Interview: Eve Sussman

Eve Sussman: White on White. A Random Thriller (installation view), 2010.

Perhaps you could give me an idea about what is going on in here?

Sure. Here in the big room is a work called White on White. A random thriller. It is a film that I’ve been working on the last 2 years that is being edited by computer live as you are watching it. So there is a hard drive filled with about 2.500 video clips and about 35 voice overs and about a hundred music clips. The computer is, with a bunch of database queuing, creating the order of the narrative and the editing. Every time you see the film it’s different. If you see it on Monday and your friend sees it on Tuesday you see a different edit of the film. And as you watch it you begin to create the narrative for yourself based on the pictures and some of the narration that you’re listening to. Some of the narration is in Russian with English subtitles, while some of it’s in English with Russian subtitles. Therefore you often see subtitles on the screen but often with different pictures and with different music. It’s an experimental film noir. A sort of thriller about a guy caught in some futuristic city. What he’s doing there we don’t exactly know but there’s a backdrop of the oil business or the water business - sort of new money in the post-Soviet world.

It’s shot in a very sort of improvisational way and it plays with cinematic convention and the way that you edit narrative, and the way we create narrative in our own lives. Watching the film is a little bit like life; you walk down the corner and you might see the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen in your life but then they’re gone and you never see them again. Or you see a great sunset out of the car window but then it’s gone and you never see it again. We improvise the script so some of it is storyboarded and some of it is improvised on the spot. But I don’t take credit for writing the script by myself. It is really something that grows out of these more expedition type of artworks. In this case the expedition was to find the futuristic fantasy city, which is a conglomeration of many places, but we were shooting mainly in post-Soviet Central Asia.

Do you take inspiration directly from the film noir genre?

Yes, very much. I call the piece a film noir because I’m trying to play with some of the film noir conventions; the idea of the anti-hero, the idea of the flawedness of humanity. A science-fiction noir where people are questing for this perfect future which is impossible to have. And it’s doomed to become a Dystopia instead of a Utopia.

The obvious reference here is the film Alphaville by Godard. I am a huge fan of the French new wave. I admire these more improvised directors who improvise as they are shooting and have a script and keep changing it and work a lot with what their actors can do. We did that a bit here too where we had one American actor who didn’t speak Russian a bunch of set relation actors who don’t speak English and only spoke their main language or Russian. So we were improvising with actors who didn’t speak the same language with simultaneously translation and that was really interesting. So that’s a really interesting challenge to not be so dependent on language and on everything being so familiar.

Eve Sussman: white on white: a randomthriller, 2010. Unique Programming code, MacPro Tower, LCD monitor. Eve Sussman, The Rufus Corporation, Ed. 10.

You mostly work with film and video?

Yes, I am mainly working with film and video, but as I say there is almost a sculptural component to that. I came out of a background of sculpture. Sometimes I do collage storyboard drawings and I also use installations that I have made in some of my films. I just made an installation about six months ago called Yuri’s Office where we rebuilt the office of Yuri Gagarin. Now I’m thinking of how to use that as a possible movie set.

Sometimes you take your inspiration from famous works from the history of art?

I have a couple of times. I did a piece called 89 seconds at Alcázar that’s sort of my best known piece. That was based on Las Meninas by Velázquez. I mean that was sort of a “happens” thing - it just happens you know? It’s not like anything I’ll probably ever do again. But it did happen, it’s true, I can’t deny it.

Where do you get your inspiration from in general?

My inspiration has a lot to do with human psychology. What was interesting to me about Las Meninas was that it had a really strong sense of the psychology of the people in the room. You sense them as emotional beings in a way that you don’t experience in a lot of painting. Much more in the sort of way that you sense it in photography. In photography you sense the emotion of the subject more obviously. I’m really interested in how you film that ineffable, sort of invisible psychological state. What Velázquez was able to do was capture that in painting. This is very rare and it takes a great painter to be able to do that. But I’m not really inspired by his painting as such more in how you capture the energy of the room - you can’t see it but you can feel it - so how do you film that? That’s really the challenge. The way a painting or a photograph conveys that is different because it is locked in time - it’s frozen. In a film it’s not frozen. And so how psychology builds narrative even if you don’t use language is really interesting to me.

Eve Sussman: How to Tell the Future From the Past, 2010. 3 channel High Definition Video v.2. Eve Sussman & Angela Christleib, ed. 6.

Eve Sussman: Parliament of Rooks, 2010. 2 channel High Definition Video Dim: 45"14"x3" , 2 LCD screens enclosed in Plexi, 2 mac minis. Eve Sussman, The Rufus Corporation, ed. 6.

You mentioned before how people create a narrative about their own lives?

Oh, I’m really interested in the idea of the expedition. If you think about any of these historic explorers like Livingstone, Shackleton and Jacques Cousteau - these famous explorers or people go on expeditions because that’s their job - that’s what they do. I think that is possible to have an artistic life that also takes that as your job. But instead of bringing back scientific or research data, what you bring back is poetic data. And in a way that’s what White on White is - it’s an expedition to bring back poetic data.

From where?

From this version of the future that is being created before our eyes.

In which way do you think of yourself as an explorer?

I think that when you interact with people you are always interacting with their psychology. I’m interested in how we capture those ideas and how we express them. No matter how much we have progressed technologically or as a society our psychology has not actually progressed. It’s been the same for thousands of years; it doesn’t advance with technology. We don’t have extra words for describing how we feel as people. Basically our emotional being, our sense of ourselves as human since the dawn of man, has not actually progressed. I think we are emotionally not more complex, we are equally complex. And that’s interesting considering we are always concerned with advancement. ‘Cause as people our ability to advance in the core is I think very limited. You are who you are and that’s what you have to work with. Therefore the thought of going forward and staying in the same place is a very poetic and interesting idea to me.

Eve Sussman: Pond, 2010. 112 x 160 cm. C-print by Simon Lee for Eve Sussman/Rufus Corporation, ed. 10.

The middle piece - the piece that is shot on the train - is called How to tell the Future from the Past...

It’s a question and a statement ‘how do you tell the future from the past’. Like how do you tell the difference? As if you can know the difference. Really it’s about standing still and going forward at the same time. As beings I think we stand still but in idea and as society we move forward.

So how do you stand still and go forward at the same time? Do you think we stay the same all through life?

I think people change and people progress, and become more mature and obviously you are not the same person you were as a child but I think that the dice that you’re cast or the set of potentialities that you are given is always there.

Some people are almost living their life on the Internet and we see the concept of “Reality TV” gaining popularity. Do you think this changes our perspective on the narrative in life?

I don’t know. I think it’s been going on a lot longer than we realise. Like there was a very landmark show in the seventies in America called The Louds - An American Family, which was the foundation of reality television and it’s actually an amazing documentary - I remember it from my childhood and it was revolutionary then. The show was twelve episodes long, edited down from about 300 hours of footage, and documented the life of a family, the Louds of Santa Barbara, the break up of the marriage, the son coming out as gay, and all of this crazy stuff. It was absolutely revolutionary when it was made and that was the beginning of reality TV.

And this was a real family?

Yes, a totally real family. There was nothing done for TV. I mean any documentary maker of course says that as soon as the cameras are there it changes the dynamic of the family. I guess I can say, in a way, I’m not that interested in it because I’m more interested in the fictions that we create and the poetic license that we take with things. And I’m interested in making a metaphorical statement and to me the reality shows lack metaphor and they’re not very deep. Right now I’m actually hooked on this TV show The Wire, which I think is a metaphor. It’s based on a lot of reality but it’s actually an artwork.

Eve Sussman: Woman in Field, 2010. 112 x 160 cm. C-print by Simon Lee for Eve Sussman/Rufus Corporation, ed. 10.

And what do you mean by metaphor in this case?

It’s very metaphorical in how it plays with power, politics, struggle, humanity, and the way people trick each other. It uses ideas that are Dostoyevsky or Shakespearian and applies them to the American ghetto. It’s brilliant. I mean its not fantastically shot or edited but it’s brilliantly designed. You can see it’s a conceptual artwork. It’s built to sort of take down every aspect of the American power structure. From drugs all the way to politics you know? Everything and all the players are there but it’s in this low level way they’re talking about small time crime but actually that’s a metaphor for corruption worldwide. It’s in every pocket of everyone’s life somehow. It has that Dostoyevskyan thing where no one is only good, everyone has that double-sided personality, that real sense of humanity. That’s what the novel is about. It works with the properties of a real novel and I think that’s what makes something art. A metaphor is when something stands for something else and does it in a way that’s subtle, interesting and artistic. You have to make X stand for Y in a way that’s not cliché. And this is what a lot of reality TV totally lacks.

The shows that are made by HBO are more like novels and take on the problems and the challenges of actually making a novel on television. A movie is a short story, while a serial TV show is a novel. It can be more complex, it can have more characters and it can take twelve hours or fifty hours; again like life and that’s what’s interesting. To me these Reality shows are more like throw away. I don’t know why audiences are interested in it but I think it’s because a lot of people aren’t interested in art. Not everybody cares about art. Some people are interested in I don’t know what to call it - Schadenfreude.

Can you tell me be a bit about the photographs that accompany the videos?

They are from the train journey across Kazakhstan and Simon Lee shot quite a few of the photos he has been calling The Shadow over the Land, also of the same location. They sort of go nicely together but the project is related to the film. It’s sort of neither here nor there - the idea of the film is that it is really a conglomeration of different places that are showing this future city that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world. So where they are shot with regards to the narrative is not important. But they do tie-in to this idea about the future and the past. Standing still and moving forward at the same time. I think Simon captures a lot in these photos the feeling that you’re moving. Because all of the photos are shot from moving vehicles but the way that they’re shot you feel that you’re standing suddenly very still even though you can tell they are shot from a vehicle in motion. So you’re almost freezing time. The photos are a project in relation to White on White but are really good in their own right. I mean this idea of the overexposed and the underexposed in the same image - they are really amazing.

What gave you the idea of going to post-Soviet states?

It was like life really, it just happened - you don’t even really make choices. I mean things happen, you do shit. It’s just like saying ‘how did you end up where you are now?’ I like it when the work process is really organic and I trust that instinctual way of working. I don’t do a lot of calculated choices.

Thank you.

Eve Sussman: Pylon, 2010. 112 x 160 cm. C-print by Simon Lee for Eve Sussman/Rufus Corporation, ed. 10.

Eve Sussman: Orange Factory, 2010.. 112 x 160 cm. C-print by Simon Lee for Eve Sussman/Rufus Corporation, ed. 10.