This interview was conducted by CIAC's tour guides in August 1998.

Q: Can you explain this mysterious title 137 Tecumseth?

Ian Carr-Harris: The title is the address of the space that the image refers to, the address is a place. The work is about place, about the identity of something, and an address is a way of giving a place an identity. One characteristic of this place is its windows. The work, as it was shown there, in a sense constructed a memory because these windows were already blocked over. The act of reopening them with sunlight, even though false sunlight, was a way of reconstructing an idea of this place. Now when the piece is shown outside of that space, it becomes a memory identifier of that place. It shifts it further into the area of a sign. 137 Tecumseth becomes as a title in a sense a document that is already imaginative because we’ve never seen this space with this light anywhere.

Q: What is your relationship with this place? How did you study the space in terms of sunlight, and is it a true representation of this light?

ICH: The place is close to me in that it’s my gallery in Toronto. It was a barrel storage and resale business at one time, and the image that you see here is faithfully constructed from the image of the windows that are now covered over. The question of the literal relationship of the sunlight to the space is difficult on one side to determine because there is no sunlight coming into the space. It’s an act of imagination. Also the sunlight would never appear this way because the space is actually orientated to the West. The gallery would have to have been facing the other way in order for this light to have occurred this way in that space. My decision to have the light reflect morning light rather than evening light had to do more with a sense of how I wanted the light to move. In other words, an overriding of an idea of documents by the idea of story-telling.

Q: Do you see the piece as closer to painting or sculpture?

ICH: I guess for myself, of course, I’ve always been committed to a sense of the movement one has through space. In the sense that painting, not to try and define painting obviously, but in my experience of painting, it has attempted to construct a space beyond me. I’ve had an intellectualized relationship to the space of painting. Painting has therefore been for me a little bit abstract or one could even say tantalizing. The space of painting always seems to be beyond me, and I’ve always enjoyed the sense of moving within space. I tend therefore to think of the work,this work and other works, as relating to theatre and film, because even in film you’ve got projection. And to sculpture of course. We all know the phrase painting with light. If I can extrapolate beyond the rigorous definitions of what constitutes painting, and shift more into our popular use of the word painting, I like very much the idea of applying that sculptural or theatrical idea of painting to the experience, even though it’s not painting of course.

Q: Would you say that it’s a form of chiaroscuro?

ICH: The subtle interplay of light and shade has always been attractive for me, Chiaroscuro is very much related to my idea of physical dimension. It’s a way of making things physical even if it’s a painterly technique. I’m interested by an article that Hickey wrote on Robert Mapplethorpe. He makes a relationship between Caravaggio and Mapplethorpe on the grounds that art is in many respects a means by which we acknowledge argument. Caravaggio’s painterly techniques, which we can enjoy on a formal level, also have to be acknowledged as powerful argumentation, just as Mapplethorpe, for instance, in Hickey’s argument is powerfully engaged in arguing for a particular way of seeing the body.

Q: Are you interested in identity?

ICH: Contemporary arguments would suggest that the idea of identity is itself suspect because identities are so pluralistic and fluid. That it’s perhaps impossible on any kind of ideological level to say that one has an identity. One has many identities. Nonetheless, the idea remains important for us because it’s a way of theatricalizing or drawing out the possibilities of argument. So that it’s more useful for me to say I have many specific identities, if I wish to acknowledge those...than to say I’m all things to all people.

Q: What is the meaning you find in your art that is specifically related to identity?

ICH: The work seeks to provide us with the recapitulation of a natural experience, an experience that we all have in one way or another even if we haven’t noted it at the time. The work hopes to ground any viewer who encounters it in a recognition of something they have already experienced. It’s what I understand as a kind of retracing. It provides that moment of passage from present to past to future as it were.You could say this almost grammatically in terms of our understanding of past, present, future, to remind us of feelings we have that are related to the natural course of the sun. The work is grounded in the natural or in the idea of nature. But in fact it is a cultural artifact, it is after all clearly constructed to acknowledge it’s artificiality. Much like a magician. I suppose this reminds me of the western dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, the separation of the sacred and the profane in order to bring them back together again as an acknowledgment of consciousness.

Q: What marks the simple fact of its beauty?

ICH: Well, I love the idea of beauty. I mean beauty to me is a word that we grasp in order to acknowledge something that we can’t quite articulate. We can find the words only to describe why we think something is beautiful. They always just lead you on to other words. The question of beauty is for me built into this concept of sacred and profane. It can never be stabilized. Something that is beautiful for me is something that invites articulation but can never be held by it.

Q: Is the work supposed to have a moment of darkness?

ICH: Yes, the work is about 26 or 27 minutes in complete cycle, and about 2 1/2 minutes of that cycle are darkness, no light. What that does is to provide a break and construct in narrative terms a form of suspense so that the power of expectancy can be built into the work. Just as one wakes up in the morning and waits for the sunrise and one is never quite sure when the sun is going to appear on the horizon.

Q: You spoke of cinematic elements in your work, I see elements of German Expressionism. I’m curious to know how you perceive it as cinematic. Just in terms of the projection of light?

ICH: One thing that has always struck me about cinema is the apparatus required to project it. The projectionist is central to cinema. I’ve used cinematic experiences, even techniques in several of my works. Perhaps what’s interesting about this question of projection and cinema is that you find yourself having to acknowledge the distance between the projected image and the projectionist, and the fact that one is caught between those two elements. What is powerful about cinema is the fact that we are always distracted by it. We’re not focused on it the same contemplative way that we are with painting. We are caught between the projectionist and the image. There’s a kind of extended play that one experiences. There’s no stable place where you can say, this is where cinema is, it’s always in a state of becoming. There is a field in which the cinematic experience plays out, and it’s this field that I’m interested in. In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or American film noir, which is an adjunct to German Expressionism, there’s a hightened sense of contrast or contradiction, and I like contradiction. I like the lodging of one element against another... I’ll follow up on your comment by insisting upon the importance of the object of the projector in this work. The work is a field that exists between the means of production and that which is produced. I find myself inevitably using that space to become more conscious of my place in time. The light itself becomes a way of retracing my steps, retracing history, going beyond my own personal history to think of the history of the place, and perhaps beyond that of other places. So there is a strong sense of history that is at the edge of memory and this becomes a powerful factor in one’s experience. I think that we are all just in awe of the idea of time. A play of light such as this can construct that awe.

Q: Did you try and recreate the speed of sunlight?

ICH: I didn’t actually set out with the idea of making a one to one relationship between the projector’s speed. The projector is working at a higher speed than the natural rise and fall of the sun. But what did strike me when I was working out the piece was how fast natural light actually does move. In the evening or in the morning. I did some studies using a model in order to calibrate the direction of sunlight and the speed at which it rises, and over an half hour period I was struck by how quickly the light moved on its structure. So while it’s not literal, it’s imaginatively close to how fast light moves. During the course of the day of course you don’t really notice it.

Q: How did the public react to the piece when it was first exhibited?

ICH: From my understanding, the people who have talked to me...it’s like a magic act perhaps, and people have found it magical.

Q: Poetic?

ICH: Poetic, yes... And one or two people, I was pleased, said as they stood in the space, and watched or experienced the movement. It made them think of their lives, or it made them think of who they were, and I guess their own personal history and memory and these sort of existential questions. I like the idea that one can make art without being literal or without being didactic.

Q: I don’t know if you are aware of the work of Andrei Tarkowsky. He speaks of his films as sculpting in time, and I was wondering what relationship sculpture has with your work?

ICH: Sculpture carries many characteristics and I’m interested by this phrase that he’s using. I guess I value... I was trained as a sculptor, whatever that means, and I think of my work largely in terms of sculpture. Why? I guess because for me sculpture has retained despite, or because of rapid transformations in the 20th century, in many respects a kind of projection of one’s own body into space, not necessarily in literal terms like a statue but rather in terms of the tangible association of the body to the world of objects.

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INTERVIEW WITH STEVE REINKE

This interview was conducted by CIAC's tour guides in August 1998.

Q: Can you give us an idea of "Spiritual Animal Kingdom"?

Steve Reinke: Sometimes I say its my version of a television variey show. There are three or four musical numbers, comedy skits in the form of monologues, and the little aphorisms are kind of like commercials or bumpers.

Q: Is the voice-over and singing improvised?

SR: No, all the spoken texts are carefully written out. They're delivered in a way that might sound improvised, but the intonations and pauses and everything are carefully planned. And even the singing is practised. (laughs)

Q: Do you consider it a critique of pop culture?

SR: Not at all.

Q: Is it like a diary or a journal?

SR: A lot of the monologues bear resemblance to the autobiographical/confessional modes of the journal or diary. But really, its just a rhetorical ploy. A few of the things I say are true and personal, others are untrue and personal and some of the stuff is just not personal - whether its true or not. I never really went to my doctor to ask for Prozac. Not yet, anyway. (laughs) But maybe I'm just predicting the future - maybe all this stuff will really happen and then it will become a diary in retrospect...

Q: What are you working on now?

SR: I'm working, as always, on a bunch of things. More and more instead of just writing I'm working with sound and fooling around with still images. You know how the full title of this video is "Spiritual Animal Kingdom (incorporating material from 'Sad Disco Fantasia')"? I'm going to make the mirror image - "Sad Disco Fantasia (incorporating material from 'Spiritual Animal Kingdom')".

Q: I notice there's a William Burroughs sample in your video. What is he saying?

SR: "I claim every ghost."

Q: Where is it taken from?

SR: Well I cut it up. He never said that sentence.

Q: So you're using Burrough's cut-up technique?

SR: Not really, though I have in the past. In this case the pieces were arranged purposely rather than randomly. I wasn't looking for a secret or latent meaning, I was actively authoring one, and putting the words in his mouth. I've been working with his voice for a while. I have a bank of him saying over six hundred words and phrases that I fool around with. I've tried to get him to sing along to pop songs, but it never sounded quite right.

Q: Is there a theme that connects all the components together?

SR: No, I'm not aware of there a being a theme.

Q: How did you go about picking the 4 or 5 songs you used? Do they have personal meaning for you?

SR: I did the Kiss song "Beth" first, and I guess it has some personal meaning. I liked it enough to buy the single when I was a young teenager and I'd never bought any Kiss before. I've been working with pop songs from the seventies for a while. I was born in '63 and so they were the songs I first actively consumed. But now I'm going to regress to the 60s. When I was a child I found the Beatle's "Eleanor Rigby" profoundly sad, depressing, disturbing. I'm going to change the words around and sing it myself in an attempt to make it a happy song. Of course my attempt is doomed to failure. And then if you interview me again and ask if the song is personal, I'll just say no, not at all.

Q: The main themes I noticed are sexual identity and death.

SR: Sure, that stuff is there, but its in almost every narrative. People used to say my work was all about sex. Lately they say its all about death.

Q: What brought you to the musician's brain in that book?

SR: I used to hang out at the Science and Medicine library at the University of Toronto. It was sort of like my studio, because my apartment was very small and this library always has lots of empty desks and great books to browse through. I found the book there and found it rather unbelievable. I've been interested in the process of mourning, how desire impacts the supposedly objective process of doing science, and the history of medicine in general. Here everything was combined in one incredible over-sized book "The Brain of a Pianist". I wasn't sure whether to put that section in the video because its so different from the other components - but really all the sections are so diverse, it seemed to be okay. I think as the video goes on, the type of material it incorporates becomes more idiosyncratic. The spiritual animal kingdom keeps opening up to include more types of creatures and spirits.

Q: Would you say your work is fragmented?

SR: Yes, its very fragmented. Sometimes I'm surprised that the things hang together at all. "The Hundred Videos" was a good structure for me because I could just put anything in it and give it a number and it had a home and seemed to fit. This is the first video since I finished that series that I've been comfortable with the overall structure. Before that, I was trying to make stuff that was more thematically coherent, more of a single piece. Now maybe I'll give up on that, or atleast stop worrying about it.

Q: Who inspires you?

SR: A lot of people. A long time ago, when I didn't know there was such a thing as art, there was Laurie Anderson. "O Superman" taught me that writing could be expanded into other forms. Really, it was like a lightbulb. I heard the song and then packed my bags and went to art school. This whole awful mistake can be traced back to her. I would have been safer following Lou Reed.

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