Graham Gussin

Interview by Liam Gillick

from Audio Arts Volume 14, Number 2, 1994

Transcript

Liam Gillick: With Graham Gussin.

Graham Gussin: I should really talk about the process that I went through to reach the finished result. What you’re confronted with in a gallery is a sound-map, about three meters across. The sound is taken from a pornographic film and the sentence and the music being used is the title of the piece which is: ‘I wish that you could be here with us,’ and in brackets (Summertime when the living is easy’). So there’s this moment of a kind of invitation from one of the characters in the film and it’s a notion or illusion to that kind of perfect space – summer time and living is easy, everything’s fine and you’re invited into this, kind of, utopia. The sound is fed into a computer. I then take the computer readout of that map, which looks like a landscape. It has a three-dimensional grid with hills and valleys etcetera. That map is then redrawn in pencil onto paper. That translation’s quite an important aspect because it removes it once more because the sound is already overdubbed on the movie. Then there’s another translation involving my own hand, because the artist’s hand kind of joins in with that activity, it’s as if put my body into the activity that’s taking place. That is then photographed and projected onto the wall much larger ,the drawings are only around a half a meter across, and then just traced out onto the wall. Previously the people have been in blue on white, this is the first time that I’ve made a piece using the negative of that. I like the idea of this negative because it’s as though an impression has been left. The wall appears like a huge sheet of carbon paper on which a tracing has been made. You’re left with this kind of absence rather than a presence. The title is included with that so that’s it’s a read-out from a single sheet.

LG: This whole question of using the wall as a way to present certain ideas; what level is it at in comparison to your whole project?

GG: Well when you use a wall on that scale you’re involving the spectator. The spectator’s within the work, it’s not like a painting or an object. You’re actually placed within because it’s part of the architecture of the building and so you’re confronted in a different way. Implicated on a different level, which is, I think, essential in the work that I’m doing. But there’s also this quite obvious notion of a sound-wall, of a wall of sound; so that the richness of the colour and the fact that it is a sound made into an image, those translations are all, important.

LG: I’m interested in asking you about what you could call a second order idealization.

GG: Yes I suppose there’s a kind of notion that I’m playing with, or using, and getting involved with notions of various ways of thinking and utopias and a progression towards certain ways of thinking. And moving away from those ways of thinking again and it’s very clear in the super-nature piece. It’s again dated 1970 so, there’s this kind of, a recent kind of past involved, from which you move back towards and then away from again. When you know, the date of the work that is then included as well. So there’s a kind of distance opened up. That’s a time aspect coming into the work again. I’m interested in that, the way the work is remembered and like the sound piece, for example, people going away from that this evening whistling ‘Summer time and the living is easy.’ So the work has entered, or been received in a different way. It’s remembered and there’s a relationship between image and sound there, which I’m interested in as well. They carry away a memory of an image and a sound at the same time or a tune. So when they find themselves whistling that then they’ll remember that image again. I’m interested in the way that kind of imprints itself and the way it stays intact.

The notion of wall drawings and the idea of them being a temporary show because when the show ends the work will be painted over but, that’s not that different to me because all shows are temporary to a certain degree and work is temporary in the way that it’s working when it’s displayed, and when it’s not it’s closed. So it’s been assimilated into that way, into that activity already. I’m not making any claim about the life span of the work and the way it may be working against the notion of the object etcetera. That’s really not my concern; it’s just another way of making work.