Mary Lucier interviewed by The Brooklyn Rail
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/03/art/mary-lucier
Rail How did you manage to get your work to emerge out of all these incredible activities around you, in that period especially with the dominance of body art? Some critics saw Dawn Burn as the counter-response to the masochism of Vito Acconci or Chris Burden.
Lucier: I think that it came more out of my involvement with the composers who were working in live electronic music or musique concrète because it was more about phenomena. My interests were about taking time and making it spatial. It was not at all about the physical body, or my personal body, certainly, even though I liked so much of that work. Dawn Burn was followed by other burn pieces like Fire Writing and Untitled Display System where I burned the vidicon tube with lasers. That was about exploring the limits of the technology. I went from performance back to a kind of Minimalism: an investigation of the foundations of the medium by reducing the art form to its essential elements. Then things started to build up again eventually towards a more theatrical kind of narrative structure.
In retrospect, the work that really interested me was and still is about having a real eye and a strong sort of cerebral quality, as well as this thing about the sublime. It’s about being in the presence of simple but powerful phenomena.
Rail It’s true. Let’s shift to your synthesis of image sound. For instance, “Floodsongs” which I had seen at MoMA in 1999. Would you say that piece was one of the more complex in the interplay between image and sound or was there one before that?
Lucier: For some of the most ambitious sound tracks I’ve done, I have to credit Earl Howard, who I have worked with since 1983. We always try to construct as complex a music as we can. When it got to Floodsongs my whole idea about the way the sound ought to be in a piece like that was shifting. And instead of making a sound that would accompany an almost a narrative sequence of pictures, as in Noah’s Raven (1993), I felt that Floodsongs had to have a enveloping and immersive sound that the individual voices could play off, The voices are also embedded in that sound track. I had been working in that genre for a little while. I did a piece called House By the Water at the Spoleto USA Festival in 1997 using some speaking voices, and before that, Oblique House (Valdez) in 1993 and a piece called Last Rites (Positano) in 1995, where I used motion sensors to trigger as many as six processed voices.
Rail Your last solo show at Lennon Weinberg, included a very powerful piece, Migration 2000, a portrait of John Lado Keni, a Sudanese man who was born deaf and who used his own invented language to tell his story. I thought it was so effective that by portraying him in ¾ profile—less confrontational, and with the white official background—you were able to bring out a subtle yet very powerful image. To me, it’s probably your most expressive piece in the sense that you rarely have done that kind of work with a single person who also can prolong that amazing sustainable time and space. How did that all come about?
Lucier: I met John Lado Keni in Des Moines, Iowa where I was shooting a group of people who were, for the most part, refugees—many from Somalia and in his case the Sudan, as well as other places around the world. Most were brought there by Lutheran social services from the refugee camps, and one of the men who was teaching them English said to me ,‘Oh, I know this fantastic fellow named John Lado Keni who is the most amazing storyteller,’ and so I met John who was a completely compelling and charismatic character. He hardly knew any sign language and neither did we, but his whole way of storytelling was so expressive and coherent. His gestures were a kind of pantomime accompanied by these vocal sounds that he was unaware of. Needless to say, I thought that this could be very controversial but that it was an amazing opportunity to videotape this individual who was such a natural performer, with a particular disability that completely shapes the way he tells a story. So I made an appointment and communicated to him about the project and he was happy to participate.
Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings -Anne Troutman
(google book link):
http://books.google.com/books?id=v4OWo8r8IYsC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=inside+fear:+secret+places+and+hidden+spaces+in+dwellings&source=bl&ots=PmOvTVbMea&sig=aoShoTqQeba5WbjksnaLYu4LV80&hl=en&ei=inaATJGOBoP7lwf2_YD0Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=inside%20fear%3A%20secret%20places%20and%20hidden%20spaces%20in%20dwellings&f=false
so now I learn a new wa
