It comes back again, like a nightmare
Graham Gussin, in conversation with Jonathan Watkins
JW
Savannah, an early work by you [1990], is an abstraction of a landscape. A spherical light fixed to a
gallery wall becomes a moon hanging above an evocation of ‘savannah’, actually a house name spelt
out in kitsch gothic on a rustic piece of wood that transports us, at the same time, to a suburban
front door. The moon is a porch lamp. Savannah signifies dreams of an outdoor life being lived by
someone somewhere else.
GG
That idea of being in one place, but wanting to be in another fascinates me. That’s why I’ve done
work with travel magazines. For example, The Great Outdoors [1990, based on a photo from a
National Geographic magazine, depicts a boy on a fence surveying a vast landscape. Like Savannah,
it’s about desire and being on the threshold of something.
JW
In this vein, you have a strong interest in science fiction, a genre that is essentially about collisions
with unfamiliarity, about us taking everything we think we know to a place that is strange. It is about
us, essentially, being outside our natural habitat.
GG
I’m interested in science fiction not only because of this notion of unfamiliarity, but also because it
opens up a space full of potential, of becoming. It is a utopian space – or dystopian space - for the
discussion of possibility. The science fiction writers I like, such as J.G. Ballard, are more concerned
with inner space than outer space, with what is very close to us being projected outwards so that we
can understand it.
JW
Remote Viewer [2001], your installation featuring an individual who sees things beyond human
eyesight, is half set in Iceland, a place so remote that it resembles another planet. In fact NASA used
it for training astronauts …
GG
Yes that clicked with me, that particular choice of a location in our world to approximate what is
extra-terrestrial. In the 1970s a lot of science fiction movies were shot in Nevada, around the Grand
Canyon because that’s the strangest place on earth. I like that slip from something we can’t
comprehend back into the comprehensible, or perhaps the reverse.
JW
You often say that you are concerned with ideas of the projection of what is possible. For example,
the remote viewer didn’t find you, but you were interested in the possibility that he might have
done. His search was quite possibly hopeless because he had no special telepathic powers, but that
might not matter so much to you …
GG
No, but remote viewing is such an interesting proposition. It’s like raw material for me - what
happens if I mix this with that? Our remote viewer didn’t find me, but if he had I probably would
have made a very different piece. Above all, his reaching desire and effort was the subject of the
work.
JW
Do you believe in some spiritual, transcendental realm, or is it just a question of known unknowns
largely because we don’t yet have enough technology, or because we haven’t thought through
things sufficiently …
GG
I’m more interested in the human approximation of things, the shapes that ideas take on, and then
develop in accordance with their own kind of logic. Things take off to arrive at their own
momentum. ?? New technology shapes things in ways we don’t and often can’t expect. I’m
interested in spirituality only as a notion, or a state, or a possibility …
JW
And how about the existentialist alternative, the idea that we exist in an absurd universe, that as
individuals we are absolutely alone in a place without intelligent design? Existentialism is suggested
by a lot of your work, perhaps most in your use of loops - for example, the Sisyphean nature of your
video Costa del Sol [1995] in which the road trip never stops because the end seamlessly meets the
beginning. And then there’s the remote viewer alone in a room – a classic existentialist scenario and he occurs to us either as a hero or the victim of his own existentialist ‘bad faith’ …
GG
… projecting a world beyond himself in a space in relation to what he is doing, convincing himself
that he is in a kind of airlock between reality and non-reality.
JW
Is it significant that now you are not making such explicit reference to science fiction in your work?.
GG
Yes, it tends to be more in the background. Science fiction was my way into literature, what I started
to read and understand at the same time as being transported ... Transport is a very everyday word,
in that it could refer to a truck taking something from A to B, but then there is also the idea of being
transported in a different sense. I remember going into the ‘Rothko Room’ at the Tate Gallery, when
I was 14 or something, and seeing people there looking at paintings waiting for something to
happen, waiting to be transported. I thought it was nonsense, frankly, but I was interested in what
they wanted, the fact that they wanted something to happen
JW
As well as literature, science fiction is a film genre and film as a medium - as well as a message in
itself - is of great interest to you. Not only do you make films about film, but much of your other
work is similarly inspired by film and Illumination Rig, in its various manifestations outdoors, is a
recent case in point. It is assertively making the visible world filmic.
GG
It’s about making spaces full of potential. Illumination Rig can be seen from a long way off. People
move towards it thinking that there must be a film being made, and then it becomes clear that if
there is a film, then they are the subject, possibly the actors, their surroundings a backdrop..
Film spills out into the everyday, into our reality all the time. We pick it up and we use it. There’s a
very interesting set of essays by Constance Penley about the relationship between science fiction
and science, the way that science fiction informs science, and that science brings the future into our
present day, and film is the same, not just in terms of gadgetry and franchises, but in a psychological
sense.