This transcript was exported on Mar 24, 2020 - view latest version here. Steve McQueen Dialogue with Stuart Comer, 2013 Stuart Comer: We're at the Walker Arts Center for a dialogue with Steve McQueen. Tonight's program is titled Steven McQueen: Art and Cinema. We'll talk about his remarkable career as both an artist and a filmmaker. Steve McQueen began his career as a visual artist. In 1999, he was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize, Britain's highest honor for the visual arts. At that moment, he was part of a new generation of artists who were really forging a new kind of video installation, pushing filmmaking out of the cinema and into the gallery. Many of the projects he did at the time were multiple-screen video installations or projections in which one became very aware of the reflections on the floor or the space around the screen. So, the viewer became much more mobile, not seated in a stationary seat in the cinema as I am now but really mobilized so that they would move from screen to screen and become a much more active participant in the experience of cinema. Stuart Comer: Subsequently, he actually reversed tack and returned to feature filmmaking, beginning with his feature film, Hunger, about Bobby Sands and the IRA prison strikes in the Maze prison during the early 1980s. This won him wide acclaim and also really highlighted his interest in the body, in particular the brutal punishment to which the prisoners at the time were submitted. He continued this interest also working with the actor Michael Fassbender, who also appeared in Hunger, in Shame, a film about a sex addict in 1990s New York City. Stuart Comer: Subsequently, this year, he's now come out with his widely-acclaimed feature film 12 Years a Slave about history of slavery in North America, based on the life story of Samuel Northup and his memoirs. This film is also one that continues to shock people and I think really realizes Steve's ambition to show the unknown, show repressed histories, really reveal things that are invisible within our society in a very direct and physical way. His cinema is one in which the body has a very central role, in which sound and sensation are as important as the visual image so that it becomes a very sensorial and physical experience. Tonight, we'll be discussing many of these ideas in his work and how he's really moved fluidly between the cinema and the gallery. I'm Stuart Comer, Chief Curator for Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and now let's go to our dialogue with Steve McQueen. Stuart Comer: Good evening and thanks very much to Sheryl and Dean and Olga and the staff at the Walker for bringing us here. It's a huge honor for me to be here with Steve in a room which is very rare in museums like this. For most art museums to take cinema seriously is a very rare thing and to have a cinema as exceptional as this one is a very exciting thing and to be in the company of an artist like this who has really demanded that we take both the gallery and the cinema much more seriously and the connection between the two has become much more interesting in the years that he's been producing the incredible work that he has. So, I hope we can really get into some of the ideas that happen onscreen in Steve's work but also talk a bit about the spaces in which those screens are situated and what that means to all of us, both physically, architecturally, politically. It's a very complicated recipe that Steve's presented us with, and it's really great to be here with him to draw this out a bit. Stuart Comer: From his earliest work in the early 1990s, I think two key things have happened to cinema. It's been submitted both to the Internet and it's been submitted to the generation of artists of which Steve is a major leading figure who were pioneering new modes of video installation, often using multiple screens but, most importantly, really taking the viewer much more seriously as an engaged spectator, somebody who is often mobilized who wasn't necessarily stationary, as we are all in this room at the moment, but really moving from screen to screen. But then subsequently, he came full circle and has now returned to the cinema and has been making feature films, not least of which is 12 Years a Slave, which hopefully most of you have now seen in the past few weeks. Steve McQueen Dialogue with Stuart Comer (Completed 3/24/20) Transcript by Rev.com Page 1 of 26 This transcript was exported on Mar 24, 2020 - view latest version here. Stuart Comer: But I wanted to start initially with an image from a video called Illuminer from 2001. If you can bring up the first slide, please. This is a fairly less well-known video, I would say. I hadn't seen it until Steve's retrospective, which opened a year ago at the Art Institute of Chicago and then when to the Schaulager in Basel. It was an exceptional exhibition. But this video really captured my imagination, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it ever since. I see it as a really threshold, Steve, in your work between your earliest videos, which really were meant for the gallery and which were very much about you and your own body, and then the shift to these feature films in which you no longer appear, except behind the camera. Stuart Comer: But there's something about the way that your body disappears. Correct me if I'm wrong, but basically the video was shot in a Paris hotel room just before an opening of your exhibition at Marian Goodman. You were watching the television late at night, and there was footage from a documentary about military action in Afghanistan. So, the light that lights Steve's body is the light of violence. It's the light of atrocity and warfare in the Middle East. But the camera that you used to capture this was just a small tripod camera on top of the monitor. So, you also begin to think about webcams and the era of Internet pornography and a lot of other things that I think play into your work, in particular, Shame, a few years later. Could you talk a little bit maybe about this shift in your work from your early use of your own body and to becoming a director and really directing action from actors, not just bodies in a more abstract sense? Steve McQueen: Well, first of all, I was cheap and I was reliable. I would always be there. No. It was just a case of urgency. It was a case of wanting to be as direct as possible and being present. In a way, you could think of it as some kind of performance in a way that one wanted to not just paint on the canvas but be in the canvas as well. It was just one of those things where, just as a figure within a landscape, I just wanted to sort of experiment with that performing element, as such. With this piece, Illuminer, it was very strange. It was one of those situations where I was running out of time. It's very classical, in a way, the nude figure on the bed. It's just one of those things where you think of Cézanne, these things like that. Steve McQueen: I mean, what was interesting for me was obviously... if you hadn't realized, I'm Black. Hello. Good evening. Welcome. On these white sheets, and it's just this whole contrast. Of course, what's making me visible is those images of violence reflected on the television. I was interested in the classical. I was interested in, of course, what you do in a hotel room on your own. I was interested in the political aspect of our presence, as such, because as much as we're here through love, we're here through violence. I mean, it's just a fact. Our presence here through war, through warfare, through immigration, through whatever has led us through where we are sitting today, as well as love, of course. So, those things I was sort of questioning and looking at. Stuart Comer: I think there's this notion of 24 hour news and webcams and a camera whose eye never closes. It's constantly looking at us. But what's really interesting to me in this video is, unlike the later work where the visual register in which you're operating is so crystal clear and sharp, this is a low-grade image. This is what Hito Steyerl, who's an artist in the exhibition 9 Artists upstairs, calls the poor image. It's an image where the digital image is degrading and dissolving and the body is being dissolved by this digital light. Steve McQueen: Yes. Well, the camera's fighting to sort of make sense of the image, because, again, it goes black, it goes white, and there's sort of a polarization, there's a sort of flash. Flashes, explosions, gunfire, and what happens in warfare, of course, is reflected on my body through light, and the camera's struggling to keep up.