Beauty and Dissonance

The Moment of Making

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?

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

**James Richards at Wysing Arts.**
Photo Ric Bower, 2014

Summer 2014

**(Detail) Rosebud, James Richards 2013, HD Video, 12 minutes, 57 seconds.**
Image courtesy of the artist; Cabinet, London and Rodeo, Istanbul

speak much during the collaboration, just exchanged material. I enjoy that, the looking and thinking in conjunction with another, perhaps all the more pure without language, with the material itself and its modifications becoming the dialogue. We were invited by Thomas Beard who, along with Ed Halter, runs an independent cinema in New York called Light Industry, to make a work for a day of screenings. Steve’s 20 years older than me, a different generation. We exchanged short emails and swapped material. I appreciate him as a fan of his work, but in working with him, I wanted to show off to him to be honest, not my technical finesse, but show him a sensibility and atmosphere, a shared way of engaging with found material...

DL: Demonstrating your understanding of his work?

JR: Yes. So, I’d send him things, he’d return them manipulated in strange, perverse ways. We posted data DVDs, weird to think now, but we didn’t use the Internet. It was slower, but ideal, making us think more, with a sense of expectation because of the interest in one another’s work. It was casual too, but it had energy, as it wasn’t necessarily for public show. Part of the process was the combination of engagement with methods of communication and the technology we used. Built into it was the anticipation of waiting for new material to arrive, and then working separately on these clumps of stuff. The whole process hung together on the ease and slipperiness of sampling from different formats, and shows the ease with which you can force and cut things together, with fluidity, slickness. It’s crude too — but in a good way.

DL: What material were you using for this exchange?

JR: Older material. Things I’d tried to put in my own work but not found a place for. It was a chance almost to clear the decks. By giving it to Steve to interpret, that process resuscitated it.

DL: Can you tell us a bit about how you’re working here at Wysing.

JR: I am in my studio day in, day out. It’s great to have the conditions for making work to match the level of exhibition; for instance, editing on a large screen, with great speakers. I haven’t had the location for this before now. Also, it’s good to have some un-fragmented time, with no teaching, away from the city, no juggling of the day. Here, it’s very open; one does less physically, so more is able to happen in the studio.

DL: It’ll be interesting to see how that might affect the work.

JR: Yes, it’s too early to know exactly the rhythm of what I’m making here at the moment. It’s a commission for a video art biennial in Geneva, and I’ll be showing it at Cabinet Gallery, London. Visually, it feels quite luscious though, photographic. The imagery is a mixture of my own footage and some material from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin — radiographic, x-ray imaging of oil paintings. Rosebud, was very unmusical, rasping and in a vacuum. The work I’m doing for this film’s soundtrack, though, is all about harmony and emotion, in that there’s little diaretic sound. I’m composing and then using samples of composed sections; it’s harmonically set so that I can then intercut the separate pieces. The pieces all cohere musically and they are harmonious rather than dissonant.

Summer 2014

DL: You mentioned dissonance in your earlier work. Cerith Wyn Evans used the term ‘spot-off-ness’, and it’s something I’m interested in in your work — the gaps, doubt, fragility.

JR: It’s the pleasure to be found in something being wrong. Not in a punk way, not subversive, self-conscious — rather, not quite fitting, not coming together. I like things that sit just at the right edge, between feeling precise and arbitrary…

DL: ...that make you rethink your assumptions, a moment of doubt.

JR: Yes, and it’s important for me to build into a composition those moments of beauty interspersed with dissonance. And also a shifting between highly-processed or enriched material and matter that feels, well, more matter-of-fact. So, some imagery and sound is manipulated, some tempered, making a piece that nudges in different ways.

DL: You curate as well, don’t you. Is that approached in a similar way to making work?

JR: For me it’s all coming from the same pot. I’ve curated various group shows, screenings and kind of compilation mix-tapes of found and curated material. Last year I put together the exhibition If Not Always Permanently, Memorably at Spike Island, Bristol and this year I convened the exhibition Alms For The Birds at Cabinet Gallery, London. I’m excited by a new opportunity at Whitechapel I’m doing next year, working with the VAC, a Russian public collection. It’s a finite resource, but I have complete freedom as to how to curate a show with the collection, how to present and frame it. So, there’s a discipline to it. I’m able to use my own work, in addition, so perhaps working with audio and light, the setting; perhaps, I might stage a grand anti-climax. I don’t know yet.

**(Detail) Images used in The Screens, James Richards, 2013, 35mm slide projection, four sets of eighty DIA slides (320 slides in total)**
Image courtesy the artist; Cabinet, London and Rodeo, Istanbul

DL: You’ve not mentioned the Turner Prize yet.

JR: I was nominated for Rosebud and that hasn’t been shown before in the UK, so that’s there. It’s a great opportunity to show work to a broad audience, and show it very precisely. I’m also showing The Screens, a recent 35mm slide installation which features projected images from a theatrical make-up manual, and Untitled Merchandise (Lovers and Dealers), snapshots of lovers and art dealers of artist Keith Haring transposed on to souvenir blankets that usually depict members of the US military. —CCQ

James Richards was shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2014. He was also a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award 2014 as well as the ars viva Prize 2014/15. In 2015 exhibitions of his work will be staged in Munich, Germany and Bergen Kunsthalle, Norway. As a curator he is currently working on exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London and Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin. More information about his work can be found via Rodeo gallery rodeo-gallery.com and Cabinet Gallery cabinet.uk.com For more information about the residency programme at Wysing Arts Centre visit wysingartscentre.org

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