Curators don’t have time to research the way they used to. We need to function more as catalysts. That’s why I think it’s essential to work with collaborators.
Interview with Mark Aerial Waller
by George Clark
Interview conducted in April 2006 in London
GC:
When you’ve shown your work, what sort of negotiations would you have with the curator or venue? What are the perimeters, how much room have you found to negotiate different sorts of spaces for instance, or different ways to show work?
MAW:
Well usually people come to see a piece of work and then when I do specify something then they sometimes find it too difficult to include. It’s happened a couple of times, and I think it’s because people see video as something that can be on a television or that can just be programmed in a screening. It really depends though, because I’m quite happy about people showing work on monitors, for instance, if they’re doing an archive show. Like the show at temporaryContemporary a year ago, where the exhibition space was more like that Video Acts show at the ICA a few years ago where they presented works from the Kramlich collection. It was not a good show in terms of space but if you wanted to see a lot of video work, then you could see it. But you wouldn’t get the same experience as when the artists had originally shown the work. Probably a lot of them had had in mind those monitors, those cube monitors on white plinths in the early 70s and they were probably all imagining that in their unconscious dreams.
The thing about it with me is that when I’ve re-shown pieces of work like Reversion of the Beast Folkm but also when I’ve re-shown works by other people in my Wayward Canon projects, there is a certain amount of flexibility because you’re responding to the architecture of the space as well as your own needs. So inevitably it does change slightly. I’m working towards more modular things – like the last thing I did was Superpower - Dakar Chapter (13 mins, video, UK/Senegal, 2004), for which I’d made an Islamic airbrick wall that would divide the gallery in two so that when you came in through the entrance you would see the video through this moiré pattern of circles and shapes. Then you’d have to walk around the wall into the screening space where you would be able to see an unblocked vision of the screen. That wall is made up of hundreds of fifty-centimetre blocks so it can change size but it’s still basically the same modular unit.
The thing about it with me is that when I’ve re-shown pieces of work like Reversion of the Beast Folkm but also when I’ve re-shown works by other people in my Wayward Canon projects, there is a certain amount of flexibility because you’re responding to the architecture of the space as well as your own needs. So inevitably it does change slightly. I’m working towards more modular things – like the last thing I did was Superpower - Dakar Chapter (13 mins, video, UK/Senegal, 2004), for which I’d made an Islamic airbrick wall that would divide the gallery in two so that when you came in through the entrance you would see the video through this moiré pattern of circles and shapes. Then you’d have to walk around the wall into the screening space where you would be able to see an unblocked vision of the screen. That wall is made up of hundreds of fifty-centimetre blocks so it can change size but it’s still basically the same modular unit.
GC:
A lot of the Wayward Canon is about re-contextualising work. La Société des Amis de Judex in particularly is about changing the space in which you watch films, the physical space but also the cultural space as well. There is that striking shift from being in 50s Americana with the vintage 'Batman' episode, then suddenly after the first smoke burst, you kind of wakeup in 1910’s Paris with Louis Feuillade’s Fantomas (France, 1934). It’s disorientating in a really interesting way.
MAW:
The same surrealist device is used in both films, so the Riddler does actually have close connections to Fantomas in that he’s an anti-hero and malevolent character who's playful. But yeah, there are these cultural shifts as well.
GC:
The shift, particularly between these two sections, is instigated by smoke filling the room, masking the entire space in mist. The shift effects the space and your awareness of it in a quite similar way to the shift that goes on in Reversion of the Beast Folk, so both involve a movement from the cinematic space to the space of the cinema.
MAW:
Yes, but in La Société des Amis de Judex, the architecture disappears and it’s even less apparent than in a cinema because it’s not just dark but it’s so dark you can only see as far as your fingertips. You could be in a small room or it could be in a massive hall.
GC:
Maybe the question is how do you see the Wayward Canon events relating to your own practice? There are similar techniques being employed in Wayward Cannon, but not with material you made. In what way is showing work part of your artistic practice?
MAW:
Well, the Wayward Cannon was first of all conceived as a means to show films that were really only available to private collectors of videos who exchanged movies on the internet that you couldn’t get in normal distribution because they had been deleted or maybe they had never been released. It was really just to show that kind of work. Then I started being more interested in relations between work and I was particularly interested in the work of Georges Franju and the way that he related his practice to setting up the Cinematèque Française. Franju was originally a film collector and he collected the works of people like Louis Feuillade who made Fantomas (France, 1913), Les Vampires(France, 1915) and Judex (France, 1916). Then he made documentaries that were really surrealist works. For instance in Le Sang des Bêtes (The Blood of Beasts, France, 1948), made in an abattoir, he showed the animals post-death. I think probably if people were filming in abattoirs, they wouldn’t necessarily film the animals after that moment of death. But he would actually film them for 15 minutes afterwards whilst they were still occasionally flinching, especially the veal calves that had been decapitated and their skin had been separated from the flesh with compressed air so their bodies were all blown up like little teddy bears. Then the skinner would come in and wouldn’t be able to skin the animals because the legs were still moving like some kind of strange animatronic toy.
It was quite macabre, but I think what he may have come across by accident was an idea that the relationship between film and post-mortem movement is that cinema in some ways is the coming back to life of the dead; the relationship between life and death in terms of animation. The film is always dead in the archive and it’s only when it’s in the projector and screened that it actually exists and contains the movement of something which has passed away.
He went on to make films that seemed to continue with this project. He made Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face, France, 1960) which deals with the grafting of skin onto a living face that always rejects it, it always dies and falls off in the same way as an attempt to try and bring something back to life would always fail. Maybe that’s the failure of cinema that things don’t actually come back to life, it’s only there for a moment and then it dies away. But nobody ever seems to say this stuff about Georges Franju but I think perhaps there is something in it because it seems to run through all of his films. Coming back to my own situation, I was interested in trying to move into a position when you would show a group of films together, which is what I’ve been doing with the latest projects, and explore how positioning films together can create a new meaning that isn’t just to do with straightforward programming of film. It’s not to do with saying these are similar, it’s perhaps closer to collage but over really long time duration. Instead of having an instant 2D collage or a fast edit pop video collage, this is two hours, followed by two hours, which works on another kind of psychological level but still operates in a similar kind of way.
It was quite macabre, but I think what he may have come across by accident was an idea that the relationship between film and post-mortem movement is that cinema in some ways is the coming back to life of the dead; the relationship between life and death in terms of animation. The film is always dead in the archive and it’s only when it’s in the projector and screened that it actually exists and contains the movement of something which has passed away.
He went on to make films that seemed to continue with this project. He made Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face, France, 1960) which deals with the grafting of skin onto a living face that always rejects it, it always dies and falls off in the same way as an attempt to try and bring something back to life would always fail. Maybe that’s the failure of cinema that things don’t actually come back to life, it’s only there for a moment and then it dies away. But nobody ever seems to say this stuff about Georges Franju but I think perhaps there is something in it because it seems to run through all of his films. Coming back to my own situation, I was interested in trying to move into a position when you would show a group of films together, which is what I’ve been doing with the latest projects, and explore how positioning films together can create a new meaning that isn’t just to do with straightforward programming of film. It’s not to do with saying these are similar, it’s perhaps closer to collage but over really long time duration. Instead of having an instant 2D collage or a fast edit pop video collage, this is two hours, followed by two hours, which works on another kind of psychological level but still operates in a similar kind of way.
GC:
Do you consider these presentations as part of your artistic practice or as a curatorial project?
MAW:
It’s in between the two, but some people would consider it their artistic practice but I see it more as an experiment because I don’t necessarily get enough pleasure out of it.
GC:
So what’s the motivation for doing these screenings and these projects?
MAW:
It’s more to do with the space the time or the way that you can operate within time, within a social situation and how that can be orchestrated. I think it probably does feed back into my own work but it’s very difficult to define whether this is one’s own work. I enjoy that it’s difficult to define though.
GC:
It seems that it gives you a space to look at work but also it allows you to think about how work can be looked at. That’s something that can feed directly back, that you get a certain freedom with showing someone else’s work that you don’t with showing your own.
MAW:
Sometimes I’ve tried showing contemporary work and I’m going to do it again in the summer. Even though you shouldn’t really have any more or less responsibility, I always feel more responsible towards living artists just because I might know them.
GC:
Is that just to do with the way you might show the work?
MAW:
I did a project about a year ago which was co-curated with Giles Round called Simon and The Radioactive Flesh and it was to do with Simon of the Desert (Luis Buñuel, Mexico, 1965) and having short films inserted into the feature. The whole thing about Simon of the Desert is there’s a religious man standing on a pillar in the desert, praying. He’s there for a long time. And he gets tempted, he has visitations from the devil every now and then, so over the course of the film there are several temptations and every time the devil comes, we show a film to sort of tempt the audience away from the feature. That was with contemporary artist filmmakers and we said what we were doing. People can be quite trusting as long as you say what you’re doing and why. We said what we were doing with the work, and they agreed to it.
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