The Many Mona Lisas: An Interview with Malcolm Le Grice
Mike Sperlinger

Malcolm Le Grice began his career as a painter in the mid-1960s, but quickly became involved in film and performance and was an important member of the London Filmmaker's Coop from its earliest days. He has produced an impressive body of work across many media, including film, video, computer programmes, digital video and many expanded and hybrid forms, as well as many influential critical and theoretical writings. His work continues to be widely screened and exhibited in different contexts: several early films were included in the Shoot Shoot Shoot touring retrospective of the early days of the LFMC, while his double-screen Berlin Horse has recently been included as an installation in the Interfunktionen: Behind The Facts gallery show in 2004, and he recreated some of his performances as part of the Expanded Cinema series at Hartware Medien Kunst in Dortmund in the same year.

His prolific and varied output poses many problems in terms of its preservation, both practically and theoretically. Mike Sperlinger, the head of distribution at LUX, spoke to him about some of the issues around conserving and exhibiting older works.

Mike Sperlinger: I was remembering that when you were working on the Dortmund show you were looking at some of your old materials and you were watching a film called Blue Field Duration, which you hadn’t seen for many years, on the Steenbeck. At first you were worried because the print was very scratched, and it was only after a few seconds that you realised it was actually a scratch film and that it had been completely intentional. What looked at first like wear-and-tear was actually an integral part of the work: that seems quite a typical problem, when thinking about the complexities of your body of work.

I’m interested in your attitude to preservation in general, how important it is to you, and the kind of issues that come up when you’re dealing with older work. What is that prompts you to look at older work? Are you interested in preservation per se, or is it something that’s always a response to other people’s interest in showing the work in some form?

Malcolm Le Grice: Well, I think in my earlier period I don’t think I paid any attention to preservation at all - I just assumed I would continue showing things - although I’ve always kept my masters and negatives in fairly good shape. They’re all stored, and I can get hold of anything I made in the past, so I haven’t just let it disappear.

Also, a lot of the work that I did was performance or multi-projection, or performance with multi-projection, and it couldn’t be preserved in that sense - it had to be reconstructed. Although, on occasion some of the documentation - for example, some of the Horror Film documentation that I have - is really quite good; if someone else wanted to reconstruct it and do the performance, it would give a fairly good indication of how that performance should go. So I’m now a little more interested in documenting the more transient work, just so there is a record of it and someone can come back to it.

With all the single-screen and simple double-projection films, there’s not really a problem of having a good copy of it as long as 16mm film is still being made. But at this point I am getting more interested in making sure that it is kept in good order, and what I’d like is for somebody to say, “OK, I’m going to look after all that for you”. Because when I’ve got time I tend to spend it on doing new work, rather than paying attention to looking after the old stuff.

MS: Do you feel that for a lot of artists that’s an issue - the conflict between the desire to make sure that the work is preserved in a form that will last and, on the other hand, the desire to constantly be moving forward and making new work? It takes so much time and energy, particularly with film work where you have to spend so much time in the lab, that perhaps people do want a third party to take care of it.

MLG: That’s certainly the case with me. I don’t want to do the work of preservation, because it’s not productive - I’m in the middle of new work and I want to be paying attention to that, and I guess it’s been like that all the way along. What motivates you is the current work, and you’re not terribly motivated by your old work.

It’s been interesting for me, in the last three or four years, that there has been a review of the older work - an active review, it’s not preservation so much as re-presentation. When Mark Webber did Shoot Shoot Shoot, I said to him, “Why is anybody going to be interested in this stuff?” I was very surprised by how much interest there was from a younger audience - I thought that all the old lags, all the people that were involved in it the first time around, would turn up and that would be it! But in fact, everywhere we went, it was younger people who very interested in the work, and interested in it as, in a sense, part of the contemporary condition - it wasn’t like it was simply old work.

If we’re looking at the question of preservation, I still like the idea that preservation and conservation are linked to active presentation. With painting, for example, the museum shows the painting and it’s conserving it at the same time. I guess I would like a model where the preservation and presentation went hand in hand, so that it was available. Which possibly means that there’s a technical question about what we mean by “conservation”…

MS: One obvious question is, how do you feel about the work being preserved in other forms - are video or DVD versions of 16mm work authentic presentations of the work, or are they something more like second order documentation?

MLG: I think I have a slightly different attitude to a lot of other people about this. I’m not very strong on the question of authenticity. I think certain works that I’ve transferred to video, if they’re on high-quality video - and I guess the best at the moment would be Digibeta, or even Beta SP, and then below that mini DV or DVCAM - in some cases I like the work better when I see it on video, with good quality video projection. For example, with Berlin Horse I’ve been able to get closer to the original colour with a video copy than I’m able to do now with film printing, because the film prints are made from negatives and the original was made from reversal materials and that’s virtually impossible to get done now. So I’m not precious about that. I mean, I don’t want low quality preservation - I don’t want VHS!

But I think I would be quite happy if something like Digibeta was used as the main conservation medium, rather than the film, provided that there was a process that was backing it up - something like keeping two copies of everything and every five years recopying them, because of problems with tape magnetic print-off. Those tape media are not one hundred percent secure - but film isn’t one hundred percent secure either, there’s a lot of colour fading going on from colour prints and negatives. I guess the best format would be something that saves the Digibeta version as a digital file, rather than as a videotape. But I’m as happy that something is being preserved in a video format as I am that it’s being preserved in a film format.

MS: One particular issue in your case is that some of your early work seems very concerned with the medium of film and with making the audience aware of the materiality of the medium. Do you feel that the works can be retained on video in a way that doesn’t damage their essential meaning?

MLG: In a way, at the most extreme level, of course you’re right. For example, with my film White Field Duration there is no copy of that, because by definition the new scratches and deterioration on that are part of the work - I put deliberate scratches, but there are also other scratches that it has accumulated. When I made that work, I knew that that was a work I wouldn’t even make a print of - it will gradually deteriorate and finally disappear altogether. But again, if I had a good telecine made I could present it from video as a two projector video piece and it would be extremely difficult to know that the scratches on screen which were just reproductions. With very good video projection, it’s difficult, even for me, to always know whether I’m looking at film or video.

MS: Would it still be important for the audience to know that there was a real deterioration every time the film version was shown? You would be losing that element of the original concept...

MLG: That’s right, but in a way conservation is never holding something in its utterly original form. I guess the main purpose of conservation is to make the work available to the future generations.

It is different with painting or sculpture, which builds its own conservation in by the stability of the medium; but other artists, for example Richard Long, who come out of the sculptural tradition and aren’t involved in film, also produce work that is by definition transient. Long makes a circle of stones in the landscape - he may take a photograph of that, and then want to sell it, but that isn’t the work. You can’t have it both ways, in that sense: if you make work that is about its transience, or about live performance, it makes conservation as such really impossible.

MS: In those extreme cases like White Field Duration you’re faced with a conflict between preservation and exhibition - it’s a work that actually resists being conserved. You then have to make a choice at some point between posterity, on the one hand, and on the other trying to let something run its original course, based on your idea of its original intentions which are maybe quite difficult to reconstruct thirty years on.

MLG: But at the same time, some kind of representation is better than nothing at all. Otherwise, it really does disappear from history. Maybe it’s a good thing for it to disappear from history - as a young artist, I was very against the dominance of history over the present. My early work, and I think even my current work, is very much about presence, about the present experience as itself - not as a substitute for something else. And I take a huge amount of trouble that when I screen something, I screen it in the right way. I don’t like the format of academic screenings, which aren’t like a public screening, because I like the drama of presence and presentness.

In that sense I’m still very ambivalent: what is the function of the preservation? It only seems to me valid if what is being preserved is carrying forward something of interest to the current environment, it’s not an academic exercise for me - which is why I said before my ideal situation would be that preservation is directly linked to continuing exhibition, as in the museum. It’s the same political issue as ever: the Tate has been very negligent. The work that I’ve been involved with belongs much more in the history of the plastic arts than it does with the history of film. The Tate should be the place that’s handling that and they’re not; they’ll do the occasional show, but there are plenty of works, mine and other peoples, that could be on permanent display or on a permanently rotating programme, running alongside other works from British art. Now we have a technology that allows them to do that.

MS: When you’re rediscovering older work because there’s a demand to show it again now, and its going through this process of being transferred to video, is there a temptation to revisit it and remake it as much as to conserve it?

MLG: Yes, certainly there is. First of all, I don’t think I ever felt that any work that I did was in a total definitive form. The definitiveness of it came, in a way, from the economic constraints of the production system. So once you’d made a film, the process of editing and putting it together made that a definitive form, because you it was too expensive to go back and change it. The new media, video and digital media, don’t work like that. I am now constantly, if I feel like it, modifying works.

I have a very short piece called For the Benefit of Mr K., which is silent, and I always said I wanted people to whistle the Beatles song, but no one ever did. And then my son bought a CD of outtake materials by the Beatles and there’s a little section on it when they’re workiing up to doing For the Benefit of Mr K., and I thought, “This is what I need”. It’s not like the song, but it’s got elements of it just before the recording takes place, so I put that on as the soundtrack. That isn’t how the video was when I first showed it, but I don’t care about that.

With the Cyclops Cycle, when I made it on mini DV I was using 64 minute tapes. But when I made a DVD version of it, I could only get an hour at full quality - so I cut two and a half minutes from two of the pieces. And I don’t see any problem with it; some later scholar may say, “This version is different from this other one”, but even when I made it I didn’t have any certainty that “now I’ve got this absolutely right”. So with the new media, the definitive version almost doesn’t exist. And with the multi-projection, I’m constantly changing it as I’m working on it, it’s like work in progress, and I could easily go back and do that with everything I’ve done.

For example, in After Manet, the four screen film: at some point I’m looking forward to going back and just slightly restructuring it, because the tracks were shot on non-sync cameras and they’re slightly different lengths and I used to have to move the projectors around to keep them in sync. As it is, when they did the video for the Tate show we sat down and cut sections out of the leader on the video version. I have in mind to make it as a four video projector piece, and when I do that I shall make whatever changes are necessary in order to make it work properly in that format. It’s not like I’m cheating on the history, I don’t think it’s like that at all, and I’m certainly not remaking it conceptually or in terms of any of the fundamental components - but new technology is allowing me to make it in a form which doesn’t need me to be there when it’s played. Whereas at the moment, I don’t think anybody could play After Manet without me being there because, over an hour, the synchronisation would go haywire.

MS: So with the really ephemeral works, performance works like Horror Film, do you feel that they’re completely tied to you being there, or is there any way of formalising them as a set of instructions that someone else could carry out? Or does the video documentation of those performances stop being just documentation at some point and become something that could be shown in its own right?

MLG: What works are we talking about? There are works that are performance works, like Horror Film, which is a shadow performance. And there are multi-projection works which are performances because I’m moving the projectors, like Matrix, which I did in Dortmund, with six projectors being moved; the three projector version of Threshold, where I move the projectors and adjust the zoom and so on; and After Leonardo, which doesn’t involve moving the projectors but there’s a little element of performance in it.

I could certainly give a script, an approximate script like a notation, for someone else to do the performance. I’d be extremely happy if someone else performed Horror Film, I wouldn’t have any problem at all, and again there could be a set of instructions and I could say as part of the instructions, “Take a look at this documentation”. I’d rather someone did that than relied just on the documentation. Although actually, the documentation is much better than I ever expected, and I do often show it now if I’m doing a screening of work - I’ve got an edited documentation now which is assembled from about five different performances. It gives you a pretty good sense of the piece, and it does have elements in it which stand up, in a way, on their own.

I don’t want just an idea, I wanted it to be nearer to the experience than an idea - I’m not interested in just transmitting ideas, I’m interested in transmitting experiences. But that could work, and I think it might be smart to have a set of instructions, with the right spirit so there’s an improvisational element there too - if someone has a good idea while they’re doing it, it belongs to them. It’s like in the tradition of jazz, you take a piece of music and if there’s something that you want to do with it, at the point when you perform it, it belongs to you.

MS: I suppose there’s already an element of that in Castle I, which was part of Shoot Shoot Shoot, which has a light bulb suspended in front of the screen being switched on at random intervals. When it was touring and you weren’t there, someone else had to operate the light bulb and although there were a limited set of possibilities, you were already delegating part of the work to someone else who you didn’t know.

MLG: Yes, and there was never a totally fixed strategy to that anyway. In the very first screenings, I operated a press-switch, but I tended to keep it going pretty much through the whole film. Then I found a little timer box which did it, and when that was there it was absolutely right through the whole film regularly and utterly irritating - but at that time, that utter irritation was important. Then there was a screening, which I wasn’t at, and they said, “We can’t possibly get a bulb in front of the screen” - it was in a huge cinema, the picture was enormous - “what do you want us to do?” I said, “Well, just hang the bulb somewhere in the auditorium on the side with the flash unit and let it run”. So, even then, I was prepared to fit to the environment.

Now when I’m doing it, I have the opportunity to use the light bulb more sparingly and at certain points in the film when you get certain sorts of effects, which I think is much better - it isn’t authentic, but then there never was a totally “authentic” version. Then it becomes more of a performance, and someone else can do it, because it was already like a piece of jazz performance, right from the beginning - there are these components which come together differently each time.

MS: You’ve worked in so many different media, and in the 1980s you also worked with computers with works like Arbitrary Logic. Obviously one thing that’s happened, in a way that was perhaps unexpected, is that computer technology moved so fast that the programmes you were using became inoperable quite quickly - is that something that you’ve had to grapple with?

MLG: Yes, that’s right. I have retained the programmes for all of those - and I actually think that if I got my old Atari machines out and loaded the programmes, they would probably work.

Arbitrary Logic was originally a performance piece, it is a sound image synthesiser that I play with the mouse, and when I did performances of it I did large-scale projections directly from the computer. I did it like that at the London Filmmaker's Coop, in a performance evening I did with Keith Rowe, with him improvising on the guitar. As a performance piece, it could last as long as you liked, and I only put it onto video when I did the Channel 4 Sketches for Sensual Philosophy. I made an eight minute version by doing a performance with the video recording from the machine as I was performing, and then edited it to fit the timeslot - it wasn’t very edited, there were just a few sections cut out.

The other pieces that I did with computer, Digital Still Life for example and Heads, all run real time from computer programmes, and you only have to change a few numbers in the basic set-up and you’ll get a different version. That was for me part of the opportunity with the computer. It wouldn’t be so difficult, even if the technology changes, to reproduce the programme in another programming language, if anyone ever wanted to; and I’ve deposited that material with CACHe (Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories, etc...) project at Birkbeck. So if someone had just a few minutes video of the original and the computer programme list, a programmer would be able to translate that to any computer system - it wasn’t specific to the Atari. It was a logic programme, in FAST basic, not machine code or assembly language.

MS: Thinking about all the problems with preservation across the various media, what do you think would be helpful for artists in terms of helping them to think about preserving their work? Do you think that it needs institutional support, is this a question about museum practice? Is there a way of providing a set of guidelines for artists, or will it always be someone else’s responsibility - artists can’t be responsible for art history, as it were?

MLG: I think it is ultimately the artist’s own responsibility. For example, the National Film Archive offered years ago to preserve prints and they would give people a Beta copy of the work, and I never took it up because I was too lazy - I fought for it, and then didn’t take it up. In that sense, it is my responsibility, although as I said at the beginning it’s not something that motivates you very much, or it certainly doesn’t motivate me. And so much of my work doesn’t fit the model - it’s not simply a question of getting a good negative, putting it in good conditions and keeping it in a vault, because so much of my work doesn’t function like that: it’s a performance, it’s a particular kind of presentation. For those parts of my work that do conform to that model, the preservation isn’t so difficult, except that preservation materials aren’t perfect.

That’s the other question - what are the perfect preservation materials for digital work, for example? What sort of deteriorations are we going to be facing? Will the deterioration in the digital signal be greater than the deterioration that there has been in film? I don’t know. There is a European research project called ARCHIMEDIA about this and I spoke at a seminar about it in Amsterdam. But there isn’t any consensus on what is the most reliable form of preservation, and the National Film Archive are trying all sorts of different approaches, including three colour separation and a black and white version on 35mm film. I don’t know the answer to that, that’s a professional question and in a sense I’m in the hands of the professionals.

I would like someone to take on the project of looking through everything I’ve got, making sure it’s in good shape, putting it into the best possible preservation form, and looking after its storage and so on. But as I said, I would much prefer that that process was done in relation to a continuous presentation, or regular presentation.

MS: Do you think that there’s anything that could be offered, in terms of information or resources, to artists who are earlier in the career to help them to think about these issues that might come up later in their career?

MLG: I think it’s more difficult now with the new technologies, I think it would have been easier with film. First of all, I don’t know now what the boundaries of what we call cinema and projection are - I mean, what are we talking about? There are streamed videos on the internet, people doing work that is for that context. There’s so many different formats now and the likelihood is of increasingly mixed formats, interactive formats.

The other thing is that so much work is being produced that, institutionally, you couldn’t even contemplate trying to preserve it as it’s going on. Some work will not make the grade, as it were, which makes the effort of preservation worthwhile. So in that sense, there has to be a filter, the historical filter, to decide if something is worth conserving; so I don’t think setting up an institution for this, or a code of practice, is easy.

Some of it would take care of itself, if there was an institution that was concerned with presentation in the plastic arts that said it would take things for a permanent collection, in the way they do with painting or sculpture, and then the collector’s responsibility is maintaining that work in a viewable form. I sold work a long time ago to the Pompidou and their deal, which was a very sensible one, was that they were allowed to show the work, but they also had a negative from which they were allowed to make new copies for themselves. If I was selling something to a museum, I would be very happy to have an arrangement with them that they hold a master from which to make a new copy. But the problem in Britain is that nobody’s doing it - the Museum of Modern Art in New York has the Hollis Frampton films for example, but try going to the Tate and seeing if they have the David Larchers or the Malcolm Le Grices, because they’ve not paid any attention to it. I’ve got more work in collections outside of the UK than I do in the UK.

MS: From what you’ve said, there’s a constant blurring between conservation and making, there’s not an original work that has to be recovered - so for you, preservation is tied to re-presentation. I know that some of your earliest work involved found footage and I wonder if that gave you a sense that moving images have different kinds of afterlife, and whether that has affected your ideas about preservation?

MLG: That’s exactly right. I think that idea of an afterlife is part of this issue of transience of the works, and my lack of a sense of a definitive version. I had this example: what would Beethoven be thinking if he was riding in a Mercedes on a German authobahn at two hundred kilometres an hour listening to his Third Symphony on a stereo system? What sense would he have of the relationship between how he conceived how his work would be heard and how people actually listened to it? Of course, then someone said that he wouldn’t have been able to hear it anyway because he was deaf...

You don’t know how your work is going to relate itself through history. With da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, how many versions are there? I made a version of the Mona Lisa with After Leonardo, and what my version says is that what you see now, when you see the painting, is in such a different context to its original condition that its meaning is changed: the meaning of a work changes through its history. I was always interested in the way that meanings change with time, so the deterioration of the film materials in White Field Duration is only a symbol for that, in a way, a symbol for that philosophical question of deterioration and decay - for the way in which the permanence of a work is an illusion.

If somebody got my videotapes and started to make new works with them, how could I complain? Because, in a sense, it’s part of my aesthetic - using found footage was a part of that. It’s part of my aesthetic and ethic that the work belongs to a culture or society, even though I need to make enough money from it to be able to stay alive and keep working. When you do an artwork, you are acting in the public domain - you may have a whole system of economics for selling it, but fundamentally the experience and meaning of the work is in the public domain. It’s a different question to copyright; copyright is a system for making sure you can make money from it in order to preserve your capability to work as an artist. But basically, in terms of the work, it becomes part of a language in the public domain. And with the preservation question, a bit of me would say it’s not just physical preservation, it’s having the work out there - and then if someone wants to work with it and do something different with it, that’s part of how culture develops.

Read more about Malcolm Le Grice at LUX Online - see www.luxonline.org.uk