Between Art and Music

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard are artists who explore notions of authenticity, re-enactment and recollection in relation to live events and performance. They have made many works that examine the meaning of live and recorded music, such as ‘A Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide’ at the ICA in 1998 and ‘Silent Sound’ at the Liverpool Biennial in 2006, and are currently working on a series of video pieces for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Iain and Jane are showing ‘Kiss my Nauman’, ‘Walk with Nauman’ and their ‘Precious Little Series’ at Broadway Media Centre in Nottingham until June 11 as part of the Digital Arts programme. These works were accompanied by a talk and screening on May 15. Whilst Iain and Jane were in Nottingham Fay Nicolson joined Matt Davenport, curator of Digital Broadway, and the artists themselves to talk about their past and present projects.

F.N: I was going to ask about when you first begin to explore popular music in your art works, but it’s become very clear today that since you started working together music has been a main concern of your work.

J.P: I think the music that we love and used as a couple to communicate with each other when we first got together also allowed us to understand or articulate the possible relationship between a performance, object, or piece of expression and a viewer, an audience or receiver. I think that music has that relationship sorted out so much, it’s considered, played with and experimented with, it’s at the forefront of things much more than it ever is in art.

F.N: Your early works, such as ‘The The Jesus and The Mary Chain’ and ‘Why Can’t I Be You?’ stem from and focus on your own personal experiences and obsessions with music. How do later large scale re-enactments relate to these earlier pieces?

J.P: I think you start with yourself because it’s what’s available to you and what you have in limitless supply, your memory, your stories, your thoughts, your anecdotes, your hopes. It’s the simple thing of that’s what you’ve got to play with.

I.F: I think it’s what a lot of people describe. Novelists, for example, often talk about their first novel being very autobiographical. You write that, and if it’s successful in some way you suddenly find yourself faced with writing the next book and you realised you’ve blown everything you’ve got. It’s the same with records. Many people talk about their first record being musically and lyrically self-referential. And again, if that works and you’re lucky enough to make another record then you’re suddenly thinking ‘what else is there to say, what else is there to work with’? I think that’s pretty much our experience.

F.N: I’d like to move on to talk about your ‘Precious Little Series’ that’s now being shown at Broadway. You’ve made many works that explore the meaning of the mix tape, how have these works evolved since ‘I’ve Built My World Around You’ made in 1995? I think it relates to what you have just said in relation to moving on from the personal in order to make something more objective.

J.P: I think you’re absolutely right. As objects they’ve developed, now our only interaction with them tends to be through video. To begin with we very interested in the object itself as a kind of sculptural souvenir, they’re souvenirs of relationships, time, people and places. But these days we are less interested in the potential of sculpture, or even of much 2D work. It’s very much video and live work that we are drawn to. I think it’s also changed culturally because the landscape in which we consume has changed so dramatically. So now, talking about mix tapes is a nostalgic thing. In 2001 we made the first of the ‘Precious Little Series’ and at that point CD’s were obviously around..

I.F: ...Yes, at that point people had started burning CD’s for each other and I have a feeling it was just before the first iPod was out. The way that you can manipulate music and playlists digitally is so easy now; you can have iTunes on your computer, everyone has ten thousand songs, there’s software that will work out tunes that go well together or have got the same beats per minute. There’s all these automatic, smart playlists, and (I don’t mean this in a wistful way, just in a practical way) it has taken away the craft of compiling a tape. I, and many other people, have spent hours and hours, days and days just trying to piece together that perfect pair of 45 minute sequences, to the point when you’ve scrapped the whole thing and started again. You’ve had to physically listen to records just to find that right song or something the right length. You don’t have to do that anymore.

J.P: ...and that you are a live participant in that ritual, with your finger on the pause button. It took a lot of time, it actually took a lot of space as well, you’d have your records out and there would be piles of stuff all over the floor. And then you start looking for pieces of spoken word, so that you can start the whole thing with a bit of something from a film or TV programme.

M.D: Being a DJ I have that thing as well, of planning it and having a meticulous nature over the whole thing. I love that.

J.P: Yes, that sense of being a DJ is really pertinent because you go on a journey with it. You’d often choose a song because of how the beginning of it sounded but in the process of recording it to tape you’d hear the end of it. So the next song is always chosen on the end of the song before. Whereas, when you think about compiling an iTunes these days, you make your play list folder, you start dumping songs into it, and then you start ordering them, but its dead easy to listen to the first ten seconds and the last ten seconds. You don’t have to live through the whole thing; there is no sense of going on that journey. I know we sound wistful and nostalgic, but it has changed. The video pieces we have made acknowledge that. When we first started we were like ‘bring the mix tape with you’, but now it’s more about the track listing, about the sense of it being a collection of songs rather than rather than an actual, physical mixtape. Our decision was not to go down that nostalgic longing of a past art. But to keep talking about the thing that the music stands for, and the way that you use it to say something to somebody that you can’t work out how to say yourself.

I.F: I think the songs still mean the same, they’re just used in a different way.

F.N: Mentioning the DJ, this relates to a quote by JJ Charlesworth in ‘Anonymous Lovers: The Public and the Personal in Anyone Else isn’t You’, 2005. ‘A mix tape is the materialization of a person’s vocabulary of songs, their collection given new shape and meaning as a form of language, their own language, a song sentence made out of other people’s song words, that reverses our relationship to idols’. I’m interested in the way Charlesworth is implying that the creation of the mix tape gives an individual back his agency, making him a producer, rather than a passive consumer, and one could liken him to a DJ, editor or curator. Do you agree with that definition of the mix tape maker; as someone who is reclaiming a part of the commercial music industry for themselves?

J.P: For me there’s no sense of reclamation because you never don’t own it. What’s so different between music and art is that the moment the music is put out there it is immediately owned by somebody else. It immediately starts to soundtrack the life of the people that listen to it. To those ends you already claim it. With music you don’t have to bother about what the accurate intention of the author is (the song writer) you don’t even have to read or know the lyrics. I think the act of compiling propels you further into the act of being a curator or a DJ. But we do that so naturally, just think about the way you get up in the morning and what you choose to listen to, the things you put on because you’re feeling a bit crap and the sort of things you put on because you’re going out.

I.F: It’s become a very contemporary thing, hasn’t it? These days everybody’s a curator.

F.N: I’d like to move on now and talk about your live art projects. In discussing your re-enactments at the ICA, Vivienne Gaskin says that ‘One of the elements common to all the figures Iain and Jane choose is their kind of influence on the course of pop music – a rather raw and working class kind of music and following (from Morrissey to The Who)’ (‘The Second Coming’, 2003). I’d like to ask if you agree with that definition of the bands you choose and whether you think your work has a certain relevance to a working class public, (if that definition of class still exists)?

I.F: Hmm, It’s either a bit late or a bit early in the day, I’m not sure which. That’s a ‘three pints into the night’ question.

J.P: Yes, it definitely is.

I.F: I have all sorts of issues with the idea of class and pop music. It’s very easy to simplify but it’s actually a very fluid thing. Things move so seamlessly that John Lennon can be described as a working class hero whilst being a nice middle-class boy who went to grammar school. Or even someone like Bowie, where the whole concept of glam is in one way a great working class movement, but at the same time Bowie was imbedded in a very middle-class British art school tradition, it’s kind of meaningless in the end.

J.P: And the kind of culture that he was drawing from, from mime to cut-and-paste poetry, again it’s from a different ‘class’. I don’t know, ‘class’ seems like a very odd...

F.N: Yes, the reason I asked that question was that Vivienne Gaskin has mentioned ‘class’ rather than ‘high and low culture’, which is something that you might be used to discussing in relation to your works.

I.F: In terms of Viv’s wider practice as a curator and a commissioner I think it’s more important to her; her ideologies and thinking, than it ever was to us. The first project she commissioned was the Smiths project and I guess that it comes into more relevance when you’re talking about the Smiths.

F.N: I think your music re-enactments have all taken place at the ICA, with the exception of the first Smiths Piece?

I.F: No, most of them have but we’ve done a project at Bluecoat in Liverpool and in Belgium, but at that time the ICA were a huge supporter and that gave us a lot of opportunities to work there, so certainly a lot of them were.

J.P: You meet people throughout your working life where really nice things happen and Viv Gaskin was a really lucky thing for us (and for her) because she was the Membership Officer at the time and she’d never put on a event, but she found a way of getting the keys to the theatre! We were her first event and it was quite a landmark piece for us to do that. I think that relationship was amazingly formative for us, both of us. Being one of the first British artists to look at re-enactment, it then led her to other artists who were thinking about it, and to pursue that as a cultural form.

F.N: I was going to ask whether the ICA have influenced your practice, but the way you talk about it, it’s almost as if you’ve influenced the practice of the ICA. Because after that they commissioned Jo Mitchell to do the Einsturzende Neubauten re-enactment and worked with S. Mark Gubb, it seems that it’s a two-way ‘relationship’, if that’s the right word. 

I.F: I guess it has been, in an ideal world that’s what you’d want to get out of everything you do. Most projects start with a dialogue, between artists and an institution, between artists and a commissioning or funding body, and when you’re working on something for so long in an intense way you often have a lot of dialogue at the beginning. Then everything gets set in motion and you’re just following a process, you get to the end, you deliver the end result and the dialogue drifts away. I think what was so great about working with Viv and the ICA is that the dialogue was allowed to continue throughout a project.

J.P: I think for me, the best art is always site specific, and that’s not to say that it needs to utterly engrain itself in the history, culture, space and time of a particular site, but that in some way it’s responsive to the audience that goes to that site, it’s responsive to the physical space, presence and architecture of that site, and the most successful projects are. I think that the best art and the best artists should reveal back to the institution or museum something about itself; they should be able to unearth or uncover something about their place in culture.

F.N: I find ‘File under Sacred Music’ very interesting because it seems more problematic than other re-enactments as it involved asking mentally ill people to form the audience of a re-enacted Cramps gig. Why were you drawn to that particular moment in music history?

J.P: There are lots of reasons. There’s something about that document, it has an aura to it, not just in itself but as a cultural icon. When Iain was at college he saw it alongside the then banned ‘A Clockwork Orange’; the two would be screened as a double bill. So it has this odd moment in culture and history. It’s infamous and has a reputation of its own.

I.F: It became almost mythic; it was something you heard rumours about. It became one of those things that you just had to see, when you are growing up there are certain films and albums you have to see, and they begin to alter the way you filter your vision of the world.

J.P: They’re like shared landmarks between a group of different people or peers.

I.F: And they’re passed down from one generation to another. That was certainly my musical education.

M.D: But has it changed? It seems more ephemeral now with things such as You Tube.

I.F: I don’t know, we haven’t got kids, but it still seems that the older kids get into something and pass it down. And this film’s very much part of that culture, it’s something the older kids would be whispering about and eventually we would get to sneak into the back of a room in the Art College with a projector and see it.

J.P: I think the dissemination of cultural artefacts was a lot slower then. Now it can be instantaneous because of YouTube (for example) and it can spread so far, so fast. Whereas then, you had to organise a physical place and time to be, and in doing so, just as in being the first person in your peer group to send round a particularly good YouTube clip, there’s a status in being that person; in being the first one aware of something. Also, within that performance (and I don’t know how to be particularly eloquent or articulate about this) there is a proximity between authentic or raw musical expression and madness or mental health issues. Those two things have had a really weird, convoluted and difficult relationship or connection. You might say ‘the audience was going wild’, ‘the performer was going mad’, if you think about the terminology you use.

I.F: That’s something that we talked a lot about with the people that eventually formed our audience; this idea that the collective environment of a rock gig heavily borrows language from mental illness; ‘the audience is crazy, this is a mental gig’, and all of that overlap. It’s weird that in the context of music this language is privileged, it’s a way of expressing something positive and visceral. Whereas, in the context of mental health it’s the exact opposite; being crazy is not a good thing, going mental is not a desirable thing, in society terms. These things occupy very opposing positions.

J.P: The sense of the uninhibited self in the context of an audience or performance is a desirable thing.

I.F: But it’s not what people want to see on the top deck of a bus.

F.N: Tom McCarthy, in discussing the talk at the ICA after the event, has said that ‘It was a disaster. Rock-n-roll train spotters wanted to know whether Iain and Jane had used the '81 Beta version of the Napa video or the re-released '84 VHS; art theory people wanted them to declare conceptual positions; sociologists wanted a definition of madness. None of them could talk to one another’, (‘Nests, Puke, Frames and Baby Faces’ catalogue for ‘This much is certain’ 2004). You mentioned earlier that failure is good, so do you find it an exciting thing or a negative thing that your work occupies all of these different spaces?

J.P: I thought it was dead exciting! It was really nerve racking. We put ourselves up for that discussion. The piece was made on a closed set without other people in there but we bought in a number of journalists because we thought that it would be an interesting experiment to understand how that process was witnessed. We also knew that what we were doing could have been perceived as exploitative and we needed somebody else to objectively witness and document it. In a more public way we decided that on the evening after we filmed we would open the set for a discussion. We knew that it was only at that point that the issue of exploitation could exist. The moment we made it into a degraded document that went on display in galleries the re-enactment and the act of involving an audience that were from mental health organisations would be lost in the story of the work, they would just be a factor or element.

I.F: Those conversations were so exciting for us. It was scary but exciting to be able to sit with these people and watch the original tape and say ‘What do you think of this? What do you think is going on, why is it going on? What do you think of the idea of what we want to do with it? How does it reflect on you, or us? Are we just being completely exploitative?’ At one point Viv spoke to one of the more mainstream mental health charities and they said ‘You’re just trying to rent a busload of mentals, this is exploitative, don’t ever phone us again’. And that’s great, when you’re sat in your office in central London and have just spoken on behalf of an entire group of people that share very little apart from perhaps a particular mental health issue. But maybe it’s more interesting to hear what those people have got to say for themselves? We met a lot of people, had a lot of conversations, and there wasn’t agreement. In a way we thought that those voices weren’t necessarily going to get heard unless there was some sort of platform.

J.P: ...unless we stopped and allowed that platform to happen. It became part of the process of making the work.

I.F: It was a bit of a disaster though, wasn’t it?

J.P: It was a disaster because we couldn’t speak. The moment we did somebody else would defend us, so whilst other people were attacking us, there was no scope for us to talk at all. There were people who had such strong feelings about it; some of those were from the art background, some of those were the people who had participated in it, who felt so furious that people were speaking on behalf of them. They were getting out of their chairs and going ‘What? You can’t speak on behalf of me’. In terms of Tom’s position as the Chair it probably was a disaster, because you could pull no structure into it whatsoever. 

F.N: It sounds like an event in itself to have witnessed. Relating to the art re-enactments, well I say ‘re-enactments’ but they’re not really re-enactments, they could be ‘re-appropriations’.

J.P: ‘Re-workings’ is what we always call them.

F.N: Some of these pieces are now being shown at Broadway and I’m interested in what you think the difference is between re-working a music performance and re-working an art performance, and whether you make this work for a different audience?

I.F: Yes, very much.

J.P: Yes, we didn’t make the first one until we were showing in a commercial gallery. It’s been a peculiar decision and it’s often been other people’s (curators) decisions to take them into more public spaces like museums. And when they do that we’re always keen to ensure that there’s a communication about what the work is, not just an expectation. Or it’s communicated that you don’t need to know what the original is in order to be able to get it. Otherwise there is a pretentiousness, even just having the word ‘Acconci’ in the name of a piece.

F.N: I’m very intrigued as to why you worked with young R n’ B acts. You’ve combined performance art and R n’ B, a mixture of high and low culture again, and you’ve always worked with rock bands before, so why the R n’ B and Rap?

I.F: I think the grain that got that entire line of thought started was the gallery talk we were asked to do on the ‘Video Acts’ show at the ICA and seeing the Acconci piece, ‘Walk Over’, and immediately seeing that so many elements of that piece (the camera angle, the corridor and the delivery to camera) had this connection to urban music videos.

F.N: Do you think it’s because they are quite confrontational?

I.F: Yes, I think that’s part of it. I think that rap, R n’ B, those kind of genres, tend to have an ‘I’m talking to you’ kind of delivery. In a way, rock music performance tends to be directed a more general audience.

J.P: I’m talking to you, as in the stadium.

I.F: Or it’s talking in a very direct and intimate way, it’s a love song. Which is very different to the way rap music works, there is a notional audience of one and it is very targeted.

J.P: ...and personally narrated. There’s that sense of the personal, singular delivery. We just saw so many parallels that we had to give it a try. It’s not an area of music that we’re fans of or know particularly well, we just thought that it was linguistically right.

I.F: And at that point of time, that was where more innovation in music videos was probably happening, with directors like Chris Cunningham and Mark Romanek pushing some barriers that a lot of people making rock videos weren’t so bothered about.

J.P: What’s the Jay-Z video? ‘99 Problems’. That piece in particular uses the language of reportage photography, and there are sequences in that where he is in front of the estate and he’s talking to camera that we were really wowed by, just the simple directness of how one considers the camera. We’re always looking at how people consider the camera and that might be why we are more influenced by television than we are by film, because film tends to step back and consider the picture and the picturesque. You talk about ‘cinematic’ experience or landscapes; it creates a large world. Whereas in good television the way in which the camera is considered is very much the hole in the wall, that sense of the box in the corner, that psychical transportative thing.

F.N: What do you think you have lost or gained through being commissioned to make a piece of work for an artist like Nick Cave?

J.P: It’s only gained. ‘Engaged’, more than ‘Commissioned’, He was like ‘do you want to do this? What would you do with it?’ That was his question. All the time in the short period that we’ve worked with Nick (and we’ve done quite a lot with him in that time) it’s always about a dialogue.

F.N: Is it a quite a collaborative process?

J.P: He lets you make your own decisions.

I.F: I guess it starts in quite a collaborative way and there’s a lot of dialogue around; ‘What would you do? Have you got any ideas? I was thinking about this’ and then it becomes ‘right, go off and do it then’. I think where the ‘Dig Lazarus Dig’ music video came out of is that the point of music videos has changed so much. The number of outlets... MTV doesn’t even play music videos any more. Nick is a very astute and aware person who understands that those things are changing and who saw the possibilities through new technologies, through digital video; that there was the possibility to do a lot more with a lot less. I think what he was interested in was taking a budget and instead of making one promo video for one single that no-one is ever going to see because those things don’t have an outlet any more asking ‘can we do something visually interesting and creative with the same amount of money?’ The séance videos were the first thing we did. They were intended to be these little viral ‘one-line jokes’ for YouTube that begin to tease the idea of the album coming. I think we had a plan to make three videos and we ended up making four out of a budget that was there to make one promo video. I think that was something Nick was keen to try.

J.P: Yes, he likes working in different ways, and he just likes working a lot all the time. I’ve never known anyone with such a phenomenal work ethic, pace and progression and it’s always about what’s next and what’s new. He seems to rarely look backwards.

F.N: When I first started watching ‘Do You Love Me Like I Love You’; it seemed like a documentary that could have been made by anyone at the BBC. But then I got pulled into the fact that it seems to relate to your earlier wok in that it’s about obsession and being a fan. Nick Cave isn’t on there, there are lots of people who have had different experiences and it diverges off into their lives at certain points. Was it your intention to make it as much about being a fan as it was about Nick Cave?

J.P: From the outset, it was our intention not to speak to Nick because his voice is too much of an authority in the middle of it. The moment he says something it’s perceived as more right than anything anybody else could say. We use the language of documentary, so we borrow heavily from that language. However, I think we make subtle but potent shifts in the way in which it is presented: We often let people finish each other’s sentences, we pile people on top of each other in a way that would never happen in television, we don’t tell you who people are and we get people to look at the camera, to look at you, and that’s quite a rare thing. We often leave out anything that explains too much. It’s funny because my dad worked for television for thirty years and always when he sees our work he’s like ‘where’s the establishing shot?’ There are real conventions of TV making that he’s like...

I.F: ‘Where’s the music?’

J.P: ‘yes, it would be lovely, you could be playing the song underneath whilst their talking about it’, and I think for us it’s often what’s not there. Just these slips and shifts that haven’t yet been adopted by television, that as an artist you’re free to do. The first one is closer to documentary in that we had to grapple with the Birthday Party as a concept because you can’t talk about the first album without understanding that in some way it had come out of Nick’s previous band and was in part a reaction from what had been happening. But it’s also in  part a continuation of what had been happening, so there’s more of a sense of the factual at the beginning of that one. 

I.F: ...of story telling...

J.P: But then it topples into that sense of weaving through the songs and it being a mixed up mess of facts, theory, opinions and then memories. For me the best thing that somebody could say about those is that they couldn’t stop watching them because it’s like you can’t take a breath until the end, that’s the kind of pace we’re trying to get.

FN: I saw your recent piece ‘Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work’ at the BFI last week. It’s obviously very different to what you are doing with Nick Cave. It’s technologically very ambitious. I’m not sure what you set out to achieve but do you think you have reached your aims?

I.F: I’m not sure I knew what they were, in some cases.

J.P: The more feedback we get the more we’ll know. There are certain things we do know; we wanted it to immerse you, we wanted to place you in the middle of something so that you become, not part of it but central to it, so that it plays out around you. We’ve not yet had the chance to work with a sense of theatre, so that piece was our first experimentation (despite the fact that it was at the British Film Institute) it’s more an experiment with the language of theatre. 

I.F: What ‘Radio Mania’ did allow us to do that we haven’t done before is go into a project with a lot of loose ends, a lot of openness we usually try to avoid.

F.N: It’s very rich. I sat in there for the whole loop and a bit more and when I came out it started to sink in. It’s definitely immersive.  Something that was really interesting (and you mentioned theatre) was that there was a constant paradoxical play between the real and the staged, the live and the recorded. And in that way it seems to fits in with your previous work but move somewhere else exciting and uncertain. Earlier today you mentioned that the rehearsal was scripted.  Why did you want to have a scripted rehearsal rather than a free rehearsal or alternatively, a play?

J.P: It’s a really good question and it’s a really hard question to answer. We were all working to the same script and made changes to it when we were rehearsing the rehearsal. We did two rehearsals of the rehearsal, and then we did the scripted rehearsal twice and filmed it and used the second of the two.

I.F: Essentially, it is like many things we have done; it is a performance for the camera, and even the bits that appear to take the form of a rehearsal were not a rehearsal, they were a performance. It needed a structure. A genuine rehearsal of those five scenes wouldn’t have played out anything like what was on tape. I’m not sure how interesting it would have been to see the real rehearsal.

J.P: I think the word you used was great: ‘uncertainty’. There needed to be a sense of uncertainty about how scripted it was, and some of the scripted real bits I think you can tell. Some of it comes across as it wouldn’t naturally happen; things are said a bit louder or in a certain direction, people never walk further than a certain point toward the camera, which is in itself a very false situation. And it was one we had to grapple with as the directors, stood in the middle of it; that we never go towards the actors and they never come towards us despite the fact that the whole thing is a dialogue and a discussion. There were some incredibly false elements that needed to be in place for the piece to psychically maintain the sense of extended reality once it moved into installation. You then started to work around that and say ‘you can only exit the piece in these places’ and the floor had a serious set of markings about where you could and couldn’t walk.

I.F: I suppose in that way it owes more to theatre than to the screen.

J.P: Well certainly the live experience and the live event.

Iain & Jane's work is on display at Broadway until 11th June. If you want to find out more about their work, NVA recommends a look at their comprehensive website.