Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1980 – 1981 (Time Clock Piece)

This year is a Liverpool Biennial year, and the International 10 show at FACT will make it well worth a visit. Presenting new commissions from artists including Yves Netzhammer and Minouk Lim, Touched will consist of new work that affects the viewer deep down: “art that moves us in mind, body and soul”.

Pedantic-iti-ness aside –  (Isn’t that what art exhibitions should be doing anyway?) – the line-up looks a treat. Focusing on works that examine ideas around separation and loss the show seeks to explore how, when more and more of us live urban lives dispersed across cities and overseas, do we learn new virtualised ways to be touched and touch?

A highlight will be Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980 – 1981 (Time Clock Piece), presented in the acclaimed artists’ first European exhibition. The film documents the artist’s project of punching a worker’s time clock in his New York studio on the hour, every hour for a whole year, capturing a single frame of 16mm of himself in the act each time.

The 6^th Liverpool Biennial runs from 18 September to 28 November

Invisible Film, Melik Ohanian

Dates: 18 June – 5 September | Location: FACT, Liverpool

How does memory influence what we see? What part does technology play in shaping both how we see and what we remember?

Informed by scientific research and inspired by historical developments in media technology, Liverpool’s FACT presents an exhibition exploring the relationship between vision, memory and media.

Persistence of Vision brings together the multimedia work of eight contemporary artists that repurposes image technologies, including cameras, slide projectors, magnifying glasses and mirrors, to playfully review and re-imagine how our memories are stored and revived.

Melik Ohanian will show Invisible Film (2005). A video installation that brings radical post-sixties cinema back into visual memory through the image of a film projector standing in a desert landscape beaming a film into nowhere. The film is Peter Watkins’ rarely screened docu-fiction Punishment Park (1971), a landmarkwork on US political repression, but a film deliberately ignored for over twenty years by distributors in the US and UK because of its controversial content.

Other participating artists include: Julius von Bismarck (Germany), Julien Maire (France), Mizuki Watanabe (Japan), Gebhard Sengmüller (Austria), Jamie Allen (Canada), Sascha Pohflepp (Germany), AVPD (Denmark).

XXX: Get Off at Edge Hill

APEngine talks to artists AL and AL, winners of the Liverpool Art Prize 2009, about XXX: Get Off at Edge Hill, a show they’ve curated to open Metal’s new space at Liverpool’s Edge Hill Station.

I want to ask you about your work as curators, but the background to that you’ve been collaborating as artists for a long time, and I wondered you came to work together as artists in the first place?

AL Taylor: We have been collaborating around 11 years. And that began when we met really – we almost instantaneously began making work together, and it’s just been a progression from there.

AL Holmes: I think the work started coming out of a conversation, which was “How do I do that?”  Or “Can you help me do this?” – and, as everybody knows who works in film and media, you always need hands around to hold cameras or help you with lighting.

Our practice grew out of helping each other, until the point where we realised we were making each other’s work, then to the point where we were making the same work. From there we started asking each other how elaborate the work could become. And I think that curating as well comes out of that conversation.

When did you start curating, as opposed to making?

AL T: Well in a way, since the beginning. We’ve always done shows with friends or peers or people we’ve met in London. Though I never saw it then as ‘curating’, because it was more about knowing somebody’s work that you felt was interesting, and they knew your work. So it was a collaborative curation then of all the artists.

But even so, even at that level, there must be not just a subconscious filtering or or thinking about who would be appropriate artists.

AL T: Exactly – even friends that you’re hanging out with have the same concerns as you and it’s not as if you’re going to hang out with an artist who thinks something completely opposite to you.

AL H: Also there’s a sense in which you’re having a conversation with those people and you find the place. Quite often, in the earlier stage of your career, you’re not being asked by galleries to show work. So you’re finding spaces – in London anyway – that people will come to. And quite often those spaces have a context about them – they’re not like the modernist white space – that kind of generated work and generated conversations, and helped you select artists. Quite early on the idea of the site specific emerged in our minds – the importance of context and making it work, which of course later on happened as artists, making work for television. Those early experiences of putting exhibitions on in certain spaces, we transferred over into the idea of making a work for television as a site.

There’s a kind of a curatorial consideration inherent in your practice then – in making site specific work rather than just making work.

AL H: Absolutely.

AL T: It is always about responding to the space that we’re in, even if that’s a city that you live in – not necessarily a building. Because for us that’s what’s interesting – we think about where we are.

Well, where you are now is Liverpool. And you moved to Liverpool because you were preparing a show, at FACT, and you were hosted by the agency Metal, at Edge Hill?

AL T: We were invited to do a solo exhibition for the European Capital of Culture Year in Liverpool. And we said to them ”Well actually, we’ll move up to Liverpool for a few months and make a work from that context.” There was all this investment in city and we wanted to explore what that might mean and how that might affect our work.

So we came up to look for a studio, and discovered that Metal were trying to talk Northern Rail into giving over Edge Hill’s train station as a space for culture.

One stop out of the city centre…

AL T: That’s right. We happened to be there on the day that they’d finally got to meet up with Northern Rail. When we walked around we immediately knew the significance of the space in terms of technology – it’s the first place that a passenger train left to go to another city.

It was where fossilised fuel was used to create movement rather than using horse power. So we like the idea of installing our technological studio there – our virtual studio, our blue screen studio, which we sort of see as like an inert vehicle – it’s like a flying carpet. It’s the idea of being able to travel anywhere but stay within one space.

We sort of saw it as an end game of an idea of travelling, virtual travel. And the place where people first started to think of travelling as something they could do daily – it seemed like the perfect place for us to have a studio.

So all of that idea of context and the site specific emerged immediately.

That’s the context for your practice as artists making work. But then you had a practice as curators, curating other people’s work in that context. I think that has to be more than just an extension of your artist practice, it’s a leap and it’s a different kind of thing. How did that come about?

AL T: When we moved into Metal we got involved in trying to bring the station back to life again. And there was an opportunity for the space to be transformed into a project space. So it began in trying to make that happen. We felt we had a lot of good ideas – site specific ideas – that we didn’t want to explore in our own work necessarily. Or we didn’t want to explore them to the extent that we had to sort of lock ourselves in a studio for 12 months and make a work. For me, the curatorial thing became a way to think about ideas and see how other people had maybe made work that had responded to some of those ideas.

AL H: Yes.  It’s almost as if it became the building. And putting exhibitions on became a way of showing our sketchbook. It became a way of actually thinking about ideas, and rather than realising them as this gargantuan art work, we could actually show the process of those ideas by conversations and collaborations and by showing other people’s work within a particular site.

AL T: When we first got here we realised that even though it was the Capital of Culture and the Liverpool Biennial had been putting shows on for a number of years, that artists within Liverpool itself weren’t given much space. They weren’t given any space actually.

We wanted to give them a space, and we wanted to bring some ideas that they could then respond to. And perhaps try and kind of create an art scene here that had a community and that wasn’t just kind of an isolated artists, in a city that was ignoring them essentially.

Well, you say curating is a sketchbook, but I think it’s more than that. With the Horse Power show that you did at Edge Hill, you’re not simply appropriating other artists work. The show included established artists like Malcolm Le Grice and Tim Macmillan, and non-fine art kind of artists, like graphic novelist Grant Morrison…

AL H: And also, we also brought in other elements like engineering – drawings by Ferrari or films that Ferrari had made. We realised that the space is as much about innovative engineering as it is about culture. Although we do sort of see that as an artist’s job, like Michelangelo’s drawings of machines are as important to us as his Annunciation for example.

What I’m thinking is that it may work, to you, as a sketch book. But Also, you’re organising a conversation between those objects, and that’s curating isn’t it?

AL H: Exactly.  And actually, we were really inspired by Marina Warner and the way in which she curates. We went to the Science Museum when she put on her exhibition Metamorphing.

AL H: And she was quite willing to put for example GM seeds, genetically modified seeds next to Hieronymus Bosch.

AL T: We thought that was really brave – more brave than perhaps just going to an exhibition that just had Bosch paintings pinned to the wall. That there didn’t seem to be any thought process in that. You know, that you can put on a Gustav Klimt show, but what are you going to do, just go through the catalogue? That’s fine, but we wanted to break down some of those boundaries between what is an art object and what isn’t an art object.

The shows that we have curated have, so far, always included different disciplines and different practices within them. That somebody in the art world may not necessarily think is art.

AL H: It’s fascinating allowing the world to creep in next to our art works and seeing the way in which the world does influence and penetrate what artists talk about.

It’s a rare approach in this country, but it does happen abroad.

AL H: Absolutely. The Museum of Modern Art shows ball bearings next to Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel.

AL T: I think in this country that usually gets seen as being appropriate for the Victoria and Albert Museum or those other institutions, rather than the white cube space.

But we love those cross discipline shows.

And while the Science Museum is quite happy to display art alongside mechanical objects, to reflect upon each other, our art galleries seem generally averse to that. I think it’s very strange.

AL T: As well what we really realise is that in London you can enclose yourself in an art bubble. All your friends are artists, and you go to galleries and you are a particular way. Coming to Liverpool, we live in a community, a working class community, and you begin to see the untouchability of some of the exhibitions that are in those bigger institutions for some people.

Anyway, what I love about, for example in Horse Power, is seeing a Ferrari advert of its factory next to a painting by an artist in relationship to the idea of movement. People can start to unpick the art itself as well – which may have seemed more cryptic or coded but actually. It’s about breaking down those boundaries.

AL H: But technology is also interesting in relation to the way art works have come into being. We included Muybridge in that show and his pictures were realised by a railway engineer who had worked out how to create a trigger to enable the 12 cameras to go off at the right speed in order to capture movement.

That collaboration between a photographer and a railway engineer enabled us to create the moving image. And so it’s taken as a given now that the moving image is a medium that can be used to create art works.

AL T: The curatorial decision has actually become the story of the show – of a subject matter or an interest rather than the artist.

When was the Horse Power show?

AL H: It was autumn 2008.

And since then the station’s been redeveloped.

AL H: The station closed for the winter. Horse Power was in buildings on platforms three and four, which is where we had our studio. But there was this much more magnificent building, this engine room, an accumulator tower on platform one and two that needed completely renovating.

During the winter and spring of 2008/2009, Metal managed to secure funding from various bodies… Network Rail, Northern Rail, from lots of different rail companies interestingly enough. And all of the building work is now coming to completion.

Metal have ‘renovated’ the buildings to their raw state, so that anything can happen in them.  They’ve not been turned into refrigerated modernist spaces or anything like that. It’s just that we’ve cleaned up all the Victorian brick.

They’re resolutely industrial spaces…

AL H: Exactly. They’re 1836 the first year of Queen Victoria’s reign – buildings that mark the beginning of the great industrial period of England.

So, back to Belgium… working with the curator Edwin Carels?

AL H: We had an early conversation about what we might realise together as a curatorial and a commissioning process. One of the things that Edwin felt about our big solo show in 2008 was that it concealed the formalist end of our work, in the sense that we put on a big spectacular show that was really about the special effects end of the spectacle of perfect illusion and the malpractice.

AL T: The show was for MuHKA, in in Mechelen, which is where trains for Auschwitz departed. We went over Mechelen to get a feel of the place. Again it’s a site specific thing – we went to Mechelen and we made some video work relating to that. It became a show of what we call our ‘void’ works – all ‘blue’ works.

Rather than the more elaborate baroque pieces – those works about our relationship with contemporary culture and pop and the relationship between that and science and technology. Our FACT exhibition as AL just said, really focussed on that.  I mean we kind of see those three works as being a kind of trilogy really – Perpetual Motion, Interstellar Stella, and Eternal Youth. Edwin came over and said “But you also do loads of really formal, beautiful, stripped down performance work that’s actually not about this…”

And so it was gorgeous to revisit all that older work and make some new work more in line with that.

AL H: And when we went over we discovered about the trains, because everyone knows about the trains to Auschwitz, but nobody ever knows where they set off from.  It’s a really curious one way journey that has no departure point. And we discovered that that was the departure point. Mechelen happened to be at the centre of the railway network in Europe from very early on, it connects all across Europe.

And the Nazis acquired the city in order to use that as a distribution centre. When we got there it just, we just couldn’t help but think about it.

AL T: And we realised that 50 years previously we’d have been on the trains. That felt really terrifying and hideous, and nobody actually spoke about this. We did a lecture in Ghent at an art school and they looked really shocked when we spoke about this.

But the people from Mukha, the curators, they were touched that we’d even mentioned it, because nobody normally talks about this there. And it was almost as if we were the only ones that had the guts to say anything. But to me it didn’t seem like something that shouldn’t be spoken about anyway.

AL H: It came up was because we were talking about doing some formalist works we’d been thinking a while about doing stripped down biometric works from our performances. By which I mean the system used in animation, where the human body is recorded doing various movements and then that data gets transferred into an animated character.

We’d become fascinated by the fact that within all the spectacle films of animations at the moment there was this biped skeleton inside those characters that you never see, that produces all of the movement.

The Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee makes ‘skeletons’ of Sylvester and Tweety Pie…

AL H: Essentially, we made a kind of dancing skeleton film which showed a number of our studio performances stripped back down to being a biped, that were sort of mirrored, like a chrome biped, reflecting a snow of pink triangles.

AL T: Because it was a big institution and we had a budget, we could also show some Yves Klein and Anish Kapoor.

There’s a different kind of curation there – you’re making work and you’re invited to select other work to show alongside.

AL T: Yes, and funnily enough, when I saw it, it felt like an installation. I think all our curated shows feel like installations. More artists should curate shows.

AL H: People like Duchamp did – when the Surrealists first went to New York he he wrapped works in string and you had to find your way through the show.

It’s something that has always been part of our vocabulary, that artists do create shows with the people who they’re having conversations with.

Get Off is the show that launches the new renovated space.

AL H: Yes. “Get Off at Edge Hill” is a local Scouse pun that describes coitus interruptus.

AL T: I don’t quite know what that means actually.  Is that actually a scientific term?

AL H: Yes – it’s pulling out.

AL T: When we’d been talking to people in Liverpool about us renovating Edge Hill they’d all go “Ah… you’re getting off at Edge Hill!” It’s this joke about that pun – if you get a taxi there they always try and tell you about this pun “Have you ever heard of getting off at Edge Hill?”

And so the show became about the kind of Scouse vocabulary, as well as it’s originating point.

AL H: The station has actually found it’s way into the language of the city.

Are the people of Edge Hill notoriously randy!?

AL H: Well exactly! But there’s also a technical reason, because the train – The Rocket – couldn’t travel into the Liverpool city centre because there’s a gradation, a hill, and at that point there was no brakes on the train. There was no sense of how to make the train travel down a hill and be able to stop.

AL T: So Edge Hill is where people got off and got onto a horse and carriage for the rest of journey. So it goes further back than the community reascribing the idea of getting off at Edge Hill – for the bourgeois in the 1840s it meant getting off the train. But for the local community it means something quite different.  So we’ve explored that.

AL H: And we were fascinated by the idea, the sexual pun and the industrial landscape.  Because, like Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even, it’s a machine, there is a sexual pun about the mechanics of sex. This idea of engineering and these machines that go in and out, in and out, in and out.

And trains go into tunnels.

AL T: Yes, there are so many puns, so many cinematic clichés about that. We wanted to explore all of those things.

AL H: For example, we are showing the first edited sequence from the 1899 film A Kiss in the Tunnel – which is the first time that pun of a train entering a tunnel was projected onto the silver screen. That’s the earliest work in the show, but it goes to show the way in which the industrial world has become resonant with the idea of sexual puns.

Especially now, with cyber… humans and machines melding.

AL H: Exactly. And we’ve made works ourselves about the sexuality of the computer world and people meeting up and finding love together. And we’ve been thinking about Alan Turing,  and the fact that those machines have come out of his thinking and that he himself went through a difficult political life because of…

AL T: …his sexuality. And yet now you’ve got literally 16, 17, 18 year old kids who are dealing with their sexuality through the internet. Because of these machines that Turing helped invent they’re coming to terms with those issues.

What else is in the show?

AL T: We’ve got some local artists that all have made new works for the show.

AL H: Imogen Stidworthy is looking at Scouse back slang, which is a kind of a language that comes from the street that Scousers use with each to pass secret messages onto one another. She felt that the Get Off at Edge Hill being a Scouse pun enabled her to explore that.

We’ve got Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos, which essentially is a film that explores a boy’s love affair with his car, his chrome car. It’s an extraordinary work, with the Paris Sisters singing Dream Lover, which is going to be a delicious sound within the show – the idea of the machine being a dream lover, being this perfect, powerful source of energy.

AL T: We’ve got a sort of Bride Stripped Bare – in Through the Large Glass, by Hannah Wilke, who does a strip tease behind the large glass. It’s a performance from 1976 and an absolutely beautiful piece of work.

AL H: That carries on our idea of actually drawing on the history of video art and performance and using that to put in some major works that are interlaced with local artists.

Any engineering pieces?

AL H: We’ll have a Pirelli calendar.

Which is sex and engineering, and mechanics…

AL H: Yes. You’d find it in every garage and it becomes a collectors item.  And in a way it’s an engineer’s art work. It’s collected and considered as art work, and combines sexuality and engineering.

AL T: I worked in fashion many years ago and to do the Pirelli calendar is a big thing fo a photographer. People think of the Pirelli calendar and think of scrubby garage men.

I think that’s a difference in this country – things like Pirelli and Playboy have this American exuberance around sexuality, it’s not repressed.

AL H: And of course, we are talking about putting an exhibition in a Victorian building, which is the archetypal word for repression. And yet here we are talking about a building that has given birth to a Scouse pun.

All of those things generate meaning and discussion about the space. And about the emancipatory nature of technology and sexuality.

AL T: The other two other shows that we’ve done at the station have been quite formal about the technology there and the science there. And we wanted to have a little bit more fun with this one.

AL H: It is about fun and it is about how culture can be about learning and enjoying yourself at the same time.

The group show XXX: Get Off at Edge Hill curated by AL and AL is showing at Liverpool’s Edge Hill Station from 23 October – 5 December 2009.

Still from the Primitive installation by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Rachel Baker shares her thoughts with APEngine on a masterclass with Apichatpong Weerasethakul prompts thoughts about film and art…

Fresh from the previous night’s Jarman Award announcement at the Whitechapel Gallery, where the fraught topic of ‘cinema and art crossing over’  was the subject of some energetic ranting, I took myself and the rant to the AND Festival at FACT Liverpool, where my primary mission was to check out the Apichatpong Weerasethukal show and masterclass.

The ranting continued with Jamie King and Peter Mann, makers of Dark Fibre, decidedly a straightforward film, not art, according to Peter. But why the labelling, he puzzles, and how do you spot the difference?

They look anxious at having to think about art – that pretentious party gatecrasher with its pompous discourses and judgemental elitism. I drag them along to Apichatpong’s masterclass, thinking it might hold some clues. They fall asleep.

Apichatpong is notably an artist that crosses over with apparent ease from experimental film and visual art into feature filmmaking along with Steve McQueen, Sam Taylor Wood, Douglas Gordon, and a bunch of others, lesser known, including some of those currently feeling their way around the Film London FLAMIN Productions scheme.

He talks about the hybridity of visual art and cinema as something that is integral to his approach and refers to American experimental filmmakers such as Bruce Baillie as influences. Most of the masterclass is a showcase of his gallery shorts, installations and performance work, rather than his feature films.

Emerald,  a short film, is a portrait of a hotel that was alive with entertainment and ‘hosting’ activity during the Eighties boom in Thailand. Over shots of empty dreamlike hotel interiors, disembodied voices recall this other, distant time. The reminiscing and recounting of the past, unlocking repressed memories, stories and ghosts is a recurrent theme in Apichatpong’s work. He also reveals that TV soap operas, radio drama serials and sci-fi romanticism figure in his inspirations.

It was a real pity that there was so little Q&A time allowed for with the audience because it would have been a great excuse to continue the film/art crossover debate and ask him about the different modes of behaviour and attitudes applied to filmmaking and artmaking, in particular in relation to the making of Primitive.

J and P are still asleep. I haven’t seen their film but they’ve evidently been working relentlessly and sleeplessly to get the edit done. There’s also a fair amount of hustling and negotiating with backers, buyers and distributors, which I think is all folded into the creative process for J, who has a talent for pitching and persuading. That is an art in itself. The trailer has been pitching Dark Fibre all over the AND Festival and I’m already sold. Apichatpong’s session is a masterclass in underselling; the commentary is not so revealing but the clips are visually mesmerising and speak for themselves.

Visual artists do not tend to ‘pitch’. It’s a peculiarly industry-orientated term, used in film, TV or digital media. Cinematic filmmakers talk of propelling the narrative forward, and the act of making an industry film is itself all about propulsion, it seems. Apichatpong and his works have an intuitive, sensual and dreamy demeanour. He embraces the accidental, and there’s more meditative suspension then there is propulsion.

Ultimately the distinctions between art and film are more acute in the cultural infrastructures they inhabit, than in the language or conventions that any artistic endeavour employs, because, as Apichatpong proves, the hybridity of languages is ultimately an opportunity to discover a new language.

Currently, the film and television industries in the UK find themselves in a state of confusion – the models are having to reconfigure in response to the digital age of user-generated content and multi-platform distribution. As the discussions around technological and economic models circulate endlessly, the impoverishment of ideas and cultural, artistic content is evident, excepting The Wire, Generation Kill etc. (But hang on…they’re US imports – how can we get an HBO set up over here?)

Meanwhile the art world is rich with moving image experimentation. However, collectors aren’t quite as ready with the chequebooks as we imagine so public funding agencies and foundations are left to address the high level of demand from artists wishing to make images move, and that provision hasn’t really accommodated the art and film crossover. But its not just about having a substantial fund available its also about having the right kind of producers available.

Douglas Gordon’s Zidane was co-directed/produced by artist Phillipe Parreno who, the all-knowing George Clark reminds me, is part of French production team, Anna Sanders Films, together with Charles De Meaux, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster and Pierre Huyghe.
Charles De Meaux produced Apichatpong’s features Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady. My guess is that Anna Sanders Film producers probably know how to negotiate the film/tv industry world and the art world, with an artistic fascination for both. They are very different worlds – so it’s a producer/director-skill that might well be in demand in this hybridised climate.

Maybe it’s a French thing. In the UK we never had a Godard or a New Wave.

Apichatpong himself appears utterly unphased and untroubled by the transitions between making features and making art. But then, he is a Buddhist.

About the author: Rachel is an artist, a member of irrational.org and plays with the band Antifamily. She is Media Arts Officer at Arts Council England, London.

AND Festival brand by Uniform

If you haven’t yet seen the bold branding for the inaugural Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival, then check out the festival website and the trailers below. Developed by Liverpool-based brand and design consultancy Uniform, the agency has created a slate of funky animated stings that are inspired by the festival’s theme of questioning the normal. As you can see in the video below, Uniform has mixed together an eclectic range of images to capture the essence of the festival’s concept.

Charlie Pastor, Motion Graphics Designer at Uniform commented, “One of the main challenges was sourcing the footage, from going to Colwyn Bay to shoot a flamingo to trying to source a 1950’s camera!”

The AND Festival takes place in Liverpool from 23-27 September 2009, offering a programme of screenings, exhibitions, debate and performance across Liverpool, driven by a collaborative partnership by Northwest media and arts organisations FACT (Foundation for Arts and Creative Technology, Liverpool), Cornerhouse (Manchester) and folly (Lancaster).

Action Diana, The Centre of Attention

APEngine’s Gary Thomas talked to Pierre Coinde and Gary O’Dwyer – The Centre of Attention – when they took a break from editing their feature length film Action Diana, which gets its world premiere as part of the AND Festival at FACT Liverpool, this September.

So, who and what is the Centre of Attention?

Gary: The Centre of Attention it started off as a gallery, but we also treat it as an artist. So it makes work as well and does some curation as well. We’ve been going about 10 years. It’s basically the two of us yes. I work as an artist as House of O’Dwyer as well.

So you see Centre of Attention as being ‘it’.

Pierre: It.  Yes, we say the Centre of Attention does this and it does that.  Which slightly removes it from us. When we talk about different ideas for work, I would say, or he does, “with that then it’s more of a House of O’Dwyer work and this is more of a Centre of Attention work”.

Do you think of yourselves as a partnership or an organisation?

Gary: In the very beginning we wanted it to seem like it was a big organisation. So we wanted to give it quite a grand name. So it was like a Centre of Attention Studies, give it that kind of feeling. And also it was quite serious, but also could be humorous as well.

Pierre: There’s been an on and off Centre of Attention magazine. There’s been a Centre of Attention prize.

It’s incredible to have sustained over 10 years – and without funding – at the level that you work – ambitious, complex, sophisticated projects. And you have that extremely impressive list of collaborators and artists – in your website archive.

Gary: There’s everything here.

Pierre: We often do about eight shows or so a year, so every new show adds a few pages. It’s only because it’s been a 10 year endeavour that now there’s 1000 pages. But it’s quite a regular activity -  regular exhibitions or works. Whether it be in London or overseas.

It’s an extremely varied breadth of work. I wonder if there’s an underlying thing that’s driving what one might call your ‘practice’?

Gary: Well we’d thought that would be revealed – that’s one of the reasons we’re documenting everything, because what we’re into would be revealed to us. We never really had a fixed agenda except for – what can you do with no money, and how long can you keep going.

Pierre: And we started as a gallery because we thought that artists, at the end of the 90s, early 2000, had a lot of varied places to show work, but at the same time, galleries were just presenting work the same way as they had done for the past dozens of years. We were interested in how work is presented. What part is the public taking in this?

Whether it’s in terms of exhibitions that we create, or works that we make, there is always that sense of presentation and production and consumption of art.

I think one of things that’s evident is the characteristic of openness and wanting to engage.

Pierre: It’s partly that you have to bring some vulnerability or that we tend not to hide behind the projects. So we don’t usually present things with the pretence of an objective manner. It’s obvious that something will have been either curated by us, or if we’re on location, it actually involves interactions with us. At the same time, it’s open for the visitor or the viewer to have any sort of interaction that they want.

In terms of performance, I’ve always disliked it where the rules are too much dictated in terms of how will you interact with the work and vice versa.

We did a show called The Curators in New York, which was me and Gary in the gallery space, saying “we’re cutting out the middle man” – the artist. Just showing the curators, because it’s the curators that have an important message to put across.

But the visitors could do anything that they wanted in terms of how they engaged with that work. And some of them were artists and thinking well, this curator’s here, I’m going to show them my portfolio.

Other people were abusive because they were feeling robbed, that there wasn’t any work on the wall to see. And it’s just open to whichever way you want to engage with it.

Gary: We’ve always had the sense that people would like to be involved with art rather than just looking at the decorative panels hanging on the wall, or an object on the floor. And then just walking by and feeling really empty.

That they somehow can interact with you and respond in person, whether they like it or not I think.

Pierre: At the same time, sometimes the generosity veers towards asking what we as artists can get from the public. In Action Diana – we need to make the film, so we need you – the public – to do something for us. We’re asking you to be the generous one.

Another characteristic is the wit and humour and fun in your work. You know, you use the word ‘play’, which I don’t think means it’s not serious – I think it means it’s all the more serious.

Gary: Yes, we’re quite keen to distance ourselves from art that pretends to be or poses as serious, like that’s somehow art because it’s serious, when art should include everything that life might include.

And humour would so obviously to be part of that. But hopefully it’s not treated as throw away just because we don’t present ourselves as so serious.

In a way I don’t care about that anymore. I used to be more worried – that it’s a bad name, The Centre of Attention – that it sounds like a big joke. But now I don’t really care. But people still don’t know what we’re doing.  Are you a gallery?  Are you an artist?

Pierre: It’s partly our own aim – not to make it easier for people to be able to classify and say “Oh yes, it’s about performance arts.”  Or “Oh, they’re curators.”

I think if you make things clear then that skews the way that people might look at the work. Whereas I would hope that it’s the work, whether it be a curation work or an artistic work, that helps define what The Centre of Attention is.

I guess your point there isn’t simply to be stubborn and not to define yourself, but to say that these are changing definitions and things aren’t sort of fixed.

Gary: There are opportunities out there that we don’t know about. So why define yourself so rigidly. It’s keeping ourselves open to opportunities that we don’t even know exist.

When we started I don’t think we thought we’d be in the Venice Biennale as The Centre of Attention.

Pierre: Or in the AND Festival.

Gary: And people were confused, like “Oh you’re a gallery but you’re in  Venice.” Well, we’re a gallery and we’re artists. And Centre of Attention makes products for exhibition.

Pierre: But I suppose it is easier for artists who make a well defined range of products, because this is what they’re known for, this is what they’re asked to do and they’ll just carry on doing it.

Gary: And familiarity can even make you start liking things you never actually liked. Just because every two years you’ll say “Oh, that’s the thingy.”

We don’t really do that because we keep everything so random -  but when you actually list them you can see some sensibility going through most things.

Even with the thing we’re working on now, the Pavilion for Post Contemporary Curating, which is utopian, conceptual.

I was initially very impressed.

Pierre: Oh, not any more?

Well, then something dawned on me!

Pierre: It dawned on you that the English Heritage might not let it happen.

And a million pounds seemed quite cheap for what you’re proposing

Pierre: That’s just to start, that’s the feasibility study!

So, Action Diana.  It’s going to be a feature film?

Gary: Yes. We’ve been working on it for a couple of years. Because we only make it as a performance so it has to have the framework of a show.  So it has to be either in a gallery or sponsored by a gallery or a theatre.

How do you mean?  It’s a film, but how do you mean as a performance?

Gary: Because we regard our making of it and dealing with the public as a performance that you can come and watch as well, and not get involved.

Pierre: It’s an exhibition, and it’s about what you do with the materials that the exhibition provides, which is a space and people. So we didn’t say we want to make a film lets go out on the street and do that.

Our approach was – what is it you can do and make and create from an exhibition, and that is a film. So it’s only being made during exhibitions.

And you spent time in Liverpool making it?

Pierre: Five weeks, six weeks, more, yes.

And who are the people?

Gary: Just whoever might visit the gallery, or whoever’s going past the front door who looks like they might be good for the film.

Pierre: We’ve filmed in several locations. So the longest period has been in  Liverpool, but also during the summer we did a few stays in Mount Stuart, which is a 19th century neo-gothic mansion on the Isle of Bute. Where again, this is a public space open to the public so  coaches arrive and we just used them to make that film. And we  also did some filming in Guttenberg, in a theatre in Vienna. For the theatre in Vienna, people would arrive at 8 o’clock in the evening and instead of actually seeing a play, they’re just actually making the film with us.

And at the end of the evening we show the rushes.  So the work gets created there and then.

Gary: So this fits in with our making ourselves vulnerable, and then to show them immediately, that was one of the most satisfying ways of doing it. Because everybody arrives, you do the filming and everybody is watching, people can help.

And then the conclusion, at the third act, everybody sits down and watches what they’ve been doing. And it’s hilarious for them.

But in the edited film – is that a film or does the process remain evident?

Gary: It does in that there are unedited rushes that we call scene selection – so scene selection Vienna exists on its own. But in the final Action Diana film, we treat it properly, so no takes or bloopers.

Pierre: Action Diana in effect is a series of portraits of people saying a dialogue and being put together. Where the main character in the film is played by several hundred different people according to who was where at what time. But it doesn’t take in all the different takes and it’s not about the making of the film – it’s a narrative story which is probably very difficult to understand because of the changing actors.

Because of the way it’s told?

Pierre: Yes.  But at the same time it doesn’t matter too much, because really they are portraits of visitors to John Moore’s University.

And what is the dialogue?  Is there a script?

Pierre: It’s a 1960s script by Frederic Raphael.

Gary: Which adds to the performative aspect of making it, because we’re standing there with big idiot boards and people are reading off that.  We don’t really give them time to rehearse or anything.

How do people respond to your invitation to take part?

Gary: Most people are happy. If you select them they feel that you know that you want them for something they’re suited for.

You’ve cast them.

Gary: Yes, exactly.  But sometimes we’re working so quickly they’ll be doing it, they go off and then they come back and say “What was that about..what have you made me do, what is that for?”

So it’s quite varied. Some people just get it immediately. And I don’t think people feel used or that they’re being made fun of.  But they are generally all quite bad actors.

But even the actors are quite bad – the people who are actually actors are quite bad.

Pierre: I think if you’re visiting somewhere and suddenly you’re being asked to be in a film, it changes your perspective or how you look at the exhibition space, because you’re not external anymore, you’re part of something that’s happening there.

You’re even a part in the sense that you’re playing a role for other visitors – in Mount Stuart for example, in the mansion, people were going beyond the rope barriers in the house and sitting on chairs and doing their thing. Eating from the plates. Suddenly it completely changes how you see the space you’re in. There’s an immediate engagement with the work – a work that can be lived as it’s being made. And it’s a work that can also then be watched as a film in the end.

You’ve used the term ‘hot installation’.

Gary: Because I can’t think of another word. An installation where you’re actually producing something rather than an installation where you’re just in it. I do quite like hot installation, I think it’s funny.

But the other side of what you say about process is interesting, because although you show those rushes, the process is the exhibition, but you don’t then go on to exhibit the process, you exhibit the film.  Is that right?

Gary: If somebody asked to show the Vienna scene selection, I probably would show it. They wouldn’t necessarily need to show the film.

Pierre: I think there are links with other video works we’ve made where we arrive in the space and work doesn’t exist. At a private view, in Switzerland we made them have a fight.  And we filmed that fight and then that was the video that is shown for the rest of the exhibition.

Gary: We wanted to reproduce a scandal, so we had them booing.  We warmed them up, they could boo, they cheered, and then we’re like… “fight!”.

Pierre: Or in a project at the Cafe Gallery, we got people to do animal noises in the dark.

Gary: Get into a circle, hold hands.

Pierre: So then you’re the visitor the next day, and what you see is something a little bit weird that’s happened in that very place during that exhibition that you’re seeing.

They can be shown, and they have been shown, elsewhere. But if I was the curator I’d ask The Centre of Attention to do a work specifically for the space rather than show one from elsewhere.

Another quote of yours I’ve read is about the notion of the poverty of video art against the wealth of art in the movie.

Gary: With Action Diana, the final film, we wanted to somehow make it analogous to video art in that it’s possibly unwatchable, incoherent, you have no idea what’s going on, really bad aesthetic, cheap video camera feeling.

But there is a story embedded in the narrative. It seemed that filmmaking is just such an amazing art form that isn’t considered art really. A narrative film just seems amazingly wonderful, creative, intelligent – not all of them of course.

And video art seems a very poor relation, even with ideas, which is what conceptual video art is supposed to give you.

But is that to do with video art or is it all art?

Gary: Well you can get away with anything with video art can’t you?  Because it’s quite new you can almost just do anything and it’s art.  So I think people aren’t applying their full critical faculties to what’s going on yet.

I think cinema and art are separate things. And there are artists who understand and take cinema as their subject. I think Jane and Louise Wilson understand cinema.  And Gillian Wearing. But I remember when they were first making work, how many art critics  couldn’t understand their work in relation to cinema at all. And certainly now you get artists engaging with cinema in a way that seems a shortcut to something.

Gary: Yes, because when we tell people about the project they go “Oh..there’s a lots of remakes…” But I don’t think Action Diana is a remake because it fits all our other criteria – we do other things, whereas some people just do remakes and pretend to be doing more. They highlight the theatricality and the campness more than I’d require. But they’re almost side effects.

One of our things is not to overly fabricate anything, but do as little as you can to make the idea feel like it’s being passed across.

Also when I read about it, I think a difference between what you’re doing and other examples is that there’s something hilarious about your proposition. I think Gus Van Sant remaking Psycho frame by frame is a fantastic piece of conceptual art. You don’t have his millions, but you have his ambition!

Gary: Yes, we don’t have the resources but you know, you shouldn’t let that get in the way of our ambition.

Pierre: And our actions are less practised.  And all we have is iMovie.

Gary: But Gus Van Sant is somebody who I think is making amazing art works as well – Elephant and Last Days.

I don’t know what the art world’s dealing with, but I think we should be dealing with the things that make us stop and go wow rather than with people’s responses to a Marxist theory.

I just find that quite deadening, and not inspiring. Perhaps other people can get something out of that but I don’t think that’s what it should be. It’s going to end up being like 19th century French academician art isn’t it?  It’s just art for the academy, for specialists, for  people locked away. Which I can see is totally attractive if you’re part of that. But if you’re dealing with life and contemporary living and art and what’s amazing about living, then it doesn’t seem so appealing to me.

And is that what your art is for, that it’s about – what is amazing.

Gary: I hope so. Because ideas are entertaining in themselves. I wouldn’t want to throw away ideas of conceptualism totally, but I think you can try and have everything.

The Centre of Attention’s Action Diana screens on 27 September, 4.30pm, at FACT Liverpool as part of the AND Festival.

Primitive, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Dates: 23-27 September 2009 | Location: FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool

Abandon Normal Devices (AND) is a new festival of Digital Culture and New Cinema, inviting us to consider what are our normal devices? And why and how might we abandon them?

AND kicks off on 23 September 2009 in Liverpool with five days filled with screenings, exhibitions, public interventions, debates and workshops. Highlights of the festival include influential artists such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, The Yes Men, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Carolee Schneemann, Jamie King and DJ Spooky.

At the heart of AND lies a fascination with ideas about social, physical and technological norms, offering artistic approaches from the playful to the downright provocative, and featuring a distinctive emphasis on critique and ideas. A Northwest festival, AND will continue with future editions in Cumbria, Lancaster, Cheshire and Manchester.

AND is presented by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) (Liverpool), Cornerhouse (Manchester) and folly (Lancaster). The festival forms part of WE PLAY, the Northwest cultural legacy programme for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.