Rodney I'm on my mobile. Is everybody there?
All Yes.
R Are you guys all in the same room?
Philippe Yes, we are all in the same room.
Dan Okay, let's get going.
P Let's ask Dan where the Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty project really originated and when.
D It originated in, I think it was 1988, in Brussels. Chris Dercon was very involved with doing a production for Flemish television along with Jeff Cornelis. He had this idea for a collaboration with the Brussels La Monnaie Opera, which would be a small opera piece on stage, which would be broadcast, live on television.
He picked, as Chris would do, architecture and art stars like James Coleman and Aldo Rossi. It was a spectacular idea, but it was very short, everybody had about eight minutes. So James Coleman gave his eight minutes to me, so I could do sixteen minutes. I don't know anything about opera, but I sure know rock opera. I was a little bit appalled by Tommy, I liked Arthur by The Kinks, but actually it was a mini-opera that The Who did called A Quick One While He's Away. It was about a lorry driver whose wife had a quick affair when he was away. I was into this idea of using popular material. There was also a film called Wild in the Streets, which as a teenage film starring Shelley Winters and Richard Pryor, and the theme of the film was something that teenagers liked at the time because it was about a twenty-four year old rock singer who was approached by a congressman running for senator, kind of a Kennedy-style politician, and he was advocating that you
only had to be eighteen to vote. The rock star agreed and eventually put into action, fourteen for voting and fourteen to be old enough to be President.
P When you first developed the project you also had a woman involved, Margaret?
D No, Marie-Paule Macdonald who I've collaborated with before on a Matta-Clark Museum. She is an architect, writer, involved in rock and roll and designed a nightclub for the Rolling Stones. So I thought she could do the set design for that project which was called Wild in the Streets. Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty, the title of this new version, is saying all these things about hippie culture and the fact that they thought you might be dead when you are thirty. And of course Americans really don't like people getting old. It's a paradox. I was very interested in what happened after Sky became president. In the film, he puts everybody over thirty-five in rehabilitation camps and they're getting LSD in their drinking supply in the morning. I was particularly interested in hippie culture when hippies moved to the country. This was the time of Neil Young's first album and Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan, and I wanted to costume the rock opera with late sixties, country hippie, in other words, peasant dresses. Actually, President Neil Sky's character is based on Neil Young and Sky Saxon of the group The Seeds. President Sky does this press conference at Camp David in a rustic hut, which is also a go-go cage from TV programs like Hullaballu or the English Top of the Pops.
P Why do you think America doesn't like people getting old?
D Because we came to America to be young. Donald Rumsfeld hit the nail on the head when he said 'Old Europe'. [Laughter] But the thing is, it's a contradiction because everybody gets old. The original opera was never produced but I did a small pop-up book on it with Marie-Paule for a publisher in Ghent. And then it occurred to me, maybe because I've seen-I can't remember seeing these things-I may have seen Mike Smith's puppet show, which was very early apparently, but the thing it occurred to me to do something like the puppet show called The Fantastics. I had the idea that people who were hippies now have kids, and maybe they can take their kids to learn about the sixties and see a puppet show. But of course, as it has been worked out by Sandra, we do this in art fairs and what I find happening is people who really love the puppet show are usually Jewish women in their late sixties who told me they smoked marijuana when they were younger, so it's nostalgic for older people. [Laughter]
T America has always been responsible for youth culture in relation to the rest of the world. This is tied into the economic export of pop culture so there is a fear of death, which involves a fanatical equation. In the time period when this work takes place, ideals were still in place above money, and the theme loosely traces this decline: from utopia to market. Timothy Leary said something like the best of all the old worlds moved west until they hit California and the there was no place left to go but space.
P It was not produced in Belgium?
D No. It wasn't produced in Belgium.
T Then there was a reiteration, it must have been ten years ago, when we first got involved together on it, which was when Marian Goodman got involved_
D Well, she had us in this meeting_
T Well, there was at least one meeting and plans were drawn up for an earlier version with you, me and the amazing Glenn Branca.
D Yes, it's because Tony is doing these things, and what I love about Tony's work is that he does a downscaled video.
I didn't like spectacle, but I liked the downscale thing. I also liked the puppets, he was using and of course Glenn and I collaborated on many things before, but it was a time when everybody was upscaling. In fact, Mr. Oursler was working with large things for David Bowie!
T That was shortly after that. I have always been interested in collaboration and crossover, and of course in love with rock and the possibilities it seemed to suggest, in terms of reaching out into a new public.
D That was just after. Whereas Glenn was very into the opera thing, I thought it was too upscaled. Also Tony always wanted to collaborate with me, so we gave him a goldenopportunity to do a real collaboration on this project. He's been involved for a long time, he liked the concept. In terms of Rodney, he also wanted to collaborate with me, to do a tapestry for the original rock opera. Of course we all loved rock opera. I don't know if you love Kim Gordon, but Tony and I are very close to Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth.
T Absolutely.
C So Rodney, when did your involvement start?
R I guess it was about maybe_I don't know_ Dan, I can't remember what year it was, but we talked about it quite a bit. You described the project to me. I was always excited about it and we had this fantasy of doing the tapestry at a certain point. But in terms of actually doing the music it was only recently that Dan proposed that I do the title song and the other song Fourteen or Fight, that was last summer. But we talked about it vaguely for years. I always was excited about the project, you know, but in terms of being directly involved, I guess it started last summer.
D I have to say one thing now because, when we talked about it with Marie-Paule Macdonald, when I redid the
script, I co-wrote it with Teresa Seeman, who was an assistant of mine and who loves rock music. And also we should mention in terms of collaboration the soon-to-be superstar Japanther from Brooklyn. Actually, what I wanted for the original Brussels Opera was a group like the Beastie Boys or an amateur group just beginning, kids who could improvise. Now Japanther has written five new songs. It's very important that we have young energy.
T That ended up being one of your main focuses in the production, working with Japanther. You were working with them on the music right up to the end. I didn't have any connections with them at all except loving what they did. I worked on the visuals, which started back when we first began with Glenn and it began as an enormous machine that had animatronics on it because we thought we could never really afford to have puppeteers, so we were going to make animated puppets with video projections and actual kind of motion like Disneyland that would move so you'd sort of move around the room but it would also move in different ways. In this show, I was thinking how would the video and the puppets interact? Laurent and I designed
the idea of a simple series of boxes within boxes. In other words, focusing the energy of the live band in a box on one side, and the puppets in a rectangle on the other side. This is all connected by one big video screen that can change scale when needed.
D I never heard that because I was so dedicated to this idea of downscaling. My big attraction to Tony's work is that it was so intimate and downscaled and at the same time, it would scare both children and parents. [Laughter]
P So the history of the project_You get involved, and Sandra, you enter the conversation_
Sandra Actually it was maybe about two years ago, no_when did Bush win the first time? A year after Bush won the first time, I started asking Dan about it, and he kept saying hippies are not ready yet, they are not ready to come back and I kept insisting. At that time we were doing a project with Dan, Revisiting: Homes for America; actually the filmmaker ran away with the film and we only have the VHS. So, at one point Dan said to me "Okay" and we started getting together. At the beginning, Dan was a bit skeptical, and rightly so, of having live music and the multiple overlayers. He did not want anything spectacular. However,
I thought it was very important the idea of making it to be a bit schizophrenic, of really pushing that moment of
frictions, extensions and overlays between the different elements. Also it was important that this be a collaboration of friends, the celebration of communal friendship. Earlier on, this piece was going to be called Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty: Entertainment by Dan Graham and Friends. In a phone conversation Dan came up with the "Entertainment" because he said he was not a professional director. The fact is, none of us have done theater per se, so there's no professional theater director, so, there are moments in which thepiece is taken over by one element, then another element,elements that were done by the different collaborators,
including musicians and sound designer. For me it was very essential, the coexistence of the three elements: video,marionettes and live band, the difference of scale between the puppets and the band. The two different windows in the proscenium: a landscape-like, horizontal, tight window for the puppets and the portrait/go-go cage for the band. Dan commissioned Rodney to do the theme songs Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty and Fourteen or Fight. I thank Dan for agreeing for the band to be live, at one point we had a screaming conversation in which I said "It's important to have it." The other day, with Rodney we were talking about the possibility of his band playing live in the London version. In this sense, I see this work as a work in progress.
P What do you mean at some point you weren't ready?
D What Sandra did, she got first-rate professional people, which of course means we're bankrupt. [Laughter] It also has to be small scale because the puppet stage has to be a small stage, and although I proposed for older people with more money to buy opera glasses and then we'd charge them for the glasses, that hasn't happened yet. But actually Sandra got the most incredible professional people, including the best puppeteers.
S Phillip Huber from Huber Marionettes.
D Apparently the man in charge, we had some ego problems with him and we had to work through this. We also got
an amazing stage designer from France_
S Laurent P. Berger.
D Who actually understands American culture the way only a German normally can understand American culture; he was brilliant. Also the sound person, Bruce (Odland), is brilliant. We had brilliant people and it all came together. Finally Sandra asked me to be the director which I was very happy to be because I thought I was out of the picture for a while and I made some suggestions. There were some compromises, and actually Japanther was very instrumental in picking up my ideas. And Tony put in a lot of sex because we actually have older people who are very nostalgic about sexual things rather than young people, we don't have enough kids actually in the audience.
S Well, we dedicated it to the kids and to the spirit of rock and roll_
D It's a first rate theatrical production.
P Did you think that from the moment it was written in 1988?
D Well, I didn't really write it then, I just did some of the scenario, but I did a lot of writing with Teresa Seeman's helpfor this version.
T I wrote some short scenes, which are interior monologues-sort of daydreams, which the puppets have in their wooden heads!
P Looking at the sixties from 1988 or looking at the sixties from 2004, the context is very different.
S Yes, very.
T Also Dan and I are two different ages, which has always been a great dynamic between us. I first met Dan when I was a student and I saw him lecture and I had started to make my first videotape; I really loved the way he did installation. It was so much more complicated than anything anyone else was doing at the time and it was super important for my development. About five years later, I started a small editing company in New York with a bunch of other artists that was like a collective almost and I worked on Rock My Religion_
D Actually, the hippie section.
T The hippie section, and that's when Dan and I really became friends. This is before Sonic Youth was really even Sonic Youth, and at that time I was also producing a videotape with Kim Gordon, about architecture, the interior architecture of clubs in New York City, which was very influenced by your work. I liked it because I was becoming very interested in the theory behind rock, trying to understand how it functioned as a social force. I had just sort of broken up my band, The Poetics with Mike Kelley and John Miller by moving to New York, I was questioning the relationship between the audience and the performer, the whole system. I was doing more soundtrack music. Dan and I had a lot to talk about, so that's when we got together and we liked a lot of the same bands, so we shared a lot of the same interests but from slightly_How old are you Dan?
D Eighty-nine. [Laughter]
D No, sixty-three.
T I'm forty-eight.
D Actually Tony took all the drugs except LSD.
T Well_no, see_you didn't like drugs, neither of one of us liked drugs but we liked to talk about it as part of our artwork. People think I was a big drug guy but I was interested in the culture around it. How could you not be? It formed all the social codes, pop culture and psychedelic imagery. I never took LSD, I was very spooked by LSD.
Salvador Dal? said he didn't need it because he was it! I agreed that art should operate on the same level.
D But your question to Philippe about the difference_See, in the late eighties I thought the sixties would come back and, actually, for the DIA Foundation project I want to have inflatable chairs which would have two-way mirror mylar, on top of inflatable vinyl. Actually, there's a small script for Erika Beckman, which was set in Poussin's painting about Arcadian innocence and was written about Apollonian hippies. So I was very fascinated that the hippie culture would come back at a certain point. But also, I'm a rock and roll historian. I wrote something, actually, it's a published article in a catalogue for The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven called Country Trip. It's about Neil Young's first album and Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan. It's about that
Period, so I was always fascinated by that period in terms of costuming. The first costuming was done by Marie-Paule, it's more a kind of British 'mod,' whereas the costumes for this production are more country-hippie American.
T You basically did them with Sandra. We sat there and worked on them together, the three of us. Then you invited me to make comments on them together, the three of us, which was very strange because it dredged up memories of people and places from that time period. I forgot what a wild mix of times and materials the hippies were fusing-very wonderful.
D Yes. So I think costuming is very important and I guess that's about theater also.
P Looking at the piece when it premiered in Miami, there is a very strange flavor because we look at the sixties as this kind of golden era, almost like a utopian dream_
D Also you had Altamont, and in Rock My Religion I show the
Decay of that period, but I think this distance you're talking
about is my Jewish tradition, dealing with Jewish satire like the films of Billy Wilder. It's about American culture seen from an ironic, humorous Jewish point of view.
C Rodney, how does your approach relate to what Dan just said because you, also, have been very involved in rock music, drugs and LSD, and making work about that; about that experience and rock. You're Canadian like Neil Young. What's your take on what Dan just said and also on the relationship between your approach and your work and that of Dan's and Tony's?
R Sorry_between my work and Dan's work?
C Well, I was interested in what Dan said, then thinking about your approach because you're Canadian so you have this similarity of background and conceptual thinking, plus an interest in music and bands, drugs, LSD_
R Like Tony, I was very influenced by Dan. Dan came to Vancouver quite a bit. You have the art school there and both universities and that's when I met him. I was a student. Dan's own pop music really encouraged me to pursue that. After that, it was just developing. I was always interested in it anyway. I was always in bands. I never thought of it as my work you know. In terms of influence, but I are you asking
about the attitude towards the sixties?
C Both, I guess: the attitude towards the sixties and American culture. You're the non-American in this. I know
it's similar culture but_
R If you ask me about the culture of music, especially pop music, it is actually dominated by American music of course, but so is Canadian I guess. I was thinking specifically following Dan's briefing on writing the songs for Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty. I was really thinking of something in the spirit of Neil Young. Dan's writing is about incorporating that kind of Neil Young-type character or a combination of Neil Young and Sky Saxon. You've heard of Sky Saxon? So I've got to put myself in a Neil Young sort of position vis-?-vis the subject.
P Did Dan bring Jewish irony to the picture? Do you bring Canadian irony to your relationship with the sixties?
R There's an irony_yeah.
T Now I bring the ex-catholic paranoia. [Laughter]
D In other words 'guilty pleasures.'
T Exactly, yeah.
P When we were talking about younger artists, or younger than Dan, what do you think of this urge of people involved with visual art to embrace popular music, or rock music? It started when Dan_you started to write a lot about that, you did Rock My Religion. It was difficult to find an artist who was not involved in a band. Why do you think there is this connection between the visual and pop music?
T Well, I think that for me, and I have done a lot of interviews, I did a ten-hour interview series called Synesthesia, distributed by EAI, for which I interviewed a lot of artists and musicians about the connection between art and music,
mostly with David West helping me. I did this with The Poetics Projects, a collaboration with Mike Kelley, so I think that artists look to, as Dan said, this idea of popular culture, and the easiest way to get to it is to kind of work in the vernacular. I think that kind of conceptualism led to really interesting uses of the vernacular. This is one of the reasons I wanted to use television; it was because when I grew up people were watching TV. It was the vernacular, and rock music, you know, the idea that anybody could just pick up a guitar, especially with punk. It became do-it-yourself and people, the whole idea of conceptualism, destroying the idea of craft. Before that, you had people in the institutions trying to learn, you know like, "I am going to learn how to
use stone for fifteen years before I can become a master" or something like that. Then conceptualism comes along, and says you have the idea which is more important than the craft, and if your idea is good enough then you can jump over this hurdle of craft. It changed the way we make art and also music. People were seeking ways of finding a new audience, a new system all together: punk rock is just one happy result in a lot of ways. And that I think really opened up punk rock in a lot of ways, people who were really disturbed by the white room of the art world, the ivory tower, ought to move out into like stand-up comedy like Mike Smith.
D I think the abstract expressionists loved jazz, and I think art was gradually getting away from play and was turning into business. I think what we like in the art world is a kind of communalism; I think in the seventies many artists like Richard Prince or Robert Longo for example, were in rock bands, and also of course Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley. The idea was a kind of communalism, a recreation in the community of the art world. And also there is the idea of the group rather than the artist as individual, who is an isolated businessman. Tony is right about the vernacular, but I also think it had a lot to do with the interest in performance in the seventies as well as punk rock, and I think what happened was there was a revival recently. People
are fantasizing about the sixties and seventies which they call neo-psychedelic-I think it's the same period-, and they want to have music inside museums and galleries, which I think is a big mistake because I think the most important place for music is in a cave-like structure, in other words, a derelict cellar-type situation, but I think Rodney Graham is taking advantage of this period, to actually go with it.
T Which is also where the first movie theater started, which was in caves. The first moving image was thrown on the back wall of a cave, because you had the perfect situation for a camera obscura, to say nothing of the first cave painting.
R Let's not forget that the acoustics of galleries are notoriously bad because the walls are all parallel. Do you know what I mean? They're the worst places for music.
P There's a name that comes back over and over again: Mike Kelley. Is he, was he, is he going to be involved with the project?
D No, he never was. But we had a fantasy, Sandra particularly, that Paul McCarthy could work with us, but he's sort of overbooked at the moment so he couldn't do this. And I think, I don't want to overdo it, I'm interested in people who are very good at their particular areas. I think Mike would have been great, he would have done something, but he's overbooked. Tony actually gave up some of his bookings just to work on this. Also, Paul and Tony and Rodney always wanted to collaborate with me, so we're giving them this chance.
S Mike Kelley was involved. He wrote the preface for the Wild in the Streets pop-up book done by Dan and Marie-Paule. I have approached him to write the preface for the upcoming book of Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty as well. He is such a punk, it would be interesting to read his revisiting to the hippie culture.
T The funny thing about this project is its immersion into the experience rather than analyzing it, or deconstructing it, which I thought was really like a breakthrough for the situation because, you know, like Rock My Religion is all about, you know, sort of stepping back. Well, you never had a rock band, did you?
D No, it's an essay. It's an essay.
T You never had a rock band. I know it's an essay.
D I made possible many things as a producer.
T Believe me, I know that. But I think in this one, it's very immersive, and that's why I think it's a great step for you, it's no longer Dan completely analyzing, if you look at the whole structure of the piece itself, there's a lot of referencing of course to history and so forth, but still it's a very pleasurable experience. There is a generosity in that position, which of course you have set up in situations in your pavilions and have facilitated in other situations but here we dive into the pool together!
D In other words I was responding to the situation of opera, which I never understood.
C But the difference between the seventies rock opera structure and this one, is this one is small, and intimate, which I like. There's something about the puppet show that's very intimate because you have to be close to puppets to see them and to see how they behave, as opposed to rock opera where everything is about distance and spectacle, lights_
D Oh, I think rock opera was a huge mistake, although I liked Arthur. So I was going back to the origins with The Who, A Quick One While He's Away but actually what I like is when things get very stupid they become very interesting.
T The thing about this particular puppet show, what happens, is that there's a mixture of, it's interesting that you brought up scale and the pomposity of the rock opera. We took television scale-something I have always been really fascinated with-this tiny screen, it has more to do with psychological space than actual physical space and brought it into a live format, _so you had this inversion happen: the actual play between, taking place in the widescreen of the puppets, then you have the live, the moment is happening with the band, and then you have the intermediary video playing between, it shifts scale between them, so you have this very interesting shifting of scale and time, you know_
D I think what Tony is saying is very important because my experience of television was being in a studio audience as part of a children's audience during a cartoon show which actually had a puppet, a live puppet. Also, Howdy Doody, that was very important. And what I was thinking for the Brussels Opera was that it'd be like a studio audience for one of these popular music TV shows, we would have the groups appear in a go-go cage: think Howdy Doody studio audience of kids with puppets. I don't know if you ever went to a TV show as a child. That was a big experience for me.
R _about you_ on the Howdy Doody show?
D I was influenced by the Howdy Doody show on TV. Isn't this is where Paul McCarthy would have come in because he deals with this kind of period of terror through puppets when you're a child?
P Also during the launch in Miami, I couldn't take my eyes of it, the structure of the stage with the band on the side. At some points, maybe it was on one of the drawings done by the set designer, there was a mirror. For me there was a contagion, between the way you structure this piece and, Dan, your early performances in front of mirrors with the audience in the back of the reflection of the audience and the way to involve the audience in front of you. It's also still working within your pavilion, was it a decision?
D No, I was not part of that, but the thing is when I first did the performance audience-mirror, one of the first time was at Riverside studios and I had Static, which was Glenn Branca's first group and a performance with me using this mirror, so I always wanted to integrate that kind of performance, simple performance in front of the audience with the kind of rock narrative. But that wasn't my idea, this guy is quite brilliant, the French set designer, Laurent.
C Do you think Laurent was looking at your work?
D I don't know but he was looking at everything. He was quite brilliant.
T He looked at everything.
C There are structures with architecture and TV, and TV within architecture_
T We worked down the actual overall layout because Dan had come up with the idea of, okay, the puppets, the live band, the video_
D Sandra had the live band_[Laughter]
T Sandra had the live band, so Laurent and I came up with the structure that was the stage itself, which was the box, the wide screen format, kind of a1950-60s little puppet stage which related to TV but also sort of had this wide screen format, and then the fact that the video would then cover the whole thing and then change scale as a kind of mediator between it, but my point is Laurent was a really incredible sponge, because he was looking at everything and totally open-minded. I met him only a short time before_
S Oh, I worked in this project for about 9 months, 24/7, but the crew worked less than 40 days_, it was very much of a communal energy then. The energy and tightness of the production is mirrored in the energy between the performance and the audience, another collaboration, I would say. The formal structure was set up by Dan, Tony and I which created this overlapping of textures, counterpoints, Dan's slogans and clich?s and of course the script! This situation allowed us to be playful, exploring our kid side inside us. The result is this overlay of opera, puppet theater, video, live and recorded music, Dan's favorite and specific songs from the era, and so forth, how can you describe it? On the other hand, working with live performing marionettes gave us a structure what it needed to be done previously in videos. Culturally, the funny part is, the artists are United States or North American citizens, but the crew is a compilation of Bolivians, French, Turkish, Brazilian, generations, all of us above 30 except the band, plus they are neo-punk! The artists were so great to work with, everyone got completely immersed in the project. You really need to see it in that tight space to experience it, just as we were all sleeping in my studio_it was incredible_
D I think this became a theatrical experience, but actually there's a big conflict in this production, Japanther's parents were hippies, and Japanther are neo-punk and very antihippie and I think there is a real distrust of Japanther and the Neil Young-influenced Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty but somehow we have to reconcile these things, songs, we have to bring everything together_
P That was also what was in the performance, the tension between what was happening on the stage and their music, that is so much not hippie. I don't know if you need to reconcile them because this tension is actually wonderful.
S Exactly_
T That makes the piece.
S That is what I call the joyful schizophrenic moments, pushing to create frictions_
T Everything is time-shifted in a science fiction way and I know Dan and I both really like science fiction, especially Philip K. Dick. So also in a way there's a time shift, there's a scale shift, the puppets are very small, so you can barely see them, and then they are bigger than anything, so they take over the human scale. At certain points, and I think that's really the strength of the piece, there's always these kind of conflicts. It also continues in the narrative, it's stripped down and written in a dumb way like a Neil Young song, yet there is a lot of truth to it. You can follow it as a silly story yet what is really interesting is that it has all these reflections to more complex issues happening now in politics. The dated elements show us how we are living in a loop on any number of levels_
C Also the live element of Japanther playing_but also you're aware that the puppeteers are making the puppets move behind the screen, so you've got this proscenium arch, but you know like in Punch and Judy where it's almost like the first TV, and it's very violent too. There are people behind, the puppeteers are behind and then the puppets who seem to mimic the live action of the theater traditionally creating something much more low-brow, and popular culture. Then you have the band who're actually live, live when the young people and the puppets are kind of_
T Then at one point the puppets sing with the band. Which I love so much.
P There is for me something very strange about the piece, when people ask me what it is. Is that a theater piece? Is that a concert? Is that a video projection? I actually cannot find words to describe it. Like when people ask me what is Dan Graham's works. Is that architecture, is that sculpture, you fall into aesthetic language, semiotic. You fall between aesthetic categories, and what for me that is very strange with this piece, actually it doesn't match anything we know. There's not a word in the language we're using in aesthetic, there's a band, there's a puppet and nobody in art was interested, or is interested in puppets, it was really the enemy, [we say "stands as a sculpture".] and we don't know that. I'm very curious with this piece and about its legacy. Is the piece going to be able to change the way we perceive what a cultural project is? In institutions and museums we always talk about multi-disciplinarity and then we don't really know what we're talking about when we say that and here you have a moment when everything comes together and then we don't know what to do about it.
D It's a hybrid. All my work is on the boundary of different things, but actually I want to call it the influence by Philippe Vergne and Entertainment.
P What would be your take on that?
T My take is that_ Later, I'm hoping to develop another version of the piece, which becomes a three- imensional storyboard to experience the piece but in your own time in one way or another, and then we'll use animatronics. It'll use some of the actual puppets that would move, synchronize with sound. I'm hoping to take a lot of the designs, imagery or some elements out of the videos and sets to accentuate them into a kind of musical, linguistic, sculptural installation storyboard that you would get the different facets as you move around in the space. It will give you more than what you will get in the show but less at the same time because it will be important, that it's two different experiences-otherwise they negate each other.
C That relationship between live performance and installation has a very long tradition back to the sixties and seventies. I Like America and America Likes Me, by Joseph Beuys, was a performance and then became an installation later. Likewise Joan Jonas' Mirage was a performance and then became an installation, Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy, a performance and an installation. So that relationship between the live performance and then an installation, which is both its own piece, but also has a relationship back to a live performance. What is it? Again that is another form of hybridity, that's another kind of questioning of the relationship between something that happens in real time and then is over, and something that exists over time.
T Yeah, I'm fascinated by it and I think that it's something I have been working on with performers quite a bit, time shifting (in) projected faces. Dan mentioned my work with David Bowie where I did some of the sets for his 50 birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden, then it became a TV show. So, it kept shifting from one thing to the next, I worked with Sonic Youth. I shot Kim doing certain songs for the camera trying to capture her performance into a kind of dummy. Some place between music and live performance as experiments and then rock videos with them. This cycling back and forth between what television or what film can take and give back to the live performance and what it can give back to the physical performance, I'm hoping that it will succeed somehow, that Dan and I can work together, because he has his own take on what can be done with performers using time delay and mirrors. I would love to take some of his, also elements of his performance and installation and try to evolve it in the storyboard, on a small scale we haven't really talked about it yet, but it would be great to bring some of that in as well.
P Rodney? Allo? Rodney Graham did we lose you?
C Rodney?
T He heard the word David Bowie and he hung up.
P He got bored with us. [Laughter]
D Well, the thing is, Rodney's never actually seen the performance. [They dial Rodney's number. Voice operator saying the number cannot be completed as dialed. Rodney connected again.]
P We want to ask you a question. We're talking about what is going to develop out of the piece. We started with this idea that the piece brings together so many different aesthetic categories and the question was where do you go with that in terms of_not discipline_but, are we facing an aesthetic category we don't really know or to name, And as artists and people who do exhibition[s] we deal with that, and I was curious to know, within your own practice how do you negotiate these different disciplines, from photography, films, music, do you consider them as something different or is it just the same body, a constellation of activities?
R I have an ambivalent relationship to this kind of interdisciplinary activity in terms of music anyway because, as we were talking, because the ideal venues for those things are quite different, like the idea of the cave some kind of acoustical environment for music that's appropriate, its something you don't find in a museum or gallery context, and I find negotiating the different registers sometimes quite difficult, I don't really know if what I'm doing in music is really part of what I'm doing in visual art_ I think they're really quite different stuff I think what Dan and Tony are doing with this. I think is recalling right away that I certainly couldn't get to be able to do myself.
T Not really to take issue with you, but I've seen many pieces of yours that involve music in museums and things that have worked quite well. One where you're playing piano as a prisoner that was in that sound show at the Pompidou, that sound and light show_
D THE LSD bicycle piece.
R [INAUDIBLE] That was very avant-garde music_I think that in terms of pop music there's something about the environment, where you need to a certain kind of immersion and the volume_
T Oh, I see what you mean. The difference between rock _
C _so it does make a difference because in the live puppet show, Japanther play live, so we're suddenly watching them live. You're in a theatrical situation where you're in your seats watching a puppet show and suddenly there's live band element which is different from an installation-people are moving in and out of the room, the sound is part of that, they walk in or they walk out, it's part of something different, like with your bicycle piece, the LSD piece, you're looking at the record, you're looking at the projection, so it's part of something that's almost ambient. With the puppet show live performance you are in a situation where you're gathered together in a specific place, for a specific time, so the live element works very well in that situation.
S Yes, it does. On the other hand, it's also very much a white cube box rather than a black box. It became more of an installation kind of situation but again is a concert.
T It's funny because Laurent comes from (the) theater world, yet another world that's not really represented by
anybody sitting in this room. It's the slickest performance thing that I have ever seen, I think, in the art world because of his professional ability to transform what you call the white box, so I think that it's amazing_
C But at the same time it's amazing because if you thing of the Punch and Judy show, it usually or often takes lace on the beach, people gather around, and it's very small, in
England anyway, people gather around in a small group and they watch it together sitting on the sand, and it's small like a TV, and it's kind of a canvas covered, sort of oblong kind of object almost, which is different from being in a theater where you're surrounded by the architecture of the theater where the proscenium arch takes over, and this is not about proscenium arch, this is about an intimacy, the scale of the whole thing is small, isn't it? Even when it's a theatrical situation rather an installation, in both cases the scale of it is small, you must be fairly up close to the puppets because you do, you can't sit hundreds of feet away, have 500-seat theater and you're in the back, you won't see the puppets.
T Although I have to say I saw the Wooster Group recently and their scale is not much different from our puppet show, I think it is small in terms of Cats_
D I have to say this is anti-Wagner.
T In that sense of course it's tiny, but in terms of avant-garde theater it's certainly acceptable.
D What I thought of, I never saw it, but I thought of the Fantastics which was a kind of puppet show for children, I have never seen it but_
T _I didn't see it either.
D _I have never seen it either but that was where I had my mind. They were off-Broadway, they were in Greenwich Village, and much my life has been against, I can say it now, bringing artists into a kind of Wagnerian grandeur, and I think what happened in the video was, I won't mention names, but I'll mention one name Bill Viola, we got into the spectacle thing, also Douglas Gordon, and I want to downscale, and my attraction to Tony's work in the beginning was that he downscaling.
T I have always been interested in the idea of taking minimalist aesthetics and applying that to pop culture
so another words can you take_you know_what is the smallest reductivist entity that will become a performer per se, so in my tapes you have worms, and all sorts of strange body parts acting as performer.
D I think the downscaling thing is pretty important given the issues of things in museums today and I think all artists are very attracted to this alternative version through the vernacular of rock music. I first got interested in rock music because my friend Robert Smithson was very enamored of Andy Warhol and Andy Warhol used to do his work by listening to rock music and when I did my first conceptual pieces I was listening to the Yard Birds, and the Kinks pop songs and I wanted to work a short form which was like pop/rock hit songs.
T I think working on a smaller scale has always been underrated because my belief in scale is that is not where things happen, it's psychological, it always happens in the mind and during the experience, it's an interior event, when you internalize the image then you really give it scale. But puppets, I always had a little bit of problems with puppets, because they were so complete. I want my audience to dream to make u p there own world. I never liked the complete form so I was always resistant to Dan's attraction to the puppets themselves but I have since come around because there's something that happens with the audience that they work though these stereotypes in a very interesting way, because I think that the designs where you have these echoes of John Kennedy, echoes of Neil Young and other kind of rock stars and then you have the old guy who looks like that horrible Southern senator, what's his name? You know the guy who was against the arts_
S _Jesse Helms
T Jesse Helms_ and then you have this Hendrix, sort of very sympathetic character and then there's the boy who becomes almost like a transvestite, because he looks like a middle-aged woman. So I think the choices of puppets opened me up to a new way of seeing you have time travel again types that trigger current and past pop cultural figures. I've always been into having art works be read on a number of levels and this adds a complexity to it.
D _a shop that had railroad models, and I would also go to get small dolls, Mike Kelley said he began as a feminist with his dolls, and as I started shopping around for these little dolls to put in my models I became very attracted to the doll culture that girls had that I missed out on.
T You have to because it's the yin yang, it's the opposite, it's your alter ego, all the feminist dolls, the female dolls that I produce they become this alter ego, it's the thing that boys don't get to play with dolls, it's fascinating, you become another person by doing it.
C I remember seeing that in your studio, the model for the pavilion, with the teenage girls with the mirrors, things that young girls have. I'm thinking that was very_
D _You mean the model from the Day Care Center Computer, Cdrom, Cartoon library, which wound up in another version when we did this structure for the Hayward Gallery in London.
C But it had girls, it was girls, because I remember thinking that was very unusual, but also not only spitting image_
D The Spitting Image.
C The Spitting Image. I remember watching a TV program in England, it was American in the 60s, it was puppets, it was a space_it wasn't Star Trek_what was that_? It was all puppets.
C The Thunderbirds!
T _It was so great!
C _In the spaceship
T Something about the lack of ability of these characters, because they are images but they are bound in a way, you think that they are able to do things but they really are not. I noticed this when shooting for two weeks with the master puppeteer. I kept thinking I was going to get more emotions, movements or articulation of the puppets, and I noticed that they really can't do that much so that they're this kind of stuck image. So the beauty of that is that they rely on the audience to create_
P to project_
T _to project onto them. That's exactly it: you project onto them.
C That goes right back to what you were saying about the cinema starting in the cave with shadow because that's like the projection of the shadow, because the shadow puppets and the idea of these shapes that are archetypes, so you're going back to these kind of very powerful archetypal figures rather than_it's all anti-realism.
T Which has to do with the group producing an event, themselves, in themselves, which is really lost in pop culture now, with pop culture you're put in the position of the, you know I've said a million times, you're put in this kind of drug state, you're kind of in a trance, it's about escapism. What's wonderful about something like this, you become a participant as you watch it, as you have said that there are these three levels that kind of wash back and forth, and the audience has to put it together, and make up the story "it's about the 60s, but wait that's a punk band"! There's these little puppets and there's this happening, this projection, you know so you have to just weave it together.
D When I was just beginning as an artist I was very attracted to Bertolt Brecht and so I thought of using the idea of alienation effect.
T What is "alienation effect" (just for the record)?
D Alienation effect was making things strange because they don't live up to our normal expectations. I wrote this article about Dean Martin and his use of idiot cards, but what I wonder about this production, and I am a little suspicious about this, is how is it going to read in non-American cultures, because I think when you have Americans they look back at their own history and their own memories.
C But I think that American culture, and the history of American culture, is so well-known now in Europe that
although there would be a different reading I think everybody was brought up on that, to a certain extent.
D Certainly the Brits! [Laughter]
P There's also something pathetic also, (grotesque). They are great things, you cannot take them seriously because there are little, strange, disgusting. If it were actors, you'd be like "Oh my god, Dan Graham has turned preachy" but because it's puppets you bring back this absolute 'uncomfort' with the narration.
D 'Discomfort', that would be like alienation of fact, a little bit.
S For me it was a political action as well, Bush had won the elections, and The Botanical Garden was a voting place, and it was also in the state of Florida. How do we reconcile our political disillusionment, everything we have been working, I mean, people that were active in the 60s, 70s, and my generation in the 80s and 90s, to get to where we have gotten, to go back to, I don't know, 70 years, or something, so for me it was a little bit of a trigger at that moment justbecause I knew also it was a voting place.
P Have to move to Canada.
D And of course Florida belongs to South Americans, or part of Florida anyway.
S We were going to do it there, remember?
T There's also a funny thing that I want to bring up, which is about the fact that the art world is fascinated with the idea of crossover, and it's been kind of my dream to be able to make art work that crossed out of the ivory tower and worked for people who have no knowledge of art, except that when you actually do it, then the art world is kind of scared by it, they can't really accept it.
P You become a populist!
T Yeah, in a way, if you do work with a bigger band, I have done something now with U2, in their current tour I did a collaboration with them where I projected into smoke, Bono is obsessed with human rights, So he has the UN human rights read in between in the two halves of the concert, but I don't even really talk about it to the people in the art world, because you just see people's faces go blank, you know, like what does that mean_
D What it means is you're dealing with U2 the way you're dealing with Starbucks; it's the same when you go to Starbucks. Starbucks is too middle of the road. So I think it's not only that, it's the middle-of-the-road-ness but I think_
T _but again I work also with Sonic Youth, maybe you think they're middle of the road too_ [Laughter]
T I recently did their video for a short tour that was about a week ago, where I did 2 hours of video for the entire set, but my point is what do you think about the idea of crossover, where things really actually get out of the art world?
P For me, if you look at the way the art world developed a little bit over the last 20 years. If your brand goes out of where it is supposed to go, then you have a lost product, and if you start to work with U2, the structure that support you economically is at loss because you're doing something where's there is nothing to sell, it's like highly democratic, Even within the utopia of the art world being avant-garde, the minute you reach this moment where it is actually democratic/populist, it's not about crossover anymore, it's about economy.
C That's why cinema has always had such a hard time within the art world, or film because it's democratic_
D I see being an artist a little like being an architect, you have certain things coming into the office and I think that's what Tony is thinking and you respond to them. But I also think public art was so dumb, including late Henry Moore was somewhat dumb, but when everything became public art, it became a challenge to try to work in that area. But the hardest thing of all is corporate art. We have a many artists doing corporate art but I think Tony is speaking about the public domain, another words, the larger public and I think artists after a certain point have to deal with that.
T _which this piece, I think, succeeds in doing. And I'm very curious about why, it seems, that the art world loves it. Like they said in Miami: "The art world loves puppets? what was it? "Puppet_"? "Art loves puppets"?
S "Art Loves Puppets" yeah, Sam came up with the Art Loves special events section few years ago; well it was a special event of Art Basel Miami Beach, boy they were courageous to give us the platform.
C I think it's partly because it has that structure, where it takes place within the white cube, but it has this very strong visual element. I think people are beginning to accept video projections so they'll understand that within that, and then it's very cool, live music now, so it's also entertaining all of a sudden, it operates on these different levels and the fact that it's in a white cube rather than in a black box, theater, it's an event that's almost within a gallery, so when you project your film in a gallery, everyone sees it, when you project it in a theater nobody sees it, and I think this is that kind of hybridity that brings it to the art audience, they would not go and see a more classic piece of puppetry or other things. It wouldn't even get into their head to do that probably. Yeah, and how can you go wrong?
T _about a dream that existed at one time in this country, and anyone who remembers that, in any way, shape or form is fascinated by it. That's what I love about this piece, is it that it kind of brings that dream back to life in such an interesting way, PEACE and LOVE, which is really why I wanted to work on it because I was a teenager during that time period and I have a very personal memories of it, I wasn't really in any way_ you know I was just beginning thinking about art and so forth, but there was so much happening and then it's just evaporated_ But you know what, I have a child now and I want him to feel peace and love to as a social unifying factor. In fact I want it too now. One of the scenes that I made for when sky is traveling around and gaining power comes from a real image that happened to me and my older sister in Vermont. We would hitch hike and collect bottles and cash then in for money to get a buzz (back then Vermont had a very hippie status and eco laws like getting a nickel for a bottle) and we were camping and we went to this strange camping ground which was near the high tension electrical wires and a river. We met up with this strange group of people who we spent the night with who clamed to have been living with Charlie Manson in California and when things got hot they came to Vermont. So we cooked and camped out with them and I ask if they thought Manson had done it (as he was on trial then) and they defended him to the end. We all went nude swimming in the river the next day-this was the first naked girl I saw ever-and I was glade the water was freezing! But the image of how close they were camping to the road and the power line somehow bothered me.
D So maybe it's another neo-60s project. In other words, everybody hates the 80s and 90s because it was so business oriented and we all have different nostalgia for that earlier period_but you were a square teenager. Is that what you're saying?
T No, no. No I wasn't, I was a hippie. I had long hair and I smoked pot once in a while. But that's just what everybody did. I loved to have people tell me stories of acid trips they took-it was like a fairy tale for me.
C We have to, Philippe and I, have to go to the train station, so we should probably end. But it was a fantastic discussion and I'm looking forward to getting together again_
P And the food was great. [Laughter]
C Yeah we can't tell you what the LSD was like yet, because we're still going up, you know_
T The only person I think we left out was Brecht. He is my man in terms of performance and theater; he had a theory about letting the audience know the mechanics of everything that was happening_
D _It's part of the alienation effect
T _and then that making them participants in it, making the experience richer, and making them part of it. I think that Sandra's idea of this combination, and Dan's idea of the combination of the three different things constantly shifting back and forth, this is the Brecht effect_
C _that's a great phrase: the Brecht effect.
T Well he had a name for it, the X-effect or something, the Estrangement effect.
All Thank you. Bye.