.
is another reductive, 'minimal' film, though it's more complex, more subtle than it first appears. It seems to be one shot long, but if you're watching and listening carefully, you realize that it's not a single shot. A drop of water sometimes doesn't make it to the sink, for instance. And a multilayered space is created outside the frame by the soundtrack.
I made the tape first as music. I just happened to notice this drip, and started to listen to it. And it's really fantastic. So I made a tape just to listen to that sound amplified. The original tape was longer than the film. Mike Sahl, wonderful guy, a composer who at that time did a new music program on WBAI, played the entire tape on the radio. That dripping sound on the radio: fabulous! Joyce had the idea that maybe we should make a film of it.
There's an irony in the fact that
announces that it's a collaboration of two filmmakers, and yet there's precious little to collaborate on.
We just set the camera up together; and I guess we put the dish into the sink together [laughter].
has grown on me. It's a quirky film, but very interesting. If I remember the photographic piece
[1973] correctly,
has in common with it the idea that the process of recording something inevitably creates interference, which everybody normally labors to avoid, or at pretending it can be avoided. In
the many levels of interference, of distortion, become the primary subject of the work.
That's certainly true. I think you could say that representations are all abstractions from some original given, whether they're photographic or verbal or whatever.
is a Chinese box, one abstraction within another, within another . . . until you get a new form. I've always tried to make the recognition of exactly what's happening part of the experience of seeing a film. In this case, the projection of the slides of the paintings becomes the film, and I think it really
transformed into a film.
Of the films,
seems the furthest from the other arts that have fascinated you.
combines music, painting, sculpture, photography
film.
has a musical element and, at the end, references to photography and
. By
you're really into film at a very intense level with, at most, vestiges of music on the soundtrack. Then with
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you move back toward photography and with
you combine photography (in the slides) and painting and sound in a kind of artist's autobiography.
Yes. It's not exactly autobiographical, since you can't really see the paintings. It's really a redigesting or a recycling of earlier work. But it is true that other kinds of work come and go during various periods.
I think of
as autobiographical in the sense that, as a
artist, you were first a painter, then a photographer, then a filmmaker. In the film, the paintings are recorded in the slides, which are recorded in the film. Did you and Hollis ever talk about the similarities between that film and
[1971]?
Well, actually
is more similar to
[1970], a slide and tape piece, my only 35mm 'film.' It's a slide of bookshelves I had in my studio, loaded with all kinds of stuff. And the sound is a voice, my voice, discussing what's on the shelves from various points of view: what it is or what it was and where it came from. The bookshelf has many small things on it and the text is written to move your eyes around on this big image. There's a plan in the text that moves you over the whole space of the image, and through time, because some of the things and events referred to are recent and some are older. Some are art related and some are related to my so-called private life. But it is very autobiographical. And it's similar to what Hollis did in
although there's no destruction involved.
