly and Casper (2000), digital video, color/sound, 27 min. Below: Still from Death and the College Student (1999), Hi8 transfered to digital video, color/sound, 31 min.

ART iT: Most of Telly and Casper is shot with a handheld camera, and it’s never quite clear whether the camera is just a camera–an objective viewpoint–or in fact represents another person. Toward the end, there is a long, static take of Telly dancing. When Telly finishes dancing, he walks to the camera, picks it up so that now we’re seeing things from his viewpoint, continues to the bathroom where Casper is, and tries to enter. At which point, Casper shuts Telly out, and then we cut to a “second” camera inside the bathroom with Casper. It’s like the camera has a split personality.

KO What I like when I re-watch the work is that it’s almost itinerant or peripatetic–the way both the dialogue and the camera’s point of view rove around or start to space out or get lost–because the script was constructed by taking dialogue and locations from Larry Clark’s Kids and inserting them into this very naturalistic situation where the relationship to the film becomes so oblique that it seems like reality again, and then there are those breaking moments where the camera’s point of view suddenly changes.
With the dance scene, we have this five-minute take from a static camera-–almost like a Chantal Akerman reality–which is the most “objective” point of view, and then there is a rupture when the character picks up the camera and turns it around. There is a rupture in the tension between acknowledging that this is a film and believing that you are experiencing something happening in real life that’s very emotional. And then it brings in the question, what is the point of view of this film at all?

ART iT: Maybe in the way that the actors are playing both Telly and Casper from Kids and at the same time “Telly” and “Casper” in a film by Ken Okiishi, you are also simultaneously playing the filmmaker “Larry Clark” and the artist “Ken Okiishi.” It’s not just that the camera is a character in the film, it’s also an embodiment of somebody who is necessarily outside the film. Were you consciously trying to complicate the agency of the camera and, by extension, the viewer, in this way?

KO: I think when I made the work I was responding to things I was encountering in my studies at Cooper Union. At that point, it was post-Marxist theory; structuralism; semiotics; Foucault, etc; historiography; and certain kinds of feminist theory that would now be understood as relating to “performativity,” but at the time were hotly debated and fractured. This theoretical study doesn’t necessarily appear in a clear way, but that to me is the correct relationship of theory to an artwork. The artwork should not be an illustration. That unresolvability is what makes something an artwork.

ART iT: I saw that at Cooper Union you studied with Hans Haacke and Doug Ashford. What was that like?

KO: I think the work I was making at this time was partially a reaction against the relationship between the theoretical and the artwork that was sometimes happening in their classes–which often felt deflated and repetitive. So I developed a rather conflicted relationship to the notions of “criticality” that were being debated there. I shared a commitment to the political concerns, but found the forms that were generated within this network of criteria for signifying “criticality” to be boring–in a way that Hans’s and Group Material’s work, when seen in historical perspective, was decidedly not. I guess I was reading between the lines, and finding the gaps and hesitations in theoretical discussions related to artworks: the places where the artwork exceeded what was being claimed about it; the points where new and perhaps unresolved and contradictory relationships were formed. And, it should be mentioned, they were both supportive of this experimentation, even if it led to some pretty volatile group crits.

ART iT: So do your works start from the idea of challenging the critical or “meta” perspective? Are they attempting to short circuit the idea of the outside perspective?

KO: Yes. It’s something that is almost easy to understand now with globalization–that there is no outside. Whereas before, when there was the tension between capitalism and communism or socialism, between East and West, the Berlin Wall–all those boundaries–there were always fantasies of the other side. The idea of another side is difficult to conceptualize now. It feels like there is no outside. But there is no inside either. There is no individual. There is no collective. It cancels out both ways.

ART iT: Is that something the green screen was instrumental in realizing for you?

KO: Yes. That seemed to be the place where you could collapse these things. Or it was the actual site of collapse–the screen itself, a void.

ART iT: Do you think your works are anti-utopian in that sense? For example, is (Goodbye to) Manhattan showing us the fantasy in order to get us more focused on the real?

KO: I haven’t really thought of that. One of the things I like to do is to project displacement onto inappropriate bodies–to project displacement onto people who may not be seen to feel displacement–as another way of creating rupture. So I think that’s why it becomes difficult. Because if you made a film about an immigrant in general, or an alienated migrant, specifically, everyone would understand exactly why the characters feel and talk the way they do. I like the rupture that happens when you take a different kind of person and make them act in a totally unexpected way, because it’s also displacing the direction of what’s happening. You can have one script with the wrong person and the right person at the same time. In this sense the utopian question is interesting because, when that happens, you do find a commonality among sites that ordinarily would not have any commonality or shared ability to relate.

ART iT: You mean the fantasy and the real?

KO: It could be the fantasy and the real, or it could be the entitled subject and the marginalized subject, or the entitled subject and the exploited subject. But this melancholic mode is just part of my work–the aporia of the melancholic, the production of hesitation. I think those go together.


Above: Still from (Goodbye to) Manhattan (2010), video, color/sound, 72 min. Below: Installation view of (Goodbye to) Manhattan at Take Ninagawa, Tokyo, 2012. Photo Kei Okano.

ART iT: Where does the combination of high-tech and low production value in your films come from?

KO: I go to the movies about four times a week, both to see screenings at MoMA and at regular cinemas. Maybe that’s why it’s all mixed up. Robert Breer is another person I studied with, so I have a hard time understanding why it’s necessary to make a distinction between low-tech or low production and high production. We tend to just accept the materials the artist has to work with.
People seem to think that everyone should either have a 10-million dollar budget or a five-dollar budget, but of course that’s not true. It’s not a decision. Because, really, to make a film look like what people would call “high production” these days, the budgets start from 50 million dollars. So the way I see it, it’s not about signifying the personal, or whatever, it’s simply that those are the materials I have to work with.

ART iT: People from a generation or two after us probably have a different mentality, but having grown up in the 1980s at the height of blockbuster films by Steven Spielberg and Universal Studios, the idea that you could take a home-video camera, or now a digital camera or iPhone, and make something into a legitimate filmic expression is still pretty new to me.

KO: Yes. Now people are used to seeing all different kinds of formats of production and accepting all of them. Another thing that is probably uninteresting to younger people is that there was a time when you couldn’t post video online. That has made a dramatic difference. There was a time when the only way to see a film was to see it in the cinema, or to wait for it to come out on VHS or DVD, or to go to an art gallery or archive like Electronic Arts Intermix. The idea of people posting videos of themselves for everybody to see didn’t exist–except maybe for public access, which was pretty amazing. There was this strange mood that would appear, late at night, watching these truly bizarre shows. Just sitting there, and watching it. That’s an experience of shared isolation and limited connection that cannot be reconstructed any more.

ART iT: Your works seem to move in and out of an Internet sensibility. Maybe that awareness of life before the Internet has something to do with it.

KO: I think it is that kind of cusp situation. For me, the really slow image-loading Internet–like dial-up–was in middle school. There was email already, but not so much of the other stuff. It’s funny that despite its history, the Internet has recently become talked about again as a new thing, which I think is related to social media producing a different kind of situation. I think when people talk about the Internet now, it’s shorthand for the increase of social anxiety and fear of missing out and all these things that are influenced by the emergence of social media. But my work’s relationship to that Internet is not so literal.

ART iT: This also dates me, but I think about your work more in terms of the Internet of hyperlinks. That porousness of whatever it is you’re interfacing with–that’s something I find in your work.

KO: Yes, when hyperlinks were a big deal and you could jump through words as if they were wormholes. It’s difficult now because 1990s media theory has reemerged and been recoded in a way that makes it seem like it was just invented two years ago, which is not the case. I read that media theory when it was first current. It was very utopian about bringing the world together, whereas now it’s more dystopian. But the specific hyperlink thing is so nerdy and old-fashioned. I guess the hashtag is really the hyperlink now.


Spread from The Very Quick of the Word (Sternberg Press, 2014), design by Ken Okiishi, with texts by Annie Godfrey Larmon, Alise Upitis, and Ken Okiishi. Released on the occasion of the exhibitions “The Very Quick of the Word” at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and “List Projects: Ken Okiishi” at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

ART iT: The thing is that the Internet is fundamentally a hierarchical place–anything based on algorithms necessarily will be so.

KO: Ultimately, it sorts. It’s also limited to just one screen. The world is not one screen. In order to present information on one screen, there has to be a hierarchy. It’s kind of dumb as an idea–that all the information would come through one page, basically.

ART iT: But isn’t that what you were pointing to with the design of your book for Sternberg Press, The Very Quick of the Word (2014), with different texts overlapping each other or becoming mirrored across the pages of a spread? It, too, has a website feel to it, only glitched, like when a webpage isn’t loading properly and the text and images bunch together.

KO: Yes. The conceptual frame for the book is that physical books are starting to look weird because all you see these days are PDF files, etc. The idea is that the book itself is in crisis. It’s as if the book could load files. It has loaded a bunch of files, and then it becomes a book–the paper’s quite heavy, so it has the weight of a book–but something’s slightly off.

I | II | III

Ken Okiishi: Ab/Ex/In/Amb/Om

Copyrighted Image