FICTION AGAINST REALITY
The Rufus Corporation interviewed by Jill Conner
or the past decade Eve Sussman has sought to capture cinema verité within various film, video and installation pieces. In 1997 she launched Ornithology, Fwhich was a surveillance projection of birds living outside of the gallery space. Later that year, Sussman participated in the 5th International Istanbul Biennial and wired the city’s entire subway system with cameras. By 2003 the artist successfully moved beyond the confines of artifice and combined her fascination with random interrelationships in 89 Seconds at Alcazar, which was a film projection of Diego Velázquez’s world-renowned painting Las Meninas. Following the debut of 89 Seconds at Alcazar at the Whitney Biennial the following year, Sussman founded the Rufus Corporation, an interdisciplinary performance group that consists of 22 members. Rufus continues its quest to capture disarming realism, rendered through the paradigm of the short motion picture. This interview with Helen Pickett, Anette Previtti, Walter Sipser, Eve Sussman, Jeff Wood, and Sofie Zamchick was taped in February 2005 while Rufus was working on The Rape of the Sabine Women, a film inspired by the myth portrayed in Jacques Louis David’s 1799 painting.
CONNER: Your previous work has not drawn directly from art history. What drew you to use art historical subject matter as visual content in 89 Seconds at Alcazar?
SUSSMAN: Well I suppose initially seeing this painting in the Prado. I mean I wouldn’t say I’m drawn to art historic subject matter. I’m just drawn to things that are inspiring in terms of looking for ways of thinking about making work.
CONNER: Wouldn’t you consider this to be a form of appropriation?
SUSSMAN: No, I actually don’t. I’m so tired of appropriation I can’t tell you. I think appropriation is very different. Appropriation actually incorporates artwork verbatim and that’s not what I’m doing. I find it pretty boring.
CONNER: What was your way of working on 89 Seconds at Alcazar?
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028106775329598 by guest on 24 September 2021 SIPSER: We were dressed in seventeenth-century clothing and were walking around the inside of a Velasquez painting with baroque music playing in the background. Eve paid painstaking attention to the lighting. The combination of all the effects was entirely transformative. If attempting to explore some of the emotional and psychological conditions of characters moving through an environment was one of the larger concerns of this piece then I can say that the foundation was pretty solid. The atmosphere was erotically charged and the feeling of improvising and working within the space was a nice combination of cerebral and sensual.
WOOD: From an actor’s standpoint this was really interesting because we really had no exact idea of how the characters would behave in this situation and period. So we worked through a process of improvisation, playing around with all kinds of hilarious and embarrassing things, and in the end in order to avoid creating a parody-piece we went in the direction of pretty methodical gesture and choreogra- phy, with very little language at all. But because of the process of improvisation there was a strong emotional interior, so it turned out to be a situation of almost total subtext, which to me is one of the most powerful elements of the piece, a quality of charged narrative whereas there’s very little actual story happening at all. The emotion almost feels like an accident, which seems closer to how emotions actually operate as opposed to being scripted and forced. And it feels like it might fall apart at any second. We’re working through a similar process with the new piece, a process of sub-textual improvisation, and we’re experimenting with different acting styles ranging from minimal realism to more conventional dramatic improvisation to abstract gesture work.
SIPSER: One of the interesting things about the way Eve works is the variety of ways in which she allows the process of making a work to be documented— something that many artists are reluctant to show.
PICKETT: The amount of space that is afforded is key to Rufus. It allows ideas to percolate and morph and blend with other components. Also, what “space” allows is the reality of responsibility. We are all responsible for what happens in this arena. In using the word responsible, I mean also the aspect of letting the ego go and letting go of preconceived ideas and that can only happen with an on-going monologue and with an on-going dialogue with the other members. What we bring individually to the process can only work if it works for the piece as a whole. This is true collaboration and sometimes the most detailed, beautiful work comes from this place.
CONNER: How would you say that your work differs from other video artists like Matthew Barney, Bill Viola, and Pipilotti Rist?
SUSSMAN: I think Barney is really ambitious and visually really stunning but he leaves me cold. I don’t think I’m into what is cold. I think that’s the main difference. Bill Viola is also kind of emotionally cold to me. Pipilotti Rist’s work is a lot different. Her work seems to be more about herself. My work is not about me. Mine
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028106775329598 by guest on 24 September 2021 Video stills from 89 Seconds at Alcazar. Top: “King Sleeps”; Bottom: “The Infanta Enters.” Photos: Benedikt Partenheimer. Courtesy Roebling Hall.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028106775329598 by guest on 24 September 2021 has more to do with the interaction that occurs between people in a room and the emotional conditions of people, and so on. I’m really interested in emotional conditions. I don’t think Barney is at all. I know Bill Viola is but within Rist’s work it is much more about her own conditions within the world. I put myself in my work in a much more oblique way.
CONNER: So you seek to leave meaning open to the viewer?
SUSSMAN: Doesn’t everyone? I want the viewer to feel something. I don’t think Barney’s work carries that as a priority. I’m really interested in something that provides the viewer with an emotional experience, connecting them to what they see. That’s what I don’t like about most video art. I consider myself closer to filmmakers than to video artists.
CONNER: I saw Bill Viola’s Five Angels for the Millennium at the Whitney. It is split across five different projections within an expansive uneven room. Viewers are left glancing back and forth to see what screen is going to animate next. One screen, for example, portrays the artist diving in water while the other is a sheer reversal of the same action, in an effort to create something that is theatrically sublime.
SUSSMAN: Video art tends to be a lot more about tricks. You can have really great special effects or not so great special effects—but often the tricks take precedent. Filmmaking often has really great special effects, but it actually less about the gimmickry of the trick. Filmmaking is also about acting. I’m into acting. I work with actors.
CONNER: How does Rufus compare to the performance groups that flourished throughout the 1960s?
PREVITTI: It’s like we live, eat and sleep together.
PICKETT: Well, we did that when we were in Greece. That whole time we got incredibly close. This collective atmosphere is indicative of things that happened in the sixties and seventies. I think the lack of money in general has prevented the art world from having more performance groups at this time. It has caused artists to move away from collaboration. But in this kind of cooperative situation, everyone has different strengths that together create a full picture.
SIPSER: Jeff likes bright colors and flashing lights for example.
ZAMCHICK: Every moment is being filmed, and every moment is the collabora- tion. It’s not based on a specific moment. Instead it’s about everything that everyone experiences.
CONNER: How did you become acquainted with video?
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028106775329598 by guest on 24 September 2021 SUSSMAN: The same way that everyone else does, I guess. It’s all around you all the time in the generation we grew up in. I used to shoot with super-8 cameras when I was about 18 or 20 and I watched TV from the time I was a little kid even though my parents tried to prohibit it (which makes you want to watch even more). It’s ubiquitous. I don’t know how you could not be acquainted with it unless you grew up in the middle of Africa or something.
CONNER: How would you describe cinema verité?
SUSSMAN: A movement that began simultaneously in a number of countries— France, England, Canada and the United States—and has been called number of things—free cinema, direct cinema, and observational documentary. Chris Marker in Sans Soliel and Wim Wenders in Tokyo Ga worked in the form founded by the likes of D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, and Jean Rouch. They were the first to define this style of taking the camera and shooting real life. The subjects are not acting. It’s what I’m especially intrigued with. I’m interested in the space where cinema verité and fictional filmmaking meet as in some of Cassavetes work. It’s something that I think about a lot, especially with respect to the next piece.
CONNER: 89 Seconds at Alcazar consisted of gestures between characters and no audible dialogue, yet the Making of 89 Seconds exposed the casual, Shakespearean- style exchange that actually occurred. Will future pieces be portrayed similarly?
SUSSMAN: We’re not going to have much dialogue. There might be one interview scene that actually has language in it. But there will be very little spoken language. We’ve been working a lot with fake language, and we’re more interested in using sound and singing but it won’t be close to any typical filmic dialogue.
CONNER: By reducing an art historical icon to a brief, fleeting moment in time your work clearly is imposing a photographic sensibility on history. Do you think this makes it more redundant or more visionary?
SUSSMAN: Obviously the choice and hope is to be visionary. I’m really not interested in repeating existing things. I’m really about trying to discover a language that I think communicates some sort of emotional state or some psychological condition and forms a bond between the viewer and what they’re seeing on the screen as well as between the characters on the screen. Whether you do that using cinema verité or on a sound stage, you’re still trying to create that emotional moment and you’re still tying to get a psychologically poignant thing that people can connect to. You know, you still need a hook. And I’m interested in that, the way a filmmaker is. I believe video artists don’t often have that as a priority. That’s why the difference between film and video art is so important, and why I have little patience for boring motion-picture art. So I’m certainly not interested in being repetitive. I’m merely trying to give you an experience that’s meaningful. It doesn’t matter if it’s an experience you’ve seen before or not. It just has to be meaningful. You can see the same narrative love story at different times but it doesn’t prohibit you from being
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028106775329598 by guest on 24 September 2021 moved every time you watch the movie. It’s not about trying to find something new so much as it is about finding something gripping. I don’t think that what we did with 89 Seconds was anything new, however it definitely had a certain emotional and psychological tenacity that kept people watching often more than once.
CONNER: It felt like a cliffhanger.
SUSSMAN: Exactly. This was the build-up, and in the end nothing happens. I’m really into movies where nothing really happens. Like Chantal Akerman’s Je, tu, il, elle in which a woman eats a bag of sugar, drags a mattress around a room and then ends up fucking a truck driver. Almost nothing happens. Video art is not very emotive most of the time. It can keep you for a while if you have a certain, really esoteric, developed palette, but I think if you don’t have a developed taste for a certain kind of esoteric artwork, it’s not going to hold you for very long.
CONNER: 89 Seconds at Alcazar has been incredibly successful, but despite this have you encountered any criticism from art historians?
SUSSMAN: Not really. Sometimes the occasional boring comment. You know, the fixation on a certain detail, like we forgot the key on Velasquez’s belt. Only things as tedious as that. But that’s not the point. Nobody has come up to say that the piece really sucks or it’s horrible that it’s a duplication of a masterpiece. I think most people are pretty infatuated with it. So, no, I haven’t had any constructive, negative criticism. The only criticism I have had has been kind of petty. If someone has constructive or negative criticism I’d love to hear it.
CONNER: Other video artists attempt to propel their work beyond the notion of the “frame.” Would you say that your work does that even though it is dealing with content that has been physically framed?
SUSSMAN: I guess I want to know what you mean by “other video artists beyond the frame.”
CONNER: Bill Viola, for example, creates an environment on screen that uses visual effects, giving the illusion that his work is physically within the space that it is exhibited.
SUSSMAN: You’re constantly imagining another space in the film because the camera is constantly moving. On one hand I am super conscious of the “frame” such that if you stop the film at any moment, you will see a compelling photograph. And that’s something that a lot of filmmakers don’t think about. I think how you frame things in the camera is really important. Antonioni, Wong Kar-Wai, Stephen Soderbergh, and Lars Von Trier are people who really think about “frame.”
In terms of 89 Seconds, there’s either a sound or a gesture that serves as a cue, but I don’t think it’s as conceptual as you may be imagining. It’s not really an issue, but I
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028106775329598 by guest on 24 September 2021 keep thinking about the photographs. How do you view this sequential moment as a compelling photograph? I do think it’s great when you make a piece and can just hit pause and you have a great photograph. There will always be something beyond the frame that is not pictured and that’s exciting to me.
CONNER: How do you feel about art theorists and historians who have turned the idea of frame from a formalist reality into a socio-political issue?
SUSSMAN: That’s something that’s never really intrigued me very much. I don’t understand why ideas like that matter. I certainly think about what makes a compelling image as well as an image that doesn’t give the whole game away. But I think part of making an image that doesn’t give the game away is one that doesn’t have all the information in it. That’s why the Steadicam is such a great tool—it allows you to really take advantage of the feeling that the next important moment is just beyond the frame and if you stick with the camera long enough it just might be revealed, or not.
CONNER: Making 89 Seconds showed that the actors were indeed engaging in dramatic dialogue to ground their actions. However, in 89 Seconds at Alcazar the speech was blurred to the point of incoherence. What advantage existed in obscuring this detail?
SUSSMAN: Everything that they were saying was made up in improvisation. It was all about developing character as well as a psychological place, so as to achieve a certain tension. We needed a certain tension between the King and Queen, so the actors were in charge of having to figure something out through the use of language. But in the end, I didn’t want that since I thought it was unnecessary to have comprehensive language be available. Although there are a few words you might be able to pick out here and there, having people speak comprehensible English with a fake British accent would have been such a joke. We had no idea how they actually spoke in a Spanish court and there’s no good way to invent that. In this case language was used as a support that I was able to strip away once the piece was built.
CONNER: How long did it take you to complete 89 Seconds?
SUSSMAN: The idea came about when I saw the painting in the Prado in 2000. When I got back I wrote a proposal and sent it out to a couple of foundations. They didn’t give me any money for it, so I dropped the idea due to the fact that it would have been impossible without any kind of funding. Three years later I got an NYSCA grant for a different piece at a time when I had a show deadline in England. I thought that 89 Seconds would actually be doable, so we started the pre-production in March of 2003. Then over the summer it went into post-production. For conception, it took four years, but from pre-production to opening at the Whitney it was exactly a year.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028106775329598 by guest on 24 September 2021 Rehearsal for The Rape of the Sabine Women, January 2005. Photo: Courtesy Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028106775329598 by guest on 24 September 2021 CONNER: When do you expect your current project, The Rape of Sabine Women, to be complete?
SUSSMAN: We’re shooting in May and in post over the summer. There’s a goal of fall 2005 for the premiere of The Rape of Sabine Women in Berlin.
CONNER: You’re going to film in front of the Pergamon frieze in Berlin?
SUSSMAN: We have permission to shoot at the Pergamon Museum in the altar room. We are also shooting at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. In Athens our locations are the Herodion Theatre and the modern Agora as well as a 1961 international style house by Vasalmakis.
CONNER: How does your work reach out and generate catharsis within the viewer? Do you see your work in terms of the Brechtian fourth wall?
SIPSER: As the actor portraying Velasquez, it was odd to look out on the crew and onlookers from inside of the painting which I was both inhabiting and actually working on simultaneously. I also see the painter as mediating the tension that you see unfolding in the film.
PREVITTI: Eve had the camera on us all the time, which ultimately helped us forget about aesthetic boundaries. But when someone says “you’re on camera” it is much more nerve-wracking.
SUSSMAN: I think we’re trying to break the wall in the way we play with the concept of cinema verité. It is about presenting the narrative that you see in front of you as something that happened in life—something that is alive and unrepeatable. In video you never quite get the opportunity to break the Brechtian wall like you can in theatre. As far as catharsis within the viewer is concerned, I wouldn’t know how one can ever be aware that they are definitely creating a connection with the viewer. You just don’t know. People will tell you once they’ve seen a piece, but you can’t prove you’re doing that. You can’t even really assume from your own reaction, because you’re reaction as a filmmaker is not to be trusted. But I am interested in breaking down the barrier between the imaginary narrative and the work that goes into creating that context.
It’s a discussion that we have a lot. If you break down the fiction too much, are you killing the magic? When 89 Seconds at Alcazar was being shown at the Rice University Gallery in Houston, the curator didn’t want to show Making 89 Seconds at the same time because she thought it undermined the magic. I’m also interested in changing the magic to some degree. For example, I might be in the new piece as a photographer, but I’m still directing the piece. Or the choreographer may be in there as a runway ground signaler, but she is still giving directions. It’s a question of how much you want to put forth. I’m interested in what you’re saying about the Brechtian wall. One could say it’s broken by Making 89 Seconds because you see all
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028106775329598 by guest on 24 September 2021 the drywall and lights and gear. But I think there is a way to do that without having a narrative film separate from a “making of” documentary. That’s what we’re trying to figure out now.
WOOD: If catharsis is a relationship between tension and release, then the fourth wall is somehow a mediator there, for the actors as well as the viewer. It’s strange how in this sense we really need the wall, whatever it is, in order to be carried through it. Because when we’re confronted with something that we perceive to be a fiction, we want to challenge the conditions of that fiction, but we also want the fiction to uphold those conditions. It’s a paradoxical situation. The division is invisible, yet fundamental—something we carry around inside us rather than something that exists as a screen or at the edge of the stage. The viewer and the fiction are both leaning into the wall and testing its ability to uphold and transmit tension. If the tension of a work can translate into a cathartic experience for the viewer, then the piece has been successful, and I think this should be the goal of films. There’s no other good reason to go through the monstrosity of a production. But if a catharsis occurs, it’s still somehow accidental. It’s not something you can fake or engineer.
CONNER: Eve, your previous work has not been cathartic. What attracted you to communicate with viewers on an emotional level? Do you think this is a bit romantic?
SUSSMAN: 89 Seconds has more of the emotional experience of going to the movies. I think that Ornithology created an emotional response in viewers since some people got involved with it by going out on a ramp and then stayed out there on the platform. As a result they were in the piece that was being projected back into the gallery. It was a different type of involvement, because you’re not really drawn into the pigeons as characters. Yet there’s something kind of awesome about seeing them a little bit like humans. But there’s a point when live-feed is never going to have the emotional content for the viewer to connect with that fictional film has. I still think there’s something great about it and that it is possible to make live video a cathartic experience. I could watch people on surveillance forever. Making live video a cathartic experience is what I attempted to do in How to Tell the Future From the Past at the Istanbul Biennial. I tried to create an emotional connection with the people in the video by juxtaposing them with fictional stories—only that the real people in the train station picked up by the live-feed surveillance cameras actually became fictional characters because of the stories that appeared next to them. How to Tell the Future is an example of the mix of cinema verité and fictional film that I keep trying to talk about. I don’t see this mix happening very often in video art. I’m seeing work that either uses pure doc style shooting or the current strain of video art that employs visual art direction or fantasy.
It is frustrating that we as humans are so attached to cathartic narrative to the point that every other form fails in comparison. But I have decided to accept the power of narrative rather than fight against it. It can be as simple as two people entering a room, they turn around and see someone else and leave again. That’s narrative. I’m
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028106775329598 by guest on 24 September 2021 interested in people having some kind of cinematic experience and I think a lot of video artists don’t care about that. Take Patty Chang’s Untitled (Eels) (2001), for example: her work makes you a voyeur of her personal experience of putting eels in her shirt. It’s a hilarious and at the same time horrifying piece of work, but I wouldn’t call it cathartic. That work grows directly out of performance art that was done in the sixties and seventies. People didn’t give a damn about the audience experience—cathartic or otherwise.
CONNER: Are there any theorists or filmmakers who inspire your work?
SUSSMAN: Theorists, not at all. Filmmakers, lots. I could give you a laundry list: Antonioni, Dennis Hopper’s early work, Robert Altman, Lars van Trier, Wim Wenders, Goddard, Mike Leigh. I also like Gary Hill’s early work. Circular Breathing, which was one of the most amazing pieces I ever saw when it was first presented. I think Hill is great, but it seems like he’s run out of ideas. I think Bruce Nauman’s one of the most important visionaries of our time—tantamount to Beuys—he is in a way the American Joseph Beuys. But in general I look at more film than art and I’m much more interested in the history of film than the history of art.
JILL CONNER is an art critic and curator based in New York City. She also writes for Sculpture and Afterimage.
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