[Me and Billy Bob / 2004] Daniel Wong: Let's start by talking about your use and embrace of markers from popular culture as a material to engage the viewer. This is apparent throughout your practice with your use of the horror genre and in works where you digitally insert yourself into existing films with celebrity actors. This is may be a very broad question but what is your attraction to popular culture as a type of raw material? How do you relate your work to cinema in particular? Jillian McDonald: My attraction to specific types of pop culture and popular cinema started as repulsion, or less dramatically, disinterest. I started my celebrity-based work in 2003 because I couldn't relate to why people fall in love with or become obsessed with celebrities; my newer horror work sprang in 2006 from a genuine incomprehension of how audiences can enjoy the visceral sensation of terror. In both cases, once I started investigating I lost interest in these critical questions and quickly sunk my teeth into enjoyment of the material. The most interesting thing to me, and where there is common territory, is fandom. For horror in particular, if it weren't for legions of die-hard fans, the industry would fall on its face. In works such as Me and Billy Bob I ‘play’ the adoring fan, but now with horror I'm tapping into the fan base, even working with fans collaboratively in performances and videos. Horror films are, to my surprise, rife with metaphor, archetypes and rich themes. Although in some ways narratives are recycled endlessly, there is an evolution. There is so much humour and artifice that I keep finding new things to investigate. Suddenly, for example, we have the gorgeous abstinent male vampire, who is about as far from monstrous as one can imagine – in a competing archetype, there are plenty of scary vampires baring their fangs, but these beautiful vampires are compelling. I'm recently also attracted to the cinematic clichés in horror: the clues that we are in a horror film, rather than say a romantic comedy, begin with the opening credits. Mary-Anne McTrowe: You've done a number of works the production of which have been in collaboration with horror fans, and interaction becomes an important aspect in some of the other works in their finished form (for example, The Sparkling, in which the viewer's proximity to the work provokes a response from the video, or even the Temporary Billy Bob Tattoos, whereby anyone can show their adoration for the actor). Can you talk about how engaging with your audience in this interactive way is important in your practice? JM: The moment I moved to New York I was compelled by my daily interactions in the street to become involved with strangers through my work – at the time my work might have been labeled a social practice, providing services in public spaces in order to interact with passersby. I altered clothing, borrowed personal items, shampooed hair, gave advice and went for walks. Since then a lot of my work has included aspects of participation, and in some of my recent works I can’t resist the exciting collaborative nature of working with fans who play significant roles in making the work. I enjoy the relationship between participant and artist, and the exciting reality that I don’t have complete control over the work because so many people are involved. I am directing these performances and videos, but I simultaneously feel like I’m playing the role of director. When I made the Billy Bob tattoos, I had launched my MeandBillyBob.com website and was getting attention from fan websites. I wanted to offer something for those fans rather than just the experience of watching the videos – I mailed out tattoos in exchange for photos of the fans wearing them. On the website I made a gallery of images so the fans could picture themselves as part of their own community. The Sparkling was inspired by many horror films featuring chandeliers swinging out of control; my projected chandelier seems haunted because it sways crazily and emits eerie high-pitched sounds when viewers approach. DW: The notion of fandom is interesting. As you say, some of these genres or celebrities are driven by their fan base and almost become subcultures in themselves. I have in mind your video, Field of the Dead and Undead, where you cast a variety of non-professional actors of various ages to portray zombies (and I am assuming various degrees of fandom as well). Without the standard zombie narrative tropes and camera work, it can almost be read as a documentarian style behavioural study of these fictional creatures – but also on another level, a study of a cultural collective understanding of these fictions. I’m wondering how much you view your work as having an anthropological aspect as well. JM: I don’t consider my work anthropological. I’m not studying people, whether fans or actors, but rather fictional characters. I’m interested in audiences and their relationships to cinema and archetypes that sometimes evolve and sometimes get recycled. Zombies are pretty pervasive in popular culture right now. They weren’t when I started this work, but now they are even used to sell books, cars, and TV. If it weren’t for horror fans across the world staging zombie events, there wouldn’t be so many zombie films, and vice versa. There’s a symbiotic relationship. Field of the Dead and Undead is meant to be meditative and timeless, it’s the longest video I’ve ever made, by far, at over eighteen minutes. It could be read as a study of collective and individual ideas about how the undead move since those actors were each given a simple direction: to walk onscreen alive and walk offscreen dead. They weren’t influenced by each other or me because they were all filmed separately and I didn’t teach them how to do it. The characters are the aimless undead, and can be read as something like ghosts or zombies. I read that George Romero (arguably the auteur of the contemporary film zombie) tells his actors that he doesn’t want them all moving in the same way – I like this approach, because once you say “drag your feet” for example, then everyone drags a foot and the bigger picture of a field of zombies without individual walking styles will seem less believable. MM: I like this idea of giving the actors none but the most minimal direction; the individual interpretations of being “dead” and “undead” in the video are quite different, yet all fit into what we understand the “undead” to be according to pop culture. This brings me back to what you said at the beginning, about the cinematic clichés in horror film and the way clues to what type of film we are about to watch are delivered to us as early as the opening credits. What other sorts of clichés are capturing your interest right now? JM: I’m watching for all the clues, taking note. Visual clues include wind in trees, grey skies and other signs of bad weather, doors opening or closing on their own, disembodied shadows and reflections, broken things such as neon signs fizzling out, dusty abandoned toys, wall-mounted taxidermy, dirty crumpled paper blowing down an empty street (which I see as a reference to the tumbleweed of the Western genre), close-ups of flies, peeling paint and wallpaper, chandeliers or other inanimate objects swaying, lightning illuminating the setting, dripping blood, the dark side of nature seen in dead or rotting things, uncanny sights such as a decapitated (possibly rolling) head; also cinematic clues like startling jump cuts, strategically implemented slow or fast motion film, and shots that include the monster’s point of view. Audio clues include creaking doors, unexpected and loud sounds like claps of thunder, doors slamming, ticking clocks, breathing, scraping, high pitched voices, glockenspiel and toy piano, silence. The list is endless – I’ve been thinking about making a super long video called Endless Horror that simply cycles through the tropes of horror but without any actors, possibly randomized. Despite the fact that they are clichés these techniques are powerful. RedRum, a video I shot in Buffalo in 2009 with a crew and cast of teenagers, consists of clichés specific to ghost or haunted films. It’s shot with very little motion, and the surprising result is that despite being predictable in shot composition and arrangement, viewers still find it scary. Those scare tactics are tried and true. Also the cliché of handsome vampire male, fiercely protective of his young mortal ingénue, is capturing my interest at the moment. DW: This recently popular brand of the good ‘beautiful’ vampire narrative has cultivated a massive fan base – though, these fans are a very different kind from the standard horror fans. There seems to be much debate amongst the horror fans about whether things like Twilight even qualify as horror and there is even some animosity about the markers of horror being appropriated into this other form. Your interest in this type of narrative makes sense to me since, along with the horror tropes, it also seems to relate in a way to your earlier non-horror themed works that dealt with celebrity romance and jealousy. This is mostly an observation, I suppose, but I just wanted to know if you see it the same way or if your recent attraction to this type of narrative comes from a different place.
[Hunger, still] Also, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your commissioned work for the Electric Speed exhibition. JM: I don’t consider the Twilight and friends to be horror but they do come from that tradition. The work for Electric Speed is called Hunger, it’s a video for which I’ve also gone back technically to that earlier work, shooting with green screen and trespassing into existing film scenes with some of these contemporary heartthrob vamps, locking eyes with them in staring contests. I made a video in 2008 called Staring Contest with Brad Pitt, which is an endless loop where no one blinks – effectively, no one wins and no one loses. I wanted to make more staring contests but got distracted by other projects, so now I’m taking the time to revamp that project. These vampires are apologetic monsters, somewhat benign, so you’ll perhaps need to recognize them to get the vampire reference. Edward from Twilight doesn’t even have fangs for crying out loud, but Edward is such a household face by now as that saga wraps up it’s final segment. MM: The curators of Electric Speed talk about Marshall McLuhan’s “idea of the global village [introducing] utopian connectivity as well as physical disquietude: Speed brings a network of moments in which we experience not only smooth connection with other people but dissonant disembodiment from ourselves.” They go on to describe the works in the series as questioning “totalizing visions of a simultaneous global culture in order to design or reinvent ideas of connection between people, systems or places, with a critique of speed and technology.” Edward’s ubiquity is doubtless in large part a result of speed and technology – does work like Hunger explicitly critique the role of speed and technology in bolstering (and in some cases producing) celebrity and feeding fandom? Can you talk a bit about your work in relation to the broader themes in Electric Speed? JM: I am critical of some aspects of popular culture, and the speed and influence with which they spread. For example, McLuhan wrote about hot vs. cold media where what we might call rich media is hot, yet coldness signifies more participation (or imagination) from the viewer/reader. Some of these vampire narratives began in novels, allowing readers to envision their own protagonists and anti-heroes, but by the time the movies were released, everyone everywhere who was connected to the rapid electric force of popular knowledge knew what Bella the ingénue and Edward the vampire, for example, looked like, as well as the gist of their dilemma, without having to read the story or see the film. And it’s hard to erase these images because this hot media version is instantly everywhere at once, indelibly replacing our own. I find it curious that there is currently a squadron of the male vampires I described holding sway on TV and the silver screen. At least one UK series is even being remade in the USA while the original is still being created. I am wondering, are the fans proliferating because there is so much media or is the glut of these soft vampires an answer to what the audience wants? As we discussed, these vampires are like watered down horror monsters – when there are more fascinating and terrifying on-screen versions out there, why is this one so compelling? |
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