John Duncan, Stockholm 2002. © Carl A
John Duncan (born 1953) is an American artist based in Italy. His long career has often been marked by controversy, not seldom because of his willingness to place himself (and others) in positions of extreme vulnerability, in order to see what lies behind the corners of the expected. Although a part of the international art milieu since the 1970s, certain people still find it relevant to keep discussing Duncan's motives or justifications for extreme works like "Blind date" (1980). When in Sweden on a residence-grant 2002, the same old hulabaloo ensued, which actually led to a termination of his grant – but also to a spontaneous and successful counter-movement by several Swedish artists, which made it possible for Duncan to finish the projects he was working on.
John Duncan is interesting, not only because of his art and the varying phases its dynamic expressions have gone through, but also as a "victim" of an ever growing media complacency, where fast demands and fast reactions demand fast information. Once an artist is stuck with one particular and conveniently recognizable facet (in this case, a then 22 year old performance/action and sound recording), it's become harder than ever to integrate a more nuanced picture/overview. All of these aspects interested me, and it was a pleasure to finally sit down with the highly influential Mr Duncan and hear his version of the then current debacle in Stockholm – a perfect example of a prejudiced and negative re-hashing of the past. Plus, and this is important, to let him tell his own story in regard to his art and career in general.
You've been working in many disciplines. Why do you think you've specifically worked so much with audio?
It's a perceptive sense that I wasn't really trained to develop. I don't have a musical background. I don't have a formal training. At a certain point I started imagining what it would be like to be blind, to be more aware of what sound was doing, the properties of sound. That's when I started getting interested in it. The other thing that spurred me on was that I wasn't interested in painting anymore. The basis as my training as a painter was the relationship between the frequencies of light, i.e. colour, and our emotional response to those frequencies. I figured the same thing would work with sound and that there'd be a correlation. I got interested in developing it in that direction, developing audio in the same way I had with images.
How did you get started with the actual experimentation? What did you want to use first? What did you use first?
Voice. This was in the early to mid-70's. I used sounds of breathing. The first thing that I remember recording was the sound of a group of people breathing, and treating that as a chorus. I took that to a guy called Charles Amarkanian and he got me on the air on his radio show. That was the very first time I really made what I consider music now. It was also the first time it was put out in public.
Was your own response to the finished result approximately the same as you had expected?
I didn't know what to expect.
Were there any other people experimenting with the same kinds of things at the time, using voices and organic sounds?
Now I know there were. At the time, I thought that I worked in a vacuum. I was going along according to whims and didn't know anything about the history of music, or what other people were doing at the time. The closest people I knew who were experimenting with sound were people like Tom Recchion, Fredrik Nilsen, Joe Potts and his brothers, Chip Chapman. I realized later on that they were actually a very loose organisation called LAFMS. All of these people were introduced through a man named Harold Schroeder. Harold and I were driving schoolbuses; one afternoon after work he started talking about this weird music he was listening to. He introduced me to a record by someone named Lady June, called 'Linguistic Leprosy'...
So you found some people who were doing similar things?
Through him, yes. Whether it's by circumstance or fate or the movings of the world, I don't know, but this sort of offbeat guy at this job had heard that I was listening to 'strange things'. We talked and found out that we had interests in common. He started introducing me to LAFMS people and that's where I went.
What did your paintings actually look like?
They looked like blocks of colour, the size of a wall. It would look like one colour. As you sat in front of it and looked at it, you'd start seeing other layers underneath. These layers were other colours, decided by the psychological response they evoked, some of which some were compatible and some were not. They were washes, thin layers of colour on top of one another. The more you looked at the entire surface, the more and deeper you were drawn into it.
That corresponds very well to the pieces of music you make.
It's the same source.
Do you regard all of your work as cathartic?
I'm not quite sure how you mean that. What I do is basically to let a sound source work on me, and see where that goes. And then find something complementary to that or find a way to treat that sound. To build an atmosphere that has a psychological effect. I don't know what it's going to be. I'm just trying things. At a certain point, the audio, the composition, starts to indicate directions. It almost makes demands as to what should be added, what will work and what will not. What kind of effect it will have. That it won't contradict itself. And then I just go on. I'm more an operator than anything else. I'm an equal partner with the project itself. I'm not a maker per se.
Would you call "Blind Date" a cathartic project?
It's now so many different things... The original motive for doing it was cathartic. The motive for making it public was more about giving a personal gesture a universal reference or relevance. At least hopefully. To do something that many people could understand as something fundamentally human. But of course it turned into something more complex than that. It turned all my work into something much more complex than I'd initially intended.
Was that because you had learnt so much or because you felt elevated to a new level of understanding?
Absolutely. It expanded my head so far beyond what I'd imagined was actually there. I understood my existence as being a very linear process. After that, it was very, very different. It's been very different ever since then.
Have you consciously tried with other experiences to try and reach a similar kind of breakthrough or elevation?
Yes, absolutely. But they're all private. One of the things that I learned from the original response to 'Blind Date' and something that was reinforced by the recent experiences here in Stockholm, was that it's not good enough to do something in front of an audience if they're simply sitting there. They have to meet me half way. They have to demand. The work has to have some kind of structure that demands something from each member of the audience, to pull out of themselves. Otherwise I'm just like a carnival act - basically an entertainer. I'm not interested in that. I don't have enough of a sense of humour to succeed with that. It's essential now that each member of the audience is included. It's difficult for me to see a mass. I see individuals. I always see individual responses. I know that the crowd mentality exists and that crowds have their own psychological structures. It's very difficult for me to see that, but I do understand individual people. That's why the work I've been doing, especially recently, involves getting people to confront a decision within themselves. To participate further or not. That decision is the art. The art begins with that decision. If they decide to go on and continue and go along with the process, then the art continues. If they decide to stop there and refuse this experience, then the art basically stops there for them. Then that's the only thing they walk away with and live with.
My reaction to that is that it's a very magical view of art, in the sense that it's not in any way made to please or to externalise just for the sake of it. It's there to change. It's all done with a specific purpose to change something in you or in the participating audience.
That's my hope, at least. If it works or not depends on the participants.
One could throw oneself into the sea of challenges and one could learn from very positive and pleasurable as well as negative and painful things. A quote: "You learn most from what you want least"... To what extent do you push yourself to experience negative emotions or negative experiences?
I've learned that it's not necessary to push myself into bad experiences... they come anyway! For me, the issue is to be prepared to ride them, to be responsive to them. To accept the experience, to accept how I feel about it and, at the extreme, to avoid continuing or spreading it further. I'll give an example... If you do something to me that hurts me, I have a choice to retaliate or to absorb it. Most of the time I choose to absorb it because if I retaliate, then that's my responsibility. It's something I create; however justified I may feel. If I hit you back or get revenge, the revenge is an illusion. On a global scale, I think the things that are happening in Afghanistan are a very, very big mistake. That's not the solution to this. It's not the way to solve the problem. It's just a way to make it much worse. What's going on right now in the West Bank in Israel is another good example. What I mean by absorption is not just holding on to it, but also seeing to it that it goes no further. Just riding the wave, if you will. And understand that it is a wave. It's not something you own, unless you attack or do something deliberately, to act as an instrument of fate.
On an instinctual level, one naturally reacts to threats. Usually though, most reactions lie on the emotional level...
I saw this in a situation that's the closest I've been to a war situation, in South Central Los Angeles. I was a driving a city bus. All the other drivers who were driving that line or driving in that general area at the same time, which was midnight to six in the morning, had weapons of some kind. They carried guns, they carried knives, they carried meter-long chains that they could use as a whip. I didn't carry anything at all. They were always getting into trouble. The most extreme example was a driver on a line that was parallel to mine. He got cut in half by barbed wire. Someone came on the bus and sort of came up behind him, looped the barbed wire around him and used it like a saw. People were threatening me all the time, every 15-20 minutes, all night, every night, all through the year. I learned that if I ever carried something, I would attract someone who was more desperate than I was and wanted me to test him. By not having anything, by not carrying a weapon, I managed... I carried psychology. I would listen to people, show them respect, and be ready to move out of the way as best I could if they lunged at me. It turned out that in just about every case, that was what they really needed most. This was the most effective tool for dealing with these situations.
If you don't have any fear, you don't show any fear. And then you don't get attacked.
I always had the idea that it's possible that this would be my last night on the planet. This may be the last thing I do. I had in mind that I felt pretty good about what I'd done. If that should be the case, then I can accept that. I still feel that way. It worked out that way.
You transcended the primal fear...
We'll see. It seems that way now. You never know...
What originally made you interested in art? What made you want to become a painter?
That takes me back to Kansas as a teenager. What I remember is feeling a kind of resonance with certain images and with a way of life. Reading van Gogh's letters... I read his letters more than I looked at the paintings. I became interested in his paintings after reading those letters. You heard all these myths about this crazy guy who lobbed his ear off... It was like a cliché of what an artist is: someone who is crazy and completely out of control emotionally, and beyond reason. Beyond any kind of sense of social balance. Reading his letters, it was absolutely clear that that was not the case. He was extremely clear, extremely articulate in describing what he was trying to do. What he was trying to do was actually to be precise and empirical and at the same time open to his spiritual self. I was really, really impressed with this. This kind of dedication, this kind of focus he had was something that I really identified with a lot. I wanted that in my life. I must have started to paint and draw before that, because I remember a teacher told me about these books - a three volume set of his letters. By that time, I must have already gotten into painting. The only thing I can remember before that is that people in my family helped me start doing that, when they saw that I wasn't responding to school. I found school very boring. The teachers were tedious, they were cut off from the students, they were honing their lessons to the slowest of the students. I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know if I would finish school at all. My family pushed me into doing this instead as a way of at least giving me something to do. I wasn't interested in sports and I hated the people involved. No one knew what to do with me...
You've lived in LA, Japan, Holland and Italy. Four distinct periods... What differences can you see between these different periods? Did the moving create the differences or did the new directions demand your moving?
The atmospheres of these different places shaped the work I did at the time, and also shaped who I became in these places. In the case of Italy, the process is still going on. But it's not just Italy. Being in Stockholm has had an influence and, I have to say, a really positive influence. Especially after the event of March 9th. That night was such a rewarding experience, I don't know how to put that in words. It was very inspiring.
How would you define the different periods?
LA was concentrated on a sense of myself as a member of society. One in a social order, trying to understand myself as a member of this larger society. Japan was a deliberate move to be completely cut off from society. For me, Japan represents an atmosphere where you can develop yourself inwardly and not show what you feel to anyone. Very often when you meet Japanese people, they don't seem to be like you expected. This essence that they were showing me in letters and in communications, the stuff that's cut off from physical contact, they didn't show that in the way they acted, the way they dressed, in the daily life choices they made. Everyone looked very homogenous... I'm thinking of the people who look like they could work in an office, and very often do. They can interact with other people in an office who who would never, ever have an idea that this person has this other life. That's true for nearly everyone there. They keep this other life entirely separate. There was a guy that I met named N. Nakayama, who had run an amusement park construction company. He built Ferris wheels and things like that. When the company went bankrupt, he went to prison for several years. When he got out of prison, he lived on the streets for about seven years. He told me that the Japanese are very much like lizards or crocodiles. That made a lot of sense to me, especially in regard to the experiences on the subway trains. They sit there checking on each other but you never see the other's eyes. The eyes are always narrowed, slit, moving back and forth, watching people around them, but unless it's deliberate no one ever really makes eye contact. He saw them as a nation of lizards. This encouragement to develop myself inwardly and not show it to other people turned out to be invaluable. It's been very, very worthwhile to me. In Holland, I started getting into that in my art. Looking for ways to encourage other people to do that. But they usually involved some kind of confrontation with an audience. Usually a confrontation that took the form of me in front of an audience. Usually me doing something nude in front of the audience. Or getting the audience to volunteer to go nude into a situation. I'm thinking of 'Maze'. People didn't know what to expect. Now, in Italy, it's changing. The music is changing, the events, the installations change. Now, they're more like a seduction. The music is more like a seduction. The events are more like promises that something will happen but you don't know what. If you agree to do X, if you do X, you will find out more. If you do not, you will have the fact that you refused to go further as something you take home with you.
What has X been so far?
A variety of things. Here in Stockholm, it was taking your clothes off and going into a completely dark room with strangers, something that disrupted your sense of space. You couldn't really get an idea of how big or small the room was.
Would you say that the first three phases make up a kind of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, in the sense that you were involuntarily exposed to the reaction of 'Blind Date' in the US? You went inside instead in Japan and in Holland went both ways, demanding an interaction?
Yes, very much so. Following that line of thought, one could say that the experiences in Italy and Stockholm are those of transcendence. It's in the past. The shock that anyone might feel is not my problem anymore. I'm not interested in all these things anymore. People always come up to me and want to discuss things like 'the value of a body', 'the value of a human being before and after death', the way that society treats women and so on... already full of judging that, judging me as a representative of that. It doesn't work. I'm not interested in these issues. I didn't care about all this then and I don't now. If I were watching a television documentary about it, then I might continue to watch it. But discussion of these 'issues' is really important to others, not me. Why should I care?
- - -
I found the same kinds of quality in Yukio Mishima. He ended up distorting his own values and they were further distorted by the right wing and they're still using him as an inspiration for all the wrong things. My experience has convinced me that discipline is essential to going into this kind of research. But military discipline is a mistake. Discipline is a way of creating a defense against chaos. It's about finding your own balance instead of being knocked around by whatever feels like smacking you at the time.
You mentioned that you're meditating...
That's part of my discipline. I started doing that in LA. Then I stopped doing it in Japan and started again in Holland. In fact, I went to Thailand to a buddhist monastery outside of Cheng Mae; stayed there about a month and went through a meditation training program they had. The training has nothing to do with religion. It's a way of teaching the discipline of sitting down and practising and accepting what will happen. The practice I'm doing now is developed from that. It was a very useful base to start from. In LA, it was basically Zen that I practiced. In the end it wasn't enough, although I took that as far as I thought I could. I was not in any way interested in any religion; that's never worked for me. The discipline of practice I translated to the one of the Reichian breath exercise, especially in Japan.
What's the next step in the experiments with sensual impressions or deprivations? You did this at Lydmar and in Tokyo and in Canada. But that was basically a visual thing.
Visual in the sense that there was a complete absence of anything to see. Audio in the sense that the sound was overwhelming. I was in the room, also nude, responding to each person according to what I felt from them without being able to see them.
Have you thought of taking it any steps further? There are other senses and things that could be deprived. Movement, agility, having people have earplugs...
There are a couple of projects that I may or may not realize in my lifetime. One of them is an amusement park based on laboratory experiments, based on the experiments on rats. Right now it's important to offer people the chance to leave at any time. So binding people, tying them up or down, limiting their freedom is something that I'm not really interested in now.
The video work in Japan had nothing to do with similar ideas of deprivation?
The idea was simply to make commercial pornography and to see if it could be subverted. The ideas about deprivation came much later, in Amsterdam.
So, did you manage to subvert commercial pornography?
Certainly not then. If I've subverted anything, I've subverted my own ideas on what it was. In making commercial pornography, there's an interesting labyrinth you get into. Similar to making Hollywood films, I imagine. The producers want to make money on their investment. In order to do that, they pay close attention to what distributors are willing to distribute, who in turn pay close attention to what their customers want to buy. It's a very strict, rigid formula that's very hard to break. Audiences expect to have a storyline. In Japan, the censors demand a storyline with redeeming social value. There's got to be a narrative, there's got to be a reason for all these people doing these strange things in the films. It's not just action and then 60 minutes later, the tape ends. There has to be a beginning, a narrative development and an end in Japan. It's a very rigid structure. You can't really do anything abstract with that. Even if you're interested in doing something outside of this full-on 90 minutes of sex, you still have to conform to these demands. It's much more limiting that I'd expected. The situation in Japan made it more interesting than I'd expected. People who get into it are very often people who are not professional sex workers. They're students, they're people at film school or people who have just graduated from film school. They have ideas and techniques and special effects and camera techniques and script ideas... All of these techniques that are taught in film school, but that they can't use in the commercial industry because it's so hard to get in there in the first place. They have to 'pay their dues to the union' for several years before they can even get into the building. They were so frustrated with that, and at the same time the adult video industry was so open, always looking for people who can do new things. The people I met and worked with could apply what they'd learned in film school and make money out of having fun. And making a sex film was part of it. It was a different situation from what I'd seen in Europe. The films show this. They show that there's a very different way of thinking about them among the staff.
The pseudonym you used, John See, was that meant as an anthropological imperative? John... See!
Yeah. It was a message to myself to wake up. By using that name, I don't feel I was hiding; it was a way to try and get out of myself but at the same time give myself a push all the time.
Do you think that breaking taboos has a value in itself?
That depends on the taboos. It can.
Do you think it's a prerequisite of the concept "artist": that they need to push the limits? Could someone be an artist and just be fine in the middle?
There are plenty of artists who've done incredible work, really inspiring work, where they don't push the limits. But please don't ask me to think of who they are... The idea of deliberately breaking a taboo is not something I've really thought about. It's just ended up that way. It's something I've needed to do; I've never considered it in terms of breaking rules and taboos. This is an issue that I actually think alot about, because it's important to me to avoid inspiring people to cause trouble, just for the sake of doing it. But at the same time... If you're really going to explore who you are and what your life is and really look into your existence, that in itself is very often seen as threatening by people who are not prepared to do that. You have to be ready to deal with the fact that you're going to threaten these people. The research is going to threaten some people. And those people are going to react, out of fear of themselves, out of fear of their own lack of information.
Wouldn't you agree to the suggestion that the same act can be looked upon differently, depending on if it's done in a pursuit of soul searching or creating shock value? The soul searching is always more threatening...
Yes, that's true.
I was thinking of Damien Hirst in the beginning, when he visited morgues. I really think he profited more from the shock value of it.
There's another guy named Alex Gray. After 'Blind Date' was first publicised, he wrote a letter to someone saying that he and his wife had been doing this for years. He had a job at a mortuary and they'd go in. She would film him or take photographs of him having sex with cadavres in the mortuary. He'd done it a number of times and had pictures of it. He argued that he could have saved me a lot of anguish. His rationale was that since he'd been doing it, it wasn't really necessary for me to do it. He doesn't really talk about it these days. He may be a little bit more intelligent than I am...
Maybe it has to do with the kind of actual work that comes out of it. He makes bright and psychedelic paintings of the human body. Perhaps your work and your documentation of it was simply too painful for people to handle?
Yes. A lot of people avoid looking into themselves. Someone who's compelled to do that is threatening. If you are compelled to do that, you have to be ready to accept this kind of kick back and this sort of hostile reaction. When this happens, when this resistance comes, it's very, very tempting to look at the people who give this to you as weak, as shallow, as pretentious and spiritually lazy... Any kind of number of negative judgments. All of these things may be true. But none of them really matter. The way I see it now is that, as hard and discouraging as it can be sometimes, ultimately it's a kind of test. If you see this resistance as a test, you come out of it stronger. The alternative is to accept that they are right and to shut up, and to just get back in line. Whether that's good or bad I don't know, but it's not for me. I couldn't do that even if I wanted to.
What are your thoughts about all of this after the support evening?
The night at Fylkingen on March 9th (2002) was a kind of culmination of what I can only describe as a wave of support that I got after IASPIS got into the scandal of kicking me out and their arrogance and cowardice behind their actions. I thought I was completely alone. The day it happened, it just seemed like something that would never end. I thought that no one cared, that my role on this planet was to suffer for other people's stupidity. Starting the next day, Annika von Hausswolff called and asked if it was really true and that she couldn't believe it. Her call was the first time I felt someone had cared about what had happened. After that, the phone didn't stop ringing for two weeks... I felt everything but alone. On March 9th, all of these people... Cotton Ferox, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, the Sons of God, all of these people... All of the things that were done on that night, from the machine that generated sound from fire, to Ingrid Engarås' performance using the space of Fylkingen itself... Very subtle, incredibly beautiful. Everything was of an incredibly high calibre, such as I'd suspected Swedish art would be but hadn't seen. Fetish 23's videos... It was an honour to be included in the night. It was an honour to be there, an inspiration. Amazing work, all on one night, and at short notice. It was a real inspiration to be there. To have this done as a gesture of support, to make it possible for me to stay here longer, I will never, ever forget... I do not feel alone anymore.
When you're performing a piece, are you in the moment all focussed or do you allow yourself to drift away with the sounds?
I'm listening to what's going on and I'm playing the mixing table as a participant. In the beginning, I can say that it's deliberate. I impose what I want to happen onto the instrument and the sound it's making. But after a while I just feel like I'm a part of it.
Have you ever experienced any kinds of communication in these states of mind?
If I'm simply listening to it, Yes. If I'm part of it, I feel that I have to keep a certain distance, an objectivity. I have to stay conscious enough to work the controls. It's a different thing to be responsible for what happens than being a participant as a listener. I used to get out of control when doing the Reichian exercises. The idea of these breath exercises is to lose physical control and when I did that I didn't really remember what was happening. I couldn't feel what was happening. I felt like a conduit. The performances would change considerably, depending on the kind of energy I felt coming through me from the audience and out, or from wherever... There were times when it was incredibly benificent and positive. There were other times when it was openly hostile, especially when it was coming from outside through me and into the audience. The last performance was on the altar of the Parochiale Kirche in Berlin. There is something in that building - I don't know what it is - that's very strange. It was very strange at the time at least. Definitely hostile. I don't think it's used as a church any longer. From what I heard, there was a crypt underneath the altar. I don't know how to explain it. That was an experience when I needed some kind of defense. There was something happening there, and I didn't know if the audience was aware of it. And it wasn't necessarily a positive thing to open this. It's one of the few times I can remember that I've been really frightened. I was in touch with something and was being used by something that I didn't and don't want to be a part of. It wasn't worth it.
"When your dreams become flesh, can there be anything but trouble?" I'd say that's a distinct dystopic view... Some would argue that when dreams flesh, it's a moment of joy and power and pleasure... Do you still ascribe to this view?
If you're dreaming about pleasure, joy and particularly power, you're going to get them. And they're going to use you. Power is something I try very hard to avoid. If somebody tries to give me power, I try hard to give it back. It can be a distraction. If you get pleasure, you want to hang on to it. If you achieve joy, you want to hang on to it. If you're seeking power, you do everything you can to hang on to it, maintain it, increase it.
So you see it as a matter of detachment versus attachment?
I see it as a trap. If you try and hang on to these things, you're going to get stuck in a series of illusions, and in trying to maintain the illusions. If you want to understand them as parts of a process and appreciate them for what they are but don't try to hang on to them, then there are things that are beyond that. If you're ready to let go of these pleasurable things, you can go further. If you're not, the growth process stops and the illusions become a kind of hell. Dreams become real. You get what you imagine -- and how. So you'd better aim high, impossibly high, because it's going to happen...
Speaking of dreams... I think that's actually where that quote comes from "The Error"... One thing that seems to be clear is that it's based on dreams. These textual and image fragments make a whole, just like dreams. Would it be correct to define your work as an externalization of inner experiences through a specifically philosophical grid or matrix?
Frankly, I hadn't considered that, and I don't usually try to 'define'. Basically I write these things down -- when they come to me, I write them down. THE ERROR is simply a collection of these phrases, and of images that in some way complement them. The two usually don't have any connection at all. They're supposed to add up to, or suggest, something beyond either of them. As for the philosophical structures, I don't have anything fixed in my mind to follow. Perhaps something emerges, but it's not something I consciously use as an architecture.
In Thomas' film ("Think of me as you will", Thomas Nordanstad, 2002), you mention an abusive father and a desire to interrupt what seems to be a lineage. Spirals become spirals and the victim becomes the victimizer. What do you think would have happened if you hadn't had art as a valve or a focusing point?
I don't know. I can't really imagine. It's difficult for me to deal with the issue of 'what if...?' I have no idea.
What new projects are you working on now?
The piece I did with Graham Lewis at Fylkingen on March 9 is from a CD project called "PRESENCE". There are new CD's with Jim O'Rourke -- we've been working on that material for quite awhile -- and with Elliott Sharp, called 'Vox', based on his voice. I'll be working on a new project together with Asmus Tiechens soon, with his voice as well. There's a children's choir that I want to record here in Stockholm. To put it simply, I'm really interested in working with human voice at the moment.
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