Category: interviews

‘The Sound of Footsteps’

Tacita Dean on the making of Craneway Event, the rehearsals of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in a former auto factory on the San Francisco Bay, which she filmed exactly a year ago:

I edited it alone on my film-cutting table using magnetic tape for the sound, which means you have to continually mark everything to keep the film in sync. The sound and image are separate, and the moment you lose sync it’s a nightmare: It’s just the sound of footsteps, which could be from anywhere in the film so it’s nearly impossible to find sync again.

17 hours of film edited down to 1h48, which fits nicely with the “longueur of some of [her] other films.” Looks and sounds fantastic.
Tacita Dean | 500 Words [artforum.com]
Craneway Event premieres Nov. 5-7 at St. Marks Church as part of Performa 09. [performa-arts.org]

James Turrell On Earth Shadow, Anti-Twilight, And The 15-Minute Museum Experience

0300801.jpgThe newly redesigned Design Observer would’ve been awesome even without hosting the archive of Places: Forum of Design For the Public Realm, a print journal published by the architecture faculties at MIT and UC Berkeley from 1983 until Spring 2009.
One of the first pieces to be republished is an interview from 1983 with James Turrell conducted by Kathy Halbreich, Lois Craig, and William Porter. Much of the discussion is about Turrell’s “most ambitious current project,” Roden Crater, which is only now nearing completion, 25 years later. A couple of interesting parts, the first of which is only interesting insomuch as it kind of puts paid to Michael Kimmelman’s recent [sic] lament over dwindling museumgoer attention spans and how people only stand in front of the Mona Lisa long enough to take a picture. Turns out a) duh, b) duh, and c) Turrell’s been looking at looking for decades now:

Places: You’re really challenging the 15-minute museum experience. There’s a requirement, there’s a demand in this to be somewhere.
Turrell: Well, if you don’t do that, then, it’s just the emperor’s clothes. Either you do the work or you forget it. There is a price of admission and most people don’t pay it.

Now for something I didn’t know, even after decades of looking:

For instance, there’s one light event that’s every important to me: the rise of the earth’s shadow. When the sun goes down in the West and you look to the East on a clear day you’ll see this pink line, with white silvery-blue below. Actually, you’re looking at the earth’s shadow advancing up in the sky in the East as the sun goes down in the West, so you see the earth’s shadow projected in the atmosphere. What you see underneath is night rising. Night doesn’t fall. It rises.

Really? Really. With formulas and diagrams and everything. The anti-twilight arch, or as the Victorians called it, the “Belt of Venus,” is also new to me. If there’s anything more banally sublime than the Mona Lisa, it’s a beautiful sunset. And yet there you go.
Sounds like it’s time to break down and read The Nature of Light and Colour in the Open Air, Marcel Minnaert’s almost quixotically exhaustive and hugely influential attempt to pin down and explain all the phenomena of light in the world. Turrell mentioned it last Spring.
The photo above of a 2001 space shuttle launch at sunset shows part of the exhaust plume in the earth’s shadow, and part of it illuminated by the sun. Apparently, the shadow of the plume itself, which only appears to connect with the moon, is called the Bugeron Effect, [or Burgeron Effect?] which is apparently different from the Bergeron Effect . So that’s like three or four things I didn’t know, and one I still don’t. here’s a normal picture of the earth shadow rise. [via nasaimages.org]
Posted [sic] 07.15.83 An Interview With James Turrell [places.designobserver.com]

Stephen Shore Interview At Vice

Here are some dots I never would have connected. When Stephen Shore took his photography-changing 1972 road trip from New York to Amarillo, was he going to see Stanley Marsh 3?
No se, but as this portrait shows, Shore definitely made it [back?] to Marsh’s by 1975:
stephen_shore_stanley_marsh.jpg
I’ve been a huge fan of Shore’s work for a long time, and I have a hard time seeing myself asking a single one of the questions Steve Lafreniere asks. Maybe that’s why this interview is so interesting.
Stephen Shore interviewed by Steve Lafreniere [viceland.com]
image: Stephen Shore, Stanley Marsh and John Reinhardt, Amarillo, Texas, February 15, 1975 [viceland.com]

Hirokazu Koreeda Interview At The Rumpus

I thought Hirokazu Koreeda was going to be making a samurai jidai-geki. Wait, he did, in 2006. Hana yori mo naho. Here’s a review: “The only samurai movie with pink flowers on the cover.”
Odd then, that even considering how much they talk about his films being somehow representative of Japan, the period movie doesn’t come up at all in his interview with Shimon Tanaka, published at The Rumpus.
The Rumpus Interview with Hirokazu Koreeda
Previously: A 2004 interview with Koreeda after Nobody Knows won for best actor at Cannes

Content Machine & Vessel Interview

Hans Ulrich Obrist – My last question, Olafur, is one I’ve asked you many times before: what is your favorite unrealized project?
Olafur Eliasson – I would like to build a museum–to reevaluate the nature of a museum and build it from scratch, not renovate an old one. It should be both an art school and a museum and in between the two there should perhaps be a little hotel–a place where people come and spend time.
HUO – A relay?
OE – Yes, and maybe the rooms themselves will be the artworks. Maybe the way people end up spending time in the hotel rooms will be what the students do and the museum shows. Maybe the life in this building is what, from a museological point of view, will be the performative element. And the building itself is just the form — it’s a content machine.
HUO – Ah, yes–another vessel! This is our vessel interview, and that should be part of the title.
OE – A vessel interview–it’s its own vehicle.
HUO – Thank you so much.

from “The vessel interview, part II: NetJets flight from Dubrovnik to Berlin, June 2007”, published in Olafur Eliasson & Hans Ulrich Obrist: The Conversation Series: Vol. 13 [also in pdf: part II]
Especially interesting since Olafur was just coming off a soon-to-be-unrealized renovation of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.
Also, I would like to see this blanket of which they speak, Skyblue versus landscape green, the one NetJets Europe commissioned from Olafur in 2005 in exchange for use of the plane.

Amar Kanwar’s The Torn First Pages


Last September was the first anniversary of what’s now called the Saffron Rebellion, where Burmese monks took to the streets to protest the military government. As a commemoration of that movement, the Stedelijk Museum showed the first of three parts of Indian artist/documentary filmmaker Amar Kanwar’s work in progress about the Burmese resistance.
The title of the project is The Torn First Pages, 2004, which is a reference to the private, anonymous rebellion of a bookshop owner named Ko Than Htay, who was imprisoned for tearing out the first page of everything he sold, pages which contained mandatory praise for the junta.
Parts of footage for The Torn First Pages come from Burmese democracy activists, who surreptitiously tape and smuggle their work to Kanwar in India.
Kanwar talks about the work with the Stedelijk curator above:

I felt that everybody who writes, be it a poem, be it a novel, be it a fashion magazine, whatever, in one way or the other is indebted or connected to Ko Than Htay, because he’s tearing the first page out from any author. It’s not necessarily a specific book. So in a way, I felt that artists of all kinds, writers of all kinds are connected to this. And in many ways what this is all about is your own relationship with authority and your own defiance. Your own need for defiance. Your own articulation. It’s not necessarily that this articulation is going to become public or recognized. So in some way, in order to understand Burma, if one can understand Ko Than Htay and this act of tearing the first page, you can understand what’s happening in Burma. And if you can understand that, you can understand your own life, regardless of where you are.
…
The Torn First Pages is about presenting evidence of a terrible series of crimes, evidence of amazing resistance. In a way, it’s about saying maybe poetry also has a presence, a validity, in a court of law.
…
Everything you remember, there’s a way to remember. If you remember in a particular way, if you look in a particular way, you’re looking only so that it clarifies you in the present. The purpose of clarifying you in the present is only so that you can take a step forward. In that sense, the act of remembering is really the act of moving forward in time.

Longtime readers of greg.org may remember my swooning at Kanwar’s work when I saw it at documenta 11 in 2002.
Amar Kanwar- The Torn First Pages (Part I), 5.09.08 – 1.10.08 [stedelink.nl]

Morris, Dunkelman, Humiston

Errol Morris is unfurling another fascinating investigation of a 19th century photograph on hit NY Times blog. Today, in part 2/5, he talks with author and Civil War historian Mark Dunkelman about a breakthrough in researching the life of Amos Humiston, who became famous as the Unknown Soldier who died at Gettysburg:

ERROL MORRIS: As you read the letters for the first time, did you feel that Amos was coming back to life?
MARK DUNKELMAN: Yes. My whole idea of him was changing because I knew nothing of his personality or his personal experiences during the war. He was sick on occasion during the war. He mentions his comrades caring for him like a brother. And he referred to his hands. He said they looked like bird’s claws. That was great stuff. That was the key to me. That was the key. He could speak again. He could be a living person again instead of a corpse in rigor mortis on the battlefield.

Whose Father Was He? (Part Two) [nyt]

Meanwhile, Agnes Varda Is Making Installations Now

Agnes Varda, who’s DV mini-masterpiece The Gleaners was formative in my own decision to start making movies, tells Artforum:

I’ve been making films for so long, for over fifty years now, but I really think I have two paths of work–cinema and installation.

Varda talks about an installation opening at Harvard’s Carpenter Center, which was one of several shown previously at the Fondation Cartier.
500 Words | Agnés Varda [artforum.com]

Warning: Don’t Invite Julian Schnabel To Anything

Or if you do, don’t have ellipsis in the name, because Schnabel will inevitably fill in the blanks with his name.
From the WSJ’s article on Spectacle: Elvis Costello with…, the Sundance Channel’s excellent-sounding new TV talk show about music:

But the first few shows are marred by an almost amateurish laxity. Julian Schnabel, the artist and director (and Lou Reed’s neighbor in downtown Manhattan), steps out of the audience to join Mr. Costello and Mr. Reed onstage and hijacks the conversation.

I still remember vividly the artist panel discussion at MoMA for the Cy Twombly retrospective, where Rob Storr talked to Serra, Marden, and Francesco Clemente. The first question was by an unidentified idiot in the front row, only it wasn’t a question, but a rambling speech. Storr finally kind of interrupted to identify the speaker as Julian Schnabel.
[update: shoulda listened to me, Morley.]

Satyajit Ray In Film India, c.1981

Steve Rosen found a 1981 interview with Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray at the flea market. He transcribed a bit onto Airform Archive, starting with an encounter Ray had with the 1913 Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore:

Satyajit Ray: I’ll tell you a story here. In 1928, when I was seven, I went with my mother to Tagore’s university. I had my little autograph book, newly bought, and my mother gave the book to Tagore and said, “My son would like a few lines of verse from you.” And he said, “Leave the book with me.” Next day I went to collect it, and he brought it out and said: “I have written something for you, which you won’t understand now, but when you grow up you will understand it.” It’s one of the best things he ever wrote in a small manner, and what it means is this: “I have travelled all around the world to see the rivers and the mountains, and I’ve spent a lot of money. I have gone to great lengths, I have seen everything, but I have forgotten to see just outside of my house a dewdrop on a little blade of grass, a dewdrop which reflects in its convexity the whole universe around you.”

At first, I thought this sounded incredibly ballsy, but Tagore’s and Ray’s Brahmin families were close.
From the dewdrop, Ray and the interviewer continue in a discussion of the microscopic, but the power of the quote seems to me to be about ignoring the beauty and profundity of the world right in front of us.
Ray would go on to study with Tagore, and in 1961, Nehru commissioned him to direct a documentary of the writer’s life.
…the essence as a dewdrop on a little blade of grass… [airform archives]
Satyajit Ray [wikipedia]

Films, Fax Murals & More: Stan VanDerBeek At Guild & Greyshkul

vanderbeek_fax_mural-gg.jpg
I first encountered filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek’s work in Aspen Magazine. His 1964 collaboration with Robert Morris, Site, combined dance/performance, art, and film. Performers create a physical, 3-D approximation of camera wipes and reveals using large black and white panels. Though Morris and VanDerBeek made it years before, it reminds me of early video art work from WGBH that explored the functions and visual properties of the new technology.
Throughout his career, VanDerBeek was an “advocate of the application of a utopian fusion of art and technology.” [That’s from his E.A.I bio on Ubu, btw.] Which would be interesting enough on its own. But until I get down there to see the actual show, what I find most fascinating about Guild & Greyshkul’s current survey of VanDerBeek’s varied output is the intricacies of how his family began dealing with it after he passed away.
Two of G&G’s artist-owners are VanDerBeek’s children, and the process they went through–part biographical, part familial, part art historical, part archive/conservational–is just awesome. Sara VanDerBeek’s discussion with Brian Sholis is at Artforum.com.
The image above is Panels for the Walls of the World, a 153-panel “fax mural” which VanDerBeek sent from MIT to various places around the country in 1970. Phase I, above, was transmitted to the Walker Art Center. There were four “phases” of Panels, and it’s possible that a significant percentage of all the fax toner in the country in 1970 was exhausted printing out VanDerBeek’s murals.
Stan VanDerBeek runs through Oct. 18 at Guild & Greyshkul; Navigate from this crazy page, too [guildgreyshkul]
500 Words | Stan VanDerBeek by Sara VanDerBeek [artforum]
Films of Stan VanDerBeek [ubu]

“OH Yeah, Cocteau. My Main Man.”


Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman, “Live at 01”
“Recorded entirely on location at
Borders Store 01
Ann Arbor, Michigan”
I was almost too busy rolling my eyes at these two smug knuckleheads doing a promotional prowl of the CD and DVD aisle to notice the real eyeroller: the corporate reverence for “01” as if a giant, shitty, homogenized bookstore can somehow be unique because it’s the one they’ve cloned everywhere else. [via fimoculous]

Lady Madonna, Children At Her Teat

beecroft_madonna.jpg
From the Great Opening Paragraphs Department, Matthew Placek interviewed NZ documentary filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly for V Magazine:

In March of 2006 I traveled with Vanessa Beecroft to Rumbek in South Sudan on two separate occasions to produce an image for her latest project, VBSS. Vanessa asked me to produce a painterly, Madonna-esque image of her wearing a custom-made dress by Maison Martin Margiela burned at the hem. There were two slit openings for her breasts in order to nurse two orphaned Sudanese twins. Vanessa was and is trying to adopt the children legally.

The vapid, superficial, self-absorbed aesthetic fetishist in Brettkelly’s new film, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, will be instantly familiar to anyone familiar with Beecroft’s perennially hackneyed work, which has been a lowpoint of at least two Venice Biennales [the most recent one is in the film].
NY Magazine has a nice takedown recap. It puts the interview in fashion-friendly V into interesting perspective; Beecroft’s collaborator and the outsider director make what are rather contorted attempts to be nice and non-judgmental about what is a transparently repulsive, self-damning project. Good stuff.
Filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly on artist Vanessa Beecroft’s new quest in the Sudan [vmagazine.com]
‘Art Star’ Vanessa Beecroft: Slammed at Sundance [nymag]

Tom diCillo Interviews Roger Ebert

In an attempt to figure out why his well-reviewed film, Delirious, grossed only $200,000 at the box office–or rather, to figure out why a small, independent film is subjected to the same make-or-break Opening Weekend metrics as a studio blockbuster–Tom diCillo emailed Roger Ebert some questions:

5. Does independent film exist anymore?
Yes, barely. The irony is that indies are embraced at film festivals, which have almost become an alternative distribution channel. “Delirious,” for example, was invited by San Sebastian, Sundance, San Francisco, Seattle, Avignon, Munich and Karlovy Vary. All major festivals. But you didn’t make “Delirious” to sell tickets for festivals. I frankly think it’s time for festivals to give their entries a cut of the box office.

With the acknowledgement that festivals are a business–or at least have an economic, not just a cultural, value proposition–and that they function alongside commercial screens as a part of the theatrical distribution channel, Ebert is righter than it sounds like he knows.
Shifts in the way theaters make money–specifically, the split between the studio/distributor and the theater on opening weekend vs later weeks–have combined with the overbuilt glut of screens–and screens per multiplex–to constrain theater owners. They need tons of traffic to generate concession sales, since the studio gets the lion’s share of opening weekend receipts. So they fill their screens with the latest releases, pushing smaller and independent films out.
The maturation and consolidation of non-mainstream theaters, too, means that actual independents constistently lose screens to the products of the mini-majors.
For the moment, theatrical runs are still apparently important to securing a film’s success in the DVD sellthrough and rental markets, but maybe there’s a way to change this. The potential returns from DVD’s could become key to profitability, especially if there were ways to better leverage a limited theatrical run or decouple DVD’s and box office entirely, or if there were a way to capitalize on festival exposure. I think of the way bands burn and sell live concert CD’s on the spot or online. If festivals are dispersed enough, there would be next to no downside for selling DVD’s of a film, maybe coupled with festival extras like the director Q&A as part of a ticket package.
diCillo may be a bit of a stretch, but I could picture directors with healthy online followings–from Mike Mills on the quiet end to Kevin Smith in the food court–reaching a decent sell-through audience. Then let MySpace fill in the rest. Or maybe get a blog.
An indie director asks: Is the whole thing a Kafkaesque nightmare? [suntimes via kottke]