Beauty and Dissonance It’s been a busy year for James Richards, who took the opportunity to step out of the limelight for a residency at Wysing Arts Centre this summer. Here he talks to Wysing’s Director, Donna Lynas, about collaborations, sources and censorship.
Donna Lynas: James, it’d be good to talk to you in terms of your time at Wysing Arts Centre, of course, where you currently have a residency; but, I’d also like to focus on the role of music in your work, the sampling of images too and the sources, and how you mix them. But, let’s start with your experience of growing up in Cardiff in the late 80s and 90s. James Richards: Well, my interest has always been in contemporary electronic music, sound and, then, some singer-songwriting from the 70s. I used to buy Wire magazine from Chapter Arts Centre, which was near where I grew up, and that’s where I also saw lots of contemporary dance, which my mum is involved in. I saw a lot of installation art at Chapter; There was a nice energy there — I remember a Mona Hatoum show particularly; seeing art like hers for the first time, or videos installed in the gallery rather than on TV or at the cinema — and then the dance programme and cross-media presentations. Another influence was spending a lot of time at the Central Library in Cardiff, where they had a new age music section, and CDs of Gong, Vangelis soundtracks, Stockhausen, John Cage, dawn chorus recordings and meditation music. That was where I started my method of making a bank of material, an archive of my own, taped from what they had there. DL: So, early on, you started to record and copy from other material and saw that as a way of making work? JR: Well, for example, jumping immediately to the present, I’m using copied visual material at the moment here at Wysing, spending 3-4 hours a day sampling and manipulating. The material I am using is drawn from a catalogue of ideas which I have amassed by gathering and looking, ripping from discs, converting
files from Blu-ray, from films I’ve watched, borrowed and bought, for pleasure, really, to bring together to make a stock, a bank. DL: Is the research continual? JR: Yes, but some of the stuff I use is my own footage; for example, for Rosebud [currently showing as part of the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain and as part of the exhibition Cut To Swipe, at MOMA, New York] that’s from film I shot myself. For the new piece Raking Light I am making here at Wysing, the imagery is from narrative films; mainstream almost, certainly not cult film, but 50s/60s 35mm film, very high quality HD transferred from 35mm film. I look for off-moments from the films and appropriate them for my own use. It’s not that different for the viewer necessarily; whether it’s appropriated or shot myself, it’s still the result of a kind of gleaning, and then composing together with other elements into a work. DL: But you set out to create a bank stock of these images? JR: At different times I’ll work with a different technology to gather a bank of clips. So for a year I bought a lot of VHS videos from charity shops and combed through those. Some years later I would have a camera on me much of the time, opening up the opportunity for the odd striking image to be captured directly from the world. It’s quite an inwardlooking practice. I record diaristically. The process is most important though, the process of generating images for my archive, that comes before any other decisions about whether they are going to be used or not. DL: So you’re always alert to a moment?
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JR: Yes, and carrying small equipment where I can — things that can gather sound or image. DL: Was Rosebud made using this way of working? You came across the images in that film when you were on a residency in Japan, is that right? JR: Yes. I found photographs with scratchedout sections in a library: censored sexual images, some from a Mapplethorpe catalogue, very famous photos. I hadn’t known about this beforehand, this active censorship. And so I filmed the images and photographed them too, not really knowing what I would do with them. I then kept the images I’d shot for about a year, and returned to them again and again, both as film and stills, mulling them over; that happens in my work often, coming back to ideas, source material from years before. There’s a passage of music in Rosebud, for example, that was something I copied from when I was sixteen . DL: Then you were in America after Japan? JR: I spent a week at the Experimental TV Centre. It’s closed now, but it was a repository of old equipment – a lot of North American universities were closing and selling off their analogue video gear, and the centre bought it up. I went and worked there with Steve Reinke, who I’ve collaborated with a bit. We experimented with a wobbulator, a video synthesiser invented by the Fluxus artist and video art pioneer Nam June Paik. DL: Is it important to you to have a dialogue with others? JR: It’s been important for my work, not because of the dialogue necessarily though. Steve, I’m a big fan of his; we didn’t
