The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993
Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)
The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993
Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)
Peter Hill: You are currently spending a year in Australia on a Scottish Arts Council residency. This has allowed you to spend five month's in Canberra, Australia's capital, five months in Hobart on the island of Tasmania, and two months travelling around the country. How has it been?
Stephen Hurrell: The biggest challenge has to do with being taken out of my normal environment and placed on the other side of the world with the expectation of continuing to make art. Over the past twelve years in Glasgow my projects have become increasingly complex in terms of collaborations with other artists and working with various public spaces. I saw the opportunity of coming to Australia as a way of going back to working more 'lightly'. It has encouraged me to work a bit more with my instincts.
PH: Were there other reasons you wanted to come to Australia?
SH: I first became excited about Australia four years ago when I was working on the fotofies project in Scotland. I was doing research in to artists who work with new technologies and was quite surprised at the number of Australians making art works involving sound, telecommunications and digital media.
PH: A unique feature of this residency is that it is split between two centres. How did you find that?
SH: Challenging, is the word that springs to mind. You know
that you have only a limited time in each city, but on top of that both cities
are so totally different. When I left Canberra I had a whole lot of ideas that
I planned to work on in Hobart, but when I got here they no longer seemed relevant
and I had to start from scratch again. But that's a positive comment. Canberra
is very much a planned city. And I enjoyed the Utopian, modernistic feel that
it has.
Then I moved to Hobart which is Australia's second oldest city and has many
aspects about it which are quite familiar to someone coming from Europe. There
is also the whole wilderness aspect of Tasmania which is totally foreign to
any European landscape with all these strange creatures like the Tasmanian
Devil which you don't even find on mainland Australia.
PH: Canberra is a small city, but being the seat of government is full of embassies and consulates each with their own national style of architecture. It's a bit like walking around a set for The Prisoner.
SH: That's right. And that same variety is found in Australian television. If you tune in to the commercial channels it's like American television while the ABC is like the BBC and buys in The Bill, Two Fat Ladies, and Hamish Macbeth. Then you turn to SBS and it's totally multicultural with films from China and documentaries from Italy or Croatia and live news bulletins every morning from Japan, Germany, London, and France.
PH: Tell me about the projects you have worked on since leaving Scotland.
SH: My first project was the doppelganger piece,
and its the first time I've used writing as an art work. It evolved over the
first two months here. It has to do with the experience of arriving in another
country and having a premonition that you are going to bump in to somebody
who you know and then actually seeing people who remind you of other people
who you do know. I developed that idea into a narrative of how I bumped in
to someone who looked like me.
But it is a fiction that goes off at tangents and which explore the nature
of perception in relation to photography, video, and digital imagery. It was
an entertaining project to do and humour was an important part of it. It
was a story that grew in the telling and people would start recounting
strange experiences to me of chance meetings in other countries, bumping
in to old friends at airports and on beaches miles from home.
PH: I've long been fascinated by the opposite of that too, when coincidences nearly happen but not quite. Two people from Dundee, say, sitting back-to-back in a Macdonald's in Manhattan and not realising the other was there. Only God will ever know.
SH: There's a lot more to be explored in the broad area of the doppelganger. I see it as an on-going project which will involve making video portraits of people I meet in different parts of the world. When it is shown in a gallery as an on-going slow dissolve I can imagine people becoming quite transfixed waiting for that moment when they might see somebody that they know or that looks like themselves.
PH: Would you use a video projector?
SH: No, probably a monitor to keep it to a domestic scale that would allow references to looking in a mirror.
PH: And how important is travel to your work?
SH: Certainly the more I travel the more I want to have a project that I can take with me wherever I go and work on in very different environments.
PH: And is the white, modernist gallery space the best setting for this type of work?
SH: The ideal would be some kind of slide monologue which would turn this particular project in to a kind of performance piece, maybe even in a lecture theatre. But the narrative could also stand up as a text-based art work, either in a book or on a gallery wall.
PH: I'd now like to talk about the project you worked on in Germany which also dealt with notions of identity set within the modern city. It was a collaboration between three Glasgow artists and three Munich artists. How did that come about?
SH: This was put together by Dave MacMillan who was very active in Glasgow for a number of years and who initiated Windfall for Glasgow. An organisation called Breathe took the project on and they were very experienced in twinning events between different cities. Sabine Kamelle (?) was the organiser in Munich and Dave had met her when they were both at the Royal College together. So, three artists came across from Munich to Glasgow and created temporary art works which integrated in to the fabric of the city and used the various networks of the city. It was a bit like a treasure hunt and if you wanted to take part in it you were given maps of the city and had to get keys for buildings or bank vaults and go through various institutionalised rituals.
PH: And what did you do in Munich?
SH: Peter McCaughey, Fionna Wright and myself each proposed separate ideas and applied separately through an open submission. But it turned out we had each proposed ideas that dealt with the media systems of a city, in particular cinemas, magazines, and television. My work involved interrupting a live television broadcast. And I wanted to do it with a general news and current affairs programme rather than an arts programme. Every so often a male and a female would appear on the screen as if they were talking by video. The idea was that somehow their private conversation had dropped in to the wrong transmission signal and was interrupting the program. I needed a male and a female actor so I used Peter and Fiona as the protagonists.
PH: And the television company agreed to go along with this?
SH: They did. But the viewers at home were not warned about it in advance. The presenter was very good and played along with the whole thing, looking very puzzled and apologising to viewers for the interruptions.
PH: What did the others do?
SH: Peter's proposal involved creating a cinema trailer for a film called No Way Back. which was also the name of the whole project. Each of us worked the title in to our interventions somewhere. Peter's 72 second trailer was then inter-cut with genuine trailers at six different cinemas around Munich. Fionna's piece involved re-inventing herself as a completely new character, in this case a soap star. She invented the soap programme and her own personal history and biography. Then she arrived in Munich with a new persona. She appeared in two city guides which were a bit like Time Out, in this role as another character. So we camouflaged ourselves in to the city in such a way that a lot of people didn't realise that what they were looking at was art.
PH: And do you have any plans to do a similar project in Australia?
SH: Only in the sense that I am still interested in exploring a convergence between identity and technology in relation to specific social spaces. But I want to do a project which relates to the context of where I am currently located. At the moment I am working on a piece which will use a shipping container which is a common sight around Hobart. I plan to use it as a lightbox with images being back projected from within onto a screen at the open end. It will be viewed from outside. Reference will be made to the idea of human containment and the role of sea transportation in the colonisation of this country. The other element of this project will update the idea of a 'message in a bottle.' I have made a sealed fibreglass casque which will contain a video-tape. This casque will be dropped from a ship into the Antarctic Ocean on the last day of 1977. Then I will have to wait until someone finds it and contacts me before I can continue. I have looked at the main sea currents to ensure that it will have a good chance of reaching a populated area. I've linked the notion of chance and probability to technology, for artistic ends.
PH: And what's on the video tape?
SH: I'm afraid that's between me and whoever finds it. The 'container piece' is the public communication of an experiencee of place. The 'message in the bottle' is private. We've all got secrets after all.
