Interview with Lisa Samuels

Light Glyphs 7:

Lisa Samuels

Lisa Samuels is a poet whose work diversely explores and inhabits a plurality of form and impulse: essays, sound art, collaboration, performance, film, theory, philosophy, and the continual intermingling of these fields in ways that energetically refute their distinction. From LETTERS (Meow Press, 1996) to Symphony for Human Transport (Shearsman, 2017), in the fourteen collections in-between and through editing a recent anthology (A TransPacific Poetics, Litmus Press, 2017), Lisa Samuels engagement with poetry has always upheld a challenging and tireless ability to question and invent. Although it is facile to suggest any one defining characteristic in a poetics that prioritizes the mutable and mobile, it is in the confluence of body and language and the possibility to embody (or be embodied), that Samuels often returns. Syntax becomes a bending gristle of feeling, words are willed into somatic friction, and the page opens itself (as a self and its dissolution) to reacting anatomies of experience. Her poetry is complex, felt, and philosophically realised (without resolution) in the sensory and tactile proof of living, as that living pursues and loses grip and gulp of where and when to ground, in language, what living is.

I want to begin by asking you about the writhingly glorious epic of skin, breath and water that is Tender Girl (Dusie, 2015)…taking Lautréamont’s proto-surrealist Les Chant de Maldoror as inspiration, you imagine the being that results from Maldoror’s tumbling sexual tryst with a shark…the consequence being titular ‘Tender Girl’: an amphibious shark/girl hybrid that arrives on the shores of mankind and spends the novelistic prose-poem’s entirety navigating patriarchal and linguistic resistance…exploring, experiencing and encountering…There is so, so much in this book that (before going any further) I would like to echo Carol Watts’ blurb in seeing the logic of calling it ‘a classic for our time’ and urge anyone reading this interview, to READ Tender Girl post-haste!

The interaction between textual and corporeal, somatic and syntactic, drives much of the book…to choose one moment (of many) that switches between a linguistic naming and a physiological functioning:

The body emanates salt perfumes, tiny reeking.

She turns on soft light gets the encyclopedia images and begins

naming her parts: Sisyphus Amanda regicide wisdom serpent clam

pennyroyal bread Roland wingspan commoner fence.

This transitioning back and forth between language and bodily phenomenology often exists in your poetry, I was wondering if you could say a bit about this fascination?

Thank you for your interested words about Tender Girl. I feel happy for the intensity of making that book that it can have the kind of committed reading you bring to it. And I think these transitionings you point out are imperative for me; they are the way things are in my experience. I breathe language or am breathed through by language, which yet also morphs in relation to non-lingual feeling and geometric cognizance and diaphanous imbuing. I experience my body intensely and it erupts or soothes itself by way of language. So yes, the transitions go at least “both” ways.

And of course language is its bodies: its sounds, spaces, displacement, stretching letters, ink-shapes, tongues of fire and disdain, clusters of words or letters together (or solo swishes), wishes for ears, electric (digital) trembling, wet electric (mental) happenings, wishes to grow differentials (extensions, new forms) in relation to itself such as with human bodies. So it’s volitional, and that wilfulness is part of the social nature of language.

At the same time languages operate always between at least two points or beings, object-events, persons, person-to-text-to-person, so the transitionings you perceive in my writing are always communicative in the broadest sense. Communication as attitude, sense-markers, message transfer, touch, invitation, threat, distance, closeness, and more.  

And bodies have languages: exhalations and imprecations having to do with blood, marrow, breath, holes, also communication with gestures, expressions, actions, also movement-shapes of the limbs and torso and head: all languages. Every gesture for me is a language in relation with the potentially expressible. So the relation is I suppose dialectical, though I don’t know that I have thought of it that way precisely before, much as I live in dialectics.

Are there any writers, films or music that you turn to for inspiration, or in research, when considering the poetics of phenomenology…or for a phenomenology of poetics?

This is an interesting question for me at this point because it shows me that I have not been thinking recently so much about phenomenology per se in terms of reading philosophical works ascribed to it.

And yet I think the question is about how I am reading things rather than perhaps what I am reading, thinking of reading as viewing and experiencing also.

In the past I have liked Merleau-Ponty and Michel de Certeau for helping me think about how I encounter thinking and object-events, yet de Certeau wouldn’t be considered a phenomenologist. Latterly I have been recurrently obsessed with Charles Sanders Peirce, Theodor Adorno, and Édouard Glissant, whom I am using as support and door-opening thinkers in some as-yet-unpublished essays I am writing. And yet again: not phenomenologists per se, I suppose.

I suspect my more precisely phenomenological ponderings are forwarded by writings that are not disciplinarily philosophical, for example Ida West, a Tasmanian, wrote and published only one book, Pride Against Prejudice, which I’ve also been writing an essay about. The way she uses language as a foreign entity of encounter with the political intensities of her life comes across to me as ethical phenomenology shunted through the challenges of creating any way to speak about life. Leslie Scalapino, too, has long been a phenomenological writer I find really interesting.

As for music: huh. That’s such a different realm of being for me from the lingual and the scopic, at least in terms of being a listener. I’m not a devotee of particular musicians nor of type really, unless you want to point to the Unusual, or maybe to “new music” and free jazz and sonic play. I’ve worked with three composers to make poetry and sound events happen, and I could possibly talk a lot about that, but I want to consider your question in terms of what I “turn to” as a listener. For example in 2016 I encountered the work of trombonist Stuart Dempster, and part of what excited me was the environments – such as the “cistern chapel” (a disused water cistern) he played and recorded in with other musicians – and score-with-open-borders that he seems to work with, at least in terms of how I experience the music. My response to his work is certainly interpretable as devotion to environment and open script within the demands of working one’s instruments; that devotion describes at least one part of my phenomenological poetics.

 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Leslie Scalapino

The other most obvious element in Tender Girl, which lends it a theoretical urgency, is how, in answering Les Chants des Maldoror with a hybridised female character – the literally untold story of Maldoror’s spawn – you invoke the historically troubled, marginalised, neglected, projected, and falsified presence of women in Surrealist art (I like to think your book belongs to the always more interesting category of ‘in dialogue with Surrealism’ as opposed to declaratively ‘Surrealist’). It also begins to uncover and play with the Surrealism of gendered experiences, and presents a shifting female re-configuration of thinking about, and as, Surrealism. Could you say a bit about the interaction between Feminism and Surrealism, as you see it, in Tender Girl?

Again, I’m so glad you like this book and I am grateful for the book’s sake that you have given it so much time. Thank you for that responsive generosity. I know you are interested in Surrealism, which is a set of historical attitudes and procedures I have, at different times, attended to. You doubtless know far more about it than I do at this point, since I moved away from it as a topic of study after graduate school. It’s probably true that my moving away was for critical gender reasons, after I shifted from a pretty naïve engagement with Surrealism to a more sceptical one. One might say that working with Laura Riding’s writings is the closest I have come to a critical interaction with Surrealism. What I mean is that her writings perform interesting work with surrealism without being particularly astute – or interested in being academically situated in astute dialog – about Surrealism as a European mode or a set of approaches.

I feel a bit twisted up in answering this question, and I suspect that’s because I know how I feel about the question re Tender Girl, but I don’t know immediately how I think about it. Maybe I’ll try to talk about how I feel.

My vision of the inciting idea of the book was sudden and unplanned. I imagined this Girl arising from the sexual encounter between Maldoror and the shark. So the shark gives birth to Girl, and later she rises out of the ocean and I imagined her learning language and learning to interact with the human world.

Certainly one can read that sexual encounter in Les Chants de Maldoror as a voluntary erotic violence, at least according to the book’s language, which is all there is of that imaginary encounter. So the female has already been scarily enstranged in Maldoror’s surrealism, which is of course not “surrealism” at all but rather an exuberant-to-violence masculinist imaginary set of encounters that the 20th century French Surrealists took as a grandfather text. This shark cannot speak though she is described as having volition with her body and in her eyeing the human male. And she exists only as language, so in that sense she is “speaking” or being spoken and spoken for.

Yet there’s an interesting power balance available in Maldoror’s text at that moment, for of course the shark could kill the human easily, is among other sharks doing just that. So their fucking each other is a replacement violent desire. Can we say that imagination is permitted license to think the imagined shark-female has volition in her fucking? Well, the scene is very short, really, so what happens immediately is that we interpret, imagine, prolong or look away from, judge the fantasy that a powerful unlanguaged non-human animal would want to fuck a human. The grounds of Lautréamont’s imagining do not have to be ours, yet we are, as readers of the book, meeting his realm. So then, writing out of that realm is re-making the book from that point, empowering an off-script new imagination – or, to think of it in terms of your question, critiquing the book’s violence against females, its deployment of imaginative excess in relation to violent permissions.

So the Girl of Tender Girl is partly an extra-human avenger – who yet “achieves” nothing in her vengeance. She does not mean to be one, by the way, nor did I plan her that way when writing. She sometimes avenges herself against those who take advantage of her, and she clashes against social pressures; but sometimes she is simply violent accidentally, as part of her physical powers and combinatory body. Almost all the moral action of the book is at least polyvalent, partly because almost all the males of the book are configured as consequences of their worlds. The characters are almost all opaque or symbolic, canvases and response points for the dominant story of Girl.

I think one of the things I have to say in response to this question is that my literate or literary background is itself hybrid. For example I have no grounded relation in a particular discourse of either Surrealism or Feminism. I was carefully trained neither in French Surrealism nor in, say, Continental Feminisms or their Anglo-American-Australasian counterparts or counterpaths. The very name of the principal male in Tender Girl, for example, comes from an entirely different place, say a place that is outside of theory unless one zeroes in on the personal in all theory: I chose it because, once upon a time, a kind Palestinian named Ramsey gave me a copy of The Jerusalem Bible, when I was a teenage girl living in Jerusalem. I still have that bible, and the episodic nature of biblical – or, say, recurrent theistic – discourse is part of the self-permission and picaresque of Tender Girl. It’s like she’s a Nothing god-female, an unwitting version of the dual-action divinity in The Book of Job, a litmus slathering through human action. Ramsey is the only male who comes in to any kind of focus and the only character with a normative human name in the book.

So it might be interesting for me to push on why that is, since my carrying on in that fashion was instinctively done rather than critically decided and controlled in terms of how I wrote and revised Tender Girl.

Something salvific in the Ramsey character keeps Girl from entirely despising human masculinity, though she still accidentally then increasingly consciously bristles against those male figures who condescend to her and/or molest her. She grows more and more feminist as she has more human experience, and there was never a question that her offspring would be a female, since the offspring is a rebirth of identificatory possibility and a marker of continuation. Also we never know – I never knew – which seed Girl chose from her blue-sharkish pouch for insemination. This matters in terms of your question – which I realize I have veered around in relation to – because volition and plotted blanks, non-available motives and uncharted ingredients, are part of Girl’s powers across the human zones she encounters. Insofar as she is a moving target of para-surrealistic legibility, her character is in type and action evasive of knowing: like history or selves.

One point I think of here, finally, in terms of the Feminism in your question, is that some small part of Tender Girl – “part” in the way that a piece of water is part of a large body of water – is a critique of The Awakening, a novel I find deplorable, depressing upon the head of woman whilst presented as some kind of female wake-up narrative.

In saying all that, it’s important to recur to Girl’s non-actuality or non-possibility. “Girl” is a nonce equation: biological unachievable, carried by discourse, maybe by theory, which is what your question supposes. I can’t answer the matter of feminism and surrealism adequately by resolved exposition nor by normative mimetic dramatic character. So I took it up through Girl.

Building upon the destabilised centrality of bodily experience as textual/textural experience or the relationship between both experiences – a moving back and forth that denies a settling certitude – and considering the title of your collection, Wild Dialectics (Shearsman, 2012), could you elaborate on the role of theory and philosophy in your work? Are you immersed in one and then turn to the other for expression…or are they more simultaneous to you?

When you write “one” and “the other” in your question, I wonder whether you are contrasting poetry and theory/philosophy, or if you mean theory is one thing and philosophy is “the other”? I prefer to think of the second option because it’s so interesting to think about the difference between theory and philosophy.

I have two essay manuscripts developing. Their delay is due to limited time to work, and I admit that my limited writing time gets preferentially allocated to so-called “creative” works, mostly. Anyway the difference between theory and philosophy forms part of the energy in my “creative theory” essay manuscript. That ms. begins with “Wild dialectics,” an essay that has nothing to do with my poetry book of that title per se and everything to do with the nominal intuition proposed in my mind by the idea of wild dialectics, which is focused on the hinge of thinking. I realize, though, that I can’t really explain that essay nor fully take up your question in the confines of this interview – there’s too much to say, and the answer might be: the essays I am writing.

So maybe I’ll turn the question a bit: in the way that we say everyone should write poetry, we might say everyone should write theory. Everyone with privilege to think, given basic security and bodily care, should consider how to develop a consciousness rather than assuming they already have one, to paraphrase Nietzsche’s critique (in The Gay Science). I perceive theory as more open to human permission than philosophy, in terms of its cultural and disciplinary positioning. To be sure, people often try to solidify position and builds walls, but really I think theory is still a free virus among the chances. I reckon perhaps the digitas has opened up those chances in something of the way enjoyed by speculative essays, broadsheets, pamphlets, etc., at various historical periods.

Well, every sentence here is making me think of how much more there is to say, but again I’ll curb, and turn to the other interpretation of your question. If I could work on my projects full time I think I would constantly range back and forth between the creative and the critical. As I sometimes say to students, I find each one to be REM sleep for the other. But they are not the same thing to me. I want poetry to be theory; I want creative writing to have the status of first-order thinking. Just because it doesn’t, in general, doesn’t mean one stops working on that border. When people are irritated by experimental creative work it seems to be because they think creative work should be mimetically normative stories only. Super-short (poems) or extended (narratives), in any event stories.

When people are irritated by experimental theoretical essays, it seems to be at least partly due to a (however understandable) desire for “clear” narrative or for focused furthering of a topic deemed to be disciplinarily shaped. For me, I am not interested in univocal certitude. I’m simply not interested. Nor do I concede any conversations as finished or as dominated by some set of persons or styles. I suppose similar assertions could apply to my poetry, so again: these associated realms of poetry and theory allow my own work to have more discursive instruments and my mind to have more voices.

I’d like to move on to talking about Tomorrowland (Shearsman, 2009), this book-length sequence has led to a film (adaptation/extension) … in addition to the double CD of accompanying sound experimentation… could you contextualise how this came about? What was your creative relationship like with director Wes Tank?

More big questions!, whose answers encompass years and many possible thoughts. Well, Tomorrowland was the first book of mine for which I had the urge to record and compose soundscapes. It’s an epic – in the sense of a poem including history, and also in its sustained length – and it’s an intensely motivated poem. I wanted a sound performance to exist as an embodied translation of the paper text. There’s a narrated quality to the book that comes out probably more vividly in being read aloud. But I also wanted to make soundscapes; I really enjoyed the process of creating sound differentials and thinking about how they could be contra-puntal ambience for the recorded voice of the different sections of the poem. I have many different musical instruments and other sound-making objects and I like to play them dis-connectedly or improperly, to conjure diastolic differentials by way of diachronic systole, to adopt a heart metaphor.

Anyway the film happened very differently and surprisingly: Wes Tank contacted me about making Tomorrowland into a film after he had listened to the CDs repeatedly. So I consider that the film started with the CD soundtrack rather than with the paper book. I had known and taught Wes as an undergraduate student in Milwaukee Wisconsin, and he had become in intervening years a musician and videographer in addition to a writer. We met up in person in late 2014 and storyboarded part of the film, which was a fascinating process. Wes printed out the text of “All the Buildings Made of Voices” and cut up the pages into small aspects of lines, 2-6 lines or so apiece, and then glued them to a large board. We went through each of these textual sections and discussed possible interpretations of most of them. What did they mean? How could something like that be filmed?

Finally in June 2016, when I was on research leave and based in Seattle, we filmed with a ten-person crew in Milwaukee. Then in January 2017 Wes flew to New Zealand and we filmed with a more minimal crew. Those two location shoots gave us the footage out of which the Tomorrowland film was sculpted and edited. There are countless hours of footage made with multiple cameras, and Wes and his editorial team created what is now the viewable art short. He imagines creating a different and longer version at some point, but whether or not that happens is up in the air. In terms of your question, our working relations have always been great, and it’s worth noting that the film result is principally Wes’s vision out of the potential of my materials in both the book and the CDs.

You also appear in the film as the alien-like, travelling figure of Eula. Was it important for it be played by you, do you see your poetry in conversation with elements of performance art?

Casting me as Eula was, in the first instance, purely economics. We had no money to make the film, and Wes suggested I play Eula. I had to get over an initial surprise and resistance to the idea. I trusted Wes, so that was not a problem. I just imagined casting someone other than me so I could be more distant from the film, have more of a critical or maker’s eye. I also register the fact the film is not the book: Wes has created a film narrative that is not the same thing as the possibilities of Tomorrowland as book and as CDs. The film’s Eula arrives as a space alien; the book’s is not. The film becomes meta-narrative in a way the book really doesn’t, for example. But of course a morphic translation – a new mediality – is always different from another media state.

Anyway, I do certainly see my poetry as in conversation with performance art. The CDs are performance art, for example, and I have recorded toward making other CDs that will eventually exist, barring sudden death. I want to make more performances, but again: world enough and time. I have a full-time academic job, and for now performance works happen hither and yon amidst other work.

A different way to take up your question is that the interlacings of signs, the prospects and possibilities of interacting modes, is brought out when something happens with more than one technical aspect or platform of its possibilities. So if there is sound with print, or moving bodies with dialog, then engagement has structured dialectic to work with. When there is modal dialectic, there are multiplied chances to see, feel, and think. Which might seem to put pressure on anything apparently mono-modal. Isn’t it okay to read a book, for example? But there again I would say that the reader is the contrapuntal modality: the reader’s embodied mind is the performance space of the book’s textual object-event. In other words, everything is already multi-modal. Performance art torques and displays and overtly plays the keys of multi-modality.

It also struck me that, in the film, the sense of Eula as a wandering, nomadic explorer …begins to resonate with the character of Girl in Tender Girl…is this a consciously reoccurring interest…as the outsider, a female (but whose gender seems ambiguously in play away from any binary) who allows a perspective through which to re-encounter everyday experience…to estrange and interrogate our accepted experiences? It reminded me, to an extent, of Scarlett Johansson’s alien abductress in Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel Under the Skin (2013).

I have not seen that Glazer film. But I can say that once I realized what Wes Tank wanted to do with Eula, I thought of Liquid Sky, the Slava Tsukerman film from the 1970s that made a keen impression on me when I saw it on video in the 1990s. If you have seen that Tsukerman film then you can imagine how Eula became a visualization for me in terms of Wes’s film vision. In terms of picaresque experiences, though, Girl is much more akin to the Liquid Sky heroine than Eula is, in both the book and the film version of Tomorrowland. Oh, things get all interwrapt!

Certainly a predominantly female-figured consciousness in imagined cultural spaces has become a legible obsession in my works. Hardly surprising, perhaps. I am more interested in the differentiations in various works than in the type-trace per se. But it’s possibly interesting to see this androgynous-female figuration intensify in my work. In the Tomorrowland book Eula isn’t a character so much as a para-narratorial figuration whose name stands for End User License Agreement and whose position is partly androgynous contemporary. Similarly but not identically, the other named principles of the book are not characters but symbolic forces. But Wes had to, or wanted to, work with human actors, and he set up Eula in a fairly stable body relation to actors who play the other named principles (ideas, that is, not mains) in the Tomorrowland book, that is: Fasti, Manda, and Jack.

What films have inspired you in the past?

I suppose it’s worth mentioning that I wasn’t raised with films. I saw possibly ten films in cinemas before the age of about 14, and after that I went only somewhat more often until I got into my 30s. I don’t consider that I have much sophistication or depth of knowledge about film, though in the last decade I’ve seen a lot of children’s films because of raising my son and mostly watching movies that appeal to children.

Most of the time I don’t want to see what is showing at the cinemas because it sounds too obvious: pre-interpreted dramatic situations of greater or lesser intensity. However, there are films that have moved me a great deal, and of course film as a medium has formidable powers of engagement with our bodily (scopic, sonic, and kinetic) and leisure-motivated (cinema-going) and critical selves. I’ve just mentioned the Tsukerman film. If I had my way I would almost always watch strange films, things like Buñuel’s, anime whose resolution isn’t too loud – perhaps The Red Turtle is a good contemporary example, mytho-symbolic as it is, though I saw Spirited Away when it first came out in theatres and I can’t think of an anime film I like better.

I should try to answer your question with more specifics. What films have inspired me? With manipulated dread and nausea: Pan’s Labyrinth, and its type of film. With desire and curiosity, Orphée. With discomfited interest, Theresa Hak Kying Cha’s short films, and similar short works whose makers and titles I forget because I have simply come across them while scrolling through ubuweb looking for moving image work. Werner Herzog’s films, too, especially Fitzcarraldo. Oh and also the legible-as-film digital kinetics of some of the work in the online Electronic Literature Collections, the most effective collocation of digital/new media works that I know of at present, however one might think at least twice about the ELC’s English-dominant orientations.

The merging of film and poetry, or the one-in-the-other dynamic, is a really difficult, but fascinating area – are there any particular coordinates of film or poetry that you look to as encapsulations of when these two mediums work well together?

This is a good question. The problem of language in relation to anything else rises up acutely. The potential swamping of abstraction by sensory particulars also. I’ve already talked about multi-modality, so I think here I’ll say something about control and the open line. I have an essay called “Soft text and the open line” (coming out in Axon journal), and I’m thinking of it now because I know part of my experienced resistance to watching films is about control and swamping. Except when I go to the movies for what I call brain candy films, I don’t want to be seized by art; I want to be conscious. To sustain that consciousness, I want art to leave openings in itself. Such openings might be what are sometimes judged to be mistakes, which I think is part of the public pleasure in continuity errors in film editing – modern watches on the wrists of historical characters, for example, allow or force the audience to become conscious of the made experience. That consciousness actually increases the pleasure of immersion in the constructed film, at least for some viewers.

But open lines can happen in more deliberately constructed ways: internally-skewed aspects of a work can function as waking points, breath moments interposing in the coherence of a made work. These open moments can be rougher, and perhaps feel like mistakes, or somewhat smoother and structured into a non-integrated and yet whole work.

Even in terms of open lines film and poetry have different “coordinates,” as you are calling them here. For the sake of considering this question further, I want to acknowledge yet set aside the expansive possibilities for “film” and “poetry,” either of which can be almost anything that a maker and context wish to say they are. So film could be, for example, an audience raising its mobile phones – in a theatre with no central film showing – and filming what they see for ten minutes, then declaring the end of “the film.” Or poetry could be a person being handed slips of language written on tree leaves by another person right then on a boat, reading the slips aloud, then letting them fly out to sea.

Actually, though I intended to imagine two examples that are different from a film in a cinema and a poem on a page being read in a book or on a screen, I find those imagined examples of ephemerally-focused control-loosening film and poetry to provide sufficient images of modal “coordinates.” The scopic-experience orientation of the filmic and the performed-interpretation orientation of poetry have a great deal to offer each other in terms of exponentializing dialectic opportunities and therefore mental food.

You have mentioned in another interview (on ‘Jack Ross: Opinions’) the writers you are most often drawn to: ‘certain writers are recurrent for me, sometimes as a matter of the note I need to have plucked at a moment of thinking. Writers of excess can help me re-imagine our boundaries and exposures in the world – here I’m thinking of William Blake, Lautréamont, Friedrich Nietzsche, Laura Riding, Georges Bataille, Kathy Acker, William Vollmann.’ I was wondering whether the world-creating and ambitious excess of these writers, which certainly enters your work in the book-length explorations of Tomorrowland, Gender City, Tender Girl, and Symphony for Human Transport, is something that you think any other contemporary poets are doing? Who have you read recently that excites you?

It isn’t poetry, but I read without stopping The Stolen Island (2017), Scott Hamilton’s narrative of the pillaged island of ’Ata. It speaks within alternative histories of places – and I mean alternative ways of telling and considering histories – with and from a sustained “irrational” commitment (the way love is an irrational commitment) to Oceania ethics, identity, and histories. And Erín Moure’s Kapusta (2015) is one of my favourite recent books: translingual poetry and prose, experimental drama, investigation of communal and familial self – it performs multiply. Alice Notley’s poetry books are go-to readings for stripped encounter, not to be reductive, but certainly to be summary in terms of your question. By stripped encounter I suppose I mean poetry written in an unvarnished (hence “stripped”) self-encountering with many different aspects of life and death and utter commitment to imagination as thinking bodies. These encounters are of course artistically considered and shaped, and I’m conscious of imagining how they were written when I am reading her books.

Alice Notley

In terms of “world-creating and ambitious excess,” well, people create in their contexts and therefore zeitgeist recurrences zoom out everywhere. I am sure there are many poets writing now, whether or not I am aware of them, whose work features this large-creating aspect of imagining that you reference in your question. Don Mee Choi, for example, has completely entered my zones of attention: I am moved and discomfited by everything she writes, and she too writes in multi-modal history and lingual re-making. And in terms of more writing I am excited by – it’s hard to pause and think of more writers to mention, but some come up without too much push: Laressa Dickey and Nathanaël, for example, are both in the new women : poetry : migration (2017), edited by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, who has performed a service for the transnational imaginaries I live in by compiling this anthology. And the writers included in my own anthology A TransPacific Poetics (2017, co-edited with Sawako Nakayasu) are resonantly interesting for me: Don Mee is there, and Melanie Rands and Jai Arun Ravine for example. And in the new Chicago Review issue, Anne Kawala is a discovery for me; I’d like to find more of her poetry to read.

- Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, February 2018

Interview with Andrew Kötting

Light Glyphs 6: Andrew Kötting

The first film I saw by Andrew Kötting was This, Our Still Life (2011). After the film finished, I had that rare and fluttering excitement that what I had just watched would far outlive the duration of my viewing. I had watched the film on DVD in a flat in London. On leaving the dark room and out into the street I began to immediately walk towards the BFI Southbank where I knew they had a copy of his first feature Gallivant (1996). It was one of those moments where, walking beneath an unnervingly blue sky and in the giddy aftermath of what I’d just seen, everything seemed bustling for my attention, each thing more vividly itself and newly awake to (re)discovery. Striding forth to purchase another skittish dose of Kötting, bounding after my next fix, caught up in its afterglow – gratefully infected – seeing within and from its restless energy, following its propulsive curiosity.  

Taking a mutable form somewhere between documentary, collage, film-essay and a playfully diaristic recording as the basis for a visual poetics, This, Our Still Life centres around Kötting’s family (specifically his daughter Eden, who has a rare genetic disorder, Joubert’s Syndrome) as they spend time in a remote part-time home in the Pyrenees. Taking cues from the changing seasons, the old farmhouse (deeply and romantically isolated amid forest and mountain) becomes a rickety locus for family rituals: the daily struggles, frustrations, intimacies, and joys that build a life and its collaborative explorations in and as art. The film is edited with Kötting’s characteristic jumps of intuition and scattershot logic; itching with humour and eccentric seriousness, its handheld kineticism eager to be out and among the accidents of happening. In this unstill ‘still-life’ portrait (if ‘portrait’ is in turn the departure for makeshift galleries of moving), the film’s distracted zest for observation and personal family-footage begins to perfectly enact a defining focus for Kötting’s filmography: the spaces between ‘outsider’ and ‘insider-art’; between art, performance, living and film; between a collaged poetics and a filmed journey; and between people and landscape.

This interview took place after I met Andrew for a Q&A at Tyneside Cinema, he was introducing Edith Walks. The film (like his films Gallivant, Swandown and By Our Selves) took the form of a journey. A walk-in dialogue with the spirit of Edith Swanneck, stepped out in séance between Hastings and Waltham Abbey to reunite the dismembered, battle-torn body of King Harold with his wife. Undertaken as an improvised pilgrimage, the film curates a troop of fellow musicians, historians and writers, bringing together: the bearded gnosticism of Alan Moore, the conspiracy of literary cartography that is Iain Sinclair, the musical innovations of Jem Finer, and the incarnation of Edith in Claudia Barton – a singer clad in an increasingly bedraggled dress. The film was accompanied by a beautiful book (EDITH (The Chronicles), a CD of field recordings and music, and touring performances alongside screenings.

Andrew's responses came in the emphatic shout of caps-lock, reminding me of the text in This, Our Still Life, I kept it that way as I feel it is in-keeping with the spirit of a 'dirt-under-the-fingernails' bounding, climbing and swimming that runs throughout all of his work...BOLD ELEMENTS OF LANGUAGE UNTETHERED / GATHERED / LAUGHING / LIGHT / WALKING / DRUMS UP / & ONWARDS...

Whether it is in puncturing the hubris of Pound’s cantos with a small plastic swan (Swandown, 2012), retracing the pilgrimage of John Clare (By Our Selves, 2015) or exhuming the lines of Heinrich Heine via strolling song (Edith’s Walk, 2017), poetry continually excerpts an influence or presence in your films…are there any particular poets that you read for pleasure, or that are particularly significant to you?  Do you read much contemporary poetry?

I READ POETRY INTERMITTENTLY – BUT INVARIABLY IF IT’S FOISTED UPON ME I’M RESISTANT TO IT – WE DID A LOT OF WORDSWORTH AND KEATS AT SCHOOL – HOWEVER I HAVE SHARED A STUDIO WITH A POET AND PUBLISHER OF POETRY FOR ALMOST EIGHT YEARS NOW SO A LOT OF HIS ENTHUSIAM HAS RUBBED OFF ON ME – I LIKE THE METAPHYSICAL WEIGHT OF POETRY – THE NEED TO DIG INTO IT – BUT ALSO ITS IMMEDIACY WHEN IT WORKS

I USED TO LIKE TO STUMBLE ACROSS POETRY – WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IT WOULD HAVE BEEN RICHARD BRAUTIGAN – SAMUEL BECKETT AND JOHN COOPER CLARK BUT MORE RECENTLY IT’S KATE TEMPEST MEREDITH MONK MARGARET ATWOOD AND NICK CAVE – AND THEN OF COURSE JOHN CLARE – LUCKILY I WAS BULLIED MERCILESSLY INTO RESEARCHING HIS WORK BECAUSE OF A PROJECT I WAS INVOLVED WITH - BY OUR SELVES - PROFESSOR SIMON KOVESI WOULD KEEP BOMBARDING ME WITH ‘STUFF’ – HE’S A CLAREHEAD - THE ASYLUM POEMS ARE VERY POWERFUL AND INSPIRING – IAIN SINCLAIR HAS OBVIOUSLY BEEN A BIG INFLUENCE AND ALSO BRIAN CATLING.

TODAY I FIND MYSELF TRAVELLING WITH THE WRITINGS OF E.M CIORAN; ‘THE TORUBLE WITH BEING BORN’ ‘ON THE HEIGHTS OF DESPAIR’ ‘THE TEMPTATION TO EXIST’ ‘A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY’ – THE TITLES THEMSELVES ARE LIKE HAIKU POEMS AND THEN THERE’S DAVID SHIELD’S BOOK ‘REALITY HUNGER’ – I NEVER TIRE OF DIPPING IN AND OUT OF IT – BUT IT’S NOT ‘PROPER’ POETRY.

I WRITE A LOT OF PROSE POEMS MYSELF AND INVARIABLY THEY FIND THEIR WAY INTO PROJECTS THAT I’M WORKING ON; PERFFORMANCES/FILMS/BOOKWORKS/WALL TEXTS AND MY DAUGHTERS COLLAGES AND PAINTINGS

Through using sound as collage and with an ongoing collaboration with Jem Finer (and subsequent albums of field recordings), many of your films seem to suggest a kind of sonic poetics. I’m thinking here of the detailed, careful (dis)arrangement of voices, the hauntings of one film’s audio in another’s (Gladys and Eden’s voices from Gallivant as recalled in Swandown, or the short film, Klipperty Klopp, 1984, echoed by a character in Ivul, 2009, who utters the phrase in joking imitation of a horse), and then the mischievous way in which sound will often complicate or confuse the image.  Do you collect sound as part of a project, in a comparable way to accruing footage, or is there a more specific method? Are there particular archives you return to, to gleefully pillage and plunder? Do you approach the cutting up and editing of sound as a kind of poetics, embodying and furthering a mode of ‘expanded cinema’?

YES – YOUR QUESTION(S) AND ASSUMPTIONS ARE VERY CLOSE TO REVEALING MY METHODOLOGY; SONIC POETICS/MUSIC CONCRÈTE/MEDIATED COLLAGIC CHAOS/DRIFT POEMS/CHOREOGRAPHED SOUND/IMAGE SCAPES AND ‘SPILLAGE’ - I’M ALWAYS REVISITING WORKS – LOOKING TO RE-IMAGINE/RE-WORK/RE-CONFIGURE/RE-ARRANGE/RE-ALLIGN AND RE-GURGITATE BOTH OLD AND NEW FOOTAGE WHETHER IT BE MOVING IMAGE OR SOUND.

‘PILLAGE AND PLUNDER’ MAKES IT SOUND TOO BRUTAL – I’D LIKE TO THINK THAT THERE’S MORE FINESSE INVOLVED – A NUANCE OF STRUCTURE – AN EBBING AND FLOWING OF IDEAS – A TIDE OF UNDULATING ‘IMPLIED’ OR ‘FRAGMENTED’ NARRATIVES – THEMES AND SCHEMES BUT NOTHING TOO DIDACTIC OR OBVIOUS.

I LOVE SUBSTRATA AND SUBTEXT – I LOVE THE INFINITE POSSIBILTIES OF REVERSE ENGINEERING - I ALSO LOVE ATMOSPHERE - I WAS VERY INFLUENCED BY DUB REGGAE WHEN I WAS PRETENDING TO BE A PUNK – I NEVER FOUND THE 1 2 3  SHOUTY SHOUTY WAY OF MAKING MUSIC THAT SATISFYING – ALBEIT THAT I WAS QUITE GOOD AT IT AND CAN STILL DO IT TODAY - BUT ONCE I DISCOVERED THE POTENTIAL OF TAPE LOOPS/REVERB/ DELAY AND ECHO SUDDENLY I WAS UP AND RUNNING INTO THAT WORLD OF ‘HAUNTOLOGY’ - AS IT HAS MORE RECENTLY BEEN DESCRIBED - YOU CERTAINLY DIDN’T HAVE TO BE A MUSICIAN TO ‘MAKE MUSIC’ AND JEM FINER HAS ALWAYS BEEN VERY SUPPORTIVE AND REASSURING IN MY ATTEMPTS TO ‘MAKE MUSIC’.

I AM ALSO VERY INTERESTED IN MOVING IMAGE ARCHIVE – I HAVE A STRONG RELATIONSHIP WITH SCREEN ARCHIVE SOUTH EAST AT THE UNIVERSITY IN BRIGHTON – I SPEND A COUPLE OF DAYS A YEAR CATCHING UP ON NEW AQUISITIONS – IT’S MAINLY HOME MOVIES THAT HAVE BEEN BEQUEATHED IN THE WAKE OF A FAMILY DEATH – 9.5MM/8MM/SUPER 8MM/16MM - SOMETIMES EVEN VHS AND THERE IS DAVID LEISTER - WHEN I WAS LIVING IN LONDON – WE WOULD HEAD OUT TO THE BFI IN BEACONSFIELD AND SALVAGE ANY 16MM PUBLIC INFORMATION FILMS THAT THEY MIGHT BE THROWING OUT TO MAKE WAY FOR THE NEW HARD DRIVES – IT WAS LIKE CHRISTMAS – AND DAVID STILL HAS MASSES OF THAT STUFF SCATTERED ACROSS LONDON IN VARIOUS LOCK UPS BATHROOMS AND KITCHENS – I CONSOLIDATED MY COLLECTION WHEN I ARRIVED IN HASTINGS 15 YEARS AGO BY TRANSFERRING MOST OF THE SOUND TRACKS FROM A STEENBECK ONTO DAT TAPES OR MORE RECENTLY MY iPHONE.

You seem very attentive to the movement between repetition and play, where ‘play’ offers interpretive mobility in addition to valuing child-like perception (whatever that can or could encompass) and ‘repetition’ suggests and disrupts patterns in each film, as a process in which context can re-configure meaning. Does this changeable, open and chance-led approach interact with your ‘eARTHOUSE Manifesto’?

REPETITION IS IMPORTANT – AS IS PLAY AND OF COURSE COMEDY – I THINK DADA IS A PART OF MY DNA – PERHAPS IT’S THE GERMAN GENES – IT ALSO SERVES TO DISRUPT ANY POTENTIAL GRAVITAS OR SELF-IMPORTANCE - IT ALLOWS FOR OTHER WAYS OF SEEING OR HEARING – CONTEXT IS THEREFORE GIVEN THE CHANCE TO BE READ DIFFERENTLY AND THUS AMBIGUITY COMES INTO PLAY – WHICH I’M A VERY BIG FAN OF – IT’S EASY TO GET LOST THOUGH AND OCCASIONALLY I RESORT TO A REPETITION-OF –ATTEMPT BY WAY OF TRYING THINGS AGAIN BUT IN A DIFFERENT ORDER!

THE EARTHOUSE MANIFESTO WAS WRITTEN WITH MY TONGUE FIRMLY IN MY CHEEK AS A REACTION TO THE DOGME MANIFESTO WHICH HAD JUST COME OUT – I THINK BOTH MANIFESTOS REMIND US THAT THERE ARE OTHER WAYS OF MAKING WORK OUTSIDE OF THE INDUSTRIAL NORMS – BUT FOR COLLEAGUES AND FELLOW PRACTITIONERS THAT WORK OUTSIDE OF THE MAINSTREAM FILM GULAG - WE ALL KNEW THIS BUT IT WAS GOOD TO BE REMINDED AND HAVE IT WRITTEN DOWN – AND OF COURSE THERE WAS THE JUSTIFICATION FOR ME TO GET MY ARMS OR FEET INSIDE ANOTHER SENTIENT BEING, ALIVE OR DEAD…

 

It seems like this would be a good point to question the significance of what is left unfinished or unresolved in your films. Looping and meandering, the films (like the journeys they depict) often enact a restless structuring that permits no final structure but that is left open to continue – a continuing – a going-on…I was wondering how much of this was linked to your reading of Beckett or E.M Cioran…or other bleak advocates of the fragment, the decay and the endless unanswered...

I THINK THEIR WRITING HAS HAD A PROFOUND IMPACT – THE WRITING IS OPEN FOR INTERPRETATION AND MEANING – I ENJOY THE NOTION OF FLUX OR CONTINGENCY – THINGS AREN’T FIXED – THINGS AREN’T ‘NORMAL’ IN THEIR STRUCTURE.

THE BIRTH OF MY DAUGHTER EDEN – THROUGH HER PROFOUND DISABILITY HAS ALSO ‘ENABLED’ ME – SHE HAS INSPIRED ME AND THWARTED ME – MOVED ME AND ANNIHILATED ME – BECAUSE OF HER I NEVER BECAME THE PERSON THAT I THOUGHT/HOPED I MIGHT BECOME – SHE CONTINUES TO TEACH ME ABOUT ENDURANCE/HUMILITY/HOPE AND DESPONDENCY – SHE PUSHES ME INTO TROUGHS OF MELANCHOLY ONLY TO THEN HELP ME SOAR INTO THE REALMS OF SUBLIMITY – SHE HAS NURTURED MY LOVE OF BOTH THE PHYSICAL AND THE METAPHYSICAL – LIKE A MUSE OR ILL ADVISED CONFIDENT….

BUT ALWAYS THE GOING-ON….    

Despite the improvisation and play that animates much of each film, there is also, it seems, an interest and investment in ritual, or versions of the ritualistic. This is apparent throughout your work: from the early and incredible Hub Bub in Baöbabs (1989) and the folkloric anthropology of Gallivant (1996); the chain of site-specific, inflated tributes of In the Wake of Deadad (2006); and through to the re-traced journeys, honouring and speculating upon obscured histories, in By Our Selves (2015) and Edith Walks (2017). It feels as though a kind of ‘ritual’ might also apply to the significance of collaboration, of gathering and constellating like-minded people? Or perhaps even your continued gravitation towards acts of endurance, of making the film a physical, as well as artistic, endeavour (or erasing those distinctions) …this also seems connected to a ritualised impulse. Would you agree that non-religious ritual is something that consciously shapes your approach?

YES – A PRE-CHRISTIAN ANTI-MONOTHEISTIC APPROACH IS VERY IMPORTANT – IT’S ONLY DURING THE LAST TEN YEARS THAT I’VE ATTEMPTED TO ARTICULATE MY LOATHING AND DREAD OF ‘THE BIG-BOOKIST-BRAIN-WASHERS’ – A MALE DOMINATED/ALL POWERFUL/SUPERSTITIOUS/ANTI-HUMANISTIC APPROACH OF CONTROLLING FREEDOM OF SPIRIT – I LOVE THE FOLKLORIC – THE METAPHOR OF MYTHOLOGY AND THE POWER OF RITUAL – THE MARRIAGE OF THE CORPOREAL AND ‘REAL’ EXPERIENCE WITH THAT OF THE CEREBRAL – THE CONTEMPLATIVE MEDITATIVE POWER OF BEING-IN-LANDSCAPE – THE MULLING OF DEEP TIME – AS ARTICULATED BY JEM FINER’S 1,000 YEAR-LONG MUSIC COMPOSITION LONGPLAYER OR ALAN MOORE’S THINKING…. THE SHAMANISTIC POTENTIAL IN ALL OF US IS SOMETHING THAT I’M ALSO INTERESTED IN.

SO THE WORKS ARE CONSISTENTLY CONCEIVED WITH ENDURANCE OR JOURNEYING AS A CATALYST OR AMBIITION AND THIS IS SOMETHING THAT IAIN SINCLAIR HAS BEEN DOING FOR A VERY LONG TIME – WE CONNECTED WHEN I MOVED TO HASTINGS AND FOUND A WAY TO CELEBRATE OUR KINDRED SPIRITEDNESS THROUGH COLLABORATION – HIS GENEROSITY OF MIND RE-CHARGED MY BATTERIES AND TOOK THE WORK INTO A DIRECTION THAT I HAD INTUITIVELY BEEN DABBLING WITH WHEN I MADE JAUNT AND GALLIVANT BUT NOT FULLY REALISED - HIS MORE RECENT PROSE MANAGES TO CONSTRUCT POETIC THOUGHTSCAPES USING JUST WORDS TO GREAT EFFECT – I FIND THEM SPELLBINDING - MY PROCESS INVOLVES MOVING IMAGE/SPOKEN WORD/SOUND AND MUSIC BUT ULTIMATELY I’M ALSO TRYING TO CAST SPELLS.

IT IS THROUGH COLLABORATION THOUGH THAT MUCH OF THE WORK ATTAINS ITS’ MAGIC AND POTENTIAL – I’VE ALWAYS WORKED WITH PEOPLE THAT I HAVE A FONDNESS FOR REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THEY ARE ‘GOOD AT THEIR JOB’ OR ‘PROFESSIONAL’ – IT IS MORE ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS AND BEING-ABLE-TO-SPEND-TIME-TOGETHER – SOME OF THOSE EARLIER COLLABORATORS HAVE DRIFTED AWAY BUT THAT INVARIABLY HAS MORE TO DO WITH GEOGRAPHICAL DISTANCE – ALTHOUGH IN A FEW INSTANCES IT HAS ALSO HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH A MEANESS-OF-SPIRIT IN THEIR AMBITION FOR WANTING ME TO BECOME MORE MAINSTREAM AND ACCESIBLE.  

Following on from the mention of endurance, I was wondering whether you are ever tempted to explore the viewer’s endurance? It seems that, whilst your own endurance or pursuit of physical and feet-on-the-ground experience (extending to those around you in the filming process) is paramount, the films do not necessarily demand a reciprocal endurance in the viewer… in terms of shot-length and duration (a slowness that emerges, say, in Ben Rivers work), or the resistance of abrasive imagery or uncomfortable visuals…do these cinematic approaches interest you at all?

THEY DO AND WITH BEN’S WORK IN PARTICULAR – I THINK WE ARE BARKING UP A SIMILAR TREE BUT BEN IS BRAVER WHEN IT COMES TO THE DURATIONAL – HE’S VERY INTO THE MATERIALITY OF FILM - OF CELLULOID – I BLAME IT ON THE FACT THAT HE HAND PROCESSES MUCH OF THE WORK AS WELL AS THE LENGTH OF A HAND CRANK TO A 16MM BOLEX.

A LOT OF MY EARLIER WORK WAS A PRETTY HARDCORE BARRAGE OF SOUND AND IMAGE – MY RYTHMS WERE ERRATIC AND AT TIMES TOURETTES-LIKE – I’VE SLOWED DOWN AS I’VE GOT OLDER LOOKING FOR A DIFFERENT ORDER – AND I’VE NEVER BEEN AFRAID OF ‘UNCOMFORTABLE VISUALS’ - WORKS LIKE ANVIL-HEAD THE HUN/FLESHFILM/NUCLEUS AMBIGOUS/ME/ABOVE THEM THE WORLD BEYOND AND THIS FILTHY EARTH - I THINK MY NEW FILM LEK AND THE DOGS IS QUITE AN UNCOMFORTABLE RIDE IN PLACES BUT THE IMAGES ARE MEDIATED THROUGH A LESS ERRATIC VIEWING EXPERIENCE – IT FEELS LIKE A HYBRID; A PIECE OF WORK IN WHICH THE JOURNEYWORKS; GALLIVANT/SWANDOWN/BY OUR SELVES/EDITH WALKS MERGE WITH THE AMBITION OF THE STORYWORKS; THIS FILTHY EARTH AND IVUL.  

                                      

Having just said asked about ‘abrasive imagery’ and the possibility of uncomfortable viewing experiences, I have just remembered two of your short films that do delve into this area: Me (2000) and Above Them the World Beyond (2013). Both of these films, in very different ways, approach frightening levels of discomfort and make for challenging, and impressively unhinged, viewing. Do you find yourself drawn to darker implications and sequences in your films and then having to later cut back, or edit out (as with Me, which was originally to be included in Gallivant)?

I THINK I’VE EXPANDED ON SOME OF THIS WITH THE ANSWER TO THE PREVIOUS QUESTION – BUT YES I’M ALWAYS REVISITING WORKS – LOOKING TO RE-IMAGINE/RE-WORK/RE-CONFIGURE/RE-ARRANGE/RE-ALLIGN/RE-GURGITATE OLD AND NEW FOOTAGE WHETHER IT BE MOVING IMAGE OR SOUND – OLD AND NEW ANSWERS ARE NO EXCEPTION!

To what extent you see your films as an extension of performance-art…or the documentation of performance art? I feel as though the suits you wear (In the Wake of Deadad / Swandown / Edith Walks) signal the initiation, in costume, of a performance or persona…or is ‘the suit’ (in its changing guises) perhaps another instance of ritual?

MUCH OF THE WORK IS ROOTED IN PERFORMANCE ART – I WAS BESOTTED BY JOSEPH BEUYS STAURT BRISLEY AND GINA PANE WHEN I WAS AT ART SCHOOL – THERE WAS AN ATMOSPHERE ABOUT THEIR WORK – THEY PERFORMED MAINLY FOR THE GALLERY SPACE BUT MY ANTICS WITHIN THE PUBLIC SPACE HAVE PROVIDED RICH MATERIAL FOR BOTH THE INSTALLATIONS/FILMS/PERFORMANCES THAT I MAKE THEREAFTER - THE SUIT REPRESENTS A MINDSET OR CHARACTER – AN INVITATION TO ENJOY THE RIDICULOUSNESS OF AMBITION AND BY INHABITING THE SUIT I FIND MYSELF COCOONED OR COMFORTED – A PROTECTION – I THINK IT WAS INSPIRED BY BOTH MY GERMAN GRAND FATHER WHO WOULD ALWAYS BE MENDING THE CAR OR GARDENING IN HIS THREE PIECE SUIT OR THE FILM THE MOON AND THE SLEDGEHAMMER – I LOVED THE IDEA OF THE MEN OF THE PAGE FAMILY WEARING SUITS WHILST HARD-AT-WORK IN THE LANDSCAPE – IT FELT INCONGOROUS AND EXCITING - ON ANOTHER MORE MUNDANE LEVEL IT ALSO MEANS THAT I NEVER HAVE TO THINK ABOUT WHAT TO PUT ON IN THE MORNING.  

I was wondering if you could say a bit about the Earth trilogy? With This Filthy Earth (2001) you mutated elements from John Berger’s Pig Earth and Zola’s ‘La Terre’ to create a mud-soaked community wed to the earth, and in Ivul (2009) a fractured family leads to a young boy’s self-imposed exile from touching the earth – into an existence in the treetops. Is Lek and the Dogs the final in this proposed trilogy? Do you feel much has changed in your practice from the first ‘Earth-instalment’ to now, with its completion in sight?

I TOUCHED ON THIS IN THE ANSWER TO AN EARLIER QUESTION BUT INDEED A LOT HAS CHANGED FROM WHEN I MADE THIS FILTHY EARTH – TO MAKE THAT ‘TYPE OF FILM’ TODAY WOULD BE A LOT HARDER – AT THE TIME I WAS SEDUCED BY ALL THE ATTENTION I WAS BEING PAID IN THE WAKE OF THE SUCCESS OF GALLIVANT AND ALSO A SELF-CONFIDENCE OF BEING ABLE TO ‘TELL-A-STORY’ ON A GRANDER SCALE WITHIN A POETIC (MADE-UP) LANDSCAPE – I WOULD HAVE BEEN LOST WITHOUT THE SUPPORT OF SEAN LOCK WHO WROTE IT WITH ME – BUT ULTIMATELY THE FILM IS A FRAGMENTED NARRATIVE DELIVERED WITH A WANTON DISREGARD TO THE COVENANTS OF CONVENTIONAL CINEMATIC STORY TELLING – I REMEMBER SEAN COMING OUT OF THE FINAL SCREENING WITH HIS HEAD IN HIS HANDS BEMOANING; ‘WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE?’ – I DID IT AGAIN WITH IVUL – ALWAYS LOOKING TO REVERSE ENGINEER NEW/DIFFERENT MEANING INTO WHATEVER THE PROJECT STARTED OUT AS – IT MUST BE VERY FRUSTRATING FOR MY COLLABORATORS – HOWEVER AS THE BODY OF WORK HAS GROWN I THINK THAT PATTERNS ARE APPEARING THAT WERE MOST EVIDENT IN MY FIRST PERFORMANCE/LAND ART/PISS TAKE FILM; KLIPPERTY KLÖPP – IN WHICH A MAN (ME) IS SEEN RUNNING ROUND AND ROUND IN CIRCLES IN THE LANDSCAPE CARRYING A PAINTING OF A PRE-HISTORIC HORSE TO THE POINT OF EXHAUSTION – A MONOLOGUE AS VOICEOVER ATTEMPTS TO MAKE SENSE OF WHAT IS HAPPENING BUT ULTIMATELY FAILS TO GIVE ANY RATIONALE OR ORDER TO THE EVENT – IT WAS SHOWN MANY MOONS BACK AS AN INSTALLATION AT THE CENTRE POMPIDOU AS PART OF A SAMUEL BECKETT EXHIBITION WHICH MADE ME HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY – AND HAS COME TO REPRESENT MANY OF THE THEMES AND AMBITIONS THAT STILL INFORM MY WORK TODAY.

LEK AND THE DOGS FURTHER DEVELOPS MOST OF MY PREOCCUPATIONS THROUGH A MONOLOGUE (INSPIRED BY KRAPP’S LAST TAPE)

- THE THEMES OF ISOLATION/ENDURANCE/ RELIGIOUS BELIEF SYSTEMS/LANDSCAPE/PLACE/RITUAL/REPETITION/ARCHIVE/ATMOSPHERE/BEASTIALITY/DOGS/ETERNITYAND HOPE    

 To return to writing, specifically poetry, you have yourself written a series of what could be called experimental essays and prose-poems, many of which accompany your daughter Eden’s art. Beyond a collaborative input with Eden’s published sketchbook, This Illuminated World is Full of Stupid Men (2015-2016), and the books that accompany your films, do you have any desire to further publish your writing? How do you view your own writing? Is it always in service of, or inspired by, another project…or do you often write as an activity separate and autonomous from your film and art?

I’VE NEVER SEPARATED WHAT I DO WITH MY PROSE-POEMS AND OTHER WRITINGS FROM WHAT I DO AS AN ARTIST – THEY ARE PATHETIC ONGOING ATTEMPTS AT BEING NOTICED OR REMEMBERED – AT ONCE ONE AND THE SAME AS ALL THE OTHER ‘STUFF’ THAT I MAKE – I’D LIKE TO THINK THAT AT SOME POINT BEFORE I DIE I MIGHT PUBLISH THEM MYSELF THROUGH BADBLÖODANDSIBYL WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM AS MANY OF THE PEOPLE THAT I’VE LOVED AND WORKED WITH OVER THE YEARS AS POSSIBLE.