A Make Believe Conversation
Performance Artist Ron Ehmke and Filmmaker Lawrence Brose discuss the Dark Times, De Profundis and the Decay of Family Values
from Basta! v1n3 (Winter/Spring 1998)
Who: Lawrence Brose––film artist and film/public art curator at CEPA whose masterly use of found, manipulated and heavily-textured images anchor lavishly poetic meditations on theme, as in his current film De Profundis, which employs the prison letter of Oscar Wilde to launch an exploration of the marginalized identity. Ronald Ehmke––writer, editor (Consider the Alternatives: 20 Years of Contemporary Art at Hallwalls), performance artist and former performance curator at Hallwalls, whose long-awaited "triptych" of loosely related monologues on the subjects of art, death and human frailty––The Dark Times––came to fruition under the direction of Margaret Smith last fall.
What: "A make-believe interview." Launched from Brose's responses to questions originally posed by Elizabeth Licata for an upcoming Afterimage story on De Profundis, Ehmke wrote forward and backward at once, formulating new inquiries based on Brose's answers as well as new questions to the answers he had already received, which in turn prompted questions and answers formulated by Brose--both forward and backward--as well as new movement into unanticipated areas of inquiry caused by the interplay of old and new information, freshly juxtaposed and reconceived. "There is nothing new, nothing from a totally original place. All that we have are dead images and sounds. It is in the act of pulling these elements together and ripping them apart and out of original contexts––rejoining and recontextualizing––that we can create new things ..." (Lawrence Brose)
When: The collaboration took place over the course of several weeks in March, 1998
Where: in words, in theory, in textuality, in cyberspace, floating in vast seas of detached, fragmented images, texts and ideas ...
Why:"I'm intrigued by the idea [of a collaborative interview] because I don't really think our work has much in common, his being lush and painstaking and proudly 'difficult,' while I tend to favor the cheap and fast and proudly 'accessible' as a working style of my own. But it is true that we both choose to continue living in Buffalo and we both present lots of stuff out of town. And yep, we're both white male homos of a certain age so ..." (Ron Ehmke, responding to Basta!'s request for a 2-way exchange).
[BEGINS HERE, OR SOMEWHERE AROUND HERE:]
LB:
Ron, I'm not even sure if I should begin here but, as with this process of writing from something else, it does seem to be a beginning. So, concerning the arena of originality and working with other texts and with found sounds and images let me [say] that nothing is ever created from scratch. Most narratives start from a text or some other context. There is nothing new, nothing from a totally original place. All that we have are dead images and sounds. It is in the act of pulling these elements together and ripping them apart and out of original contexts --rejoining and recontextualizing -- that we can create new things.
RE:
Sure, like this make-believe (I really don't like that buzzword "virtual," although it does seem to fit here) conversation we're having in the pages of BASTA, stitched together from remarks of yours in an earlier interview with Elizabeth Licata, and my responses to those remarks, and your responses to my responses, and so on, all of which have been or will be retroactively rewritten. The end result will probably look like a single linear exchange, but nothing could be farther from the truth.
This little digital dialogue of ours is sort of like Natalie Cole's duet with her dead father, though I'm not sure which one of us is which. Richard Wicka and I made a videotape this way once--dropping more and more stuff into a pre-existing tape over a period of maybe two years, until very little of the source remained. It's also making me remember the process of constructing the book I edited for Hallwalls' 20th anniversary, which is a collage of archival material, transcribed interviews, new essays, fragments of radio talk shows, and a lot of other stuff that librarians like to call ephemera.
I love ephemera! When you get right down to it, I'm actually more interested in scraps and rough drafts than I am in finished masterpieces. Ticket stubs, grocery lists, shooting scripts, journals, newspaper clippings, all of that; it's just so exciting and tactile; there's this slightly forbidden air of voyeurism to the act of rooting through other people's closets and trashcans. I'm not really that big a fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels, but I absolutely love his book "The Crack-Up," which is a collection of outtakes, stray bits and pieces not originally intended for publication.
I've noticed you use ephemeral material quite extensively in "De Profundis," particularly home movies.
LB:
Well Ron being a garbage picker is one thing but calling it "voyeurism" is quite another. Actually though that is what I like most about your performance work, you are able to maintain a line through all of the various scraps of "found" materials and somehow conecte them to a larger idea. And then you even make your own ideas seem like discoveries. In "De Profundis" I really tried to work with all materials as if they were "found". The interviews, the NPR stuff, home movies, early porn, and Wilde's language - all pieces of culture that I could tease other meanings and readings out of. To release them from their original moorings and re-present them. Wilde was imprisoned in the year of the birth of cinema so I wanted to address cinema in its infancy and the earliest images of cinema are home movies. I have also found this to be true of early gay erotica and muscle boy film like the Athletic Models Guild films. I wanted to tease out other readings of these home movie images of these men and boys on a boat -- the boat acting as a container just as the framing is a container and as language is also. I also wanted to take something private (home movies and porn) and make it public -continuing the friction between those two arenas. Think about it, what is "coming out" but an act of revealing, to exhibit, to make public. This is also the impulse of cinema - it desires a public arena.
RE:
So in a sense, taking someone else's private ephemera and making it public--recontextualizing it -- is a form of outing. Ahhhhh. In lots of my monologues I incorporate personal letters, journal entries, stuff like that, because I like what happens when you take something written under fairly intimate circumstances and then present it to an audience of strangers. When you get right down to it, it's a violation of trust (albeit a fairly benign one, sometimes), and trust is such a crucial element in the relationship between an artist, his or her subject, and the audience. I like to find out what happens when you tamper with that.
But back to this business of pulling things together and ripping them apart: when I worked on the Hallwalls book, it dawned on me what a wonderful tool the computer is for a person who writes and thinks as haphazardly as I do. I know it's terribly late in the day to be having this kind of insight, but back in1982 when everybody else was raving about how their Macintoshes had changed their lives, I wasn't having any of that nonsense. I liked the hands-on aspect of literally cutting and pasting little scraps of paper together to make an essay or a story. I've always been envious of you filmmakers, with your little scraps of celluloid, and sound engineers, whether they're actually splicing loops of tape together or doing it digitally. In fact, let's paste a bit of your talking about your own technique right here:
LB:
Let me respond first to the idea of cutting and pasting which in new media terms is "non-linear editing" - which is what film has always been. As you said filmmakers cut and paste. Actually in a strange way the electronic experience (video) is what led me to this new working style in "De Profundis", of working directly on the material of the film. I created the "IMUSICIRCUS", the John Cage piece with 5 one hour videos (and presented with several musicians and performers) at the Experimental Television Center which was really exciting, especially because of the speed of working. When I finished I really wanted to get my hands on film again. So I went right to work on the emulsion.
Up until this film ["De Profundis"] I achieved all of my "alterations" of the image through driving the film stock and optics beyond their conventional uses. With this film I am working directly on the material of the film itself- its skin - the emulsion. What I want to do is to address the image, transcribe it to a different place and then using heavy chemical interventions contaminate the material. It is like the piss paintings of Warhol (I actually used a similar process in this film).
RE:
All of what you're talking about there has a parallel for me, but I didn't really realize how to acheive it with words until I started receiving material for the Hallwalls book via e-mail and floppy disc, and I watched the bits and bytes of text and image move from somone else's computer to mine, to the graphic designer's, to the printer's, undergoing various manipulations along the way. For the first time it dawned on me just how malleable and palpable language has become in the digital age. (I still wouldn't advise pissing on the keyboard, though.) I'm constantly lifting passages, relocating them, rewording them, which now feels as familiar to me as when I had my scissors and tape at hand. I've always thought of language--on the printed page, I mean--as a physical entity, with weight and texture and form, and now I have a tool which allows me to move the stuff around.
Around the same time that I was piecing the book together, I changed my focus as a performer from one-night-only extravaganzas (and collaborating with Richard on very quick-and-dirty tapes, one a week) to much more meticulously constructed shows involving months of rehearsal and refinement. My greatest joy as a writer comes from being able to revise and rework a text, to find exactly the right way to express something. I love fine tuning more than anything else. What I'm trying to get at here is an analogy between the collage aspect of your films, which is literally right on the surface, and my writing, where the reassembly is sometimes less visible to the naked eye.
LB:
You started this discussion saying how you prefer scraps and rough drafts to "finished masterpieces" but as I always suspected you do really work your stuff. I think that its always remarkable to achieve that feelin of spontaneity when you're reworking the material. I can never seem to get to that (though this film comes a little closer to it) feeling of looseness. I work everything, every shot every frame. But it might also be because of my working method which is on a table with rewinds and a splicer. I count frames.
RE:
Well, as far as spontaneity, I have to say that one of the things I like most about "De Profundis" is the sensation I had while watching it of constant little surprises, particularly on the soundtrack: silence, then multitracked voices, then music. (I may not have the sequence down, but you know what I mean.) I love that feeling of not being sure what's going to happen next. So you may see your task as frame-counting, but I don't think the end result is overly mathematical at all.
*******
RE:
Let's talk about content for a moment. So many of your films are haunted by death, which has been a recurring subject in my performances for the last several years. Obviously AIDS is a catalyst for that, but I think we're both striving to look beyond the health crisis at hand to larger issues of mortality.
LB:
You're right of course with much of my work before this film beginning with "An Individual Desires Solution" which is a film about my boyfriend at the time who was dying from AIDS. That film was followed by "Hyacinth Fire" which is an epic film poem and meditation on the body in the AIDS pandemic. Then of course there are the other death works like "Chamnan" - inspired by my brother's death and then the portrait of Virgil Thomson just prior to his death, and "War Songs" which deal with the seduction of war and death and power.
Now with "De Profundis" there are many things at play here. There is direct refrences to AIDS but also to survival (many of the people connected with the film are HIV positive). I am also addressing the idea of fragmentation. Laura U. Marks, in a recently published article in Cinemas titled "Loving a Disappearing Image" raises an issue dealing with identification with a cinematic image which is always disappearing from our view. She asks "To have an aging body, as we all do, raises the question of why we are compelled to identify with images of wholeness... what is it like to identify with an image that is disintegrating?" And later postulates that the primary identification may be an identification with dispersion, with the loss of unified selfhood. I think that this issue is another key to deciphering "De Profundis." I have created a cinema that presents a partial image, that continues to disperse, that resists a wholeness and yet at times I allow a shot to continue uninterrupted to wrench the viewer back into a place that once again breaks apart.
When we think of Oscar Wilde and the differences between his aphorisms and the prison letter we get to certain issues of how ideas of frivolity and more serious writings get misread. I think that Wilde was at his best as a social critic. With the aphorisms he really works the paradoxical and the inverted expectation. That is why I created the sound loops of them to repeat and almost desensitize the humorous to focus on the content. The prison letter is often considered his most "mature" work because it supports the idea of serious self-inspection as a higher goal. When in Wilde's case it doesn't travel beyond romantic existentialism. Which leads me to the idea of art as artifice.
RE:
Oddly enough, I tend to think about what I guess is the opposite: art as a part of nature. A friend of mine who's a bit older than me once said that she couldn't identify with the kind of writing I do because I make so many references to stuff I see on tv, in movies, hear in pop songs, read in books or magazines--which for her constitutes "pop culture," but for me it's just part of the landscape. As I look up from the keyboard right now I see two houseplants, a pair of speakers, and a tv. (And I'm not even at my own home!) That's my environment--that's the American landscape, at this point. It doesn't feel artificial to me at all, it feels very real. And, yeah, sure, I suppose this shows just how far gone I am, this willingness to actively participate in the closing of the American mind, the decline of Western civilization, the decay of family values, and all that.
LB:
I love the idea of the decay of family values. What values?
RE:
And whose family?
LB:
Perhaps when we get beyond this myth of the nuclear family being an ideal configuration we can begin to see other options. Those options are created by folks "outside" and that is where there is much power (individual not collective). This, in a way, brings me back to the film "De Profundis."
In the film I was interested in the trajectory of Wilde's aesthetics and philosophy before he was imprisoned and in a way drew a line to today 100 years later. The debate between and essentialised gay identity and a socially constructed fluid identity has been going on since Wilde and Andre Gide began it in earnest at the end of the last century. I have found the recent debates concerning the more conservative elements of the gay community and the more radicalized ideas of the queer theory evidenced in my film and I come down on the side of the queer theory advocates. I don't think that it is particularly useful to link your sexual desires into a defining principal of your identity. It doesn't necessarily liberate you and it functions to uphold a containment force that is easy to police (both by outside forces and even within the "gay Community"). Wilde could not have been imprisoned for homosexual acts if it had not been defined - named. And the third part of the film "De Profundis" questions the framing of a singular voice in the 1990's gay movement and thereby shattering an ideological framework of normalization, piercing the skin of a homogenous unified voice. The entire film is about the act of naming, defining and ideas of containment (of masculinity, sexuality, and identity).
****
RE:
How about a word or two on working with other people's text...
LB:
I began to read [Wilde's prison] letter and highlight sections that I thought would capture some of the spirit and language of the letter. I kept thinking about Wilde and the political and philosophical/ cultural critique aspects of Wilde's work. This questioning led me to read all of the biographies of Wilde (at that time there were approximately 7 or 8). I was left unsatisfied. The bio's were more about the prejudices, politics , and vanities of each of the authors and were more anecdotal than serious explorations of Wilde's writings. As you know, Wilde is often portrayed as insincere - a surface personality, a Liberaci, a dandy with no depth and I saw a social critic who understood that the masks that we wear when removed reveal yet another mask another constructed self. I saw a connection with Bakhtinian ideas of the carnivalesque and a subversive quality at work/play. Yet what I could not find was a real analysis of Wilde's writings in relations to these ideas and to his aesthetics. Mark Betz (Curator of Film at the Eastman House) gave me a book that changed all of that and helped me begin a serious undertaking of Wilde and his language. The book is "Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault" by Jonathan Dollimore.
RE:
Reading about your approach to Wilde, I think about something I set out to do in "The Dark Times." Each of the three parts of the monologue series is linked (pretty loosely) to a particular writer: first Brecht, then Frank O'Hara ... and then for some reason I went back to Brecht again in Part Three. (Guess my frame of reference is pretty limited after all.) There are two dimensions to these guys that I wanted to introduce in my own work. The first is a meditative quality, an impulse to reflect on the big, unresolvable questions of mortality. The second thing that appeals to me about both of them is much more down to earth: the practicality of being a working artist, writing poetry during your lunch hour from your day job, hiring yourself out as a hack in Hollywood. Their presence in my monologues is so subtle it's probably subliminal, but hopefully it's there.
LB:
Here we are again with the issue of influences, nothing being created from scratch, dare I quote Wilde? "There is no such thing as a good influence, all influence is immoral (from a scientific point of view)" now I guess we could talk about morality and the queer community and issues of sex and identity.
While researching and working on the film it became clear that there is a similar debate currently underway within the gay/queer studies world - the split between the Depth Model idea of identity (that your sexuality or what the sex of your object choice is determines your identity) versus the queer idea that resists linking identity with the practice of sex. I think one of the arenas that Wilde's philosophy engages, within this debate, is one which acknowledges gender as an involuntary performance and sexual identity as a constricting concept. He understood and exploited the artifice of identities and social positions.
It is the idea of the artificial nature of wealth, privilege, and class that Wilde used in his writings to lampoon high society of Victorian England. In fact I believe that Wilde was imprisoned not for buggering boys but for freely crossing class lines with rent boys and lower class faeries and not upholding certain codes of the upper class which he was but an invited visitor (he was an outsider by virtue of being Irish).
The film became an exploration of boundaries, identities, and the process/act of naming. Wilde lived in a time that was obsessed with the categorization, cataloging, and the taxonomy of everything. It was an era that invented Homosexuality - by naming it. Before homosexuality was invented as a category (and therefore by implication gave birth to heterosexuality) a person's identity was not associated with a sexual act, in fact before this naming people were much more free to explore their various sexual desires than they are today.
Part II
****
RE:
I'm struck by something you wrote in an off-the-record note to Elizabeth, which I'd like to yank out of its original context, because it reminds me of something else I wanted to bring up:
LB:
I don't want to let anyone off the hook. Just like the film they [readers] are going to have to work a little and not just sit back and be entertained. The entertainment is in the work.
RE:
Now, here's a big difference between the two of us, or at least what looks like a difference on the surface: I don't really see anything wrong with entertaining people! In fact, I'm tempted to say that entertainment is a crucial element of politically useful art, or at least the kind of art that I want to devote my time to. I certainly don't equate laughter/visual pleasure/enjoyment with mindlessness, or being accessible with being facile.
I'm absolutely convinced that culture and class are inextricably linked --that the language we use, the references we employ, the assumptions we take for granted, are all tied to educational background, which in turn is tied to economics. While I'm not presuming that the work I make speaks to everyone, I don't want to intentionally shut anyone out, either.
At the same time, I like your phrase, "The entertainment is in the work," very much. There is an immense joy to be found in working through the layers and folds of a piece of music (whether it's a fugue or a 3-minute pop single) or a visual image (whether it's a Basquiat or a billboard) or what have you. I fear I'm coming across as some sort of Champion of the Lowest Common Denominator here, when in reality what excites me most is density, complexity, mystery. That which resists the two-sentence paraphrase....
LB:
This is good. What we are seeing now are all kinds of crossovers, influences in contemporary work. DJ Spooky references Gertrude Stein, Deleuze and Guattari, Marshall Mcluhan, Susan Sontag, Artaud, and Toni Morrison (among others) and appropriates music of Morton Feldman, Nancarrow, and jazz performers - and calls himself a conceptual artist.
RE:
The thing for me about DJ Spooky is: I like some of the music he produces, but the texts of his I've read are impenetrable. I don't think most of his references really illuminate anything--nonetheless, I like the idea that he makes them. His earlier writing, mostly music reviews as Paul Miller, was usually pretty clear and readable. By the way, I understand he's signed to Geffen now; God only knows what either party was thinking. I'm sure it's the old familiar trade-off, in theory: he gives them artistic credibility, they offer him a larger audience. We'll see what happens.
LB:
All art is artifice. There is good and bad art (not high and low) and you work the medium you choose. You choose the arena of Stand-Up/Performance/Readings and use humor in its dual capacity to reel people in, get them comfortable, and then spring it on them when they least expect it - that is your art.
In the world of film I have always created work that is a kind of immersion experience. Pushing the possibilities of the light gathering devices (Lens/Camera/Filmstock) and layering a fairly lush visual and aural experience. This experience being open to most anyone who chooses (my two wonderful aunts came to a screening of the "Films for Music for Film" and they both said that they "had no idea of what they just saw but the experience was absolutely wonderful").
Now with "De Profundis" I am interested in a different type of investment, still an immersion experience but one that references things that people are familiar with (like home movies) and other cultural artifacts (detritus?) like porn and sounds that people hear on the radio and even treating the images I shot as "found" to be recycled. All of this to engage in ideas of sexual identity, concepts of gender, the idea of a "gay community"and the fascicism of that concept , the language of defining spaces, truth, perception, self, and of course Oscar Wilde. I also wanted to create something unique with images that the viewer would retain, and something that would reveal more on repeated viewings.
But Ron please, your work is not for everyone, you are a university educated writer. When you "dip" into "low culture" you might even just be a tourist.
RE:
Hey, them's fightin' words! While I wrote earlier that education plays a factor in one's response to art, I wouldn't leap to the conclusion that a given work can't be "for everyone" simply because its maker has a college degree. (On the other hand, come to think of it, I'm not at all convinced that_any_ text/painting/song /film speaks equally clearly to everyone who encounters it.)
In any case, I never, ever think of what I'm doing as "dipping" into anything "low," some territory which would presumably be beneath me. It's not slumming, it's more a case, as I see it, of drawing on every resource I have at hand. And of making connections between things people tend to see as unrelated: that's the big challenge.
LB:
But there are areas that many people share in the popular culture realm, especially with TV. And I am influenced also, in fact I thought that "De Profundis" was going to be like a long MTV piece. Some of the effects I use you see on music videos and many I've developed (which if I was enterprising could be patented and sold). I do find my film to be entertaining, humorous (in an ironic kind of way) and engaging. And I do believe that good art asks the viewer to engage. It is a learned process and its not for everyone. But I am not making work with the intention of excluding anyone, in fact what we need are more venues for what we do and to present the work to a variety of people.
Also, this film has respect for the viewer though it is a difficult work there is much to be mined here and like I said "the entertainment is in the work" both in the making of it (for me) and in decifering the layers (for the viewer).
And you expect the same thing from your audience. You at least expect that people understand and even share the fragments (like what an everyday object like a shopping list might reveal and those pieces reveal much about you which is the risks you take in your work).
*****
[SOME STRAY BITS]
RE:
....Y'know, what occurs to me far more often than "the entertainment is in the work" is the awareness that entertainment (okay, cultural activity in general) IS work. It seems like I can never escape that; I'm always thinking about the amount of labor (and money, too) that goes into a performance or a film or an album or whatever.
LB:
Yes it is immense work and dedication and when it's good you get a certain satisfaction from that work and when it fails hopefully we learn. Perhaps because I'm writing this late at night and not feeling very "gay" (but I do have a drink in my hand and a cigarette burning) I feel the urge to quote Bette Davis ..."hard work is its own reward".
RE:
Both of us have spent large chunks of our lives working at art organizations to pay the rent. Well, not just for that reason, but it's an important factor. And I'm sure you've gone through the same thought process that I have as a result of that job choice, the one that everyone goes through, where you start questioning what you're doing there, helping other people get their art made and shown instead of devoting your attention to your own art.
LB:
My job experiences are somewhat different (having owned a business for many years restoring pianos and then closing that, for many reasons), now I'm more focused on my art than ever and I actually enjoy working at CEPA Gallery and working with artists, collaborating on projects, raising money to make it all happen, which I find exhilarating. It is a place where my ideas have currency and it affords me enough flexibility to create my work and tour with my films.
RE:
One thing I've learned over the years, both as a maker and an observer of art, is that it's a good idea to provide the audience with a certain base level of comfort if you want to get them to look at or think about uncomfortable subjects. I find myself frequently starting a show with something deliberately odd, and then acknowledging the oddness of it, usually with a joke.
LB:
I agree. I suppose that is why I travel with my film and present it to the audience. I really want the audience to get it or at least have some idea of what they are about to experience and offer some clues without over determining the experience for them.
RE:
Speaking of overdetermining an experience, our imaginary chat here has taken up 15 or 20 pages by now, hasn't it? To say nothing of two weeks of writing and rewriting. While this isn't really the end (because we'll both be revising everything several more times), I propose we make this conversation look like it's over, perhaps with some sort of pleasantry, like:
Well, this certainly has been a pleasure. And then you say:
LB:
The pleasure is all mine.
[ENDS HERE, OR SOMEWHERE AROUND HERE]