Over the course of the next few posts, we’ll share artist interviews and insights about this year’s ON SIGHT visual arts line-up. You can experience all of TBA:09’s visual arts installations from Sept 4 – 13, every day 12 – 6:30 pm. And join us for a free opening night party September 3, from 8 – 10:30 pm at Washington High School (map).
Named after the Chris Marker video Sans Soleil, Condon’s Without Sun is an edited compilation of “found performances” of individuals on a psychedelic substance. Images and sounds from the various clips collected from the Internet overlap and combine into one seamless experience, creating a 15-minute pseudo-narrative focused on the exterior surface of their “projection of self” into visionary worlds. Condon’s global players in Without Sun have this time recorded themselves looking at the camera. Taking up where Marker left off, these (inner) travelogues question memory, perception, and the effects of current participatory media and technology on culture. Condon’s work is notable for its influence on the repurposing of existing computer and live games to create sculpture, performance, and software installations. Youth of the Apocalypse, a series of self-playing game modifications based on Late Medieval Northern European religious paintings, is just one example.
Figure III: A Video Still from Condon’s Without Sun.
KK: You have spoken to me about your work, in particular your video, Without Sun, to be about in some part, “the projection of self.” What do you think it is about humans, firmly planted in one world, who go to all sorts of lengths (drugs, psychotherapy, role-playing, religious ritual, dreaming, magic) to conjure up other worlds?
BC: It would take lifetimes to fully answer that question. I will break it into a thousand smaller bits for now. What do people look like when they are on psychoactive substances that dissociate conscious perception from the body? What are the visible ways over-identifications with fantasy affect culture? Etc.
KK: In the Chris Marker film Sans Soleil, on which your video is based, he opens the film with the Racine quote, “The distance between countries compensates somewhat for the excessive closeness of time.” How do notions of time figure in your piece? What about sense of place?
BC: I didn’t actually have Sans Soleil in mind when I made my video. By using that reference, I am saying that I am now sitting next to it, thinking about it. Thinking about what Marker’s film could possibly tell us about this collection of inner travelogues from the future that were recorded and put into this nebulous public digital space. It’s a strange situation where they have intentionally traumatized themselves and attempted the emotional time travel of post traumatic stress therapy all at once.
KK: At what point in the process of making this piece did you decide to add a performative element or companion? How are the two works related (video + performance)?
BC: I decided to add the performative element a year after the video was finished. It was a natural transition, my videos have consistently been “collections of performance documentation,” whether it is recording myself playing a game or collecting found performance footage from others. In the case of Without Sun, I reversed the process. The video collection turned out to be the perfect choreography document and script for a performance.
KK: In the festival we present work by both visual and performance artists, and some artists like yourself cross these boundaries. Do you think of these genres as being two different worlds? Is it important to have a distinction or should we just invent a new term for how artists interpret the world?
BC: I don’t know if a radical distinction is necessary, and somehow the terms are still useful. This crossover has been going on in recent Western art history at least since the early 20th century avant-garde, then cropping up again with force in the 60s and 70s. Meaning artists my age who studied sculpture and installation came into the game 30 years after its re-adoption of experimental theatre and performance, so integrating performative strategies into our work was common.
About
Born in Mexico, Condon received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2002. He attended residencies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in 2004 and Skowhegan 2001. Past exhibitions include 2004 Whitney Biennial, Pace Wildenstein Gallery and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Santa Monica Museum of Art and Machine Project in California.
www.tmpspace.com
