Interview: Lindsay Seers

Lindsay Seers: It Has to Be This Way² (installation view), 2010.

Could you introduce the piece you’re showing in the X-room?

I’m showing a large architectural structure made of cardboard and wood and a video installation. It’s a film projected onto a round screen you view from above. It has a novel and a documentary to go with it, which are integrated into the whole piece, so all the pieces interrelate. What I want is for the piece to take video into a kind of sculptural spatial representational form and allow some kind of emotional import within the physical experience of the work. The idea is that you’re standing above the screen, looking down into what looks like a well or a circular pool. While standing there, you’ll hear my mother’s voice, which was recorded while she was under hypnosis. It has this kind of quality of stream-of-consciousness to it. In her voice you can feel a sense of emotional unfolding quite clearly, so in some sense it’s a very emotive piece. The setting of it is highly theatrical and one might feel that it’s too much or a bit excessive but the form is really important. I want you to experience it as an expression of real lived experience but also as a kind of act, as a kind of performance or artifice. It’s an idea which relates to the presence of the mechanism of recording – how recording actually changes the event that you’re in. I’ve gone around filming in Africa, I’ve used archived footage of family, I’ve used my stepsisters footage of Africa, so it’s a collage of things. It’s not a homogenous piece, because it takes all different types of genre, all different types of imagery. I want you to move between being immersed in the media itself and in the narrative that it’s trying to lead you through. It’s a kind of Brechtian move between form and content, between having some kind of physical and emotional effect on you but at the same time you’re feeling it as a constructed event.

Lindsay Seers: It Has to Be This Way² (installation view), 2010.

You project your video onto a round screen, placed inside an architectural structure in the shape of a colonial slave fort. Could you elaborate on this?

My piece has to do with the idea of memory. How does memory exist? How does the mind actually function in terms of relationship between language and image? I think the piece is slowly moving into trying to turn film image into an idea of a mental image. In film and cinema we have a lot of tropes and metaphors for representing mind or dream. The image becomes blurry just before the character falls asleep or moves very fast for that moment just before death, where you see everything from your whole life flash before you. I’m trying to look for a language for that. In this piece here, I was thinking very much of the idea of the oracle. In Greek, Roman and Sinbad movies they often have a pool in which they see what’s going on now, in the future and in the past, but basically it’s a kind of consciousness. You look into the water and see how things really are. That was the idea for this piece. The architectural structure mimics the structure of the slave forts in West Africa. They were always two or three storied buildings. The slaves would obviously be down and the colonial slave traders would be above, and they would look and choose the slaves from the balconies. That overall structure of power is a part of the piece as well. The video also has a lot of imagery of the slave forts because the Danish, the British, the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Norwegians were all trading slaves on the Gold Coast.

Lindsay Seers:It Has to Be This Way², 2010. Video installation, film stills.		Lindsay Seers:It Has to Be This Way², 2010. Video installation, film stills.

In the narrative of this piece, yours and your family’s personal history becomes correlated with the larger collective history. What is the idea behind that?

I want to offset ones individual lived experience as a history against the idea of emotional or total history. Each of us as individuals are playing out something within the mass abstract idea of historical context. In a way everything we do is actually historically constructed. I’m a white British woman and, whether I’m aware of it or not, I’m carrying forward the historical precedent of that. We make certain choices and we feel like individuals with free will, but I also think that we’re operating within a larger system of which we’re only a fragment. The piece is offsetting the idea of ones individual lived experience against the experience of the millions. In the video installation you will hear my mother express her feelings about certain choices she’s made while she lived in West Africa. She was involved in some dealings, a typical colonial havoc, so inadvertently I feel associated to that history of colonialism directly. But being British, I guess, one is always influenced by the idea of colonialism, because the historical state of Britain right now relates to its colonial activities, and we carry forward a certain amount of guilt for those activities. When I go to Africa, I think of my mother living in Africa but I also think about what has happened to Africa in relation to European countries. I’m thinking about how am I personally culpable to the larger history? How do we stand for historical fact?

Lindsay Seers: It Has to Be This Way², 2010. Video installation, film still.

As you mentioned, the piece also has a novel to go with it. What function does that fill?

The movement between a written narrative and a visual narrative really interested me as a kind of sideline. I think the novel gives so much potential to how you can interpret the piece. When you go and see an artwork, in particularly in an institution like SMK, quite often you might feel rather puzzled about it. You go in and there’s an exhibition with a cardboard box with plaster pouring out of it and some bits of wire, and you might not have any context for that as an audience. You don’t understand how it is breaking down the history of sculpture monumentally. The institution might have a brochure, a catalogue or some informative films, which are not the exhibition but yet they are actually formative on your experience of the exhibition. They are like propaganda in a way, but they also really inform your vision and help you contextualize what it is you see. I think there are many opportunities for manipulating or using that within the work itself. Rather than having the institution position you, I wanted to position you myself. I was actually quite against having a brochure, which is a real exclamation of the work, mainly because I want you to have the novel, which is much denser. It’s not an explanation of the work but it does make some things clearer, and at the same time it’s a piece of work in itself.

So, should we read the novel before we experience your piece?

I think you go in, you see the piece, you see the imagery, you go away and then you read the book, and you start to understand something else about what you saw. It changes what you saw. Your experience of an artwork actually never stays the same. You go and see a work of Picasso when you’re fourteen and it means something entirely different to you when you’re forty. And it is the same with film and novels - nothing stays the same, everything is constantly transforming, which is also a very Brectsonian concept. I want that to happen with the piece. You watch the piece, you read the book and if you ever saw the piece again, it would be informed by the book, so it’s a kind of shifting matrix of meaning. It examines how meaning is attached to things, and where these meanings are constructed, where they come from and how they relate to memory, to history and other big things.

Lindsay Seers: It Has to Be This Way², 2010. Video installation, film still.

It’s a piece with a lot of layers, details and philosophies behind it. What would you like your audience to take with them from their encounter with your piece?

I think it has a lot to do with what technology or representation can do, and what it can give to you. I see it as an incredible powerful medium. We constantly use these prosthetic technologies as if they were just innocent forms, but actually I think they construct our lives and conscience really substantially. I want to make something that slightly breaks the stream of the ordinariness of those experiences by pushing very particular ways of looking; my audience will be entering a big sculptural form and the screen is configured in a different way that they’re used to. I want to bring this Brecthian experience of what representation does to us. It’s not like I want to make one simple point to somebody. I want to take the mediums and stretch them, force them and construct something that provokes different types of thought. It’s not related to advertising or entertainment but to some kind of philosophical idea of natured life, because most of the imagery that we are faced with is related to desire and capital, except for our own personal archives of photographs - but then they can be about constructing relationships or fantasies.

Your works are always correlated in some way - earlier works are referred to in newer ones. Does your audience have to be familiar with your earlier works to fully grasp this new one?

No, I don’t think so, because it’s fragmentary. It’s like overhearing a conversation between people sitting at another table. Hopefully it is of some interest, but you can never really know the total story of something. It’s just like any set of memories – once you try to discuss them with somebody, they are bottomless. I believe there is no total understanding of something. No matter how much you try, there’s only a partial understanding and my works reflect that partial understanding. Although classic films go for a homogenous simple plot; there’s normally a beginning, middle and end. That’s just what we want life to be about, but that isn’t what life is. The piece is more about lived experience – incomplete!

Thank you.

Lindsay Seers: It Has to Be This Way², 2010. Video installation, film still.