desperate optimists : " are we getting somewhere?" |
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e-mail discussion with Joe and Christine from desperate optimists and Ben Slater conducted between 21/4/02 and 28/4/02 Introduction desperate optimists is the name used by artists Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy. After coming to England from Dublin to study art and performance, they began desperate optimists in the early nineties as a touring performance company. Working the UK circuit of black box and art centre spaces with a sequence of highly idiosyncratic, provocative and richly entertaining pieces for several years. In 1998 they decided to call it a day as theatre practitioners but have continued pursuing their concerns in other media. Since then they have launched a website - www.desperateoptimists.com - which comprehensively documents their past and current projects. In 2001, they produced a CD-ROM entitled 'Stalking Memory' for the 'On Memory' issue of Performance Research. I first saw their work during my first year at University, and the risk-taking nature of the show Hope and its extremely fragile performance style, left a long-lasting impression. I finally met Joe and Christine several years later when they were giving a two-week residency as part of work on their piece Stalking Realness. The fortnight was by turns frustrating and illuminating. I won't forget their propensity to encourage spiralling discussion for days on end instead of practical work, and I won't forget their ability to break a sequence down to basics, to figure out what felt good, what wasn't working, and what needed to go further. Despite my staggeringly bad performance in the public show, we have remained in intermittent contact ever since. After they gave up live work, I was able to programme their first few short films at The Showroom cinema in Sheffield. When they returned to the Steel City for a BBC/Arts Council funded short we crossed paths again. In fact we were in pretty regular contact right up to the moment I flew out to Singapore, after which the following email exchange took place. Question One Let's make this thing more of a dialogue... (and it saves me asking all the questions in one shot)... Numero Uno. Since the touring show Play-boy in 1998 you have mainly concentrated your efforts on making work for the Internet. I know that you don't see yourselves as Internet artists, so can you talk about how this has happened and developed both in terms of pragmatics and the places this has led you conceptually and aesthetically? ben Answer One Hi Ben, Ok let's go for the dialogue and see where it ends up. Let's do them in short punchy segments... oh yeah, went to see Agnes Varda's 'The Gleaners and I' - fantastic!!!! ( http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/current/gleaners/gleaners.html ) You're quite right, we don't see ourselves as Internet artists in the strict sense (Joshua Davis - www.praystation.com; Yugo Nakamura - www.yugop.com; Vuk Cosic - www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/) of the word. Nor indeed are we simply using the Internet as a distribution mechanism. For example, when we make work that is distributed via the Internet we make that work with the technical (limitations) and aesthetic (implications) concerns of the Internet very much in mind (e.g. www.map50.com and www.minutebyminute.co.uk) Going back to distribution, there's no doubting the fact a major liberation for us has been the distribution possibilities offered up by the Internet. The notion that we (by which we mean any artist) can control an entire process from the beginning to the end without having to negotiate with an institution or organisation is significant. Going back further again to your point about how we segued from live work to media based work. Actually the word 'segue' is quite important as we feel it to be more a segue rather than a break! Afterall, we're still, to our minds at least, concerned with the same things both with regard to form (performance; narrative structure) and content (poverty; urban space; survival strategies and coping mechanisms). Where has this led us? Curiously, the contexts we find ourselves in now are much more diverse and interesting to us than the 'contexts' that performance led us to. Perhaps by foregrounding the digital aspects of our work we've invariably found ourselves hanging out where the more interesting and current cultural and social debates are happening. Performance, at least the end of it we were involved in, is very hermetically sealed and actually quite academic (and apparently pleased with itself in this regard). We find that very uninteresting and dangerously inward looking (it can be a very small gene pool the academic world). Much better, we think, to be developing moving image and digitally based initiatives which have a relationship to communities both on-line and especially local and real. Did we say 'real'?, we meant outside of formal institutions. FOR NOW _ OVER AND OUT_TOO TIRED RUNNING OUT OF STEAM_YOUR MOVE Question Two hi guys, saw a fantastic short film yesterday called 15, made by a Singaporean director...a highly aestheticised documentary about serious teenage drop-outs. Really worth seeing. but anyway. Certainly the 'live art scene' in the UK is operating in a very rarefied margin and I completely understand why you wanted to break out of that circuit (http://art.ntu.ac.uk/liveart/). But the thing that marked so much of your live work was your unique presence as performers, the way you filtered material through those live 'personas'. I'm now finding it easier to look at the work you're putting up online and forget about you as 'performers'. But I've now met people who only know you through your films and online projects. With them I have found myself describing with some nostalgia the things you used to do onstage. I suppose the questions are - do you think about your 'presence' anymore when you're producing an online project, the way you would when making a live show? and a supplementary... and are you interested in playing with the live or real-time aspects/possibilities of the online world? ben Answer Two Hi Ben, (send us some photos of you in Singapore!) REGARDING YOUR QUESTIONS: No, we never think about our presence in making online work. By this we're assuming you mean our physical live presence. Oddly though, when we think of our presence we really think of our voices. This we very much think of. I guess this is more than our writing voice (or is it?) but the attitude we impart through the work. So if you go to, http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/shootinglive/desperateoptimists/ - which has just gone live today on the BBC website - it's clear that we're not performing in it but we're convinced that we're present both in the use of words and even how the film is performed. That is far more important to us than literally our (Irish) voices. You might refer to this voice as a kind of hallmark. I think this is very feasible and evident in many directors work. Regarding the other point, we're not in the least bit interested (not yet anyway as far as our work goes) in the real-time aspects of the online world - we'll leave that to the gamers and the geeks - actually most examples of it are, at best, irritating and at worst, technically disastrous. There are some notable exceptions, we loved Big Brother and once watched Craig brush his teeth for 15 minutes late one night (I should point out we were totally pissed) and recently for TV Swansong we saw this live broadcast some bloke did in Peru which we also liked. What are we saying we love the live aspect of it all - but again not creatively, more as consumers. talk soon joe and christine Question Three hi j and c Marianne has a digital camera which I'll try and dig out - we'll see how it goes. REGARDING YOUR ANSWERS... Watching your film on the BBC site, I was struck from the opening images at how 'authored' it was - how it related right back to your live work - but I think that sense of care and deliberation over the image and performance would come across to anyone who sees it. Can you give me a few concrete examples of how you make that kind of 'presence' felt, and it needn't just be about the films? and another related supplementary. On map50, how did you feel about working on those episodes not as desperate optimists, but as individuals? Ben Answer Three Hi Ben, yes, dig out that camera and start snapping (or is that documenting?). Yes, working solo, as it were, was an odd one for map50 - although we did that for another project in Arizona as well. It's strange when we do that because the process just isn't put through the rinser in the same way. What we really enjoy is the process we put material through together. It's very much a hybrid then. You might be best placed to view our contributions to map50 and then compare and contrast but maybe they're not so different as after 20 years of being together a lot of osmosis has gone on - I'm sure you know of Flann O' Brien's book The Third Policeman and his thoughts on the transference of atoms from one thing to another thing? For example, a postman can, overtime, transfer his human atoms into the bikes atoms to the bike he cycles and vice versa. After many many years the bike can contain half human atoms and equally the human can contain up to half bike atoms. A dead give away, is an elderly postmen not being able to stand up straight but always needing to lean against something for fear they might fall over. Equally, with the bike, you'll note many old bikes leave traces of bread-crumbs around the wheel! We're purposely and clumsily avoiding your point but find ourselves with little to say other than it's good to do once in a while but I think our working together is where it feels and is at its best. As for any substantive difference - hard to say. Regarding the other point. I think we know what you mean by 'authored' style. Because things have to be very very static (when they're video images anyway) to stream very crisply - you are forced (or is that a decision you want to embrace?) to make things very contrived looking e.g. quite still and unnatural in their movement. We like the potential humour in all of this. Somehow it seemed to suit the very mannered approach of the very middle-class couple being held at gunpoint and being quizzed over their marriage, wealth, etc. Also, this is heightened by the odd tempo of it all - very still, stilted, static. We like that. Actually, because our main emphasis is on moving image based work - we are more comfortable with it in terms of making 'authored' 'nuanced' 'humorous' 'provocative' work. Although we can technically author in various (software) packages we really are quite limited and therefore cannot fully express ourselves in say Flash as much as Final Cut Pro. This must come across as being quite techie - by it we mean that one has to be able to master the medium to begin the process of making more subtle, complex work. The same is true, of course, for live performance. As you know we studied that for many years and made countless performances and so there is a technical understanding of that form - equally but only very recently, we're beginning to feel more and more confident with the tools we've decided to place at the centre of our work i.e. camera and computer! That's the way in which we're trying to make our 'presence' felt - by understanding and manipulating these tools in the way we want them to go. But isn't this the way with anyone's work which is distinctive? Lynch (www.davidlynch.com) has a very special way of directing performers, of using time, of hiding the storyline, that takes an enormous amount of skill simply on the level of technicality. Creativity and technical understanding are more crucial in film/moving image work than say live performance. We say this not because we believe that live performance is any less technical but that it is infinitely less forgiving in work for the camera. ok too tired - wanna stop! need….water……must……sleep….. Question Four Yo, that was a long answer...what happened to punchy segments? I have camera now but this leads me to... a change of tack. Would like to go back to your point about being more interested in real, local communities and places in some of your recent work. How might this relate to all the technology that you are embracing...you persuade community groups that you are making a sci-fi movie (www.londonframed.com), you detail the minutiae of urban existence within a web project, you ask artists to relook at their surroundings via camera and then website (www.minutebyminute.com). What is your interest in places and locations at this point? and another question to think about... have you abandoned liveness altogether? in your last answer you talk about the way shots are held in films-made-for-streaming, so there is an inevitable theatricality about that. The way Lynch and so many other directors play with time does emphasise the live moment in front of the camera. It seems that this is what you are more interested in now. I couldn't imagine you making a 'live' website which streamed real-time action or regularly posted up stills from a live event. My sense is that you are now far more interested in more subtle forms of liveness, and that one reason for leaving performance alone is that despite documentation you want to move away from the ephemeral nature of that kind of work? OK...see you tomorrow. ben Answer Four Hi Ben, Yes, you're right about this interest in local areas or communities. Now we're sure this might be explained in a rather psychoanalytical way in that we are Irish people living in the UK. It's not our home and so we're using art and in specific technology to work through that anxiety. There may be a grain of truth to that but you may recall before we left Ireland to come to Art College - we were both heavily involved in the community arts scene there. A lot of that work was also around community and housing projects where the initiatives were often looking at the immediate locale that people worked and lived in and making art-works about that. This is, of course, familiar turf. Scorcese is at his best on the home soil of Little Italy or at least the Italian Community (a few exceptions to that but generally speaking he's making work about what he knows best) or even (because we watched it last night) Chris Petit's Radio On (http://www.sting.com/filmography/films/stradion.html) looking at the road that joins London to Bristol (presumably something he's travelled a lot). When you're making live work you're constantly travelling and not really engaging with any context other than the black box one. How many times did we (and this is echoed by others also) travel to a city and just do the gig and go on to another one. Never really getting a sense of where we were or what the local terrain was like. It's an important thing we were missing out on there. Except in the case of residencies and these were always much more pleasurable partly because you felt you were more engaged with that town, city, community, people. You know what they say LOCATION. LOCATION. LOCATION. We love locations and location shots and at the moment we're interspersing these e-mails trying to book flights to Andros, Greece and using the Internet to give us a sense of the location we'll hopefully take a break in. The photos people take of their apartments to rent and here's us looking at them weighing their aesthetic value. Not sure where that's going... We're on a panel next week with Liz LeCompte (http://www.thewoostergroup.org) to discuss with her the relationship between liveness and technology. Not sure what our attitude will be for the discussion but we're going to give not the form a hard time but the culture around it. In many respects we still love the form - we had a ball directing that show up in Lancaster in February. But the culture around it…..oh brother!!! On the other hand - yes, we want to make the elements in our live work (sound, moving image, photography) more central. A by-product of this is that we're very aware of the product (antithetical to ephemerality) orientated nature of this direction. It's now about videos, DVDs, websites, 35mm prints - potentially buyable products, although we haven't gone there yet. We told you about that Best Buy anecdote (Ben's Note: Joe and Christine have been approached by a online arts site in the US about creating an American version of MAP50 which contains e-commerce links to buy the equipment that was used to make the site). enough for now - are we getting somewhere? talk soon love j+c |
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