Jesse Malmed: Let’s start somewhere in the middle: what were your cultural interests in your mid- to late-teens? And what would have been the obvious first question in an interview about your practice at that moment?

Dan Miller: I could conveniently bookend that period with two musical experiences: seeing Billy Joel and Elton John in concert as a fourteen-year-old, and seeing the anonymous art-rock band TISM play shortly before my nineteenth birthday. What I learned in those years is reflected in the enormous gap between the family-friendly Anglo-American über-culture and an Australian band who were wasting their university educations on writing vulgar anthems against the establishment. In those years it was music where I encountered ordinary people making things in response to their immediate worlds. This is the kind of culture I’m still interested in today. Back then, I gravitated to musicians and writers who understood our double isolation; suburbia at the “arse end of the world.” I was an enthusiastic spectator, but I completely failed to imagine producing anything other than good grades. If someone had asked me about my ‘practice’ then, I would have assumed they were asking what I was going to do when I finished law school.

JM: Transgressive/aggressive/soft/DIY/DIT/&c musics (and the communities surrounding them) seem to be the gateway for so many artists’ awakenings and interests in making culture. I think part of the ubiquity of this experience is reflected in your answer—conventional music is everywhere, so unconventional music has something obvious to bounce against, to camouflage itself as, to appear in stark relief against—in the way that maybe tens of thousands of people don’t assemble to watch a bloated but weak example of social practice on SPTV and then find their minds blown when they see a really killer sopra group playing in their cousin’s basement. Or maybe that’s what reality tv is. Did you ever play in bands? Are there other obvious or non-obvious ways that impacted your practice?

DM: You’re absolutely right. Although for many would-be artists I think music is the gateway but not the drug. I’ve never admitted this, but I was in a band in high school with a couple of friends for about five minutes. We practiced maybe twice, and we never played a show. Because I couldn’t play any instruments, I was designated as the singer. Because I couldn’t sing, we hit a wall pretty quickly (none of us appreciated the ideology of punk). There is a cassette tape in the bottom of a drawer somewhere that I really hope has been sitting next to a strong magnet this whole time. If anything from this experience influenced me it was the sheer terror of the idea of nakedly attempting to perform a talent in front of an audience. In recent years I’ve avoided repeated feats of virtuosity, and I’ve avoided being ‘on stage’ in various ways. I’ve explicitly shied away from working alone. Art is a place where—if you choose—you can be the singer, the guitarist, the roadie, the sound engineer, the pit photographer, the groupie, and the PR flack, all at the same time, while everyone else looks in every which direction. I love the messiness of this, and the unpredictability of a practice in which the author-spectator binary is abandoned or ignored.

JM: Maybe we could flip the old pedagogical saw and say that “those who can’t play instruments sing and those who can’t sing go on to make art”. I’m curious about how the “author-spectator binary” is contingent on some kind of spectacle (or text, I suppose). What does that relationship (or the breakdown of that binary) look like when there’s nothing else to look at? Or, if that question feels too obvious (or too opaque), could you offer some reflections on your experience in artists’ gardens?

DM: Well, it’s a truism that artists often “hide behind their work,” but I think the separation of artwork and author does little to avoid the extent to which the artist themself is also the thing offered up for consumption. The spectacle/text is all-encompassing. Thomas Pynchon may never give an interview until the day he dies, but we, loyal spectators, will forever be imbibing the Pynchonesque. What a breakdown of the author-spectator roleplay could bring is not necessarily “nothing else to look at,” but maybe “everything else to see.” A theorist whose work has influenced my thinking around this in the past couple of years is Stephen Wright, who argues that we should replace spectatorship with usership. What this implies is that art has to become more useful—perhaps so useful that it is indistinguishable from all the other useful things in the world. We should remember that ‘art’ as we know it is a set of conventions invented only in the last few hundred years. The ancient Greeks surely knew what to do with an oenochoe when they saw one on the dinner table.

JM: Do you remember in earlier days of the internet when email forwards or geocities pages would be filled with either lists of Steven Wright quotes that weren’t his or unattributed jokes that were his under the heading Head-Scratchers to make you go HMMMM? His work became useful in that context and functions pretty well as a voice and institution (let’s not say brand) such that it magnetizes ideas and phrases that feel like they could have been his. I would love to see him do a set of all the various jokes that have been speculatively attributed to him. The other Wright was my introduction to Bernard Brunon and a number of other artists whose practices he described as a kind of dark matter or, at least in my recollection, artists whose work is almost invisible unless you know what to look for. I’m curious about how your own interest in visibility (and in invisibility) deals with usefulness. I think it’s easy for us to see how a vessel can be doubly useful (I see what ewer doing there), but I’m curious about work that may be both useless (as art is sometimes described and proscribed to be) and invisible. We can easily make the argument that no art is truly useless but that its utility is bound up in our intellectual and sensorial experience, in its role as catalyst for thought and feeling—of course. Maybe there’s also something about the space between visibility and legibility that could be interesting to talk through.

DM: I would love to see Stewart Lee, my favorite meta-comedian, circle the wagons around Stephen Wright’s joke-magnetism. Or Yogi Berra’s, for that matter. I don’t know if The Other Wright has a funny bone, but my favorite anecdote of his is attributed to Brunon. Bernard Brunon is of course a very unwellknown artist who ran a house-painting business for 27 years, That’s Painting Productions, that was 100% a functioning house-painting business and 100% an ongoing artwork. I recall Wright mentioning in a talk he delivered to my laptop screen that Brunon often turned down invitations to exhibit in museums and galleries on the basis that he is “too busy working.” This is almost the diametric opposite of Duchamp’s boast that he had never worked a day in his life; that he had “never gotten wet.” Marcel, naturally, loved making the useful useless. If the readymade can said to be work, it is negative work. In the White Box, Duchamp asks “can works be made which are not “of art”?” This reads to me like a challenge that has never really been taken up. Let’s say that it was; would these “works” be invisible? I don’t think so—at least I believe that an artwork that is not visible (this is not to restrict visibility to the visual field alone) is not an artwork at all. But I agree with you that legibility is an important part of this—I’m interested in “works” that are legible as completely viable non-art to some people, and as completely viable art to others.

JM: I was once with a gaggle of artists at a small-town diner and there was curiosity about our presence there. “We’re residents just up the way,” one of us said something like. “Oh—you’re doctors?” they earnestly responded, trying to square our grubbiness with a concept of scrubs-iness. Like that, like practice, let’s shift in thinking about works to working. I’m always interested in how artists’ work impacts their work (and vice versa). An amount of your productive labor is given over to others in various ways. What other work have you done since you began making work? How have these works impacted your work? Are you interested, like Brunon, in fusing your work and your work in that capacity?

DM: Obviously art has an internal language and syntax, but we artists often don’t give non-artists enough credit for understanding what we do—or, worse, we relish the idea that what we do is somehow arcane. The classic “what kind of art do you do?” question can be a genuine invitation to dialogue, rather than eye-roll small-talk. Still, the possibility that a kind of double liberation can come from collocating (physically, conceptually) work and work is incredibly seductive. Ben Kinmont’s Sometimes a nicer sculpture is to be able to provide a living for your family (1998–ongoing) is a major inspiration. It’s no coincidence that many of these kinds of projects—Julia Bryan-Wilson named it ‘occupational realism’—occur at sites of commerce. Outside the work I’ve done in and around the art world, since I became an artist I’ve done all sorts of things for money—I’ve mowed lawns, moved furniture, hosted progressive dinners, ushered concert patrons, mounted televisions in fast food restaurants, and installed christmas decorations in shopping malls. Some of these jobs were fascinating (and many gave me ideas for artworks), but none seemed to offer the kind of structural stability needed for a true work-work fusion. But I keep thinking about it—I even wrote a manifesto last year calling for a group of artists to run a convenience store. This was heavily influenced by seeing Thomas Kong run his store Kim’s Corner Food over the past three years, but also by Chris Kraus’ book Kelly Lake Store, in which she applies (and is rejected) for a Guggenheim Fellowship to re-open a shuttered general store in one of those small Wisconsin towns you know so well.

JM: There’s something especially excellent about the convenience store as the site for these conceptual and physical experiments, as it relates to our earlier mention of usefulness and uselessness. Convenience stores have in their bones the understanding that you might be able to find a better selection or a better price or a better match elsewhere, but that there’s enough here, it’s not too expensive and what could be a better match than you and it being in the same place at the same time? They are eminently useful and in their relative predictability reveal their differences more immediately than other species of spaces. Did you know about Thomas Kong’s work before visited Kim’s or did you stumble upon that store just looking for a snack or something to drink? Do you remember your first conversations with him?

DM: I didn’t know anything about Thomas’ work before I met him in his store, although certainly a few other artists in Chicago had been aware of him for a while. The ironic thing is that I was walking home from the grocery store when I first noticed Kim’s Corner Food—I’m much more inclined to go the extra distance to avoid paying above retail (although there are a lot of surprising bargains at Kim’s). But you’ve absolutely nailed it when it comes to ‘convenience’—there is something irrepressible about it. If there’s a convenience store on your block, not even an Amazon drone could deliver you a cold Pepsi faster than you could put on your slippers and shuffle down the street. So what is this thing called ‘convenience’ we’re all so willing to shell out for? Perhaps it’s a kind of surplus value—maybe the surplus value that some people claim art produces. Fundamentally, though, it’s the use of this revenue-generating peculiarity to create time and space for other things that interests me. Some of the best jobs I’ve ever had have been inside the galleries of art museums, working in pseudo-security guard roles. I was always good at my job, but I also got a lot of thinking done and even conceived a bunch of artworks while making sure visitors didn’t touch the expensive paintings. One thing is for sure: the museums never docked my pay for thinking.

JM: I tried a form of active Cartesian splitting once while doing a cater-waiter gig in which I actively kept my mind occupied by a specific art problem that I had while I was dropping dinners and refilling glasses. I found that it was easier for me to be doing two kinds of work at once (at least something like that, with specific rhythms and relatively low agency) if I was focused in my mind-wandering. I also held one of those museum non-guard jobs before and thought often of this line from a David Berman piece about that kind of position: After guarding masterpieces for weeks, it feels good to stand in my dentist’s office before this cheap painting of a ship. Now, re-reading that piece I remember another line that I love: What Duchamp did with the urinal no longer surprises me, what surprises me is the idea that they had urinals back then. I was thinking yesterday about a class clown alone and home from school or wondering how if your work was doing your work would you daydream about washing dishes and populating spreadsheets. The you/r there is everyone/’s. I’m in rural Vermont as we type and two days ago a few of us walked a few miles to the General Store, which is mostly germane to this moment because of the name. There’s also been an uptick in an urban/e, curated “General Store” that strikes me now as being very much a Specific Store. Should interviews have questions at the end of each paragraph?

DM: Wow, that David Berman piece brought back a lot of memories for me. The anecdote about the guard placing asbestos fragments on the floor is brilliant—being sent home with pay is pretty much the ultimate work fantasy. To answer your non-question, if my work was doing my work (let’s say I was sent home with pay forever), I have a feeling I would still be washing dishes and populating spreadsheets, since they seem to be two fairly essential parts of living these days. I certainly wouldn’t be fantasizing about them. Do you daydream about writing grants when you’re in the studio? I recently got to see a piece of antique furniture called a dry sink, from the days before running water. Wasn’t a urinal without water just a pan? What would a dry spreadsheet look like? I’m not a luddite since I think being a reactionary is the surest way to misery, but I do enjoy inconvenience. Doing things the hard way is part of my DNA. Despite the idiosyncrasy of the space of the convenience store, some part of me thinks being an artist should mean being against convenience. Or maybe just against standardization. Where I live now, my nearest ‘convenience store’ is one of those monolithic chains that practically owns all of us. When Žižek first came to America, he was famously shocked by the condition of the toilets. Me, I was shocked to discover that businesses readily sell postage stamps for more than their face value. Still, I wouldn’t hold gouging like that against a mom-and-pop hardware store/pharmacy/tobacconist if they had some exotic plants in the window and a few handmade signs behind the counter.

JM: There’s a very specific handwriting that I associate with that scale of capitalism. My grandfather—Poppa Clown—who ran a vacuum store, produced his own special rug shampoo and sold bric and brac at the Cloverdale Swap Meet in greater Vancouver, had a style of writing that I still see in bodegas and on occasional telephone poles. When I just googled “my grandfather’s handwriting” I felt class anxiety that apparently he wasn’t a member of the quill-squiggling epistolarati. I’d like to switch gears a little bit—though I could type about handwriting for days—to ask you about Plinth Projects. I am, of course, very interested in platformist projects and outré curatorial conceits. This one has particular resonance for me in this moment because of the on-going conversations about the removal of Confederate monuments in this country. Perhaps you could share with us a bit about that project and how it has or hasn’t impacted your own thinking surrounding monuments here and in Australia and beyond.

DM: That’s a timely question. In the past few weeks that there has been renewed focus on monuments in Australia that celebrate colonial victories and ‘heroes,’ as rallying points for ongoing work by indigenous activists and their non-indigenous allies. Monuments are excellent things around which to focus people’s attention in a time of struggle, but they also allow us to see the absurdity and cruelty of the nation-state and its myths. Plinth Projects took an empty pedestal in Edinburgh Gardens, a popular park in Melbourne, as a site for a series of public art interventions in 2013 and 2014. The original statue, of Queen Victoria, had gone missing some time in the early 1900s, and as an empty pedestal it was actually very beautiful—it seemed to suggest, “we don’t make those kinds of myths here any more.” It had an empowering quality. My first real experience of the plinth was standing on top of it and making out with a date, not long after I moved to Melbourne in around 2009. A group of friends who used to meet for picnics in the park referred to it as the “statue without a statue.” In 2011 some traditionalist members of the otherwise left-wing local city council proposed erecting a new statue of Queen Victoria, a harebrained idea that was scuttled on the basis that it would be too expensive. So when we came along in 2012 and suggested mounting a series of con/temporary art projects on the plinth for a fraction of the cost, they were very glad to take us up on it. I do regret that we didn’t work with any indigenous artists, but I would at least suggest that our efforts, and those of the artists we commissioned, were deliberately anti-monumental. Art is almost never able to enact change at a political level, but I hope that it can at least present propositions for different ways to work against the status quo.

JM: Just a bit away from where I grew up there was an interesting response to a newly erected monument to sadistic conquistador Juan de Oñate y Salazar: indigenous activists chopped the statue’s foot off in mirroring recompense to his own brutality four centuries prior. This is a different but related manner. In the span of a week I was reacquainted with Laszlo and Lazlo Toth. The former is the geologist who attacked Michelangelo’s The Pietà in 1972 and the latter is the nom de plume of Don Novello (better known as a whole other character, Father Guido Sarducci) which he’s used for any number of wonderfully frustrating and deflating epistolary relationships with corporations, politicians and other loci of power. I’ve been thinking about this in part because I’m interested in characters like Sarducci because through their persistence of being as they move from show to show to movie to newspaper to show they stitch together diegeses and reveal them as a (speculatively) unified universe. Considering how fictions overlap might seem like an academic or obtuse response to our ever-worsening political climate. I obviously don’t advocate for what Toth did to The Pietà, but there’s something striking about how easily, if we were inclined, we could damage art. As a culture we have such respect for these objects that I won’t even consider touching a commercially-produced and friend-designated sculpture’s plinth without clearance. But they’re very vulnerable in real terms. Have you ever used a pseudonym?

DM: Late last winter I walked into an exhibition opening at an artist-run space in Chicago, having just hopped off my bike and carrying a large backpack of stuff. The entrance to the exhibition space was narrowed by an inexplicably-placed empty pedestal, and just as I had squeezed past I turned to hug a friend and swiftly wiped—with my backpack—a small sculpture off a shelf on the opposite wall. It didn’t break, but the gasps were audible, and everybody turned to stare at me. Someone from the gallery came over to ‘handle’ me. Most people there continued to give me the side-eye for the rest of the evening, as though my presence as a human in the space was worth less than the artwork I had accidentally assaulted. I was puzzled by the reaction. Somehow it never occurred to me that the artwork might have value beyond its role as a prop for our gathering there. Or, to look at it another way, it was our gathering there that was the thing that gave the object meaning. I feel the same way about monuments and other objects that aspire to permanence—they are just taking up space until people decide that they have meaning in their moment. This is the difference between making history and receiving history. Personally, I am not someone who cares a lot for objects (my favorite kinds of pseudonymous public performances are more along the lines of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping), but I appreciate the role of icons because without them there could be no iconoclasm. And no, I’ve never used a pseudonym, but I have such a common name that it happily often functions like one.

JM: We hear often about art “starting a conversation” or, as you just described it, as a prop for our gathering (I’ve found the idea and phrase MacGuffin useful too). Like any good octopus, I’m both seduced by this idea and can easily summon another seven counter- and comple-example of how I experience art both in public and private. I’m curious maybe to hear more about the types of sociality and conversation you’re thinking about both with your work and the work that most appeals to you. I’ve spent 93.5% of this conversation thinking about it in terms of the constraints we’ve laid out and what I want to read and write about than about its eventual (and not circumstantial) public-ness. This is a very specific type of public-ness and of conversation. The inanity of the questions on talk shows is forgettable if not forgivable because we seem to want to hear about a celebrity’s vacation or their co-star’s pranks. In this process I am trying to write to you as if we were just writing to each other but there are also moments when I have a sense of your answer or, even, when I’m curious what that answer looks like as we type from our cheated-out talk show chairs. I want also to interject now briefly with one of part of that Toth thing that I think is an interesting historical footnote: apparently the first person to subdue Toth after his attack was a young Bob Cassilly, the artist who later created St. Louis’ City Museum. What is the best painting to have a conversation in front of? Have we ever seen a social practice work built around conversation that ended up yielding objects because people were so talked out they just wanted to spend their social time more materially? Someone told me recently that someone less recently had told them that when orchestrating large events everyone benefits from a small but irritating shared experience—like a quick rainstorm—to bond over otherwise they’ll seek that same antagonism from something more integral to the occasion itself—the dreary groom or the bad wine—which event planners generally try to avoid. How many times has the word “iconoclastic” been engraved into a monument?

DM: I’m not arguing that art’s main function is to “start a conversation.” That is the kind of cliché we see used all the time in defense of the indefensible—witness the responses of multiple US institutions in the past year to outcries over their exhibition of racially offensive artworks. What I mean is that the public presentation of artwork—even if distributed privately—is always an attempt to engender a public of some kind. But your question about paintings is a good place to start. For me, the best paintings to converse in front of are anti-authoritarian and dark and delightful and often vulgar. To return for a moment to my home country, I think of paintings by artists like Juan Davila, Gordon Hookey, Helen Johnson, or Janenne Eaton. But when I think of the conversations that could be had in their presence, I imagine viewers who share something with the artist (a community, an inclination, a grudge, a species) and see that thing affirmed or tested in some way. With artworks like this, you could say that the social both precedes and follows the artwork.

I’ve never understood the idea of a social practice that was somehow divorced from material practice—like you suggest, I see plenty of so-called social practice that generates objects. But I also see plenty of material practices that generate sociality. Bob Cassilly is actually a fine example of a kind of social practice artist who was motivated by a fierce allegiance to the material world. I had a chance to visit his unfinished opus Cementland while in St. Louis earlier this year, and I have been haunted ever since by the mystery of how he imagined his audiences moving and conversing through that space. There are also great examples of artworks that acknowledge the co-dependence of the social and the material while not privileging ‘art’ as an unimpeachable realm of experience. I’m thinking here of much of Group Material’s work, in particular their project Democracy (1988-89). For me, even something as frivolous as having a cuppa in the ‘tea break’ room in Jeremy Deller’s British Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale was completely moving and concretely social. I like your pop-sociological hand-me-down fable about bonding with strangers. I am for an art that can be a “small but irritating shared experience,” but we shouldn’t forget that any shared experience is completely dependent on other previous mutual experiences. A quick rainstorm feels like it does because we all know what it’s like to wear clothes, move through public space, and be struck by falling water.

Soo graciously agreed to answer a few questions and explain a bit about the process by which it was created. For your own copy, visit Amazon. It’s only fifteen dollars.

(all images drawn from the book)

For those unfamiliar with it, what is Fight for 15?
Fight for 15 (FF15) is part of the national movement for a $15/hour wage that began in 2012, when fast-food workers in New York City went on strike. This movement has really changed the minimum wage debate. They have gotten some serious increases in some cities and states, and they are still going. I think the mainstream media has been fairly sympathetic to it. Even from the beginning. I guess it is obvious to most people that these workers are being exploited. And it is a pretty obvious question to ask: if McDonalds makes 6 billion dollars a year, why do their employees need public assistance just to get by? Why are taxpayers subsidizing the labor costs of these huge, profitable corporations?

What made you want to promote the Fight for 15 campaign?
A desire for social justice, and in interest in socially-engaged art. As an MFA student at UIC, I studied with Brian Holmes and Blake Stimson, and they introduced to the “extradisciplinary investigations” of artists like Trevor Paglen, Critical Art Ensemble, and Laurie Jo Reynolds. This kind of art practice appealed to me.

How did you come to this project?
In 2014 I worked with Laurie Jo Reynolds on an art installation at “The Proximity of Consciousness” show at Sullivan Galleries, curated by Mary Jane Jacob. For this installation, titled “Tamms Year Ten Family Room,” I made portraits of members of Tamms Year Ten (TY10) their homes. TY10 was a grassroots legislative campaign that had worked for 4 years to close the state supermax prison in Tamms, Illinois. This installation at Sullivan was kind of “family room” in that the group used galley space for their meetings. At that time they were discussing the future of their campaign. For the portraits, I made home visits to TY10 members, and borrowed a piece of furniture, or decorative item, for the installation. So the belongings in the “family room” were visible in the portraits. I had worked with Scott McFarland on this installation, together, and he suggested that I do a portrait series of FF15 members.

What was Scott’s connection to them?
He teaches in the English department at UIC, and he had connected with FF15 organizers through his work for, UIC United Faculty. So we went to FF15 and asked if they wanted to do a series of worker portraits. They liked the idea. Luckily, we then received a monetary award from the Graduate College at UIC that enabled us to produce a book. We expected this to be a book of portraits of FF15 workers. This was in April 2015, when I started taking photos for the campaign. Some of these photos will become part of the book of portraits that I’m working on, but I’ve also been sharing all the photos with FF15 to use in their publicity.

But you decided not to use portraiture in Fifteen Dollars. Given that it’s a book about Fight for 15 (FF15), about fast food workers, one might expect to see photos of workers.
There are photos of workers at FF15 rallies in Fifteen Dollars, but these aren’t, in this context, portraits of workers. I am planning a book of portraits that will include photos of workers at home and at rallies. I expect that these rally photos will feel more like portraits because you will see them as individuals, as mothers and fathers, as sisters and brothers, at home, or at work, before you see them—and recognize them—in a crowd.

This project uses labor as a lens for considering intersections of race, class, neoliberal economics, corporate structures and rhetoric, structural inertia and the movement. Do you find that the more specific your subject matter, the more the works open up into other avenues?
Yes, I think that is a good way to describe the way my work has become more political, or at least the way my intentions have become more political. I think aesthetic interests have evolved into more political ones. I am thinking here of my photos of Guryong Village in Seoul, a shantytown in the wealthiest area in the city, where my mother has lived in for the past decade. I lived there myself for three years. The photos I have been taking for this project are not really exercises in formalism, even though I always do want to make images that are visually compelling. It’s been equally important to document the dire circumstances of Guryong’s residents, to call attention to themselves. And I want the viewer to face the political realities as well as the visual evidence, to consider how shantytowns are symptoms of structural problems, of elite power structures and neoliberalism in South Korea.

Having seen the “Guryong Village” exhibition, both in its beginnings when we were at UIC and then as came more and more into focus, I’m wondering how your personal experience of class and mobility has affected your approach to this project?
For that project, I visited my mother for six weeks, documenting the village, and also providing much-needed photographic services, such as passport photos and funerary images. I wanted my portraits to show respect for my family members and their neighbors, to not simply document crushing poverty, but to document ingenuity, perseverance, pride, community. So my personal experience of poverty has shaped my political sensibilities. I think it’s what has led me to doing the portrait projects we’ve been talking about, since I see my own family’s circumstances in those of my subjects, I mean the members of Fight for 15 and also the members of Tamms Year Ten.

You employ a number of photographic styles and strategies in this work, from something akin to inverted advertisements, empty domestic spaces, portraiture and street photography. Will you discuss these various strains and your approach to picture-making and taking?
I think that, primarily, there are three visual languages that are employed, that of commercial, journalism, and “documentary-style” photography. They’re used for different purposes, since they are in dialogue, in some sense, with the text they’ve been paired with. The texts in the book come from advertisements and media reports, but also from internet memes, academic studies, corporate handbooks, corporate documents, P.R. firms, lobbyists. Some of the photographs have been paired with were taken with that particular text in mind. The architectural photographs are inspired by the New Topographics. Others are inspired by print advertisements. So it varies. While images of the Fight for 15 rallies might have the photojournalistic feel, images of the workers’ homes might seem more like fine art photography, in the sense that Walker Evans distinguished between documentary- style and documentary.

Was it important that this became a book (instead of a website, an exhibition, a film, etc.)?
Yes. We see this project as an “artist’s book,” rather than individual images. So it’s important to us that each image in the book be understood as part of a whole. There is a lot of irony in the book that could be misunderstood if read out of context. For example, the meme: “Liberty will produce prosperity. Government mandates won’t.” The conceit of the book is that you’re reading a McDonald’s employee handbook from bizarro world, that everything is being said in the “voice” of the McDonald’s Corporation. So the individual images in the book need to be seen in context—without it, their meaning is lost.

Tell me about the collaborative process between you and Scott.
There’s not been a single process that I can describe, since we’ve been working together on many different things. A lot of it has involved just pitching ideas to each other and then making on-the-spot decisions, assigning ourselves different tasks, coming back with something, and then figuring out how to improve it. For Fifteen Dollars, Scott was more responsible for the conceptual aspects of the book, and I was more responsible for realizing it, for making the images. We hired graphic designer Jangho Park to do the book layout and design, but his role grew as the project developed, and we came to see him as co-creator.

What has collaboration taught you about your own practice?
It gave me a chance of reaffirming the possibility of mixed art, considering the relationship between image and text, which has a long history in art.

What is the future of political photography?
I take this question to be more about photography in contemporary art than about photography in journalism, or in general. In the near future, capturing images will involve collecting all information available, rather than some small, select amount that catches a “moment.” This trove of information can be sifted through, and arranged, after the fact. I believe this and other technologies will open up new possibilities for all kinds of artists, but especially those that are engaged in “extradisciplinary investigations.”

SOOHYUN KIM (b. Busan 1979) earned his MFA in photographic design from Hongik University and a second MFA in photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He researches the catalyzing potential of art for social change. In his role as Assistant Director at the National Photographers Association of Korea (2005-2010), he traveled to remote villages, working with families to preserve their photographs, document their homes and take portraits for use in daily life. He is working with the Fight for Fifteen campaign to raise the minimum wage. Kim has received awards for his work, including the 2016 CDS Documentary Essay Prize. Kim currently teaches at Saint Xavier University in Chicago.

JESSE MALMED is an artist and curator living and working in Chicago. His work in moving images, performance, text and occasional objects has exhibited widely in museums, cinemas, galleries, bars and barns. He is the curator of the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival, co-director of the mobile exhibition space and artist bumper sticker project Trunk Show, a programmer at the Nightingale Cinema, instigates Western Pole and curates exhibitions, screenings and performance events both independently and institutionally. His writing has appeared on and in Bad at Sports, Cine-File, Incite Journal of Experimental Media, The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature, Temporary Art Review, Big Big Wednesday and YA5. A native of Santa Fe, he earned his BA from Bard College and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Using breath from mouth to ear:
“I’m going to write something on your back and you have to guess what it is.”
Using gesture from finger to back:
“I need to know if you feel it too.”

They’re two teenage girls and they’re getting ready for the prom and one is wearing a marching band uniform. We’ll see that uniform again, in another movie, but everything will be different. For now, Jennifer Reeder needs us to feel it too. I had the privilege of working with Reeder for the last two years, while she served as my advisor at UIC. I am the beneficiary of her attention and support, her acerbic and absurd sense of humor, her immense intelligence and her ceaseless fierceness. She insists on vulnerability, even as so many of our interactions are goof sessions.

Her work—primarily in video, primarily for the cinema—is teenage girls, it’s pop noir, it’s language heavy, it’s singing Madonna to an ET figurine, it’s death metal brides in a graveyard on a toy camera, it’s impeccably pencil-rendered vulvae in the halls of a school, it’s electromagnetism of the heart, it’s an all-girl choir singing Judas Priest. It also looks and sounds more and more like the way movies look and sound. It is thankfully and unrepentantly feminist, deeply personal and idiosyncratic. And, luckily for Chicago readers, she’s doing a big hometown show tonight at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the integral and much beloved Conversations at the Edge program.

When I’m doing what I’m so often doing, when I’m doing what I’m doing right now, when I’m trying to convince people of the merits of someone’s work, to convince someone to attend a show, I say that Reeder’s movies feel like movie movies, but better. That even people who don’t like a lot of what they think I like will like her movies. That they’re smart and funny, surprising and deeply feeling, that they’re clever and daring. I heard something recently that felt insightful for a lot of creative practices. A comic said that sketch comedy privileges the joke over the character and will always sell the character out for the joke, whereas most episodic or narrative comedy privileges the character over the joke, such that every joke must feel real or at least, let’s say, diegetic. I was thinking about how this idea could be resonant in a number of forms while rewatching Reeder’s work. Deploying, as she invokes, bathos, she is able to maintain emotional credulity while covering and uncovering new layers of humor, trauma and complexity.

Her work has been screened and exhibited at venues like the Venice and Whitney Biennials, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, New York Film Festival, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, PS1, Pacific Film Archive, Rotterdam Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Vienna Short Film Festival and many, many more. She’s won countless awards, grants and other —including being named one of Chicago’s Top 50 Artists’ Artists by Newcity—while maintaining a vigorous teaching practice as an Associate Professor and the Head of the Art Department at the School of Art and Art History at UIC. She is represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago and distributes her videos through the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, shortfilmagentur, LUX and independently. She earned her MFA from SAIC and her BFA from Ohio State University in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio. She is the mother of three boys and lives in Indiana.

As your work has progressed, its resemblance to conventional cinema—to what people think we mean when we say we make movies—has grown. Do artists too often limit their potential for engaging wider audiences by sticking to niche forms and the safe spaces those enable? Has making work that looks right enabled you to sneak in more of your own idiosyncratic ideas and stories? Is convention camouflage?

I set out to make very functional films, but honestly, narratives are very challenging. I compare my process to sewing. If I set out to make a fully functioning pair of pants but cannot get the pockets right, I sew them shut. BOOM, no pockets on these pants. Then I put super striking patches on the knees (or something) and hope that no one notices the pocket situation.  Other times, the “experimental” parts of my narratives are much more directed and intentional from the get go. I start out making this move to pocketless pants because, ya know, people expect pockets and it’s more satisfying on my end to do the unexpected. I do appreciate so much, however, that these more conventional narratives I have been making over the past several years have reached a larger audience. I have a solid fan base of film lovers and programmers who fully support and encourage the wonky way I tell a story.

We’ve talked before about multipronged ways of moving culture towards a greater sense of inclusivity and social justice. Shows like Modern Family or Will and Grace—with their mainstreaming of gay culture, or, more precisely, with their insistence that obviously and already mainstream culture includes people who are gay—are important in that they provide hungry brains stories that include a wider variety of represented protagonists. At the same time, there’s a need for more radical cultural shifts, ones that at their cores those shows and the machinations through which they’re made are at odds with. As an educator and cultural producer, how do you balance these concerns? Are there, perhaps, times in our lives when it makes more sense to fight for same-sex marriage and others when it makes sense to dismantle marriage? Do we need more television shows with more people or fewer TVs?

Representation matters! Since the beginning, since White Trash Girl (1995-97), I have made work with some sort of justice component. My protagonists have agency. The enormous popularity of shows like Orange is the New Black and Transparent, confirm that general audiences want and need to see themselves and their friends/family reflected back from the small screen. I do not understand what still motivates lots of film and TV makers to actively ignore diversity in terms of casting and storyline.

In a way that is totally unsurprising, I am always drawn to your use of text on screen. A Million Miles Away (2014) makes use of emojis, subtitles that read occasionally as transcriptions of characters thoughts and other times like a rogue radio signal piped in through diving braces on crooked teeth. Tears Cannot Restore Her: Therefore, I Weep (2010) prominently features a classroom sign language interpreter détourning a lecture on electromagnetism into an intimate and crushing tale of love gone awry (or maybe just love gone away). As much as your films are filled with visual nuance and striking characterizations, I often think of your work in writerly terms. What about the screen seems so keen on rendering multiple modes of address?

During an emotionally charged conversation in real life, there also exists these multiple layers of iteration. There is what you say out loud, and what you are thinking when you say it and what you have written to someone else prior about what you will say. Then there is how the other person interprets what you have said and speculates about what you might actually mean and how later they retell the conversation without precise accuracy (adding parts or leaving parts out). I fill my films with many layers of translations, as you pointed out, because it’s how I unpack communication and interactions in my real life. Perhaps not everyone does this, but it cannot be just me, right?

Does the film exist on paper before you begin to shoot or do those extra-textual moments come in the editing room?

The extra language (texts, subtitles, etc.) exists in the script from the beginning. Often the actual words change during post as the temperature of a scene changes from script, through production to post.

Another striking component of your films—and one that extends into a gallery practice potentially—is the way that customized objects find their ways onto the screen. Keychains, ringtones, aprons and t-shirts, either purchased or constructed, telegraph something additional about the characters as well as providing another textual mode of address. Sometimes they signify subcultural statuses, sometimes they feel like gifts from someone off-screen and might not even fit right. Can you talk about these choices?

Art direction matters—this includes the props and wardrobe which are specific and intentional. The art direction is another layer of narrative language, a sub-plot even. It operates as bathos does in literature. A stupid image or phrase on a coffee mug visible in an emotionally revealing scene can disrupt the narrative in a charged and challenging way—injecting humor or absurdity or magic even into an otherwise pretty deadpan exchange. This happens in real life also. It is what makes “a serious talk” tolerable. I cannot resist a visual prank.

As your work has shifted to take more of the forms and processes of recognizable conventional productions, you’ve increased the number of people with whom you work. To what degree do you conceive of these productions as collaborations? Is there a way that working with so many more people on set changes how you think of the works? Are there auratic or affective overlaps in the jobs of director, parent and teacher?

I have worked with the same crew (Steven Hudosh, Chris Rejano and Paul Dickinson) over a few films now and the same editor (Mike Olenick) for over 10 years. These films are like relationships. I have to fall in love with the film then eventually break up with it to move onto the next film. It’s an emotional process and I need to surround myself with people I trust and who trust me back.  I listen to everyone’s opinion from the script writing stage through post-production and distribution, but ultimately the final decisions are up to me. This could change with a different kind of financing model. There is a kind of collaboration in the scoring (music), because I depend on the composer (Jenne Lennon) to directly translate my notes in terms of how I want to film to sound. I appreciate what trained actors bring to set. I allow the cast to know and play their characters on their own terms, but I do not allow for improvisation. The dialogue is very specific. Don’t mess with my dialogue! Ok, and yes, I am quite parental on set. I am bossy but more mom bossy than boss bossy—lots of hugging and head patting, for real.

What is Tracers Book Club? How do the various spaces Tracers inhabits function together or separately? What can exhibitions do that online fora or real-life discussions cannot? What is lost or gained by making art in a group, orienting more toward making an argument or experience than originating from authorship?

Tracers (www.tracersbookclub, www.feministasfuck.org) is a free form collective dedicated to promoting feminism as a means toward social justice. Over this past year, we have had two gallery exhibitions in addition to many other events like a mini-conference (a day of panel discussions about intersectionality), two iterations of a radical crafting fair called “FEMINIST PARKING LOT,” films screenings, rock concerts, a youth poetry workshop and informal conversations (often around a book or presenter). Each event attracts a different audience. Feminism is personal and so Tracers makes an effort to offer lots of ways to get your dose. As we gain momentum, we are likely to expand the range of events. We are not a one size fits all kind of operation. If we are committed to inclusive, which we are, we must super-size the options. A narrowly actualized social justice mission is not very just in my opinion.

In rewatching your work for this piece, I found so many little moments that felt synecdochic, like they expressed something big about your entire practice in a small way. I know that you aren’t making work simply about your work—the equivalent of an advertisement for an ad firm—but over the course of your career, you seem to be honing in on a series of concerns. One of the most exciting is the continual and ever-changing challenge of communication and connection. In addition to shared concerns and themes, the reuse of props and costumes gives a hazy continuity to your work. Do you think of these works as being fully distinct or part of a much larger project? Are there ideas that you’ll have that you have to abandon because they don’t work within the scope of your current activities? Since we’re dealing with and in the world of narrative cinema, is there a Reeder universe, nestled somewhere near the speculative and psychic universe of John Hughes? Are the unnamed sites for these recent works in one unnamed town?

Ok, so yes, it’s all intentionally connected—stacks upon stacks of parallel universes. I feel as though I am making the same film over and over and over again. This tic is related to my need to provide multiple translations of narrative language within a single scene. I must keep prodding, “did you get that? Here let me put it another way. Ok, now, did you get it that time? Let me try again.” It’s an obsession with being heard and understood. I appreciate that my films are recognizable as mine. My favorite filmmakers are the auteurs. I am at a loss to understand how some filmmakers make entirely distinctive moves from one film to next. Ya know, like Ang Lee made both The Ice Storm and Hulk. No thank you.

What can the admittedly porous worlds of experimental and independent cinema learn from each other?

The experimentals should be less afraid of being liked/popular and the indies should be less afraid of taking some artful risks in terms of the form. It’s like the jocks versus the nerds. The jocks should get weirder and the nerds should get tipsy and make some prank phone calls.

What is your process for working with actors? Is there a sense that an actor is being instrumentalized—walk over here when the camera gets here, say these words in this order, wear this shirt and face this way—or is there a consideration of and conversation around the more mystical way that a person can embody another person? What has directing taught you about performing? How has your approach to directing actors changed from your White Trash Girl days to now?

The performers in WTG were all amateurs (including myself). No one could act, which is why all the “dialogue” is in the form of a voice over. Plus all the physical action is hyperbole—it’s like a live action comic book. Overdoing it was the only way to do it. My direction to the performers in WTG was like, “haul ass and then pretend to vomit.” In the past several years, I have worked primarily with trained professional actors, which is lovely. These are people who know how to transform themselves into another person—it’s a magic trick really. I am in awe when it works.

I am particular about my dialogue, as I mentioned, so I am known to ask for many takes of a scene (or even a specific line) until I hear it the way I want to hear it. I actually think that I hold my breath during some on-camera exchanges. I get very anxious behind the monitor but I have gotten much better at bringing performances out of the actors. They need to know who I think the character is and why I think they are doing what they are doing (after all I wrote it, I should know). Its all about defining the motivation and clearly communicating the emotional temp of a scene. So for instance in the film I just shot (Blood Below the Skin, currently in postproduction), a young woman has the lines, “you want a best friend? I can get you a best friend. I can get you a best friend forever, but you have to be ok with the pain and the blood.” She was not saying it right and so I eventually told her to say the lines as though she was talking about a dead body…..”you want to hide a dead body? I can help you hide a dead body….” It worked. Gone are the days of simply yelling, “haul ass,” but I don’t miss those days.

If my math is right, White Trash Girl is nineteen years old—right on the precipice of leaving its teenage years. When was the last time you revisited the character and that work? How do you think of her relating to your current work?

I still screen WTG occasionally. I have not made a WTG tape since 1997 but I am still very much making films about unruly women and the midwest. The trajectory from WTG to the current work is very clear and direct for me. It’s the same film over and over again, just now with better acting, better equipment and better fonts.

I’m hoping you’ll say more about why so much of your work centers around teenage girls? Are they both the subject and audience for the work?

In my opinion, no other group of humans is more misrepresented in cinema (in all of media really) than the teenage girl. We are a culture obsessed with female youth and we get it wrong every time. I am just trying to set the record straight or at the very least offer up an alternative—a disruption. I write scripts from observation and my own experiences. There is a kind of art therapy component to my filmmaking process—a lullaby that the adult me hands back in time to the teen me. It’s a retroactive survival strategy. Indeed my primary audience is the teen girl but these recent films seem to appeal to a much wider audience which is a surprise and fantastic. My dream is to pitch an idea to Nick at Nite for an edgy, racy (complicated) teen girl TV show (both for and about). Or better yet, a series of David Lynch-esque after school specials—weird but accurate and entirely in celebration of the teenage girl.

This will happen.

It’s been a month, but I’m saying it’s been a week. This is what I’ve been thinking about recently: bpNICHOL wrote for Fraggle Rock.

This is a record of this moment but also a place to put open tabs. We should all share all the open tabs. The radio today told me social media was 2000 years old because we used to tell each other things too. I turned off the radio and listened to myself singing and chopping.

I’m excited about this project: MAI through FVNMA at SAIC as run by EF. 

• Jim Davis (Princeton [but for this work: Chicago] filmmaker)
• Jim Davis (Muncie visual artist, writer) (also excellent to see a sentence where both “artists” and “entertainment” are in quotation marks)
• Jim Davis (“Dallas” actor)

Fugue State(s)

Also, this band, The Fugue, that I saw at Bard in 2002 or 3 (first year of college). They were friends of a friend and they played a good show. Then, this year, I found this funny clip on youtube (though my interest in television courtroom interruptions).

This led me to re-visit this.

And this.

(which is really part of that this)

I can pretend I’m not thinking about this pretty often. Especially when linked with this.

The re-release of Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini (which learned about from Bad at Sportsers PvZ and RH).

idyrself by Krystal South.

Editions and Additions by Jacob Edmund

Morgan Fisher on Ivor Cutler. Morgan Fisher of Mott the Hoople, not Morgan Fisher of Projection Instructions and ( ) and other marvelous films.

(Draft for) Infinite Black Flag:

This other medium inane idea I just made up.

A gif for every one of 1001 Nights.
A list of the dumbest lists on BuzzFeed.
Under 1 who is under 1 (part of a profile on an athlete/artist who is 8 months old).

Sibling Cinema (thanks to the Frameworks list-serv for responding so well to my query) :

• George and Mike Kuchar,
• Jonas and Adolfas Mekas,
• James and John Whitney,
• Mark and John Jr. and Michael Whitney,
• Paul and Greg Sharits,
• Peter and Kathy Rose,
• The Lumière Brothers,
• Jane and Louise Wilson,
• The Brothers Quay,
• Jem Cohen and Adam Grossman,
• Dziga Vertov and Boris and Mikahil Kaufman,
• Tom and Ed Bowes,
• TwinArt Sisters,
• Soda_Jerk,
• Bruce and Norman Yonemoto,
• Reggie and Warrington Hudlin,
• The McDonagh Sisters,
• Nadjoua and Linda Bansil,
• The Cifuentes Sisters,
• Albert and David Maysles,

These three, posted elsewhere, but that do something together:

Guy Sherwin — Man with Mirror (1976/2011)

Peter Campus — Three Transitions (1973)

The Marx Brothers — Duck Soup (1933, excerpt)

James Benning‘s Nightfall is a curious piece. His works are often challenging structurally, but saying the logic of this one is simple is like saying the simple logic of this is one. We watch the trees and they are still. We watch the light and it changes slowly. It would change more slowly, but the camera is doing what it can to keep up. Fauna haunts the aural space and I thought I even heard what sounded like human sounds. Mostly I floated in and out of the cinematic space (the seats, the people around me, my thirst, someone else quenching theirs, the size of the rectangle, the quality of this light) the represented space (the trees are so beautiful, there are fourteen main trees, there are an additional dozen supporting trees, the light coming through the branches looks like someone I know, the light through these branches looks like a stranger) and the space between (could I sit on the stump I’m imagining for this long?, when was the last time I spent this long seated with my head facing one direction?, when was the last time I spent this long seated with my head facing one direction outside?, how much better must this be to be there instead of here?, how has the concept of nature become so abstracted from [my own, at least] daily life?, what is that phrase about seeing forests and trees?, is this based on that?).

I do well with so-called durational works. Maybe it’s because I meditated as a child or have a very (let’s not say hyper-) active interior life (though my suspicions are that everyone does) or because my durational muscle has been honed through years of grueling training. Whatever the reason, I found Phil Solomon’s Empire to be satisfying, beguiling and eminently watchable. Immediately after the screening, I asked Patrick Friel, the festival’s director, if there would be another chance to watch it. Empire is a 48 minute remake of Andy Warhol’s film of the same name. Instead of, or maybe in the stead of, an indexical film in which the titular State Building takes center stage, Solomon’s video takes place in Grand Theft Auto’s Liberty City. Time passes quickly—two minutes in the game representing an hour in the world—even if slowness is the dominant feeling.

I was going to and still might write through Empire, telling you everything that happens. I might make a newspaper of it and then scan that and put it on a thousand flash drives and throw them from the top of a scale replica of the Empire State Building (from Liberty City). I don’t have it in front of me, so my memory will have to suffice. This is another type of reenactment, of bootlegging, covering or translating. The first thing I remember is the glistening, glittery reflection of the sun in the water that I chased long after it had gone. There is slow but continuous garbage flying toward us: perhaps someone printed out my newspaper. Airplanes appear regularly about an eighth of the way across the screen. They fly a straight line and disappear once they pass by (or seemingly hit) the unharmed protagonist. At a certain point light orbs pass from one side of the screen to the other, while the building abides. The sky changes, drastically. The different buildings turn on and off at different times. The sun. The wind is mostly steady and a truly delicate lull. The moon. I saw no cars. The splotches of fog that signaled incoming weather were terrifying. The rain almost shook me to my core with anticipation. I don’t ever play video games but I feel like I should, like I’m missing some of the critical ways that culture is moving. Sometimes I read about video games so I won’t be an alien in the senior home.

I had seen Empire before, on a monitor. I probably watched for a few minutes. I chuckled because I know about Andy Warhol and know about Phil Solomon and know about video games and know about the new media one-liner and know about duration and know about simulation and am a sensitive viewer with a rich interior life. But I probably watched it for a couple of minutes at most. I am an advocate for the space of the cinema. I think it’s ok for a work of art to be bossy and tell me to sit still and watch the whole thing until the lights come up. No talking, no texting. I also love talking and texting, but I know sometimes that makes listening and watching and being present and letting the mind wander a lot harder. I’m not telling you these things because I don’t think you know them, I’m just telling you them because this is my turn to be bossy. Even if we’re both talking and texting during the production and reception of this text.

Raised in Canada, Brett has lived in Pittsburgh (while teaching at Oberlin) for the last several years. He is known perhaps equally for his own filmmaking as he is for his critical writing, his work editing INCITE Journal of Experimental Media (medium disclosure: I have a piece in the next issue) and his curatorial pursuits. INCITE does an excellent job of publishing works both scholarly and playful (a G-Chat conversation between Jesse McLean and Jacob Ciocci, for instance) without privileging either or presuming one form might have a monopoly on all types of insight. 

As part of the exhibition Spectator Sports (opening this Thursday!), Brett will be screening his work and discussing it with Lester Munson at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago on Tuesday, April 23rd. Graciously, he never brought up the name of this publication in relation to his own work. 

You’ve curated, written about and made films about Canadian identity. I have dual (US and Canadian) citizenship. Half of my family is Canadian and I’ve spent a decent amount of time in Canada and thinking through the issue of Canadian identity. No identity is fixed and national identity can be as useful or as destructive as any other unwieldy, essentializing concept. That said, I’m hoping you might elaborate a bit on where your thinking is on the issue now and how it’s changed in that last many years of living in the States.

I agree – national identity is an abstract, complex construction, a symbolic category, which serves both good and bad purposes. As someone who works a lot with sports as a subject, it’s disturbing to see how they’re often used, in ways subtle and overt, to stir up nationalist sentiment and prop up dangerous ideologies. I’m thinking of that famous quote from Ronald Reagan: “Sport is the human activity closest to war that isn’t lethal.” He meant that as an endorsement. On the other hand, sports provide a common, everyday, shared experience that has deep (often under-acknowledged) reverberations and significance. I’m most interested in its relationship to place and community, as a kind of folk culture that is potent and tribal, rather than as an instrument of national identity.

I finished Valery’s Ankle shortly before immigrating to the U.S. in 2006, to upstate New York. At first it didn’t seem that much different than living in Canada, though the Iraq War certainly cast a shadow over everything during that period. It was a dark time. There was a distinct feeling of uneasiness, which I attributed to the political circumstances, and that did seem to dissipate somewhat after Obama’s election (replaced by a different, more manufactured form of paranoia).

The longer I live in the U.S., the less I feel connected to Canada but the more I come to recognize differences between the two countries. Part of that understanding is intuitively felt, and part of it has to do with core principles and attitudes rather than anything related to day-to-day life. When I think about what it means to be Canadian, I often come back to the question: “Where is here?” For Northrop Frye, that was the central question of Canadian identity. Our sense of self is determined by external factors, the things beyond us, which we don’t control. Whereas in America, identity seems determined from within – “Who am I?” – and rooted in those founding American ideas of personal liberty and freedom.

I’ve only ever watched Valery’s Ankle on home screens. In particular, I’ve enjoyed being able to watch it on my laptop and scan through it, returning to certain parts and skipping over others while thinking about the work and this interview. In this changing media landscape, there are lots of new opportunities for works to be experienced. Typically for works that do not originate with intentions for the small, portable screen, we maintain an understanding that this isn’t how they’re supposed to be experienced, but this is what we have. UbuWeb recently tweeted “UbuWeb is a photograph of a painting.” For video works whose form is shifting and fluid (are there people who really think a new export with a different codec is an inauthentic copy?), this is a little more complicated. I have been speaking recently with others who (in this mode of speaking) identify as a fellow makers of “dense video work,” and are excited by the potential of video for the home, for the computer, because it allows the chance to view and re-view. With works in the essay tradition, this seems to be an even greater boon.

A common response I hear about my work is that it’s dense. I use a lot of text layers and sources, onscreen and through voice-over, and the editing style is usually fast – I like a constant flow of images and ideas. I’m not interested in making conventional documentaries that you can watch once, process the information, and arrive at a satisfying conclusion. Even though it’s unlikely and probably unreasonable, I embrace the idea of making work that will reward multiple viewings. So in that sense, the home computer, the small portable screen, offers a lot. I’m glad you find value in returning to certain parts, in shuttling back and forth. I prefer that its reception be productive and relational, not merely consumptive.

Then again, I consider the filmmaking that I do to be part of a cinematic tradition, best suited for the theatrical screening context. The conditions of that experience are still important to me: the large image, the fixed starting and endpoints, the focused attention, the darkened space, the social dimension. But more and more, I find that situation to be limited and unsatisfying, at least for the kind of work that I make. I would like for it to circulate more freely, and across platforms; to be more available to more people than the one-time theatrical screening allows. I’m not sure that YouTube is the answer, in terms of the mindset that’s required for viewing a longer essay film or video. But perhaps the work can exist in different forms, as a modular construction, and the platform determines the version of the piece that you see.

In perhaps a similar vein, how does your work in curating and writing impact your filmmaking practice? Does the skillset of the curator align with the culling and positioning of archival materials? Does critical writing engage the same part of your brain as making critically-engaged films?

I tend to think of curating, writing, and filmmaking as distinct and separate parts of my life, linked together by expertise in editing. They definitely impact one another, sometimes consciously and sometimes in coincidental or supplementary ways. My work as a curator and a writer, for instance, has influenced my approach to filmmaking, which I’d describe as a research-based practice. From Deep, the project that I’m working on now, about the cultural history of basketball, feels at times like a curated film. It relies on the editing together of hundreds of discrete elements, including movie clips, music videos, TV commercials, video game footage, and so on, which are interwoven with self-shot “moving snapshots” of the game. I can easily imagine an exhibition on the same topic, or a book. But I don’t think those forms would connect or communicate in the same way, the way I prefer. The moment-to-moment conjunction of image and language, which provides the central tension, the collision and mix of ideas within a set period of time, being able to control the entire experience and where people enter the work, those factors require that it be a film or a video.

In terms of the overlapping skill sets, my working knowledge of film/video production helps when I write about and curate moving image artwork. I understand the technical aspects and logistics of film and digital media, and I know what to pack when I’m presenting a screening to avoid technical problems and troubleshoot. But crafting narration for a film is quite different than writing a critical essay or a curatorial text. Writing voice-over requires constant revision, to get the timing, sound and flow of the words right and it can’t be too complicated. It’s one of the final stages, so often the sequence lengths are already set and the text has to fit into predetermined blocks. It’s about concision – how to say the most with the least. But being able to write critically helps in the pre-production and post-production phases, in the preparation of grant applications and the development of secondary writing about projects.

In Valery’s Ankle, you declare your interest in asking questions (over providing answers). Have the intervening seven years answered some of these questions? Have you found this interrogative mode of making to be productive or frustrating to audiences?

Posing questions is a useful rhetorical device, a way of opening things up. I’m interested in the anti-authoritative perspective, in the amateur or fan’s point-of-view, and in Foucault’s notion of counter-memory. Many of the questions that I ask in Valery’s Ankle can’t really be answered, and aren’t meant to be. If they provide an opportunity for individual reflection, or if they provoke a discussion, that’s great, that’s the ultimate goal. I don’t think the mode is frustrating for audiences. I’m careful about building in different entry points and levels of engagement. Accessibility is important to me, and so are variety and surprise. I like to frequently shift between a first-person mode of address, the subjective, and a more straightforward presentation of facts and evidence: Here is where I’m coming from (my frame of reference) – here are some things you may not know about (forgotten or overlooked histories, silences of memory) – here’s why I think they’re important (the argument). The viewer can decide for herself whether the argument has merit, whether the connections I’m making are sound, and whether I’m to be trusted as a reliable narrator.

The things that I struggle with are: How to synthesize the personal with the formal investigations? What is important as information? What does the viewer need to know in order to follow the work? Where is the point of convergence between local and universal experience? I also work from a basic assumption that every record (every fact) has a b-side. There’s the side that is marketed and sold, but the other side is usually more interesting.

For all of its formal inventiveness and engagement with the expressivity and history of non-fiction filmmaking, Valery’s Ankle is still an immediately watchable film. The questions that it poses are quite literally posed and the gestures you make toward an expanded notion of nonfiction film (perhaps the space between documentary and essay) fit and flow seamlessly. Will you speak a little about questions of legibility and the ways a background in “experimental” media can impact other types of making? Am I just “in too deep[ly]” to see that this work is secretly difficult for non-specialized audiences to enjoy?

Having a background and an ongoing interest in experimental film has definitely shaped my approach. I don’t consider the work that I make now to be part of that tradition, even though it circulates in that world. I feel like that background does give me some license, or drive, to mess with the tropes and conventions of documentary. Alternately, the appearance of documentary provides cover for the more formal investigations, the manipulation of the image and so on. Creative nonfiction is probably the most accurate description, but it’s more of a literary term. It hasn’t quite crossed over into film and video, even though a lot of my favorite work– by practitioners such as Jackie Goss, Harun Farocki, Michael Moore, Chris Marker, Barbara Hammer – fit that categorization. Also, I don’t believe the work is automatically difficult for non-specialized audiences to enjoy. That hasn’t been my experience. It doesn’t give viewers enough credit. The public screenings that I’ve attended often elicit homogenous, guttural groups reactions to the visceral and/or humorous parts; that kind of bonding amongst strangers can have a powerful effect.

Lately, I’ve been motivated by a couple of overlapping concepts: Brecht’s notion of a theatre (or a cinema) of pleasure and instruction, and the idea of “edu-tainment,” which I associate most with the hip hop artist KRS-One. I’m trying to find ways to bridge accessibility with critical inquiry. I don’t want to make straightforward work about sports – there’s already a lot of that out there, like ESPN’s 30-for-30 series. I enjoy those films – they’re well produced and fun to watch, but once they’re finished I never think about them again. It’s institutional storytelling. The one exception that comes to mind is Brett Morgen’s documentary about the O.J. Simpson chase, which stands out because of its unusual form: a found-footage compilation that presents the events of one day – June 17, 1994 – with no commentary. It’s a mesmerizing piece, and a reminder of how much the media landscape has changed since then. The 24-hour news cycle really begins right there, with those long helicopter shots of O.J.’s white Ford Bronco navigating the L.A. freeways.

Speaking of specializing audiences, how have hockey fans (in particular Canadian ones with long enough memories) reacted to Valery’s Ankle?

In many ways, hockey fans have been the best, most accepting audience for Valery’s Ankle. Part of that is by design. I’ve presented the video in a lot of places across Canada, in a lot of different contexts – from academic hockey conferences, to big city and small-town film festivals, university classes, art galleries, microcinemas, sports bars. The sports bar is almost an ideal setting for me, because I work with a formal language that most people understand, the language of sports broadcasting. If you’ve ever watched a hockey game in a bar you’ll know that nothing captures mass attention like a hockey fight, even though, nine times out of ten, they’re the most banal things to watch: a couple of guys clutching one another and spinning in slow circles for two minutes. Valery’s Ankle pulls you in with the fighting, the spectacle, but then it flips things around. It starts posing questions about our common assumptions of hockey violence. For instance, when, and why, did fighting become an accepted part of the game? What is the deeper meaning behind the trophy for most sportsmanlike behavior in hockey?

The people who are old enough to remember the 1972 Canada-Soviet Summit Series either don’t remember the slash – Bobby Clarke’s intentional breaking of the Russian star Valery Kharlamov’s ankle – or never knew about it. The visual evidence scarcely exists – it happened quickly, with no camera close ups. The image quality is poor. No one is truly surprised by it, though, as Clarke had a brutal bully reputation, but the general response is one of embarrassment for the sanctioned dirty play, and the fact that the Canadian men’s bodies were so out of control. If there’s a negative reaction, it’s usually from people who don’t think I go far enough with the critique; that I leave too much out. The violence touches a nerve.

I’ve received a lot of wonderful notes and messages over the years, saying to the effect that Valery’s Ankle has changed, or modified, their opinions about hockey and its relationship to their identity. The video has acted as a bridge piece (peace bridge?) between artist friends and their dads, who wouldn’t normally have much tolerance for experimental work. Just yesterday, I received an email, out-of-the blue, from an established Canadian filmmaker, a person I’ve never met but have great respect for, who wrote: “my 15-year old son and I watched Valery’s Ankle and he thought it was ‘awesome’; me too! thanks for providing that perspective with such calm passion, along with the great hockey images.” I can’t really ask for anything more than that.

Will you tell our readers a bit about your most recent project and what they’ll experience at the Museum of Contemporary Photography?

The MoCP will be showing a couple of my pieces as part of their upcoming exhibition, Spectator Sports (April 12–July 3, 2013). In addition to the video essay Valery’s Ankle, there is a newer work titled Anything But Us Is Who We Are, which is comprised of two parts: a burned LeBron James Cleveland Cavaliers jersey, framed and mounted on the wall, and a live video game feed of James (in Cavs uniform) holding a basketball at center court in an otherwise empty arena, waiting to be activated, perhaps in a moment of indecision, contemplation, or awaiting orders from the viewer/fan/agent/gamer. The game controller is displayed in such a way that you can’t actually use it.

For me, the piece was a way of exploring and coming to terms with the limitations, but also the agency, of fandom. The bond between fans and players is so tenuous, so illusory, and typically one-sided. In his great book Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, David Shields writes that “Fans want to think it’s us against them… and that the players on ‘our’ team are in cahoots with us, in some difficult-to-define way – difficult to define, since their contempt for us is so manifest.” LeBron’s decision to leave Cleveland for the Miami Heat in 2010 demonstrates the volatile nature of this relationship. It was such a charged moment, because as fans, we like to believe the players play “for us” and that we’re part of the team, or at least recognized by and important to the team. But this isn’t really the case. They play for themselves and each other, and we invest symbolic meaning in a multimillion-dollar corporate enterprise.

Nonetheless, when a cherished star leaves town, it’s hard for those fans not to feel betrayed. Complicating this is the fact that nearly all of the NBA’s owners, team executives, and paying customers are white, while nearly all of the players are black. The struggle to possess and control the subjects of our sporting affection is such a potent metaphor. In many ways, sports have been at the vanguard of social change in America. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the racial integration of baseball in 1946, followed by NBA’s integration in 1950, preceded the racial integration of schools in 1954. Athletes like Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos did a great deal to bring awareness to racial inequality, and helped to erode the structures of racism that were inherent at the time. When Obama was campaigning for president in 2008, he deliberately played up his interest in basketball, to make himself more relatable (the professor could hoop, too).

In addition to the exhibition, I’m doing a public event on April 23^rd at the museum. I’ll be screening excerpts from my in-progress feature documentary From Deep, and discussing the culture of basketball with Lester Munson, a writer and legal analyst for ESPN, who also teaches journalism at Northwestern.

I was a tremendous basketball fan at one point. I have dozens of books and VHS tapes on the subject and still find myself accidentally stuck in the mental morass of John Starks’ number of Dikembe Mutombo’s full name on occasion. Will you talk a bit about the personal shift you made from being a hockey kid to a basketball one and about the larger societal shifts in fandom? Why make a film about basketball instead of baseball (our supposed national sport) or football (our apparent cinematic/televisual national sport)?

That transition, from hockey to basketball, occurred during my teenage years. Typical of Canadian boys during that time, I started played competitive minor hockey at age 5. After ten years of full-time play and grueling travel, I realized hockey wasn’t the sport for me anymore. Part of it was the danger, the fear of serious injury, since I was the smallest kid on the team. But a larger part of it was an evolving sensibility – I just wasn’t into the small-town, country-and-western, hockey-obsessed prairie culture. By then I was listening to rap, fascinated by graffiti, urban style and expression, and following the NBA. This was a golden age for basketball: Jordan was just reaching his prime, Magic and Bird were still in the league (this also around the time that Magic revealed he had HIV); the video game NBA Jam was a huge success. Then there were the 1992 Olympics and the Dream Team, which took basketball to an even bigger stage internationally. I was also really into Skybox basketball cards, which had those amazing computer-generated abstract backgrounds, and also the Arsenio Hall show, which often had rappers and basketball players as guests. Michigan’s Fab Five were bringing hip hop fashion and swagger to college ball. It was all cool, and fun and exciting. Basketball hoops were suddenly popping up on driveways everywhere. A tremendous shift was occurring. The world got much larger, seemingly overnight.

Although, unlike baseball or football, basketball is less rooted in American myth, it is, in my opinion, the 21^stcentury American sport. It is certainly more global and easier to play: You don’t need a lot of equipment or a lot of space, it can be played outdoors or indoors (all weather), by yourself or in almost any sized group. It’s democratic. Everyone does everything on the court – there aren’t highly specialized roles, as with baseball or football. I like those sports and enjoy watching them but I never really played them growing up. So basketball was the natural next step for me, as a subject to explore. I’ve been thinking that my next project might be about football, though. With all of the recent studies that have come out about head injuries in football and the long-term effects of repeated concussions, it seems to be facing a major crossroads. The game, and the NFL, will have to adapt to this new science or it will become obsolete. It’s an interesting parallel to where the U.S. is at in right now in its history, as an international power trying to maintain its primary place in a changing global landscape. The idea of the masculine warrior athlete, and of sports as a gendered institution, a “school for masculinity,” is no longer contemporary, or relevant. It’s time to evolve.

Switching gears to some of your other endeavours, is there a specific niche you’re hoping for Incite to fill? How are you approaching print/web publishing decisions? What are some historical forebears whose output has influenced the project?

As an undergraduate film student, I loved flipping through back issues of Film Culture and Millennium Film Journal and smaller, more idiosyncratic hand-bound journals like Spiral. Those publications had a big impact on me, as did Jonas Mekas’ “Movie Journal” columns. The way he mixed criticism, advocacy, community building, and poetic language into his writing was inspiring. I knew from that point forward that I wanted to start a journal. My favorite types of writing have always been artist statements, manifestos, personal essays, letters and filmmaker responses to their colleagues’ work.

INCITE was founded in 2008 with the goal of reinvigorating the culture, community, and discourse of experimental film, video art, and new media. P. Adams Sitney made a comment around that time, in an interview with Scott MacDonald, decrying the lack of new writing about experimental film and video, at a time when it was going through a huge creative resurgence. That was a major catalyst.

From the beginning, INCITE has embraced a plurality of forms and approaches, combining the spirit, eclecticism, and individuality of zines and artist books with the review process and editorial methods of academic publishing. In addition to scholarly articles, INCITE regularly prints manifestos, aesthetic statements, artist projects and drawings, archival documents, “G-chats,” diagrams, collage-essays, and so on.

Through the integration of print and online platforms, we attempt to distribute our publishing activities as widely as possible while also providing a material trace, a tangible legacy. It’s important to me that we publish an annual printed issue. But those take so much time to produce, and are dependent on volunteer time. The current issue that we’re working on right now, Exhibition Guide, has over 50 contributors. We decided a few years ago to create an online interview series (“Back and Forth”), which would allow us to have an active publishing presence between issues. We have a couple of other web initiatives planned, including a reprint series of important texts that are difficult to find or no longer available, with new contextualizing information; and a “work bench” series, which will feature annotated documentation of artists’ studios and editing spaces. And we’re close to finishing our first artist monograph, on the work of the pioneering Canadian media artist David Rimmer. It was edited by Mike Hoolboom, and will be available as an e-book on our website as well as in a print-on-demand edition.

I absolutely adore Arthur Russell and was ecstatic to see Wolf’s documentary when it made its way around the festival circuit in 2008. Documentaries about artists, to my eye, are rarely successful at generating the heat and intensity of their subjects. Perhaps conventional logic dictates that the documentarian’s duty is to present the material in a straight-forward and information-driven mode. The very impulses toward idiosyncrasy, subjectivity and innovation that drive the work of these artists are often lost in the translation to a different context.

Wolf’s work is vital because of the care he takes to ensure that his formal, conceptual and aesthetic decisions reflect—though subtly—the works and lives of his subjects. The pacing is delicate and deliberate without feeling slow. The shared emphases on biography, work and social context entwine to produce fleeting documents of artists who have passed but whose influence still grows.

I Remember, which was released last year, profiles the artist and poet Joe Brainard. Brainard is best known for his poem cycle of the same name and for his work in collage, painting and assemblage. For the piece, Wolf has constructed his own collage of found footage and archival images of Brainard with a swirling conversation between a recording of Brainard’s own reading of I Remember and the poet Ron Padgett offering a very personal biography of his best friend. 

Wild Combination is available on DVD and iTunes. I Remember will screen at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and Images Festival soon and can be streamed online or rented through Video Data Bank. Wolf’s latest film, Teenage, premieres this April at the Tribeca Film Festival. 

Because it seems a good a place to begin as any, I’m hoping you might tell us a bit about your background—where you grew up and were educated, the types of jobs you’ve held to help you make work and, most important, your evolution as an artist. When did you realize you wanted to make films? Did you begin by being in bands or making paintings or was filmmaking always the goal?

I grew up in San Jose, California. I was a teenage gay activist, and I thought that I’d grow up to work in politics. I was on Good Morning America, lobbying my legislatures and stuff like that, but I also wanted to be an artist. I got obsessed with ‘90s queer independent films and directors like Todd Haynes and Derek Jarman. And then I started discovering video art and experimental films by people like Sadie Benning and Kenneth Anger. I was inspired to become a filmmaker, so I enrolled in film school at NYU.

It didn’t really occur to me how traditional and industry-oriented NYU would be. But I stuck it out, and eventually had the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt as a professor, which was really inspiring. During college, I got involved in the art world. I was writing art reviews for magazines, and most of my friends were visual artists. So when I finished school, I worked in a painter and video artist’s studio. Slowly I got some opportunities to make short documentaries about artists first for the public art organization Creative Time, and later for the New York Times. It was around this time that I started making my first feature Wild Combination.

My first experience with your work was through Wild Combination. Arthur Russell’s music has long meant the world to me and I was excited that someone had chosen to make a film about his life. To me, one of the most effective strategies in the film is your use of time-specific camera and media formats for your “reenactment” shots. Be-walkmaned Arthur on the ferry is shot on VHS tape, while Iowa is captured in luscious super-8. More so than the interviews, these moments tie us to the spaces, places and feelings of those periods. Can you talk a bit about the process of creating those reenactments? Do you, in your own mode of remembering (and as a filmmaker), see your own past in such aestheticized forms?

Making “fake archival footage” is one of my main filmmaking interests. I love working with found footage, but I like creating my own vintage-looking material too. My new film Teenage, which is coming out this Spring is a pretty expansive look at the birth of youth culture. In the film, I’ve made recreations that are shot in the style of period home movies. I shot scenes with vintage 16mm camera bodies and uncoated lenses, used experimental printing techniques to further degrade the footage, and then even organically got dust, scratches, and dirt on the films. Viewers shouldn’t necessarily be able to identify this stuff as original, staged footage. A lot of people will think it is archival.

The first moving images I ever saw of Arthur Russell were these de-saturated, extreme close up shots of him performing cello. They were shot on an old VHS format. I knew that was the material, texture, and feeling I wanted my film Wild Combination to have. I’m always trying to make films that have a cohesive form to them, even if I’m drawing on eclectic material. The recreations I film are a kind of visual glue that tie all the elements together.

Arthur Russell didn’t have immense media exposure from which you could draw footage, but there are numerous tapes of him performing that could be utilized. To what degree was the film shaped around the footage you were able to find? Were there scenes you were unable to include but that demonstrated something about Arthur you wanted to show? Also, I was struck by how many of the credits for this footage belonged to other legendary downtown figures (Phil Niblock, Jean Dupuy). This shouldn’t be too surprising considering where they were shot or his audience, but I’m curious if this lent itself to another kind of collaboration or, at least, an opportunity to reflect on the rhizomatic, entwined structures of artistic community.

There was a tiny amount of documentation of Arthur. If I had been a more experienced filmmaker, I probably would have said there’s not enough archival material to make this film. But that limitation proved to be a really productive challenge for me, and it helped me think more creatively about the filmmaking. It contributes to this sense of mystery about Arthur, the subject who is absent from the film. But really, I’m using every existing filmed recording of Arthur that exists. It was cool going to Phil Niblock’s loft to pick up a VHS tape, and the Kitchen’s archive was very generous in helping me access Jean Dupuy’s wonderful video documentation of Arthur performing “Eli” from the performance event “Soup and Tart.”

Still, Terrace of Unintelligibility by Phil Niblock, courtesy Audika Records

Arthur Russell and Joe Brainard share certain similarities. They were both born far from the coasts but found their way to the cities (and New York, in particular) about as quickly as they could. They both operated on the fringes of their particular scenes but were well-loved by their peers and small but devoted audiences. They were both gay and casualties of the AIDS crisis. I’m curious what about these figures (beyond the incredible work they produced) drew you to them.

Lately I’ve been thinking of those two as “gentle gays.” They both had a certain intensity and self-deprecating quality to them, but they also seemed like incredibly sweet people with a sensitive demeanor. I’m really interested in telling the stories and exploring the biographies of artists who died of AIDS. I think a lot about what New York and our world would be like if so many brilliant queer people hadn’t died prematurely. In some senses I imagine myself as a peer to them today.

I’m interested in the artistic inheritances of queer art (in particular from the 1970s to the 1990s) to makers in the present. Because of the tragic ravages of the AIDS crisis, so many of that era’s great makers’ lives ended much too soon. The question is broad and will be necessarily subjective, but I’m hoping you might have some thoughts on these questions of inheritance, lineage and historicization.

This is all stuff I think about a lot. Being queer is an important part of my identity. But often times I don’t really connect to contemporary gay politics. Queer culture from the past is what resonates with me the most. I’m not entirely sure why that is, but I know I’m not alone in that feeling.

Regarding these questions of inheritance, there is an incredible book I would recommend: Sarah Schulman’s Gentrification of the Mind. It’s a memoir about the AIDS crisis and ACT UP movement, and Sarah discusses how AIDS lead to the gentrification of Manhattan. She reflects on gentrification not just as phenomenon in cities, but a phenomenon of consciousness.

Arthur Russell, courtesy Audika Records.

I imagine one of the pleasures of making documents/portraits of artists is the chance to interview and work with their peers. Are there artists through whose interviews you’ve felt a particular closeness or whose way of talking about your subject was particularly illuminating? Did the chance to have a relatively narrow topic (one artist) allow for a conversation that touched on other, broader topics (I imagine talking to Philip Glass about Arthur Russell is easier than talking to Philip Glass without a subject at hand)? What sorts of lessons about artistic kinship and community have you learned through these interviews?

I love interviewing people—it’s one of the most stimulating and rewarding aspects of making a documentary. To me a good interview is a two-sided conversation, not just a series of questions. Through my work I’ve met a lot of really interesting artists and thinkers. I believe that any good biography transcends its subjects and is about other cultural histories, or larger ideas. For Wild Combination, the biography was a way for me to also explore the setting of downtown New York in the 1970s and 1980s, the intersections of pop culture and the avant-garde, as well as queer culture and the impact of AIDS.

Still from I Remember.

I Remember is described as “a film about” while Wild Combination is “a portrait of” their subjects. Without dissecting hairs or whatever the phrase is, I’m interested in these small designations. Do you think of these works (and perhaps in contrast to other projects you work on) as being distinct in their processes? Or, perhaps, do you have ways of describing the shift between portrait, document, documentary, essay or non-fiction (or other categories) filmmaking? Are these terms useful in the construction and reception of your work?

Both projects are really portrait films. A portrait isn’t a definitive biography, it’s a selective and artistic treatment of a subject.  I didn’t interview everybody that knew Arthur Russell or Joe Brainard—I make focused and somewhat selective choices about how I would present their stories. That’s how I can be specific in my filmmaking rather than general. To me, it’s about making creative non-fiction, rather than straight documentaries.

I Remember was commissioned by Nathan Lee while he was at Bard’s  Center for Curatorial Studies. How did this come about? How does making work as a commission differ from other forms? Did knowing the work would exist in a museum exhibition (I’m assuming) before screening spaces impact the way you made it? Do you consider these works to be collaborations with your subject?

Nathan was really supportive, and gave me free reign to make whatever project I wanted. I had already started the Joe Brainard film, but needed an excuse (and some financial help) to finish it. I was excited about the opportunity to work in a gallery space, and to explore the documentary form in an elliptical, non-linear way. I felt like the structure of Joe’s poem “I Remember” speaks in circles, so it felt right that the film could play that way too. Truth be told, it’s only since screened in festival contexts, so I think it really is perceived more as a self-contained documentary, but I think it works in both contexts.

Your next major project is about teenagers. Can you discuss the project a bit?

Teenage is premiering in April at the Tribeca Film Festival. I worked with the author Jon Savage on the film—it’s inspired by his book of the same name. The film looks at the pre-history of teenagers, and examines youth culture from before WWII. It’s really about the role youth play in shaping the future, and how society oppressed and controlled youth before they were finally recognized as “teenagers.” It’s not a traditional historical film—the entire story is told from the point of view of teenagers. It’s been a major project that I’ve been working on for four years, so I’m excited for it to come out soon.