ARTROCKERS
Séances with Nick Cave, recapturing the great concerts of psychiatric hospital history and mixtapes for the social networking generation; the art world according to Forsyth and Pollard.
It’s almost a courting tool of years gone by, a knick-knack you might find in Grandma’s hope chest in decades to come, something that exists now but through changing media has lost its true essence.
The mixtape used to be the ultimate way to say ‘I really like you’, a personalized musical message that at once imparted your own pristine taste in music and hinted at how you truly felt about the recipient. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard gave each other many mixtapes while they attended Goldsmith’s art school in London in the early nineties. Through these tapes they discovered a shared interest in music and art, which has been intertwining throughout their lives and careers ever since.
The work of Forsyth and Pollard has been packaged for the public in print, live performance, radio waves and mp3’s, and more than anything through the medium of video. They have staged a faithful reenactment of Ziggy Stardust’s farewell concert over two sold out nights, dressed up as Robert Smith and Souixsie Souix, lead an unassuming audience on a paranormal journey and most recently have made Nick Cave & the Bad Seed’s new video. Although they also sport a number of projects that aren’t strictly centered on rock ‘n’ roll it is the mainstay of their work and does seem to seep into everything they do. Perhaps mirroring their relationship and how they bonded over music, the Precious Little series of videos shows people talking about love, loss and music. They add to the series on occasional travels, with Auckland being their most recent installment last year.
“The project was really very much about mixtapes, and the culture of tape exchange that we’d both grown up with in the eighties and early nineties. We’d made a number of works prior to this that had drawn on our own personal exchanges, such as “I’ve built my world around you” (1995) and “I love you to the moon and back (which was made for a show at Tate Modern in London in 2001) and the more these works were seen and people talked to us about them, the more we realised of course that our experiences were far from unique. These intimate little exchanges were going on all around us, all the time. So we began finding ways to get other people to share their stories. This series for us is very much about portraiture. Each film is a portrait, and also very much a self-portrait.”
One their most ambitious works has been a re-filming of a cult video they discovered of rockabilly band The Cramps performing at a Californian psychiatric hospital in the late 70’s. In fact a number of their projects update or remake older work by other artists. They explain: “There’re a few reasons that working in this way became interesting to us. Partly, of course, it was a progression of the work we had been doing with live re-enactments and music (such as A Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide). Put simply, we’re trying to discover something about now by re-channeling the past. With those early live art events there was something remarkable and liberating about situations that are in some way based on the past – a kind of reality warp happens – and this opens up a space for the audience to participate in the ‘now’. We’ve never really been interested in uncovering anything about the original event through these projects, although of course the process of making them requires us to undertake a huge almost forensic level of research during which we do of course delve into the past, uncovering things along the way.”
And that brings us to Nick Cave. After filming a radio session of Grinderman, Nick Cave asked them to make the new Bad Seed’s video, Dig Lazarus Dig!!! They jumped at the chance to work with the tall sombre one and found the collaboration so fun they’re signing up for their next video too.
“The first thing we did was a series of little video teasers which are based on a Victorian séance. The next was the promo video for the single, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! There’s a pounding groove reminiscent of the Velvet Underground and you can just hear the spirit of seventies New York. The séance videos came much more out of a discussion. Nick had read a biography of Harry Houdini, who was a legendary de-bunker of Spiritualists and fake mediums and some of that had influenced his writing on the album, so we had some shared interests around that area. It was also just fucking funny, the idea of having a séance with Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.”
The work of Forsyth and Pollard has been packaged for the public in print, live performance, radio waves and mp3’s, and more than anything through the medium of video. They have staged a faithful reenactment of Ziggy Stardust’s farewell concert over two sold out nights, dressed up as Robert Smith and Souixsie Souix, lead an unassuming audience on a paranormal journey and most recently have made Nick Cave & the Bad Seed’s new video. Although they also sport a number of projects that aren’t strictly centered on rock ‘n’ roll it is the mainstay of their work and does seem to seep into everything they do. Perhaps mirroring their relationship and how they bonded over music, the Precious Little series of videos shows people talking about love, loss and music. They add to the series on occasional travels, with Auckland being their most recent installment last year.
“The project was really very much about mixtapes, and the culture of tape exchange that we’d both grown up with in the eighties and early nineties. We’d made a number of works prior to this that had drawn on our own personal exchanges, such as “I’ve built my world around you” (1995) and “I love you to the moon and back (which was made for a show at Tate Modern in London in 2001) and the more these works were seen and people talked to us about them, the more we realised of course that our experiences were far from unique. These intimate little exchanges were going on all around us, all the time. So we began finding ways to get other people to share their stories. This series for us is very much about portraiture. Each film is a portrait, and also very much a self-portrait.”
One their most ambitious works has been a re-filming of a cult video they discovered of rockabilly band The Cramps performing at a Californian psychiatric hospital in the late 70’s. In fact a number of their projects update or remake older work by other artists. They explain: “There’re a few reasons that working in this way became interesting to us. Partly, of course, it was a progression of the work we had been doing with live re-enactments and music (such as A Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide). Put simply, we’re trying to discover something about now by re-channeling the past. With those early live art events there was something remarkable and liberating about situations that are in some way based on the past – a kind of reality warp happens – and this opens up a space for the audience to participate in the ‘now’. We’ve never really been interested in uncovering anything about the original event through these projects, although of course the process of making them requires us to undertake a huge almost forensic level of research during which we do of course delve into the past, uncovering things along the way.”
And that brings us to Nick Cave. After filming a radio session of Grinderman, Nick Cave asked them to make the new Bad Seed’s video, Dig Lazarus Dig!!! They jumped at the chance to work with the tall sombre one and found the collaboration so fun they’re signing up for their next video too.
“The first thing we did was a series of little video teasers which are based on a Victorian séance. The next was the promo video for the single, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! There’s a pounding groove reminiscent of the Velvet Underground and you can just hear the spirit of seventies New York. The séance videos came much more out of a discussion. Nick had read a biography of Harry Houdini, who was a legendary de-bunker of Spiritualists and fake mediums and some of that had influenced his writing on the album, so we had some shared interests around that area. It was also just fucking funny, the idea of having a séance with Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.”
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