From our new book: Japanther in conversation with Dan Graham

This is the first in a series of posts that features excerpts from the new Performa book, Everywhere and All at Once: An Anthology of Writings on Performa 07, which is available for purchase here.

The excerpts below are from the book’s pages devoted to Performa 07 Commission recipient Japanther, who presented the riotous Japanther in 3D at P.S. 122 in November 2007. The show featured a spark-spitting robotic dinosaur, performance duo robbinschilds crawling, running, and go-go-dancing through the crowd, punk icon Penny Rimbaud declaiming from the corner, and video works from artists including Chad Von Nau and Gee Vaucher. All of this activity surrounded the band themselves, performing in the center of the space within a shimmering, cage-like set designed by renowned conceptual artist Dan Graham.

Below are excerpts from a conversation between Dan Graham and Ian Vanek and Matt Reily of Japanther, moderated by Performa Director RoseLee Goldberg:

Ian Vanek (IV): [We first worked] with Dan on Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty [2004]. [After that] we saw the possibility of doing a puppet show with some of his optical and visual ideas that we really enjoy, which became the basis for Japanther in (3-D).

Dan Graham (DG): I couldn’t get away from them. They brought over a collaborator, Eugene Tsai, who also worked on Don’t Trust.

IV: In the props department.

DG: And we just tossed around some ideas very quickly. I work very fast and they work very fast, so within about an hour and a half, with the help of Eugene, who had a lot of practical ideas about set design, I came up with something. Eugene was so important in this.

IV: He’s a great artist. He works with Urs Fischer, Pierre Huyghe, Robert Wilson. He has a really brilliant mind. One of the things I admire about Eugene is that he works very fast. He’s always at the store spending the budget.

RoseLee Goldberg (RLG): So what was your thinking behind the set? I thought it was brilliant that the audience could be so close to the music, and close to the musicians, yet also kept away by this perforated, mirrored set. It was like you were wrapped in cellophane.

DG: Right. The idea was for the spectators and the performers to interact optically. When people see photographs of the performance, they don’t realize that the set works as you move. It’s all about your own perception, and yourself moving. I have been using perforated aluminum in many of my works. I like the optical effect you can get from it. Here, I used two differently sized holes in the double layer of aluminum. One sheet has large perforated holes in it, the other, small holes. As you move, the holes are re-reflected into a mirror in the shape of an open parallelogram. So while you’re moving, you see not only yourself moving, but also the visual effect changing. It actually encourages moving around. And you wanted dancing, right?

IV: That’s right.

DG: We also tried to make it inexpensive. But most importantly, I wanted to go back into history. I wanted to get something like the naturally occurring optical effects that were built into psychedelic architecture from the ’60s. This set references that culture by creating an analog visual effect for the viewer, with small elements seeming to flash on and off like a strobe light. Also, little kids, particularly girls, love hiding behind and looking through peepholes. I thought, Ian and Matt want to enchant children in their piece, and this could do it, but it could also be like a traditional, interior rock ’n’ roll stage set.

***

DG: People take their kids to see puppet shows. So I thought old hippies, or maybe grandparents who are hippies, could take their grandkids to see a puppet show and also hear rock ’n’ roll. I brought Japanther to perform Laugh Dance [2007] with the robbinschilds dance company in Marfa, Texas, and some old hippies came with their children.

IV: There were kids from all over Texas there.

DG: I think this idea of trying to reach a mixed audience is so much more interesting than the myth about the “young generation” audience at Woodstock, which is boring and practically commercial.

IV: Very—as proven by Woodstock ’99! For Japanther in (3-D) we tried to work with people from different generations—artists like Penny Rimbaud, the English punk, Layla Childs and Sonia Robbins [from robbinschilds], who are very much in the performance art world, Ryan Doyle and Conrad Carlson and us, who are all in our twenties, Jah Jah and The Hot 57 kids, who are younger city boppers, Clarence Seneca, Sr., an older Native American activist, and Clarence Seneca, Jr., his son, who is a teenage skater. We tried to work with people from as many different groups and walks of life as possible.

If we said, “In this performance, we intend to educate people about good eating habits,” the response would probably be, “Are you kidding? That’s too big of a topic.” But, if we dumb it down into a one-minute childish commercial you might actually be able to remember. That’s why Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street were so effective.

DG: So you are going back to your own childhood, to what affected you on television.

IV: Definitely.

DG: The thing that unites us is our love of rock ’n’ roll music and history. And these two guys here really know rock ’n’ roll. At first I thought they were post-punk. Then I realized they were very interested in the goth style, as fashion and as a musical genre, but what I heard in their performance at Marfa was The Ventures—an instrumental surf group from Washington State that came before The Beach Boys.

IV: We love The Ventures.

DG: It all comes back to the origins of punk and garage rock. I think Ian and Matt actually understand the rock form, which is a pop form—it’s not just rock ’n’ roll or punk. Punk was important because it was the antithesis of Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple.

IV: I hate Led Zeppelin.

DG: For me, punk was also the antithesis of these narcissistic singer-songwriters, like Jackson Browne or Don Henley from The Eagles.

IV: I hate the Eagles. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Coen brothers movie The Big Lebowski, where Jeff Bridges complains about the music that’s playing in a taxi cab? He says, “Come on, man—I fuckin’ hate the Eagles!” And the driver kicks him out of the cab for saying that. On a funny side note, do you remember the hippie guy who was hanging around our show at Marfa? That was Boyd Elder, the artist who painted The Eagles album covers. Cool guy! [laughter]

***

RLG: Dan, how do you think this sort of crossover between visual art and music has changed over the last few decades?

DG: In the ’70s the great rock venues, like Tier-3 in New York, were very small, derelict places because we insisted on having derelict places. All the artists were in rock groups then. Richard Prince had a rock group. So did Robert Longo. These club-type situations were where we really enjoyed ourselves, and I don’t think you can recreate that in a museum or a chic gallery.

Matt Reily (MR): But these days, a gallery is almost a safer spot. Women often feel alienated by the sexual aggression in dark bars and clubs.

RLG: You really think that women feel threatened in those venues?

MR: I just think rock ’n’ roll has become over-masculinized. I grew up going to hip-hop shows and punk shows, and being involved in skateboarding, and there was no female presence. It was so macho. I just didn’t see the future in it. How can there be a future in something without a female presence?

RLG: You are right about that. It closes out half your audience when the content is one-sided. What about the video projections you used in Japanther in (3-D)? Was there any back and forth with Dan about how you were using those images?

IV: No, I don’t think Dan saw the videos. They came into the project much later.

MR: Which was ironic, because they were the part that interacted most with Dan’s set.

IV: There were projections on the walls on either side of the set, which you could also see reflected in the set’s two-way mirrors. The projection was repeated in three or four different places, so no matter where you looked in the space, you really couldn’t look away from it.

DG: Two-way mirrored glass is transparent and reflective. The side that gets the projection is more reflective. The other side is transparent, so you can look through it.

IV: The projections open with a video piece by Gee Vaucher, Semi-Detached [2004]. Gee uses a very old video camera to film her television in London, which is showing a series of horrifically violent, hateful images from the Vietnam War set to a soundtrack of really beautiful bird sounds.

IV: There was a girl from Canada in the audience who said, “I’m so offended that you showed those images,” because some of them were really graphic, and Gee had looped them over and over.

DG: The problem is that Canadians are afraid of violence. I remember Roy Lichtenstein was accused of being a fascist for showing violence in his work. He said that he was showing how the media portrays these things.

IV: I think that’s what Gee was doing, and it’s important to illuminate that.

DG: The video in Japanther in (3D) was presented in a way very similar to the ’70s—there were a lot of performances then that included videos. But you can only do this in an intimate space where you really have a sense of community.

IV: That’s why we chose to use the smaller space at P.S. 122. We wanted it to be intimate, so that the audience could circle around the piece rather than having a flat experience.

RLG: The space that Dan created also made the viewers, their bodies, part of the music.

DG: That’s rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll is about dance. The secret of Patti Smith is she knew how to dance.

To read the rest of this interview, and all of the other fantastic artist interviews in the new Performa book, order your copy here!

–Posted by Lana

Image: Paula Court