There seemed like there was no interest out there, people wanted to know what happened to all that work that hadn't been seen for a long time and that they were reading about in books.
Interview with Ian White
by George Clark
Interview conducted in March 2006, in London
Ian White is an artist, curator and writer. In this interview he discusses the intersection of these disciplines in the context of his many curatorial projects and collaborations. The interview focuses on his approach to a variety of projects including Three to the Power of Three, Ciné Lumière, London 2004; The Artists Cinema at Frieze Art Fair, London 2005/2006, and his many programmes as Adjunct curator of film at Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Biography: Ian White is Adjunct Film Curator for Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, an independent curator, writer and artist. Projects include Kinomuseum for Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (2007) and he was associate curator of The Secret Public: The last days of the British Underground 1978 – 1988 (Kunstverein Munich; ICA, London; The British School at Rome Gallery). As an artist his most recent work was a collaborative performance with Jimmy Robert, Marriage à la Mode et Cor Anglais (STUK, Belgium; De Appel, Amsterdam).
George Clark:
To begin with I am interested in discussing a specific project, Three to the Power of Three, and talking about how that developed. This was a project you developed as an independent curator with the French Institute’s cinema in London. The three programmes you curated presented a fascinating selection of work pairing new artists with historical work but also questioning and exploring what the cinema space and a film/video programme could be. What was the starting point and what was the connection with the French Institute?
Ian White:
Well, the idea emerged because the French Institute really wanted to show artists' work, work that was identified as being made by artists. The idea behind this series was to try and do something that was about historical and contemporary work that had some kind of relationship to France. Either work that had been made in France or by artists who were French or living in France. The idea was to try and put things together in a way whereby in seeing them together meaning would accrue or escalate exponentially. They wouldn’t be so much thematic as different but in related ways. So there would be an accumulation of meanings rather than a sort of simple explanation of something.
The Ciné Lumière has a really fantastic auditorium and used to be a theatre with all those trappings like lighting rigs and wings. We started thinking about how the auditorium could figure in shaping the experience. By the theatrical having a more active presence, the auditorium could shift how you would receive the work towards understanding cinema as a place of exhibition as opposed to a place of passive reception in a traditional auditorium sense.
The Ciné Lumière has a really fantastic auditorium and used to be a theatre with all those trappings like lighting rigs and wings. We started thinking about how the auditorium could figure in shaping the experience. By the theatrical having a more active presence, the auditorium could shift how you would receive the work towards understanding cinema as a place of exhibition as opposed to a place of passive reception in a traditional auditorium sense.
GC:
When you say ‘we,’ is that to refer to yourself and the French Institute? Was this programme developed through a dialogue with them?
IW:
Well, no. I mean they probably would have, on one level, been much happier if it was just really normal and we just did a really normal screening because it wouldn’t have involved any kind of hysteria or organisation.
But by saying ‘we’ I mean that it was a project that developed out of a lot of conversations with a lot of different people. It was my interest to try and use the auditorium, but how it was used and how it developed came out of conversations with a lot of the artists but also other curators and friends. When I’m working on more, say, special projects, outside of the regular film programme at Whitechapel, there’s a sense of it coming from somewhere, that it is not just coming from myself, that it’s part of a network of ideas.
But by saying ‘we’ I mean that it was a project that developed out of a lot of conversations with a lot of different people. It was my interest to try and use the auditorium, but how it was used and how it developed came out of conversations with a lot of the artists but also other curators and friends. When I’m working on more, say, special projects, outside of the regular film programme at Whitechapel, there’s a sense of it coming from somewhere, that it is not just coming from myself, that it’s part of a network of ideas.
GC:
How did you settle on a form for these ideas, to have three screenings each with an invited artist? How did you go from this idea to utilise the theatrical elements of the auditorium to working with these specific artists?
IW:
Well, it’s a good question. I don’t know really. I suppose that I’m often led by instinct and by personal relationships too. The process was quite long and the French Institute paid for me to take a research trip and go to Paris. I talked with a lot of people there, curators and artists and saw work and went to Lightcone (www.lightcone.org) and viewed quite a lot of stuff there. I tried to think by looking at things and feeling for what would be interesting and to get a sense of what is happening now. We ended up with these artists for different reasons.
The Germaine Dulac work I watched at Lightcone. I just think it’s fantastic and I still think L’Invitation au Voyage (33 min, France 1927) is one of the most brilliant, brilliant films. I just love it. I don’t know why but somehow it started to connect to Mark Aerial Waller’s work. In particular L’Invitation au Voyage and its' interest in the exotic and the naivety with which the exotic is represented in the film, like the very rough hand drawn palm trees and exotic islands, when she goes into the bar. I found them really stunning in the film, there’s a sensibility around that work which really connected to what I understood Mark’s work to be about. I also knew that Mark had made Reversion of the Beast Folk (12 mins, UK, 2003), and we talked about it, especially the last five minutes where the screen goes black and you hear a soundtrack of Brazilian music. As this happens, his original plan was for the light in the gallery where he intended to show it to change, so it would automatically go from white light to red light. I was really interested in that idea, in the simplicity of it and how in would work. That conversation had already happened and it was just in my brain I suppose. So it seemed like an opportunity to try and realise that work in a different way, in a different context than the art gallery that would really lend itself to what we had at hand. As it turned out we ended up having to hire the lighting equipment so it wasn’t entirely using everything that was there.
I suppose the other projects grew out of that initial link. I’d worked with Jimmy Robert before, I’d shown his films elsewhere. I’d never curated any performance work that he’d done but I’d seen work that he’d made and it was really fantastic. So I started talking with him, whether he would like to do something and what that might be, and Babette Mangolte is just generally fantastic and so began thinking about her films. I really knew her as a cinematographer for Yvonne Rainer rather than her own work. I suppose one of the threads that was certainly running through the first programme and in a way the last one but maybe in a bit more obscure sense, was an interest in feminism in the broadest sense. Obviously there’s more of an explicit sense of that in Germaine Dulac’s work and in Babette Mangolte’s work. But I think also in terms of how the auditorium started to be used and about different kinds of discourses that might occur in the auditorium. I think it was at least one of the things that were really underpinning the whole project on a conceptual level.
The final artist was Alice Anderson and I didn’t know her work so much but she was friends with friends of mine and they kept suggesting that I go and have a look. We spent an afternoon together looking at her videos in her studio and I actually found I was genuinely convinced by them. In a way that I was quite surprised by, I wasn’t really expecting to be. I knew she had shown the work in a gallery. In a sense with all of the artists it was about taking their work out of the gallery and into the cinema. But they are all at the same time pretty much familiar with cinema and certainly interested in it in terms of their own practice. They weren’t completely out of depth in thinking about what a cinema might be or what that experience is. They have all had work shown in cinema spaces before.
The Germaine Dulac work I watched at Lightcone. I just think it’s fantastic and I still think L’Invitation au Voyage (33 min, France 1927) is one of the most brilliant, brilliant films. I just love it. I don’t know why but somehow it started to connect to Mark Aerial Waller’s work. In particular L’Invitation au Voyage and its' interest in the exotic and the naivety with which the exotic is represented in the film, like the very rough hand drawn palm trees and exotic islands, when she goes into the bar. I found them really stunning in the film, there’s a sensibility around that work which really connected to what I understood Mark’s work to be about. I also knew that Mark had made Reversion of the Beast Folk (12 mins, UK, 2003), and we talked about it, especially the last five minutes where the screen goes black and you hear a soundtrack of Brazilian music. As this happens, his original plan was for the light in the gallery where he intended to show it to change, so it would automatically go from white light to red light. I was really interested in that idea, in the simplicity of it and how in would work. That conversation had already happened and it was just in my brain I suppose. So it seemed like an opportunity to try and realise that work in a different way, in a different context than the art gallery that would really lend itself to what we had at hand. As it turned out we ended up having to hire the lighting equipment so it wasn’t entirely using everything that was there.
I suppose the other projects grew out of that initial link. I’d worked with Jimmy Robert before, I’d shown his films elsewhere. I’d never curated any performance work that he’d done but I’d seen work that he’d made and it was really fantastic. So I started talking with him, whether he would like to do something and what that might be, and Babette Mangolte is just generally fantastic and so began thinking about her films. I really knew her as a cinematographer for Yvonne Rainer rather than her own work. I suppose one of the threads that was certainly running through the first programme and in a way the last one but maybe in a bit more obscure sense, was an interest in feminism in the broadest sense. Obviously there’s more of an explicit sense of that in Germaine Dulac’s work and in Babette Mangolte’s work. But I think also in terms of how the auditorium started to be used and about different kinds of discourses that might occur in the auditorium. I think it was at least one of the things that were really underpinning the whole project on a conceptual level.
The final artist was Alice Anderson and I didn’t know her work so much but she was friends with friends of mine and they kept suggesting that I go and have a look. We spent an afternoon together looking at her videos in her studio and I actually found I was genuinely convinced by them. In a way that I was quite surprised by, I wasn’t really expecting to be. I knew she had shown the work in a gallery. In a sense with all of the artists it was about taking their work out of the gallery and into the cinema. But they are all at the same time pretty much familiar with cinema and certainly interested in it in terms of their own practice. They weren’t completely out of depth in thinking about what a cinema might be or what that experience is. They have all had work shown in cinema spaces before.
GC:
The work that you showed with these artists was work that was made more for the cinema because a gallery didn’t really exist in the same way as an exhibition space. Would that be fair to say?
IW:
Yeah, I suppose. The Babette Mangolte films aren’t that old but they were definitely made for cinema rather than for the gallery. The works with Alice Anderson weren’t really made to be shown anywhere, it was just home movie really. And the other two artists show their work in galleries, so that was kind of coming from a gallery. And yeah, Germaine Dulac was making her films in the 30s…
I suppose by talking about a gallery and cinema a lot of that is predicated on thinking about the commercial gallery, because MoMA has been showing film in its auditorium since the late 30s. I think you need to work out how you define what it means to show work in a gallery or not.
I suppose by talking about a gallery and cinema a lot of that is predicated on thinking about the commercial gallery, because MoMA has been showing film in its auditorium since the late 30s. I think you need to work out how you define what it means to show work in a gallery or not.
GC:
The works that you selected are from quite a disparate array of sources. I guess that is what you meant by avoiding a prescriptive thematic programme as here the works are more autonomous and would accumulate meaning through their juxtaposition?
IW:
In a very general sense I’m much more interested in the way in which work resonates with each other than in lumping everything that’s similar together. I think one of the things that people didn’t enjoy about the final screening is that the first half was too similar in tone and that became really difficult for the audience. And maybe it was. But in general I’m much more excited by the way that you can put two works that you wouldn’t expect to see together and actually something else occurs. It’s very much connected to the works themselves, the ways of reading the work or finding other things in the work that you haven’t seen before. On another level, it’s also connected to thinking about how as a viewer you respond to work that you see in a mixed programme. On a very simplistic level I understand two works that resonate against each other to be more activating for the viewer than works which are thematically similar or unchallenging in their relationships between each other.
GC:
One thing that was interesting with the second programme (with Jimmy Robert work) was the inclusion of the film Kensal Rise, which was really striking because it was unexpected in that context but at the same time it was completely logical that it was in that programme.
IW:
Putting together Jimmy’s films and Kensal Rise was motivated by the exploration of living spaces. Also the way in which film as a cultural document was conditioned differently and what kind of articulation might or might not be possible about those issues and how the self figured increasingly in Jimmy’s work compared to the most historical work. I was interested in the way things broke down from over-arching governmental structures into something much more personal. Combining that really early British film with the other work was related to a project that I did for the Oberhausen festival. There I worked with Jimmy, Emma Hedditch and Melissa Castagnetto around a programme I curated for the special programme which was called Today We Live. My programme was based around two Ruby Grierson documentaries, quite short, about the way in which the government was constructing communities, literally building community centers, but also instructing people on what it meant to behave communally and how you used a community centre between the wars.
The programme included Charten Court by Jimmy and a video by Emma and a double screen piece by Melissa, so in a sense the French Institute programme that Jimmy was in did have a quite strong relationship to that. It was something I was interested in continuing, to experience the work in that way. I was really interested in the way there was a relationship between that early quite strange British documentary work and contemporary practice that seems peculiarly locatable in England. Even though Jimmy was born in Guadalupe, grew up in Paris, lived in London for a good few years and then moved to Amsterdam, so he’s not in the least bit British – but at the time it was about a particular sensibility. Actually all of that started when I was asked to do a one night thing at Cubitt which became very collaborative with Jimmy and also with Emma. I made a slide show piece of my own and Jimmy showed the Super 8 films and Emma showed a video with a live soundtrack.
Those two things, the Cubitt event and Oberhausen, we’d really invested in process. For Cubitt we were talking a lot between the three of us about what it should be and almost to the extent that we were thinking more about the things around the work than worrying about the works themselves. The works pre-existed that for that night, my slide show thing didn’t but Jimmy’s and Emma’s pretty much did. We would talk about how we would work together, how we thought we could be together in that space and what it meant for people to be coming into it, how the relations between the works would be and how we would articulate them in terms of the order of things and how people would move around the space. We had a number of dinners where I cooked and Jimmy, Emma and Melissa came over. We wouldn’t really talk about the meaning of the works, although we talked a little bit about why I wanted to show them with the old documentaries but not excessively. It wasn’t a theoretical discussion about my thesis, say, it was a discussion about what it meant to be showing work in this way and about our relationships and trying to talk about them to the extent that they would really inform what the screening actually was when it happened.
The programme included Charten Court by Jimmy and a video by Emma and a double screen piece by Melissa, so in a sense the French Institute programme that Jimmy was in did have a quite strong relationship to that. It was something I was interested in continuing, to experience the work in that way. I was really interested in the way there was a relationship between that early quite strange British documentary work and contemporary practice that seems peculiarly locatable in England. Even though Jimmy was born in Guadalupe, grew up in Paris, lived in London for a good few years and then moved to Amsterdam, so he’s not in the least bit British – but at the time it was about a particular sensibility. Actually all of that started when I was asked to do a one night thing at Cubitt which became very collaborative with Jimmy and also with Emma. I made a slide show piece of my own and Jimmy showed the Super 8 films and Emma showed a video with a live soundtrack.
Those two things, the Cubitt event and Oberhausen, we’d really invested in process. For Cubitt we were talking a lot between the three of us about what it should be and almost to the extent that we were thinking more about the things around the work than worrying about the works themselves. The works pre-existed that for that night, my slide show thing didn’t but Jimmy’s and Emma’s pretty much did. We would talk about how we would work together, how we thought we could be together in that space and what it meant for people to be coming into it, how the relations between the works would be and how we would articulate them in terms of the order of things and how people would move around the space. We had a number of dinners where I cooked and Jimmy, Emma and Melissa came over. We wouldn’t really talk about the meaning of the works, although we talked a little bit about why I wanted to show them with the old documentaries but not excessively. It wasn’t a theoretical discussion about my thesis, say, it was a discussion about what it meant to be showing work in this way and about our relationships and trying to talk about them to the extent that they would really inform what the screening actually was when it happened.
GC:
Within this process your involvement changed in a way that maybe Jimmy’s didn’t. For instance, from the event at Cubitt where you were also showing your own work to the programme in Oberhausen where you were showing their work. I’m interested in how the processes that went into how to show your own work then fed into how to show other people’s work.
IW:
All of this needs to be seen in the context of the fact that I’ve made other work prior to that, so it’s not sort of such a linear transition between those two projects. But in all of the work that I’ve made, it’s pretty much always been within a collaborative context. It’s never really been about me as an artist with a singular vision in a traditional sense. They’ve always been collaborative, they’ve always been based around something live, so they’ve always been event-based and they might happen once only.
Interpretation has really figured in those. We had this funny situation when I was working with Jimmy on performing at the Tate and we had to write the wall text which I wrote. The interpretation department of the Tate wouldn’t allow me to say that interpretation was content. I was trying to articulate the way in which the act of interpretation was really what the work was about and that that was the content of the work as much as anything else. In that sense the things that I’ve made have a very close relationship to one end of the spectrum of curatorial practice which is a more explicitly constructed way of presenting work, a more subjective way, the opposite end of the curatorial spectrum from presenting work in a chronological way or an interest in history over and above anything else. I suppose to me there is a point where the two things become very close together. Obviously I don’t always work like that when I curate film programmes but I think it’s where I feel most alive.
In terms of there being a transition between, say, showing my own slide show at Cubitt and then working on the other programmes with Jimmy and Emma, there wasn’t a conscious register of difference for me. It wasn’t like I put a different jacket on or anything. In both instances it was really about finding a way of working with other people – they had a really similar base line. I don’t know how people perceive that from the outside. I can understand why people question the ethics of making work as well as curating work and I’m open to conversation about those things.
Interpretation has really figured in those. We had this funny situation when I was working with Jimmy on performing at the Tate and we had to write the wall text which I wrote. The interpretation department of the Tate wouldn’t allow me to say that interpretation was content. I was trying to articulate the way in which the act of interpretation was really what the work was about and that that was the content of the work as much as anything else. In that sense the things that I’ve made have a very close relationship to one end of the spectrum of curatorial practice which is a more explicitly constructed way of presenting work, a more subjective way, the opposite end of the curatorial spectrum from presenting work in a chronological way or an interest in history over and above anything else. I suppose to me there is a point where the two things become very close together. Obviously I don’t always work like that when I curate film programmes but I think it’s where I feel most alive.
In terms of there being a transition between, say, showing my own slide show at Cubitt and then working on the other programmes with Jimmy and Emma, there wasn’t a conscious register of difference for me. It wasn’t like I put a different jacket on or anything. In both instances it was really about finding a way of working with other people – they had a really similar base line. I don’t know how people perceive that from the outside. I can understand why people question the ethics of making work as well as curating work and I’m open to conversation about those things.
Further Reading
Other Sections
