Interview: Simon Wallis with Dryden Goodwin - August 1998

Published in Transcript - Volume 03 Issue 03 Spring 1999

ISSN 1356-7624

I want to start off by asking you about your time at art college. I know you spent some time in the life studio at the Slade and that you still continue to draw - how has this fed into your work with video?

When I started at the Slade I was interested in spending a concentrated amount of time with the figure and poses often lasted for weeks on end. But after a while I became dissatisfied with the artificial nature of the whole set up .......people with plumb lines holding up pencils and squinting at the model. So I began to make drawings away from the life room, drawing people on tubes, trains and in parks, but then I had an opportunity to do some drawings in an old people's home, drawing the residents and the space. I found this a very engaging experience, becoming aware of the structures of the environment, how it worked, how it looked, the people in it, the events that occurred and its distinctive mood and atmosphere. The situation demanded a new awareness on my part - away from the safety of the life room the role of observation and the quality of my involvement changed. With the element of unpredictability my senses needed to become more receptive, able to adjust and respond to quite harrowing events. I think it's relevant that my interest in the history of observation at the Slade, particularity through the Coldstream tradition, gave me a simultaneous distance from the subject which was combined with my desire to engage and be receptive on quite an emotional level with the particular energies of the situations in which I was working.

So it was a concern with context that made you want to escape the artificiality of the life room and move out into more public spaces?

Yes, I wanted a situation where the idea of time and duration wasn't imposed by the length of a pose. I started to tune into the particular duration of activities in the old people's home as practical and emotional events unfolded around me.

What do you think this does to the quality of your engagement when you know you are not able to exercise control as you could in a life room?

With the work I make there seem to be two main ways of developing structures. One is when I set out with a very distinctive idea for a structure, maybe single frames or snatching pockets of time, so the subtleties and meaning occur through the repetition of a certain structure. The other way is by going to a particular environment, such as an airport or hospital, and it's the experience and what I find which generate the structures in a much more organic process, rather than something being imposed at the outset.

So how did you move out from the processes of drawing into work with video?

I started making drawings and photographs at Heathrow airport. What became apparent were the temporal qualities there and how things changed and altered over time. I was trying to find ways to describe and capture this durational quality to reveal the nature of what I found and experienced. I started to bring a tape recorder and Super 8 camera to the airport and began to think about sequences and organising images through time. At this stage the two dimensional work and time based work had begun to inform one another more directly, the work I was making in different media all became part of the same investigation.

Are the drawings ongoing as you are working with film?

Yes, in fact in the latest group of work which I showed in London at Berry House at the SOLO X 9: Artists in Clerkenwell show, I've combined drawing and video in one piece called Suspended Animation - 26 Drawings of the some Photograph. The title refers to the number of drawings I made of a photograph of myself looking up into the sky. These were put onto video and looped in different orders. The sense of agitated movement was caused by the inevitable differences that occurred between each drawing as I tried to repeat the moment. Another piece I showed was a one hundred page flick book, hand drawn in pencil and suspended in the space on a wire. Each page contained a different aeroplane drawn from memory, caught in close proximity to taking off or landing. 1 liked the tact that visitors to the gallery could pick the flick book up and use it, wearing away the fragile drawing over time.

It's interesting to think about temporal qualities inherent in the drawing process. I can think of drawings by Matisse where the quality of the line is so beautifully wrought one gets a very clear sense of a decision making process and the speed of a certain gesture. Then there is Giacometti, who I am sure is very relevant to a Slade training as his drawings create a palimpsest of various states of minds and qualities in one particular image - it's here one gets a sense of time captured in the drawing process - it's something about the immediacy of the activity.

Its to do with the directness of having a piece of paper and a pen when you're on the move, maybe just travelling about and at any point you can start to draw. There can be a pleasing tension and immediacy about it, maybe you begin a drawing of someone on the train who has an intriguing face, but of course they might move or get off at any moment.

I'm a great believer in keeping a note book with me at all times so if something does come to me I can capture the power of a idea striking for the first time. That seems to me to be something to hold onto - that first moment of inspiration which is something that is built up to. It's interesting to see what mediums we might decide to record these moments with.

This relates to photography or having a video camera, they can be very instantaneous tools. But there is something very particular about the way you connect with what you're drawing. It's to do with the act of looking, because of the time it takes to construct a likeness or record something very particular about what, or who, is on front of you. Drawings almost become a record of an inability to hold a moment, this is why I often use repetition in my drawings, making many attempts to hold a moment.

There is something of the train spotters' morbid mentality to some of your work particularly in One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Six (1996) a 16mm film loop installation consisting of 1996 frames, each frame containing a different car photographed from a bridge overlooking a motor way, and the latest film loop One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Eight (1998) containing 1998 aeroplane fuselages caught as they take off and come into land. You seem to want to order and grasp these fleeting and subtly interchangeable vehicles - there seems to be a degree of futility and desperation over this, the impulse to catalogue and to grasp something so ineffable, why else do we make fun of train spotters and think of them as sad? However the works are oddly compelling. What were your concerns in making these pieces?

Trainspotters have caught a bug for recording and knowing the imperceptible details that are usually missed. This degree of focus is intriguing. I am really interested in capitalising on the material nature of each medium I am working in. I want to key into the nature of the desire to make a drawing or to record something with film. For example, I want to capitalise on the fact that film is made up of separate frames.

That's interesting because with the car film loop you physically show the film on a light box alongside the projected work and with the aeroplane piece the way it's presented is very much to do with the presence of this huge film loop in the space. You're being a very conscientious modernist in foregrounding the nature of your materials as integral to its presentation. The quality of the film doesn't become simply transparent leaving the viewer to be sucked into a dream world as there is obviously something very physical going on too. Perhaps this a consequence of drawing and wanting to deal with the materiality of a medium!

With the film loop piece you are aware all the time of how the images are being generated. It works on a number of levels: you can examine each frame, you are aware of how it's produced, but then there is a tension between the image on the film itself and the projected image, which has movement and tirne. There is also the shift in scale between a minute image on the film and the large projected image that I particularly liked in the plane piece. By using repetition I was compressing the idea of potential danger and the physical excitement of capturing these giant vehicles taking off and coming into land. Some of the situations I am drawn to have overtones of transporting, a well known phenomenon that could appear mundane. But when one actually experiences all these planes screeching overhead there is this sensory thrill, there is vibration and visually are so many of these vehicles, both cars and planes, they bombard the viewer on an epic scale.

I think: the reason people allow the experience of these things to be downgraded, in terms of their perception of them, is because of the 'overload factor' in what is happening. It's incredible what we have deal with on a day to day basis with the assaults our senses undergo, there is so much potential for being traumatised that this results in our blotting things out and categorising them as mundane. I am interested in the notion of you making works that recover what is very particular and extraordinary about these phenomena.

It's interesting making these collections. Although the final piece is a bombardment of sorts, there has been a filtering and focusing on this one event. It is my intention that these pieces distil, compress and intensify the particular dynamic of this event.

This moves us onto to the Kettle's Yard commission About (1998) that shifts away from a singular focus on something. It's not simply that it was presented on three screens, but there seemed to be so much information in the footage, it was very rich and complex as a piece. What were the particular problems and durational qualities that came through in this work?

I wanted to isolate something that is quite ordinary, so it becomes like an artefact or a curiosity. Particularly when filming people there is an innate curiosity in capturing them on film. About takes these encounters with others and allows the viewer to be able to really examine them through the shift between myself as the viewer and the audience in relation to those viewed. the piece allows us a certain amount of voyeuristic pleasure without the tensions that I had in making the piece. The camera acts as a form of shield from those I was filming - I could distance myself even when I was in quite close proximity, for instance when I was filming on the escalator. It was almost as if I was watching a film through the viewfinder as I was shooting and that people were looking at the camera and not at me.

Absolutely, the viewer empathises with your view entirely, it's shot as if it were our eye looking at these people, this implicates the viewer in the piece and that's one of the crucial things in making its reception very active for an audience. We are pulled into a relationship with the people you have filmed, although we come to the work with our own agendas and experience. There is so much information on each screen. About seems capable of many readings - it's interesting to see where the spaces for empathy occur and where they begin to break down.

I think setting up a structure, or setting out to find a structure through an experience, allows for a balance between a disciplined focus and a potential for a mass of information to be interpreted in many different ways without being too open and flaccid.

The structure is the crucial thing here, there must be parameters in which these possibilities for interpretation and openness can function. If these parameters start to break down then either making work becomes impossible or you end up with something that is unreadable for others.

There is a balance between imposing and presenting, so you invite the viewer in without being too didactic. But one also needs to present an attitude and point of view in the work, there must be a balance. You always have to consider the relationship to the viewer as a fundamental thing, to really see what it is you have and what will happen with presenting the work in a particular structure and how this will engage someone.

Composing and performing your own soundtracks to the videos has interesting parallels with the visual construction of the work. I've always been fascinated by the relationship between moving image and music and how they work in combination - one can think of truly great and emotive combinations such as Bernard Herrmann, who worked with Orson Welles, Hitchcock and Scorsese, or Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone, or John Carpenter playing the role of both film maker and composer. Even John Williams' score to a film like Close Encounters seems to take the experience into realms far beyond its populist remit. Music and image both conform to some type of internal structure that has an emotive, ordered ebb and flow that nevertheless allows room for improvisation. What do you think about the relationship between soundtrack and image, and are the processes of improvisation and leitmotiv relevant to you in terms of your work?

Well, the way I handle the visual images has one structure and the way I handle sound and music has another. They are separate but once they come together they form a third thing. There is an implied relationship between sound and image. The soundtrack in About has four parts and each has a distinctive mood to it and that is what lead me to the completion of the pieces, by keeping these distinctive moods intact. One sequence of music is disturbing, one melancholic or almost sentimental, another playful and quite throwaway and the final piece is heroic or adventurous. 1 am interested in how these moods can effect the visual encounters. What's interesting is editing in relation to sound and how sound punctuates visual information - how the emphasis shifts depending on different synch points.

That puts me in mind of the leitmotiv used during the shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho which seems to lodge the scene so firmly in the memory. This really highlights how infected film is by a soundtrack, how powerful it can be in directing our reading of a given situation. About really draws attention to the way the music you've composed, and sounds you've recorded, direct the viewer's reading. It's slightly disconcerting to go back to a particular visual sequence from About and find it overlaid with a different sequence of music - it completely throws you having the pattern shifting in that way and highlighting the effect of the soundtrack.

Yes, the whole mood can be changed by this.

The music is a direct way to manipulate people's emotions.

Yes, the film loop works are stripped right down with no soundtrack just to see what would happen. But sound can be used as a prop to soup up the emotions in quite a crass way so I use the loop pieces as a kind of check on the way I am using sound. But I am playing with the manipulative emotional responses to soundtracks and I want to capitalise on the nature of film music - its scale and range.

The forms of transport you filmed About from: a night bus, a barge, on an escalator and a train all offer a shielding from what you are filming. Even its darker moments appeared to promise excitement without risk because we empathise with being protected and slightly removed when on a night bus, train or barge - the sense of movement seems to insulate us from directly engaging in the world - I think that is the thrill of travel with its transitory quality temporarily divesting us of responsibility. The viewer experiences this insulation twice over, in empathising with your point of view, and in looking at a screen. It allows the audience the space to look intrusively into these people's faces and at their gestures.

Yes, even the barge or escalator has a hit and run quality to it. I was only with these people for a very short duration and you know you are going to move on - so even if they react badly to being filmed you can make a run for it! There is that sense of risk but it's diminished by being on the move and the camera provides an explanation for being intrusive, it allows me to be simply mistaken for a tourist.

About seemed to me to be a very romantic, humanist account of the city. What kind of relationship do you feel About created between the viewer, the city and its inhabitants?

I think there is a sense in which we are more than curious about strangers we encounter in the city, there is a fascination with an imagined what if factor in relation to others. But there is also a fascination with imagining a whole life and world that they might be part of within the way they look. People act as triggers to the imagination. There is some desire to make contact but having a camera in front of your face complicates things, it pre-empts a response.

I think the issue about context is relevant here as the places you choose to film people are immediately emotive with a lot of coming and going. As in the airport, you have also used the environment of the hospital with Ospedale (1997) and encounters you present in About are inherently full of possibilities for other lives with their own agendas that we can only imagine. There is a romanticism in our travelling from place to place that seems to open up possibilities that we want to flesh out as viewers.

The reason for all these possibilities is because you are removed from your usual context when you're in transit, there is a diminishing of your hold on things. Movement adds an intensity to the quality of these relationships as they are so brief and snatched.

There is almost a moral element to this in examining the quality of your treatment of complete strangers and what position or judgements you make about them. Our reactions to strangers seem to reveal a lot about ourselves - the prejudices or stereotypes we have about people, or what we find attractive in someone. These things become highlighted in About as you gather these experiences in the day-to-day world and allow the viewer to reflect on his or her interest in strangers. I think it's fascinating that there has been a resurgent interest in the quality of everyday life with contemporary artists examining and trying to make what we undergo each day recoverable as significant and often extraordinary experience. This is a kind of overcoming of our habitual numbness to what we think of as familiar. I think this has something to do with realigning art practice to the basic truth of our sensate experience in the world. What do you feel about the phenomenological and documentary aspect of much contemporary work done in film, video and photography?

Well I am interested in harnessing something that is in existence and orchestrating that with other elements to achieve something that extends our perception of reality. What I am doing has a high level of intervention in the way I manipulate the material using different methods of filming, ways of editing and use of sound and music. Ospedale a film I made while spending a year in Italy at Fabrica, an arts and communication research centre funded by Benetton, put me into a far closer proximity with individuals in the environment than I had experienced before. I spoke directly to the doctors, patients and visitors and fragmented these conversations in the final piece to intensify the meaning and make it more pointed by setting them within a soundtrack. Once I had all the material distancing myself from what I had was so difficult as the experience had been very emotive. In the morning I would be in the premature baby unit with babies half the size of my hand and then I might find myself in the mortuary in the afternoon. These experiences were so strong I couldn't just shoot away with a preconceived idea, so it became quite difficult to see the visual material I had gathered for what it was, because it was coloured by my emotional response.

So what you add to this emotive experience of intervening in the real world with camera is the structure through the editing process. Would you say that's right, is that what you bring to real life events in your work?

With both Heathrow and Ospedale the environments were contained and I shot the work over three months so what was contained in the piece was what I found in that time. I collected material and it became important to add lines of thought orchestrating things to give them some sense of engagement. I mean, if you want to express something about someone waiting for hours in a corridor in the context of a whole sequence of interlocking episodes you have to find a way of bringing it out through sound and the rhythm of editing. What was interesting was this rhythm became very eclectic with many influences rather than the overall treatment that is present in car and aeroplane loop.

Yes, some very different qualities start to emerge in your treatment of the work in Ospedale and About depending on what kind of relationships you are entering into with your subject matter. I am wondering if you are beginning to be able to predict what sort of structure will emerge in the work from certain situations?

Of course I am starting to make connections between the different works I've produced. I am mixing up the pivotal points from each piece and interested in fusing together qualities to develop a language and new structures. The new commission I am working on Within for the Pandemonium festival couldn't have happened without the experience of producing About. What I am doing there is taking fewer encounters with people, again on different modes of transport, but the frames within the pockets of time I've caught won't just pass in real time, they will be examined and repeated and certain frames looked at more closely. By releasing the element of time and making it more elastic it will be possible to through into question, the nature of these encounters in a different way. I might reveal the middle of a particular encounter first so there is a shifting and changing nature to the relationship, playing with expectations and assumptions about what comes before and what might follow. I want to be aware of the frames I have caught and to edit them in a non-linear way exploiting these temporal possibilities.

It sounds like the editing process Orson Welles used in Citizen Kane to tell a story about one individual from multiple viewpoints and from different moments in time. Has expanding onto three screens with About opened up new things for you?

Yes, I've been thinking about the space the viewer occupies away from a single screen piece. I want to activate the space the viewer is in.

To break down passivity?

Totally. But all the discoveries I've made I would like to work in a single screen piece. To move between forms for presenting work with a new attitude. I want to keep options open.

Are there particular influences you have been engaged by?

I am interested in the paintings of Edward Hopper with their cinematic quality, the wide screen feel of many of the paintings and the sense of being removed and isolated. Also his picking out small areas of the canvas to sensitise the viewer maybe with a figure within a window with the light on that draws the imagination into that space. I like the longing and isolation of his works.

Yes, he's very modern in dealing with the way space inflects on us emotionally and how we occupy it. The works sum up the tension between viewer and voyeur, documentary reporting and something more melancholically poetic. They are emotionally complex.

Also, the way they are painted is quite awkward and it gives the paintings an emotional intensity and thoughtfulness that isn't in any way easily arrived at.

In terms of other influences, I did an Erasmus exchange in Germany while at the Slade and spent three months not making work which was a privilege. I came into contact with the film class in Frankfurt run by Peter Kulbelka, and the American short film maker Ernie Gere Both worked a lot with the material nature of film. I am impressed by epic films that combine soundtracks with vastness of image and set shots. But my experience in Germany gave me a chance to think about producing film on a small screen with limited budgets. I became aware of the potential of organising and changing phenomenological events in film over time. I also started to think about the kinds of effects that might be present in an expensive car advert, crane shots with beautiful sweeps. I wanted to take these ideas with a high 8 camera on a bus and replicate what was done in these ads, making the movement of the camera on the bus appear choreographed in a way.

Obviously working on a much smaller scale with a limited budget does force you to be particularly inventive in solving filming problems.

Also, the way they are painted is quite awkward and it gives the paintings an emotional intensity and thoughtfulness that isn't in any way easily arrived at.

In Frankfurt I tried to find ways to use the camera. I tried to slow down and understand possibilities. Contemporary dance also interests me and how the camera relates to it. I am planning to work with the choreographer Rosemary Butcher. I am interested in how the language of sound, film and video can relate to the structure of dance, so it doesn't simply illustrate something but is something in itself.

Yes, I think this is crucial. This is why I want to highlight the importance of going beyond a documentary aesthetic, because out and out documentary reportage does sometimes end up being no more than an illustration, it doesn't take you further to reveal what would have previously been occluded. Its about the work being more than the sum of its parts, to pull things together to create something extraordinary.

You're right, even with an experience like Ospedale or About I am not just reporting an experience, I am trying to engender an experience as well. I don't simply want to say, 'this is what happened, take it or leave it', I want people to get caught up in the work.