(Originally published in: Parachute September/October/November 1982)
Peggy Gale: I’ve noticed a trend in the last year in video. I’ve seen six or seen tapes in the last month that have not been talking heads, people delivering lines. Like the tapes from New York at Gallery Quan, nobody said a word. It was all music and overlay. And at Art Metropole, Les Levine, Paul Wong, General Idea, it’s all images with voice-over. It seems like a split is already going on, where content is on one half of what’s being produced and visual assault is really on the other side. It plays to the thirty-second attention span that everybody has about everything. And it feeds that. It’s a sort of a renaissance of the technology of video all over again. Only this time, what is accessible to artists closely approximates what’s possible to do in a commercial television studio.
Do you think that consumerism per se is one of the contents? It’s certainly become part of the form. It’s attractive, seductive… but I wonder whether the artists are actually commenting on that or just welcoming it.
Colin: I think it’s a bit of both. The progress of video outside the art ghetto has been amazingly slow. The major part of work produced is shown in an art context. Pay TV is here, broadcast TV, cable TV, whatever. Video has moved into nightclubs and rock clubs, but the kind of work that has moved the most successfully in that direction has been image-conscious video as opposed to narrative. Video also has a history of being a tool that multi-media artists use, go in and out of, so there are people who do performance and write books and do the occasional tape… It seems that kind of work is being picked up on. It’s like the renaissance of video imagery again, now in its new highly technical stage. It’s glamorous again. The images are fabulously glamorous again, seductive and rich and varied. What I see about a lot of that work is that it still does convey a sense of awe. You don’t see anyone pulling the strings, all you see is the results.
Peggy: Do you think it’s a return of the literate?
Colin: Certainly the last two scripts I’ve written have demanded much sharper attention than my previous work has, and refer more to things outside the art context than my previous work. But that’s the demand I made on it to keep it interesting for me.
Peggy: Earlier you were talking about seductive images, and that so many tapes are non-verbal abut very heavily loaded with content. Yet we’re also saying that their very strength lies in a narrative structure at the bottom. To me, the new work that is really successful is using both. Given that colour is pervasive now, you have to have both those elements. When people first began to use colour, I think almost everybody was dismayed to find that although the work was prettier, it looked stupid, whereas black and white could be extremely extended in time, but it never looked stupid. What I’m searching of ir somehow to isolate this seductive presence physically, the use of color, the new approach to time and structure, and the narrative underpinning to give it substance. When you have all of those together, as I think Dangling By Their Mouths does, for example, you have another order of videotapes that is far more than television, and more than film too. It really is a different form that doesn’t exist elsewhere.
Colin: I’ve always found colour in video or television unnatural. It’s electronic, and none of those colours are real anyway, but then there’s the inherent flatness of the video image. You don’t get that richness of depth any more in colour than you do in black and white. In fact, it seems even flatter in colour somehow. So when I approached Dangling I wanted to say, “This is a colour tape,” as opposed to “this is not a black and white tape.” So I used slide backdrops for almost the whole tape, as a narrative structure, but also to try to get a diffuse kind of light that was somehow richer than on-scene location shooting could ever be. I also used large black and white photo backdrops in the tape in a couple of places, again as a narrative device, and also to say, “This is an approximation of reality.” In Conundrum Clinique I used either strictly flat, bright, grid colours for the background, or slides again.
Peggy: It seemed that you came to colour at a time when everybody was working with colour. So there was a sense of inevitability about it. It wasn’t as if you had struck out on your own. There had been people working with colour for three or four years already, but those people were working with colour as an ideological decision at base, whereas by the time you decided to move into colour it was because of something quite different. The same shift seemed to happen for a lot of people….
Colin: I started to appreciate colour in film when I saw Antonioni’s Red Desert, which was his first colour film. It was mostly shot in industrial settings, grey, white and red dust. At points there were real moments of colour and when there was colour introduced then it seemed to parallel a heightened sensitivity or awareness of the characters involved in the film. In the first colour tapes I saw, on the other hand, I was very unmoved by the fact that they were in colour. I thought it certainly was something for a black and white tape to come up against, but I’d seen hundreds of colour films before Antonioni’s and that was the first time I saw colour could be a vehicle as much as a fact. I was in the process of making Bad Girls when I switched into colour, mostly because of accessibility to the equipment. But when Bad Girls switches into colour, nothing much is enhanced.
Peggy: Yes, it not like Dorothy arriving in Oz.
Colin: Right. So I started to think about how to use colour. Sets in video don’t look like they’re supposed to look, which is why in He’s a Growing Boy, She’s Turning Fourty, which is my first full colour tape, I use mostly black and white sets and blow-ups, because I want to reduce the colour to where it really mattered. I did try to keep the tape mostly in black and white and accentuate some developments in colour, particularly the last shot, which is very loaded with colour. The camera is set askew. So it’s more magenta. So that was the first tape where I tried to manipulate colour really consciously. And with Dangling I wanted to make it as lush as possible, feeling that colour can do that, that it’s a real element to work with.
Peggy: Do you think my dissatisfaction with other people’s transitional tapes is that they haven’t realized that they’re transitional? They haven’t taken responsibility for the colour, but are simply using…
Colin: I think that’s really possible. Why just accept colour as a fact, because it is an emotive force and why not try to use it as one? It can be specifically directed, consciously, as opposed to unconsciously.
Peggy: But what about the other issue which is implied by colour, its commercial reference? It seemed to me that the reason you didn’t move into colour earlier, when you could have, was that you were interested in the elegance and intimacy of the black and white, and the kind of classic look of it. Classic photographs are in black and white and classic television is in black and white. You specifically were not interested in the commercial relationship to be brought to anyone’s attention. Now with your move to colour, you’re using colour for its emotive appeal. And are you still just ignoring the reference to television?
Colin: No, of course not. A good example when I showed tapes recently at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. The first tape I showed was black and white, The Woman from Malibu, when I was ready to show the next one, people asked, “Oh, is it in black and white too?” “Oh good.” There’s an expectation of colour now anyway, and I think it’s hard to get away with shooting a black and white tape. You feel the same in movies these days…
Peggy: That’s not really the question I asked, because what you’re talking about is audience appeal, about audiences that are not looking very well. They’re simply sitting and waiting to e pleased. On that level colour has made the work more accessible, so colour can be a ploy to reach people who wouldn’t otherwise be bothered. Which is certainly good politics, because everybody’s talking about enjoyment. Everybody’s a consumer, and we’re a long way from conceptual art. But what I was really asking was another sort of issue, which is, is commercial television being addressed directly or indirectly by the kind of work you’re doing now? It seems to me you’re moving towards the possibility of the work not being seen as capital A art, but being seen as very unusual television.
Colin: I think that’s true. I guess what some video is doing right now is borrowing the best of the sensibilities of film and television, but there’s a grittiness still about video that talks about television. It’s still not as seductive as film, still not as palatable.
Peggy: Do you think that either consciously or unconsciously you’ve been working towards the possibility of broadcast with these recent works?
Colin: I can’t say. For about three years, at least, I’ve had an interest in reaching an audience outside the specific art gallery audience, which never seems to grow very much. That’s why I chose to make and show Bad Girls in a bar (the Cabana Room, Toronto). So what if they’re there for the band, ,they’re still there for the tape too, whether they want it or not. I really felt that I expanded my audience and got very different kinds of reactions to what video was, from that audience. The response was both good and really bad, everything from beer bottles at the screen to people shouting “turn it off,” to standing-room-only and everyone saying, “Sshhh, there’s a tape on.” There were a lot of musicians there who generally never went to galleries to see tapes, who liked the motion of the tape. I tried to keep it short, and, you know, Perils of Pauline. In general, nobody said they were bored… For a long time artists said, “No, video isn’t television, it’s video,” and I thin people are reconsidering that. I certainly am. I’ve always viewed broadcast television as not undesirable but impenetrable, and I’ve also seen we wouldn’t be given the chance to work creatively in a studio situation. I think that a lot of videotape being produced now cannot be just popped onto broadcast television and sit there very comfortably. But I think, yes, given the chance to do a production for broadcast television, my work would change, my ideas would necessarily alter in that process, and I’d love to have the chance to do it. So obviously I think something good could come of it.
Peggy: I wonder how the issues to be addressed will change as it becomes possible to access that audience? In Toronto, the narrative work is different now. I think there’s something different happening.
Colin: I think so too. For one thing, it’s a much broader cultural collage that’s being contained within the work. A lot of earlier video talked about the system of art and was quite formalistic. Even within narrative I think it kept addressing art issues, whereas now the work is much more out in the realm of common experience. Characters are identifiable now as real people.
Peggy: We are assuming that video will not become television but will continue to be something evidently different and acknowledged to be different. If you’re not longer going to be simply closed-circuit, what are the properties that you will try to bring out in your work?
Colin: The idea of intimacy hasn’t been explored in television. It would have to be altered in the way it would be done, but it could be very startling once it started to work, to be used in work that’s being broadcasted, not as video art but as broadcast television. I think much more complex ways of getting a narrative across could be used, rather than the particularly linear way that most television works right now. I would assume that there’s a large number of people out there who can withstand a more complex layering of ideas… Watching television like the Olivia Newton-John special, I think that if an audience can be whisked around visually that fast in four minutes, then think if it had some content in it! Artists’ initial response to broadcast television has been, “Oh, great, we can put our work on and convert the unconverted.” Not true. Or they’ve thought, “Okay, well to be on broadcast television you have to sell out and become like television.” I think that’s not true either. Television doesn’t need that, it has enough people doing that already.
Peggy: After Dangling and Conundrum Clinique, how would you see the next step if you were moving towards broadcast as your next possibility?
Colin: What I’m specifically interested in doing right now is almost completely non-linear kinds of pieces, quite short, like ten to fifteen minutes. Maybe even five minutes. I’d like to produce work that’s about the thought process of producing it. Wouldn’t that possibly have an equal although different kind of impact than one which is all tidied up and strung out to be completely comprehensible? Our perception of the world is not a tidy linear process, and I want to investigate that. My idea of the next tape is hat it may be ten minutes long with six different characters who don’t relate to each other in any way. Seeing what happens.
Peggy: Do you see other people looking at similar notions?
Colin: I don’t know. In Rodney Werden’s Yes (36 minutes 1981) there’s that disassociative, discontinuous… there’s a huge cast in that tape that seems to have nothing to do with each other at all. It’s bound by the thread of an underlying narrative. I think that’s a real transition point for Rodney’s work, it’s much more complex a narrative style than we’ve been used o. He’s the first example that springs to mind.
Peggy: But you’re not conscious of being part of a trend?
Colin: No. But I don’t think you ever are, then suddenly four people come out with tapes simultaneously with new ideas that are closely related.
Peggy: Nevertheless, to know that there’s a not a conscious sharing of these issues is significant because it means that everyone’s going ahead by guess and by golly.
Colin: I agree with you that there’s some kind of turning point happening in video right now. Just at the point that video may be approaching an extremely broad sort of audience, it’s also becoming much more sophisticated and complex and demanding in another kind of way… But in just the last three months, people have been coming from Pay-TV down to Charles Street Video, and looked at tapes. “Never seen anything like this before, I rally like it, don’t know what we can do with it.” Even that is such an unexpected response. They’re responding. So of course it’s going to influence people’s thinking.