Precious Little
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard
Curated by Louise Garrett
Physics Room
Christchurch
www.physicsroom.org.nz
Interview with the Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, May 2007
Curator Louise Garrett commissioned Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard to make a new film in Auckland for the exhibition Precious Little at MIC Toi Rerehiko in July-August 2007. Here the curator talks to the artists about their work to date.
Louise Garrett: You met and started working together while at Goldsmiths in the early 90s, a few years after Damien Hirst and his peers attended the same college, and at the height of the BritArt phenomenon. How did you relate to or position yourselves in this scene?
Iain & Jane: There’s no doubt that the profile and status afforded to Goldsmiths at the time we first studied there is what inspired us to want to go there. But in the early nineties the college was very much in the shadow of that phenomenal success. On one-hand the institution itself was reacting, beginning to sense an impending media backlash, and that paranoia was influencing internal politics in a really unhealthy way. On the other hand, many of the students were enjoying the reflected glory of the previous generations, and there was definitely a number of them sat back simply waiting for the final show and Charles Saatchi to arrive handing out fistfuls of cash. Of course this is an enormous generalisation, and certainly doesn’t hold true for everyone we studied with, but a very particular mindset had developed. The logic was that if you made work that was big and shiny then fame and fortune was an inevitability. At the time we were infuriated by it, but looking back, it was an amazing experience, to have something so tangible to react against. It drove us to become obsessed with the experiential elements of our work, to create a practice that cries out for an emotional reaction before an intellectual one. Returning to Goldsmiths ten years later to do our MA was a very different and sobering experience. For all our misgivings about our BA experience at the college, by the time we went back the fire really had gone out.
LG: Writing about your first performance event, The World Won’t Listen, a gig by the Smiths tribute band the Still Ills at the 30 Underwood Street gallery in November 1996, David Barrett describes the different expectations carried by the members of the audience at the event: “on the one hand, the art crowd were turning up for an opening, and on the other, the Smiths fans were turning up for a gig”. He also describes the different types of behaviours exhibited by the two groups at the event: “The music began and the art followers watched attentively. The Smiths fans began their dancing, as if having spent the last decade just killing time [...] Completely lost in the music, singing with more passion than Morrissey on stage.” He goes on to observe that “he art coterie were self-conscious, distanced and alone, while the fans were engulfed, swept away, part of the crowd, the band and the music”. At a later live performance, your re-enactment in 2003 of the infamous Cramps concert at the California State Mental Institute, Napa Valley, California, at the ICA in London, a different kind of dynamic was set up. For this concert you invited members of Core Arts and Mad Pride – charity organisations that work with people with mental health problems – to be part of the audience. It seems to me that much of your work plays on audience reception in different ways – how the work is received and what the different reactions of the audience(s) mean for the interpretation of each work. Would you be able to comment on this, and also your own position as artists in relation to the work and its audiences(s)?
I&J: There’s some truth in the polarisation that David Barrett describes, but it also serves well as a journalistic device. In reality, it was much less divisive. We were looking at some photographs from the event just the other day, and you can see art critics up the front dancing, just as you can see some kids in Smiths t-shirts stood at the back of the room looking bored. To us, his thoughts on the expectations of the different audiences are much more interesting, and something we have deliberately played with in all our live work. The World Won’t Listen was our first performance piece, and in some respects obviously the least sophisticated, but even then we were pushing and manipulating the expectations of the audience, and running parallel marketing strategies, intended to speak to different audiences in different ways. An event is never simply about what happens on the stage, it’s a psychological package that begins when you first hear about it and continues long after the event has passed into the realms of memory and myth.
LG: Over the past ten years, you have produced a series of performances by tribute bands as well as re-enactments of seminal rock concerts at the ICA in London: The Smiths is Dead (1997), The Kids are Alright (1998), A Rock’n'Roll Suicide (1998) and later File Under Sacred Music (2003). What was your original motivation for creating these live re-enactments of earlier performances? How does your work serve to create the originals anew, that is, how do the re-stagings transcend reproduction? How does your work respond to the spectacle-making process and systems of representation inherent in the music industry?
I&J: The earlier projects developed from The World Won’t Listen, so they were really building on the idea of the tribute band and the rock concert as ready-mades. It wasn’t until A Rock’n'Roll Suicide in 1998 that we produced what you could call a “full-on re-enactment”, in that it recreated a specific documented event from the past. We have never been particularly interested in the past as a subject. Nostalgia can be a useful device to play with, but we have always been much more concerned with being here, now, in the present moment. And that’s what initially drew us to performance in the early days. But the idea of re-enactment was a half-baked and untested theory that the idea of “re-experiencing” an event grounded in the present would open up a possible space where each member of the audience, presented with the familiar, is freed up to participate. Our primary interest was in creating a direct, emotive and immersive impact on the audience – something that would be experiential ahead of analytical. The psychological effect on the individual, of being in time with the familiar, of knowing what’s coming, is what initially fascinated us. Prior to A Rock’n'Roll Suicide our live work had explored the idea of being able to repeat the broad brushstrokes of the past, but not to literally attempt to replay the events of the past in a present moment. Re-enactment wasn’t really established in the wider culture at that time, it was a fringe activity – community groups restaging historic battles and a handful of tribute bands perhaps, but it wasn’t understood in the same way it is now. It was an embarrassing endeavour very much the domain of hobbyists and freaks. However, it served our purpose well. Re-enactment as a specific act became less interesting to us as it became more generally understood and embraced by all areas of the media.
The live side of our practice gave us a way to emotionally unhook our audience’s personal narratives – they’lI remember where I was when I first heard this song - kind of individual memories, a whole series of personal re-enactments played out with the event as backdrop. Our work relies on provoking a mass will to participate, to contribute, and to be immersed and interactive in the experience of now. For us, at that point in time, re-enactment was the most powerful tool available to us for doing this – for re-framing now a short-circuit to a more real, more now, authentic experience and a democratic possibility for audience participation.
LG: In the last few years there has been a number of exhibitions in Europe anthologising artists who have produced different types of re-enactments of earlier performances or events (one example is Life, once more: Forms of re-enactment in contemporary art, Witte de With, 2005). The ICA has even started a commissioning programme dedicated to re-enactment as a form. Why do you think that artists in recent years have been drawn to replaying past events? Are you trying to engage with a past that is somehow more “real”? What does this say about now?
I&J: The cultural framework for understanding re-enactment has shifted enormously in the past five years. Most people are familiar with the idea of imagining yourself, as a kind of daydream, inside a pop video or historically important moment – an individual, personal, imaginary (re)enactment. The increasing accessibility of the technology that allows everyone to experiment with these ideas in reality and share them (YouTube and MySpace are obvious examples) has dramatically contributed to this shift.
The conceptual awkwardness of re-enactment is also diluted through advertising, music videos, television, comedy we’re all much more fluent in reading visual and conceptual languages for irony, appropriation and simulation. The act of re-enacting has moved from the difficult edges of culture to occupy a prominent space in the mainstream language of popular cultural expression. This shift has broadened the awareness and understanding of re-enactment, but it has also diluted the power re-enactment once held for us, and other artists, to act as a radical catalyst altering and double-exposing reality. We’ve moved away from re-enactment in its strict sense – as its too safe, too central, a little impotent – it certainly can no longer have the impact it did ten years ago. Personally, we’re always looking for each new major project to be a challenge, a new just out of reach experiment (often doomed to fail) but always sure to produce something dynamic and illuminating.
It’s interesting how quickly culture is now historicised and recycled. In terms of the recent institutional focus on re-enactment, The Whitechapel’s A Short History of Performance series (London, 2002-2005) stands out as perhaps the beginning of this current interest. But it does seem that even in the last couple of years this interest has grown rapidly. Recently we’ve been asked to do several shows and events that have re-enactment as their focus. Some, like History Will Repeat Itself (at Hartware Medien Kunst Verein, Dortmund, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin) we’re really excited about, but lots of them we’ve said no to because they just haven’t seemed particularly interesting.
LG: The Precious Little series (2001- ) presents films based on interviews with young people (twenty- and thirty-somethings) talking about compilation tapes they have made for lovers or friends and what the compilation of songs mean to them. Your engagement with mix-tapes goes further back to one of the first works you conceived and made together, which was I’ve Built My World Around You (1995) – a work made up of 100 home-recorded compilation tapes, Volumes 1 -100 of ‘A Tape for Jane’, with handwritten inlay cards listing the tracks on each. Clearly, mix-tapes have a lot of resonance for you personally – can you describe their significance and how that is conveyed in your work?
I&J: When we first began working together, personal narratives were particularly important to us. They’ve become less so as our own narratives have become entwined over the last 13 years working together. But when we began those stories were really the most potent material we had to work with the things close to our hearts, and the sharing of those narratives was mirrored in our own relationship as we got to know each other better, sharing our own personal stories. Those stories, somewhat inevitably, tended to involve music in some form or another. A piece like I’ve Built My World Around You was sparked by the first Christmas we spent apart. We returned to our respective family homes, as most students do at Christmas, and in a week apart Iain made seven compilation tapes for Jane. In many ways the piece was just an amplification of that, blown to an absurd scale where the sentiment collapses in on itself.
We tried to use the narratives in ways that left space for personal interpretation and appropriation, giving the viewer space to find their own narratives within ours. That more than anything led us to the Precious Little series of video works. These pieces literally weave a new narrative from the collective stories of a group of individuals. The device we use to draw out these individual narratives is the mix-tape. It’s amazing how honest and open people will be about love, life and loss when talking about it in relation to a particular song or memory triggered by music.
We’re excited by the potential that music has to act as a psychological mnemonic device – our focus is always on the potential connection or impact we might be able to have in one person’s mind. Consequentially the work also plays with the role that music takes in our lives and relationships, but this isn’t our impetus.
With the Precious Little series we’re not really aiming to further or document the discourse of what music can and does mean to people. That’s not our focus, we’re using it as a device to allow us to tap into what it means to be today, how we shape ourselves and communicate that to others. We want to enact and personify this – in all its twitches and uneasiness, in all its pretence and fantasy and its over-romanticism and its honesty. Ultimately, we want to make something that reflects and connects to its viewer.
We use the mix-tape because of the potential it holds. Anyone who has ever made or received one will relate to the obsessive ritual of compiling one, of saying more to someone else than words alone could ever muster. Each of the collection of songs operates as a souvenir of a remembered person and time.
LG: When filming the interviews on which the Precious Little works are based on, you shoot about an hour of footage of each participant, which is edited down to just a few minutes. Can you describe how your editing process works? What do you look for in the footage that you go on to use in the final version of the films?
I&J: The editing is an extremely slow process. The recording sessions are unscripted, the participants aren’t professionals, and they’re often talking about very personal and intimate moments in their lives, so it takes time just to get the subject comfortable. Although you don’t see it in the final edit, there’s also a lot of two-way dialogue, it’s much more a process of sharing stories than it is a formal interview. During the process of recording it’s often the material we think is exactly what we’re looking for that we end up completely unable to use. The times where you think something just isn’t working often turns out to give us some really special moments.
We begin with a total of something like 15 hours of material, and we’re making a thirty-minute piece, so even reviewing the tapes takes a lot of time. It’s actually got easier as the technology has got better. For the first piece we made in the series it was a nightmare, constantly reloading tapes, digitizing a few minutes at a time and having to keep extensive written notes to track and find everything. Now you can transfer all the tapes to hard disk and instantly access anything.
The composition process is in some ways actually like compiling a tape. We’re looking for stuff that works well together, that flows, seems in tune with each other, or things that jar, in an interesting way, that change the tempo or mood of the piece, that upset or conform to the rhythm, introducing new themes over time, and perhaps returning to earlier themes as the piece progresses. A friend, who’s a psychoanalyst, once described the process of making these works as like composing a sonata, which seems like a pretty good analogy.
Precious Little is a series of films of edited excerpts of interviews with young people talking about love and loss. Participants are asked to talk about swapping homemade music compilation tapes with their friends and lovers as a trigger for talking about relationships through a shared love of music. The resulting frieze of personal portraits and stories channels Iain & Jane’s continued engagement with the soundtrack underpinning contemporary life. Previous works in the Precious Little series are Fucked up lover (Hobbypop Museum, Dusseldorf, 2001), Everybody else is wrong (Pavilion Projects in Montreal, Canada, 2004) and Anyone else isn’t you (The Hospital, London, 2005). Make me yours again (MIC Toi Rerehiko, Auckland, 2007) is the fourth in this ongoing series.
Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard met and began working collaboratively in 1993. Their practice is characterised by a process-led and interdisciplinary approach to art, music and “liveness”. They are pioneers of the recent trend exploring re-enactment as an artistic genre, and have produced several major live performances and videos reconstructing seminal moments in rock and art culture. They are represented by Kate McGarry, London.
Further information www.iainandjane.com
