Wafaa Bilal, « Domestic Tension (Shoot an Iraqi) », FlatFile Galleries, Chicago, 2007. Courtesy and copyright the artist.

The Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal is one of my colleagues in the Photography and Imaging Department at New York University. Though his studies were originally in photography, Wafaa has an open and flexible attitude toward media, and it is not only the politically charged content but also the form of his works – which are becoming increasingly well known internationally – that will interest readers of this blog. This interview took place over lunch in Greenwich Village on September 19, 2012.

Shelley: Given the fact that your life has been so eventful, I think the best way for readers to understand your art would be for you to begin discussing your background.

Wafaa: I was born in Iraq in 1966, that’s about two years before the Ba’ath regime took over. As a child, I grew up idolizing the regime, we were kids and we were swept away, of course, but slowly as I grew up I noticed, everyone noticed, that the regime became more and more oppressive. At the age of 18, I had a strong ambition to go to art school, but for political reasons this was not allowed and I was sent to study geography at the University of Baghdad.

S. What kind of political reasons?

W. Physical education and art were considered to be highly effective fields, and the regime made sure that every candidate for these fields was carefully screened. Considering my family’s background in politics, I was rejected, so then I was sent to study geography. Even though you can see that is not at all my passion and I resisted, I had to do it, because if I failed college I would be forced into the military, placed on the front lines, and this was during the war with Iran. So of course I stayed in the program. But it wasn’t so bad, I had access to a studio at the university and I could paint on a daily basis. I used that as a platform, I put up shows, and every show I organized had problems. Some works were political in nature and they were confiscated by campus security; sometimes I was dragged to the office for interrogation. But in 1990, right after the invasion of Kuwait, I was one of the students who stood up publicly and refused to volunteer for the Kuwait war and at that moment I knew I was blacklisted and needed to run. In 1991 there was the bombing for 40 days, and I used that opportunity to escape from Baghdad. I waited on the edge of my hometown of Kufa until March, when there was the uprising, one of the first Arab Spring uprisings when people took over. But the regime unfortunately crushed the entire uprising and we were on the run. I stayed in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia for two years. After that I was able to come to the United States, to New Mexico, and that’s when I said: no more geography and geology, I will study art.

S. How did you get to New Mexico? That’s not a self-evident choice…

W. I had a friend who was a translator for the U.S. military.  He left the camp before me and his sponsor was one of the American officers who lived in New Mexico. I needed an address and that was the only one I had. But it ended up being good, the university was a great school for me, with great photo teachers. Five years later I got my undergraduate degree and then I went on to Art Institute of Chicago and studied Art and Technology for my Masters Degree.

In 2007 I started one of my major projects, called Shoot an Iraqi. Shoot an Iraqi came from my personal devastation after the loss of my brother, who was killed by a drone in Iraq in our hometown. I think at that moment my work shifted. From being about human rights in general it began engaging larger, more personal issues. It became intensely focused on my deeply felt responses to the war in Iraq and, and the same time, on the idea of engaging people beyond the confines of art spaces. This is when I started linking gallery spaces with the Internet.

I received the news about my brother’s death in 2004, and for the next few years I honestly did not know how to deal with my losses, or how to communicate that through art to the public. Only when I watched an interview with an American soldier who was sitting in Colorado, directing these drone planes and dropping bombs on people in Iraq, did I realize that she was completely disconnected psychologically and physically from his targets. That’s when it hit me, that’s when I knew the combination of media I needed to communicate my ideas. I wanted to create something that gave control to the viewers, but also detached them psychologically and physically from the target. Then I thought: The target needed to be real, needed to be live, and its interaction with the viewers needed to last long enough so that people had time to connect to it. For this project, which was originally called Domestic Tension because the gallery thought that Shoot an Iraqi was too provocative, I lived for a month in a 32 x 15 foot space in the back of the gallery with a bed, a desk, a computer, a lamp, a coffee table and an exercise bike. Several Plexiglas screens separated my “bedroom” from the rest of the gallery, where a paintball gun, outfitted with a robotic mechanism that fired in response to the commands of online viewers and gallery visitors, was stationed at the threshold. People could go on site, direct the gun and shoot a paintball at me at any time for 30 days.  By the end of the live event, more than 65,000 shots had been fired at me by viewers from 136 countries.

S. So where was this? Which gallery and when?

W. It was in Chicago, in the FlatFile Galleries, for 30 days from May 7-June 5, 2007.

At the beginning, I disconnected myself from the viewers: there was no sound, the picture was grainy etc.  But every day I uploaded a 10-minute video clip so people could see the emotional roller coaster I was going through on a daily basis. Because of that more and more people started coming, to see the site and to interact with me. Then the media picked up the story. The public got attached to the project first and then the media came around, which is the reverse of what usually happens.  But it got much bigger when the Chicago Tribune wrote an article about it on the front page, about targeted shooting. It was such an important project for me, because after that Shoot an Iraqi I started thinking about making projects that are dynamic, rather than didactic. I started involving the live body as a medium because of its immediacy, connecting people inside and outside of the gallery through the Internet and giving viewers some kind of control over the work. These ideas about dynamic encounter have a lot to do with earlier works like Happenings, by artists such as Allan Kaprow, of course. Like them, I want to make art that is open ended: nothing is pre-determined by me, but evolves with the participation of the viewers themselves. Without the participants, nothing will happen and the project will be idle.

S. After the performance, I know that you published a book about your experience. Why did you decide to do that?

W. When Shoot an Iraqi was over, I ended up with massive amounts of documentary materials –videotapes, daily journals etc. — and I decided I wanted these records to be archived so that everyone could have access to them. I wanted the project to continue beyond the 30 days. One of the writers, Kari Lydersen, who at the time reported on the project for the Washington Post, did an excellent job. I was so amazed by how she dealt with it that I approached her later, asking her to co-write the book with me. We had a few offers from publishers, but chose City Lights because we knew the quality of their work; the book continues even now to be well received by many people, including academics. We structured it by describing how I survived the 30 days without breaking down – but also by showing what things, which events, inspired the project in the first place. So there was a parallel structure: after a day in the gallery, the focus of the book would shift to Iraq. Going back and forth between art and life gave the reader a sense of what happened in the gallery space and also an open window onto Iraqi life, how my family lived and the devastation we suffered losing both my father and my brother within two months.

S. I know that all of these things continue to be major parts of your work: expanding media, interfaces with the public, and your engagement with political issues of the day. How do you see the development of your art as moving on a parallel track with the development with your media?

W. That’s a really good question. I always see the project as determining the medium, and not the other way around. Right now, new media work best for what I want to say — because most of time I’m dealing with global issues so it doesn’t make sense to stay local in my art. As I said before, I’m building not objects but events, encounters – and encounters are very dynamic. I need a physical space, a gallery space, as a platform, but after that the medium becomes the story: the encounter between the platform I set up and the viewers of the event, wherever they are. Digital connectivity is not just a tool, it becomes the medium itself.

S. Would you like to update this interview by discussing some of your recent work, like the event you created in Tehran at the end of 2011? This project is a very good example of the interactivity you’ve been describing, and the interface of film and performance too.

W. One of most recent projects was entitled A Call (which translates into Farsi as Neda the name of the young Iranian woman killed on the street during the recent protests against the election in that country). I was invited by the Aaran Art Gallery gallery in Tehran to commemorate the 30^th anniversary of the Iraq/Iran War. I didn’t know how this was going to happen, so I started talking to people, looking at the space…. One thing that triggered the entire project was the empty swimming pool sitting at the back of the gallery, which used to be a home….

Video streaming by Ustream

S. Had you seen the gallery?

W. No, one of my students from Iran alerted me about the empty swimming pool. It hadn’t been used for 30 years, so it had become allegorical. Since we were talking about the losses of this war, which continued for over 8 years, I wanted to divide these losses into the ones who were lost and ones who were left behind. The pool, of course, is underground. So I separated the performers into two groups: the ones standing in the swimming pool and ones above, the ones that left and ones that are left behind. I used all local performers, 80 performers dressed in black and white. They descended from the second floor of the space, moving through the viewers to arrive at the swimming pool. Some stood in the pool, some were placed around it, and then they all stood and stared at the audience for 30 minutes. Standing motionless, looking at the viewers surrounding them, at a certain point they began to symbolize the status quo in Iran at that time. So the piece moved beyond being a commemoration of the 30^th anniversary of the war.

Wafaa Bilal, « A Call », Aaran Art Gallery, Tehran, 2011. Courtesy and copyright Aaran Art Gallery and the artist.

One complication to all of this: I didn’t get a visa to go to Iran. We tried everything, but nothing worked. So I directed the entire piece through Skype from my living room in New York, with the gallerist Nazlia Noebgshari in Tehran holding a laptop, walking around and showing me where everyone was walking and standing! On the day of the performance there were so many people who couldn’t go — even the curators (Ava Ansari and Molly Kleiman from The Back Room) weren’t able to be there — that we decided to do a live stream of the performance from Iran to the White Box Gallery in Manhattan. At that moment, everybody was connected: Iranians who were not able to witness this event could come to the gallery to see it performed, while the people in Tehran could look at us in New York commemorating this event. So the distance was erased through technology.

Wafaa Bilal, « A Call », Nazlia Noebashari and friend in the Aaran Art Gallery in Tehran communicating by computer with Bilal in New York, 2011. Courtesy and copyright Aaran Art Gallery and the artist.

S. How did the Iranian government react to this event?

W. I don’t think the gallery had many problems. No, as far as I know the only complaints were that the event involved too many people. The piece was very vague, so there was nothing to complain about, and that was deliberate. Political art does not have to be so direct; sometimes, it is much more powerful if it suggests multiple interpretations rather meanings assigned by the artist. That’s the good thing about creating an encounter: you trigger something and let it unfold, and you don’t control the outcome. The gallerist said that everyone involved felt a lot of responsibility to do the best they could since I could not be there. The performance had two runs, and there was so much demand that the gallery decided to do a third show one week later.

© Shelley Rice / Wafaa Bilal 2012

Wafaa Bilal’s work will be screened during ARTE Video Night 2012 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris on Saturday, October 20 from 7:30 p.m., with the participation of Véronique Cayla, president of ARTE and Jean de Loisy, president of the Palais de Tokyo. 

L’article Domestic Tension: An Interview with Wafaa Bilal by Shelley Rice est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Image courtesy of The Glass House, photo by Eirik Johnson

Since this blog began, I have been harassing my friend and New York University colleague Pepe Karmel, well known art historian, curator and critic of contemporary art, to make a contribution to the ongoing discussion. Happily, The Philip Johnson Glass House staff decided to enlist him too, so we have all joined forces. The Glass House, completed in 1949, was Johnson’s private residence, and it is considered to be one of his greatest architectural achievements. Inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, the building has exterior walls of glass and no interior walls. It sits on 47 acres of land in New Canaan, Connecticut (which are home to supplementary buildings and works created by the artist over a period of 50 years), and the entire campus has been named a National Trust Historic Site by the U.S. Government.

Before practicing architecture, Johnson was the founding Director of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and curator of the famous 1932 exhibition, “The International Style.” As a trustee and patron of MOMA for many years, he donated more than 2,000 works, by artists as esteemed as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, to the institution. Johnson’s close ties to the art world, and to its most important movers and shakers, inspired him and his partner, David Whitney, to use the Glass House as a meeting place for the great cultural players of his time. Conversations with people like Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Robert A.M. Stern became legendary, and Vincent Scully called these gatherings “the most sustained cultural salon that the United States has ever seen.”

After the deaths of both Johnson and Whitney in 2005, The Glass House continued to host these conversations. In 2010, partnering with graduate students from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, the staff created an expanded digital forum. Accessible at www.glasshouseconversations.org, the site proposes provocative questions or debate topics, and by now 20,000 people from 150 countries have participated in the ensuing exchanges. The question posed to Pepe Karmel by Glass House Conversations recently is indeed a hot button, and often controversial, issue:

Is the United States still the leader in innovative new art as it was in the latter half of the 20^th century?

Here is Karmel’s reply, as it was posted on the Glass House Conversation web site. Readers are encouraged to continue the discussion, of course, by publishing comments here or contributing responses to glasshouseconversations.org.
SR

Pepe Karmel, 2012, courtesy Pepe Karmel

If there is an avant-garde today, its very nature contradicts the assumptions implicit in the question. Why should we assume that the most important new art of a given era will be associated with a single nation? Is it actually the case that the United States was the “leader” in new art during the second half of the 20th century? Is “new art” necessarily innovative? The idea that, at any given moment, one nation is going to be the home of the avant-garde is a translation into artistic terms of Hegel’s idea of the world-historical figure. In canonical art history, Italy carries the baton from the Renaissance until the 18th century, France is the leader from 1775 until 1945, and the United States has the historically important avant-garde from 1945 until recently. This is demonstrably wrong. What about Netherlandish art in the 17th century? German and English art in the late 18th and 19th centuries. South American, non-Western, and, yes, French art after 1945?

Specifically, I would argue that the dominance of U.S. art after 1945 is in large part a chauvinist illusion. After the triumph of Pop and Minimalism in the 1960s, U.S. art historians rewrote art history (in the 1970s) to eliminate pretty much all important art made elsewhere. Arguably, much of the most innovative art produced between 1945 and 1970 was made in and around New York. But that doesn’t entitle us to ignore the rest. Nor does it entitle us to pretend that the dominance  of New York lasted beyond this 25-year period. Certainly, in the 42  years since 1970, as much or more important art has been made elsewhere as has been made in New York.

Finally, we need to question the concepts “innovative” and “avant-garde.” They are rooted in the same Hegelian model, which assumes that the “essential” events in art history are formal innovations (Cubism, geometric abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism) that supposedly follow a coherent logic of development, and that everything else is a sideshow. In an era when Marcel Duchamp is a much more important influence than Pablo Picasso, is there any credibility left to this position? There have been few–or no–significant formal innovations since 1970. Not in the US, not elsewhere. Some critics and scholars take this to mean that the history of art came to an end in 1970, and that everything since then is an epiphenomenon. That seems absurd. Much terrific art has  been made since 1970. It is distinguished, not by formal innovation, but by the way it crystallizes and expresses important experiences of life in our contemporary world. From this perspective, much of the important art of our time is being made in the former “Third World,” and addresses the experience of post-colonialism, triumphant in China, catastrophic in much of Africa, and different in different countries. If this means that the avant-garde has departed U.S. shores, so be it.

— Pepe Karmel, New York, 2012

L’article People in Glass Houses… By Shelley Rice and Pepe Karmel est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

SR

Emmanuel: So, Shelley, what would you like me to talk about?

Shelley:  First, can you give me an overview of this project, since this is the second book you have written about Alan Ingram Cope and we need to inform our readers about its history.

E: Alan and I met in 1994 on a tiny island off the coast of France called the Ile de Ré. I asked him for directions on the street and after that we became friends. We stayed friends for five years, from the moment we met until the moment he died. In the meantime, I taped hours and hours of conversation between the two of us to gather this patrimony, which would allow me to turn this man’s experience into biography.


S: But why him?

E: Complete chance, just because we had some sort of crush on each other. I felt he was a very interesting person and I wanted to spend time with him. It just started like this. He was retired. He invited me to his home, he introduced me to his wife, his dog, and then his life. He showed me some pictures, then some books, and very soon I found myself meeting with him in the little garden he had near his house on the Ile de Ré to talk and tape conversations. The conversations became stronger after a while as he opened his memory and his philosophy of life to me more and more. I was thirty at the time, and it is always interesting for an inexperienced man to speak with someone who can see his life in perspective — a view of life that can be both an overview and a close up, something only possible for an older person. It was fascinating for me. The main thing I can say is that he was one of the people in my life with whom I’ve spent the most memorable moments.

So I started very soon to turn his testimony into drawings, because I thought it would be interesting for him to see his memories coming back as drawings done by someone else, to see if that worked and if he would allow me to interpret his memories. They couldn’t fit exactly because I hadn’t lived what he had lived, but I listened carefully to him to catch all the words and the images linked to the words. I knew that we could go quite far together if he would accept my interpretations, and I was relieved because the first time I came with my drawings he was very enthusiastic. We both felt that this was a way for our friendship to go on. We worked together for five years, from the time he was 69 years old until his death at 74. I worked hard to make sure he could see the first book but unfortunately he died six months before it was released.

S: Can you talk about the first book and why you chose that aspect of his life – his experience as an American soldier in the Second World War — for the initial volume?

E: We had the opportunity to be pre-published in a magazine (Lapin), every three months, with no limit to the number of pages…

S: Wow, that’s like Balzac…

E: So I started to create episodes about this childhood, but after a while he said: “We have this regular appointment with readers.  Maybe we should tell them something that can be like one story, like a feuilleton…”

S: Like Balzac!

E: He said the best thing to do might be to tell the story of “his war,” because it has a beginning and then it is a voyage: you are in a vehicle, you are sent abroad, you cross Europe and end up at the border of Czechoslovakia…. This is really a story to tell in a magazine. So I stopped working on his childhood and started working on the war. While he was alive of course I always had the gold mine of his memory, and the opportunity to call him up and ask him questions: “What was the weather like on this day and what kind of jacket were you wearing back then?”

S: And he remembered?!!?

E: Yes, because he was an elephant! He was incredible. Maybe, at the origin of this project, there is the decision to pay a tribute to his incredible memory, because most people are not able to answer questions about the days of their lives.  After his death, I decided that was the moment for me to travel to find his traces, to follow in his footsteps and meet some people who had known him. So I went to America and to Germany, which he had occupied with Patton’s army. It turned into an inquiry. I sent shot-in-the-dark letters to people wherever and got answers or not. In 2009 I was in Ohio with an old flame of his, his girlfriend when he was 20 and she was 16. Almost every week, even now, I receive photographs from a historian in the Czech Republic, who read the book when it was translated into the Czech language. (Alan’s War has by now been translated into ten languages.) The mission that took Alan from Germany to Czechoslovakia during the war is not well documented, but it is the specialty of this historian. I went to visit him and he opened his archives to me. He wanted to help me (even though of course the war is over for me now!) to find Alan, and the fact is that we didn’t when I was with him. We found pictures of people in the book: I recognized the top sergeant, and others. But it was only a few months later, after I came home, that I received from him a picture of Alan himself.

I meet people here and there who are often moved and interested by the fact that a young person is dedicating an important part of his life to an older one. That always attracts attention because we carry within us an urge to listen to those who have more experience. A lot of doors opened to help, to provide clues and images and memories, so the fact is that this project becomes more and more interesting as time passes.


S: Since you brought up photographs: Alan talked to you for a long time but he also gave you pictures from his past. What’s the relationship between images and words in this project? How do these photos function as memory tools within the context of the books?

E: Some of them are published in the books, or interpreted, re-drawn to be presented in the books…

S: And how do you make those decisions?

E: I wanted the reader to see his face, his actual face in a photograph, at least once in the book. In the American edition, I included a photo album at the end of the book since I know Americans have all seen and owned pictures like these. But in the rest of the book there are no actual photos because the drawings refuse to be associated with them. I tried, but it doesn’t work. You have to have a graphic style that is very particular to allow a drawing to be near a photographic image: most of the time they don’t want to be side by side and they fight against each other until one of the two is dead.

S: But you know that Barthes called photographs “counter-memories.” He insisted that they stop the process of memory. As an artist, you are trying to delve into the process of memory, so these two types of images are fighting against each other not only visually but also philosophically.

E: Exactly, but the fact is that these photographs are not part of my memory. They are part of his. If you accept the fact that now I’ve been living with them for almost twenty years, you realize that they have now become part of my life too. This also is something very interesting, and it is something that I will have to explore in later years. The time has not yet come, since I am still the process of treating his testimony. I have told the story of his war and his childhood, but his teenage years are still to come. Until that is done, I’m not thinking too much about everything that is happening to ME by working so long on such a subject. After I have finished telling his story, that will be the moment to ask myself “what have I done, and why?” And when that happens I will be probably be about the age he was when I met him!

S: Yo!

E: But about the pictures: I have a few anecdotes to tell. For instance, I would go to California with Alan’s photo album in hand. In this album, there is a picture of a house on a certain street. I knew he lived in this house, I knew more or less when, but I didn’t have the number of the street address  – and you know streets in California can go on from San Francisco to San Diego! So I would spend days going up and down a street looking for this house. I knew that I might not find it. There was always the risk that the building would be gone, or changed, or that trees might have grown. But I do this only for the emotion I have when (if!) I do find it. If I do find the house, that’s fabulous, and I just sit in front of it staring in amazement…


S: Have you ever gone in to meet the people who live there now?

E: No, I haven’t done that yet, because I haven’t yet drawn these houses in the books. When I do, the books are going to come back to these places in California. They will be in libraries and bookstores, there will be blogs and people in the neighborhoods will know.

S: And then the people living in the houses now will invite you to tea!

E: Yes, maybe, and then that invitation will become part of the story too. It’s like the chance meeting I had with Alan on the streets of the Ile de Ré. I prefer to wait and let things happen. Sometimes when I do find people and see places, it is precious for me because I can draw exactly what is there, and often people have closets full of documentation that they generously offer to share with me. And the story grows.

The book I have just finished, of course, is about Alan’s early years. The war book was about the experiences of a soldier who never really faced fire, who traveled through Europe seeing countries and meeting people. Alan’s Childhood, on the other hand, is about everyday, simple anecdotes, his family and the people in his young life: his uncles, grandparents, friends, his drawings etc.


S: I have the sense that this new book is very much a look at la vie quotidienne of a young person living in California at that time.

E: Yes, but Alan’s childhood coincided with the Great Depression since he born in 1925. His father lost his job, his grandparents moved in with them because they couldn’t afford a home, there were earthquakes…

S: So there were natural disasters and human made disasters…

E: Yes, all mixed up with the simplest things of childhood. One thing I have learned from listening to older people, is that even though a person may have lived very dramatic moments in his adult life, the things that stay closest to the bones are the facts of childhood. What remains in a lifetime are the first memories from which all the others grow, early memories that Alan sometimes told me with a trembling voice – a voice never present when he talked about the war or other aspects of his later life, some of them very dramatic. I try to capture that intensity in the new book. I tell my readers simple stories, many of which they have already lived themselves. But when your work is very simple it is also very risky, because the frontier between art and the banal is very, very thin. But that is where I like to be: some place we have all experienced.

Alan had a particular gift for telling those stories, which is part of my admiration for him. When I was with him, sometimes I would have this hallucination that he was shining with the capacity to resurrect episodes so one could SEE what he was saying. But when you see what someone says, you build the picture only from your patrimony. The images you are able to put together to illustrate what someone is telling you are not theirs; they are those that you have created yourself by connecting deeply with another. That is the miracle,  that is what I call friendship. I make books to prove that it is possible for one person to listen so carefully to another that there will be coincidences in their visions, because there is in fact a certain logic to life. All of these human experiences, we have them in us, which is the reason why stories can pass from one person to another. They all play on the same keyboard.

© Shelley Rice and Emmanuel Guibert, 2012
Many thanks to Edgar Castillo, for his technical help and support
For all images: © Emmanuel Guibert & L’Association, 2012

L’article Stories Played on the Same Keyboard: An Interview with Emmanuel Guibert by Shelley Rice est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Duane Michals during filming in New York. Photo: Gordon Spooner

I met Duane Michals when I was 24 years old. Throughout the years, he has been what I call my “spiritual advisor,” my role model in living life to the fullest. I was delighted to learn that the French producers (Terra Luna Films’ Anne Morien and France Saint Leger) of a new documentary about Michals’ life and work would be willing to let me post the trailer for the film on this blog; they, in turn, were happy about my plan to interview both Duane and New York co-producer Véronique Bernard. Morien and Saint Leger wrote a wonderful essay about the work-in-progress which was originally published in French for La Lettre de la Photographie (the Naudet brothers’ blog). Bernard has translated the text and I have edited it for an English speaking audience. Following this letter is the six minute trailer, a teaser for what is now a 90-minute documentary film (which is almost finished: the producers are currently fundraising to help defray post-production costs). As will be evident from the short clip, director Camille Guichard had a particular concept in mind while making this film. He wanted the documentary to bring forth emotions rather than historical facts. Instead of a predetermined biographical chronology, the work explores what he calls a “kaleidoscope of photographic sequences.” And then, finally, after the clip, as the pièce de resistance I’ve posted a short interview with Michals himself, who discusses what he has learned and what he has attempted to express in this latest creative endeavor.
SR

Do not awaken from your dreams, it’s too soon

Duane Michals

La Lettre de la Photographie – « Duane Michals 2012 »

by Anne Morien and France Saint Leger (translation by Véronique Bernard)

 
It was 2009 and we were headed to the South of France for the Rencontres d’Arles. A large Duane Michals retrospective was planned that year, and we were curious to rediscover his work that spanned half a century.

The exhibition was held at the Archevêché. The quality of the photographs selected for the show was clear, but there was a peculiar ambiance in the halls. The public was simply enraptured by Michals’ stories, his series, his words, his thoughts. Viewers of all ages were transfixed by the photographer’s poetic world. And we followed the wave of people, fascinated, amused, touched. Never has an exhibition caused so many laughs and mischievous looks. The visit concluded with Duane Michals himself moonwalking for the spectators. That night, at the ancient theatre, the house was packed and the day’s infatuation lingered. It wasn’t clear who was having more fun, Duane Michals or his audience. One thing was certain: we would have to make a film about him.

Right from the beginning, we wanted to make a film about Duane Michals’ inner world. We didn’t want just a portrait of the artist but something steeped in his stories that would allow people to discover him as a contemporary, talking Buster Keaton. His energy was incredible. He was always ready to explore new ideas, to take us into a world where humor and seriousness mingled effortlessly. To bring together all theses different elements and to harness this amazing energy, we chose director Camille Guichard whose sensibility, sense of humor and sensitivity seemed in tune with Duane Michals’ work.

The scouting trips to Pittsburgh and New York confirmed that. Duane and Camille immediately hit it off. Duane understood that the film was open to his imagination, that they would create it together. Once the locations were agreed on and Camille went back to Paris, the two of them were so excited about the project that they were on the phone constantly. Sequences were being dreamed up from one continent to the other. Duane kept offering ideas without worrying about the structure of the film. Camille embraced this way of working. It was up to him to make sense of the multitude of images Duane was proposing.

Camille Guichard, Véronique Bernard on location. Photo: Dino Di Stefano

The first shoot in Pittsburgh was very emotional. Duane retraced the steps of his childhood, his relationship with his mother and with his father, a steel worker. There was no love lost between the couple. These were painful memories, but there were happy ones too. Months later, we were scouting again in New York City and Cambridge, Vermont where Duane owns a magnificent country house. This is where the film would explore the other themes close to Duane’s heart: sex, desire, time, death and homosexuality. The scenes started to take shape and other characters, friends of Duane, began to emerge. But it was important to stay within the film’s own reality, to keep it as a story, a game, a “mise-en-scène”. The film was beginning to have its own dreamlike quality, where documentary and fiction merged.

New York became the place where all these new encounters would take place. The invented scenes took shape, changing on Duane’s whim and Camille’s ideas. One day Duane’s shirt was wrong. No problem, Duane swapped shirts with the cameraman in the middle of the street. The next day, he did the same thing with Camille. There they were, bare-chested and laughing their heads off in the middle of Soho. And it worked. The new shirt turned Duane into the character invented for the scene. On another occasion, as the crew was shooting on a rooftop where Duane had photographed Joe d’Allesandro, Duane climbed up a ladder facing the Empire State Building to call out to New Yorkers. Suddenly he stopped. He needed angel wings like in the sequence of “Falling Angel.” He knew a store nearby. Camille agreed and off he went. As the crew waited for his return, the light was fading. They needed to hurry. Finally Duane arrived and climbed to the top of the ladder with the wings on his back. He put his hands around his mouth and started shouting” “Wake up New York!” It became the poster for the film.

Other anecdotes followed day after day. Then it was off to Cambridge, four hours north of New York City. The crew had a hard time keeping up with Duane who was driving so fast, as if he was in a hurry to get to the next part of the film. In the country, Camille spent time filming nature, Duane and his partner Fred. He wanted this part of the film to be in a different reality. He filmed Duane’s garden, flowers, the countryside around the house, trees, and stone walls. Duane suggested a scene where he talked with a stuffed duck. It would be his way of talking about the influence of painting on his photographic work. Then Duane wanted to take photos for an exhibition dedicated to animals, another sequence with a man plucking a star, and a scene about desire in an abandoned hotel. Duane resembled Méliès shooting in his studio. Duane’s ideas come and go like butterflies. You have to catch them. But if the butterfly gets away you have to let it go.

 

Duane Michals: The Man Who Invented Himself: a film coming soon. 90mn, HD, directed by Camille Guichard, produced by Anne Morien & France Saint Léger – Terra Luna Films in association with Veronique Bernard – Illiad Entertainment. Follow us on Facebook

Duane Michals: The Interview

By Shelley Rice, with Véronique Bernard

 
Shelley: So Duane, why did you want to do this film? Tell me the whole back story.

Duane: I hadn’t been in Arles for 25 years. They invited me to go and do a retrospective and a big presentation in 2009. It was a really wonderful evening, and the exhibit was very successful. But I started my presentation — in the center there is a spotlight and someone introduces you. Well, I moonwalked backwards onto the stage and it brought down the house. I just let fly, as you know I can do, and it got a huge response. You get such an international audience there. I had interviews from Finland, from Greece, from everywhere. The next day I ran into Anne and France and they asked me if I would like  to do a movie, and I said sure. I never look a gift horse in the mouth. As you know, I’ve always taken advantage of every opportunity that came my way – otherwise I would still be sitting in dear old McKeesport!

Off the cuff, we had a lot of fun with this film, it was a nice feeling. I worked on another documentary about my life that was a scripted film, a serious chronology of dates and facts. This was more playful, we just made it up as we went along. One thing really got to me, though: after shooting and seeing myself on television for 13 days, I saw my strangeness. There’s a way we view ourselves. Before this, I didn’t really know how I sounded, I didn’t know my gestures. I couldn’t see my body language. I never saw THAT GUY – the ME that others see, and he’s strange. In making this film I came into my first recognition of my physical self as it might be viewed by somebody else. That moment when you recognize that other self, who may be the self that’s more real than you are, it’s a little bit startling. So that was interesting, to see all that. That, for me, was big.

The other interesting thing: The big danger for me, in making this film, was that we structured it starting from my childhood in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Because I’m a narrative person, I saw the whole film as a story, a picturesque tale: Duane leaves McKeesport and his old house with a little suitcase and has a lot of adventures. I go to Pittsburgh, visit Russia, move to New York…and then in the end I literally die. My danger is that I had composed the film in my mind. But: it’s not my film.

Duane Michals filming in McKeesport. Photo: Camille Guichard

Véronique: You learned that in filmmaking you don’t shoot in a logical order. It had a trajectory, but it was a different logic. The shooting was done using film logic, which is not the same as Duane’s. And since this is not a film with interviews, with people talking about Duane’s life and work, a lot of the story came together in the editing.

Shelley: Having starred in one of Duane’s sequences shot in Paris 20 years ago, I know what a tyrant he is when he works. So starring in someone else’s dream must have been a real shock for him!

Duane: In Camille’s version, editing was more like slice and dice, you take the pieces and arrange them and make a stew. My way would be…

Shelley: …to make a sequence!

Duane: …of no (con)sequence! (laughter) So understanding the structure of the movie was a big deal for me, and there were things I thought were important that didn’t make it in, since it’s not my film. BUT I want everyone to know that we did not use a body double. In all those nude scenes: that’s my real ass you see up there in all those pictures on screen. (laughter)

Véronique: The interesting thing for me, since I came into this later than the others, is to work with two creative people like Camille the director and Duane. They get along very well but they are different people, with different minds. All those non sequiturs that are part of the film, they are thematic instead of chronological. The film is told not like a logical narrative, but more like the way Duane thinks.

Duane:  Well, I can’t avoid my process, I’ve spent 80 years honing it! The film has its own life and its own logic: Camille’s logic wedded to me as source material.

Véronique: You were more than source material! You created material specifically for the film.

Duane: It was exciting. And also, being 80, being on the cusp of oblivion, that’s where I am and so that’s what the film is about. First, my huge nostalgia for McKeesport, which I don’t really understand, is there. I still have the urge to go back, it’s like walking into a dream where all these places are still familiar but they don’t look the same, they are all falling down. It’s a bit like Miss Havisham, as if she herself were decorating McKeesport now. In one scene in the garden I imagined that she lived next door, and invented literary neighbors like Madame Bovary, who we called Emma and who hit on my dad… though the best part was telling how I saw the Eiffel Tower from a lighthouse tower. There’s a lot of whimsy in the film that’s not documentary at all. We told a lot of stories.

Véronique: But there is a sort of melancholy to the film, much talk about death and mortality and longing. There’s a lot of fun but an underlying seriousness.

Duane: I’m not a serious person but I am very serious; the serious trivia is underneath the other trivia.

Véronique: Deep down you are very superficial! (laughter)  That’s an Ava Gardner quote, by the way.

Duane: The one overriding personal thing I learned from making this film, as I mentioned before, was the awareness of how I function as a physical object, as a creature in the real world in a way I never see. I find this knowledge rather startling, and upsetting, because it adds to my not knowing, not only my image of myself, or this conversation or this room, but the whole universe. We live in this bad joke, the universe is playing a bad joke on us by giving us consciousness and then letting us know that we’re going to die. At this point I’m beginning to face the fact that we spend our lives distracting ourselves from our own demise. Now I’m really facing the enigma and almost feel a little bit overwhelmed by it. Because there’s no help, and no exit. The only reference might be Buddhism; I might have to get back to sitting. It’s a very strange place to be. During these last years, where’s my attention, what do I do about it??

Véronique: But you do have the work you’ve created. How do you feel about your body of work?

Duane: Oh, I love my body of work, it’s really “built,” it’s got a great waist. (laughter). I am very happy with my body of work. I’ve done so much, I’m very prolific and I’ve done so many different things: a book on Egypt, a children’s book, books on Walt Whitman and Cavafy, on quantum physics, about being gay in the military, my childhood home etc. I have a huge body of work: it’s out there, I’ve done thirty-two books.

Véronique: And here you are now, making a film. That’s why the title is “The Man Who Invented Himself.” You do keep reinventing yourself all the time, that’s very apt.

Duane:

The Man Who Invented Himself

“All things that he experienced in this lifetime were his invention. He invented the moon and the trees and all things visible and invisible. At this moment he is inventing me writing this and you reading this. Yes, you too are his invention. But if you told him this he would not understand, he would deny it, even though all things he thought possible became possible, and all things he thought impossible were.

And in the end he would even invent his own death. And he would never know that he had invented it all.”

To me, that says everything. This possibility of invention doesn’t apply just to your writing or creative work but to the whole act of your life and the choices that you make. I think it’s a very interesting premise. That’s why I’m glad we used it in this film, and for the title.

L’article Eighty Years Young. Duane Michals: The Man Who Invented Himself est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.