Sunday, July 1, 2012

Vicki Bennett: People Like Us



Vicki Bennett, Stockholm 2011. © Carl A

UK artist Vicki Bennett and her project People Like Us visited Stockholm in January 2011, to take part in something called "Art's Birthday Party". Although the event had some interesting artists present (Bennett being one, Lustmord's Brian Williams another), it was basically a showcase of predictability and art for art's sake. Anyway, I first met Ms Bennett in the UK in the late 80s. We were at that time both involved in Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth and its ultra-creative environment of pro-chance attitudes and the cutting up of artistic (and other) preconceived notions.
Given this long chronological relationship, it was extra pleasant to actually meet and talk again after a hiatus of some 20 years. Not only to reconnect on basic levels but also to fully realize what a great artist she has become. Her show/performance at the beautiful old Södra Teatern venue, containing video clips and a live mix of various sound sources, was synaptically staggering and blew me away. And I don't think I was alone in being heavily titillated by her juxtapositional tour de force, which was so furiously funny and sensuously serious at the same time.
Vicki Bennett really strikes me as someone who is able to both dumbfound and elevate people's minds with her work. Her restructuring of sound and video is intensely funny and occasionally truly mind-boggling. Audio-visual collage, in itself such a worn-out and predictable technique, in her hands becomes something vitalized and energetic.

One thing we can say is that your work is always full of humour and playfulness. But I was wondering if there is something serious in that too. 
My idea of success is to be engaging with the audience. The way I choose to do that is through collage, with sound and moving image. I figured that is the way you can incorporate several levels into your work. Someone could appreciate it on a very simple level or they could look at it on a very intellectual, complicated level and they are all right. Everyone is correct in their own assumption. That was the method that I chose for doing my work. But I really want to create a total world that people can step into. That sort of magical world where people can... 
Enjoy? 
Enjoy! Yeah! I want to create a magical world that engulfs people’s imagination in a wondrous way, by using humour as a language, which isn’t just English. It is human. Also, the thing about humour is that you can’t explain it. You can’t pin it down. It is incomprehensible and so it can’t be intellectualized. That is something that is magical as well. I want to create a magical world where humour is a way into that, because people connect through a sense of humour. 
Was that something that dawned upon you slowly or something that hit you like a rock? 
I've always been the same. I've always made collages because I don’t know how to do things any other way. I am not academically trained. I can’t play instruments. I am average with everything I am trying to do except making collages. It is actually by default that I am doing the things I can do and have always done. It is a very intuitive way of working, and also it was a monetary thing. When I first started I was using tools available to me, like records, cassette decks, radio and TV. I recorded things with cassettes, so I was making sound collages. To start with, I saw it as a sort of DJ-ing thing. I wasn’t aware of the scope that I later found out about. That you can release things like that and that I have got contemporaries, that there are movements and genres and so on. I did not know any of that. So it has been more like I have gone on this journey, and along the way people have told me things about what it is that I do, and I believe them. It is not really me trying to do anything. I am just ambling along and finding things out along the way. 
There is an analogy to cooking, I think. You don’t necessarily have to kill the animal in question. But you can use whatever ingredient to make a dish. 
Yeah, it's in the ingredients. Alchemy. I think it is a very natural way of working, to be gathering and processing and transforming what is around you. It's a folk art, I think. Making collage and working with found imagery and sound is very much the natural folk art way of working, for they are the tools of the modern times. Whereas before that, people were using instruments and poetry. But they were transforming things as well. Bob Dylan was playing a song that was being sung two weeks ago, just two blocks away. He changed a verse. That was before concepts of ownership got really entangled with copyright. It was seen as folk music. Whereas now, it's become complicated. It's a bit stupid, the way it has become complicated, because it is actually folk art. 
In all of this multifaceted creation which is your work, have you ever felt tempted to try to focus on one specific thing? For a longer period of time, I mean. Let’s say that you try to decide and work strictly with video, in the same manner, but just work with video for a longer period of time. 
In the amount of time I spend a year, I probably do video 80 % of my time and music and sound about 20 %. I can make an album in about three months, whereas making a longer piece of video takes a lot longer because it's a lot more difficult to make a video than it is to make music, as far as I am concerned. I want to make feature films and I am actually endeavouring to try to get funding to do that at the moment, because the longest films I have made at the moment have been for my live concerts, which are 45 minutes long. They have a narrative going through them that are like sketches. So actually I am doing a lot of moving image work. 
For a while, you were the only artist with, sort of, complete access to the BBC Television archives. 
Yes. 
Is that still the case or has someone else come after you? 
There may have been one other person last year. I was first though. It was crazy, because there's like a million things in the archives. We had 16 weeks to access them, me and one other artist. It was insane and basically, when we got there in the summer, they said that they realized how crazy it was, but as long as we were gone by the end of the year it would be fine. And so we just kept going back. They let us stay on and I did make a film out of it, about five minutes long… It was based upon the Festival of Britain. I like world fairs, expos and festivals because they celebrate the goodness and ingenuity of mankind. I also like modernist architecture and that kind of forward thinking. World fairs and expos, they are all about the best and the most forward-thinking things. And so I found a lot of footage from The Festival of Britain. It was held in 1951, at The Royal Festival Hall in London, which was a hundred years after the great exhibition at Crystal Palace. The Festival of Britain was about coming out of the war and everything being colourful again. I found a documentary about a chap called James Gardner, and he was one of the people, three or four people, who had to put together and program a "Festival of Britain". He said that they had no idea what they were doing and they had to do it really fast. I like the approach, and I used him as the talking head in the film. He said that he approached it like a child might. Imagine you are building a castle and that is your castle. "I like to imagine that I could do it and I just try and do it and start..." Just like playing. 
Is that the clip that is on your website, where someone is holding some dancing people? 
No, that is a different one. That is the film called The Remote Control, which is all about controlling things by turning knobs and remotely controlling people. So it has, kind of, got a slightly sinister edge to it, but it's also a self-reflection of you trying to make a film, of you trying to edit a film in the first place. To try to animate these people who are controlling things. All my films have got the same kinds of things going on in them but yeah, the James Gardener clip was all about, "You just have to try and do it." Don’t worry about how you are supposed to do things, because a lot of the time it turns out to be a load of rubbish anyway. Get on with it, you know. 
One thing that strikes me is that not only does the humour play a part in your work, but it is also very, very psychedelic. In your case, has that been an active ingredient or has it been a real inspiration for you? Because it's a way of looking at things and a way of presenting things, and it is also an aesthetic. It must have been important for you. 
I am guessing that it has been an integral part of my personality. The artist notices things more than the average person on the street. And I think it has something to do with focusing intensely on things, and then accumulating things in a way that a magpie might go and fly and find a piece of colourful silver foil and put it in their nest. You know, I think that is what I am doing. I am not saying I am like a magpie, but I like to get lots of goodies and put them together, which can make things look a bit like an overload sometimes. And I know that what I do is quite dense sometimes. But I don’t even notice, to be honest. To me, it's totally fine but for a lot of people it is too much because the normal way to compose in any medium is that you don’t mix more than about three elements. Otherwise it's too much for the outsider to take in. Whereas for me, it's normal to do much more than that, and changing direction as well. But it's also a lack of skill. In a traditional sense, everything that I've learned to do has just been by accident rather than knowing how to do things properly. So once again it is that trying-things-out ethic which could make things seem psychedelic, because you are actually being quite chaotic. But then I try to keep things in repetition, going through things. It is like the idea of the middle eight in music. Really the middle eight in music is that you have a beginning and an end with anything that you do. I don’t have to make a piece of music that is the way you are supposed to do it. You can make the most of not knowing how to do things, which means you can do anything. Which can come across as being a bit chaotic. 
I'm curious also about the work for the radio station WFMU. How does that work? Do you mix that at home and then upload the shows? 
I have been doing that since 2003. I collage it at home on "Pro Tools" and then I upload it. I can’t do it all year around. It is too much. I upload it and when the show is actually on the air, we have a live play list with comments and I update "blog-style" every minute, and we are writing the titles in the chat. So it does have a live element, in my being there with the audience. They are commenting and then know that I am actually sitting there while I am doing it. I collage pop with avant-garde because I think all music is pop. I think everything is pop. I don’t think one thing is listenable and one thing isn’t. I think it is just about the way you introduce things to people. I think you can make people like anything or not like anything. And it is all the same. It's all about education, context and environment. 
Can you remember a distinct point in time when you just decided, "I want to be an artist"? 
Yeah, I think when I was about 13 or 14. When I was a child I was always emulating what I wanted to do as an adult. I used to make tapes and I made a radio station which was just tapes. I had a pretend group. I used to collage pictures of me on top of other things, so I was dreaming of all these things that I am doing now as an adult. I didn’t realize that was what I was doing but I emulated everything that I always dreamed of. You know, like making music. And the video things, I don’t know how that happened. That was when I was about 16. It was when I was 13 or 14 that I suddenly realized that you can make those dreams real. So I started thinking, "I am going to really focus on this". I realized that if you actually do keep focusing, then something is going to happen. 
Just keep at it. 
Yeah, exactly. And I wanted... I mean, that was essentially the (Psychic TV) Force the hand of chance-album. I was a big Marc Almond fan then. That was my way of thinking, and him singing "Like a biker in the summer heat...", from the song Guiltless. That song really is about "See it and go for it". That really made me think. 
Those two first Psychic TV albums are so seminal. I think that if it were possible to scan people’s minds, I would say that those two albums would pop up very often. Instigators of young will power. 
Yeah. It really clicked in my head. I have to say taking LSD as well, probably when I was 17. 
We talked before about the confluence of creative input. 
Sometimes I go in as a visiting artist and talk and occasionally I do workshops. And I think, every now and then you're going to affect someone and you will make an impact on them, possibly to change their lives. Because when I think about it, it has taken very few people to really change my life. 
We're living in a world or a culture where it is possible to appropriate everything, "collage culture" or whatever you want to call it, with sampling and downloading stuff. All of it is basically about a sense of freedom. But it is also a risk. If you work within those parameters, then what is the essence of the creator? Can you pin point something that you can see is specifically you in your art? Where is Vicki in all of your work? 
I think it is way I tie it together. It is a patchwork quilt, and when you stand back from it, you don’t see all the parts, you see the whole. I think that I create an atmosphere. That is the essence. You have got this essence or atmosphere in it that is you. I am always surprised when I hear music or see stuff by people and I can’t see the personality. I think my personality is an integral part of this thing. It is just me talking. It is just me. It is me. All these things I am using are just parts of the quilt. And they exist in their own right. The original doesn’t die. It still exists. Which is why I find it amazing that people can get annoyed and say that you are doing damage to the original, but I am just paying homage to it. Unless you are being negative. 
But you are not really negative. 
No, I am positive. I never use anything that I don’t like. It is always paying homage to it. It is a celebration of the content. It is finding ties between things that are disparate and incongruous, showing that everything is actually the same, because I really do believe that. I try to make things humorous, but everyone tells me my work is really dark. 
Oh, really? 
Yeah, people get disturbed by it sometimes. 
Maybe it is because we are so jaded that we don't notice it? 
I am trying to do the light and dark thing, to show that they are the same. Not the same, but they are reflections of the same thing, in the middle, you know. So yeah, I probably answered that question somewhere in there. 
Would you say that you prefer working with stuff in your own confinement or taking it on the road like this, and actually performing? 
I prefer working in confinement. My idea was working in confinement but in collaboration with people who can realize the project. Whether that be other people or artists or producers, distributors, everyone playing a role where it feels real. So I don’t work in complete isolation a lot of the time, not by choice, just because no one is around. But doing gigs and stuff is the way. Is the way that people see things. As quckly as possible. You know you can have two people or twohundred people see your gig. You can have a lot more people download your stuff, tens of thousands of download but you don’t get to be part of the experience. But it is really important, because I get all my gigs and everything is through the Internet. I never ask people for gigs, they come to me. And that is through the Internet. You know UbuWeb or my site and things like that. I did an online album, Abridged too far, which had 25.000 downloads in the first month. That was fantastic. 
What is the weirdest thing that has ever happened in a live situation? 
I have lots of horror stories. There was a funny one in Norberg, also in Sweden. When I played a festival there a couple of years ago and it was mainly noise people there. That was when I was still playing stuff from DVDs. I use a laptop now, but anyway, a DVD got stuck. So my gig was actually never going to end. It was a bit into my concert, where a robot was singing: "Music alone shall live, music alone shall live, never to die, we will all die..." He was stuttering this all over, this robot. People started to realize it was not made. And it was going on and on and on. In the end I just had to press stop. That was the end of the gig and I threw the DVD into the audience. That was a really nice experience because everyone though that was really funny and cheered. I have had loads of technical horror stories as well. I can’t remember any of them actually. It's been more than I care to imagine. But I am sure I have had strange things as well. I have had really strange atmospheres. I work with Ergo Phizmiz, who is another collage artist, and we made a joint concert last year called The Keystone cut-ups. We mixed early avant garde film with early comedy, to show how important the people in them were to each other. They were both very influential to each other. It was really intense because we had eight weeks to make 45 minutes and Ergo concentrated on the music and we made 45 minutes of film on dual screens. I was doing twelve hour days, seven days a week. I was working really intensely with all this footage, particularly with the Marx Brothers. And I got this strange feeling about Harpo Marx. I started feeling fixated about Harpo Marx. When we did the concert, it was in a hall just like tonight but bigger and old and grand. I swear Harpo Marx was there. There was an eerie atmosphere. He is in the film as well. Everyone said it was very strange. In the end we both turned around and watched him playing the harp on the screen and then raised our glasses to him. And I thought, he is here. I'm sure Harpo Marx was there. 
If we get back to the humouristic attitude, have you ever considered it to be a kind of defence mechanism? 
Yes, because you can put yourself down before anyone else does. Humour is one way of dealing with uncomfortable feelings and taboos, and also confusion. People laugh at things involuntarily because of nervousness. I laugh a lot. I'm a nervous person. But the main reason I use humour is because that's the way I want to connect with other people. I find it difficult to get on with people who don't have a sense of humour. It's a way to get deeper with someone. It's vulnerability that makes you get on with people. 
If a communication is completely straightforward, it's also quite boring. 
Yes. You need to get surreal. You need to get off the main path. Surrealism and humour are very similar, in that you can't explain them. They're a parallel way of looking at something. 
When it's time to put something together, like a video for instance, do you have a very clear vision in your mind of what you want to do, or do you look at the material at hand and just go from there? 
In the past, I've looked at what's available. With found footage, you only have what they did. You can't work with what they didn't. In the past it's been a case of looking at things instead of looking for things. Just recently, I've been waking up at 5 AM with ideas and just writing them down. My brain's changed, in the way I work. I think it has to do with that I want to do things for spaces, like installations. That has changed my way of thinking. I think it has to do with that I've realized I can work with the space itself, rather than just the screen. 
What's a perfect day like for you? 
Having lots of ideas of my own and then seeing other people doing them. A lot of the time it's just either or. A perfect situation for me is to have a communication with the outside world, but also to do work. I love working. I'm on my own a lot of the time. I want to be part of a community but I don't see people that often and that can frustrate me. I know more about the imperfect days. I start wondering if other people have more perfect days than I do. But I don't think they do. 

For more on People Like Us, please go to the project's homepage. There's also a lot of PLU/Vicki Bennett material available at UbuWeb.

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