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I interviewed Shaun Gladwell at Anna Schwartz Gallery in CarriageWorks on October 25, 2011, during the installation of his exhibition, Riding with Death: Redux. Here’s the text of our interview.

Gladwell, who has moved to London to live, talked about his parkour video titled Midnight Traceur.

This is the one that features this parkour artist, Ali Kadhim. He’s an amazing performer. He’s the star of the show really. He is unbelievable. It starts off in the day, sort of late afternoon, then it moves into these sequences within Sydney at night, so he’s doing these highly athletic performances in various (locations). [The video is slowed to about 40 per cent of real time.] He’s just so incredibly athletic that every single move is just wild. But this is maybe a different experiment to other parkour videos which are usually very fast and furious. But to slow it down, of course I’m interested in the grace, and all of the detail, and also it’s like a structural film so in every scene it flips between a steady cam which is close and chases him, and a wide shot which includes the method in which he was recorded. It flips between the two for the whole video. You always see the performer and this choreography that takes place between the performer and the camera person, and the next scene is the removed view, the wider view.

Shaun spoke about the part of the video where Ali Kadhim interacts with water features.

Yeah, this is when it gets raunchy when he goes and he deals with water. There’s  a whole section of the video where he’s sort of dealing with these water features in the city, so it’s really quite a beautiful  series of sequences. That’s actually in Darling Harbour. We’re just playing with it in a different way. The work [Midnight Traceur] features as a secret parkour tour of sydney, which I like. So the work really does track this single parkour free-runner — they call them free-runners or traceurs — through his favourite spots in Sydney.

Parkour reminds me of the movements cats make.

It’s interesting you make that reference to cats because Ali is probably the best known parkour free-runner in Australia, and they have crews like break dancers and his is called Nine Lives which I think is appropriate because I think he’s probably already spent eight doing this. But they love the cat aesthetic and one of the moves is called a cat jump.

It’s like urban ballet.

It is, it’s a good way to describe it. There’s an incredible amount of skill involved. And it’s interesting because it in a way redesigns space through performance. I always see it as like these other urban activities I’m interested in, where there’s a function that was intended for that space, where that architect or civil engineer or landscape gardener had a particular purpose in mind and there’s this other purpose that gets attached to it, kind of like a para-function, and this is what I’m interested in, this idea that they’re bringing their own interpretation of use to the space.

Shaun stopped to speak about a particular part in the video.

This is actually not parkour. Ali is involved in break dancing and martial arts as well. And he’s incredibly good at parkour and break dancing and martial arts. So these are actually break dancing moves. And this is actually a capoeira move. So it’s almost like he’s involved in all these different styles. The thing that I love about his practice of parkour is that it’s not just pure parkour, whatever pure parkour is. He’s the multidisciplinary parkour free-runner, and there are not too many around.

That’s a wild move. Basically just playing with the city. But I do love the idea that he educates younger practitioners, and they do have this history that’s borrowed from break dancing which is this idea of battling where they have rival gangs but it’s actually not fighting, it’s just testing each other’s skills. So instead of gang-related violence, they’re actually dancing with each other.

Shaun spoke about the exibition in general, which included other works.

There’s quite a lot of disorientation going on in the show. Like the body is involved in a kind of manipulation of gravity and space. [In the video titled I also live at one infinite loop] the figure is in a military aircraft and what’s taking place is it’s an aerobatic experiment. It’s actually myself in this jet fighter with this acrobatic pilot and the guy’s like a military pilot so he has this aircraft that’s capable of doing these incredible things, so as you can see the horizon starts to kind of warp and the idea of wherever north is or the sky starts to become a little bit confused.

In this work I really love the idea that the military technology is being played with somehow. It’s not being used for its intended application, which is horrific. It’s being used as a kind of play thing, or a toy. And also the cameras are fairly dysfunctional when they’re looking at each other like that. They’re recording a landscape and a figure within a landscape, but the feedback loop is in a way a distortion of the camera’s function. You can’t even control it, and the camera was never designed to go into feedback. It was always designed to just shoot a picture plane in front of it. So there were several little plays going on.

Where did you shoot the video, I also live at one infinite loop?

This one was in Australia. I did get the idea in Afghanistan [where Shaun was sent as an official Australian war artist], working with these sort of planes. But for security reasons they couldn’t [do it there]. The areas they were flying over were pretty sensitive.

This was in the Hunter Valley. We wanted a pretty green, lush landscape, but I didn’t really see the landscape because it was just kind of scrolling around underneath me and I didn’t even know which way was up. That’s the plane kind of just doing a total loop. My hand’s going to start to shake when it comes down because the gravity forces are increased. I actually asked the pilot if he could try and knock me out. We were doing this without a gravity suit which forces the blood out of your limbs. I was feeling really light-headed. I think we got up to about 5.

Were you worried about nausea?

I’m OK with that. I like throwing my body around. I made sure I didn’t have a big lunch before this took place. But the pilot is incredible. This is his office. I think it’s bizarre that he’s training himself to undergo these pressures, try to work out where the hell he is in relation to the horizon line. I like the idea that it’s quite a slow video in many respects, and there’s no editing. It’s a single, attenuated, protracted take. All the imagery around this kind of stuff we probably know from Hollywood, this Top Gun style, and the editing is fast and furious and macho and again like the parkour work there’s something really graceful about this activity.

What type of aircraft was it?

It was an L39. They all have these codenames, and that’s known as the Albatros.

Tell us about your work titled Erased Hirst, a skateboard that originally had a Damien Hirst spot painting on it.

It was a limited edition skateboard that Damien Hirst did through this company called Supreme. They deal with artist’s editions. The company asked Damien to do this skateboard, which was great; I think it was fantastic that he did it. But what I was interested in was the fact that usually skateboard graphics are erased through the act of skateboarding. I thought it would be great to erase a Damien Hirst board by the deck being used rather than being like a limited edition artwork. It almost reclaimed the board’s function, but it did connect with this moment that Rauschenberg looked at De Kooning. It’s this kind of conceptual gesture.

Did you feel you were paying homage to Hirst?

Yeah, definitely. There is this interesting relationship between the artist who is erasing and the artworks being erased. They think that for Rauschenberg to say he was paying homage to De Kooning, it’s kind of a double-edged statement. I can imagine he’s identifying De Kooning’s work because he loves it. He would have to care about it enough to want to erase it. But it’s probably closer to the oedipal complex where he’s identifying the authority of this more senior artist who was at that time King of the Kids. Once Pollock dies, De Kooning is right there in terms of abstract expressionism. Even though Jackson probably had the prime spot in terms of obliterating subject matter, De Kooning had so much presence, and Rauschenberg would have been this younger artist with a really radical relationship to the abstract expressionists.

Did you tell Hirst you were going to do it?

No, this was a really removed process. The Rauschenberg story is that he goes to the studio and asks William if he can erase one of his works. If you look closely [at Erased Hirst] you can see the dots. They’re just in the background.

Did you ride it yourself to get rid of the dots?

Oh yeah, that was part of the fun.

In London?

Yeah, and in Sydney as well. It took me a while to get all the dots off. It’s a bit of an effort. I had to really go for it. It’s similar to the Rauschenberg erasing De Kooning. You can still see a ghost image. There’s still an indelible trace, even to the point where it’s the pressure of the pencil or the mark was kind of indented into the paper for De Kooning.

Elizabeth Fortescue, January 26, 2012

The Art Gallery of NSW has announced that Dr Michael Brand will take up the reins as the gallery’s director in mid 2012. Dr Brand replaces Edmund Capon, who retired as director in December 2011 after leading the gallery for an astonishing 33 years.

I interviewed Dr Brand about his appointment on the mornng of the announcement, by phone to Geneva. This is the edited transcript.

At the time you accepted this position, the National Gallery of Victoria was also seeking a new director. For you, was it a toss-up between the two positions?

It’s obviously a matter of interest when there are two positions available. I just make a point of not talking about other people’s searches. Speaking to Steven Lowy [president of the AGNSW board of trustees] and the board of trustees, it’s clear the AGNSW is in a really interesting and good position. It’s had a tremendously stable and creative leadership from Edmund Capon, very dedicated staff, public support and a very creative and focused board. They are looking for a genuine artistic director, and they are totally committed to scholarship. That’s a great place to be. We can build on success.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles disclosed your income when you were director there [US$900,000]. Did you have to take a pay cut to come back to Australia?

Yes, there’s a pay cut involved [Dr Brand will receive $445,000 per annum, which is about $200,000 more than Edmund Capon received. Dr Brand went on to explain that he didn’t see his career in terms of a “remuneration trajectory”. Rather, he was excited about living in Sydney and bringing up his family here.]

What can you say about your plans for the AGNSW?

It’s a little bit early for me to say anything. I need to get to Sydney, talk to colleagues there, and think about it in more depth. There is a plan in process which has recently begun, they’re thinking about the future. I need to join that process. The good thing is it’s a very well run institution, very popular. I don’t mean popular in a light way. Museums are meant to be popular, and people do go there. In the short term it’s a little bit of fine tuning. There are issues with staff. There are a number of members of staff who are probably approaching retirement. It’s thinking about those issues. Then there’s the exhibition planning, acquisitions, and longterm strategic planning. One of the reasons I’m so pleased to be going there is it is a dynamic organisation. It’s continued to make great strides forward. The Kaldor gift recently is of huge significance, and in a way the gallery has to digest that gift and see what it means. I suspect one of the things it means is the gallery, perhaps more than any other gallery in Australia, is poised with contemporary art to go totally global. That collection [the Kaldor gift] allows you to look at Australian art, North American art, European art and Asian contemporary art together. Perhaps we might, for example, look a bit more closely at contemporary art from the Islamic world. We may look at Central America or Latin America. If you’re going to deal with the Asian Pacific region, you can’t forget the Americas.

They [the staff of the AGNSW] are adventurous, they’re gutsy. They’ve generated most of their major exhibitions. They’ll do a major exhibition on abstraction [Paths to Abstraction]. That takes courage.

How do you see the role of the AGNSW and the [Sydney] Museum of Contemporary Art?

Like everyone else I have huge respect for [MCA director] Liz Ann Macgregor. I’m really looking forward to working with her. There are many ways we can collaborate. But in the field of contemporary art, a little bit of friendly competition isn’t a bad thing. It’s really good for a city to have more than one institution dealing with contemporary art [to provide different viewpoints].

Have you ever lived in Sydney?

No. I’ve lived in Canberra, Brisbane and Melbourne. I know [Sydney] moderately well. That’s very exciting in itself.

Do you like the beach?

I do love the beach; I almost never get there these days. And thanks for mentioning the beach. I’m sitting here in Geneva, and I’m about to go back to freezing Toronto.

Elizabeth Fortescue, February 12, 2012

I interviewed Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, the Mexican-Canadian artist, on December 1, 2011, in relation to the exhibition of his work, Recorders: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, which has just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Lozano-Hemmer is fascinated by the technology of modern surveillance. But, for him, surveillance is not sinister. It’s just part of daily life. And he believes it’s time artists took the technology and made something poetic or strange from it. It was a fascinating interview. Here’s the edited text.

Do you have a scientific background as well as being an artist?

Yeah, I do. I have a degree in chemistry. So the nerdiness goes deep.

At what point did you decide you were also an artist?

It was kind of always there. My family were nightclub owners and they were always surrounded by musicians and artists and poets. I guess at university I started working a lot with people in the theatre, so it was actors and choreographers and writers and composers, and that’s when I decided, yeah, this is what I want to pursue.

You blended the two quite early on?

Yeah, I actually graduated from chemistry. I worked in a chemical lab for about five months or something, and then I just realised that I’m still passionate about science. I believe science can be intensely creative and uncertain and exciting and so on, but most of the excitment in science in terms of research happens only after you’ve done a doctorate and a post doc and if you’re lucky you have your own lab. At my level of chemistry it was all very much analysis, it was not very exciting. Whereas with performing arts and then visual art, I always felt there was an ongoing challenge and it was much more exciting. So I’ve forgotten most of my chemistry. The other day I found my thesis and I said ‘I wrote this?’ I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what I was saying. That’s what happens when you don’t practise.

You were involved in performance art before visual art?

Yeah, totally. I was involved in performance art, radio, experimental sound art, before I entered the visual arts. Most of my first pieces, like Surface Tension from 1992, is a large eye which follows the public wherever they go. When we first did that it was staging for a contemporary dance performance where the dancers would control all their lighting projections and sound through the use of sensors. People would think those dancers were choreographed to match the pre-recorded eye, and it was only at the end of the performance where we would welcome the public to try out for themselves the interactive modules that they would realise that eye did actually follow you wherever you went. That sense of the public being the actor, or the public activating the piece, is what led me to the visual arts. That piece later became a stand-alone projection that would sit in a museum and would pursue anyone who walked around.

I love the intersection between science and art, and politics and art. Talk about how monitored we are. How do people respond to that?

It depends very much on the person and the piece. Some pieces are much more predatorial and dark and ominous, and some pieces are much more connective. With most of my work I’m trying to underline the fact that that kind of moralistic or idealistic approach to computer survellances is misplaced.  This is not like the threat of something which will happen in the future, or some kind of Orwellian tale of control and so on. We live in a society that is now completely functioning through those mechanisms of control, and we have been for a very long time. Globalisation is itself throughout the economy, politics, everything, is based on the idea of metrics, of tracking. Credit cards build an entire data bases of who we are, where we buy, what we buy, when we buy it, and so on. Whether you’re a painter or not, the fact is your public watches eight hours of screen time a day. So we live in that technological culture. Thse kinds of cameras or surveillance mechanisms are at work at all levels. I think the challenge for artists is then to misuse these technologies to create poetic or critical or otherwise creative connective experiences which bring people together. Whenever people emphasise that dark side, I try to say ‘this is at work already’. In every museum you are tracked like this. But at the same time the opposite end of the spectrum is when people think of these works just as playful, fun, as something that is quite infantile. And while that’s also fine as an interpretation, I think it’s between these two extremes of Orwellian, dark, menacing reality, and this playful, gadgety, technological, inclusion thing, there is a whole range of different experiences which can be expressed that are along the lines of what art has always done. Like thinking about absence and presence and loss and love and connection and hormones and betrayal and alterity and otherness, more like the bigger questions. And I do think that more and more, artists are being able to explore that big spectrum of possibilities with these tools instead of going for these very common interpretations of the state of technology today.

It’s a bit like David Hockney and his use of the iPhone to make drawings. He’s grasped technology, too.

Totally. I’m actually really happy that you mention him. Because he’s an example of a contemporary living artist who has embraced these technologies in his expression of his craft. I come perhaps from the other side, from the side of engineering and science and so on. But this is also part of culture, and this is also forming part of our contemporary reality. So for me it’s interesting to separate myself from this idea of new media. You know how oftentimes people talk about “new media”? I really dislike this term because there’s nothing new about what I’m doing. We’re still talking about this stuff as though they were still new or live or original, and I find it way more interesting to make connections to the past and see ways in which my work can be related to other experiments that have already been taking place for almost 100 years, than to pretend that what I’m doing is new, than people think that the novelty of it is these devices. It isn’t. My contribution has to do more with the traditions of experimentation.

There’s a work in your exhibition which is called The Year’s Midnight, where the viewer’s image becomes obscured by plumes of smoke that emanate from the eyes in real time. It’s creepy and deathly.

(He laughs). It’s inspired by representations of St Lucy in western art. St Lucy pulled out her eyes from her orbits and handed them in a little tray to her pagan admirer who wanted to marry her and who was always praising her eyes, and she said ‘if you want my eyes, here they are, I am going to belong to God’.  [The work] finds your eyeballs with face recognition, it extracts your eyeballs and it puts them on the lower left. But it also records them. So on the bottom of the display you see the eyes of everybody who’s looked at this work before . And then out of your empty sockets comes the enveloping smoke. I don’t exactly have a prescriptive reason why that happens, but it quite perverse and dark. It’s about observation. Who is the observer and who is the observed. The status of vision in a museum. This show has something like 20 or 30 different cameras that are tracking the public so in a way the camera is this eyeball. Just a little bit of an experiment about our expectations of what a painting is or an artwork is.

It made me think of human cremation.

Totally. And if you pay attention to the detail of the smoke, the smoke is actually being generated live. It’s not a pre-recorded video that just loops, it actually is the mathematics of how smoke spreads in a room, and applied live. It’s mathematically quite complex, so I’m kind of nerdily proud of that side of that project.

All the data you collect during your exhibitions, is it stored or thrown away after the exhibition?

It just accumulates until we run out of disc space in the computers. So for example the project microphones will keep the voices of up to 600,000 different participants, and then it will just, as one more participant goes, then the very oldest recording then gets erased. So it’s a constantly changing repository of about 600,000 voices

All of the pieces are memento moris. It reminds us of our fleeting existence on earth or whatever. Something like that.

Colours will influence work?

Totally. There is a project called People on People which is the mother of all surveillance devices. 11 computers track the public and record them and  then play them back into the future. So if a school of uniformed children come to see the show, they will be recorded with those uniforms. And in the future if you walk into the room you may walk into a room that is very much teeming with children dressed in that uniform. Somebody was asking me if it’s possible to resist this surveillance. Well, one thing you could do is not go to the show. The other way to do it is to wear disguises.

But this show is really as good as people end up doing in it. It’s not like I need people to perform or wahtever. Some pieces benefit from that. But I’m hoping that it’s going to be interesting for people even if they’re not performing. Just looking is a way of participating.

Elizabeth Fortescue, December 17, 2011