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? © 2005 Jill Conner PAJ 82 (2006), pp. 67–77. ᭿ 67 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 68 ᭿ PAJ 82 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. CONNER / Fiction Against Reality ᭿ 69 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? 70 ᭿ PAJ 82 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.