Into Deep Water: Interview with Lyndal Jones
Deep Water/Aqua Profunda was the title of Lyndal Jones' exhibit at the Australian Pavilion in Venice, 2001.
Lyndal Jones interview by Katy Deepwell, June 2001
Lyndal Jones: This exhibition came together from two different sources. One is my knowledge of the Australian pavilion itself which built like a little boat. It really has an ephemeral sense, a little boat amongst all these big tankers - frantically hoping, it's a yacht that I am! And the second, where I had shot some footage off the back of a vaporetto at the last biennale in 1999. I was looking through my video material and found this footage, when I was working on the Ikon Gallery (Birmingham) show, Demonstrations and Details from the Facts of Life and then the invitation came through for this. This footage was unexpectedly beautiful and this became an important source for this piece. The third source, which came later, was the sign at the end of swimming pool in Fitzroy in Melbourne which said, 'Danger, Deep Water/ Aqua Profunda'. It was in Italian because a lot of Italians live in that area. This suddenly became a wonderful source. The work is not about all water around the world being the same. This is a national pavilion and it's not about questions of adjustment or assimilation to the same, it's about the possibility of different people speaking different languages all living together and you not having to understand everything, every word. This is against government policy of course which is that people must learn to speak the official language in a culture. So those things were very important to me. Like at a swimming pool, where people will be talking to eachother in different languages and it's an enrichment.
KD: Were you setting up equivalents, parallel spaces rather than reducing everything to the same?
Lyndal Jones: In the end, they are equivalents, and there's difference but it doesn't matter. Some of the audience from Venice told me that they couldn't tell in some parts whether it was Sydney or Venice which was filmed. That was fantastic for me as this was what I was intending to do with all the details and then moving completely into abstraction. What they then said was, "do you understand what it's like when people come to Venice and make films about us, full of melodrama, and they put us in a museum. You're saying in a sense that this could be Sydney and you're saying that we are part of the world, of the contemporary world." It was very moving for me that they said this. I hadn't realised it, but I understood it immediately. The waring of Death in Venice.
KD: The multi-screen projection work between Sydney and Venice downstairs is rather framed by the woman's portrait at the entrance. There are two ways in which you could read this. One that, they are two separate pieces or two, that they have a relationship. Only the catalogue indicates directly that they are related to eachother. This framing seems to heighten the tension or the anxiety dilemma of the Deep Water.
LJ: When you make work about the everyday. Most artists I know seem to deal with the little bits and pieces of the everyday. But part of the everyday is full of deep emotion, if you're walking past a bus-stop as I did the other day and there's a young woman talking into her mobile with tears pouring down her face, lovers in the park, parents dealing with children throwing tantrums on the floor in the supermarket, funerals going by. People sitting in cars not talking to eachother. Everyday life is redolent with deep emotion and this is what I started to be really aware of. People tried to say they were separate pieces, but you can hear her voice when you are downstairs. If you move through fairly fast, you wouldn't notice this. If you hear her upstairs, she is, as the description in the voiceover says, in deep water.
KD: And the fragmentation and editing of the shot upon her face increases this tension. It's not a blank or vague look. I didn't initially hear the voiceover, partly because my attention was caught by the images downstairs and partly because there were too many people crowding into the pavilion. When I returned to listen, the scenario as a mini-narrative about downstairs became clearer.
LJ: I hoped that people when they were downstairs would stand in amongst her or would go into their own emotional spaces as well or avoid them - as there are all of those possibilities - but that nonetheless it is inescapably there.
KD: I think the figurative narrative as it is told by her is reinforced by the images downstairs. I wanted to ask a more complex question about immersive environments if video multi-screen projection can be described in this way. I just did an interview with Mary Kelly in which she suggested that most painters seem to want to escape into cinema, but you seem to be doing precisely the reverse here, by bringing out the painterly qualities of video, through the abstraction you've used.
LJ: What is really fabulous is, when I started to really play with this, is that you can take a highly representational image, a face, a bit of a wharf or whathaveyou and just go in closer and closer and it becomes abstraction. Which is really fantastic. I love working like that because you have shifted to a very different place.
KD: You have shifted to a stronger internal sense, focusing on what something is, an internal sense. Downstairs, there are 3 dominant images and you have 2 others working behind you and to the left and right. Are all the images are working on different sequences and timers?
LJ: What actually happens is, when you are on the wharf, the three main screens project what is happening from the wharf. In Sydney, there are boats coming in and out on either side. It was a five camera simultaneous shoot. In a sense the projections place you on the wharf as you watch the boats coming in and leaving. It's filmed in real time, the time it would take you to get on one of those boats and then it leaves. The, when you look back at the wharf, there is a cut and the cut is the yellow stripe on the vaporetto wharf and then you have one single view as it's difficult to have a view of every direction on the boat.
KD: And that is where the most abstract of the water sequences occurs?
LJ: Yes. That's also why I pull away from the relentlessness of this big three screen projection for a while. And also so people feel the travel and the moving, from one to the next. It goes for two vaporetto stops in real time and then you return to the wharf in Sydney. There are only two cuts in that material. I took nothing out of it, I didn't doctor the film in any way. It's really raw footage.
KD: I didn't realise it was so neatly timed. I really like the lip window in the other projection, it enhances the idea you are on a boat. Standing on the stairs watching the 3 main projections, you really feel the swaying of the water - as on a vaporetto.
LJ: I chose a wharf in Sydney that really moves, like the jetties here. So the boats are moving, the cameras on the wharf are moving. I thought, this is really mean, perhaps, but it increases the feeling you are really in something on the water. Someone rather cynically said to me, "when you're in Venice everything is moving and when you're in Sydney, nothing happens!" (laughs). It was an Australian who said that !
KD: The light across the water and the rushing feeling across the water in the most abstract sequences of the film is very hypnotic and powerful. In Demonstrations and Details in the sense that your focus is on the everyday. You manage to use the camera to focus the audience's attention and hold our attention as we pass our eyes over details everyday. This is something which I think is quite remarkable.
LJ: Do you ? That's great ! It's quite intuitive. I realise I tend to intellectualise the works a lot afterwards and tend to discover things in them. In that piece, I discovered the joy of working in detail. And yes, you are absolutely right this has some relation to Demonstrations and Details and that was closely related to the work I did on sexual selection in the From the Darwin Translation series. But this work Aqua Profunda is really going for it in terms of emotions.
KD: You could see the editing processes in Demonstrations and Details - although the interactive elements of it were not working when I was there at the beginning - and shift people's attention about time and detail in the three, four stories moving through the different video projections - maybe this is clearer because it is one single realisation.
LJ: That was a different kind of experiment. I did it again at Newlyn but I changed it a lot and had only two screens with the interactive material working full. There was a problem with the programming at the Ikon but we had a chance to develop it further. The conservatory atmosphere of the gallery suited it. It was great to see the depth of the piece. I want to return to this more complex interaction of stories, showing the work in a different way.
KD: The final question is about time. In this biennale setting, everyone's attention is about 15-30 seconds - very short - as they rush through trying to see everything but seeing only fragments of most videos. Do you think this environment is counter-productive to a decent showing or understanding of your work?
LJ: Yes. But a lot of people are staying which is very interesting. This is the basis on which all my practice exists, which is to provide a meditative space, rather than an andrenalised one. I'm saying, you can do it. A lot of people will, if they are interested. One of the things I did do was to try and provide within 5 minutes a sense of what the emotion or some of the sensation would be and, because I left it uncut, to really not try and adrenalise it. In a sense, the piece contains the same thing said differently, lots of different times to meet those audiences.
KD: The catalogue presents your work as a collection of major series, each taking 5-10 years, is this how you see your own work developing, starting on day 1, or is it only through looking back and someone else in a sense "archiving you"?
LJ: I started the Prediction series as a five year series. Then I doubled it and made it a 10 year series (1981-1991). I made an arbitrary decision when I came back from London to Australia in the 1970s to start a work that would take five years and then I doubled it. It is hard for any artist to go and do something else - economically. The other benefit that you get working on series is because you research at the start, and as the series develops, this accumulates. You don't have to start again each work.
KD: Didn't this method of working suit the content of the piece? Because it had clear limits and structures to it.
LJ: Yes, and at the time video was made on pneumatic and was twenty minutes long. And all the Prediction Pieces were 20 minutes long. Of course the (VHS) video explosion happened during this time but I stuck to the pneumatic format.
KD: Have now you extended this format from performance to video projection, in the sense that the piece lasts for a set number of minutes, in this case 30 minutes?
LJ: No, this piece was designed so that people could come and go at any time. But the Prediction Pieces started as fixed length 20 minutes performance pieces and moved into installation. In the UK, the only works people have seen are the sexual selection series: From the Darwin Translations (1994-1998). I made six pieces in that series about women's sexual fantasies, one of which was Spitfire 1 2 3 ('Video Positive', Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, 1997). I published a script version of Room with Finches (1994) in the magazine Coil (London) of woman speaking her sexual fantasies on a Freudian-type couch for 40 minutes. They get more explicit as she goes on....
Copyright © : n.paradoxa, July 2001
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 15, 2001
