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Contributor:
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Babble On. | Login
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Channels: Contemporary ArtMark Lewis
Mark Lewis joins us in IMA's Nugget Factory to discuss his installation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, constant traveling, some of his favorite films, and his career as an artist and filmmaker.
My name is Mark Lewis and the title of the show is the title of the piece that I am showing is Rear Projection: Molly Parker.
The project is a film that I shot a couple of years ago using traditional 35 mm rear projection
which is the way which very often between like the '30s and '60s where in studios would place film backgrounds behind actors
to give the impression that they were like on a bus or in a car or traveling around, usually travelling shots, but often for the case of directors like Hitchcock and others
to actually give you the impression that someone might be sitting in the cafe in Buenos Aires or in London or something. This process is more or less disappeared now, but I used this process
to make a portrait of an actress, her name is Molly Parker, she is in the title of film and I just shot her in a studio
in Los Angeles, you know, using this traditional method of projecting a background that I filmed myself in Canada, and that's it.
Molly is pregnant, and she was throwing up all time we were shooting. Well, she was pregnant, she is not pregnant anymore.
I always think I don't have any idea so and the only thing I ever start with is just like a very vague, just a really vague
sense that I want to do something and it's usually based on something I have seen and what I'm doing is never really understood, at least by me,
until it's finished. So I would say that I work in the opposite, in opposite ways, of an idea artist I really don't have ideas.
I just have a sense that I like the way something is phenomenologically and that I want to try and understand how that phenomenon, whatever it is, can be transliterated
or transformed into filming language.
Well, you know, I can say, it does and it doesn't. Again going back to the, I mean I was just being a little bit cute when I said I don't have any ideas, but I also don't have a project either, so
I don't really feel that I have a project that I am pursuing. I just feel that I move from one film to another and, obviously, when you make a film or you make a new work
something you discover or something you learn about the process can affect the way you choose the next project and that just seems to be kind of natural way in which, you know, human beings live and work.
So I have no project. I don't have an ongoing project that I'm working on. I stumble from thing to thing.
The moment something put itself inside of itself is really the moment became fully modern because that's the moment it joined the kind of conditionality and materiality
of the other forms when you think about painting, montage, and photography that the idea that you could take, you could take the thing itself
and use it to produce an image of itself inside of itself and that's even if in film that happened rather unknowingly and without consciousness, it happened nevertheless so there is something special about
having two different prospect, I mean to be blunt, there is something very special about having two perspectival spaces inside the same image and that goes right back,
you know, to early modern painting when landscapes were put beyond portraits or rather I should say portraits,
something like Jan van Eyck, in very early modern painting, where the sitter itself the subject of the, the ostensible subject of the painting
is situated in relationship to a background which enjoys a wholly different compositional design and that dysfunctionalism,
if you like, which is what makes that work so fascinating and so extraordinary, is something which in Rear Projection you get, again you get this kind of foreground and background which aren't quite right...
I know what I get from it and that's about all I can judge, you know, because that sort of kind of, the working methodology
that I have anyway, which is that when I find something at least fascinating that freezes me and fixes me, you know,
that makes me stop moving. I imagine that there might be someone else who might feel the same in the same situation and that I make the work for that person, I suppose, so...
I was in Vienna last week, I watched [Unclear speaking] for the 100th time and I watched, what did I watch...
Oh and I cried, I cried a lot watching, I couldn't believe I cried. I cried a lot watching
Viyage a Italia, Voyage to Italy by Rosselini.
People always say that, you know, in press releases the thing you said about my influence from main stream and avant garde cinema, you know, I never said that, ever and I don't think,
I don't think that I have any special relationship to cinema. I think I am like any artist, you know, more or like any human being I suppose for that matter, you know,
I love film and watch it, but I don't really think that I have a special engagement with a history of cinema. If I am looking a film, it's either just out of pure pleasure
like anyone else or is to try and steal an idea, you know, like something, you know when I am desperate for something so...but basically I would say, you know, that my ideas
for art or film come out of the history of art and that includes the history of film and I don't think I have a special predisposition towards film. I mean, I'm obviously working in film,
so it's hard not to think of film when you see my films and I am not making paintings, but I have to say that the history of art
is the history that upon which my work is made. I would say that even though I am making moving pictures and that's a kind of contradiction in terms, I understand,
my biggest interest is in the history of picture making and pictorial art and how to depict, you know, how do you depict phenomenon
in the world in a way which allows a spectator, as I said before, to be able to stop in front of it
and to be there long enough that the process of thinking about what is in that picture makes them think more comprehensively
and more profoundly even if it's just a tiny little bit, about the world. And that's a sort of, I suspect, I don't suspect it's a fact,
that is the history of picture making from the first shadow on a cave wall, it's how to transliterate and experience of life into one that's removed from life
so that one can reflect back on to life again and so I don't think cinema has any special relationship in that regard, in fact you could argue that it has a lesser relationship to that
because it's never stopping and it never allows the spectator to actually look long enough at any one thing because even just constantly disappearing and being transformed
by the next picture. So, in fact, you could say that the history of cinema is a less interesting history than, say, the history of photography and painting.
I don't know. I mean, I suddenly wrote what I have been, I mean when I was a kid, I wanted to join the army, but that was a really stupid idea, you know? So
thank god, they rejected me. I think I would be an artist, that's all. I don't know how to do anything else.
What was that...?
[Unclear speaking]
Oh...
[Unclear speaking]
You will keep that in, I hope...but please, you know, title that it wasn't mine...! [Laughter]
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