The Artists
Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard met and began working collaboratively in 1993. They graduated together from Goldsmiths in 1995 and a day later were exhibiting in one of the late Joshua Compston's now legendary Shoreditch art events. They pioneered the recent explosion of interest in re-enactment within contemporary art, most notably with A Rock 'N' Roll Suicide at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1998 and more recently with File under Sacred Music, their audacious re-make of an infamous bootleg video showing The Cramps performing at Napa State Mental Institute in 1978.
Iain and Jane
In 2005 they recreated a video made by artist Vito Acconci in 1973, working closely with Plan B, a young MC, to update the script and re-shoot the video liberally adopting the aesthetic of urban music videos. Concocted from a mixture of dark cynicism and extraordinary innocence, their universal yet highly personal strategies play out ideas of memory, performance and cultural and emotional expression in a challenging but highly accessible body of work. Their practice underlines a perfect comprehension of the secret all artists come to know: that good art always, at some level, fails.
Silent Sound continues Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's investigations into art as experience and experience as art.
Kirk Lake visited them at their South London base to discuss the project and how their work has developed.
Before we discuss your work I think it would be useful to talk about
how and why you began working together.
J: We met at Goldsmiths and
we bonded over a mutual distrust of all of the art that we were seeing being
made around us. It was a hangover from the Damien Hirst era and it seemed that
people thought they could just make it on the back of having done their BA at
Goldsmiths. We saw a lot of arrogance and a lot of “shiny” big,
expensively made work that didn't seem to mean much or change anything
at all.
I: There was no passion other than in talking up the work, referencing Derrida…
J: We knew we wanted to work together but we were almost paralysed by this dull,
dull work that surrounded us. Instead of art we bonded over independent music.
So the passion you found lacking in the art world was more available in music?
J: Absolutely. I had only really known music from a few records that my parents
had and a weekly acquaintance with the charts but not music as this passionate
DIY endeavour. Punk had passed me by. But Iain introduced me to all sorts of
music that had been fundamental in his make up and having your eyes opened and
understanding how much music can mean was incredible. Literally 100s of songs
in a matter of weeks began to have so much meaning.
I: I think that when you look at how music connects to its audience, it seems
to try harder. Music takes its audience into consideration in a way that the
art we saw around us really didn't. We realised that we wanted to make
art that not only considered its audience but tried to change things for them
too.
Now you talk about music and of course I'm presuming you mean
indie music and the first work I am aware of you doing is the Words & Pictures
boxes. These were really like an independent label releasing art instead of
records.
I: Words & Pictures was a reduction really. We ruled out everything we couldn't
or wouldn't do and that was what was left! The series has something of
the artifact about it, like a fanzine or a 7” record.
J: We were sitting on the floor at Brixton Academy waiting to see Primal Scream
when we first thought of it.
Whilst you were doing the Words & Pictures series you were also
making video pieces. There are two that I've seen and both are related
to rock music. I'm thinking of the Made In England that referenced the
Who and Mod culture and Damaged, the one using Kurt Cobain's suicide note.
But at this point you made the first step from video art into live art.
J: We wanted to make something arresting. Something direct. We knew we wanted
to make performance but we didn't want to be performers ourselves.
And one of the first live work was with the Still Ills, a Smiths tribute band?
I: It was treating a tribute band as a “ready made”. An existing
entity that we could change somehow by bringing it into a gallery.
J: We just stumbled upon the Still Ills at a local venue. It's easy to
understand something like an Abba tribute band, how and why it functions but
to us The Smiths seemed something more, like there was something extra going
on. And by moving them into the gallery for a night in front of an audience
that was half Smiths fans and half gallery-goers it would hopefully raise the
same questions that we had asked when we first saw them. Questions about authenticity,
and replication and even virtual reality which at the time was becoming a bit
of a cultural obsession. But it was also important that the audience would have
an emotional response from being at a live music performance.
A Rock 'N' Roll Suicide. ICA, London (1998)
After you'd expanded this work into the major The Smiths is dead
performance at the ICA you took the idea even further with the David Bowie/Ziggy
Stardust event which must have been a major undertaking.
I: Yes. We turned it up to 11! We've always looked at these reenactments
as almost psychological experiments, cultural experiments, anthropological...
It is always about what questions they raise and what impact they have. How
an experience makes you feel and what it makes you think.
So you were getting towards what you'd been unable to find at college.
An art that was involving for its viewer. Immersive almost.
J: That's the real drive. What happens in people's heads when they
experience the work? It's a provocation to what art can and should be.
The works have many layers of artifice. And this is what drew us to David Bowie
and Ziggy Stardust. The playing of parts. Again with The Smiths, there is a
Smiths language if you like, and it's made up of literary references,
film references. So yes, this construct within a construct becomes a powerful
vehicle to trigger something, to open something up.
But the reenactments of events were not like the World War II battles,
or that Sealed Knot/English Heritage approach. It seems less about the spectacle.
It's not merely entertainment; you're expecting some intellectual
engagement.
I: The audience's participation becomes part of the performance and their
choices become as critical as the choices we may have made. As for reenactment…
well there are similarities with process. There are certain problems and questions
that need to be addressed. You can't be wholly accurate and knowing when
to draw the line and let reality enter is key. We are certainly not trying to
replicate the past.
But there was a lot of attention to detail in these works.
J: We had been very particular about every aspect. All the music you heard at
the venue before the performance, any videos that were showing in the bar had
to be from the right era.
That's a particular bugbear of mine. Incongruous music. Like
there's a scene in Brokeback Mountain where the Heath Ledger character
dances to a jukebox and its playing a Steve Earle song that wasn't released
until 10 years or so after the scene was set. I'm no Steve Earle fan but
if I knew that why didn't any of the hundreds of people who worked on
that scene know that?
J: You do obsess about the detail. You ask “is that how it really was
or is that just how it seems now”. In the attention to detail you're
hopefully ensuring that the feeling of the audience being part of the performance,
and their participatory enjoyment doesn't collapse. But it's not
time travel. We're not trying to create a time-warp.
After the success with Ziggy Stardust did the way you approached your
work change?
I: Works like A Rock 'N' Roll Suicide happen and they are gone.
You're left with myth, rumour, memory. We were being asked to show film
of the event which we didn't have but we realized if we had something
to show then we could get our work to a much wider audience.
J: We were getting offers to restage specific events like… Woodstock,
the Stones At Altamont… serious offers! But we didn't see anything
that could improve on A Rock 'N' Roll Suicide. Nothing that would
raise any more questions than that had. Reenactment was becoming more culturally
prevalent and in a way it became less interesting to us.
I: We actually became more interested in investigating the documents of a performance.
When we were asked to show A Rock 'N' Roll Suicide as a film of
course we didn't have it. There was already the D A Pennebaker documentary
of the final Ziggy Stardust show and we hadn't been remaking that. But
it got us thinking about how most documents of a performance fail because they
dilute the experience and there is a huge gap between what they capture and
what the audience perceives.
That's true. Most concert videos are incredibly boring. Especially
the ones where the cameras are cutting all over and there are special effects
laid on top. They seem like even the director is bored.
I: But conventional documentation relates to an impossible experience. It's
a representation but it can't capture how you experience a gig. Nobody
can see something from both sides of the stage, from the balcony, at the front,
backstage…
When we'd been researching the Ziggy Stardust shows we watched as much
material as we could find and we were shown some Super 8 film that had been
taken from within the crowd. Technically it was rubbish. The sound was terrible,
the image jumped around all over the place but to me watching it it seemed like
a better reflection of what it would have been like to actually be at the gig.
This virtually static view was close to seeing what one individual person had
seen.
J: We then started buying more and more bootlegs. At this point we weren't
looking at it as research other than trying to solve a puzzle as to how to properly
record an event and how we read recordings of events.
And that leads us to File under Sacred Music. I was always a huge Cramps
fans. I even still have my Legion Of The Cramps Fan Club card. I'm proud
to say it's the only fan club I ever joined. I had adored the Cramps At
NAPA when I had first seen it. In the early 1980s right at the beginning of
home video it was a legendary tape. And talking to you now I see how the choice
of this particular bootleg follows on from your earlier references. Again it's
to do with myth, iconography, different layers, stories…
I: When we spoke to people about the Cramps tape we realized that people had
their own memories of it. There was no definitive version as it had been duplicated
so often.
Well, before the internet it was difficult to find these things. There
was no file sharing. Videos had to physically move from place to place. Copies
made copies made copies. Gradually degrading. Kind of like Chinese whispers…
I: Right. Some people remember it as all green other people said that it looked
like it had been filmed directly off a TV set so the edges of the screen were
visible. We chose to make the version that we had.
There was some controversy about the Cramps performance. Playing at
a mental hospital was somehow seen as exploitative. Was that something you had
to address?
J: Actually it was really liberating when we realized that we didn't need
to form an opinion about it. Obviously we weren't going to employ actors
to pretend to be mentally ill, so we worked with Core Arts and Mad Pride, two
mental health groups. But we didn't need to answer the question “Why
did this happen? Who allowed it to happen?”
File Under Sacred Music. DVD, 20 mins with sound (2003)
On the original film you get the feeling that both the band and audience
are having a great time. There is an incredible energy and spirit which I think
is replicated in your piece. Actually I don't think replicated is the
right word. It's more - revisited.
J: When we put the band together we realized we didn't have to get people
who looked exactly like the Cramps. For this work it was more important to get
the feeling of the original event. Again, it's to do with what is authentic
and what is replication. Although we had strict instructions laid out for the
cameramen and although the filming was tightly controlled we also knew that
as soon as something happened that was more interesting, something happening
now, then we had to go with that and let the present takeover. In a way it was
like channeling something extra.
It's interesting you mention channeling because that brings us
on to your next major work Silent Sound. One of the aspects of Silent Sound
is spiritualism and séances. Was this because you saw a link between
mediums and pop performers?
J: Not really. Aesthetically perhaps, but we were more interested in why the
audience get into it. We became more interested in the manipulative nature of
it. In particular the way that the audience is complicit. There's an openness
to being manipulated that is part of their participation in the event.
I: We're also interested in how the early spiritualist movement had links
to amazing scientific discoveries. It was intertwined with the development of
the telephone and the television. We're setting aside the issue of actually
talking to the dead and looking at ideas of transmission and communication and
reception. This is where it links with silent sound technology and subliminal
messages.
J: We are still interested in the mythology of séances. We had been looking
at the links between haunting and reenactment. I mean haunting in the sense
of the past superimposing itself on the present not a literal thing about ghosts.
I know what you mean and I think it's possible to consider a
presence or perhaps an inherent memory without needing to have any belief in
the afterlife. For me at least, in older buildings I can imagine the people
that have moved around within the space and it can sometimes feel quite dense,
almost thick with memories I don't actually have. Again, given the history
of St George's Hall and the Davenport Brothers this gives another layer
to the event. But Silent Sound is both a performance and an installation.
I: For the performance we will be using sound and light and psychological methods.
We are considering the potential for ethereal communication through physiological
means. For the installation that will follow on from the event we will be creating,
in essence, a sound installation but one that will also use some of the processes
and manipulations that were used in the original event.
J: We are looking at the idea of engineering experience. It's symptomatic
of a cultural shift that we are seeing. If you think of reality TV it's
an intensely manufactured psychological experiment. At every turn there are
people behind the scenes rewriting, reinterpreting, and affecting what we are
seeing. We see some of this but we don't know what else is being played
with. There could be other things like temperature that are being used to achieve
a particular result. So I think this is predictive of what will become more
common, or at least more commonly understood.
You have collaborated with many people in the preparation of this event.
Psychologists, parapsychologists, scientists, magicians, musicians.
J: Yes. It's a collaborative experiment in the abstract potential of creating
something. I think this idea of experimentation and exploration link it very
closely to the great Victorian innovators and the pioneering investigative urge
they shared with the spiritualists. We are bringing together lots of different
fields and this is an area where art can really be pivotal. Art can do things
without reason and without evaluation. There is no need for us to check whether
people understand the subliminal message for the work to be validated. It doesn't
have to be measured. And we don't think that art exploits its potential
in this way enough. Art can be an effective testing ground – a kind of
laboratory for the investigation of potential.
Kirk Lake's writing on the arts has appeared in the Guardian, Dazed and Confused, The Idler and the NME and numerous other publications. He is the UK editor of the American culture zine www.outsideleft.com
For more information about Iain & Jane visit their web site at www.iainandjane.com
Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard are represented by Kate MacGarry, London.