Dryden Goodwin
interviewed by Mike Sperlinger
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| Installation shot of lightbox from Two Thousand and Three (2003) |
Mike Sperlinger talked to Goodwin about his work and issues around preservation, including how he documents and archives his multi-media installations.
Mike Sperlinger: Looking at your work as a whole, quite a lot seems to be about preserving the ephemeral. And there seems to be a tension between preserving individual moments as discrete and self-sufficient, while at the same time trying to preserve their ephemeral quality too. I wonder if that sense of the difficulty of preserving things is something that you've thought about much in relation to your works themselves?
Dryden Goodwin: I think I have become increasing conscious, especially with the time-based work, of how you preserve that and the potential for deterioration of film and video, as well as slide-based works. I've needed to address that and I've done it in a number of different stages. I'm at the stage now where I'm going to try to comprehensively archive the work that I have over the next year or so. In the passed I've always been quite conscious of multiple copies of things and storing different copies in different locations.
I've worked with various different materials to engage with notions which relate to trying to preserve some experience, so it can be recorded and referred back to at a later point. These different media have different intrinsic qualities - whether it's for example drawing or photography, digital video or 16mm film - which offer up different ways of engaging with that idea. If you shoot something on video, it's locked away in this tape and the information is quite abstract. You can play it back and see it - but it's always quite removed from you, existing in a kind of virtual space, even though you've gathered it from the actual space around you. With film, the big difference and the thing that I've utilised a lot is the material nature of film. And in effect you do have an artefact, in the form of the negative and the prints, so I've tried to foreground that in the way the work is presented. With the drawing, it's more directly a recording of my experience in the space, and also a recording of the time it's taken me to make those drawings - I suppose in a way a photograph is like that too, because it's a split-second recording of something you've seen and at the same time something you've done, in pressing the shutter. I'm interested in the cross-pollination between the different media I'm working with, the qualities of one influencing the way you work with another.
MS: Your early work Suspended Animation - 26 Drawings of the Same Photograph (1998) [in which Goodwin, who was 26 at the time, transferred 26 self-portrait pencil drawings based on a single photograph onto video, with each image held for the duration of a frame, sequenced in different orders and looped] seems very much about an attempt to use one medium against another, in order to bring out different qualities they have.
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| Installation shot of Two Thousand and Three (2003) at New Gallery Walsall |
That plays out in a lot of the video work too, where I've caught something, a fragmentary moment of some event that's happened in for example a public space, and then through the layering up of that image - I might digitally work with the separate frames, layering them up and slowing them down - creating something that is much more elastic and three-dimensional. By looking at something for longer than the time in which it actually happened, you're inevitably creating something else. You're more aware of the different things comprising a particular moment, but you also start to generate other things - it fictionalises it, in a way.
MS: You've always worked with these many different media. When you first started out, were you thinking about the lifetime of these works and how they would be preserved, or was that not really important to you?
DG: I think I was quite aware of it, yes. But again, it's about the amount of effort it takes to really get on top of it, so you find temporary solutions. I think over the past few years there's been more and more information online. When I was trying to access information five or six years ago about how best to store your tapes, for example, I found that people thought it was quite strange that I was concerned, it was a bit of a struggle. I did become aware of the National Film and Television Archive, but there seemed to be something about giving your masters away which I couldn't get my head around at that moment in time. So I came up with temporary solutions, where I kept them in dry places in archive boxes, and multiple copies in different places. But constantly I was aware that it was something that needed to be addressed and thought about.
MS: Do you feel it posed quite a different set of problems from, for example, the drawings? With the drawings perhaps it was more obvious - to keep them out of direct sunlight, and so on - and perhaps that was an easier conversation to have with people.
DG: Yes, because any deterioration that might happen to tapes you can't tell by picking them up - you have to play them and watch them. Because they're time-based, obviously it takes a lot of time to do that - particularly with multi-screen works...
MS: ... and you're also risking them every time you play them back.
DG: Exactly, they become vulnerable. With works on paper, although it's not always possible, I've been very aware about trying to work on paper which is 100% cotton and doesn't have any optical brighteners in it, so you know where you are with it - there's a sense of stability.
MS: In One Thousand, Nine Hundred and Ninety Eight (1998), you were saying that there's a distinction between the inevitable deterioration of the film strip, which plays on an elaborate loop, which was accidental, but that the deterioration of Drawn From Memory (1998), the flip-book which shows along side it, was actually integral to the way you wanted the work to be understood.
DG: Yes, that's right. I think the key thing is what the spectator or viewer of the work is sensitised to. The fact that you use the flip-book as a visitor to the space and that, if you come towards the end of the exhibition, you are aware that the book is dog-eared and has thumb-prints, hopefully that is an active component of understanding the work. But I think in terms of the deterioration of the film loop, that isn't something that I've tried to foreground, so it's more a practical issue of renewing the print when any scratches or dust on the film become intrusive.
MS: It's interesting, because at the same time you are wanting the film to be very materially present, as part of an elaborate loop in the space.
DG: I think that's true. I think that's a lot to do with the difference between film as stuff and the film as a projection. In Two Thousand and Three (2003), another of the works in that series which is about the anti-war march in London, I used a film looping system so you're not so aware of the material of the film directly related to the projection - you can see it in this machine, but it isn't sculptural. Then there's a duplicate copy of the film in a long, thin light box which mirrors the idea of the procession of the protest with all these individual people in these frames. Once it's in the light box, there is this sense that the individual frames are artefacts or a collection of things, fixed between glass and illuminated, which can be looked at through a magnifying lupe. Of course, there's a slow deterioration but it's not something you're aware of when you're looking at the work.
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| Installation shot of Dilate (2003) at Manchester Art Gallery |
DG: I think there are things that really key to the work, like scale, for example, the scale of images. Often screens featuring people are related to the scale of the person watching the work. So in Wait (2000), a five screen installation where people are observed in the anticipation, the realisation and the aftermath of events, the screens are larger than people's heads if you stood next to them. In terms of how the dynamics of the space works, from where the person sees the work there's this sense of a comparable scale. So those things are essential. Because Wait has been shown in a lot of different types of spaces, it is important to think, for example, about the arc of the five screens, the acuteness of the angles between them, the space between them and the size of the screen - the work has to be slightly scaled up or down, but without losing the essential relationship between the viewer and the work.
MS: Do you always install it yourself?
DG: No, but for certain works like this which have been sold I've produced
documents described as 'certificates of authenticity', and in that
I define parameters within which the work is the work - and I suppose
outside of those, it's actually something else.
That doesn't apply to all the works I've made. With some works,
looking at them you can see more of a potential for almost creating a kind
of remix. For example, with Dilate (2003) I created a single screen version
which allows the viewer to remix it in terms of the sound and image relationships.
But there are also some works I've made which are shown fixed, but which
I can imagine 'remixing' in the future.
With time-based works there's this need to define spatial relationships
as much as anything else, because the spatial relationships almost replace
the notion of the artwork having the character of a singular object. If there's
something very particular and distinctive about that spatial relationship,
that is as important to the work as the images are. But there's isn't
just one way I've done that - each work has a slightly different
relationship to that idea of whether it's fixed or whether it can be
changed. There are always going to be core qualities that have to be retained.
MS: It sounds like each time you think about preserving a work, or providing a set of guidelines about how it should be shown in the future, you have to start from scratch to some extent because you have to follow the logic of the particular work.
DG: It's also to do with how work is made. A friend of mine Amit Lehav is the co-director of an exciting theatre company, Gecko, which makes really fantastic physical theatre, very complex and multi-layered works, but they evolve over time - maybe over eighteen months. And within that eighteen months they're shown a lot, because it's at the moment of showing that you can really understand what the work is becoming. But that's quite a big issue with creating art works, because in a certain way there's an imperative that the work is complete at the moment of showing. Of course, not all artists do that, and in a way its quite a traditional idea - that you wouldn't show something in progress. But I'm aware that is quite useful to think in those terms. Showing work in different stages is something that I'm quite interested in doing in the future, because it opens things up for new potentials and you can feed off responses. Of course, in some works if you show them too early there is a danger that the very fragile thing that you're trying to construct can be destroy.
MS: What about your source footage, your rushes? Because obviously you shoot quite a high ratio - do you preserve that?
DG: Yes, I keep all that. But practically and financially, I just want to
concentrate on the masters. All the soundtracks are stored as data too - and
I'm looking at storing some of the work as data too on hard drives, rather
than as Digibetas. Of course, hard drives are fragile things as well but hopefully
at some point they're not going to be, so you can have an uncompressed
video file that's never going to change.
But there's always lots of material which comes out from a project, even
if they're not the precise things that I use, but they become a resource
as well, because maybe they're manipulated in the sound mix, so the sound
source becomes like a library of sounds too. That's really useful to
have and, as a resource, becomes larger and something to dip back into. But
I usually find when I'm making a new project that I just want to use
what I've collected within that timeframe, because the projects become
for me as much about the experience of doing it as the thing itself.
MS: So although you would consider remixing works, you keep quite a clear distinction between the raw material and the master material?
DG: Yes. With some of the video stuff, I've manipulated it painstakingly in Avid or Final Cut Pro and I've had to invent these algorithms layering frames over each other, going through and cutting it all up and layering it, which was kind of fascinating but time-consuming. That manipulated material was then made into the original source, as it were, so I had to output those to tape. So those became the 2nd stage 'rushes', at that point, in 1998 or 1999, there wasn't the capacity to do it all internally in the editing system. So those originals will be retained, because in case I wanted to reconstruct it. And I'm actually considering putting some super 8 rushes, which were the materials for early films, onto Digibeta because that's the way I edited them, I put them onto video.
MS: Were they originally videoed off the wall?
DG: The earliest film I made, Heathrow (1994), was a video made from a small super 8 viewer. And I realise that if I telecined that material now, it would be a different type of film, because there was something with what happened to the colour in that process, which are less vivid so there's a very particular palette to them. There's one point in that film where the aeroplane disappears into white and the white is held for sometime, but it's the dust on the projected image which creates the sense of distance, in a way. So it would be interesting to see what re-telecining would do, or whether it would be worthwhile. The original lo-band Umatic I suppose is past it. Seven years ago I made a version of it on Avid, when I was teaching at the Slade. But even then there were red flashes between cuts, because the tape was beginning to get a bit dodgy, so I had to cut in sections from Beta SP dubs that I'd made from the original at the time. It has a slightly different quality to it, but that's actually the version that's shown more. It would be great at some point to re-composite it from the original, maybe I could get back even closer to the original feel of the film.
MS: In terms of how you document the installation work, is this something which you do yourself?
DG: Yes I do. There's this need to be very thoughtful about how you're going to record something in terms of how you're going to shoot it, how you're going to move through the space, what the sequence of shots is - and it's quite painful, in a way. Because it's after the opening and you've got a certain timeframe to do it, and sometimes when the show is overseas and I can only stay a couple of days, I have to work really quickly to record it - to script it, in a way, to work out what camera moves will evoke the experience. But I realise it's about a sense of place too, it's about that work within that gallery at that time. And a big part of revealing the nature of the work through documentation is showing how people look at it and engage with it. I think that lots of the work I've done is about making people aware of their physicality within the space - so for example, with Above/Below (2003) it is about looking up and looking down to view the work. So that documentation shows that, it mirrors what's happening in the work, But I realised that with that piece, it's impossible to see both screens at the same time, so how do you offer that up in the documentation? So part of the documentation is shot in the space and part of it is a composite to show the relationship of the two screens. With Dilate (2003), which has eight screens which go all the way around you, in the space someone engaging with the work has to negotiate how to look at the work. Central to the experience of Dilate is the need to find a way to look at the work: either you have a flip-top head and you stand in the centre, or you have to move around - but how do you document that on a video camera?
MS: What do you feel that documentation is for? Is it for you, is it to show people how to install the work in the future, or could it be shown in its own right in any way?
DG: I suppose it's trying to preserve the experience of the work, rather
than the work itself, and an essential component of that is how people look
at the work. Someone watching the documentation can maybe project themselves
into that space and relate to how people are watching, so hopefully something
is preserved in that way.
I made a single screen version of Dilate, which was first created as an 8 screen
video installation that formed a large floating octagon in the gallery space
that a viewer could walk around, under and within. Different to the work's
manifestation as an installation, the single screen version relates very closely
to how I edited the film. So there's a version of Dilate that has been
produced for this compilation DVD which I made with Film and Video Umbrella,
where there are two rows of four images. It misses out the stage of the editing
process I did in preparation for the installation, where I worked out spatially
how things would work in quite a conscious way. But with this version, someone
watching the DVD can select and change the combination of image and sound,
rather than having the combinations arranged for them. I'm interested
in the possibility of showing that version too at some point. It becomes less
physical, which was essential about the installation, but it stills retains
the idea of the images filling your field of vision - it a one-to-one
experience, because it's a DVD that you might look at home, but it will
be interesting to see how it's installed in a space as a single screen
work. On occasions it seems possible to forfeit certain aspects, but at the
same time to unlock further qualities which were not so apparent in the original
work.
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| Still from Heathrow (1994) |
DG: It includes a number of single screen works too, in their entirety. But the big challenge was thinking about the video documentation of the installation works - how do you offer up enough to evoke the work without offering up too much and distorting it. Often these works involve quite a bit of equipment to set up, so not that many spaces can show them, so it has been important to have something beyond still photographs.
MS: Have you made any works that are completely site specific, that you wouldn't repeat?
DG: No, I haven't... In a way, that relates to the desire to create
an artwork as something or an experience, that you can take with you, which
is taken from the flux of time around you. So I suppose I've resisted
that, the idea of a work being just for this moment and just for this time.
But I recently made a book with a friend, Tony Grisoni whose a scriptwriter.
It was a project set up by Caroline Isgar with The Slade School of Fine Art,
we made a book about a boxing club. One part of the material for the book was
documenting the space and the people we met there, the boys who trained and
fought there and their trainer. I wanted to include some fragmentary details
about how the trainer looked, just his head, in space, on these etching plates,
or the bandaged hand and the gloved hand... And Tony's approach
was just to write down what was said, what the trainer said. When we launched
the book, we invited an actor called Jamie Foreman who had boxed as a young
boy, and he performed the book - it wasn't a reading, it was a
performance. The excitement and tension that was created by his brilliant live
performance - we were there in dinner jackets, how someone would dress
for a boxing match - seemed to mirror the world of boxing, in a way.
I really found that thrilling, so the live element is something I would like
to work with more in the future.
I'm also in discussions about potentially making a live show with Amit
Lehav and Gecko. It's about having something that's live, but what
is it to take images from that live experience and feed them back within that
live experience - considering these related ideas I've worked with
before, but setting them against the live element.
MS: In terms of other people you might work with to preserve work, what is your experience of commercial galleries? It seems that sometimes they lack the technical know-how and so for example they'll get a DVD and treat that as a master, without understanding that DVDs are quite a transient form. Do you think commercial galleries have a role to play with archiving, or are they really just an outlet for editions?
DG: My experience of working with commercial galleries is that they're
concerned and they want to be as helpful as possible, but there's a lack
of knowledge about how to store the master tapes. All the professional art
storage is for drawings and paintings, but in my experience I haven't
come across a facility to store tape-based works.
When you sell a piece of work, if there is damage to a DVD copy another copy
can be made for the collector - but although they go back to the gallery
for this, the gallery will go back to the artist who has the master. It would
be great for preservation to be the responsibility of commercial galleries,
but I think that's going to take some time, to become aware of what,
really, is the work.
I think with a lot of the video work I've made, when there's an
opportunity in the future to show them directly off a hard disc so they're
uncompressed direct to the projector that would be great. Again it's
that question of whether the DVD version is the work and should always be kept
at that compression - collectors sometimes buy a Digibeta along with
the exhibition disc, so there's an opportunity for them later on to update
the format, provided that it's still within what the artist stipulates
as the work.
Even showing things off lo-band Umatics, right in the beginning, which deteriorated
quite quickly over the course of a show, there was the potential to get paranoid
about that because people couldn't see the work how you'd seen
it in the editing suite on the grade 1 monitor - but actually the installation
still retained the qualities that were essential to the work. Even if there
was a loss of some detailing in the image, it still was essentially the work.
In the future it would be great to show them all on grade 1 equivalent projectors
and I'm excited by that, and I suppose a lot of artists are moving to
HD. Even if it's a few years before HD projectors are readily available,
it would be good to get onto that format so that at least your source material
is high quality now, even if the work as it's shown won't reflect
that. As far as I'm aware you can't get interchangeable lenses
for the affordable HD cameras yet.
MS: You're also talking to MITES in Liverpool about archiving some of your work, is that right?
DG: Yes, I've been talking to Roger McKinley at MITES, who's someone I've worked with a lot to create DVDs for the showing of the work. He worked with me and Mike Jones at Film and Video Umbrella on this DVD of documentations too, he's great to work with, he took on the many technical challenges that had to be overcome for example with the single screen version of Dilate. I've wanted to do this for a number of years, but I've always been nervous about going to a commercial facilities house to copy my master tapes and so on; but MITES have made applications for funding to look at archiving artists' work on hard drives, rather than on tape formats. It feels like it's time to get on with it, because these things are vulnerable and they're deteriorating at an even faster rate than I'm deteriorating! It saps a lot of energy dealing with it. The more information available the better, so that it becomes less of a black art.
MS: So do you feel it's important to work with institutions, which have the technical knowledge but also the resources, in order to archive the work?
DG: Yes, I think so. Because then you become part of a body of consciousness
about certain issues. For a few years I've felt slightly out on a limb
thinking about these things, and a lot of artists I spoke to said, "Oh
I've just got my stuff in a box in the attic, I must get them down".
It seems that a lot of artists haven't really considered this, so the
fact that you're aware and trying to do something, even in your home
environment, is a good step. But there seems to be a raising of consciousness
through projects like this.
It would be lovely to hand that aspect of the work over, but in a way it's
like all the documentation - you have to get it to a certain point for
that ever to happen anyway. I think the hard thing is to have a system which
is easy to add to, like a huge filing system which is easy to sustain - how
do you structure that? Inevitably the neuroses of an artist, the amount of
thought and energy that go into staging something, some of that is transferred
into how the work is preserved, so perhaps it becomes much more complicated
than it really needs to. It would be great if artists had the opportunity to
apply for that type of support, so there might then be really simple models
to relate to.
If you had the time as an artist, you could probably go out and find out a lot more information, I've done that periodically, but then you build a very incomplete picture, it does take a huge amount of effort to get on top of notating where everything is, what form it is in... When I started making installations, I began a book where everything was written down for every single piece and installation - but you only have so much time, the main drive is to make new work.
More information on Dryden Goodwin's work is available at his website: www.drydengoodwin.com