APEngine launched at onedotzero‘s Adventures in Motion September 2009 and was Media Partner to AURORA 2009 in November. It was produced by Animate Projects – a UK-based, not-for-profit arts organisation, developing initiatives that explore the relationship between art and animation, and the place of animation and its concepts in contemporary art practice for exhibition in the gallery, cinema and online.

The project and online platform has been a huge success in accomplishing its initial aims. It has been home to some fantastic discussions on a range of topics around the animation and moving image sector. With over 500 posts in its 17 month duration, highlights include The Truth of Illusion – A critical insight into animation documentary and theory by Samantha Moore, A structure for Possible films by Ajay RS Hothi and Army of YouTube Rosemany Heather. APEngine received a steady 2,500 visitors per month and reached up to 6,000 visitors on particular months within its duration.

APEngine has been the platform for interesting conversation and engagement, highlighting posts include George Clark talks to Anjalika The Otolith Group and interviews with David Jacques and Kiron Hussain.

Further writers for APEngine have included the likes of Adam Pugh, Tim Shore, Edwin Rostron and John A Riley.

APEngine was the platform for the outcome films of the project Rough Machines an Animate Projects commission from open proposals for animators to produce new work. All films premiered on APEngine in November 2010 with great reception. The films have gone on to be included in offline exhibitions, festivals and biennials and are also available through iTunes.

APEngine as an online resource has also provided updates of relevant news, reviews, exhibition openings and opportunities around the area of animation and moving image.

All feature posts can be downloaded as a pdf and Animate Projects is proud to keep APEngine live online for use as an archive website.

Animate Projects would like to thank all writers, interviewees, artists and readers for producing content and engaging within this to create an interesting community around the sector of moving image and animation through the online journal of APEngine.

APEngine was supported by the UK Film Council’s Publications Fund.

Any Ever, Ryan Trecartin

The third time I visited Ryan Trecartin’s show of video installations, Any Ever in Toronto, it was near the end of the exhibition. A small army of people moved from room to room, notebooks in hand, recording their thoughts. Like few other art events I can think of, the show contained within it the seeds of a conversation. See Ryan Trecartin’s work and you want to talk about it.

Trecartin opens up a space that is innate to video’s technological capabilities; yet, before him, no one had quite dared to go there. And treading where others fear to tread can produce fear itself. Fear and a reluctance to engage is one response his work tends to get. Fear because a goal of sensory perception overload would seem to be one of the first principles from which Trecartin operates.

Ramping up the confusion, he leaves no aspect of the world within the frame unaltered. His performers, some of them former aspiring Disney child stars, wear a hybrid of clubbing gear and campy almost-drag. Spaces are filled-up with bodies and things; in one video, a gaggle of boys and girls in blonde wigs simper and scream while crowded onto a bus. Competing with the actors are layers of motion graphics, of the kind you might see on an infomercial – that is, the graphics normally relegated to a netherworld of bad video aesthetics – which are overlaid or inset, or spin and scroll across the screen.

Trecartin himself, ubiquitous throughout his work, sports bitchy attitude and mastectomy scars. Faces are adorned with self-tan, white lipstick or day-glo swatches of colour; this is make-up applied to bring the work’s human element into alignment with its tawdry mise-en-scene. The scenarios play out among the accoutrements of a cheap Florida vacation; Trecartin produced the videos in the nine rooms of a rented house in Miami. His use of disposable IKEA dreck makes sense, considering the casual destruction the performers wreck on the place. People break things and smash Blackberries against the floor. Posters of things like fluffy white dogs on the walls further help to fragment the screen space, and everything is accompanied by the drone of cheesy synthesizer music. When the actors speak, their voices are sped-up, an especial irritant for some viewers. People talk into cell phones, or mimic this by holding thumb and pinkie up to their face, all the while mugging for the camera.

Trecartin’s extreme emphasis on artifice helps to reinforce the feeling that you and the performers in his work exist in separate worlds.  The focal point of a single camera lens means you peer into the frame, and they peer out at you. Trecartin’s actors seem stuck in a box; one in which they are always compelled to perform for the camera. Of course, such an existential state of affairs would only seem like hell to a portion of Trecartin’s audience. The actors he works with are adept at suggesting this is their native habitat. It’s a naturalism of sorts, if of a world organized along the lines of a hilarious late night trip to the 711, where fluorescent lighting, a riot of purchasable items and the drugs you took are responsible for your disorientating experience of the place. It’s a world as seen through the frame of TV, but with no discernible narrative – Sit-com or otherwise – to give it coherence.

Keeping the operatic pitch of Trecartin’s vision in check, ensuring that, finally, there is order in this world, is the absolute brilliance of the artist’s language and editing technique. As with every other aspect of the work, the lines delivered by the performers are fragmented and nonsensical – but what poetry! “Don’t worry, my death was really sexy and ultra tan!” Or in the opening moments of the video, K-CoreaINC.K (section a) (2009) “I really need a case of atmosphere. Are you finding Position? It’s such a hunt.” He achieves the imagined ideal of an invented language that remains comprehensible. The same could be said for his work as a whole.

In response, people I’ve talked to have called Trecartin’s work “empty.” “Visually stunning but vapid” opined a friend; another disparaged it rather grandly as “outtakes from the world’s worst reality show.” In contrast to this opprobrium, the most intriguing comment I heard is that Trecartin’s work gives us “a new way to look at the world.” Let’s shorten that to “new”, as in “what kind of news does this artist bring us”? My guess: Trecartin answers the question about exactly where contemporary art fits into the cultural landscape. As with the response to his work, the news is both good and bad.

In his excellent book, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (2010), John Lanchester observes that a postmodern era in finance led to the 2008 meltdown: “value, in the realm of finance capital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism.” The financial world of course runs parallel to the artworld; at many points, the two intersect. As recent events have shown, both realms are adept at conjuring value out of practically nothing. Compared to the art profession, the financial world is a relative latecomer to this game, one who found itself seduced by the question: how far can you abstract monetary value away from its origin in real things before it collapses? It is still digging out from the wreckage of the answer it got. By comparison, the art system proves its resilience. It produces value around consensus that, however specious sometimes, is far from reckless. Art offers a model for the management of risk that is finely calibrated, and though it may conspire to elicit the occasional bad bet, it probably won’t ever collapse.

Trecartin’s work confirms something about this truth of the art world as purveyor of bankable assets. But he does this by showing us how the artwork as a value unto itself survives in spite of that. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, while the art business might be a centre of value production, it for the most part isn’t a centre of cultural energy today. It’s easy enough to find this energy elsewhere; I hardly need to name the culprit: suffice to say, if you are reading this, you are looking it.

The Re’search (Re’Search Wait’S), Ryan Trecartin

Trecartin smuggles some of this energy into the art gallery and its inhabitants, who are used to more calculated outrages, are amazed. Even the Guggenheim, while acknowledging YouTube’s power with its Play Biennial, balked at going the full distance in their efforts. Almost all of the 25 shortlisted videos are slick graphic animations. This isn’t what people care about on YouTube, which is at its best as a hybrid vernacular entertainment medium and communications tool. I took note when I heard my friend say Trecartin gives us a “new way to look at the world”, partly because it’s such a big claim, but more important, because it begs the question why is Trecartin accorded this honour and not Facebook and YouTube? Isn’t the Internet the new way we look at the world, so obvious we can’t see it staring us in the face? Why is it we need art to tell us what we are seeing is New, confirming the truth of what we already intuitively understood?

Trecartin relates to this new internet-defined field of play first of all as an unselfconscious participant. As a performer, image-maker and manipulator, he is one among the thousands who upload material everyday to the web. Second, Trecartin acts out his affinity with web aesthetics in his use of what Hito Steyerl has termed the ‘poor image’. While not making degraded images per se, the sheer busyness of Trecartin’s videos places his work within the visual field of the degraded image produced by illicit copies, cellphones, handheld video cameras, and webcams. Widespread access to video technology means the image proliferates, and on the whole, its legion of producers isn’t too concerned about quality.

The degree of visual noise Trecartin crams into his videos, places his work on the low end of what Steyerl identifies as the contemporary hierarchy of images, with “sharpness…and high resolution” being at the top; as Steyerl points out, this competition between image qualities is a form of class struggle. In Any Ever co-curator Jon Davies’ characterisation, Trecartin “transforms the space of the screen into that of the computer desktop with hundreds of windows open.” He degrades the video image by overloading it with information and indulging in its worst aesthetic tendencies.

A wildly accomplished practitioner of his craft, Trecartin is widely lauded but his work does tend to inspire a certain amount of aversion. I suspect this is because he single-handedly revives the dynamic between high and low art; something a largely ossified artworld had forgotten about. However, even though Trecartin’s work might expose other visual art conceits to be hopelessly dated, the significance of the work he makes goes beyond that. Trecartin is important because he reaffirms the value of art beyond its monetary worth. He shows us the role artworks can play in reducing the world to its purely visual dimension. His work helps us extract what is New from the morass of everyday experience so that we can see it as historically specific, of today and therefore quite alien to any idea we might have of the past. It’s the Shock of the New all over again; how surprising to discover again that artworks have to the power to deliver it.

About the Author: Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator.

Film Socialism, Jean-Luc Godard

Some of the films Rosemary mentions can be seen at this year’s BFI London Film Festival – clink links for more.

The 2010 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) seemed particularly hysterical. Toronto crowds have proved reliable predictors of future box office success – Slumdog Millionaire (2008) was rescued from straight-to-DVD obscurity at TIFF, and Precious (2009) was an audience favourite here before becoming an Oscar contender. It’s a track record that contributes to the sense that TIFF has arrived, it now being considered second in importance only to Cannes in terms of industry weight. Burnishing this image is the glamorous new TIFF Bell Lightbox, home to the festival and the branding of its corporate sponsor Bell, the hated pretty much by everyone Canadian telephone conglomerate. Not that we live in an age where anyone cares about this kind of thing. One of the main venues for TIFF screenings was a big commercial movie complex that is mystifyingly (to me at least) branded with the name of a bank. Regardless, the Lightbox is a glorious addition to the city’s art ecosystem, a reassuring sign that, better late than never, Toronto has caught on to the prestige and economic power that culture can bring to a city.

As for the movies, TIFF is so huge, featuring over 300 movies, that audiences will have seen at any number of festivals. Sticking to the art beat, I caught a number of films that were noteworthy. Toronto video artist Daniel Cockburn presented his first feature film, the beguiling You Are Here (2010). To say the movie is hard to summarise is to suggest what’s good about it. A series of interlocking narratives that fail to resolve in a conventional fashion, the film shares in common with Inception (2010) an world view informed by the logic of computing. At times Inception feels like an interminable Sprint commercial, because it wastes so much celluloid explaining its premise. By comparison, You Are Here is the superior effort. It explains very little to its audience and yet is fully comprehensible on an intuitive level. As such, it tells us more about where we are going than where we have already been; generally, you get the latter with most feature films.

Also explaining nothing, Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialism (2010) was typically misanthropic. A familiar late-Godard mélange of sound, image and inscrutability, the film starts off on the decks of an opulent cruise ship, lags somewhat in middle scenes featuring a country gas station and a lama, and finishes like a segment of the French director’s Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-98). Actors spoke in German, French and English, while the subtitles played another game altogether, offering up gnomic pronouncements as if summoned from the film’s subconscious. Grouped in irregularly spaced clusters, the text barked out phrases like “Napoleon burning Moscow” or “Arabs don’t get royalties”. Perhaps more than ever, Godard assumes we are barely civil. Incidentally, L’amour Fou (2010), Pierre Thoretton’s documentary about Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé makes for a nice companion piece to Godard’s film. Its focus is mainly on the couple’s relationship and Bergé’s preparations for the auction of their monumental art collection after Saint Laurent’s death. Whereas Godard holds his audience’s feet to the fire for all the sins of civilization, Thoretton’s camera presents lingering and sometimes ennui-inducing pans of their collection and the couple’s many homes, offering an unapologetic view of the victor’s spoils as it were.

As a cinematic master, Godard is his own authority and remains as committed as ever to the art of complex montage. Elsewhere, however, I detected a tendency for filmmakers to underplay this aspect of the cinematic vocabulary. On evidence of a number of films I saw, the preference is for duration and the construction of cinematic space within the shot. This includes, Bruce La Bruce’s LA Zombie (2010), which expands on the gay zombie porn genre he invented in his 2008 film Otto: Or Up With Dead People. He walks among us, in Bruce’s view as a marginal figure that could be mistaken for a homeless man. Largely without dialogue, the film coheres by combining long shots, lurid cinematic hues and the almost abstract sculpted physique of zombie-lead, François Sagat. As expected with a BLAB production, improbable sex scenes make an ostensible claim for the film’s outré status, although in today’s anti-humanist climate LA Zombie’s sentimentalism is in truth its most avant garde feature.

In James Benning’s Ruhr (2009), shown in the Wavelengths series of screenings devoted to avant garde film, new technology and the filmmaker’s practice as a whole result in a film composed exclusively of long takes. As explained to me by Wavelengths programmer Andréa Picard, with this work Benning marks his transition to high-definition video. Ruhr presents a series of static shots filmed in the eponymous German region. Freed from time limits set by the use of film cartridges, the final segment is a single image of an industrial smokestack. It lasts for an entire hour. His first feature-length work in the format, in video, Benning’s long-standing interest in film phenomenology is made sculptural, primarily due to the medium’s heightened capacity for depth of field.

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, Andrei Ujica

Andrei Ujica’s The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010) works with found footage to create the opposite effect: not a world living and breathing in cinema time but one deprived the oxygen of reality by dictates of a communist regime. Ujica constructs a three-hour plus film from propaganda footage shot over the 25 years of Ceausescu’s reign. Viewers see long unedited takes of the Romanian dictator playing badminton or droning on at the podium of some communist plenary. He tours North Korea and is knighted by the Queen of England. Everywhere he goes, happy crowds are there to greet him, and the shops are always full of goods. Presented without any voiceover narration, the film often lapses into long segments of raw footage without sound. The effect is claustrophobic. After a while one longs to see what lies beyond the screen. Oppressive and at times absurd, just like communism, in the end Ujica’s film takes on the dimensions of a great conceptual artwork. Witnessing the starring role the image plays in the construct of communism should make viewers wary of its pervasiveness today, cults of personality having moved on from showcasing the best features of the ‘top guy’ to, well, everyone in the digital age.

Speaking about the transition we are currently undergoing from film to the digital format, San Francisco filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky dryly designated the latter a mere “image capturing device”; i.e., technically competent but lacking the romance of celluloid. The series of silent film poems Dorsky presented at TIFF leave no doubt about which side of the transitional divide he stands on. In comments he made after the screening, Dorsky explained that his goal was never to just shoot images but rather “turn the screen into an object.” That would be an object infused with light, which is often in Dorsky’s films given contour through a lattice of tree branches or the shifting planes of a window reflection.

Although presenting himself as a film purist, Dorsky’s work proved to have an unexpected affinity with entirely different project, the first 3D documentary, Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010). The subject matter is the star in this film. Given exclusive access to the 32,000 year old Chauvet cave paintings in southern France, Herzog opts to film in 3D. He makes an interesting point about the paintings, some of which show staggered images of Palaeolithic mammals as if in motion, being a form of proto-cinema (they would have after all been illuminated by a flickering light). However, Herzog and the experts he interviews at other times strain for significance, and the use of 3D is as temporarily exciting as it was in Avatar (2009). It doesn’t matter. The movie is enthralling. Because the caves present a contoured space in depth for filming, and because the film gives us languorous opportunities to simply look at the paintings on these walls, Cave presents moments of stillness I hadn’t before experienced when viewing cinema.

This is the sculptural effect Nathaniel Dorsky speaks of, and which presumably is sought after by James Benning. To finally discover this ideal lurking within the cheeseball confines of 3D technology is ironic, to say the least. It’s the mystical dimension Herzog is looking for: but in the end the mystery is all in the paintings. The idea of artworks made 32,000 years ago is endlessly fascinating. Get your head around that and, with or without your 3D glasses, time stands still and history collapses.

About the Author: Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator.

Phil Collins, zasto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom), 2008, 16mm black–and–white film transferred to video and colour digital video, sound, 35 min. 38 sec. Courtesy the artist, © Phil Collins

Phil Collins was born in Runcorn, UK in 1970 and currently lives and works in Berlin. His new work, marxism today (prologue) was presented at this year’s Berlin Biennale, and has its UK premiere at Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2 October – 28 November, as part of the AND Festival.

My conversation with Phil Collins took place a year ago in Toronto, when he was visiting the city to give an artist talk. The talk focused on his 2008 work, Why I don’t speak Serbian (in Serbian), and we also discuss it here. That political conflict can be located in the mother tongue you speak is familiar to anyone living in Canada, with its ‘Two Solitudes’, so called, of French and English. When visiting Kosovo, Collins stumbled across a much more complex situation of a particular language being suppressed in the aftermath of war. The sensitivity of the situation called for use of the film apparatus in its documentary mode, something of a departure for the artist. Shot in black and white, Collins makes film a medium of self-expression for those caught up in history’s wider machinations. He gives voice to a little known consequence of the war in Kosovo, creating in the process a valuable historical document.

Can you tell me the title of your new film?

It’s called zasto ne govorim srpski (na  srpskom) (2008). The title is in Serbian, and it means “Why I don’t speak Serbian (in Serbian)”.

I have been working in the Balkans for the last 10 years, quite regularly, and have spent a reasonable amount of time in Kosovo. I’m really interested in historical and social contradictions that the conflict has thrown up.  One time I visited, in 2003 maybe, I was with a friend from Croatia. We were at a video conference, and it was really cold. In order to warm up, we said, “Well, let’s go and get a beer.” So we went to the local shop. My friend said to the guy in the shop, “Have you got any beer? Bierra? Beer?” – we were trying to speak Albanian. Then we started miming, the international language of mimes! You know, just to buy a beer. And the guy didn’t understand, he pulled a blank, and my friend asked again “Imate li pivo, molim?” – in Serbo-Croat, a language which isn’t in use popularly or publicly.

And this very strange moment occurred. The guy replied in Serbian, “But I’ve not spoken this language for such a long time.” Not in a hostile way, but in this moment of almost tenderness and wonder, which was then disturbed. The shop door opened, somebody else came in, and the moment was gone.

So we left , but I never stopped thinking about it.

I thought everybody of my age or older would have been able to speak or withhold the language, but it’s a language which had been abandoned by the Albanian majority – for obvious reasons. It was used as the official language, and so it became a language purely of the police and the military, of jurisdiction and repression; or so it was felt.

But I wondered if it  had been, previously, also a language of poetry or academia, or how else had  it functioned? These are powerful impulses, to speak  in a language  which had become taboo. And I wondered what forms of memory are accessible only through  speech? If language describes experience, what happens when we repress this impulse?

And so I went back in 2008 to begin this project in which I asked people to explain, in Serbian, the reasons of why they no longer speak the language. It happened around the time of Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia, so there was a certain charge to such a proposition. I went around explaining the project  and trying to get the contributors, which was very difficult, because even to perform the language becomes a fraught and troubled experience for most people.

But it also took  me to different places, so I interviewed people like, Azem Vllasi, who was the former head of the Communist Party in Kosovo; Bujar Bukoshi, who was an ex-Prime Minister; journalists, public figures; and then in the second part, I interviewed a Serbian language teacher, which  took the film in an entirely different direction.

I thought it was interesting that at last night’s screening in the Q&A people pointed out; “Oh, this film’s not like your other work…it’s more of a straight ahead documentary” and you said, “Yes, but when it’s screened in Kosovo, that’s its intended audience – it has a meaning there. Outside of Kosovo it’s read as something simpler, possibly.”

And I like this answer, because it was in disregard for these other audiences –  the mainstream art audience – which is, supposedly, white and English-speaking. It’s as though you’re really Globalist. You’ve travelled so much, so you don’t think the audience of ‘the centre’ – wherever that is – is the most important one.

I think that’s true. One of my first videos, how to make a refugee (1999), was shot in Kosovo. And my other works are more rock ‘n roll – about  popular culture, its genres and how we used them. But this piece is about something very specific. It is different, and still it’s part of my continuing investigation into troubled invitations and troubled platforms for certain forms of expression. I don’t think any of the projects are easy in their execution, you know. The Smiths project, for example, always comes under, or invites, certain kind of criticism as well.

Phil Collins, how to make a refugee, 1999. Single-channel video, color, sound, 12 min. Courtesy the artist

Can you elaborate on that?

Well, with a lot of the projects, they revolve around the idea of exploitation, and also around an imposition. On one level, they appear generous, and on another, they seem to be exploiting the subject. And I think they have to – in a way, they must manage these two opposing axes.

So, for instance, with The Smiths karaoke trilogy, people will say: “But why aren’t we seeing a Turkish singer or a Colombian singer, why is it the imposition of English language and an English language group?”

But who’s making that objection – Western people?

No, no – people in the countries themselves. They see it as a neo-colonial exercise, which, of course, is what I am interested in as well. How does an alternative group from Manchester, singing about a very local experience, about Whalley Range, Dublin and Dundee and Humberside – how does that translate to a very far away context?

I wrote down that line from that Smiths song about being “ crashed by a bus” – and in the film, they’re singing it in a cheerful, joyful sort of way.

It’s a very joyful sequence, that sequence of the film. So yes, I think zasto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom) also follows these avenues of investigation, but its strongest dialogue is between Serbia and Kosovo. And if we, as an audience, are placed as outsiders, and if this also throws up our own lack of understanding, then that’s what the film is about as well. It’s not a particularly inviting film. It doesn’t give us all the signage that we need in order to understand what happened there.

And it returns again and again to  the fraught nature of language itself. People are speaking a language which they generally refuse to speak, and explaining how that feels, some of them fluently, some with great hesitance and faltering recall.

In the beginning, there is a moment when a contributor can’t remember Serbian word for ‘memory’. I was particularly interested in these slippages – the way in which we try to find or recall language, or a position. I mean, in the boldest terms – and it’s something which I don’t like to use –  this is “the language of the enemy”. What does it feel like to adopt this position for a short period, and to investigate its tenor, its palate?

Phil Collins, zašto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom), 2008. Installation view, 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Photo: Tom Little. Courtesy the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art

Speaking about the coherence of your project as a whole, I would say that, in contrast to the idea that you’re investigating the exploitative nature of our relationship to forms of representation, there’s the flipside as well, that’s also in your work, in The Smiths film, and even in the Kosovo film…

For instance, the most heartbreaking moment in ‘zasto ne govorim…’ is when the woman shows the photo of her son who was killed in the ethnic violence. This shows how the photo works as a memento. It has very important role to play, a photograph; and maybe now video works this way as well…

So you have a nice coherence in your art, because it contains both sides of the implications of representation. It’s almost as if you’ve discovered this universal theme in the Globalist expanse of your practice, which is this quest for validation through mediation…

I think it’s not universal in that it’s not necessarily similar in different locations. These sites of self-expression – karaoke, the talk show, reality TV, photography – also have very local registers.  But I am interested in seeking out moments of becoming, of temporary transcendence. So within very basic familiar structures, like ‘testimony’, like ‘photography’, especially ‘domestic’ or ‘amateur’ photography, there is an inescapable, ineluctable beauty which appears democratic in certain ways.

Okay, not everybody does have a camera, but with a point and shoot, almost anybody can pick it up and use it. And what’s interesting to me is what information we’re generally not given about a place. People would be surprised that there was reality TV in Turkey in that it’s perceived as an underdeveloped economy, or that the cultural factor of Islam might mitigate against this kind of entertainment.

For me that’s hilarious. Turkey has an enormous range of reality TV, some of it very interesting in the sense that it also has to manage cultural restrictions or specificities. So you have dating shows where a mother-in-law picks for the son. Or Big Brother can be structured very differently in the Middle East to the way it’s structured in the West, because of gender relations and all of the problematic things this can pose.

I’m interested in the specifics of location, and what that might introduce. Because in a city of 20 million such as Istanbul, you’re going to find everything, you know. It might not be enormously popular – if we’d done Metallica or the Stones instead of The Smiths, it would have been much easier because metal and classic rock fans are easier to find. But it really isn’t about easiness. It was about finding this very slim, unrepresentative demographic in order to try and think through place.

And also, of course, my works are very much about performance, about what it  means to speak. Sometimes the question for me is, you know, it feels inhumane to keep recording when we’re faced with distress, but it also feels inhumane to turn the camera off in those moments. Because, whilst we might encounter a surfeit or an excess when we face trauma, this moment can also be very instructive and powerful for the subject. This is where that basic idea of ‘the witness’ comes into play.

That moment when Desanka holds up the image of her son, is something very recognisable, especially from tales of ‘the missing’ and how photography functions in this traumatic scenario. And her language is very beautiful. She says, “This is a photo of my son. Perhaps it will be moving for someone.” It’s very powerful, but reductive as well, this moment of representation for the lost person, a lost family member.

I wanted to ask you about the origins of this project. Your work, how to make a refugee – that was shot when?

In May/June 1999, which was during the Kosovan war. At that point NATO had bombed Belgrade for 78 days.

To stop the conflict.

Well, that’s the interesting question. Because really it was a controversial intervention. It was the first time, I think, that NATO had intervened within a sovereign dispute. So it wasn’t like Iraq invading Kuwait – this was within a national territory. There was a humanitarian catastrophe going on, but that bombing was an intervention the reverberations of which we’re still living with today.

I was going to say, it initiated a new era of international relations.

Yes, and at that time I was at college in Belfast, and I just got a ticket and went to Skopje in Macedonia, and started visiting the refugee camps. I was also looking at how the West was thinking about this conflict – how they began structuring imagery of Kosovan Albanians, which was already very defined. It was largely rural, so you saw a lot of tractors and headscarves. It was about the spectacular, in a way, and the exotic also.

And then I made a piece in Belgrade soon after called, young serbs (2001) which was a set of intimate portraits. So I’ve consistently made work over there…

Phil Collins, zašto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom), 2008. 16mm film in black-and-white transferred to video, and color digital video, 36 min. Courtesy the artist

So at the beginning, your motivation was an interest in areas with conflict zones…to bring another side of the story, through representation – that was your motivation?

The thing is, specifically if you are a British subject – because of course the British aren’t citizens, they’re subjects of the Crown and still live under the tyranny of the Royal Family – there are certain obligations in relation to the  politics of the British Government, on the most basic level, to go and see for yourself. So when I visited Baghdad, or the West Bank, or Kosovo and Serbia, it was also on an impulse simply ‘to see’, to understand a little of what was happening in my name, without the meditation of the BBC or CNN, or the other news agencies, that largely support the ideological parameters of the government. So, in the Iraq War, you hardly ever saw civilians on telly, or comprehended what was their position in the conflict which was being enforced on their behalf. Similarly, the understanding of Kosovan Albanians and Serbs was very much pre-defined in its iconography, and suited, it seemed to me, the ways in which the British government wanted to proceed at that time.

I think, even when someone’s portrayed as a victim, this is also something which becomes a burden, a burden of representation. It’s something which shackles and has a heavy imprint on the psychology of the place…

On that person, on the people…

On a nation, as a whole – and largely in order to mobilise support or interest. There’s very little interest in the Balkans now, in that the news media and the world have moved on to other conflicts. But that becomes a specific harness, a specific shackle, because it embeds a very unitary form of self-understanding and self-representation.

Against, for instance, the global image of America, who looked very progressive when they elected Barack Obama as President…

Globalisation means the so-called Western democracies become nations of outsourcers – to Indonesia, to Turkey, to Taiwan –  and are reliant on slave labour, which becomes endemic and indentured in the Far East. So my projects hope to perform not the sanctimonious idea of the generous Utopian artist, but to show the prickly aspects of the nature of production. Pick up a piece of clothing, take a sip of coffee – at each moment we’re complicit in the web of globalisation which isn’t always something particularly happy and fluffy,  but can be incredibly unfortunate and distasteful and sour.

Hopefully, my work reflects back on this, or loops back on to such modes of production. I am not an artist who offers redemption through these processes, but one who hopes to negotiate in some way  these sticky  networks.

About the Author: Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator.

The War According to eBay, Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl’s In Free Fall premiered at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh and is showing at Picture This, Bristol from 1-30 October 2010, and at Chisenhale Gallery, London from 4 November to 19 December 2010.

For some summer lulz, I chatted on email with German artist Hito Steyerl over a couple of weeks in August. A somewhat protracted process, I found it necessary to read a few of books in order to keep up with the conversation. Nothing particularly theoretical; I don’t think theory would have helped me. I did, however, find Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter useful. It’s indicative of the tricky terrain Steyerl maps with her art that a book about videogames and reality TV would be relevant to it. Given the dominance of these current cultural forms, however, what’s really surprising is that more artists aren’t making work dealing with these issues.

Your work is very complex, combining an art practice with theoretical writing. And you’ve produced a lot. In my mind, it exists as an entity – a very dense one. You could even say it has exceptional spatial characteristics. There is a particular conceptual reason for this: the web. When deciding how to approach a discussion with you, I realized the answer is obvious. We are doing this interview on the occasion of a number of exhibitions you are having in the UK and Germany; however, our immediate context is the site where this interview appears. So let’s talk about that – or at least focus our discussion in a way that will allow us to incorporate links, images and videos on this website.

One of the forms of your practice is the representation of data; or more specifically, its characteristic of being in motion, and so to a certain extent being beyond representation. I love that you take this on; it is so very defining of our contemporary existence and yet rather an elusive idea to conceptualize. It occurs to me that your work also represents this idea as it is manifest in the contemporary condition of the dispersal of attention, which is something I know I struggle with. As if to prove my point, while writing this question, I checked my Twitter feed and clicked on this link, a rather tongue in cheek screed about the Evils of Saving. So with this web-induced diversion of my attention, I find an analogy for the subject at hand: Capital too wants to be in motion. So that’s my question. In so far as your work engages with form in its most contemporary manifestation, is that your true subject: Capital?

Let’s step back a little and consider the relation of Capital and movement. Whilst Capital, for sure, is moving, this doesn’t necessarily mean that every movement is fully captured by Capital. There is an asymmetrical relation between both. Movement – as for example in the case of diverted attention online – can also constitute a flight from labour or other capital-based relations (of course these evasions are immediately recaptured, but again not fully). Capital is not able to fully come to terms with evasion, resistance, distraction, irritation, sleepiness.

I am fascinated, though, with the ways Capital registers digitally, how it becomes visible, how it matters, so to speak. One might like to think that it is purely abstract and invisible, but it leaves stains and traces as it moves.

One example: In one of my most recent works, I subtracted the copyright marks from WWII photographs sold on eBay. The pictures were made by German soldiers on the Eastern front and show all sorts of war scenes.  The more violent, the more expensive the photos are. eBay vendors add copyright signs to affirm their property rights, and also to cover representations of war crimes, swastikas and other illegal content. In my work, I’ve subtracted the photographic images and left the copyright marks as they were. They represent the original photographic picture seen from the angle of their existence as digital commodities. This is their contemporary form of circulation and movement. Yet, in a negative and subtractive way they retain the traces of the resistance of the persons originally shown in the pictures, mostly captured female Soviet soldiers, who were fighting against the Nazi invasion. Those women constituted one of the groups who were to be immediately killed after their capture; they had no chance of survival. So in some cases, a very abstract form of their negative imprint is preserved.

War according to eBay, Hito Steyerl

These are their portraits in 2010, under the condition of digital capitalism, and I’d argue that these are documentary images, because they show the reality of the contemporary movement and dispersion of the original photographs.

Aside from being documents of our contemporary digital reality, the compositions of your eBay works are unmistakably reminiscent of abstract paintings. This brings up all kinds of issues. For one, I am tempted to say the works have the effect of re-contextualizing abstract painting, as seen in its 1950s heyday, as being a kind of blunt instrument of forgetting – something I hadn’t thought about before. This idea makes sense, I suppose, if you consider the postwar ascendency of American culture as being somehow amnesic in intent. Your eBay works also evoke ideas about the dematerialization of the artwork. Conceptual art prefigures the regime of the virtual we now live in. Abstract painting also fits within this narrative: abstraction prefiguring abstraction. In your essay In Defense of the Poor Image (2009) you note that “dematerialized images…[are] a legacy of conceptual art.” You write very persuasively about the importance of the degraded image; and of its capacity to enact a form of “resistance against the fetish value of visibility”. Given that relevant precedents for these works are abstract painting and conceptualism, I am curious to know, what form do they take when presented in an art gallery?

I hope that, in a gallery, this work might inspire people to think about the form what is considered sublime takes: purely formal and self-referential art. Because this installation may look every bit as fetishist as if it were Art with a capital A; but it is not – it is found material from the junkyards of the web, powered by a dubious digital scopophilia. It is actually copyrighted military porn; if not worse. So what is the relation of this type of mobile image to abstract art?

In his book The Century (2005), Alain Badiou writes about the “passion for the real”, which according to him, dominates the 20th Century. This passion is characterised by a desire to tear away the veils of mere appearance and deception and to uncover the real essence of the thing under investigation. Politically, this unleashes a huge amount of paranoia against people who are not deemed pure enough or traitors of a cause. The passion for the real is not only a motor behind many of the massive purges and maybe also ethnic cleansings of the 20th Century (there are other motors as well), but as Badiou argues further, it can also be detected in abstract art works (his example is Malevich). These works evacuate the frame of everything deemed superfluous, they literally purge color and form. It is quite interesting to think about this link between the genocides of the 20th century and abstract art, both aiming for an essence, a purity to be achieved on the one hand by elimination on the other by subtraction (obviously, and Badiou insists on this: by completely different means).

In the case of the eBay work, both somehow collide: what looks like a sublime and completely self-referential minimal artwork is actually a coincidental trace of war crimes, its price tag, if you will.

Could you speak a bit more about the relationship of your practice to the concept of the poor image and the image in motion?

I have been interested for a long time in travelling images, in the ways in which their meaning and appearance changes. These, for example, are samples of pirated Chinese DVD covers on which a new peculiar language emerges.  This language is called Spamsoc, as you can see.

Spamsoc is generated by online translators, automatic scanner recognition tools, and travels on the back of pirated DVDs. It exists in many countries and knows many local dialects.

Probably it emerges late at night on the desktops of digital shockworkers, who compress, rip, and transfer audiovisual data and create covers and blurbs on the side. It is a language that is created within multiple conflicts, most of all conflicts over copyright. This is also why it is a broken language. I see it mainly as a great improvement on the English language and proof of how backwards we are, because we are not able to fully decipher this language from the future. Spamsoc’s multiple neologisms express disagreement over the ownership of audiovisual content, the domestication of translation and other aspects of digital shockwork. I love the automated ‘Freudian’ slips (which are no longer Freudian of course), which lay bare the digital unconscious of the period. Take for example this genius term “the pubic performance”, in the jpeg below.

In one decisive blow, it expresses the decline of the public sphere; the demise of traditional cinema and its replacement by private home cinema; the transformation of an always illusionary public defined by rational deliberation with a pubic sphere that thrives on spectacle, shock and scandal; as well as the performative character of these elements of the private running amok in public…

The pubic performance is the production of self on countless webcams, endless chatter on social media, confessions about trauma on YouTube, post-oedipal drama on morning TV.

I love the precision with which you have been able to pinpoint these details, Spamsoc, the pubic sphere, which are fantastically emblematic of Globalism. I have read your explanation, understand it, and yet I still do not know what Spamsoc is. As you say, we don’t understand it because we are not from the future. It’s also like a spot on the far horizon, the arc of the future, the jet plane of Globalism flying over our heads to a place we will never visit.

I am interested to know how Spamsoc figures in your work? It’s a file you made from a scan of a pirated DVD that you sent to me by email. As such, it embodies your interest in what you call “travelling images”. This brings up a question for me: if images travel do they ever come to rest, and if so in what form?

In turn, this opens up onto the bigger issue of how a digital file relates to what we traditionally think of as an artwork? I realize this may not be the right question to ask, because I can see your work exists as a kind of matrix of text-plus-image-plus-gallery shows. Still I would like to focus on this problem because it touches on much bigger questions. It is hard to credit a digital file as a ‘real thing’, which points to what I see as the epoch-defining cultural confusion about what is ‘real’; or maybe more specifically: what is truth and what is fiction?

The examples of this are legion but can perhaps best be summed up by the fact that ‘reality’ itself has become a genre, one that ‘everybody knows isn’t real (sort of)’. Can you talk about this problem in relation to your work?

Very concretely. I’ve written a text and made an interview with Jon Solomon, a translation theorist, who was at that time based in Taiwan. Both deal with the production and circulation of Spamsoc. I also made a file, which documented those DVD covers visually, though I do not consider it art. Generally, I think this question about whether something is art or not is a bit overrated – because essentially the question is mostly about gatekeeping and declaring that certain types of art shall be excluded. Paradoxically the non-art thus becomes essential for defining and sustaining the art with a capital A. But obviously, there are works with more or less formal concerns, or even different formal concerns, which may or may not be challenging enough to create a productive uncertainty (which might be my provisional definition of art: emphasis on productive). It’s about the question of form in information, the relation between both. For me, pure form is just as uninteresting as pure information.

So, can a digital file be art? Why not? Depends. It’s more important though, that there is something challenging, motivating and unpredictable about its relation it poses between form and information.

Is a digital file a ‘real thing’? That’s another question. It certainly has a reality on the material level – the level of electricity and material support. It is certainly also very much connected to reality through its coding and format. A VOB file on a DVD is pretty real, as it is tied to different networks and markets of raw materials, in this case, for example, metals and plastic, both of which are often recycled; not to mention hard disks, burning devices or other storage media. All these have the same level of reality as the material support of a photograph, or film stock. Thus there is often a history of the object, or objects involved in the storage, production and processing of a file. I made a work recently about recycling of aluminium from former military planes, and how this becomes the material support for DVDs.

In Free Fall, Hito Steyerl

I also have extensive notes for a history of glass in media, of the use of glass fiber cables, glass as a metaphor for transparency and communication. Glass is also one of the sensories of the social. Broken glass refers to destitution or insurrection. On all these levels – and surely, the art gallery with all its institutional codings can be included with these other material supports –  we could perform a material reading of the carrier medium, but also of the social histories of encoding and transmission. Obviously these are also tied to issues of copyright, audiovisual property and the social struggles around it.  This is real enough for me; or perhaps if it isn’t, it’s still interesting enough. The question whether the content of the file relates to reality or not is another question, which is ultimately undecidable.

But yet again, there is always a perspective, which looks at the reality of the fiction, if you like, its infrastructure, so to speak. Like in the movie Inception – in order to create the confusion about dream and reality you need a huge infrastructure in the first place. Cables, medication, game architecture; take this away, and the fiction (or in this case, dream) collapses. Same goes for the cultural industries, or perhaps more precisely the military-entertainment complex. It is the material base for all our confusions about reality, its matrix and it is very real.

So there is always – I think – a substantial degree of material reality to all digital things. But it may not even be so interesting to figure it out – perhaps it’s more interesting to explore the new realities created by fiction, digital or not. There is a constant transfer between reality and fiction, but as I see it, it mainly consists of misunderstanding, faulty imitation and mistranslation. People (like the urban guerilla in my video November (2004)) try to imitate fiction films; they fail, but produce new realities. It was Hannah Arendt, who said, that that ultimate creative force in politics were lies. Who could deny that the lie about the existence of WMD’s in Iraq created massive new realities?

About the Author: Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator.

When forgotten, pop stars become like wallpaper in our daily lives. Once they become ensconced as icons, they take on an ulterior function. Probably only students listen to Bob Marley these days, but this doesn’t stop me from singing one of his songs, involuntarily, when walking down the street. This is one of the subjects of Candice Breitz‘s work. By recording a popular song as sung by its multitude of fans, or taking the overly familiar images of media stars and breaking them down into their constituent parts, Breitz makes evident the unconscious roles these icons play in our lives. If the idea of ‘Clint Eastwood’ has become as natural to us as a tree, Breitz works to make sure he comes to seem unnatural to us again, helping us to decode our world and understand it a little better. In Factum (2009), commissioned for her solo exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto, she worked with sets of twins to literally construct a composite portrait of their public selves. Splitting the one into two–two people on two screens who look all but identical–serves as a nice metaphor for her practice as a whole, which reconfigures the mediated world into a self-reflective entity. I spoke with Candice in September 2009 when she was in Toronto for the opening of the Factum exhibition.

You’re working with not necessarily the newest stars but the most established.  Figures like Bob Marley, Meryl Streep are so ubiquitous they’re almost beyond conscious attention. Even when I was preparing for this interview, I got Buffalo Soldier stuck in my head…

Candice: It happens to the best of us! There’s an excellent German word for this phenomenon… a song that gets annoyingly stuck in one’s head is called an Ohrwurm or Earworm.

This goes the heart of what you’re doing. You could have chosen Colin Firth or Brad Pitt, so I’m just wondering what it is about those stars in particular that interest you? Is it because you’re a fan?

Well, I’m interested in the kind of patina that celebrity acquires with a little bit of distance. And I think that—with very rare exception—I haven’t really been interested in addressing things that are happening now, things that are too contemporary, because I think it can be hard to understand things when you’re standing right in front of them. In a sense, I’m much more interested in material which has the potential to tell us something about who we were, who we have been in relation to who we are now, than in material that claims to be able to tell us who we are right now. So much of what is happening right now won’t remain significant in the long run; it won’t have that Buffalo Soldier quality. From the vantage point of now, it’s hard to tell which cultural moments will be collectively internalised and become part of our shared memory and our ongoing cultural being: proximity can be blinding.

You could say that I’m interested in treating the footage that I recycle almost archaeologically. I made an installation in 2002 that I titled Diorama, using short clips from the soap opera Dallas as my raw material. That was the first time it occurred to me that the television screen is somewhat like a vitrine – you know, you visit a museum of natural history and they’ve got stuffed creatures and preserved artefacts displayed in glass boxes, objects that are supposed to open onto a greater understanding of who we’ve been or how we’ve interacted with our natural environment. And so within my installations, I like to think that the television or the plasma display becomes a vitrine of sorts: slightly aged footage can give off a lot of clues as to what our priorities were and are, what values we have aspired to, how current conventions came into being. With a little bit of historical distance, it becomes much easier to translate, to be in dialogue with footage.

And your formal strategies of breaking down the stars’ performances into memes. Do you think that that helps to break down our identification with them… or, as I said, our ability to disregard them, our tendency to treat these individuals as sort of psychic wallpaper?

We wallow so much in images from the mainstream media, voluntarily or otherwise, that much of this imagery comes to feel almost like a natural landscape, so natural in fact that it can be easy to forget how contrived, how constructed much of this imagery is. To come at it from different angles so that it becomes legible in alternate ways, is a way to acknowledge that the language that is available to us via the mainstream media is a conventionalised vocabulary of gestures and expressions, not to mention constructed forms of behaviour. I’m interested in looking at what terms are privileged by the mainstream, in breaking the vocabulary down: I think of myself more as a minimalist than a pop artist…

Oh that’s interesting…

So sort of breaking it down — as you suggest — into memes. I haven’t thought of my process in those terms, but it makes sense. What are the basic building blocks of mainstream culture? And how do they aggregate to convey who we are? To strip something down—a love song, a blockbuster film, a soap opera—to the basic units that structure it, is to point to its constructedness, to the fact that it has been composed or put together rather than just existing in a natural state…

Her, 1978-2008, Seven-Channel installation, Duration: 23'56", Installation View: Kunsthalle Berlin, Photograph: Jens Ziehe, Berlin, Ed. 3 + A.P.

And that also shows that we do have a kind of intimate relationship with these characters. I think because you reconstruct these images, and  present them as an installation, your work sort of acts out this process of the way we internalise these personalities.

It’s certainly not about taking cynical distance… Nor would I want to suggest that I stand outside of the culture that I interrogate or recycle in my work. I’m as prone to this culture as the next person. I think it’s important to avoid dismissing it too readily. Regardless of how self-reflexive and clever we’ve become about picking popular culture apart—understanding its effects and the ways in which subjectivity is inflected through it—it nevertheless has an affect which can’t be swept away, and which I think we have to seriously consider. I think it’s important to try and understand this affect in its complexity rather than simply characterising it as a negative force and turning a blind eye to it. Why are people so affected by a song or movie that is transparently manipulative or that portrays complex, layered experience in deceptively simplistic terms? People are not stupid. Your average moviegoer understands that they’re being manipulated to some extent, that people don’t appear or behave in reality as they appear or behave on the big screen. And yet the affect remains. I think that’s worth thinking about.

Just to add to that, I was covering the film festival in Toronto and I was at the press office and there was a media scrum around Megan Fox. So I got a little glimpse of her… even though, basically, I don’t know who she is…

I don’t either, but I know the name…

Exactly.  And I was still like dazzled because she looked so…

…put together?

Put together. That’s the exact expression that I’d use…

I suppose what my work tries to do is to understand the ‘putting together,’ you know, the consequences of being exposed to so much ‘put-togetherness,’ not only for those individuals who are put together and made visible to us by various marketing forces, but also for those of us who consume the tribe of put-togethers via our cultural habits.

You could say that these globalised stars, like Bob Marley, did the advance work of globalism, because they were global stars before globalism. And yet we’re moving into an era where it could be argued that there’s more diversity and fragmentation of the people who are considered stars, there are lesser stars, the whole B-list to D-list phenomenon brought to us by Reality TV… I’m interested in the fact that your work is also moving in that direction. Your newest project with the twins, Factum (2009), for instance, moves away from stars to real people.

I’m not sure I would agree that working with ‘real people’ is a shift in my practice. Since I started making videos around 1999, I’ve pursued two parallel trajectories. On the one hand, I’ve made a series of artworks using found footage, which tends to address celebrity in its various guises. But I’ve also been interested in the flip side of this phenomenon, not just the people endowed with celebrity and visibility, but also the invisible others who sit and watch the screen, who consume what is on the screen. I’ve made a series of works, starting with a piece called Karaoke in 2000, which are about the reception of popular culture, the fans or consumers that make celebrity a possibility in the first place. My work has tracked both the ‘somebodies’ and the ‘nobodies,’ as Warhol might facetiously put it. In a work like Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley) (2005), the fans are not telling their stories in a conventional sense, but I think they do tell us a great deal about who they are through their re-performances of the music, in the choices they make about how they stage their relationship to the music. I think of Legend, and the other projects in which I have worked with communities of fans, as oblique forms of portraiture, attempts to get closer to understanding what it is about listening to music that creates meaning for people, why it is that a particular kind of music gains significance within a particular person’s life.

So working with ordinary people—as I do in Factum—is not really a shift as such.  What’s perhaps new about this series, is that it attempts to ask the question, gingerly perhaps, maybe even neurotically, about the extent to which the biographical experience of ordinary people can survive the overwhelming dominance of celebrity narratives that are at the heart of the culture industry. With genres like biography and portraiture, it’s hard to avoid certain claims for transparency, certain tropes that imagine a lifetime of experiences as a kind of monolithic trajectory. Factum is my attempt to find a jagged way to look at how a mass of fragments comes together to make up a particular life or, actually, a particular pair of lives. Whether the works are ultimately interesting on those terms, I’m not sure… They’re still very fresh, very recently completed.

Factum Tremblay, 2009, From the series Factum, 2009, Dual-Channel Installation: 2 Hard Drives, Duration of loop: 78'08", Commissioned by The Power Plant, Toronto; Commissioning Partner - Partners in Art, Ed. 5 + 2 A.P.

And yet you made the decision to dress the twins the same.

I guess that’s the arty part!

It’s beautiful – formally it’s gorgeous. But in terms of what you were saying about biography, there’s a splitting effect there which is interesting in relationship to your older work, it relates maybe to ideas about replication in relation to mass media.

Are you maybe familiar with Robert Rauschenberg’s Factum paintings? Do you know them?

Yes, I am.

My series of double portraits of identical twins is named after those paintings. The two paintings are twins of a sort, twins that were separated at birth. One went to live in MoMA in New York; the second is in the collection of MoCA, Los Angeles.

That said, I don’t think Rauschenberg was thinking about twins when he made Factum I and Factum II in 1957. He was probably thinking about the tension between two different ideas about what a work of art is: the work of art as an exteriorized expression of subjectivity, as a product of a creative subject regurgitating its interiority or selfhood, versus the work of art as a thing that is subject, like all other things in the world, to various external forces beyond the artist’s control. At that moment in time, industrial production—its capacity to produce things en masse through mechanical repetition—was one such force. When Rauschenberg takes a gestural brushstroke and attempts to duplicate it, as he does in his Factum paintings, he predicts everything that was about to happen with pop and minimalism: the work of art was about to be overtly serialised, artists were about to start producing their works industrially in a manner that would echo commodity production. The mythologies so dear to Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists were about to be obliterated.

Though Rauschenberg may not have been thinking about twins, I think his Factum paintings basically ask questions about how a work of art comes into being… via the nature of the artist… or via the nurturing forces of the larger world as these impact on the artist. My Factum portraits I guess raise similar questions in relation to subject formation. Like Rauschenberg’s paintings, identical twins are at first glance overwhelmingly similar, but the more time you spend with them, the more apparent the differences—subtle and dramatic—become. Despite all the forces of sameness that press in on us, and there are many, the idiosyncrasy of inner life nevertheless prevails. That of course goes for everybody, not just twins. Delicate as it may be, there is a resistance to homogeneity in the minute decisions that we each make in everyday life, and this is what interests me. Hence the title of the show at The Power Plant in Toronto – Same Same – with its silent ‘…but different.’ I’m interested in the small and quirky ways in which people manage to differentiate themselves under the duress of sameness.

People perform that…

I’m Canadian and it’s often observed that Canadians have a kind of outsider perspective because we’re living next to the behemoth of the  US. And I’m just wondering if you feel, as a native of South African, that this gave you a particular perspective on these globalised stars that maybe you wouldn’t have if you had grown-up elsewhere?

In South Africa we only got domestic television in 1976. I wasn’t really born into television, if you know what I mean – television wasn’t there during my early formative years. I clearly remember the day my parents brought a television home for the first time – I think it must have been around 1978; I was about six years old. The single channel that was available was tightly controlled and censored by the state.

A bigger kick than television itself came with the arrival of VHS a few years later: the possibility to selectively view footage, to have some kind of editorial control over what one was watching, to be able to fast forward, rewind, pause. VHS gave my generation the technical tools to break the moving image down in a domestic setting, to start intuitively understanding the constitutive elements of footage and the ways in which it could be manipulated.  And once you can break something down, once you start to understand how something is constructed—the very fact that it is constructed rather than existing in some kind of transcendent form—then you can also start thinking about putting it together again in new ways, translating it, rewriting it. Later there would be a number of technical innovations that pushed this process further, but VHS was—for me at least—the first opportunity to think of footage grammatically, syntactically. By shuffling the constitutive elements of any given sequence of images, you can get it to speak different meanings, make it accessible in new ways, prompt people to reconsider what is being said.

Well, and just as a last comment, something about your work reminds me of YouTube, not unsurprisingly, I suppose…

What can I say? Those guys copied me…! But on a more serious note, I don’t find it surprising at all when different people arrive at similar forms at the same moment. If everybody eats the same food, we’re bound to end up occasionally shitting the same shit!

About the Author: Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator.

Karpo Godina , I Miss Sonia Henie (1972)

Rosemary Heather reports on Serbian Kino Clubs, Carmelo Bene, Timothy Carey, and Jeff Keen at the Experimental Forum at the 50th Thessaloniki International Film Festival.

The Experimental Forum section at the 50th Thessaloniki International Film Festival offered such a rich viewing experience it is difficult to know where to begin when discussing it. The quality of the presentation was entirely down to the programming vision of Vassily Bourikas, an individual so passionate about avant-garde film that he single-handedly revives the category from historical curiosity to living, breathing art form.

Changing notions of what now constitutes ‘mainstream culture’ mean that ideas such as ‘underground’, ‘avant-garde’ or ‘oppositional’, are also in flux. The particularly thorough approach that Bourikas brings to the presentation of avant-garde film allows us to, as he says, “extract the context’” which, in the 20th century, gave the ethos of art experimentation such vitality.

TIFF’s Serbian Kino Clubs screenings, for instance, revive to memory the role that filmmakers in (then) Yugoslavia played in the international conversation about avant-garde film. A legacy of Tito’s program for ‘popular technological education’, the true origins of the Kino Clubs are in avant-garde notions about the revolutionary potential of film technology itself. The TIFF screenings were of works from those clubs that had moved on from their original function -  providing a venue for the making of what were essentially home movies. Dusan Makavejev is the most famous product of Tito’s initiative. Although no Kino Club films by him were shown at TIFF, the screenings did give insight into the particular mix of sex, social protest and anti-militarism that is so distinctive in W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971).

With abundant nudity, full-on sex, and the chaotic feeling that formal experimentation can bring, superficial viewing might assume the Kino Cub films were partaking of the generalised language of the counter-culture (see in particular the films of Ljubomir Simunic). Deeper knowledge of the context yields a different reading. In Miroslav Bata Petrovic and Juliana Terek’s Personal Discipline, a naked women (the film’s co-director) shaves her head while sitting in front of a mirror, then ventures out into public in disguise to meet her lover, images of the two having sex being inter-cut throughout the film. Easily understood as a rebellious act – a denunciation of femininity, perhaps – in Serbia at the time, shaving one’s head had a more specific meaning: opposition to the army. Personal Discipline was made in 1983, showing just how enduring the language of liberation as developed in the 60s has proved to be when applied to local contexts.

Tensions produced by the Communist system is also the subject of Karpo Godina’s Litany of Happy People (1969-71). Few films, I’m sure, have more spectacularly fulfilled the role of retrospectively predicting political events. Part of TIFF’s extraordinary Experimental Ex-Yu programme of films, Litany of Happy People maps the ethno-political terms of the country’s future disintegration. Featuring portraits of the region’s inhabitants, all shot against the exterior wall of a farmhouse, each portrait groups its subjects by type: gypsy children, peasants in traditional dress, old women wearing the black garb of mourning. Undermining this pastoral idyll is the film’s soundtrack, a rollicking folk-rock song about the “love” that connects the country’s various ethnic groups. Although not necessarily a premonition of civil war, the film nonetheless imparts a clear-eyed view of Yugoslavia’s fragility, the artificiality of its construct under Communism. The song’s refrain wishing “The Eastern Bloc as a whole be buried in a hole!” suggests the ethnic unity imposed by the communist system, along with the system itself, was considered to be fraudulent. This did prove to be true.

Karpo Godina, Litany of Happy People (1969-71)

Unlike most Communist countries, Yugoslavia had a fairly relaxed attitude about the movement of people across its borders. It is perhaps thanks to this policy alone that we have the historical curiosity, I Miss Sonia Henie (1972). Karpo Godina masterminded the project, inviting seven filmmakers – including Makavejev, Milos Forman, Paul Morrissey, Buck Henry and Frederick Wiseman, all attending the 1st Belgrade International Film Festival in 1971 – to contribute short 3 minute films, each structured according to a simple set of rules, and including required mention of the phrase “I miss Sonia Henie”. Referring to the figure skating champion and film star of the mid 20th century, the sentence was originally uttered by Snoopy, at one time apparently a hero of the international underground. Typical of the omnibus film, the results are uneven. Buck Henry’s contribution is the most inventive. He manages to contrive a scenario in which the sentence is scrawled on a piece of paper by the erect penis of a guy in a coma – a gag no less funny today.  More interesting than the film is the way it suggests, as Bourakis has noted, that Yugoslavia was a destination point on the international map of culture.

A maverick sensibility animated by the spirit of the time unites the Amantes Sunt Amantes programme, which presented works by four exceptional cinematic talents: Italy’s Carmelo Bene, the USA’s Timothy Carey, the UK’s Jeff Keen, and the Serb, Ljubomir Simunic. Shared by the filmmakers is an explosive sense of creative ferment.  Most eccentric is Timothy Carey’s Tweet’s Ladies of Pasadena (1970). A barely coherent melange of talking animals and grannies on roller skates, the film prominently features a dithering, insouciant Carey, who had already made a career as a successful Hollywood character actor, and was a friend of John Cassavetes (producer of the movie.) Carey, also director of the more-known cult film The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962), comes across as a light-hearted, non-gay Jack Smith; or maybe a Kenneth Anger without the interest in Satanism. These comparisons are of interest especially because in Tweet’s Ladies of Pasadena, Carey provides a rare example of camp sensibility devoid of a gay subtext. Presenting himself as a holy fool who naturally gravitates to the company of women, children and animals (there are virtually no other men in the film), Carey finds within camp aesthetics the opportunity to express a parallel subtext about the discontents of masculinity.

Timothy Carey, Tweet's Ladies of Pasadena (1970)

Exploration of alternatives to ‘straight’ society also drive the Pop Art informed 8mm films of the UK’s Jeff Keen. Working far from the Structuralist orthodoxies of the London scene, Keen’s  densely-layered mini-masterpieces are populated by members of Brighton’s bohemian milieu. Handmade, using animation, colour-tinting, collage, superimposition, double-exposures and found sound, Keen made the most of the intimacy that small-gauge filmmaking so readily conveys to portray the creatively full home life he enjoyed with his family and friends. In addition to aestheticising the image in every manner possible, the films are given structure via an ambiance of narrative, one that is derived through reference to the mise en scene of pulp cinema. This is especially true of the epic 33 minute-long White Dust (1970-72), in which costumed and sometimes masked performers inhabit the genres of horror, sci-fi, mystery and soft-core pornography. Consistent with his lack of interest in London’s film scene, Keen believed the obvious audience for his expanded cinema would be found on television, and to a limited degree he saw this wish fulfilled.  Channel 4 and the Arts Council of England commissioned Artwar in 1993, but the broadcaster declined to show the work as individual segments, inserted into the broadcast stream without contextualization, as had Keen originally envisioned.

Most deranged viewing in the festival was found in the work of the Italian, Carmelo Bene. It is not within recent memory that I can think of a film that left me, post-viewing, feeling physically energized and mentally refreshed. This is an admittedly curious outcome considering that sitting through Bene’s two-hour long Our Lady of the Turks (1968) is a somewhat brutalizing experience.  A theatre director of wide-renown in Italy who died in 2002, Bene made five films, between the years 1968-1973. He referred to this creative interlude as a ‘parentheses’; it left him permanently alienated from the art form. With most scenes constructed around Bene’s performance (sometimes talking to himself, using alternating shots), Our Lady of the Turks presents the actor in a succession of absurd scenarios. Rolling around on the floor, hands tied behind his back, Bene pulls books off a chair with his teeth; runs desperately through a field, menaced by the sounds of military drumming and gunshots; pushes himself backwards off a balcony (not easy to do!) then writhes about on the ground, loosely covered in bandages; attempts to make love to a naked women while dressed in a suit of armour, accompanied, hilariously, by sounds of the metal squeaking; repeatedly harms himself and is helpless…The film continues on like this, never letting up in its intensity, 9/10ths of the soundtrack comprised of the filmmaker’s feverish talk.

“The illusion is divine!” he declares, making it clear the saint can never quite be separated from the idiot (a similar world view is espoused by Carey). Like an extended anxiety dream, in which you are late for your train because your shoes are nowhere to be found, Bene’s vision is of life as a struggle, with periods of rampant egomania superseded by episodes of self-sabotage.  For clues to the source of this torment, you don’t have to look far. The artist’s attempts to find love and erotic release are mediated by the presence of flesh and blood religious figures, most predominantly the Madonna, with whom he engages in carnal relations. Not surprisingly, while this psychodrama is particularly Catholic in flavour, it loses none of its relevance for the non-believer.  Bene’s argument was not only with the Catholic Church. He considered his work in film to be an attack on the medium. Judging by my own experience, Bene’s highly idiosyncratic brand of cinematic assault produces effects for the viewer that are nothing less than revelatory.  His work also stands as eminently contemporary: a project of distanciation from within. The success of the confrontation he constructs is probably all the more effective because Bene positions himself within the film as our surrogate; he suffers along with us, we suffer along with him.

It is this lack of faith in notions of reality accepted at face value, and active steps taken to militate against such notions, that all the films presented in TIFF’s Experimental Forum program had in common. If the works are, more or less, products of the culture that emanated from the 1960s, they also point to the broad openness to artistic experimentation that was so characteristic of the 20th century. Today we are still enjoying the effects of the cultural revolution such experimentation brought on; but as a culture we, for the most part, have lost sight of this fact. Which is why programming such as Bourikas’ contribution to the Thessaloniki Film Festival is so welcome, so necessary and so relevant.

For more information on the Experimental Forum, visit Thessaloniki International Film Festival.

About the Author: Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator.

LA Zombie, Bruce LaBruce

Bruce LaBruce talks to Rosemary Heather about his upcoming movie LA Zombie, radical porn, and the end of the world.

Now we’re in business.  Hi.

Is the record light on?

Yeah, yeah.

What would you like to know?

I’ve looked at your LA Zombie blog, where you say “Continuity is bourgeois.”

I said that actually on the DVD commentary of Otto.

So that reminded me of that Pasolini quote about Theorem, how “a member of the bourgeoisie, whatever he does, is always wrong”.

Yeah, well I would agree with that.

So how does that apply in your approach to film making?

Well, Googie in Super 8½ says “I don’t give a damn about continuity.”
And it is kind of a luxury, continuity.  Because you have to have a person who is specifically hired to do that job and you really need someone who knows what they’re doing. The person who was doing it on Otto had no clue what she was doing and she’d never done it before and she would come to me and explain all the continuity errors of a scene that I just shot after the fact.  And I’d be like, “Oh well, thanks for telling me now”. After everything had been shot…

But in a way it’s that idea of creating a scene with some narrative and juxtaposing two shots. And making it seem like this kind of illusion… of a seamless reality, without any sort of distance between the audience and the image, which is kind of a bourgeois idea.

I mean it, the whole thing is just sucking you into this entertainment and to deprive you of your critical faculties and seduce you into this state of not really being aware of what you’re watching.  Not being aware of the artifice of what you’re watching. Or the manipulation.

It’s like I said, it was a matter of not being able to afford a continuity. It’s a luxury I couldn’t afford.

But then people get so bent out of shape when you are making a narrative film and you have these continuity errors. I mean there’s this whole website devoted to it. It lists mainstream films and the supposed errors.  Most, a lot of them, are continuity based.

The problem is you either go against continuity, sort of on principle, and really, really, almost purposefully make it bad, or you completely adhere to it. But if you just do it sort of half heartedly then people just think it sloppy, or something.

So it’s emphatic in itself?

For LA Zombie the continuity was ridiculous. I mean you couldn’t even call LA Zombie a real shoot, a film shoot on any level of mainstream narrative film making. Not only was it chaotic, but going into it, I only had a three page outline. The very fact that I raised however much money it was – $50,000 or $60,000 – for something based on a three page outline was ridiculous to me. It was very experimental…fundamentally.

But it’s porn, so there’s sex connecting…

Yeah, using porn conventions and there’s a loose narrative.  But we tried to incorporate quite a few costume changes for the LA Zombie. And we were trying to match what clothes he would leave one scene with and when he would show up for the next scene, because it wasn’t shot in chronological order.  And it just was impossible because it was so chaotic. So I think that’d be good because I think the continuity will be so extremely and blatantly disjunctive – there will be flagrant disregard of the continuity.

And that creates its own excitement, for sure.

Yeah. But on the other hand I’ll probably even play with that and maybe I’ll push it even further. You know – add it in. But the other thing is this film will have to be an art film in the most experimental sense because there’s no dialogue and there’s just a character like going from one scene to another sort of wandering around and…

And it’s fucking people – dead people – back to life, or something?

Back to life, yeah.

And I was even embellishing and sort of inventing the concept as I went along.  So when I got back to LA and restarted shooting I was so shocked at how many homeless people there were everywhere. And it evolved into this idea that it’s not really about an alien zombie again, similar to my last film Otto, but it’s a sort of schizophrenic homeless person who thinks he’s a zombie or has this delusion that he’s a zombie. So we ended up shooting Francois Sagat,  the main actor, also as a homeless person, dressed in homeless clothes and pushing a shopping cart because everyone in LA has a shopping cart.

Every homeless person?

Yeah. And so we’d shoot him actually just as a homeless person, in homeless clothing and then with sort of grease on him, dirty and then we’d shoot him in the zombie make up, which took an hour and a half, two hours to apply.  And then shoot him in the same location pushing a cart with the homeless clothes on. And I’d just sort of cut back and forth between the two. So if people are expecting something like Otto, I mean it’s nothing like that. Though in terms of the product, I mean it’s very much a porno art film. Not like an indie art film.

Just a little aside is that there are more homeless people than usual in LA. I’d say like three times as more. There’s a tent city…

But we shot all over LA. We shot in West LA and we shot in Topanga Canyon which is close to the Ocean and a bit North. And we shot in Pasadena, in the graveyard, and we shot downtown and in East LA.  
And everywhere we went, I became self-conscious of seeing these homeless people everywhere.

And you said in your blog they’re actors and… aspiring actors?

Well that’s just speculation…

…and that they were good looking homeless people.

Because they were good looking. That struck me when I was there making Hustler White in the ‘90s. I would see these homeless people on Santa Monica Boulevard, that weren’t hustling but they looked like they could be or they looked like they might’ve been former hustlers. Because they were kind of ripped, I mean you know there’s probably muscle under their ripped clothing and they’d always have like grease on their chest which turned into a bit of a fetish of mine.

But then I remembered Samuel Delaney who wrote this book called The Mad Man about a guy who goes around having sex with homeless people. So that became my inspiration or justification for the film.

So you made Otto, your film was about zombies, and then – which is kind of your business model – you make a porn version?

I intended Otto to be more pornographic than it was. And during shooting, we did shoot quite a bit of sexually explicit material, some of which is on the DVD as extra features. But it became apparent when we looked at all the footage from Otto – because the budget was more than half a million dollars – the production values – it didn’t feel like porn at all.  And we had so much narrative material that we had to cut out a certain amount. So in order to tell the story properly, we couldn’t put in so much sexually explicit material plus you have to shoot the sex scenes with a lower grade camera. And it just didn’t fit in with the rest of the material which is shot with an expensive sort of HD camera and in Super 16 film.

And the other reason was the main actor who played Otto, Jey Crisfar decided pretty much just before shooting that he didn’t want to do sex scenes.

Which was totally up to him. I made that clear that it was his choice. And so he would have someone come on his chest or something but he didn’t want to show his cock or like his erect cock, or whatever. He had stipulations that he didn’t want to show. So it would’ve been impossible to make it into a porno movie anyway. But I thought, well, I did want to make more a horror-gore-porn than strictly a porn movie.

Why did you have to use a less high quality camera to shoot the sex scenes?

Well I mean in terms of budget, you just can’t afford to roll that much. And also the camera’s much bigger. And it’s less portable. They use these little Sony digital cameras because they’re really lightweight. And you could run around them and stick them in crevices and things like that.

And also that problem with it looking too clinical – is that a problem? I’ve read that – with the higher definition. Too many pimples on the bottom…

Yeah, but you get that with the other cameras too, the lower grade cameras. I don’t know, people are just more used to it…like it’s an aesthetic.

So how many interviews have you done where people ask: Why zombies? in relationship to Twilight and True Blood?

You know that all happened since I made Otto. That whole explosion of mainstream… but that’s, that’s vampire.

It seems to be all part of the zeitgeist!

The whole vampire thing really just exploded over the last year and a half, you know but…although Buffy was around, and very popular before that so I don’t know why they’re making such a big deal about it now.

It’s just the audiences…

I think it’s more for teenage girls whereas Buffy was for a slightly older demographic I think. And smarter.  But the zombie thing is still going strong. What I was trying to do with Otto was to make the zombie genre more like the romance of the vampire myth.  And make a zombie character who was potentially seen as sexy or vulnerable or someone that you can identify with it at least.

I don’t think the zombie genre really is conducive to that kind of mainstream treatment of making out. You know – a romantic teenage girl fantasy. But you never know these days.

Otto is beautifully melancholic and sweet and with kind of an elegy for left politics and The Raspberry Reich also has that kind of theme...

Although Otto is in a way more bleak.  A more bleak assessment in all ways I think.

Bruce LaBruce

So that brings me to a question I always like to ask you – given your oracular-type pronouncements on the cultural moment, and this is a very particular moment that we’re in…

It’s really dark days. I think the whole you environmental thing has become so apocalyptic with such dire predictions and the weather patterns.  I mean I was in LA shooting LA Zombie fearing for the big earthquake. And there was a tornado in Toronto!

And I was like “Whoa…you’re not safe anywhere anymore.”  In fact they say that if weather patterns continue and the average temperature of the world continues to rise, Toronto could be a new tornado alley.

Toronto could become Kansas.  So it’s a daunting sort of time at the moment.  And then of course it’s all being channelled into this 2012 thing. There’s a movie called 2012.  It’s the whole Mayan End of Time. But I did see one pretty amazing YouTube video that explained it in an interesting, more pseudo scientific way. And it has something to do with the black hole that’s at the centre of the universe. A galaxy is composed of millions of solar systems and every galaxy supposedly has a black hole in the middle of it. And just as planets revolve around the sun, then galaxies revolve around this black hole. They have an orbit.

And according to this video, which included scientific experts or whatever, what will supposedly happen is solar system is going through its orbit within the galaxy, passing through a certain force field or, I don’t know if it’s magnetic or…  I think it’s radiation or something, radio active field.
Which will take 14 years for it to pass through. Like it starts in 2012 and it’ll go to 2028, so that’s 16 years, yeah, 14 or 16 years to 2028.  And it’s not something that will affect  weather patterns and things like that. It’s not something that you will be conscious of.  But there will be calamitous developments associated with it that could wipe out segments of the population. And certain people supposedly will develop some sort of super consciousness. Because of it or they’ll go into another dimension of consciousness or something!

Well, humanity could evolve, we’re sort of due aren’t we?

Oh god, yeah. It couldn’t hurt! No place to go but up.

But anyway that’s just sort of conjecture. It’s someone’s interpretation.

Three years.

Other people think that Phantom Red Dwarf is returning. That most solar systems are binary. And apparently some people believe that our sun is in a binary sort of rotational orbit with a red dwarf which is  a failed star. Or a sun that has never developed into a sun.

And when it returns it will wreck havoc on the earth in terms of gravitational pull. Something like that. It’s kind of interesting – because of the state of the planet, I think people are becoming more kind of conscious of the world and its place in the universe and its vulnerability. And because the internet fuelled all these things we were never really that conscious of before.

And that’s contributing to the culture of fear, as well. And anxiety.

But on the other hand it’s something that we really have no control over.  So it can be just a distraction from what’s actually going on in the more material world. Everything seems to be in kind of like a kind of weird holding pattern.

There seems to be no real…there’s a paralysis I feel. Part of it is because of the environmental issues – everyone slowly coming to the realisation that they will have to be prioritised, but there’s no political will to actually change them…because of capitalist resistance to it.  And, and so it just ends up being a stalemate.
Even people within the political systems and nations who want change are stagnating because there’s no way to push it through any of those political channels now.

You mentioned YouTube a couple of times – and I’m really a YouTube fanatic.  I’ve written something for Engine about how much I love YouTube and how the art world is just totally in some very boring…

…quagmire.

…and doesn’t recognise that that’s the future. So you were talking about making your film arty?

Well it’s kind of a contradiction I guess…because art is obsolete in a way. But on the other hand that’s why I really am playing the porn card as well – because porn will never be obsolete. And this film is definitely a full on porn movie and will be marketed as such. But I’ve always had that attitude towards art that art is not enough in itself. You have to – I always have to – have another dimension to it. Another market and another angle.  Whether it be cinema or porn or some sort of political agenda that transcends its identity as an artefact or a product, an art product. I still think all models of artistic practice are valid. Like the old idea of the gay Avant-Garde is particularly so. Film is something that I think still can be used effectively and strategically. And particularly from a pornographic angle because that’s a taboo that seems to be pretty, something really solid and established and it’ll never be co-opted beyond a certain point.

But can you describe, explain what you mean by gay Avant-Garde?

Well, I mean films specifically. Warhol, Morrissey and John Waters and Kenneth Anger. Jack Smith and Curt McDowell – that tradition of gay filmmakers who make literally extreme shocking homosexual explicit movies.

So in spite of the mainstreaming of the gay movement, it still has that power?

Exactly. That’s why I’m still working in porn even though I’ve announced my departure several times! I keep coming back to it because it does seem in gay terms to be the last side of radicalism really. That’s really disparaging to the whole mainstreaming of gay culture and bourgeois suffocation and the domestication of it, you know it’s really sad and disappointing. And gay marriage – it’s a red herring which is just really unnecessary.

Everyone’s waiting. The system as it exists is obviously corrupt to the point where it’s destroying the planet and yet there’s no emerging youth movement or radical, organised kind of revolutionary movement that’s coming up to challenge it at any sustained or serious level. So…that’s what’s been missing in the past. Two decades. Since the end of Punk. Punk was the last serious youth movement I would say.

In terms of art, I’ve always had that kind of ambivalence. At JD’s we always made fun of artists and we never identified ourselves as artists. I think maybe I’ve gotten a little sloppy in that regard. Since I’ve got older I’ve kind of capitulated a little bit. And I do refer to myself as an artist, but it’s almost like, just a convenient label.

What else do you call yourself?  I mean when you’re engaged in creative endeavours. It’s just a convenient phrase but the system, the arts system itself seems a microcosm; it’s kind of the financial bubble as it exists in microcosm.

There’s this book Seven Days in the Art World. It’s supposedly sociological,  but it’s just somebody – a Canadian actually – who was very excited to get access to all these important people and just kind of slavishly…

Like important artists?

Ah no.  Players, art world players.  The top people.

You mean like gallerists?

Yeah.  People at Christie’s and whatever and she just reported straight. So it’s like “Oh if you were a collector you could read this book and find out how the art world works.”  But it has no critical perspective.

Well that’s what it became reduced to in the past ten years. Fortunately you know, on the upside, my art still never sells.  It’s resolutely unsaleable.

So it’s too good! I read a review of the book by Matthew Collings, who’s a British, pretty cool compere of TV shows, where he said that the author assumes, like the rest of the art world that, – “only a loser would challenge the system” Totally hits the nail on the head.

That’s such a, such a modern attitude – that rebellion equals bitterness or failure or sour grapes. That being critical and rebellious means that you’ve been disappointed and you haven’t been able to succeed with the establishment.

You’ve been a Punk – I read Please Kill Me not that long ago.  Did you ever read that?

Yeah.

And I was getting to the depressing part of the book and a friend said “Yeah but they were losers. That was the whole point, that they made an aesthetic out of it”.

In a way. They used to say Punk is just an excuse to be ugly. But that was the whole point. Ugly kids could be cool too.

So is there anything else you want to say Bruce?

Oh not really. I mean, just in terms of L.A. Zombie, it really is one of those projects that could be a complete fiasco! So people should be prepared for that. Because I’m sort of afraid to look at the footage, to be frank. I wanted it to be more, well I won’t say Matthew Barney!  But it turned out more like a Farrah Fawcett Playboy video.

Well, everybody likes Farrah… she’s been totally reclaimed.

So that’s as good as you get.

About the Interviewer: Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator.

Face, Tsai Ming-Laing

Rosemary Heather writes for APEngine on Ernie Gehr, Harun Farocki, Apichatpong Weersethakul, Tsai Ming-Liang and Harmony Korine at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

For all their stately elegance and clarity of intent, on the whole, the films I saw in the Wavelengths section of TIFF, a series of screenings devoted to avant-garde film, were not involving. The comments I jotted down tell the story. My notes are voluminous. I made jokes and then would write “haha!” when I thought I was being funny. It was like I was ‘live blogging’ (one of the jokes I made…haha). They were the musings of someone venturing to entertain themselves; I was compensating for what wasn’t happening on the screen.

It may be a cheap shot to say I had a good nap during avant-garde film eminence Ernie Gehr’s Waterfront Follies (2009),  but it’s true. Although I knew there was a point to the film’s strategy of presenting long static shots, of a sunset in a bay, somewhere, I struggled to remember what it was. In Gehr’s case, refusing to abide by the conventions of narrative cinema has the value of deepening, and expanding upon, the viewer’s perception of time, and to a certain extent, his film succeeded in having this effect on me. Given the deeply distracted state of a portable-computing-enhanced contemporary existence, it is curious to think there would be no need for an antidote like this. But I would be happy if I never saw Gehr’s film, or any film like it, again.

Even given my apparent unsuitability for such viewing, I am tempted to say that our culture has moved on from the lessons avant-garde cinema has to teach us. But there were films in the Wavelengths screenings that I enjoyed. The TIFF audience was lucky enough to see Titan (2008) by Klaus Lutz, a screening that was dedicated in memorium to the Swiss filmmaker, who died just days before he was about to travel to Toronto for the festival. The film, which features Lutz making his way, sometimes crawling insect-like, through a gorgeous, optically-printed universe, fulfills an ambition close to the heart of the discipline: to recreate cinema in its originary moment, when it is closest to the dream state. Shot in lustrous black and white, Titan is profoundly connected to the now seemingly ancient traditions of the European avant-garde. The announcement of the filmmaker’s death moments before the film’s screening made it all the more otherworldly.  Klaus Lutz (1940-2009) R.I.P.

I also liked the always-terrific Harun Farocki’s In Comparison (2009),  for counter-intuitive reasons. Does a short documentary about methods of brickmaking in different countries have to be boring? Not in Farocki’s case; the exercise was meditative and instructive. Adhering to a brick-like one-after-another structure, In comparison exemplified the ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ approach to filmmaking. Instead of voice-over narration, Farocki used intertitles with brick diagrams to give his images’ context. Constructing a subtle joke about the very idea of inference, In comparison brings a message about the coherence of a world infused with an everyday intelligence.

In Comparison, Harun Farocki

By far the best film I saw in Wavelengths was A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009) by Apichatpong Weersethakul.  In a landscape of pretenders, Weersethakul is the real deal: an artist working at the leading edge of cinematic practice today. Far from keeping his audience at the formalised distance so characteristic of the avant-garde ethos, he makes full use of cinema’s ability to immerse viewers in an experience of time and place. As with Weersethakul’s features, A Letter… is highly evocative of its location (in a luscious, rain-soaked Nabua in northeastern Thailand), but otherwise has little in common with conventional narrative cinema. Lacking the perspective of any view of the horizon, panoramic shots of the jungle work to create an interior space, inside of which the film situates the viewer. Matching the circular movement of the camera is the narrator’s repeat readings of the titular letter. Far from being an exercise in cinematic distanciation, Weersethakul makes believers of us all.

If once abhorred as being complicit with a spectacle-driven mass entertainment industry, the possibilities inherent to cinematic seduction would today seem to offer a viable strategy to the avant-garde – if only because of the level of sophistication such a strategy assumes on the part of its audience. This makes Tsai Ming-Liang‘s Face the best film I saw at TIFF – although saying so is itself controversial, mainly because a number of people I talked to thought it was bad – their verdict, they suggested, backed-up by a more general consensus.  Albeit long and sometimes overwrought, Face is also absurdly ambitious and extravagantly beautiful. How to enumerate its pleasures?

A series of languorous tableaux shot in Taipei, and later in the film, in and around the Louvre (for which it was a commission), Face dazzles because of the faith it invests in the power of the image. Ming-Liang has an extraordinary ability to construct film segments that reward that faith. He then redoubles the compliment, through the assumption he makes that he doesn’t have to explain anything. Aside from tangentially taking place within an imaginative realm governed by the tale of Salomé, Face follows no narrative. All power to an audience that likes their cinema majestically realized and unfettered by any further explanation.

Face succeeds because of what its structure of successive tableaux allows Ming-Liang to get away with: melodrama, grand emotions, stark eroticism. It gives him the freedom to unapologetically create the world he wants. If it happens to be a world fluent in the  aspirational language of globalism at its most perverse – a world of luxury and elitism, blissfully free of any knowledge of the underclass – so be it. That makes Ming-Liang’s film all the more appropriate as a coda to our era.

I liked Face because it affirms the value of beauty in the world, and of material things, as opposed to the infinite regress of irony and the referent. In this sense it shares much in common with Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009), except for the part about beauty, and maybe the irony too – with Korine it’s hard to tell. A polar opposite to Ming-Liang’s film, Trash Humpers would seem to be the product of an auteur who set out to make the worst film he could possibly think of; and in return has received nothing but accolades for his trouble. Korine’s audacity begins with his decision to shoot on VHS and blow it up to a murky 35mm. It continues with the film’s opening sequence: young people made-up to look like old people humping plastic garbage cans. This as-advertised brilliance continues. The Trash Humpers smash things up, and then break into a passable-enough tap dance. Mysteriously absorbing, Korine somehow manages to sustain our interest, in itself a considerable accomplishment, given the ugly look of the film and the behaviour on view.

Trash Humpers, Harmony Korine

Some people have argued that Trash Humpers would work better as an installation, but I think on the contrary it is entirely suited to its presentation as cinema. Filmic duration and a seated (not to say captive – plenty of people left the screening I attended) audience allows it to unfold as if emanating from a recognizable place. The people in it are recognizable too. The poverty of experience on display is after all not so far fetched. You can see it every night on American TV. Notably, on shows like America’s Dumbest Criminals that seem to consist solely of meth-fuelled car cashes caught on surveillance camera, the grainy veracity of which Trash Humpers recreates. If I admit that the latter is a personal favorite of mine, I say so without attempting to justify my viewing on any terms other than voyeurism. The show offers the exploits (and exploitation of) the American underclass as entertainment. This is something I understand much better now after seeing Korine’s film. He gives the phenomenon a context larger than my own prurient interest. So I have to say “Thanks, Harmony!” – you have, paradoxically, made my world a little bit bigger and more humane.  What better goal is there for cinema?

About the Author: Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator.

Still from Jib Kidder's Heavenhurst Prophet Posse

Faced with the awe-inspiring popularity of web-monoliths like YouTube, contemporary art risks becoming nothing more than a quaint relic of the 20th century.

It’s probably not fair to compare contemporary art practice with YouTube; yet there is evidence to suggest that somewhere in the ulterior of its collective brain, the art world does just this, and finds itself lacking. How else to understand the ongoing assurances given in art exhibition press releases and catalogue essays about the important role the viewer plays in the construction of meaning? And the intention to facilitate it with this very exhibition…

If artists once played a leading – avant garde – role in providing a complex and forward-looking framework for reflection on the contemporary world, it now seems most comfortable bringing up the rear, providing explanations for developments that are already intuitively understood and enjoyed by the culture at large. Of course, the argument can be made that conceptualism’s emphasis on the disembodied life of the mind presaged our current embrace of virtual experience. And that the early networks fostered by post-minimalism and its precursors – Fluxus, mail art, conceptualism, etc – anticipated today’s social media. Emphasis on the relational in the last decade of art practice can likewise be seen as having the relevance of putting face-to-face human interaction back into the social media equation.

Still. There remains something desperate in the art world’s current desire to kowtow to its audience – by way of invitations to throw coloured darts at a map, or to converse with one another on bean bag chairs. Or whatever.

By all accounts, the Guggenheim New York’s recent theanyspacewhatever, with work by known relational practitioners like Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija, was a boring show. A cursory Google search turns up dismissive blog reviews of the exhibition by its intended public; viz.,  Apparently, drinking coffee and standing around is art. Who would have thought…

In a recent e-flux article, Dieter Roelstraete voices similar doubts about contemporary art’s relevance, but from a different angle. In The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art he ponders the reasons for current art’s archaeological tendency – which ranges from artworks that investigate modes of museological display and historical re-enactments, to those artists who undertake actual archaeological digs. In Roelstraete’s analysis, such practices are symptomatic of two conditions: the first, to function as a corrective to a mass-culture that consumes its own products – movies, pop stars, best sellers – so quickly that it threatens to suck all cultural memory into a black hole of oblivion. The second, more troubling and readily suggested by the art world’s small army of past-reconstructors, is an inability to imagine the future.For Roelstraete, this amounts to a failure on the part of current art practice to live up to its role as the avant garde of our culture. But I would argue that his reliance on a modernist framework when thinking about this problem – a construct that believes in the necessity of an art avant garde – is itself misplaced.

Clues to what the future of our culture will look like are abundantly available elsewhere. All you have to do is look on YouTube.

It is only fair to point out that, in terms of video technology’s cheapness, ease of use and sheer pliability, 1970s art practice undertook some essential R&D that was cannily predictive of the technology’s current user-generated centrality to our culture. Nevertheless, YouTube is an ongoing argument for why its millions of users, everyday, have little reason to care about contemporary art practice.

When I look at the videos put on YouTube by San Francisco’s Jib Kidder to accompany the songs, sample-derived mash-ups, from his album All on Yall, I think of the 70s video work of, say, Dara Birnbaum or Christian Marclay’s work made in the decades after. But it is hardly important to know these art historical precedents to enjoy what Kidder does.

When I asked Kidder – by email – why he chooses to use the cut-up technique when making his videos, he responded that the data itself solicits this response: “It’s what it’s best at – being copied.” In Kidder’s video for the song Windowdipper,  morphic resonances between each seconds-long ’slice’ of data creates a visual tempo connecting with the music’s beat. At the same time, through these resonances, the images editorialise not only on the artist’s chosen technique but also their context of presentation: YouTube itself.

Windowdipper’s rhythmic edits of video-viral clips of kids dancing visually reinforces the rhythm of the song. By doing this, the artist points to the way content on the web tends to self-replicate – the reason why the metaphor of ‘the viral’ – played out as dance fads and the hundreds of ‘answer’ videos that users’ uploaded daily – is so aptly applied to YouTube as a phenomenon. Kidder’s videos provide a glimpse into YouTube’s labyrinthine grandeur. His comment that the data – a lot of it sourced from YouTube – elicits this response from him, is a reflection on the awe-inspiring amount of material that is available to be viewed at the site. It is also suggestive of the way that certain entities on the web are manifesting characteristics of an emergent intelligence.

The standard example of what a properly defined emergent intelligence looks like is provided by the social world built by ants. Possessing only the most infinitesimal of mental capacities, these insects work together to create a second level intelligence: the exceptionally well-run entity that is ant society. Strictly speaking, the web at this stage of its development is far too heterogeneous to meet the criteria of an emergent intelligence. But still, it makes sense to suggest that there lurks within the myriad of hands that continually contribute to the social world comprised by YouTube a kind of autonomous intelligence that wants to be organised into a second level of meaning.

Somewhere within the dynamic tension that exists between its excess and its accessibility, the web offers its users the tools for potentially profound moments of self-reflection on their use of the medium itself. For instance, the numerous Flash Mob tributes to Michael Jackson available on YouTube in the wake of the pop star’s death function like a metaphor for this possibility. Organised via the web and instant messaging, each such tribute is filmed in public space from a high-enough angle to facilitate the pattern recognition that is central to the meaning of the event.

Choreographed with the idea that the individual movements of a few dancers will ripple out, so that within minutes the whole crowd is moving in unison, the Flash Mob dance event creates itself in the very image of the self-organising entity – ie web culture. In this way, it performs the function often attributed to contemporary artworks – to provide a framework of intelligibility for tendencies in the culture as a whole.

The art-YouTube analogy has further application in that it suggests a demotion of the individual in favour of the many. In this sense, YouTube makes good on Jospeh Beuys’ faith in the universal potential of human creativity. Absorption of the one into the many also provides a fair description of the art world today – as it functions, if not how it currently sees itself. If the phenomena generated by the web do what art is supposed to do, only better, then at the very least this should expand and clarify the definition of what art is. But it also has the effect of relegating much of the activity that currently takes place within the art context proper to the status of mere mannered relics of a bygone age.

About the Author: Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator.
Rosemary thanks Ann Dean, Willy Le Maitre and Jacob Wren for their comments on this article.

Jib Kidder’s music can be purchased at statesrightsrecords.com