Lost in the Memory Palace | The Dark Pool
I N T E R V I E W I N T E R V I E W GBM: They're breaking headphones all the time. Anyway, you're listening with headphones and you're in front of this theatre box and at the end of it there's a scream and actual gunshots. We get to have lots of fun doing these pieces. In Korea people were running away from the box, headphones were getting ripped off and cords were getting broken.BC: It's almost like The War of the Worlds.JC: It's very interesting that this happened in Korea. In North America we get 3D technology all the time and we're so film-oriented it doesn't faze us.BC: In The Muriel Lake Incident, the sequence that shoots the crumpled bed, moves to the chair, shifts to include only the high heels and lower legs of the woman, and then dissolves to the cowboy at the fire, is a beautiful filmic sequence. It's a Sam Shepard moment. There's something about the cowboy and the girl and her dishevelled revelry all together which creates a loaded atmosphere. There's a real psychodrama going on that the viewer can't quite figure out. Was that very carefully planned from beginning to end?GBM: I'd love to say yes but we were just shooting tons of stuff on digital video. That mood was exactly what we were trying to get, but the shooting sequence was chaotic. JC: That's why we've never really been interested in being real filmmakers. We're not the best at pre-conceptualizing and pre-visualizing everything. We can imagine the scene, shoot it and recognize that it doesn't work. George really has an editing mentality. He's always saying, let's try this here and let's try this here, so sometimes a piece can completely change. That's why it's very difficult to give scripts in advance. Even the names of the pieces change three or four times. For us it's a sketching process. BC: So the pictures always tell you what you need. You see what you've got and then know what you need to get. Is that how it works? GBM: Yes, quite often. Or sometimes we just slow it down, or we do whatever we have to do in order to fix it. I thought we had nothing after we finished three days of shooting the cowboy shots up in Muriel Lake and it turned out that I loved that shot too. BC: There's also a great moment when the cowboy unwraps the gun from a newspaper as if it were an order of English fish and chips. What is that about? JC: I thought that was kind of funny. GBM: That's Janet's scriptwriting. The whole piece is trying to trigger the fact that you're seeing this movie but you're also getting quirky things which make absolutely no sense. Like the woman who says, I thought this was supposed to be directed by Orson Wells. We're making fun of ourselves because we're so bad at making movies that people are going to say, wait a minute, we're in the wrong film here.BC: When you do that dance, it's quite an affecting performance. Do you think one aspect of your art is about being an actor? JC: Yes, because when I'm writing some of these parts I'll call myself "she," or even when I'm talking about my walks, I'll say "she said this" or "she said that." I talk about myself in the third person. In my script I had put spastic dancing. We were just doing a test, so I put on the makeup and the hair and everything. It was in our living room; the real shoot was supposed to take place at this cottage up on a beach. But we did the test and we could see the fax machine in the corner and his mom was moving so there was tons of stuff in the room. It was a weird set. Then we shot the real stuff and it didn't look good. We couldn't get the lighting right; my dancing was bad. It's funny because sometimes the sketches work out the best. You just never know.BC: I'm intrigued to hear you refer to the fun you have in making the work, because one of the things that emerges for me much of the time is a sense of unease. I have an apprehension that something unfortunate, if not downright dangerous, is going to happen.JC: It definitely is there. I think it's connected to our love of Raymond Chandler and film noir. But the fun element is really important. When you go to a movie, you know it's a safe environment. We can go to a scary movie and while we wouldn't want to see anybody killed, or to see real guns, we do go wanting to be scared. It's like rides. We're providing a relatively safe environment in which we can scare people.GBM: The ride thing is interesting, because a lot of my work, your walks, and our collaborative work are like low-budget theme rides in a way. We were recently in Disneyland and saw the original version of Pirates of the Caribbean, which was amazing. And it's such a fabulous ride. I was like, wow, this is what I want to make. Then we went to one of the new Indiana Jones rides and it was totally boring. So the walks are like a headphones, go walk around the city. It was the same with the immersive environment in The Dark Pool.JC: It's that aspect of experiencing art where you're taken out of yourself as a viewer. Where you let go of yourself, which is the same sort of thing that happens when you go to a film. That's why we really like the film experience. Muriel Lake is very much about that; it's not about the product, it's about going to a film. It's the same thing with the piece we're doing for Venice: it's going to be even more about going to this box that is a theatre and having to give yourself up for ten minutes. BC: It's what the Romantics called "the willing suspension of disbelief." Do you want people to give over to that magical transforming moment of belief?GBM: That's right, even though we're not filmmakers, we envy the filmmakers' ability to have that power.BC: In some of the reviews, critics talk about being held hostage and they bring up the idea of manipulation. In a way, the walks do control you; there is a sense of being literally held inside the instructive nature of the piece.JC: That's part of the point to the pieces. Have fun! It's very pleasurable to give up your power, to enter into something that you know is safe. It's like the early childhood games where your eyes are covered and they say, turn to the left. There's an eroticism involved in it, sort of S&M stuff. But because you're in a safe environment you can give up your power to someone else.BC: Does all art manipulate us in some subtle way?JC: Matisse's Red Painting is pretty manipulative but, of course, we want to be manipulated like that. We want the pleasure involved. Actually, almost 30 31 Janet Cardiff, Villa Medici Walk (Rome),1998, audio walk.Photograph courtesyLuhring Augustine,New York. Robert Enright, "Pleasure Principals: The Art of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller," Border Crossings (78) 2001.