Interview: Eve Sussman

Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation, Installationsview.

You’ve been quoted for not liking to be called a video artist. Why is that?

I think there’s a lot of things that are published, but aren’t exactly true. I don’t have a problem with that actually. I guess when working as a video artist it’s more about one self, than if you’re working as a filmmaker. I think when people talk about videoart they think about something that is very much about the artist turning the camera towards themselves. That is sort of where the history of this art form came out of, in the work of performance art from the 70’s. At this point I think that people think of video art as very being very diverse, there is everything from stuff that look like cinematic future/feature film till stuff that is extremely experimental. I identify myself as being an artist. I don’t pinpoint it; It’s sort of like whatever people wanna use, they can use…

Eve Sussman: De Espaldas, 2004. Video still from 89 Seconds at Alcázar		Eve Sussman: Set with Red Curtain, 2004. Production still from 89 Seconds at Alcázar

Eve Sussman: Widow on the Set, 2004. Production still from 89 Seconds at Alcázar		Eve Sussman: Light on Her Neck, 2004. Video still fraom 89 Seconds at Alcázar

Would you call your work paraphrases?

In the sense that it’s summing up a much bigger story maybe, but I think I’m making a comletely new piece of work, rather than paraphrasing something old. I think in the same way I could have taken a photograph of these kids playing in the field (Sussman is pointing out the window, where a bunch of children are playing, ed.) and based a work on that. I could have bought a piece of survailance photo in the supermarket and based a work on that. I happened to base some works on some paintings. It’s a new piece of work and it’s using, as a spark for that work, an idea that happened to come from an art historical moment. But equally I could have used as a spark for that work something I saw in the movies or somewhere else. I happened to take these moments because I thought they had so much motion, action and gesture in them, but I don’t think I would call it a paraphrase because what are you paraphrasing? Something you can’t even imagine! I have no idea how people lived in the time of Velazquez and I certainly don’t have any idea how people lived in this Roman myth. So I’m not paraphrasing anything, I’m making something up! It’s new and it’s fiction.

Eve Sussman: 89 Seconds at Alcázar, 2004. Video still		Eve Sussman: 89 Seconds at Alcázar, 2004. Video still

How did you come to use these two pictures? What is your relationship with these two images?

In 89 Seconds it really came from visiting the Prado (Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, ed.) where I saw the painting, and realized that it’s so cinematographic and filmic. It looks like a snapshot: it has the energy and the psychology of a snapshot, and that’s really uncanny because photography wasn’t invented for another 200 years. So how you get this psychological moment that you really hardly ever find in painting and only see in photography in a painting was stunning. But then, because it feels like a film still or a snapshot, there must be moments that came before and after it in the same way as if you make a snapshot on the beach there must be moments that came before and after. So inventing these moments, that’s the artwork. That’s why it’s not a paraphrase, it’s a new piece. The before and after never existed in art before we created them, but as a reference we used this image that people can relate to, which is that of Velázquez.

But you don’t show the exact moment of the picture in the film?

It’s impossible. That moment doesn’t exist. It exists in Velázquez painting, but it can’t exist in the real world. It exists in your mind and in that particular painting, but it cannot exist anywhere else. It didn’t exist at the time of Velázquez and it doesn’t exist in my time. Also, I’m not trying to re-create Velázquez painting, I’m trying to make a new artwork. What Velasques made was an invention, and what we made was a further invention. We’re making a new artwork that has it’s own choreography. What we were really trying to was to capture the energy and the psychology of the room. What’s actually going on between the people, how is the body language, what’s the unspoken moments that’s going on between the people and what’s the narrative the you invent as a viewer that you bring into it when you see it?

Eve Sussman: 89 Seconds at Alcázar, 2004. Video still		Eve Sussman: 89 Seconds at Alcázar, 2004. Video still

How about the David painting? When did you see that for the first time?

I’ve never seen it, actually. I’ve only seen it in reproduction. At that point I was thinking if we were working that much with gesture, choreography and the narrative implied by gesture, what more could we do. Then I saw the painting and send it to the choreographer I was working with at that time, and said “let’s do a fight choreography”. Every choreographer wants to do a fight choreography. So that was again more about seing this spark of the moment and then taking it from there and elaborate it. After that point we let the painting behind, and I actually think it’s a bit misleading that they show a reproduction of the painting in the exhibition, because the painting had very little to do with this work. We decided to base the choreography on the myth about the Sabine women because the inspiration came from Davids painting, but after that we left the painting behind. The stuff that was really important is stuff from the 60’s. We based all the architecture and the setting and locations on this Mid-century modernism, this idea, this utopian dream – those was really the idea that mattered in the piece.

The video follows the same story as the myth….

Yes, it does. There’s a bunch of men, they don’t have any women. They have to find some women, so they go and steal them and then a big fight occurs. That’s the story. It’s a story that is still contemporary in some places. It’s not that this story is ancient or so mythical, there are cultures where it still happens. You find it in our culture in terms of love triangles, or in terms of someone having an affair with someone, and there’s a fight. You can take it and extravagate it and update it to contemporary times, or Mid-century modernism in art. I fought I would update it to this very arcaich periode of Mid-century modernism, which had these dreams of better living through design. Dreams of the perfect life, perfect architecture, perfect wife and all that. And then the pieces fall a part because it’s not sustainable and it really is this utopian dream, which I don’t think we believe in so strongly anymore.

Eve Sussman: The Rape of the Sabine Women, 2005. Video still		Eve Sussman: The Rape of the Sabine Women, 2005. Video still

When I saw The Rape of the Sabine Women I was wondering: there’s this person that seems to keep coming back in different roles. First he’s a museum guide and later on he’s a turist. What’s his role?

Yes, he appears also as a policeman and later on he’s a vitness to the fighting. His role comes very much from classical ideas of the theater where you have an oracle or a visionary who knows the faith of the characters before it’s gonna happen. He’s the person through the story that is continually egging them on. Or is he just watching? Is he innocent, is he not?

But in the same way as in Greek theater you have the chorus that’s telling you the story before it happens. In the video nobody speaks, so he’s not telling you anything, but you understand that he knows something. The rest of the characters are in this dream space. They don’t really know what’s happening to them, but you clearly understand that the old man kind of knows. I like that he’s a mythical character, but at the same time very contemporary; he’s a chorus for the camera.

Eve Sussman: The Rape of the Sabine Women, 2005. Video still		Eve Sussman: The Rape of the Sabine Women, 2005. Video still

The Rape is shot partly in Berlin and partly in Greece. Why not Rome?

Of very specific reasons. To me, I wanted a place where there wasn’t this sort of European bourgeois culture. We shot mainly in Greece where I feel like it’s barely European. It isn’t so overall with this extremely conformative bourgeois culture as in Italy. Also, the landscape and culture in Italy is too soft. It’s so much about this feel-good culture, this beautifull image. I wanted some of the hardness of Greece, and I wanted also the sense of individuality that is very strong in Greece. People do whatever the hell they want. There’s not this respect for authorities or rules. There is this strong attitude where people do as they want to, which I think comes from their strong democratic history. I knew that there was still this wildness in Greece, and I needed that. I needed that in the culture and in the people, in the actors and in the landscape.

The video has a very open ending. Why is that?

I don’t know if I feel that the ending is so open. I feel that it’s inevitable. In the ending basically things fall apart and we know that to be true: things do fall apart! It’s the idea of dust to dust. As much as you can build a beautifull utopian lifestyle around you, you really should be carefull what you wish for. You may wish to have the perfect house and the beautiful wife and everything in this dreamstate around you. That is why we use as our metaphore for Rome the Valsamakis house, which is one of these international style houses build in this case study period, where people really belived in a better living through design. That you can design the perfect lifestyle. My point is that you can for a while, but eventually it will fall apart.

Eve Sussman: The Rape of the Sabine Women, 2005. Video still		Eve Sussman: The Rape of the Sabine Women, 2005. Video still

How much does the process of making these films mean to you? I suppose it must be a pretty long period of time…

89 Seconds I guess was about a year. We shot it in one day, but the pre-production and the post-production took a while. I was in a technical learning curve, which was one of the reasons for the long period of time. The Rape was two years; a year of pre-production, four weeks of shooting and then a year and a half of editing.

I think it’s important that people understand that this is a collaborative process. You don’t make pieces like these alone. With 89 Seconds there were probably 39 people working on that piece and with The Rape over a 100. The actors especially have a lot of influence. With the actors we developed a lot in collaboration. There’s a shooting script that you can see in the exhibition cases, but there’s different versions of the shooting script that kept changing over the month – up untill the day we were shooting, actually. Those ideas are coming from working, rehearsal, figuring out what’s important, and then we’re changing our minds on the day of the shoot.

I think it’s really important that people understand this concept of The Rufus Corporation, and what that means in terms of being a group. The pieces in themselves are studies of group dynamic, but the process itself is also about group dynamic. So you can sort of take the fiction of the artwork and the reality of the real group dynamic in the room, and somewhere in between that is the result that comes out. I think the study of group dynamics is really the essens of what I do. I spend a lot of time using cameras, where I just let the camera run and then watch what happens. I don’t do so much directing, I just let things happen in front of me. You see that a lot in the house scene in The Rape. We did these long improps, which could be 4-5 hours long, sometimes untill three in the morning, and the crew would quit, the lighting crew would quit, my camera man would quit, but the actors would keep going and I would keep shooting – and everybody would be fallen to the floor by the end. This was in between real life an acting. They weren’t characters, but they were wearing costumes and they’d got make up on, and there were points where you couldn’t really tell the difference between your real life and the film: what was the character and what was the person? The actors talk a lot about that, and it’s a really interesting process where the minds begin to blur between reality and fiction.

Eve Sussman: The Rape of the Sabine Women, 2005. Video still		Eve Sussman: The Rape of the Sabine Women, 2005. Video still

How about the photos? Are they stills from the films and what role do they play in the exhibition?

It’s a mixture. In 89 Seconds there are stills from the film, but most of them are photographs shot by two or three photographers. They had to work around the set. Every now and then we would break it for half an hour to let the photographers work, but mostly the photographers had to find the shots inbetween or during the filming. So they are really moving around very quickly, even though the photos don’t look like it. They are both creating these artworks that are the images, but also creating the screen artworks. They see what they can catch in between all the chaos. What I like about the process is that it brings a lot of peoples creativity into it; the actors, light designers, camera men, me and the photographers, but everybody’s bringing their own view. I’m not the one to tell them to shoot this or that photo, they’ll have to catch it as they can. We shot these period pieces, I mean 89 Seconds and The Rape are both period pieces, so we had period costumes, we had makeup sets and locations, so there is an idea of trying to make something that feels a bit like a period piece, but still it's a piece of contemporary art.

Thank you.

Eve Sussman: Marilisa on the Floor, 2005. Production still from The Rape of the Sabine Women		Eve Sussman: Marilisa Reflected, 2005. Production still from The Rape of the Sabine Women

Eve Sussman: Themis in the Birdcage, 2005. Production still from The Rape of the Sabine Women		Eve Sussman: Tempelhof at Dawn, 2005. Video still from The Rape of the Sabine Women

Eve Sussman: Living Room, 2005. Production still from The Rape of the Sabine Women		Eve Sussman: Girls at the Pool, Production still from The Rape of the Sabine Women.

Eve Sussman: Jeff's Kennedy Moment, 2005. Production still from The Rape of the Sabine Women		Eve Sussman: Annette with Rabbits, 2005. Video still from The Rape of the Sabine Women