Stuart Comer

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We’ve been in conversation off and on—I contributed to the catalogue for Signals: How Video Transformed the World, and then we also just catch each other here and there and have some good conversations about histories of experimental film and video in various contexts. Maybe you can talk a bit about Signals?

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MoMA has a deep and long connection both to video and the history of art and technology in general. Many of you will have heard of E.A.T., Experiments in Art and Technology; that started in the Garden at MoMA in 1960 with Homage to New York, a machine performance by Jean Tinguely. A few years after that there was an exhibition curate by Pontus Hultén called The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age in 1968, Shortly after that Kynaston McShine did a show called Information; both of these shows featured video in its earliest forms. Then in 1974, there was a major conference at MoMA called “Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television.” That helped to establish the field of video as we know it. Fast forward five decades; Signals will be the biggest survey of video in the history of the museum. But it's not ”Video Art 101”. It is a surgical slice, looking at how video and its development as an artform parallels the development of an explosion in global telecommunication technologies. And so, it considers how video has been used to literally construct societies, but increasingly also to tear them down. To go from a very utopian moment of Marshall McLuhan-fueled “Everything is possible,” to the dystopian moment that we're in now, one of Tiktok wars, memes, and disinformation. We're trying to make sense of this by looking at a history of artists working through these questions. One of the big questions that comes up in Aria’s brilliant essay for the exhibition catalogue—is the basic question of representation: what are the stakes of the image when it is no longer a static thing, but something that exists in a network? It's a fluid, constantly shifting and evolving situation that can be sent, rather than just an image; something that is connecting people daily, hourly, by the minute, but similarly alienating those same people. [Aria], you tackle very directly the question of police surveillance technologies and how artists have increasingly questioned the stakes of what those technologies are producing. And we're both obsessed with Peter Gidal, who seems to have nothing to do with any of that. But yes, we both brought our copies [of Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966-2016].

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I will just say that one of the things that was so great about getting to write that text, and just the conversations that we've had in passing, is the way that you talk about film and video. You hold together the question of representation and the structure and infrastructure of film. We've talked about circulation in the digital age, but then also going back to people like Gidal, and we'll talk more about him, who think structurally about film as a medium, alongside what was on screen. I think with this text that I wrote about police brutality videos, I was trying to approach them structurally rather than in terms of the purely ethical content of the videos—trying to understand how to bring the history of Structural/Materialist film into the present. In terms of new technologies: what is the material of cinema now? Because it's not film stock, but zeros and ones or whatever. Also, in terms of a racialized history of cinema: How do you incorporate politics as material or, let's say with Blackness in particular, when there are Black bodies in the frame, how does that relate to a materialist understanding of moving images?

Peter Gidal has been a major inroad for me into trying to square away all those questions. If you're not familiar, he is a still-living, relatively active film theorist and filmmaker who was affiliated with the London Film-Maker’s Co-op, now called LUX. This book [Flare Out] contains texts from 1966 to 2016, so it was a far-reaching body of work. He wrote a lot about materialist cinema, but in a way that I think really tried to incorporate tactics that made room for narrative cinema as well, maintaining an understanding that filmmakers will continue to want to include people and stories on screen even when thinking theoretically about cinema. Gidal asks, “How do we do that?” And there's a lot of controversial stuff in there. He wrote this piece on the representation of sex on screen, which maybe you can describe, Stuart. It’s mostly a Marxist-feminist argument taking on British feminist film theorists from the 1970s, Laura Mulvey and others. But his argument is kind of “just don’t show women and don't show sex.”

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He was always grumbling about the established film journals. In the essay that Aria was just talking about, he basically says that there should be no representation of women on screen because it only amplifies the patriarchy. But then, of course, he's writing this at the exact same moment that there was a show at the Hayward called Film As Film, in which only one woman—Lis Rhodes—was included to represent the entire history of experimental cinema. Interestingly, both Lis and Peter were filmmakers, but also film programmers, and were actively curating and showing films at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op. And since we're around the corner from Anthology Film Archives, I think it's important to stress that as Anthology was considered the epicenter of the new American cinema, the London Film-Makers’ Co-op was, in some ways, an attempt to do something similar in England. But it was also kind of opposed to the American model, which they thought was very romantic. In fact, while everyone here thought they were super rigorous, in London they decided to be even more rigorous. And ironically, Peter was American, but had relocated to London. I think part of that rigor was about constantly questioning the stakes of representation. But in the end, I think it's a really flawed argument to say that not representing women at all will lead to their liberation, which is clearly tricky.

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It's funny, because when I first read that text in 2017—which was probably one of the first things I read of his–it was that the moment in the art world when people were constantly discussing “refusal,” “representation,” “refusal of representation,” blah, blah…especially when it came to questions of Blackness. And I was really, really trying to figure out how to evade representation. And so, at the time, I was like, “Yes, Peter Gidal, you got it.” I was like, “Okay, I'm going to make videos where it's about Blackness, but doesn't show any Black people”—or something like that. But then, in the years since, I've found that fundamentally for me—even beyond the politics of it, this anti-representational approach just gets very boring. This is something I also think about when it comes to the question of structuralism. So many people associate structuralism in film with gaps and long boring shots, or flicker films. And it’s true, a lot of it is, but then there’s a need to bring that conversation into the space where you're dealing with actual stories and people, and asking, how do you commute those questions into that territory?

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I think the other thing about the London Film-Makers Co-op, it’s important to stress, is that they were using phrases like, “the space of reception,” or “the politics in the room.” It was never just the image on the screen or the projector that was at stake, but it was literally the people in the room, the beam and the space that connected the screen to the projector, and it was a network of social conditions going on. And I think Peter was always trying to get at that. So again, the London Co-op was unlike Anthology. At the time it was arguably the only film club in the world incorporating both the production and the distribution—the entire apparatus—making a film and distributing it was brought under one roof. They even had optical printers, so that they could be more experimental with how the films were printed. That led to theories that could uphold this materialist approach. So, they were very modernist films in a way, but to now look at that from the point of view, as you said, of this very digital moment where celluloid basically has disappeared, the materiality of making a moving image is so radically different and so connected to communication and to phones and to other kinds of devices. So, this [points to iPhone in hand] is now the studio.

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This is kind of tangential in a way, but do you feel like you've read any really, really good writing about that question? Something I’ve had trouble with in my attempts at research around these topics is finding work on the fate of those kinds of practices, or like what materialist approach might be after the internet. Erika Balsom might be considered someone who does this….

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I think it’s happening in conversations like this one. Which is why I was excited to talk to you, because it's in real time. And again, that's something Peter also talked about—the “real time” of the production of the film and the presentation of the film being in sync. And that was also coinciding with roughly the beginning of video as a medium, which of course was very different from cinema because you had live feeds, and instant playback, things that radically changed what cinema could be or what the moving image could be. But I think Erika Balsom is a really key curator and writer, she just did an important show with Hila Peleg at the House of World Cultures in Berlin that looked at a deep history of feminist filmmaking. She's also looked at the question of distribution, which I think is super important. We're clearly in a moment when things can easily be distributed digitally or electronically. But there are all kinds of protocols and legal issues that get in the way of any kind of open distribution system.

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Yeah, I asked Peter Gidal once over email, “What do you think about like materialist film after digital?” and he was just like,” I don't have any thoughts about that.” Which I think is cool. He's like, I'm not interested.

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I think it's important that he worked a lot with Malcolm Le Grice. Malcolm was a key figure in the Co-op and went from being a hardcore celluloid filmmaker to only wanting to show his work digitally and on video. He and Hollis Frampton both were writing about the shift to video early and enthusiastically. I think Peter was not totally interested in that. But he was also really against Screen, the journal that promoted a lot of the psychoanalytic film theory in Britain at the time—Peter always had his issues with that. With thinkers like Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen.

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Was it a debate about the psychoanalytic approach, or was it more social beef?

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In a minute I will find the exact quote— it is really funny when he was slamming Screen. I think he felt that the journal reduced things to a sort of representational regime that he was not interested in. And maybe just to skip ahead a little bit—because I was part of a conference two weekends ago at Yale about Steve McQueen—I've always thought that Steve's work was indebted to Gidal. Steve spent a lot of time going to the Co-op, I'm sure he encountered Peter probably many times. And there are these unexpected connections: John Akomfrah and Steve will both tell you how important Derek Jarman was to them. And Derek and Peter also had debates. But by the time Jarman makes Blue, which is an abstract monochrome film addressing his AIDS-related illness and imminent death, it actually has everything to do with what Peter was trying to do all along in terms of evacuating the film frame from any image, and there was no representational image in a lot of Gidal’s films. So, he was really trying to push against this idea that film had to represent in a literal way. Steve just made an incredible new work—I think it's only been shown in Milan to date— called Sunshine State. It's about his father, who had emigrated from the Caribbean to Florida to pick oranges, and then encountered a whole series of anti-Black racist abuses that are detailed in a monologue that Steve narrates in the piece. It's a two-screen projection. But then he also includes outtakes from Al Joleson’s The Jazz Singer, which was, interestingly, the first “talkie” film, certainly a major landmark in the history of sound and cinema. I think Steve's most important innovations often revolve around how much he's done with the importance of sound in video installation. His work never prioritizes only the image—he's extremely attentive to sound. But then there are these incredible moments where, again, to your point about structural cinema and flicker films, there's a lot of structuralist approaches being used in this new work—particularly in his use of the black frame and the clear leader, the space between, and the operation of how a flicker film is made—in which take on racial associations. And so, to think about Blackness, quite literally, as a space of both possibilities, but also representation as violence. There are incredible moments with two giant suns; light almost becomes a source of violence in the work. Maybe this connects to your essay, where you're talking about, for instance, American Artist’s amazing My Blue Window. I don’t know if you want to talk about that piece, but to think about Steve’s work and American’s work together feels really interesting.

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Definitely. The work that you're talking about is from an exhibition My Blue Window, which was at the Queens Museum a few years ago. The work itself is, I think, just titled 2015. It's a video that basically is a dashcam feed that has the interface like predictive policing on it, and it's kind of scanning the street. There are no humans present or visible action, but it's registering crime all around. It’s this weird window into the technical eye of predictive policing as well as, in theory, the physical positioning of an officer during the search and destroy phase, let's say, of policing as a larger operation. One of the things talked about in the materials around the video when it was originally exhibited was the idea that it produces an identification with the police officer, because you're in this first person POV, which leans very heavily on this psychoanalytic approach to cinema where if you’re where if the you’re where the camera is, and the camera is where this person, the officer, is, generally. But in this video, there's also this alienation effect; unless you’ve ever interacted with predictive policing’s application, the information conveyed via the interface between you and the outside world you're navigating in first person is complete nonsense. And further, what the application is saying, denoting a threat in the landscape outside, very clearly doesn't match up with what you're seeing. So, in the text I try to use 2015 as a starting point to unravel how we talk about what video content around policing is meant to do—the idea that when we see civilian video that's taken from first person POV, and if an officer's coming at someone that we should have obvious ethical obligation to identify with that person. But often when it enters public discourse, as we know, there is a very strange inability for people to make that automatic identification. Also with 2015, I tried to use Harun Farocki’s concept of the “operational image,” wherein there are certain kinds of images that are not representative of or don't portray artistic process, but rather enter into a larger process. So one of the arguments of this very, I think, convoluted essay was that police brutality clips—not necessarily what American Artist is replicating in that work, but what we see in vernacular media around policing, of the police brutality event—the actual altercation between a person and a police officer—is part of a larger operation that is the process of establishing and verifying certain kinds of power—this process includes everything from the “search and destroy” images of predictive policing to images of riots that further enrage and radicalize the public. The kinds of power that are established through these operations participate in the process of both so-called “justice” and anti-black violence. So, it's not really a representative image. Then there's a bunch of stuff in the essay about riots and set talking about VSA, but that's maybe more tangential.

For me this was also a really long, weird process, because I was invited to write the text in 2019, and then the MoMA show got pushed because of COVID. In 2019 I said I would write about police brutality clips. I thought I’d figured it out, doing a structuralist film thing with them. And then Summer 2020 happened and it was suddenly even harder to do that. There were things I wrote that even you and Michelle Kuo probably never saw. This stuff was much more embedded, more man on the street style writing.

Part of the reason I was compelled to attempt writing about this stuff in the first place was that tendency in dealing with work with a structural thrust made by black artists like Steve McQueen's—people are still like, “yes, images of Black people.” There's that pure representational conversation. I became sort of obsessed with the idea that some more formalist or structural approach to the police brutality clip, as a typology that we constantly interact with, could describe why it doesn't work politically and culturally in the way that I think we've kind of come to expect it to, in terms of getting us closer to justice in some way. At the very end of the essay, I’m like, “I'm actually not sure if it doesn't work.” Because obviously a lot happened in the years since I started writing that did shift conversations, but it doesn't mean that everything's better. But the way that people understand how these videos move might be different.

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There’s three directions I want to go in, but let me just try to think about the best way. I'm thinking a little bit about when I started at the Tate and I felt really strongly that museums by and large were not championing histories of experimental film at all, or even video. MoMA has obviously had robust film programs since the 1930s. But by and large, it's been a lacuna in museums. But then as I got further into trying to do a lot of programming to make this history more visible, I began to realize who's not in that history. And certainly, the Black subject—or the Black filmmaker, for that matter—was rarely in the history that we're being told. In your essay, you get on to the question of speculative histories, and what would that history look like if we addressed it strategically. You also talk about Handsworth Songs, and John Akomfrah of Black Audio Film Collective. I remember in 2011, there were race riots in London. And within 24 to 48 hours, we turned around a screening of Handsworth Songs at Tate. For me, it proved the power of cinema—not just the film, but how important it is to have an audience, to have this opportunity to have a collective moment around an important piece like that in such a charged moment—and it was sold out in two minutes. There were two BBC journalists in the audience, who were challenged by members of the audience. It became this incredible debate. The film was broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4 in the 1980s. Getting back to this question of distribution and where does cinema now lie, with laptops and all the rest of it—a key point that you make in your essay is about the difference between evidence and speculation. You're talking about American Artist’s work, which is purely about a speculative technology that is repeating implicit bias and models of anti-Black racism that we all know all too well from police behavior, but the fact that we now have a dashboard modeling entire methodologies of patrolling based on it is really terrifying. But you also talk about this one court case to which an animation is brought forward as evidence.

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That was kind of actually the thing that made me finally start to put my thoughts down on paper. For years, I was like “I think there's an essay about police brutality videos I want to write, but I don't know.” And then the Laquan McDonald trial happened. There's dash cam footage of McDonald’s murder the was widely circulated; so that we’ve actually seen the event. We have the record of it. And then when the officer went to trial, the defense made a 3D animation of the event from the subjective account that the police officer gave verbally. You look at this animation and this figure crosses like 50 feet in three seconds, because the officer was like, “He ran at me!” The defense actually entered this into the court record as evidence. Of course, it didn’t work. But it was alarming that a court of law would consider for even a second that an animation produced from someone’s subjective account could stand against video evidence. And then there are these details, like in real life McDonald was wearing blue jeans and maybe like a blue sweater, in the animation, he's in all black and like twice as tall. It's a bizarre warping. I got really into the proposition that we were in a moment when really, really thoroughly in the mainstream, our understanding of video or the moving image as representing reality, or being a slice of actuality in any capacity was at issue–in crisis even.

Anyway, this instability seemed like a good way into your point about computation and the American Artist piece. Another thing that I mention in the text, and that I think is a useful historical point is that it really is the same thing as the “No humans involved” categorization that Sylvia Wynter writes about in the ’90s. In the ’90s, the LAPD had a whole category—on the walkies, they used to say “It’s an NHI, no humans involved,” which meant that there was a Black man who had been apprehended by the police. This was official, technical language. Now that we have another layer of the technical apparatus of policing, computation, we find this anti-Black logic on that layer as well. It’s an issue because it displays how it's not that complicated, or it's all just part of the same operation. You've mentioned things about television—and with this we’re going way out to the other side of the field—I was reading the other Peter Wollen, “Two Avant-Gardes,” and read through all this, and I guess also because of Steve McQueen…thinking about the history of the American film avant-garde, and then the UK and European ones and the different relationships between those people and the proper like film industry, and the television industry in particular. It’s not really a question but just more like “gee, what are your thoughts on that?” And also, on the relationship between the UK American scenes, historically?

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It's interesting, because when I was an undergrad—so sometime around 1988—I took a class with John Schott. He was one of the two filmmakers who made this amazing documentary about the Robert and Ethel Scull auction in the early ‘70s, that literally established the contemporary art market as we know it—the Sculls had an important collection of pop art. And there's this legendary scene that they caught on camera, Robert Rauschenberg threatens to punch Scull, because he's watching the work he sold Scull for $500 being sold at Sotheby's for vastly higher sums. After this kind of creative documentary filmmaking, John became the executive producer for “Alive from Off Center,” which was a show on PBS that commissioned work by artists like Marlon Riggs, Charles Atlas, Trisha Brown, and Laurie Anderson. It was incredible to see this kind of work on mainstream television, primetime. At the same time like many of us, I was probably gorging myself on MTV, which actually in its earliest stages was pretty radical. Even though you could argue that it took the entire history of experimental film and made it into a commercial for the music industry, they were early on showing incredible things. Cable television in general was—especially late at night—where you could see arthouse cinema and things you wouldn't see on primetime ABC, for instance. But it was really “Alive from Off Center” that got me excited about the possibilities of TV. And then I began to learn more about what was happening in London. Channel 4, in particular, was really visionary and constructed an entire infrastructure for support for artists like Black Audio Film Collective, which would have been unthinkable in this country. When I was living in London I ended up being heavily involved with organizations like Film London that had an initiative called FLAMIN (Film London Artists Moving Image Network); if only we had that kind of support in this country. If you wanted to learn how to up the production values on your film, they would guide you through that, or they had a moving image award called the Jarman Award to recognize artist filmmakers, and they were trying to build an infrastructure for this. We're left to our own devices in this country, let’s face it, and there are pros and cons to both. But I think to this day, there still is an impulse in the television and the film industry to support experimental work. Derek Jarman really had a hard time getting his films funded and even though he was hugely well known and celebrated pretty much until he died, he had a real struggle trying to get funding. And now it's ironic that he is invoked as the emissary of experimentalism. It's kind of tragic.

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What do you think the effects of that lack of support have been? There's this debate, “where does experimental film belong?” Is it should it be or even, like in the Peter Wollen thing, subsumed into the art world and into museums, or should it have its own places—like Anthology, etc.? Where do you think we've landed in that? Like right now with where experimental video belongs, or where it is?

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It's so complicated. I used to sit on so many panels where I would have cranky, 80-year-old structuralist filmmakers saying, “You better show my film on celluloid you mother fucker!” Like really did not want their work to be digitized. Obvious reasons—you can't show a structuralist film if it's not on the celluloid strip. I mean, you can but it's not the same thing, it doesn’t maintain the integrity or intention of the work. Tacita Dean is really amazing for how hard she fought to preserve celluloid film; she was literally going to the boardroom at Kodak, like, “Save the lab, save celluloid.” And we all knew it was in vain. But it was also interesting to me that artists like Tacita were emerging at a moment when everything was clearly going super digital. You started to see 16mm projectors in every gallery and every museum, this last gasp of what that culture had been. We did an experiment at Tate where we projected Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone, alongside a version he did called Line Describing a Cone 2.0, where he tried to think about how could you make a digitally structuralist version of the film. What was so striking was the difference in light. Obviously, the film had this warm golden hue, and then 2.0 was super cold and white and digital. I hope experimental film will survive at Anthology, it will survive in museums like MoMA—we will be the only ones, at some point, who have the equipment to show it on its original format. Museums have obviously been under the microscope for many good reasons recently. But I think one alternative and more positive way to look at them is as institutions that are models of care. It’s about preservation. And you can say that's a conservative position, too—maybe it is, jury's out. But I have always wanted to fight cultural amnesia. And I don't know how we do that without museums. So, you know, it's complicated. But I think this is what's interesting, too, about doing a show about video, because the whole question of the live feed is almost antithetical to the museum, antithetical to cinema. It's not a recorded image on a loop, which then gets us on to other things, like Ian Cheng, or a lot of artists making generative art where it's not a recording, it is a digital petri dish that is self-generating constantly. And that, to me, is still deeply fascinating. And where's that going to go? I actually wanted to ask you—let's say a decade ago, when artists like Ed Atkins were really prominent, and they were using digital tools to create photorealistic, hyper-representational images. And then almost at that same moment, you had artists like Ian Cheng, where the image was almost beside the point. It was really an algorithmic system and the new communities that those algorithms were generating on-screen, that never repeated but were constantly morphing and shifting. It goes back to this question of representation and a model of representation based on the photographic image, or some sort of hyper-representational image, versus something where it really is about a system. 

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I've been kind of dealing with that, I guess. I've been doing it in this project that I'm working on now, making this hyper-realistic, simulated walkthrough of this slaughterhouse without any animals, but just the infrastructure, and working with an animator who is making it in Unreal Engine. So it could be, like, shown as a real time simulation, or a recorded walkthrough as a film, which has been a conceptual debate that we're entering into. But there’s also the question of do we want to apply Call of Duty level rendering, or hyper hyper-realistic models? I’ve stumbled into making all this simulation-based work, but I'm really against getting too fetishistic about that being a part of the process, but I’m starting to have to evaluate it. I'm finding that I’m really intrigued by the sort of hyperreal, Ed Atkins-y thing. In going through this process, it really is pushing the buttons in my brain about the image and reality, and how these things interact when you're actually making a simulated reality that can be played through. There's not a cool way to talk about it, or a theoretically robust way that is up to date with contemporary technology and politics. Baudrillard is not cutting it. At the same time, thinking off the cuff about the Ian Cheng kind of approach where it's the system that’s of interest, it kind of reminds me of the now kind of passé Hito Steyerl debate about the poor image versus high def, which really is about whether we're interested in the image as image or as object, in a way. Is it about the stuff that's happening around the thing, no matter what it looks like? Or is it about really getting the thing to look right? I don't really know. In terms of preservation, the Ed Atkins thing seems much easier to figure out how to preserve. But with the Ian Cheng, that's a surprise.

Specifically, with the Signals show, I was going to ask—just going back to the question of how to deal with new technologies. I don't remember the entire checklist, but has it been a crazy experience? Are there works that you guys aren't sure what the best way to show is, if it’s hard to get an accurate apparatus for it based on when it came from, or are there things that are on the cusp between two periods of video playback and circulation technology?

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Definitely. There are very few black boxes in the show, which is obviously atypical for a big video show. But I think one of the points we're trying to make is that this is less about immersion in a conventional sense. And, you know, Chrissie Iles, did a great show at the Whitney called “Dreamlands,” which is much more about a history of immersion. In Signals, Michelle Kuo and I are really looking at networks of distribution and forms of politics. In a lot of the work you'll see, the hardware and the apparatus are a sculptural part of the work. To that end, we do have to think about, in some cases, historical hardware and monitors, and we do have to preserve them. Thinking about everything from Net Art to NFT's and wherever we're going next–so much of that does deal with data and data sets. Which also gets us back to questions of remixing and appropriation, of course, but what I'm really excited to show is a work by Julia Scher called Information America. If you don't know her work, she's been based in Germany for many years, but she's American. I first saw her work in the Whitney Biennial, probably in the late ’80s. It used a surveillance device that would capture your image and then output it on computer paper. She had a show a few years ago at Ortuzar Projects. She's really gone deep into the question of surveillance culture, but the work we're showing is from ‘95. Already at that moment, she was not only thinking about surveillance, but data harvesting. And that's how we've gotten where we are now. I mean, Instagram is the biggest data harvesting farm imaginable. I think there’s this question too, obviously, of privacy, but just how the algorithms are really functioning to capture our data and then produce images from it. The stakes of representation, in that sense, are really dangerous and different.

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I saw the Dara Birnbaum show at Bard and was thinking about “video aesthetics.” It seems that, there's not a lot of room for a nostalgic approach to video. And I was thinking about if I were to make something that had anything to do with my childhood, it might have to relate to a different kind of screen apparatus but I wouldn't want to focus too heavily on that–showing it on a 90s-style monitor. Is there room for nostalgia? It’s not even that I think there's that much interest in the future, either. There’s kind of an obsessive present-ness to how people deal with video and moving image work, which is why I think a historical show is great—because it can lay things out.

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I look at artists like you, or Martine [Syms], or Sondra Perry, who are sculpturally using the apparatus in a way that I think Dara Birnbaum did, too. But I don't think that's nostalgic. I think that's an update to what Dara was doing; a really important update getting us to think about images not just as images, but as building blocks in an entire world that's being constructed. I would love to talk about your piece at The Hammer, too, if you feel like it. Because that was really interesting to me. And again, also back to Peter Gidal, it seemed extremely invested in Samuel Beckett, whom Gidal has written about.

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Gidal is great for Beckett enthusiasts. That work, King of the Loop was meant to be very Beckett-core; initially it was meant to be performed by four actors and situationally referenced Beckett’s Quad a bit. But because of COVID, I had to switch to just one actor and it couldn't be a live performance because we couldn't have anyone in the museum. It felt like a mess at first, but in the end allowed the work to be more structurally oriented. It was supposed to be about live feeds and theater, making real-time film, but it became more about live montage. I didn't want it to be about surveillance, but then it did feel very much about surveillance because of the way the cameras were situated and the look of the kinds of feeds I was using. Most of the video work I’d shown at this point was found imagery, or very rudimentary production. I was getting really frustrated with the aesthetic of found footage and Voiceover as a mechanism, that history. And so, I pushed myself to make something more produced—larger but more controlled.

That work almost feels like it happened in a vacuum because of COVID and shooting it in LA when, out there, you couldn’t really be in the world. Also, I didn’t finish it. The whole thing was supposed to be shot in real time with this video switcher technology–like a sporting event. I was making the montage in real-time as the actor did his stuff. But then we couldn't shoot all of it that way, because it was so labor intensive and we had really short days due to museum regulations. So, King of the Loop remains this unfinished experiment that eventually I’d like to revisit to try to understand it better, because it was a useful exercise. Though I don’t know if it ever needs to be “completed.” It might have served its purpose as a playground to work through my understanding of time. And aesthetically, it was very nostalgic. In a way aesthetically, it’s a riff on Dan Graham and, as you said, Beckett. There’s also a whiff of Tony Conrad maybe. All these shout-outs to favorites of mine. 

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Dan Graham-core.

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Yeah, exactly.

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So, we’re running out of time. I just wanted to ask one last thing that goes back a little bit to what we were talking about earlier. I've always been obsessed with monochromes and their relationship to cinema and the moving image. To some extent, it also gets back to the question of flicker films. There was one paper in the Steve McQueen conference where they were going back to the old history of Malevich, his Black Square, which more recently, we all discovered, actually has a racist cartoon underneath it. To claim a space of Blackness—there's already a very loaded art history around that concept. And then you fast forward to somebody like Hito Steyerl, who did Red Alert, which is three red digital flatscreens, and there's nothing but a red image. But it was actually a video feed. The technology is still functioning even though it's not producing a representational image. But then I'm just going back to June 2020, I remember you were one of the first people that really called out the use of the black square on Instagram during the response to the murder of George Floyd. And then Amanda Williams, a brilliant architect and artist in Chicago, did a project on the facade of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, where she was also looking at that moment, and this claim of Blackness by a large swath of Instagram users, and the swiftness of the distribution of the little black square. You know, what did that actually produce? Going back to Steve's work, which I'm still processing and I wish it was on view somewhere, to really watch it. I think the stakes are really high and how he is racializing this operation of the flicker film—this almost violent toggle between lightness and darkness. Without getting too literal about all of this, I do think the stakes are high. I know that moment already feels like a long time ago, June 2020. But at the time, you were calling it out.

AD

Yeah, the stakes obviously felt super high in that moment, but they feel high in a different way now. It's the same stakes, the same problem set, but we now are in the aftermath of it. In Summer 2020 and shortly after, for many, a “black square,” or putting a painting of a Black lady on the cover of Vanity Fair—were sufficient forms of political action. And it was just so dumb. There are some wins in some ways, but structurally, these are things I wouldn't count as wins—everyone really went representation-core. In the world of artist-theorists, people who do that work, a lot of the work of deconstructing and looking at how these things are operational and not just bad things that we can fix by being nice and respectful, has gotten lost in the mix. Even like looking at something like Arthur Jafa's Love is the Message, which has been given, in some moments, its due as a structurally-focused work—and AJ is very invested in that way of talking about cinema—the conversation was like, “Oh yeah, it's Black people!” So, the stakes still feel really high because I think after George Floyd there was a doubling down, choosing an easier conversation about Blackness than the structural one.