Interview with Graeme Miller
Can you describe what audiences will see and hear when they walk
through the installation?
It will be in a huge area of darkness. There will be 13 or 14 (depending how
superstitious I am!) screens flickering away in the underground tunnel, and each one of
those will show a repeating series of photographs on the wall. So it’s a long corridor,
with light generated by these video screens, that goes off into the distance giving the
audience a very strong sense of perspective. The audiences see a cross section of the
city as it has been sampled by the people who walk the route. You will be able to hear
the voices of the person whose viewpoint you are seeing, so you’re really walking
along a line of people who are traveling through the city endlessly in a loop. And as
you approach each position you hear the voice of one of those people, hearing what
each person recalls of the city, the impressions they make, and clues as to who they
are. Each screen is the viewpoint of one person following the person in front, so you
only ever see people from behind, like following a white rabbit through the city.
Why have you chosen the Barbican car park as your location for Bassline:
London?
I originally did this piece in Vienna and that’s where I thought the idea up. I thought
that an underground space would be fantastic. They’re sort of secret places. Tunnels
under the city appeal to everybody, and in a way they represent the subconscious of
the city. Behind it, the city is making different impressions on different people. An
underground space is ideal to explore the secret life of a city.
In Vienna the tunnel was underneath one of the city’s main shopping streets, so you
could just go through a door and leave behind the sunlight, traffic, noise, people,
everyday life and go into this empty meditative space. It has to be dark to see this
ghostly side of the city, so it really suits an underground space, and they’re quite hard
to come by. The Barbican is a great location. I’ve been looking for a space to do this
in London and in a way this is a moveable piece that can work in lots of different
spaces, but it does require this underground tunnel. It needs to be an interesting space
above ground and below. London has lots of small pokey little tunnels, but the
opportunity to have this whole floor of the car park was perfect, as it allowed us to
have this kind of distance and also because the Barbican area straddles so many
different areas of the city. You can walk in five minutes between the heart of the
financial district, with its Japanese restaurants and then into council estates. But it’s also
a great architectural space with this strange labyrinth of walkways, some which are
very pristine and perfectly looked after, and others which are in a state of semi-decay.
How site specific is the project, and how will it differ from Bassline:
Vienna?
It came about by being given three days to walk around Vienna, but as soon as I came
up with it I realised that it was an idea that could be translated from space to space.
Every city has very particular qualities and the experience the citizens have of walking
around the streets is part of what makes that place unique. So in that sense it’s as site
specific as you can get. Paradoxically, it’s site specific by having exactly the same
process in each location. Finding the walkers is quite a hard process, but hopefully it’s
a system that will reveal the intrinsic qualities of that city.
What kind of people are you looking for to participate in this project?
I’m really looking for people who will offer themselves up, as if they’re human cameras
that record their impressions, that allow themselves to be printed on by the city.
Obviously a 90 year old man will see different things to a child of six, and so a child
and an old person will probably take part. A child will spot funny things, dog poo
maybe, while an old person might be able to see what was there before quite strongly.
The types of people will vary, I’d like one of everything. So, for example, people from
different sides of the tracks. Someone from the community who works in the city and
probably lives in the suburbs or home counties, who comes into work everyday, also
someone who lives in the council estates nearby. I’m also trying to get hold of someone
who’s really just arrived here, not just in London but in the country, (maybe just by a few
days or a week) and have that very particular view of seeing a place for the very first
time. You never normally get that, especially the view of people who come from less
developed countries arriving in a western European city. So the walkers are quite
anonymous, but their voices reveal a lot about them, so I’m just looking for a funny
mixture, different ages, different walks of life but also people who are just open and
able to put their views into words. It’s like I’ve got an ark and I can only take 12 people.
Can you describe the process of turning these people’s testimonies into
art?
A lot of it just comes from work I’ve done over the years to do with interviewing people
- I’ve worked a lot with sound and the spoken word. In a lot of projects I try to get
people to work quite hard at remembering, and it’s a way of getting them to articulate
things they’ve maybe never spoken about or things they can see very vividly in their
mind’s eye. These sort of words, once they leave the mouth, become funny objects and
as an artist I create quite formal ways to organise these words. So, what I’m doing is
creating a formal arrangement of a moment, an exploded diagram of a single 45
minute walk through a city. There is something quite awesome in the way that the city
shifts every second and that what people experience can be completely chaotic, but it’s
how we manage to recompose those sights into coherent spaces, making up the city as
we go along that amazes me. I try to tap into the memory and get that material and
make sense of the words that start to have a life of their own. It’s like walking through a
long ever-changing poem. No two people will have the same experience as they’ll
linger in different places. The whole thing hangs on a continuous bassline.
As Bassline also celebrates the 350th anniversary of Henry Purcell’s birth,
and his own London connection, how will you find the line of his music to
suit this project?
It is a coincidence Handel, Purcell and Haydn all have anniversaries this year, and they
all have a relationship to London. But I have quite a lot of Purcell on my ipod, so I’ve
been looking at borrowing a harmonic sequence that somehow gives this idea of
ascending and descending. I’ll probably just use that structure and translate that into a
solo piece for double bass. What interests me is the double bass’ ability to imply not
just the chords and harmonies, but the rhythm that is above it. So it’s the perfect tool to
hang words on.
How did audiences respond to Bassline: Vienna and what do you hope
audiences in London will take away from the piece?
This is part of a series of works I call my Civic Works that are for as wide an audience
as possible. And in this piece not only are the walkers citizens, but the audience is
exactly the same. I’m trying to set up a space that’s surprisingly awesome but is also a
slightly sinister space that reveals, things as simple as being able to see the city
happening from different spaces. There are certain viewpoints you get, so when they
are layered up on each other the combination of images and spaces is quite dreamy,
and the voices that recede into the distance that come into focus as you get closer are
quite immersive. I hope people will spend quite a long time just listening to the rhythm.
It’s a theatrical, philosophical place of thought, and I hope that people will come out
with a different perspective of once familiar surroundings, enjoying the curiosity of
following the trail. One of the things that happens is that you hear the double bass
before it’s revealed. I hope that it will alter people enough so that when they rejoin life
in the city and come into the light they have a different perspective. All my civic works
also offer people living in a city a chance to shift their perspective.
What motivates you as an artist?
Different things at different times. I’ve always, even as a kid, wanted to be a useful
member of the village, and although that would not necessarily be a good job
description for many artists, I also think there is a usefulness for art, and I suppose with
my civic works there is a desire to enable a shift of perception. So in a fairly humble
way my motivation for this is wanting to share my own discoveries in how strange and
volatile this city is. And I’m quite excited about the work myself, when you have an idea
you want to see it work and share it.
Is this piece typical of your work?
Yes, they started with a piece called The Sound Observatory, and a lot of the same
themes come up in Bassline. Much of it is to do with place - I’m fascinated about how
place exists outside ourselves and inside ourselves. We have a whole library of
landscapes in our minds, but the two things don’t necessarily match up and as human
beings we experience place within our bodies. We have to have faith that these things
do exist outside us, and that they tally up. Remembering that the world is composed of
other people is very complicated, and that’s a theme that runs through a lot of my
work.