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AMIF IN CONVERSATION: Kathryn Elkin and Alexander Storey Gordon discuss the work of Stuart Sherman

Kathryn Elkin works mostly with performance, video and writing. Citing a source – such as an artwork, artist, writer or performer – she applies her own personal methods of translation, transcription and representation to realize the work.

From: Kathryn Elkin

Date: Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 11:06 AM

Alexander – a thought. Maybe we could do a bit of to-ing and fro-ing via writing to each other? Maybe that could make the content for the website? It would be very nice to meet, but shall we see if we can get this going via email? Here are some great pieces of writing by Sherman that I got from Anthology Film Archive. I wonder if we could use some of them on the website? For me, his work is perhaps about a simultaneous horror of writing and love of it – so it will be interesting to write about that!

Places: http://www.mediafire.com/?377wg3yia57in9i

McCullers: http://www.mediafire.com/?6442h25mx1g7829

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From: Alexander Storey Gordon

Date: Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 3:28 PM

Kathryn - I had wanted to meet you first but I was going to suggest something similar. When I was writing out questions for the interview it seemed to box Stuart Sherman into some sort of historical art archive, the kind often marked ‘mythologized dead artist’. I wanted to avoid this, to be able to have a conversation beyond the context of the film festival. Given your experimentation with the idea of interview, it seemed strange to limit the conversation to the formality of a straightforward interview.

This idea of the simultaneous love and terror of writing is fascinating. Is this something you keenly feel yourself when writing? It brings to mind two of my favorite writers, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. Bataille famously claimed that literature is evil. Here’s an extract from an interview with him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WiwNekNJGA

Blanchot is a lot more in depth in his book, An Infinite Conversation. It’s a lot of essays disrupted by really interesting extracts of a conversation between Bataille and Blanchot. Blanchot seems to suggest that writing is a form of unnatural violence; I think the idea of disruption or interruption that’s in Blanchot's texts is also interesting when thinking about Stuart Sherman's performances.

Looking forward to reading the texts and continuing the conversation.

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From: Alexander Storey Gordon

Date: Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 9:00 PM

Hello Kathryn,

The texts you sent me are really thought provoking and insightful.

What seems really interesting, and it’s something that I think you can perhaps only understand after reading works like Places or McCullers, is the connection between Sherman’s performances and film. I feel in an abstract way his performances bear striking similarities to film; for the most part film animates the inanimate and is also to a lesser extent about manipulating and focusing our attention from micro to macro, from the whole scene to the object: cigarette ash that is being blown red hot, or a man’s suited legs being crossed.

Sherman’s gestures seem to pull our vision around in a similar way – a pencil, a sharpener, a tack inside a black balloon – only to bring us out into the whole scene in the theatre or lecture hall as he begins a rendition of Singing in the Rain or directs a rhetorical question towards the audience.

There is a beautiful description in Places, where Sherman addresses cinema directly. Holding a bit of paper, he slowly turns one media to another, swapping the vertical written page for the horizontal cinema screen. But he seems to be outlining more than that it’s not just about formal similarities. It’s like it’s his theory of art. He says: "Actually seeing a film doesn’t matter so much as appointing the hour at which to see such and such a film at such and such a place with such and such a person (or alone, in which case, you're such and such)."

I feel like he is saying that art is in fact very normal, it’s not an elevated plane of experience or even very intellectual, it is just time set aside in the day to spend with such and such, be that with yourself and the spectacle or you and such and such.

Art is magic without magic, Sherman might say?

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From: Kathryn Elkin

Date: Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 5:10 PM

Hi A!

I'm not sure I agree about the strength of the relationship the Spectacles have to 'filmic' properties. I know I said I thought that it was interesting when we spoke before – it's still interesting that you think that, of course, but I don't agree now! For me, film is just another means for him to present the Spectacles, but the thing at stake in the Spectacles is not 'filmic'. It's funny you mention that analogy about the piece of paper in Places being like a cinema screen – I didn't really dig that. I wonder if it's something to do with the differences in our interests? I think the Spectacles are about immediacy and presence first and foremost – presence of body and presence of mind – and the fluidity and movement of all that, which is something I try to work with too. That isn't something that film can do – or not in the same way. I think Sherman's interest in film is better represented in his 'film' works, rather than the Spectacles.

The Spectacles are about contrasting biological time with conceptual time, I think. But I agree that there is something awkward about the films/videos that document the Spectacles – that they can almost function as films rather than an expedient tool to demonstrate the scope of the live work. I like awkward things – that's why I chose to show films of the Spectacles rather than Sherman's video works, which I don't like so much. I also like the poignancy of knowing that you aren't really 'getting' the work in those documenting videos, that the videos are just the idea of the work; the work eludes you, because these films are not film works. That totally floats my boat.

I really agree with your idea that Sherman wanted to show something of the art of thinking in the Spectacles, and made art that sought to demonstrate the artistry and sophistication that goes into our daily encounters with the world.

I'll stop and catch my breath, more soon,

K x

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From: Alexander Storey Gordon

Date: Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 10:19 PM

Out of reading breath... do you find that your reading voice sometimes falters?

I’d agree with your critique of my interpretation, just like when we discussed that awful review of Stuart Sherman in October, which tried to tie his work to a strange academic artistic discourse. I think unfortunately we can only translate through our interests. But what I was saying was not that the work was about film, that would make it so one dimensional and academic. The Spectacles themselves are certainly not transcribing film, but they play at a related game. It’s an analogy rather than an interpretation, and I agree not one I’m sure Sherman would recognize.

His work for me is actually much more about a frenetic presence, where the hand acts out the idea, making thoughts physical and the physical action as fleeting and instantaneous as the thoughts – they mimic each other in a way.

In some ways Sherman reminds me of a balloon sculptor; there seem to be a lot of references to street theatre or simply just being in public throughout the Spectacles. There is one performance where Sherman does a pea in the cup trick, but the cups are transparent – that really made me laugh out load! But his performance also reminds me of medieval alchemy, when alchemists would try and create gold from seemingly arbitrary objects. In a similar way to Sherman, what's actually important in alchemy doesn't actually seem to be chemistry but a ritualized performance of an idea or folly.

That led me to the magic quote again. It seems to me that Sherman’s Spectacles aren’t so much magic without magic; they’re more like magic without illusion. In a way your work perhaps plays with that same idea. I feel like your performances are comedy without the illusion of comedy, which actually makes them a lot more absurd, funny and more closely related to tragedy. In the same way, Sherman’s performances actually become a lot more magic than magic because they remain awkward and elusive. They are elusion rather than an illusion.

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From: Kathryn Elkin

Date: Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 11:33 AM

Reading/writing breath - I think that's true! Sometimes it feels like that, that you can run out of air. I went for a run after I wrote to you and got out of breath in the other way. That's funny, now I think of it! Sort of Shermanesque.

I really agree about the elusion, rather than illusion! I'm of course very into that comedy/tragedy thing.

Have you read Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic? There is a summary of some of the ideas here and you can download from Project Guttenberg. Not that I'm saying read it now if you haven't – just think you'd dig it.

I'm going to talk about the way Sherman uses ACHOO in the Spectacles in the presentation. I think it's really important. The phonetic articulation of the involuntary bodily response, transcribed into a word – which Sherman utters voluntarily. The way that he likes to use 'hallo' and likes to sing the alphabet is really important too. For me that is really interesting – you can remember something as abstract as sound, melody, much more easily than a set of ordered symbols. I think the first time I was made a fuss over for performing something as a child was for singing the alphabet at nursery school. The teacher stood me up on a table and I sang it to everyone. I found it hard to write, but I could sing the alphabet!

Sorry – rushing off to work but wanted to keep this alight. X

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From: Alexander Storey Gordon

Date: Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 6:49 PM

Yes, I definitely think Shermanesque could be described as acting out the metaphor of something physical, so the idea of the brain being tired or you running out of breath when you’re reading in your head… sort of natural psychological metaphors. Perhaps ACHOO fits into that in some way. I also think the earnest nature of Sherman's performances are really important; they’re incredibly generous to the audience, or rather perhaps just he is. They’re really committed performances. That’s not to say that they lack humor or that they are solemn or serious, more that they are determined or wholehearted.

I found this as well which I thought you might find interesting, it’s supposedly Sherman’s last ever performance: The Passion of Robert Beck: https://vimeo.com/2767866 In the text below the film it refers to 'perfilmances' (what Sherman seems to term the spectacles performed between his films). This idea seemed really interesting, it reminded me about the start of film screenings, something Bergson talks about a lot in Endless Night, when film and performance were much more tightly bound. So for example, both Man Ray’s film Entr’acte and Ballet Mecanique by Fernand Leger where first screened as interludes for theatre and ballet. I like how playful Sherman is with his own work in this way, that he creates interludes to his own films and they flow into and take off from each other. But they also have this theme which is totally outside the films, that creates more of an idea that the films are there to break up or disturb the performance – that he is just orchestrating or creating interruptions.

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From: Kathryn Elkin

Date: Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 10:35 PM

I think I'm going to be breaking up and disturbing Sherman's films with my presentation! Wrong way round! Going to cut the first Spectacle short I think. Hope that's not sacrilegious! I'm obsessed with the ACHOO in the Spectacles. I think it's one of those elements in the work that is shorthand for a key set of ideas. I think maybe one thing Sherman is interested in is economy – of scale, of time, of expression – and this practice of expressing things economically is language forming really. I'm going to be doing some ACHOOing in the presentation.

Do you remember the bit in the Carson McCullers writing where he mentions her singing the Greyhound Bus jingle?

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From: Alexander Storey Gordon

Date: Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 7:05 PM

Disturbing Sherman’s work is good, I think artists’ works should never really be left alone, especially when they’re not around to disturb their own works themselves. It stops the straight writing of history that often canonizes artists, and in the process keeps things a bit more alive. The ideas stick around rather than the images. That’s perhaps where ACHOO comes in; it’s an involuntary action and utterance. Sneezing is so theatrical in that way, it disturbs the flow of everyday life and its performance – it might even in a way shock us or remind us of our own corporality.

I think the same is true for Sherman’s use of ACHOO in his Spectacles – it breaks the illusion of performance and disrupts the idea that everything performed is intentional or within a framework of the 'non intentional’. An ACHOO breaks things up, it’s like, the random, coma added, to, a sentence.

The other thing I can think of is hiccups, which perhaps have a more obvious semantic resonance with the idea of disruption, but is again an involuntary act. But unlike the burp or fart, the hiccup and sneeze are not treated as rude, but as uncontrollable, even dangerous, to try and stop. Both ACHOO and HICCUP are cured with superstitious remedy and excess easy sympathy.

If someone sneezes we say bless you, in an attempt to save their souls from escaping. Hiccups bring out the most ridiculous array of superstitious cures; head back, head forward, drink upside down, from the wrong end of the cup. NO! Hold your nose and then your throat. Thirteen seconds, now tickle your feet while jumping on one leg, then BANG!!! Reaaaaalllllly!!! scare them. There is so much performance and exceptional everyday spectacle in just a simple ACHOO or HICCUP.

#kathyn elkin #elkin #alexander storey gordon #storey gordon #stuart sherman #sherman #spectacles #blanchot #georges bataille #Carson McCullers #henri bergson #ACHOO

AMIF RESPONSE: ‘Hermit’ - Tom Varley responds to Duncan Marquiss’ moving image programme

‘It’s not hard to consider cinema expanding into a deafening pale abstraction controlled by computers.’[1]

‘The ultimate filmgoer would be a captive of sloth. Sitting constantly in a movie house, among the flickering shadows, his perception would take on a kind of sluggishness. He would be the hermit dwelling among the elsewheres, forgoing the salvation of reality. Films would follow films, until the action of each one would drown in a vast reservoir of pure perception. He would not be able to distinguish between good or bad films, all would be swallowed up into an endless blur. He would not be watching films, but rather experiencing blurs of many shades. Between blurs he might even fall asleep, but that wouldn’t matter. Sound tracks would hum through the torpor. Words would drop through this languor like so many lead weights.’[2]

At first, I see only a black rectangle interrupted by heavy strokes of text. Then, orders and washed-out ochre. Straight in. Pale golden lines connect the upper edge of the rectangle to the bottom, shivering and shaking from side to side in endlessly shifting patterns.[3] I step into the luminous screen. I hear orders: proceed in a straight line. This simple geometry is thwarted by verticals on a y-axis at right angles to the horizontal x-axis that I attempt to traverse. I’m wading through a marsh, thick with rushes and reeds. The intersecting lines I push through are lateral shoots connected to a continuous stem – a rhizome[4] – growing underground, perpendicular to the force of gravity. Any point of the rhizome can and must be connected to any other[5]. I push through for minutes on end, and hear more orders, until open space advances towards me through the density. Clearing. Keep it[6] low. Don’t want too much sky. Don’t want too many big, flat, untextured spaces.

I keep it low. I am underground, inside a cave[7] [8] [9] where people compete for prizes. I see an armour-plated alien disembark a hover-car. I hear an Australian accent emanating from a fleshy, pink orifice beneath a helmet and beady black eyes. I hear heavy breathing. I see a military man, a soldier. He guides the alien on foot through the labyrinthine cave and asks it questions. In the middle distance, I see more soldiers. They fire their weapons then vanish instantly, teleporting elsewhere. Spaces are woven together ever more tightly by more and more lines of transport and communication. You can transform any part of the world into any other part of the world; you can bend one point in space to connect to another.

High above me I see an aperture and the flat, untextured sky shining through. I climb the cave wall, through a beam of light, towards its source. Looking back, I see projections where the beam of light meets the ground[10]: I see flickering black and white figures, converging on nothing and dispersing beyond the edges of the rectangular illumination, into nothing.[11] I see a rubber plant[12] revolving with organisms swarming, photosynthesizing perhaps. Bodies swarm across the plant’s leaves like mitochondria in a cell, propelling it around and around, and dispersing beyond the margins of each leaf. Repeating. I see figures flickering, converging on nothing and dispersing into nothing. I see a rubber plant revolving, bodies swarming across its leaves. Repeating[13]. Revolving. Abscission.

I see the bare branches of deciduous trees depicted in carbon and ash; the residue of sticks and branches, burnt and compressed to varying densities, traced across rectangles of pressed cellulose pulp, derived from deciduous trees; I see a sylvan setting. I see fractal canopies – lines splitting into lines splitting into lines – pulmonary systems drawn by hand and then rendered (again) in the grains of animal gelatin[14]; I see celluloid film.[15]

Incision.

Black and white figures flicker again. Swarm again. I’m not sure if they’re the same figures as before. Another soldier, not the same one as before.

“What I’m doing is creating an environment – creating an environment whereby people feel involved. To what extent do I allow this to be totally spontaneous, maybe chaotic, and to what degree do I exercise control?”[16]

An ultramarine sky fills my field of vision as I reach the aperture and step out onto the ledge. I hear music to my left and then all around. As the melody descends, a mountain range rises up in front of me. Flat, untextured space fractures into unknowably complicated roughness[17] – convoluted and peculiar. I throw myself over the edge into the void and am swept high above the landscape on thermal columns. I find myself in free flight[18], scanning the valleys and mountainsides like a bird searching for food[19]. What I feel is not quite déjà vu, but there’s something oddly familiar about how the land looks from here: geometry mimicking geology, mathematics mimicking millennia of glacial erosion and tectonic plate movement. ‘Somewhere at the bottom of my memory are the sunken remains of all the films I have ever seen, good and bad they swarm together forming cinematic mirages.’[20] I see the ledge. I see a shark[21]. I see a teapot[22]. I see blurs of many shades.

Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules repeated without end, says Benoit Mandelbrot.[23] ‘What seems to be without order, often turns out to be highly ordered. By isolating the most unstable thing, we can arrive at some kind of coherence, at least for a while.’[24] So I fly straight towards the snow-capped mountains, isolate a single snowflake and dive into it.

I open my eyes.

I see a human face for what feels like the first time in a long time: A female face, close up.

I am in room 2D-506 of the building where the future I now inhabit was invented.[25]

She plays contrapuntal melodies, manipulating patterns of sound with machines built for the manipulation of patterns of information. She generates real-time output operations on voltage controlled equipment. She patiently answers questions asked by a voice behind me. Interrupted. The same question repeated.[26]

Her face is framed by two sets of parallel lines. I become aware of the edges.

I become aware that the voices I hear are in fact in front of me.

I realize I am motionless, mute and impassive.

I see 360 degrees of darkness surrounding a luminous rectangle.

A bell rings.

The rectangle turns black.

“Hello.”

[1] Robert Smithson, A Cinematic Atopia, Artforum, September 1971.

[2] ibid

[3] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of SWAMP, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, 1969, 16mm Film, 6 mins.

[4] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari transposed this terminology in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia Project (1972-1980) to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation.

[5] In a procrastinatory reverie, I imagined this entire text typeset in one continuous line, printed on a long scroll. Notes (like this one) to the body text and other pieces of ancillary information would be printed perpendicular to the length of the scroll, directly above the word or phrase that they annotate. Zoomed out, the entire document would resemble a cross-section diagram of a reed bed.

[6] It = the camera. Jean-Luc Godard famously said: “A camera filming itself in a mirror would be the ultimate movie.” Smithson’s ultimate filmgoer (see 2) is a response of sorts to this quotation.

[7] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of This Spartan Life: Episode 4 (Interview with McKenzie Wark).

[8] Towards the end of A Cinematic Atopia – the essay which this text ‘inhabits’ like an endoparasite or a Xenomorph facehugger from the Alien films – Smithson describes an unrealized work: he plans to build a cinema inside a cave. The only film shown inside the cave would be one documenting the cinema’s construction. He describes a shot from the film: the camera moving slowly from inside the tunnel, towards a pinpoint of light emanating from the cave’s entrance.

[9] I’m not going to reveal the extent of my ignorance of classical Greek philosophy by attempting to summarize Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I invite readers who are up on The Republic to *insert own footnote* here, or...

[10] …here.

[11] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of Gummibaum, Thomas Bayrle and Daniel Kohl, 1993/4, 16mm Film, 5mins 30sec

[12] Gummibaum is the German word for rubber plant, grown around the world for ornamental purposes. Despite a diversity of trivia relating to its cultivation and uses (in parts of India people guide the roots of the plant over chasms to form living bridges for example, or more obviously, the fact that its leaves contain a poisonous, white latex, previously used to manufacture rubber), its symbolic significance in this context (i.e. 12) seems uncertain. My best guess is that the rubber plant’s global ubiquity is what’s important here. It evokes banal, non-places – offices and institutional environments, the same the world over.

[13] Imagine visual krautrock.

[14] An aside: Before researching this text I’d never really considered the fact that motion picture film contains gelatin. Due to my personal beliefs relating to animal welfare, this revelation prompted soul-searching and Google searching. I was relieved to discover that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) ‘does not actively campaign against watching movies or taking photographs for pleasure’.

[15] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of The Role Of A Lifetime, Deimantas Narkevicius, 2003, Various formats transferred to video, 16mins

[16] In addition to this short paragraph culled from the interview with filmmaker Peter Watkins that is the focus of The Role Of A Lifetime, I wanted to include the quotation: “We as human beings try and be complicated in our memories and our feelings, but not in the pictures we see and sounds we hear. We put images and sounds together, but we never discuss what it means to do this (…) What effect is this having on society? On history? On our personal feelings? What effect is this having on the way we think about time, space, structure and process?” More words dropping through the languor like lead weights. Words that I cannot synthesize.

[17] Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010) argued that the opposite of regularity is ‘roughness’, rather than ‘irregularity’. Mandelbrot created the first-ever theory of roughness, advancing ‘fractals’ as a way of explaining and describing non-smooth, ‘rough’ objects in the real world. A fractal is a curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. Fractals are useful in modeling structures (such as mountainsides or snowflakes) in which similar patterns recur at progressively smaller scales, and in describing partly random or chaotic phenomena such as crystal growth, fluid turbulence, and galaxy formation. Fractals are also found in human activity, such as architecture and stock market prices. Mandelbrot believed that fractals, far from being unnatural, were in many ways more intuitive and natural than the artificially smooth objects of traditional Euclidean geometry.

[18] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of Vol Libre, Loren Carpenter, 1979-80, CG Animation produced to accompany a SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) lecture demonstrating how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. The world's first fractal movie, it uses 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms computed on a VAX-11/780.

[19] I originally wanted the bird in this simile to be a waxwing, as a kind of homage to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The structure of that particular novel (i.e. an enormous excess of ancillary information, relating to and vastly outweighing a comparatively formal, lyrical piece of writing that is ostensibly the ‘main event’) was in the back of my mind as I was planning this text. The sky in the first sentence of the paragraph would have been ‘azure’ rather than ‘ultramarine’: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain, by the false azure in the window pane.” It turns out, however, that waxwings live in forests, subsisting on a diet of berries, insects and sap. The majestic, aerial views of panoramic mountain ranges simulated in Vol Libre would be totally outside of your typical waxwing’s ken.

[20] Robert Smithson, op cit

[21] When sharks and other ocean predators can’t find food, they abandon Brownian motion, the random motion seen in swirling gas molecules, for Lévy flight – a mix of long trajectories and short, random movements found in turbulent fluids.

[22] From Wikipedia: The Utah teapot is a 3D computer model, which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary teapot of fairly simple shape, which appears solid, cylindrical and partially convex. A teapot primitive is considered the equivalent of a "hello world" program, as a way to create an easy 3D scene with a somewhat complex model acting as a basic geometry reference for scene and light setup. Many libraries will even have functions dedicated to drawing teapots. The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah.

[23] Benoit Mandelbrot, Fractals and the art of roughness, TED Talk

[24] Robert Smithson, op cit

[25] Bell laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey was the research and development arm of American telephone monopoly AT&T Corporation. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for research carried out at Bell Labs and work completed there is credited with, amongst other things, the development of the laser, the transistor, radio astronomy, programming languages, information theory, various computer operating systems and charge-coupled devices vital for digital imaging. Ostensibly, the purpose of the facility was to invent technology that the parent company could ultimately profit from, but by all accounts, in the 1960s and ‘70s much of what went on was closer to pure research. Bell Labs involved itself in the interface between cutting-edge technology and avant-garde art, engineers collaborating with a number of artists and musicians, including Laurie Spiegel.

[26] Des-/Trans-/En- cription of Laurie Spiegel interviewed at Bell Laboratories 1984 (Part 1/2)

#amif response #tom varley #varley #duncan marquiss #marquiss #laurie spiegel #loren carpenter #this spartan life #mckenzie wark #thomas bayrle daniel kohl #nancy holt #Robert Smithson #Deimantas Narkevicius #Benoit Mandelbrot #computers #technology #landscape #digital imaging

AMIF IN CONVERSATION: Maria Fusco and Alexander Storey Gordon

Maria Fusco is a Belfast-born writer based in Edinburgh. Her work encompasses fiction, critical and theoretical texts and publications, and she contributions to a broad range of magazines, books and catalogues. Fusco is also the founder/editorial director of The Happy Hypocrite, a semi-annual journal for and about experimental art writing. For AMIF, Fusco is presenting two films set in Belfast in the early 1970s, around the time she was born.

Alexander Storey Gordon: The first thing that struck me about the films The Hobby Horse Man and In The Name of God is the importance of memory – how we record and recollect and the disparities that often occur between the official and personal accounts of a ‘time’. How closely do these films marry up with your own personal experiences growing up in Belfast during the Troubles?

Maria Fusco: The choice of films is very autobiographical and obviously deliberately so. They are both by the same director, Robin Wylie, and are made a year apart in 1972 and 1973. In The Name of God has a bit where there are lots of shots of damaged signage; that for me is the locus of selfhood in these films: representing a desire on my part for the film to bring back my own memory to me. I remember standing in front of the mangled shop sign – or another shop that was equally mangled, there were so many of them – that appears about half way through In the Name of God, with its letters dangling off at odd angles, and thinking that the way the letters had mingled together formed actual words and I was disappointed because I couldn’t read them. I learned to read very early, before I went to school, so tried to test my new reading skills out in the street. To answer your question simply; Belfast looks as I remember it, but it looks very old. I’m sure if you filmed in almost any city across the UK it would have looked like that, but the film just seems very arcane and archaic. For me then, the film is an interesting mnemonic device, watching the materials of it, of the city, not the directorial construction of it; the film presents a very sanitised view, especially in relation to the British Army.

At that time, Belfast city centre was locked down by the army, the ‘ring-of-steel’, so a large portion of your own city was closed to you. When you had to go through the checkpoints you got frisked, but it wasn’t by a female soldier – you got searched by a male soldier regardless of gender and there was a sign when you went in that said, ‘Men this way. Sex-starved women this way’. This is what I mean when I say a sanitised view. In In The Name of God there is a nod to the impact that the presence of the army has; you see shots like the big Saracen armoured vehicle moving slowly along a residential street. In my memory those vehicles never went slow, they always went fast, so the portrayal is a very picaresque version of the real thing. These are my memories. I feel like Wylie and his team are pretending to close down the proximity to the image in these films, so you get a sense of being subjectively close to the material that you’re experiencing. Those moments become clear in scenes like the one in The Hobby Horse Man where you see ‘the hobby horse man’, Micky Marley, at home with his wee bottle of stout; you get this moment of a close proximity or identification between the subject and the idea of you watching it, but only in a way that is heavily mediated.

ASG: I found the people involved in the production of both the films quite revealing. In Hobby Horse for example, they have a narrator who is from Ireland, Norman Rodway, but he speaks RP. There seems to be a cunning game being played by the BBC, incorporating those who ostensibly are seen to have a ‘legitimacy’ to speak, ie ‘natives’, but who actually speak ‘BBC’.

MF: Yes, it’s interesting to note in In The Name of God the old woman’s narration that bookends the film is actually scripted by a Northern Irish poet, Maurice Leitch, and it’s written in way that is quite sly and sneaky, because it really forms the central emotional driver of the film. The actress who reads out Leitch’s lines in In The Name of God, has a middle-class Northern Irish accent, not a working-class accent; she retains the ‘authority’ of the outsider, the middle-class view.

ASG: Like when she says, “I won’t come into town now anymore.” I thought that speech set an odd tone to the documentary, and I did question her class. I imagine it wasn’t really a question of choice for a lot of people?

MF: Obviously I’m not sure but I suspect Hobby Horse Man is similar to In The Name of God in that it was not made for a Northern Irish or even an English audience. It feels like it was actually made more for an American audience. Some aspects of both films - the ones that evoke something out of date for me - look almost like an inverted How Green Was My Valley, or Darby O’Gill and the Little People. That said, the emotional impact strikes too in some scenes.

ASG: There’s a genuineness that comes out of Mickey’s character which I feel somehow gets past the way that the film is put together.

MF: I wonder how Robert Wylie and his little team of researchers found their subjects and why. Mickey is an obvious choice in a way because he is so characterful, but also ostensibly nothing happens in The Hobby Horse Man, it’s 25 minutes of nothing happening.

ASG: And that ‘nothing’ allows them to put this little vignette in about how his original hobby horse roundabout got destroyed in a fire.

MF: Yes, and doesn’t he seem delighted by it. There is a really important scene in that film though, when the older women get on the roundabout, and they sing ‘Happy days are here again’ and then they begin to sing ‘Pack up Your Troubles’. The women begin by singing it, ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’, and then they have obviously been told to be as authentically Northern Irish as possible, so they change it to ‘oul kit bag’. What’s interesting in this is that they know they are performing for someone. It’s their real accent, but they would have tried to make an effort to be more comprehensible.

ASG: I read an interview about your novel, Sailor, and you were talking a lot about the idea of being an exile, and having to repossess your Northern Irish demotic. I wonder whether you feel that there is a different way of thinking that comes through relearning and using a local dialect?

MF: The interview you mention was about a short novel I wrote in Belfast phonetic dialect, which was narrated from the point of view of a vervet monkey. There are certain words and phrases that appear in that text which I had forgotten, because the language that’s in that book is already arcane Belfast, but also that language is really localised: it really only came from one street. What interests me about that way of thinking is the uber-localisation of it. If read out loud, it wouldn’t even be a Belfast accent; in terms of the detail of vernacular, and the demotic and socio-political detail that comes with that, it would be an Etna Drive accent – which is where I grew up. In somewhere like Belfast for example, Catholics say “haitch” and Protestants will say “aitch”, and you can tell a Protestant from Catholic based on their H’s. Those things are sort of silly, of course, but they are actually very important, and at particular times you had to be very careful to neutralize certain aspects of your own language for people that spoke in the ‘same’ accent.

ASG: It’s almost like an idea of a Northern Irish received pronunciation, or like we were talking about earlier, that idea of the middle-class accent having a legitimacy perhaps because of its perceived neutrality or universality.

MF: Perhaps it comes down to who has the right to speak, and importantly when. As a writer, one finds one’s thoughts through one’s own language. I think generally I speak quite clearly, and the best of my writing has an ability to do that also. I feel writing for me is a process of striving towards clarity. I need to speak or to write the things in order to understand them, because the internal life is not as clear as the externalising of it. So in a sense, the use of the demotic is both in terms of the things we share, for example saying ‘wee’ rather than ‘small’, and the things that are more local or specific than that. For instance, there is a word I use, ‘clart’, which is a word from the street I grew up on; someone who is a bit clarty would be a bit grubby. When I first moved to London, I was walking down Ridley Road, which has a really big Afro-Caribbean market, and I heard someone say the word ‘rasclart’, which turned out to have the same meaning as clart. This struck me as being very profound – that something you consider to be your own personal language is in fact not; that there’s a weird universality in the local. When I moved to London about 20 years ago it was still at a time when to have a Northern Irish accent was not very desirable, politically, and you would get a lot of hassle.

ASG: I can understand that. I was born in the late ‘80s, but it’s strange how you were kept very distant from what was going on ‘over there’. That’s what I found interesting about the research for this interview, to see how much that history is controlled and how little has filtered through.

MF: Some folk might call that censorship.

ASG: Yes, but in a sense it’s censored through film and documentary. If you search for “the Troubles” in Google, almost everything that appears is related to the BBC; they write long tracts and timelines about what the Troubles ‘were’, through there own particular lens.

MF: What’s efficient about these two documentaries is they appear to be giving you an authentic glimpse of something that is culturally recognisable and yet unrecognisably violent at the same time, along side a character driven narrative: so a three pipe problem as Sherlock Holmes would have it.

ASG: You’re a writer not an artist, and the films you’ve selected seem to me to be a lot more literary; they have ideas or themes that run through them such as history, memory and autobiography that I associate a lot more with a literary response.

MF: I identify myself as a writer and my activities are concerned with writing but I did train as an artist and worked as an artist for quite a long time. I find my own work now a lot more interesting, (I should add for the avoidance of doubt, that I find it more interesting to myself, I don’t necessarily expect others to find it so!) The difficult thing with writing, and this sounds very obvious but I’m going to say it anyway, is that basically you have nothing; you only have yourself, that’s all. One could understand that as proposing that all written work is autobiographical which is not what I’m trying to suggest. Although procedurally and stylistically one develops personal ways of expressing what you’re most interested in, your work also renews outside of yourself as well.

I think with the two films I selected for the festival, they are a heavily mediated, fictionalised version of times that I lived. But having said that, the earliest is from 1972, the year I was born, so I don’t remember it as such. I think my choice and presentation of the films is very much situated in the idea of sharing a moment of history, which has been heavily guarded, heavily veiled and heavily mediated, and this is represented in the form of those two films. I also feel a responsibility as a Northern Irish person, a social responsibility to tell people what it was actually like. I feel a social imperative to look at the materials of that time and to unpick them semiologically as well as formally, and look at how one constructs one’s own history through others representations of that history. In that sense there is an element of Spivak and the subaltern, and there is definitely something in my interest in demotic accent, my own accent, that is to do with the idea of the subaltern. These ideas are very linked to what we discussed earlier about who is allowed to speak, who is not allowed to speak, how they are allowed to speak, and if when they do speak they are understood.

ASG: It’s definitely about a legitimacy to speak but it’s also maybe in a way about what can or cannot be recalled.

MF: With Mickey Marley that idea is very poignant. I was never allowed to go on his roundabout as a child. Looking at the roundabout now, it’s the the tawdriness of it and the shoddiness of it... Back then I didn’t see it like that, I saw it as being marvellous. It reminds me a lot of the first version of Willy Wonka, that carnivalesque, slightly vaudeville construction – those colours and the way the roundabout is cobbled together. It’s a really crap, contingent, patchy object, but it was a massive object of desire for me as a child, and it was the same for lots of children. Then to see how it really was is… pretty disappointing but also an important marker/maker of taste and desire.

ASG: It’s like the reverse of Hollywood cinema, these films seem to end childhood fantasies rather than start them.

MF: Yes, it’s interesting. I’m really looking forward to screening them at the festival, particularly In The Name of God. I think there’s a lot there to think about.

#amif in conversation #maria fusco #fusco #alexander storey gordon #storey gordon #happy hypocrite #belfast #robin wylie #northern ireland #documentary #maurice leitch #in the name of god #hobby horse man #the troubles #Autobiography #accent #spivak

DOCUMENTS: SHELLY NADASHI: A Place for Commas and Dots, 2013, video

#documents #shelly nadashi #nadashi #video #A Place for Commas and Dots #narrative #a good bowl of soup #performance

AMIF IN CONVERSATION: Sophie Macpherson discusses the work of Ellen Cantor with Rhianna Turnbull

I knew of the American artist Ellen Cantor, who died in April, for a while – mostly from conversations with the artists Sophie Macpherson and Alan Michael. I’d heard about Cantor's film-in-progress, Pinochet Porn, and read her 2009 review of the Michel Auder show at Cubitt in issue 19 of MAP Magazine. During my New Work Scotland residency at Studio Voltaire in London in 2011, I tried to have a tutorial with her. Unfortunately, this never happened – she was in New York.

It was reading a quote from her that made me want to know more about Cantor and her work. It’s from an interview about Pinochet Porn by Soledad Garcia-Saavedra, who was one of the curators of the LUX exhibition, Film as a Subversive Art, at Zoo Art Fair in 2009. An excerpt of Pinochet Porn was included in the show:

SGS: The excerpt, The Dictator and The Maid, raises questions about the role and the use of explicit images today – the ﬁne line between sensuality, sexuality and pornography, along with ideas of freedom and control. How does the ﬁlm tackle such imperatives?

EC: In most intimate relationships sexuality is integral. I ﬁnd these ‘ﬁne lines’ uninteresting, devoid of meaning. When my tongue is up someone’s ass I’m not thinking, is this love or desire, degrading or kind, passion or craftsmanship?

For me, the quote suggests Cantor is interested in what’s really happening, not in clipping things and tidying them up for presentation. It’s funny and full of attitude; it’s not about what’s right or wrong.

-- Rhianna Turnbull

Rhianna Turnbull: Sophie, you were on the committee of Transmission Gallery in 2000 when Ellen did a show there. How did you first hear of Ellen and what was it about her work that excited you?

Sophie Macpherson: Alan Michael, who was also on the Transmission committee at the time, knew of Ellen and I’m sure he showed me an image that he was interested in and excited by, and it came from there. I don’t think he had seen much more than that, though Ellen had made some work with the Austrian artist Elke Krystufek, something to do with them picking up a taxi driver and taking him home, and I think Alan had seen that as well. We talked about what excited us. We hadn’t seen work like it before. It was the year 2000, I was still quite young and I just don’t think I’d seen work that was so direct, was about something, was political, was quite explicit, and was sexy. There wasn’t any work like that here in Glasgow.

RT: Do you remember any reactions to the show at Transmission? How was it received?

SM: On the opening night I remember someone saying to me, “This is a great show for you to end on.” (I left working on the Transmission committee after this.) People hadn’t seen this kind of work before and that was really exciting, and I think we knew that would be the case. And then I remember a guy saying to me, “Fuck, I hate that work.” To get to Transmission office you had to walk through the space with Ellen’s drawings in it and then walk through the darkened space with the projection, which was massive (it took up the whole back wall), and I remember a Transmission committee member being quite traumatised every time; passing what was really quite noisy, aggressive and full on imagery. I can’t remember any other reactions. I think we were really pleased, and pleased with ourselves. We felt really happy that we’d put this show on and worked with Ellen. We took so much time getting the colour of each of the walls right; there was a lot of care. She was staying at the Brunswick Hotel while she was in Glasgow and one of the corridors or rooms had orange walls.

RT: The way the drawings from the Transmission show are done (very carefully in blue biro), in fact her whole aesthetic from that show makes me think of the fantasy drawings of a teenage girl. She is really valuing the teenage girl sensibility and attitude, giving it importance. The drawings from the exhibition Part Fantasy: The Sexual Imagination of Seven Lesbian Artists Explored Through the Medium of Drawing, which was at Trial Balloon, New York, 1992, have a different tone. Those scenes of women engaged in sexual acts are quickly drawn, almost as if they are preliminary sketches. They have an incidental quality, like she’s not trying that hard to convince you. I think it is interesting that those New York drawings seem quite feminine in character – one of the women seems to be wearing a corset and in the other drawing a woman has high heels on. There is a girly quality, especially when compared to the work of the other artists in that show, such as GB Jones or Nicola Tyson.

SM: Well, this is the thing about Ellen in her work – the girl thing. She was quite a girl, whatever that means, quite girly.

RT: She talks unequivocally and sincerely about love and sex, and this is the tone in her work as well. In another quote from the LUX interview I mentioned earlier, she says: “I inter-cut this footage with Vivaldi’s Gloria to illuminate the divine nature of the sexual love.”

SM: I think she really believed in love as a real force; a belief that love can conquer everything, that sex can conquer everything. When I was in New York on the Scottish Arts Council Residency in 2009, we spent a lot of time together. That’s when she was working on Pinochet Porn, and when she came to meet me she was taking a break from working very intensively with this group of people. In that bit of writing she did for MAP on Michel Auder’s show at Cubitt, you get a sense of it, because she brings in all these scenarios where she’s with her friends and they’re all hanging out a lot. You get a sense of this intensive situation – they have to spend a lot of time with each other to get this work done, but everyone is really committed, it’s a group thing, lots of mutual respect and friendship. From that piece of writing and listening to her talking about it, I strongly felt the sense of the enjoyment of working with people and being around people and having constant dialogues with other people and listening to music with people. I’m sure I came back from New York wanting that; wanting to have a group of people to do stuff with. And I did have that a bit with the band I was in – Muscles of Joy – and other projects. This sense of people working together; it’s not just one person’s masterpiece, everyone’s input is really important. And she was so caring and cared for these people.

RT: It’s interesting the way Pinochet Porn looks; that Pippa and Paloma look really ‘90s and it’s quite grunge. There is no rigid style to the ﬁlm. I guess it’s what was available, what got improvised and what she had a natural feel for; her aesthetic.

SM: I was quite surprised by it, it seemed to be quite different, even just using Super 8 ﬁlm. I hadn’t known Ellen to shoot ﬁlm before. But it does make sense that it’s Super 8, in that kind of home movie way.

SM: And for it to be about Pinochet. I don’t know where that came from.

RT: It is a dramatic topic.

SM: Sort of soap opera high camp.

RT: I read a quote by her in a piece ﬁrst published in Considering Detroit, a catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, in 2008. Cantor said: “In reality I am painstakingly exacting in my work. It’s true it is emotionally charged but it’s not random or quickly executed.” It’s interesting that she makes this point, as if she felt that the work may not necessarily be read in that way. It’s completely intentional; the casualness carries a meaning.

#amif in conversation #sophie macpherson #macpherson #rhianna turnbull #turnbull #q&a #ellen cantor #cantor #super 8 #video #pinochet porn #considering detroit #transmission #cubitt #appropriation #porn #alan michael #elke krystufek #michel auder

AMIF IN CONVERSATION: LUX/CCA Critical Forum debate, 2pm Sunday 29th September

For AMIF 2013, LUX/CCA Critical Forum will host a public discussion that utilises the energised and in-depth debate fostered within the Forum's past meetings to open up a public conversation around the various themes and ideas arising out of this years festival at Tramway. This discussion will take place on Sunday 29th September at 1400-1530 and is open to all AMIF weekend or day pass holders.

LUX/CCA Critical Forum is a monthly discussion group which has met informally at CCA Glasgow over the last two years in order to debate a wide range of issues provoked by the practice of each of the individuals involved, or members' specific interests regarding a wider range of moving image work.

Those who attend the open public discussion at Tramway's AMIF are welcome to attend future meetings of the Forum. The Forum runs as an open group but asks that its members both commit to attending its meetings each month, and are prepared to give a presentation to the group within the first six months of joining.

If you wish to participate, please email luxcriticalforumglasgow [at] gmail [dot] com

#LUX #CCA #Critical Forum #AMIF #AMIF 2013 #moving image #public discussion

DOCUMENTS: ELLEN CANTOR: Transmission Gallery, 15 April - 13 May 2000.

#ellen cantor #cantor #documents #transmission #drawing #video

#amif #amif2013

AMIF IN CONVERSATION: Alan Michael on Ellen Cantor

Ellen Cantor was invited to produce a solo exhibition by the Transmission Committee, 15 April - 13 May 2000. Here, artist Alan Michael talks about that exhibition with AMIF's head programmer, Isla Leaver-Yap.

Isla Leaver-Yap: Where did you first encounter Ellen Cantor’s work, and how did that develop into the Transmission exhibition?

Alan Michael: I first heard about Ellen and her work because of the fuss around the Popocultural show [South London Gallery, 30 October – 27 November 1996, curated by Cabinet Gallery], and her exclusion from the Southampton version of the show, which was actually in the papers – a news event. It wasn’t easy to see images of work back then, or of current shows if you weren’t actually present. But I started reading about her work in magazines, following it that way. Personally, I was interested in the way she was using her formats, drawing and video, in a particularly emotionally charged way. I was used to seeing and using those kind of codes as a frame, with layers of irony. So it was technically interesting to me – and then the persona became more interesting later. I used to go to Tower Records to read the magazines. It stocked titles like VERY that ran a feature on Ellen. I also followed her writing, read a couple of reviews she’d written in Zing, which I found very inspiring and totally unlike standard frumpy UK art criticism. I remember one on a Georgie Hopton show... They were dark days back then, I was in a very withdrawn state and reading these bulletins was a treat. Eventually, I got talking to Alexander Hetherington who turned out to be a fan. Talking to him was very valuable. He had a catalogue that became an important way for us at Transmission to get to know her work at that time. Sophie MacPherson [also on Transmission Committee at the time] was very enthusiastic. She was the main catalyst for making it all happen. She made the calls and did the negotiations. ILY: When I spoke to Sophie, we discussed the very particular presentation of Ellen’s exhibition: framed drawings and photograph on walls that were painted bright orange, white and a solid, almost royal, blue. I initially assumed it was related to the subject matter in the framed drawings: Snow White (blue and white) and Bambi (orange). I guess it’s also the trademark colours of Irn-Bru. But Sophie said that the colours were derived from the Brunswick Hotel – where Ellen was staying. Ellen was intent on precisely matching those paint colours – this in the day before digital paint-matching was available at hardware stores. What do you recall of that installation, and of the work itself? AM: The install was very intensive. I’m sure everyone who was there won’t forget it – I mean that in a good way. Sometimes working long hours for an artist installing a show can be horrible, like they think you’re a team of grateful little slaves, but Ellen was so creative about the process of arranging the show. She was encouraging everyone to help make it work, sort of like “I know we can do this!” Yeah, the colour scheme of the show was modelled on the room at the hotel… which might be a good example of the gestural impulse rendered with precision in her work. Ellen made the decision late in the week, so it was an all-nighter: a lot of discussions about art, everything while totally changing the walls, walks around the city at dawn. We had a great time. We felt we’d found a friend, also. ILY: It felt like there was a moment where people responded very directly to her exhibition. Anne-Marie Copestake made a video inteview of Cathy Wilkes and Ellen in the Brunswick, for example, which was part of Anne-Marie’s Trigger Tonic series. I was also reading over Alex Hetherington’s review of the show, which gives real insight into the effect of the work from a pretty intimate and personal perspective. Were there elements of the work that resonated with you personally? AM: As I said before, I was interested, or puzzled, by the work initially because of the arrangement of the drawings / video / persona. I was used to reading artworks as a system of codes and devices to be deployed for the most efficient use. On a certain level, her use of, for example, Disney imagery combined with inquiries into sexual experience seemed unsophisticated. But it wasn’t seeking to discover untapped cultural references or whatever – that wasn’t the project. When I realised this, and her history of making work, where she had been, where she should be given her peer group, it seemed a lot more nuanced. I think she really believed in art as a special, powerful thing, that artists she admired and/or knew were special people. A believer. ILY: Did the work have an effect on your own practice at the time? AM: I can’t say that the work in the exhibition itself directly affected my own work. But meeting her and discussing the making of work, the art system, etc. definitely had a positive effect. She was extremely encouraging and generous and made you feel like an equal involved in the same struggles... I can’t say much about how the show would have been received by others: some people just didn’t get it, or were thrown by the dual role of the drawings plus video. The aesthetic was a million miles from the usual politeness of Glasgow art of the time. But these things always come out the right way in the end.

-- 8 September 2013

#ellen cantor #cantor #alan michael #transmission #sophie macpherson #anne-marie copestake #alexander hetherington #popocultural #south london gallery #cabinet #q&a #amif in conversation #isla leaver-yap #leaver-yap

AMIF IN CONVERSATION: Duncan Marquiss and Alexander Storey Gordon

Duncan Marquiss is an artist and writer based in Glasgow. His current project considers relationships between innate searching behaviour and creativity – ideas that he will loosely present at Artists’ Moving Image Festival through an eclectic and engaging collection of films spanning artists film, documentary, interview and examples of early computer animation.

Alexander Storey Gordon: You take a very different approach to the understanding of what a film screening can be for this year’s festival – perhaps it could best be described as a kind of film collage?

Duncan Marquiss: When I started, I probably planned it to be much more of a collage, and I have a lot of very different kinds of film condensed into it. But as I went on, it seemed more and more problematic to cut up the films and put them together. There also seemed to be natural patterns occurring. I began looking at a lot of films which where interviews or conversations, and then also lots of films like the Thomas Bayrle and Daniel Kohl's film, Gummibaum, or Loren Carpenter’s Vol Libre; these kind of experiential little visual ‘things’ which are much more immersive. There are two different types of work that seemed to present themselves. I certainly felt uneasy about chopping up other people’s films to try and fit in my ‘essayistic overview’.

ASG: It is a little bit like a lecture or an essay; there are titles that your films fall under. You have a fascinating series of headings in your notes like ‘Foraging’, ‘Attention traps’, ‘Play’, ‘Inherited behaviour’ and so on.

DM: Those notes where kind of just mind vomit typed out.

ASG: But that’s what I quite liked about them. It’s interesting to see those sort of ideas being plotted out.

DM: Loose association.

ASG: That was why I interpreted your programme as a collage. It is less about cutting films up, and more about bringing together different strands of reference and types of film.

DM: Yes, I did think that maybe there would be a problem with showing works that I would call ‘artworks’ alongside more liminal film – films that ‘surf’ categories or those that are more like essay references. There is a lot in the programme that you wouldn’t normally consider part of the canon of art. But these categories are always up for grabs, so perhaps the issue of categories or separate histories isn’t such a problem. The programme most of all reflects my practice, that’s really where it comes from; these are the theories, ideas and subjects I’m interested in. But there are also works that have inspired me. That’s something I think is true of most artists when it comes down to constructing these sorts of things.

ASG: I think it’s the best way; it always reads as being much more genuine and relatable, somehow. In your notes, you refer to the philosopher Marshall McLuhan and his theory of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media. When I started thinking about the programme, I wondered if you where consciously playing with this idea.

DM: That’s interesting, I hadn’t really thought about that. It’s like what I was saying before, that there are almost these two modes of film that are going on in the programme, and yes, you could relate that to this idea of the hot and the cold. McLuhan’s definition of hot media is that it’s a lot more didactic; cool media invites the viewer to work it out themselves, or to complete the work in some sense.

ASG: With all these different films going on inside your screenings, perhaps the audience has to be more creative and search for the meaning and/or connections between the films.

DM: That’s another reason why I moved away from the idea of a collaged cut-up format, because I thought it would be more interesting to let the films breathe, and let the audience do a certain amount of mental legwork. While there are some pretty explicit links for me, I wanted there to be an opportunity for a totally different way of looking at the work.

ASG: A central focus of the screenings revolves around two processes or areas of interest: ‘foraging’ and ‘stochastic process’. I’ve heard of ‘stochastic’ as a term in mathematics and economics, but not really outside those academic fields.

DM: As I understand it, ‘stochastic’ is like John Cage and his chance operation; Cage would talk about it and say it’s not about things being random it’s more...

ASG: Unstructured?

DM: I think Cage was more interested in the idea of letting nature take its course, the idea that he was simply setting up parameters to let that happen. In the same way, I was looking at Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale, in which Snow had a special tripod built where the camera could revolve 360 degrees in any direction. The camera films wilderness moving in circles, round and through all these different degrees and angles. Snow’s film has something in common with Cage’s chance operation – the artist can’t control what the camera passes by, but he can set the parameters. In a similar way, I’m quite interested in artists that have some kind of material limits to the work. Like in Swamp by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, for example. I like how that film finds its end when the reel runs out. There’s even a bit where Holt and Smithson are talking about how much film is left, and he’s saying, ‘I think there’s 100ft Nancy’, and then it just stops.

ASG: The issue of physicality there is really interesting. Maybe that’s something we lose in a digital format or computer algorithm, where there are potentially no material limits.

DM: Yeah, definitely. This business of materiality is really important, but then it’s good to think about the materiality of the digital as well. I’ve been listening to a lot of interviews with Philip K Dick, where he was talking about how we think in digital units – he terms it as discrete semantic units. I find it really fascinating to think that perhaps even our consciousness, our cognition and/or our perception, also occur through discrete unit systems; that there is almost a sample rate to perception. I guess in a way that’s how digital technology works; it breaks things down into units and then presents it back to us in a way that seems seamless. Film works in the same way, and our perception perhaps works like this too. That’s my very crude understanding of it.

ASG: It’s interesting to think about the connections between technology and human behaviour, how we experience, how we understand. You talk a lot in your work about the act of foraging, which we tend to think of as being a more primal human mode of activity. Foraging seems coded even more into our digital world. New technology, the Internet, etc, seems to allow us to reflect on how we interact more generally with our environment or each other.

DM: Definitely, it’s as if these technologies allow us to think about how we behave, while we are behaving. There’s this sort of breadcrumb of our activity. But what I find really fascinating is that we are still using foraging when we go clothes shopping. Like TK Maxx...

ASG: It is definitely the home of modern foraging.

DM: You need to use the same skill sets, essentially. A lot of my interest in these ideas came out of this film I’m making with my dad. He’s a biologist, and he talked to me quite a lot about his field methods and how he finds certain things in the field that are often quite complex environments. If you’re going into TK Maxx and looking for some trainers, you set up some filters; you’re not looking for anything else, you’re looking for some trainers. It’s the same thing you would do if you were looking for mushrooms or berries. There is a bit in the Darrell Varga documentary, Hunters and Gatherers: A Film About Collectors, where one of the collectors describes how her experience of shopping in flea markets is the same as going mushroom picking; the things she wants look sharper or more vibrant. She quite succinctly sums up the filtering process as a built-in subconscious thing – you’re shutting out ‘irrelevant’ information all the time. I think its definitely happening in Google searching and Internet browsing. That’s the principle behind information foraging theory, which is the idea that you can make your website more efficient for users.

ASG: More forager-friendly?

DM: Yeah, setting up cues and making it clear how to get information. But I am always fascinated by these kinds of analogies, finding these things in apparently separate contexts and discovering that there’s some sort of pattern that links it. That’s a recurring process in my own work. It’s often about trying to spot analogies and patterns, and then seeing what happens when you layer them up and create a context for the work.

ASG: When I was researching for this interview, I discovered we both have printmaking degrees, which is a rare thing these days. I was thinking just then, when you where talking about layering and also the way you approached putting together your screening, whether print process played a part in that at all?

DM: Quite possibly. I think print is interesting because a lot of the techniques have this really weighted industrial history. There is also a long history of artists printmaking, but I’m very interested in the way that books work, and for so long that process happened through industrialized letterpress. It’s little things as well – like the word ‘cliché’ comes from the name for the clip that holds groups of letters for letterpress printing. I’m definitely still intrigued by the way that technologies can really determine what people do with them. I think that’s really present in digital technology now. There is a guy called Lev Manovich who talks a lot about how the interface defines how you use technology and also what you imagine the possibilities of that technology are. Photoshop filters, Final Cut Pro or whatever; there is almost some kind of rhetoric built up through these devices, certain figures of speech or compositional techniques. It’s also important to realise that there aren’t actually such huge differences between digital and analog technology.

ASG: When I said foraging is seen as a primal or archaic process, I was trying to get to the idea that society uses new technology to try and overwrite old ideas, or try to disguise old ways of processing things.

DM: That makes me think of another quote from McLuhan, where he brings up this idea that society asks new media to perform the role of old media. He argues that this misunderstands the possibilities of new technology to change both our sensibility and also the way we think. There’s also an interesting theorist called Ted Nelson, who talks about how so much of new technology mimics what already exists, like how a Microsoft Word document mimics a sheet of paper. Nelson’s alternative to this is Xanadu Space, where everything is in 3D documents and is hyperlinked. It’s kind of like a database that you can engage with spatially.

ASG: That seems to tie in with processes of foraging a lot better in some ways, in that it creates an environment to explore. For me, computer algorithms or the Internet at the moment seem to be a lot more too do with memory; you’re creating an anecdotal cache or linking layers of information together.

DM: Going back to what you were saying about printmaking, it’s interesting to see, for example, how many of the filters we use in Photoshop were modeled on things that you could do in the dark room, or an effect you would create through screen-printing. Or the way computer programmes recreate film grain. It’s like a form of weird nostalgia. We want information to look how things did, rather than imagine their other possibilities.

ASG: The click sound on a digital camera is another one, there are these tactile or physical things that we won’t let go of... You talked earlier about foraging being a natural human impulse, but a capitalist framework would almost prefer us to not forage or set up filters, or rather, it requires this to be expanded exponentially, to make us look at or desire a whole environment. If you go into a shop, they don’t want you to just look at trainers – they want you to buy the whole tracksuit. I guess in one way, foraging filters could be a form of resistance.

DM: I agree. But on the other hand, marketing involves pushing people’s buttons; they seem to have some insight into how people work on a basic level. I suppose what McLuhan is referring to when he’s saying that artists set up ‘attention traps’, is that they create effects to trap our attention – that’s his definition of art. But when he’s talking about that, he’s also including advertising. He talks about advertising being folk art.

ASG: I guess it’s a form of capitalist folk art. I hope we can look back on it like that at some point.

DM: In that sense, he’s talking about how manipulative marketing is good at pushing our buttons. So perhaps cool media is a more humanitarian pushing of buttons, because it’s maybe allowing you to think about how you operate or experience.

ASG: It gives a lot more respect to the viewer in some ways, it respects people’s innate intelligence. McLuhan talks about high definition film as being the hottest media, an experience that is just about the spectacle.

DM: There’s nothing there, it’s almost too explicit. I don’t know if it’s true, but someone was talking to me about how there is some sort of HD technology that can record in a resolution that’s beyond what we can actually perceive.

ASG: A film you can’t really watch.

DM: Information beyond what your eye can see. Information theorists talk about how information devours attention; there’s no way you can take in all the stuff that’s being fired at you. You have to have filters. I was talking to a guy who does neuro-linguistic programming, which is a quite suggestive form of therapy that works by getting people to change their filters to prioritize different things. He was saying that not filtering was similar to being autistic, where there is an inability to shut out information. Though I do feel this is sort of dodgy territory to start going into, I would say that it seems that filtering is a really fundamental aspect of perception and cognition.

ASG: Otherwise you can’t handle life, vision becomes too much if you can’t prioritize certain aspects of what you’re experiencing.

DM: I suppose there is some primary or subconscious process that’s filtering out so much information all the time.

ASG: Yeah, it seems to me an interview is a very visible form of that process; it sets up filters for information. I mean, there are so many other possible variations of this conversation. That’s perhaps why a lot of the films in your programme centre on the interview format. It seems like a very basic, even primal, way of making information visible.

DOCUMENTS: MARIA FUSCO: 'Sailor'—an interview with Maria Fusco by Richard Skinner

Richard Skinner: In your collection of short stories, 'The Mechanical Copula', you played a great deal with ideas of perception, simulation and the authenticity of experience. I’m thinking in particular of your interest in Federico Fellini’s 1976 film 'Casanova', in which this is a central idea. Do you think these issues also play a part in your novel, 'Sailor'?

Maria Fusco: 'Sailor' sprang from a scar. A little monkey bit my mother’s leg some time in the mid 1930s in Belfast. The bite mark is still visible today, not quite angry but definitely agitated. The novel’s monkey is not the same one who marked my mother, my Sailor, the eponymous narrator of the novel, is the “providential machine”, as Kant might have it, who embodies and extends my current social, theoretical and creative pre-occupations: without this monkey I would be mute. So, in direct relation to this, authenticity of experience is central to how I begin to write but not to how I carry on writing. This novel has been necessarily extremely research-heavy, demanding a thorough processing of oral and historical archives to get the right voice; I’ve had to mine my own Belfast demotic, (now inevitably diluted as I’ve been living outside of Northern Ireland for twenty years), and rely upon my family and archives to return my own voice to me. I keep coming back to the same quote, “The human word is midway between the muteness of animals and the silence of God”, borrowed from Louis Lavelle’s La Parole et l'Écriture, I’m somewhere in between.

RS: The other day, I came across the term dinnshenchas, which, as I’m sure you’re aware, is the Irish word for the way in which the land/landscape is translated into story, a kind of ‘toponymic lore’, so that every place-name bears a story. As well as being an archive of your demotic, how important is this sense of place in your novel?

MF: The local as the universal interests me, it seems such a practical, sensible proposition, speaking to the limits of what can and cannot be remembered by an exile. The sense of place in 'Sailor' is an intricate one, the monkey is very happy to be in Belfast, which might seem odd, but this is the emotional complexity at the core of the work. John McGahern has written “everything interesting begins with one person in one place”, whilst I’m slightly sceptical of the totality of this, I am convinced by the precision of subjective knowledge. Dinnshenchas then may be about the distribution of such knowledge rather than the production of it, (even though as a term it blushes specificity), its most tangible value is to let you know you can leave.

RS: I know that you are interested in literacy and orality—the power of utterance—and the space that lies between them. How have you approached the performative aspect of 'Sailor'? What effects have you tried to engage with in your thinking and preparation for its iteration in a gallery space?

MF: I don’t have an expectation visitors to my sound work in Whitechapel Gallery will ‘hear’ an entire novel, I think the temporal compression that that would demand would be unfeasible, or at the very least undesirable, in a gallery context. With this work, I am concerned with precision of delivery through textual method, to that end I’ve made extractions from 'Sailor' that can stand alone from the novel as a whole, and which require close listening, but which at the same time may be heard. Perhaps this seems quite a simple proposition, but when part of the process of reading the novel 'Sailor' is, to a certain degree, to learn how to read like a monkey talking in thick North Belfast 1940s vernacular, calibrated around the syllabic meter of monkey vocalisations, it’s not so direct. Aural deceleration is a key process here, as is the live editing that the four Northern Irish actors make when applying their own distinct accents, breaths, speeds and pitches to the text. This sound work then may be a trail, 'Sailor'’s time in the gallery merely a tenancy.

Read more of Richard Skinner's interview.