‘Artist in Residence’ – A View from the Analyst’s Couch: A transcript of the conversation between Lisa Castagner and Dr Catherine Grant, 2nd September, 2014, Chelsea College of Art and Design.

CG is waiting in a chair, she arises then sits again as LC enters stage and lies on analyst’s couch. CG: You’ve been away for some time. Would you like to discuss this? LC: I did that artist residency in Amsterdam for three months that I told you about. And I made the film I proposed, based on the life and work of a female Dutch still-life painter, called Maria van Oosterwyck. Part of the contract for the residency was to conduct interviews with arts professionals every month, which I managed, but next I have to present a ‘public facing event’ about my experience there. It’s supposed to be an informative talk about the Amsterdam art scene. But I don’t know the London art scene, let alone a scene anywhere else, so I don’t feel cut out to comment on how it works. I just feel like a massive fraud addressing a group of people.

CG: You say that you feel like a fraud, and that you don’t know anything about the London art scene. Let’s explore why you feel this way, despite having been a practising artist in London for at least the last 10 years. Maybe there are issues arising from this residency and the lecture that we could discuss, particularly around feeling like an outsider. It might help you understand what you did achieve by spending the three months in Amsterdam. Are you uncomfortable talking about your art? LC: I don’t know why, I can’t comfortably use the artist word, but I don’t feel like I can call myself a photographer either, it doesn’t seem honest somehow. It’s a bit of a love-hate relationship I have with photography and with art, when I’m annoyed with one label, I turn to the other. But I probably have a hot-cold on-off relationship with most things and most people.

I saw a documentary about Divine the other day, she started her drag career by dressing up to look like Elizabeth Taylor, at a time when all the other drag queens were aiming for realism and to look as beautiful as possible, but after a while Divine began to dress up in costumes that were less appropriate for somebody overweight to wear. John Waters said he liked this and encouraged it because it made fun of the drag balls.

It made me wonder if John Waters hated the drag balls while also being drawn towards them, if his contempt for the thing he was obsessed by helped to drive his creative process forward. In Divine’s case, his anger about his past as a misunderstood and bullied youth, led to rebellion later. He would turn against the drag balls and against his audience if he felt like it. Like Sinead O’Connor, from time to time I watch her SNL performance of War, when she rips up the picture of the pope, then her performance at Madison Square Gardens when she got booed off the stage and Kris Kristofferson whispered something in her ear and gave her a hug. Her anger seems to fuel her creativity, which gets her into trouble, attracting criticism for when she turns against the music industry whilst continuing to work in it, and for her tirades against organised religion while being an ordained priest.

CG: It sounds like you’re saying that these artists are looking for a creative solution to their conflicted relationship with the thing they want to be part of.

LC: Yeah, maybe it’s that.

CG: Why did you go on this residency? LC: A friend posted it on Facebook and someone else I know said they thought I’d like it there so that put it in my head, but I wanted to experience it as more than a tourist on a weekend break. Quite a few artists seem to be of the feeling that a trip abroad should be spent working in some capacity, they express guilt or unease at the idea of pure holiday-making for its own sake. This is in contrast to people who hold down steady jobs like I used to, who might feel they live for their holidays and deserve them. When I saw the residency opportunity I was struck by the look of the studio and apartment, I was drawn to it physically and I tried to visualise myself in it. Then you write this whole proposal and it brings a cold, researched idea into vision and that makes you want to see it through, to give birth to it. I didn’t understand the appeal of residencies for a long time, I’ve had to switch gears a bit to make art that justifies being in another country, I want to use the environment, not just have it as a nice spacious backdrop for making more of the same artwork. I’d previously been on one other residency and my proposal for a film involved similar research into historical female figures and I really tried to use the surroundings, also actively engaging with women currently living there.

In the interview the Dutch panel made me aware of the studio building and it’s history, that the studio was a letter foundry then they squatted in the 1980s now they’re all still there and they’re in their 50’s. They pointed out that it had an LGBT disco in it on Sunday nights. I imagined it to be like a wholesome version of somewhere in London like Horsemeat Disco in Vauxhall, but anyway I fantasised about this space, what it would be like if I went there, what I would wear. I brought loads of clothes to Amsterdam, about 20 pairs of shoes and boots as I didn’t know what to expect from the weather and the attitude there, and I must have wanted to blend in. It was much more restrained than London of course in terms of style and self-expression, so I developed a modest pared-back look and stuck with that. It was ages before I explored the gay disco, which is called Trut, being Dutch for ‘faggot’. It had a strictly gay-only policy, so I had to pretend; they genuinely don’t welcome straight people, fag-hags especially. It was a challenge to dress in a way I thought a European liberal lesbian might, although I got told my first night by a German girl “you don’t look queer”, that made me all the more determined for the next time, The club was in the basement of the block, so I even went on my own one night, but I think in my own way, I cracked it. It was no Horse Meat Disco, the music wasn’t that exciting or loud and the crowd were quite young and studenty, but it was friendly and positive feeling. Somehow typically Dutch and healthy, I do have other clunky observations about Dutch people, but the gay scene, speaking as an outsider anyway, is a useful analogy for the culture in general, it’s a microcosm for the society as a whole; tolerant, fair, open, healthy, not particularly edgy.

CG: How did you find the isolation of your residency? LC: I really craved a partner and collaborator, someone to work with to make it come alive, I had my dog with me for company, I didn’t collaborate with him or anything, but I was glad I had him, so glad, ‘cos I took him to openings and dinners, he gave me something to hide behind, like having a cigarette to smoke.

The lack of structure or a defined audience as an artist working alone really hit home, questions of who I am doing this for if not just for me, who cares. Unlike a 9-5 job, where you’ll get fired or get a hard time from a manager if you don’t perform or show up. The writer and critic Cyril Connolly said it was ‘Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self’ …as virtuous as that sounds, I think you’d need a really strong sense of self to be able to exist in a vacuum like that. I do need some validation, to feel the highs to be able to keep going. Both Connolly and his friend Evelyn Waugh were consumed with self-loathing but Waugh achieved success and sought solace from his misery through spirituality, although Connolly is considered to have remained the most true to himself.

Although the Netherlands is hardly a cultural shock, I had a heightened feeling of being separate from everyone else even more than usual. I suppose that’s the nature of being foreign

CG: Did the isolation of the residency have some kind of religious significance for you? LC: I felt a bit like a monk, I was being frugal with food, careful with money and not going out socialising or boozing, at least not for the beginning anyway, I thought this was a needed break from distractions that I look for and sometimes find in London. But perhaps I needed something spiritual to keep me company and give meaning to my self-confinement, instead of just trying to connect with people and things on the internet. It was quite cold there for the first month and I didn’t really see anyone, I hadn’t got stuck into my project. That’s when I found myself comfort-watching the same film I played over and over in the background everyday:

CUE PARIS IS BURNING clip: Voiceover: When you’re a man and a woman, you can do anything; you can…you can almost have sex on the street if you want to! But the most somebody gonna say is ‘hey get a hump for me!’, you know. But when you’re gay you monitor everything you do; you monitor how you look, how you dress, how you talk, how you act, did they see me… what did they think of me? Dorian Corey: To be able to blend, that’s what realness is. If you can pass the untrained eye, or even the trained eye, and not give away the fact that you’re gay, that’s when its realness. MC: Banjee! Looking like the boy that probably robbed you a few minutes before you came to Paris’ ball. Dorian Corey: The idea of realness is to look as much as possible like your straight counterpart. MC: Shake the dice and steal the rice, right here, c’mon baby. Yes daddy, I got my food stamps and cards waiting. Alright. Dust coat, Bay soap, Rolaids, you got it. Dorian Corey: The realer you look, means you look like a real woman.

CG: Why was this film so important to you? LC: There’s a familiarity after multiple viewings. I fell in love with all the people I felt like I started to absorb them through the textures of their voices. It has lots of things I think I need to feel excited, like glamour, disco, real lives, creativity, wisdom, tragedy. I don’t desire them, but maybe I desire to be them, to inhabit their form and their freedom. I don’t know.

CG: You desire to inhabit their form, because their form is all about inhabiting the form of others. They are playing out identities that they have no access to. A feeling of separation they are sharing with like-minded people at the balls. They play with identities, which makes identity itself fraudulent, so you don’t need to deal with your own feelings of being a fake.

LC: Yeah

CG: How did you relate to other people whilst you were away? LC: While walking the dog I found a handwritten notice for a film night, a screening of Andrej Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, which I’d never seen, going to be shown in a squat cinema. This cinema program was on 4 times a week across different venues in Amsterdam, it became one of the defining features of my time there. The programmer was also a cultural activist who was of the heartfelt belief that films should be watched on a big screen with an audience, not your laptop, to encourage this he made sure the entry was free or only a few euros, and the bar was cheap so that people wouldn’t have an excuse not to come. I forced myself one night after a screening of Fassbinder’s Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant to ask women in the audience if they’d be in my film, I was really nervous about doing it, but I knew if I didn’t then I’d feel like a massive failure. But they all got back to me in the end, were involved with the film, then we hung out, and stayed in contact, so I guess we’re friends. I was quite surprised; it feels like a creative achievement to form friendships outside of a job or study environment

CG: What does it mean to be creative? LC: I don’t know, maybe just not being too nice. Like there’s all these people I end up talking to on the street, they’re really interesting and creative on their own terms but quite hard work… a year ago I got to know a local known as The Streatham Tranny who would ride around South London on his bike wearing a thong and high heels, he’d written a book called Journey to Myself and he needed an audience. He noticed I was a bit lost in myself and offered to give me therapy if I recorded his songs in return.

CUE STREATHAM TRANNY clip ‘Emptiness song’: Tranny: Ok, now these songs are copyright, you’re not allowed to do with them…you’re not allowed to put the whole thing on YouTube. Or anywhere. Yes? You ready? (Sings) “Emptiness is all around us, everywhere it’s in the air; everyday we talk and say we’re going here, and going there, but when you look at our lives, they’re so empty, so empty. All the plans we try to make, yeah all the nights we lie awake, all the steps we try to take to make believe we’re not a fake, and in the very next breeze, blows us over, blows us over. Forgot about your heart, but that was long ago, forgot about your soul, but now you just don’t know, forgot about your goal you wanted to be whole, but now you just don’t care; there’s nowhere to go. So we just give up the fight, we don’t believe we have the right, embrace the dull, embrace the drag, who needs the light who needs the bright. Colours, and the bright ideas, our lives are grey; they’ll stay that way. For emptiness is all around us, everywhere it’s in the air, everyday we talk and say we’re going here, we’re going there, but when you look at our lives, they’re so empty, so empty. Forgot about your heart, but that was long ago, forgot about your soul and now you just don’t know, forgot about your goal, you wanted to be whole, but now…” (Stops, bangs keyboard) See that happens. LC: Its ok, it was really good.

LC: I started making a film about, him but we had a stormy relationship and fell out, so I abandoned the project. But I would hold him up as an example of someone using their own version of creativity to bring meaning to their lives, not for anything else. Although he was really poor and had to eat food out of the bin, and I wouldn’t be happy living that way.

So I went to that screening of Nostalghia on my second week in Amsterdam and met the programmer Jeffrey Babcock who curated and introduced the films every night, which always helped wedge the experiences in my head:

CUE JEFFREY BABCOCK film screening introduction: Welcome! To De Nieuwe Anita tonight; one of eight different underground cinemas across Amsterdam that I programme my films in. Tonight we’re going to see a film called Nostalghia by Andrej Tarkovsky, made in 1983. The last place I lived in America was Colorado, and that was back in the early1980s, while I was there my film teacher was Stan Brakhage, who’s a pretty well known experimental filmmaker. Um, there’s a film festival every year called Telluride film festival. And one year, Andrej Tarkovsky comes to that festival, I think it’s the only time he had ever been to the United States in his entire life. The head of the Telluride film festival knew how much Stan Brakhage really loved Andrej Tarkovsky, so he decided to get them to have a meeting. There’s a hotel room, there’s a little television set there, Stan has brought along some VHS tapes of his films so he can to show Tarkarovsky what he’s basically about. They meet, they’re cordial. Then Stan starts playing these films, when Tarkovsky accuses him of just… messing around. Basically just playing around with materials, and for Tarkovsky that wasn’t cinema, that wasn’t art at all. Nostalghia was the first film that Tarkovsky made while he was in exile from his homeland, Russia. It was shot in Italy, but it was still funded by the official Russian movie studio, which was called Mosfilm. But while they were shooting in Italy, Mosfilm basically withdrew all their financial support, told Tarkovsky he had to come back to Russia. And therefore Tarkovsky was in a difficult situation and he decided to defect and not return. One reporter asked Tarkovsky which country he wanted to live in, if not Russia, to which Tarkovsky replied, that asking that question was like being asked what country he wanted to bury his children in. So Nostalghia is amongst other things, about the Russian soul, but also just a general feeling of displacement and alienation that one experiences when one leaves one’s own homeland. It’s about the difficulty of translating and interpreting the world around us.

LC: Its not really possible to describe the film, its so slow and poetic and beautiful. It feels like a favourite film now, I don’t love it or want to watch it all the time like Paris is Burning, but I connected with it on lots of personal levels. Something to do with watching it at a certain time in a particular place. The central character is a Russian history professor who goes to Italy to research a composer. He’s at odds with his new Italian surroundings and dreams of his home and past in Russia. He becomes intrigued with a local madman who lives in a dilapidated house where he locked up his family for seven years cos he feared the end of the world and wanted to protect them…. The Russian tries to connect with him and is eventually inspired by him as part of his longing for meaning and spiritual enlightenment. The Russian character realizes that when he returns to the Soviet Union it will involve the end of something. This causes him to feel depressed, as he knows that he will never be able to forget or put behind him what he has experienced in Italy. So, I got that, anticipating my return to the UK with a sense of dread, but it was fine, I was just being a drama queen.

There’s a scene that is less Tarkovsky, less Russian, more Italian neo-Realist in style and humour, which serves to show what can happen to someone’s work when they leave their homeland. The scene draws attention to the real life problem facing Italy when all the mental institutions were closed down and the patients were left to roam the street and countryside:

CUE NOSTALGHIA clip: Where am I when I’m not in reality, or in my imagination? Here’s my new pact: it must be sunny at night and snowy in August. Great things end, small things endure, Society must become united again, instead of so disjointed. Just look at nature and you’ll see that life is simple. We must go back to where we were, to the point where you took the wrong turn. We must go back to the main foundations of life without dirtying the water. What kind of world is this if a madman tells you, you must be ashamed of yourselves! Music now. -Music! Music! I forgot this. Oh mother! Oh mother! The air is that light thing that moves around your head and becomes clearer when you laugh. -The music doesn’t work! (Sets fire to himself, music plays, dog howls) Zoe! Zoe!

LC: The madman’s family have all escaped and the only thing left in his life is Zoe, his German Shepherd. Tarkovsky said he was interested in working with characters whose relationship to society is characterized by a strong element of conflict. He wanted to follow this kind of person to find out how they resolve their problems: will they cave in, or will they remain true to themselves.

CG: The film you made was about the Dutch painter Maria van Oosterwijck. How did you decide to focus on her? LC: I chose her while researching a book called 1001 Women in Dutch History. She stood out as being one of only two successful female Dutch Golden Age vanitas painters. The other was Rachel Ruysch, who was considered to be more widely received and successful owing to her status as a wife and mother. It’s thought that this made her more trusted as a well-rounded individual than van Oosterwyck, who made clear that her devotion was to art and her religious faith. Although I’m not dedicated to art or religion. I don’t have the wife-mother thing going on either.

I proposed to study a painting that was hanging in a gallery in The Hague, but although my host tried pulling strings with his contacts, I never got access to film it. It was very late in my residency before I found out that I couldn’t get access and by that time different experiences and feelings reshaped the original idea. So it became about my failure to achieve a certain intention.

CUE FRUITS OF LABOUR: https://vimeo.com/97420338

CG: We’ve been talking together now for some years. We have never really discussed religion. This is important in your film, is there something you would like to talk about? LC: If you want to find religion affirmed in art you need to go back into art history a fair bit, when everything was an allegory for religion. I’m curious about people and their drive to create art as if spurred on by something bordering on the religious I thought by now, by this age, I would have had my calling, professionally and spiritually, but I haven’t had any enlightenment. I suppose I want a modicum of spirituality. To surrender to proper Christian belief would be akin to becoming irrational, and something about that appeals. But groups are hard to get on with and to fit into so I keep putting off the commitment On the residency I kept listening to music I liked when I was young, like old Manic Street Preachers. On the track ‘Faster’ from The Holy Bible album, there’s a lyric “I know I believe in nothing, but it is my nothing” which I’m told is paraphrased from some Francis Bacon said. I know it sounds like clichéd teenage angst and nihilist expression but this still chimes for me. I keep going back to my 6th form school years for music and film influences. Some of the stuff in the Fruits of Labour video reminded me of Terry Gilliam Monty Python animations, as well as the Peter Gabriel Sledgehammer music video. I was briefly excited when I noticed that; to feel the influence of TV I was exposed to as a child. CG: Perhaps we could return to the issue of being an outsider whilst being in Amsterdam. You made another film, Useful Phrases, which includes shots of doorbells of various apartment blocks. Do you want to talk about this? Did you feel shut out, do you feel shut out? LC: The buzzing of doorbells seemed like a funny anti-social thing to do while I was out walking around on my own with the dog, a bit situationist, then chickening out. A desire for intimacy and searching for it, but then needing to pull away from it once it’s offered. I was going to sample audio from Paris as I was listening to it obsessively, but then I settled with the sounds of my dog whining and the geese in the canals, stuff I was hearing everyday, and a homemade YouTube tutorial when I was trying to learn Dutch

CUE USEFUL PHRASES: https://vimeo.com/91455763

LC: I really hated making this piece cos I properly felt like a tourist pointing a camera at details in the street, or else I felt like a lost foundation student doing photography for the first time.

CG: In this film, and with the failure to get access to the painting you wanted to work with in your final film, do you think there is something that attracts you to the idea of failure? LC: Failure is completely unattractive and just embarrassing to begin with, then you get to a place where it feels okay, usually through finding humour in it to create distance. There’s a Smiths lyric in Shakespeare’s Sister, “I can smile about it now, but at the time it was terrible”. I went to see the Isabella Blow-Alexander McQueen show last year at Somerset House with my friend and he said when we kill ourselves, what would we put in the exhibition to mark our creative collaboration, obviously he was pointing at our failure to actually achieve any creative success during our lifetimes. This conversation has been ongoing, to the point that we talked about a timeline where nothing much happened between being born and meeting each other in 2012.

Although my friend is really talented, his weakness for having a good time has got in the way of his achieving any success. Maybe this is part of the appeal for me. He said I liked people like him because I find them non-threatening and they make me feel better about myself. I prefer to believe that I’m attracted to people who are talented but unrecognised, for one thing, there’s a hunger that is never satisfied so they keep on creating and they end up working in an isolation that allows them more freedom to take risks. And the lack of money and resources doesn’t seem to stop them; this tells me that their art isn’t a lifestyle or career choice.

It’s going to sound like I’m trying to make a very lofty comparison, but a book I’ve been reading talks about Mozart and how he could barely scrape a living from his work. It says that his father Leopold Mozart, “knew his son was a genius, he had given his life to proving it. He also knew him to be something very like a failure.” Failure on a scale like that, from such an irrefutable talent, suggests to me that failure is a personality trait. So what can you do?

There’s a quote from Paris is Burning that I keep coming back to all the time:

CUE PARIS IS BURNING CLIP: Dorian Corey: I always had hopes of being a big star. And then I looked…as you get older you aim a little lower. And I just say, “Well yeah, you still might make an impression.” Everybody wants to leave something behind them; some impression, some mark upon the world. Then you think, you’ve left a mark upon the world…if you just get through it. And a few people remember your name…then you left a mark. You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s better to just enjoy it. Pay your dues…and enjoy it. If you shoot a arrow and it goes real high, hooray for you.

CG: That’s all we have time for today, we can continue this next week. LC: Okay, thanks, bye. LC jumps up and exits.