Mark Lewis Interview

by Peter Joch

Peter Joch: I want to talk about how the exhibition at YYZ in 1988-We Are the world/White Noise-influenced what you are doing now.

Mark Lewis: I want to preface this by saying that, unfortunately, I don't remember very much about that exhibition. I think that the work I was doing then was part of a process of simply "trying things out." It was quite early in the development of my work, and retrospectively, I can say that I didn't really know yet what I wanted to do. I'm a little embarrassed now by some aspects of the work I showed then-for instance, the perfume machines that were attached to the back of the photographic panels. But then, this is the advantage of youth: one is not easily tamed by embarrassment. I can no longer recall precisely what I was thinking about when I made the work I exhibited. I imagine I was thinking about the limits of visuality, things we cannot see but perhaps want to see; but that may just be an ex post facto consideration.

I think, in a way, that early work was a detour that allowed me to think through things otherwise, something like what Victor Shlovsky called "a knight's move." I would certainly never exhibit perfume now, as the very idea seems quite preposterous. But as I say, very little is forbidden when you don't know what you are doing, but want to find out. Perhaps the posters, the images themselves have some relationship to what I do now. But the attention to all things olfactory-I can see no relationship between that and what I am doing now. The poster images were based on the catalogue cover of the famous 1955 Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. I appropriated the design and added "rolled" magazine images to the middle. So the work would seem to have an obvious relationship to photography and the history of photography. I trained as a photographer, so this work would have been a reflection or an investigation into the history and knowledge of that subject that as a young photographer I both inherited and engaged with. Today, I make pictures that move, and my work definitely engages with the history of photography, but also the history of painting and other things too. So there is some basic relationship between what I did then and what I do now. But to be honest, I feel like I'm a different artist now: I think that there's the work I made before I started making film, and then there are my films. In fact, I would say that it was only when I started to make films that I properly became an artist.

That's interesting. Do you remember what the perfume you used in the work was?

I have no idea. I think it was some kind of industrial odour that they use in toilets to neutralise unpleasant smell. I think those machines still exist, but I imagine they're a lot smaller now.

Around the same time you did public art works in Montreal.

Yes, at the old Mirabel airport. I installed smell machines and literary texts on smell in the airport toilets. I had just read Proust, and I was obsessed by the idea that smell could open up a world of memory and wonder. It baffles me now why I chose the toilets!

So, one of the three panels of the We are the World public art piece was exhibited in a bus shelter in Vancouver, and the three panels and the smell machine were at YYZ at the same time I believe. Was this deliberate?

I think this was just fortuitous. I received the original commission from the Or Gallery in Vancouver, and I made a single Family of Man poster, or at least my version of it. Instead of saying "Family of Man," it said "We are the World; You are the Third World." This was the title of an article that I had written just a year previously for The Guardian newspaper in London. That latter text was an attempt at a critique of the de-politicisation of poverty and hunger affected by Bob Geldof and the music industry's response to famine in Africa. So I just lifted the title from the original article and applied it to the Family of Man design. But, as I say, Vancouver commissioned the original work, and that's what I was working on when I was offered the show at YYZ. For YYZ, I made two additional posters using two different languages. One was Persian Afghan, and the other was Korean.

Do you remember why those two languages?

I think I simply wanted the work to be more of the world. I decided to use languages of people who lived in Toronto. There was a man who ran a café near my studio where I used to get coffee each morning, and he was a refugee from Afghanistan (Afghanis and Iranians speak the same language, more or less). I can't remember why I chose Korean, but I think at that time there was an emerging Korean community near where I lived up on Bloor and Bathurst. The choices were a mixture of calculation and accident I guess.

Could you talk about how We are the World interrogates representation? Perhaps about the shift from feminist representation of the body to representation of the male body, which starts appearing in the late 1980s and early 90s.

When I made that work, I was not too long out of art school (I was studying up until about 1986). I was obviously influenced by the classes I took, the books I read, and the teachers I met and learned from. When I first came to Toronto, I used to audit Social and Political Theory courses at York University. What was then called French theory was prevalent, and pretty much the core element of my graduate education. Basically, it was all we read or, I should say, tried to read, as I often struggled to understand much of it. But in essence, this reading and the teaching I followed, insisted on thinking of the subject (the viewer, for instance) as a socially, ideologically formed entity that could be "unpacked" or revealed in its complexity via psychoanalysis and the study of ideology. Feminist theory was central to this optic, as it insisted upon sexual difference as central to the making and forming of subjectivity. When I was studying, artists and filmmakers like Mary Kelly and Laura Mulvey were very present, and I was influenced by their work and their ways of looking at art and film. Apart from the usual political imperatives, I think it is worth saying that what they insisted upon was a kind of curiosity, and this was very pleasurable. Later on, I understood that it was necessary to dispense with the more didactic elements of this way of thinking. But the curiosity remains. Of course, the moment was crucially important, for me, and for many others starting out at this time.

Do you think that has shifted now?

Yes. I think a lot of work that came out of that way of thinking was actually very suspicious of the image, and as a consequence was deeply iconoclastic. The picture was felt to be "unreliable," and, therefore, it had to be qualified, deconstructed, mediated, or whatever. Of course, now it is the image's unreliability that I find so compelling and provocative. But back then, people thought you had to add things to the image in order to "correct" it or ground it-things like text, and so on, and I guess in my case, smell too. Doing things like that was, I think, to test limits, to test the ability of the image to convey information. I think younger artists today are much more confident and comfortable with the idea that an image can just stand on its own. They recognise that the image's ambiguity is part of its power, and the pleasure we get in looking at it and thinking about it. That's what I think now too.

You showed this work at YYZ; was it a deliberate decision to choose an artist-run centre?

I was a young artist who had only recently arrived in Toronto. I had moved back from London after art school, and was still doing my graduate work. I really wanted to show my work, and I wanted to be part of the community, I wanted to have a sense of belonging. So I applied for a show at YYZ because it was one of the places where artists that I liked and who I had started to get to know were exhibiting.

Do you remember the opening of the show?

I do not remember the opening at all. I don't remember very much I am afraid , though as we talk about it a bit here I am beginning to get a better sense of it.

You also exhibited Familiar Stories at the same time?

Yes, again those are works that I think were mistakes, or errors. I think I even recognised this very early on. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, as long as you recognise this very quickly, and learn from them.

They were just experiments?

Yes, that is another way of putting it. I guess the only way to know if they are mistakes is if you put them out there, and then you discover that they aren't really what you thought they were. Sometimes, that revelation can be good and an indication that it was your ideas that were wrong, and not the work. But in the case of Familiar Stories, it was both the work and the idea that were wrong.

Were you involved in YYZ in any other way then as an exhibiting artist?

No. I knew a few of the people, Bernie Miller, Andy Patton, Joanne Tod, but not very well as they were of an older generation. They were artists and writers that had already gotten themselves a little bit established in Toronto. I would meet them at openings and so on.

Can you share if you remember the process for We are the World, or Familiar Stories or Burning?

Burning was a different exhibition.

Yes, it was an exhibition in Vancouver, but I believe, you showed the catalogue.

I think from the period we are talking about, the works I made for the Burning exhibition are still interesting to me. Here, I think, I was trying something out in a way that was interesting and liminal, in so far as they made a bridge between what I had been doing before and what I eventually did after. There is a kind of perverseness to these works that I still find curious. They were works that allowed me to move away from the image text idiom that had occupied me for some years. The texts became separated from the images (they were framed separately) and they became, like the images, highly fetishized, and became images actually. The image panels were made up of rolled magazine images, like in We Are The World. I think this decision had a lot to do with my interest and fascination in appropriation and re-photography, practices that were very prominent at that time, particularly in New York. But presumably it was also a practical response to my working conditions: I had a studio with a small table, and I had lots of magazines. So the assemblage of those sculptural forms that were eventually re-photographed was something that was possible.

What about your process for the work you do now, can you share a little bit about that?

Now, I work in film, as you know. Most of my films are location based, which is to say that I begin with a place or an experience in a place, and then try to understand how that place and that experience can be depicted through moving images. Sometimes it can take a few years before I understand what to do, and sometimes, though not very often, a few minutes. Most of my initial research is done on my bicycle: I cycle around London or Toronto, or wherever I am, and just look around. It's hard to say how and why something draws my attention. But it is strange because I do know immediately if a place is interesting to me. Then the fun part is trying to work out what it is that has "stopped" me. Sometimes, I never work that out, and the films are attempts to capture that ambiguity and uncertainty. I think I make, more or less, films about everyday life-often-small things, perhaps, almost invisible things. Whereas, when I made the work for the YYZ exhibit, I was interested in condemning the image for these limits and ambiguities. Now, I see these as part of the magic and wonder of the image.

What about your influences, are they the same as they used to be when you made your first work?

I think I am probably much more interested in the works of other artists today, whereas before I was much more influenced by them. That is to say, as a young artist it was necessary and inevitable that I would be in a relationship of mimicry to the artists that I respected and admired. Today, the work that I love and am drawn to over and over again, affects my own work in much more complex and less recognisable ways. Also, twenty-five years ago I was keen to situate my work in relationship to what we then called "critical theory." So I was very influenced by that imperative. Now, I am less interested in that idea. Maybe its "influence" comes through in other ways. That's for others to determine.

We've talked about which philosophical theories influenced We are the World, but what about your current work?

Back then it would have been chiefly feminist and Marxist reinterpretations of "the subject," and the introduction of Althusserian and post-Althusserian theory via Lacan's reinterpretation of Althusser and Derrida too. A lot of this stuff was a bit incomprehensible to me, then, as it is now. I remember finding the experience of reading that material intellectually painful; but there was also a kind of sexiness attached to that project, to be part of an excited community of people who were reading these books. It almost felt like a revolution. I do miss that heated feeling that many of us experienced, discovering and sharing something that felt new and daring. I think that moment has gone.

So you would say that the contemporary art world is not as theory-based as it used to be in the 1980s?

Certainly not the contemporary art that I'm making! Though there are other artists that are still very engaged with theory, but perhaps less explicitly. But it's all very different now, and if it doesn't feel quite as theoretical as before, that is probably because the artists in question tend not to wear it on on their sleeves, so to speak. We wore it on our sleeves because of that sense of excitement I just spoke about, it seemed like an opportunity. That all seems a bit silly and naïve to me now. Younger artists are probably more sophisticated in the way that they absorb and transform that theoretical material. Their relationship to it is both more complex and more ordinary, more every day. I think that is a very good thing. When I hear my daughter who is twenty-three, talk about Foucault, Derrida, or whatever, and I see that it's just part of her natural sense of knowledge, then I know that it's a good and measured thing.

It's more mainstream?

Perhaps, it's part of how younger people think and make decisions.

Were you in Toronto during the 1980's?

I lived in Toronto between 1983 and about 1990. I have been back a lot though, and as you know, I have made a lot of films here and round about.

What did you see in, what was your feeling of the art world in Toronto?

In the 1980s, Toronto was a much 'smaller' town than it is now; it was much more provincial. The art world was definitely local. Very few people here were exhibiting overseas. I would say that things have changed a lot, and there are also a number of very serious collectors of contemporary art, and they have made a real difference, supporting, sustaining, and promoting art made locally, but no longer simply locally appreciated.

20.09.2012