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Return to Point CrONICAL July 21 2006
Discussion between Arlo Mountford, and committee members David Simpkin, Adrien Allen and Jason Maling.
AA: I’m struck by the modular seating in the show, the veneer, how they were made…
JM: It’s very Ellsworth Kelly
AA: I was thinking more Frank Lloyd Wright.
The show is a video projection but also a sculptural installation, which you’ve been combining in your work for a while, but in this case, it’s really quite simple.
AM: Yeah, that’s partly because originally I was developing… well this work was initially developed about 2 years ago, and I initially proposed it for CCP, when they were in the old building, but I hadn’t developed it to the stage it is in now. I hadn’t developed the chairs or anything like that, and I got the show. But then they closed, and they gave me the projection window. But it meant I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t have sound.
DS: Well, we’re somewhere between the old CCP and the new CCP.
AM: So, the different thing with this piece, and the other piece I was developing at the time, was that it was developed in animation first, and the objects came out of that. Whereas before that I was developing objects that were worked out because of the space I was working in. Then I was animating them, as a way of rationalising the objects to a degree. But in this sense the shapes and the object came out of the animation. So it was a different process…
DS: Did you story-board this?
AM: I did story-board this one, only because it was so long.
DS: What is the actual length of the loop?
AM: 14 minutes 15 seconds.
AA: So, there is a dim ambient lighting in the gallery, there are these modular furniture pieces, the projection and then there is the sound. I don’t think we’ve had this level of sound amplification in here before. We’ve had plenty of sound pieces, but with these 4 speakers, the others seemed under-amplified. The whole thing feels incredibly cinematic.
AM: Yeah.
AA: People come in and they sit down, and they stay the duration.
JM: It’s a compelling video to watch. It’s rare in an art context to be able to hang in there. It’s compelling, you want to see what happens next.
It’s like transcendent mockery. Like it is yearning, it wants to be. It’s like the video is a searching and a yearning, but it’s mocking. And it wants to believe…iconography as symbolism, you want to find the point (as in Return to Point), but it’s mocking. The way you’ve presented it… it could so easily have just been more art about art.
DS: What about the jazz bit of the soundtrack… John Coltrane?
AM: That was written by Rob the sound designer. He was really paranoid about it because he has a lot of jazz musician friends, and he played it all on mini keyboard. It was to try and contextualize the Jackson Pollock bit…
DS: Well, when I thought about the Coltrane score…
JM: Sorry everybody, here comes an obscure film reference…
DS: Well, my favourite was his sign off song, he did it every show, and for his whole 12 year career… and this was where my thinking was going. We’re talking about 1960’s Coltrane – the joke of the avant-garde essentially.
Death by guillotine? (referring to imagery in the work) Which begs the question: How? Was he killed by his own sword? How do you see yourself with regard to this work. Do you see that you too could be decapitated by your own work – In the mockery? Because it’s associated, the style is associated to your work. Can you talk about the impending doom, is my question. For example, the last scene, you know, cutting through the wall of Conical, and the implication of that.
AM: Well, the cutting of Conical is like – and especially where the guy’s head falls off in the end – it’s, for me, just: ‘that’s far enough’. I could keep going, but that’s what my works do’.
DS: So, it’s not the beginning. That is the point?
AM: But I don’t think it’s impending.
DS: The decapitation has come up a lot here, you know, the head being removed from the body. Tori Nimmervoll having her head removed by the fireplace and tipping salt down the chimney (see Marking Time 2006), and then Lou Hubbard crushing the turtles’ head into smithereens (see Doubt 2006) and now you show Joseph Beuys flying across a Jasper Johns target… and then he crashes. Decapitation occurs…
AA: You’re stretching a long bow here David…
DS: But then he passes the target and realises that it is an Earth-work: Spiral Jetty, and then the question is did he miss the target or did he say….
JM: Let’s backtrack. I read the Conical chain-saw cutting scene as really funny in relation to Conical’s obsession with the site-specific. ‘I’m presenting this at Conical, so here you go, I’ll give them what they want’…
Laughter
JM: ‘I’ll cut myself out of the place’.
AA: The video seems to parody the condensing of history, in the most ridiculous way. Trying to do that in 14 minutes is….
AM: Ridiculous.
JM: Some people do it all the time!
AA: Matta Clarke’s Conical Intersect – to see that just dumped into a point, so reduced – sacrilege!
AM: Well it is that, just dumping things.
JM: How do you mean dumping things, like just grabbing bits and…
AM: Yeah.
JM: Well that was my next question, because you are a vision mixer, you’ve given yourself a beat with which to register the next track on. It’s like you’ve got a Modernist stance, which is then undermined by the sampling. And that’s the thread and it allows you to get away with anything. Which I find kind of cheeky, but at the same time, really spot on. I like that.
AA: I find myself intrigued by the homage to the language of film. The editing, the framed shots, the silences – where you are almost obsessively loving the long takes – that’s what makes it engaging. It’s not cynical, which is good.. because we’re all pretty tired of that!
AM: Yeah, yep.
AA: Yet it doesn’t necessarily make us believe either.
AM: It’s kind of like I want to take the piss out of these things, but I also love all the artists that I take the piss out of. So it’s kind of a weird.
DS: It’s not the name of the artists for me, it’s the name of the buildings.
JM: Also, there’s our familiarity with the flash animation software you’ve used. My experience of it is usually a shitty spam email that comes up with some crap kind of photo. Like Skywalker. Did you see that Starwars one? Where they did a rap version of the whole Starwars narrative made out of a flash animation. It reminds me of that, and … who’s your father, who’s your father.
AM: Well, you know I love South Park.
AA: There are those long takes in it, and at the same time… well,
AM: It’s kind of clunky.
AA: So how do you compose the scenes, are they accumulated over a period of time?
AM: Well, it is accumulated. Like this is the only one I’ve story-boarded, and that’s only because I knew I wanted it to be quite long and I was having ideas about things and needed to work out how I was going to connect things. So I basically story-boarded it just so I could remember it. But usually I work at it as a progressive thing so I won’t be able to tell you the duration until it’s finished.
I started this piece over 2 years ago.
JM:: I’d imagine tracing those images, you’d really start to think about those images as well.
AM: Yeah, well JFK, I’m in love with Jackie Onassis. You watch her crawl out of that car… and then the secret service man comes over…
JM: How was it with that Richard Hamilton piece because that would have…
AM: Ah, well there’s a secret to that one… my girlfriend drew it.
JM: Do you ever see yourself doing like a feature length thing?
AM: I want to do a science fiction.
JM: Cool.
AM: But that would be a film.
JM: But what about an animation?
AM: Not really, I only use animation because it’s suitable.
AA: You’ve flattened the content out of it, and there’s a pretty seamless relationship between the flattening of the image and the content.
AM: Yeah, yeah definitely. There are definite and deliberate signposts.
JM: Do you think you’re over the referencing of the art thing now?
AM: If I wanted to reference more outside of the art world, then I think I would like to do other things.
JM: You could do it with any content. And I am interested to hear you say that you would like to move onto something else. It seems to me that this is story telling.
AM: Yeah.
JM: And that is the strength of it, and the content just happens to be a lot of art reference points, but the strength of it is it’s visual story telling. And it works. And it has a tone which is very considered and a pace which is very polished and all those elements make me go, ‘I’d like to see what you do with some other content’. And the only reason I’m asking is maybe the irreverence was that you chose this as a theme or maybe it was a preoccupation, as I haven’t seen much of your other work.
DS: That idea of a replay of memory of the history of the avant-garde, when did you decide to rewind it into the mix-master?
AM: No the rewind was more of a decision that was made when I started to come to an end, and then you just have that really boring thing, where it goes black, and then it starts again. And I thought, well, I’ve listed all this stuff, so why not just…
JM: Also, if you walk in at minute number 7, you don’t have to hang around because you get an instant replay.
DS: There is that repetition, because you turn a 15 minute work, into a 3 minute video.
JM: I do really like that about it. Because it’s one of the things I really loathe about video art in galleries. ‘Oh fuck, how long is this going to go for?’ How long will I sit through this?
AM: There’s that film, ‘funny games’… there’s a part where the guy has just shot this kid, and then he dies, and the guy just looks at the camera, has the remote, and rewinds it and changes the plot of the film so that you can sit through more horrible murder.
