Audio Arts: Volume 19 Nos 3 & 4

00:00:01 Mark Wallinger; installation actuality and interviewed by Jean Wainwright. Interviewed, shortly after the opening of his retrospective at the Tate Liverpool, titled Credo. Mark Wallinger talks about the past 15 years of his creative work, which has included painting, photography, video and drawing and most recently, Echo Homo, a publically sited sculpture for the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. Given the diversity of the visual languages the artist employs, the conversation explores the consistency with regard to the issues and themes raised in his work. These include: religion, ideology, class and language. He speaks about works including the video piece titled, Threshold to the Kingdom, where individuals are seen in slow motion coming through gates at London's City Airport to a sound track of Allegri's Miserere. Here Wallinger likens the formal structure and symmetry of the work to a Renaissance painting, with people moving metaphorically from a confessional state (through arrivals), to absolution, (at the exit gates). He goes on to finally speak about his interest and use of religious references which are not employed from the perspective of a 'believer' but more through an elliptical or Joycean interrogation of their underlying power, authority and influence. Following the interview, a sound extract taken from Mark Wallinger's paradoxical video Hymn (1997): Wallinger stands on a box on Primrose Hill dressed as Blind Faith breathing an oxygen helium mixture and singing There's a friend for little children. 00:32:12 Runa Islam interviewed by Jean Wainwright. Runa lslam discusses her work at the White Cube Gallery during her exhibition Director's Cut (Fool for Love) based on a Sam Shepard play (Fool for Love 1975). She elaborates on her engagement with the different characters in her two screens projection, commenting on the filmmaking process, explaining how she likes to break down the language of film and its fictional qualities. Islam discusses the truth that can be reached through role-playing, she enjoys deconstructing the point where the actors become themselves, 'there are many binaries in the work' she declares. The conversation also explores the nature of double perspectives and Islam's enjoyment of double narratives which reveal the fluid element of human nature. Please Disturb Me, a group exhibition at the Great Eastern Hotel is also discussed. Ultimately Runa Islam's work is about the absent moment recaptured, foregrounding the theme of performance. The recasting of pivotal filmic moments in works such as Tuin and Gaze of Orpheus underpins much of her aesthetic.

00:00:01 Roderick Buchanan interviewed by Zoe Irvine. Roderick Buchanan gave this interview at Dundee Contemporary Arts (noisy cafe!), on the day of the opening of his show Players. This is the first time that Buchanan has shown a major body of his work together. All the works in the show deal with different aspects of sport, from football and ice hockey to golf and roller-blading. Ten in a Million is a multiple screens video work central to the exhibition, the monitors display views from football pitches, shot from the centre, the camera rotates twice through 360° slowly revealing the peripheral, municipal landscapes from all over the world. This, with other works brings into focus the extremes of the global culture of sport with its simultaneous intensely local particularity. Peloton examines a similar territory transposed to the social dynamics of the Tour de France. A large video projection hangs in the space showing a four-hour distillation of the televised footage of the 1998 Tour. Buchanan has edited out all the shots other than the aerial views of the peloton, that is to say the main group of cyclists. In this version of events there are no leaders, none of the drama of the individual remains, this is the drama of the group. Buchanan talks about other works, what it means to see them together and Out the film commissioned by Dundee Contemporary Arts for the exhibition. 00:20:25 Marc Quinn interviewed by Jean Wainwright. Marc Quinn claims that his work is a direct result of an individual approach to his subject matter. He is interested in the corporeal, how our own bodies are formed, science and genetics. In conversation in his studio, he discusses his most recent exhibition Still Life, as well as seminal works such as Self, a sculpture made from eight pints of his own frozen blood; the result of wanting 'to start at ground zero'. In Italian Landscapes his desire was to make something that was not gory, but rather beautiful and life enhancing. Quinn discusses the irony that his Italian Landscapes are forever dead, eternal gardens frozen in silicone, yet vibrantly alive. The photographs taken from his Prada installation, his Impossible Garden of Eden, are the ultimate metaphor for the dead photographic moment. Quinn studied history of art at Cambridge and he feels that a great deal can be learnt from the subject. He discusses the fact that his marble sculptures of people, who have lost their limbs through birth or accident, are displayed, in a recent exhibition, alongside neoclassical statues provoking a dialogue. The interrogation of sculptural materials is vital to Quinn's aesthetic, the choice of marble for his work with disabled models no accident, 'marble is the material for heroes and I decided to use it because these extraordinary people, such as Alison Lepper, have conquered their inner world'. The scientific avant-garde concentrates on the 'conditions of being, and that is central to my work'.

00:00:00 Bill Viola interviewed by Jean Wainwright. Bill Viola discusses his recent exhibition Five Angels for the Millennium and Other New Works at the Anthony d'Offay gallery. He conducts the interview as a mental walk tnrougn the gallery claiming that this is the way that he conceptualises space, and that it is a 'deep' part of what he does. He talks about his techniques in making the work, why he uses high-speed film, and slows his images. Viola discusses the fundamental human emotions in such works as Man of Sorrows, and the relationship between religious panel paintings and hyper-reality. He postulates that we have many states of being and how works such as Catherine's Room engage with different concepts of time, suggesting that his current exhibition has a great deal to do with women's work and women's worlds. Bill Viola has a traumatic incident when he almost drowned as a child and he talks about his fascination with water, how water 'takes us away and throws us around, tosses us and drags us'. His work Remembrance (Surrender) made him think of 'waves of emotion' and why we use water metaphors, which for him was the 'greatest gift and biggest surprise of the show'. 00:30:24 Johan Grimonprez interviewed by Jean Wainwright. Johan Grimonprez discusses his exhibition Inflight at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery. The conversation begins with a discussion on dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and its double narrative, the tracing of the history of hijacking's and terrorist acts and how they have been represented in the press. Underneath is a fictional narrative based in Don DeLillo's White Noise and Mao II where a conversation takes place between the terrorist and the hijacker. Grimonprez's gallery conversation takes on the twists and turns of dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Leila Khaled and her 'skyjack diary' (where recalling events on 26 August 1969, she recounts sitting next to a man on a plane who is proposing marriage to her, while she is carrying explosives to blow up the plane) is woven into a conversation on media spectacle. Desire and repulsion fuel the viewer in his work, we create the monster that provokes the fevered press corps leaping on the hijacker at the point of death. Inflight is an exhibition at the gallery that extends dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, a mock-up inflight lounge with copies of the magazine you would read when flying. The contents are subverted, the metaphoric twist is that the magazine will infiltrate the giant aviation corporations, equivalent to concealed explosives.

00:00:01 Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamboyé interviewed by Jean Wainwright. Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamboyé's exhibition at Anne Faggionato is the backdrop for a conversation that ranges from diaspora and geographies of the body, to racial stereotypes and the photographic moment. Bamboyé is Nigerian and his work arises out of a self confessed need to make sense of culture and its complexity. He discusses probing the technicalities of the photographic medium, to display the body as a site of memory and physical presence. Bamboyé's work is displayed in light-boxes at each end of the gallery, as well as on the floor, where silver gelatin prints are displayed in wooden boxes, forcing you to navigate the space to look at them. Trained as both a dancer and engineer as well as an artist, his conversation engages with both the technical processes involved in making the wok, as well as his concerns with his body as an artistic site and his 'own constructed geography'. Referencing the body as a site of memory and physical presence, images such as The Lighthouse/Das Lichthaus 1989 with its play of black and white, the juxtaposition of his nude athletic blackness and the sleeping figure are discussed, as well as his thoughts on being a black artist exhibiting in South Africa.