Damir Očko in conversation with Maria Rosa Sossai
Damir Očko in conversation with Maria Rosa Sossai │ 2010
MRS: I will start our conversation analyzing your concept of work of art, which is (I’m quoting your own words) “a process never finished and closed, an organic creation”. How deeply does your aesthetic standpoint affect the reality in general and produce a change of perspective in the public, which plays a significant role in contemporary art?
DO: I feel that the world we live in is very exhausted with changes. I looked for this exhaustion in the unfinished University Hospital in Zagreb, while working on “The Boy with a Magic Horn”.
At that time, I was already very tired of the stigma one feels when coming from a specific environment such as a post communist country in a transitional phase, and I felt it had very little to do with me. I was too young when the Eastern Bloc collapsed, in fact I lived in the transitional period, which was normal for me.
This normality was extremely turbulent and produced a huge amount of waste charged with a history I could not feel as my own. At that point, it seemed natural to think of this waste with a different mindset, as a state of things suspended in time and space, where I could take a critical distance between the historical context and my own projection.
A similar observation took place in Tirana, too. While making The End of the World, my focus was the whole city, which is a fascinating example of things changing too rapidly. There was something beautiful and at the same time disturbing surrounding the city, and I felt that I had to observe this notion rather than work with a linear objectivity in terms of cause and consequence.
With The Age of Happiness, I took a step forward in my practice. Instead of having one subject, I worked with something much more ephemeral, a spectrum of references. At that time, I was very interested in Mysterium, an unfinished project by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. This was no typical late Romantic music, but rather a work of art proposing a completely new culture, so advanced and visionary that it had to fail. Scriabin imagined this work as an event lasting seven days and performed on the Himalayas. The cast of performers was to include an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. He also proposed a stage for this event to be non-architectural, but instead to be able to shift and change with the motion of the music.
But more significant was his claim that “there will be no more spectators, all will become participants”. This was very strong for me, and when I looked more into this, I found that the idea for this sensory extravaganza had another agenda: the Apocalypse which would happen at the high point of the performance and would transform every human being into a higher form of life. Of course this was a very utopian vision, but it is interesting to analyze the tools the composer proposed, such as a harmony system based on human emotions and colors. At that time I was also very preoccupied with researching acoustical illusions, prenatal memories, the use of music in hypnosis, the mimicking of nature with acoustic and electro-acoustic instruments, and so many other things that I felt no need for a strong subject, instead I wanted to work with fragments and constellations.
So, when I speak about The Age of Happiness now, I speak about many things and how they are connected with each other. In essence, it is always about the way we are and can be affected by art much more intensely when things are pushed beyond what is considered normal. This was the reason why I had to set things in a fictional site, uncharged with architecture and history, where everything was possible.
MRS: Can you explain what the source (biographical, intellectual, or other) of your constant reference to music is? In your work, music becomes a sort of lingua franca which includes the listening experience and the sound element.
DO: I was educated as a visual artist, but I was greatly influenced by music and the history of music.
One of the reasons for this is that I feel personally very close to the language of music and the organization of time one can experience while listening to music.
Music flows through time in the structure of the event, so to speak... It is always in the past and in the future. Film is no different; it simply is the attraction of working with time as a perpetual motion that drives me. Narrative plays a significant role too, since in music narratives are much more abstract than in any other form of art. I like this uncertainty in music and I like to work with it.
MRS: The fundamental experience of the circularity of composition, at the core of many of your works, is a way to bypass the problem Nicolas Bourriaud outlined as the “matter of replacing the question of origin with that of destination”, so “Where should we go?” has become the modern question par excellence. The allusion to a non-existing world in your video works is linked in some way to the utopian idea of freedom for all mankind. In an interview, you advocated “the right of the author to make mistakes, the need to develop and adapt a system and to avoid virtuosity”. Examples of what mentioned above are the creatures in the videos “The End of the World” and “The Boy with a Magic Horn”, who are customized living machines that have to adapt to unusual conditions. These characters bring us information about another universe, as if the real world no longer mirrored any image of us: a metaphor for today’s fragile and deracinated culture. Or maybe they are figures of alienation, according to the idea Walter Benjamin expressed in his book “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”. Here, the film actor is the prototype of the new proletarian, who moves in a fragmented context that he doesn’t master, where he feels as if in exile, that is to say, alienated from the images of himself that the camera records.
DO: One analogy I used in the Boy with a Magic Horn and The Age of Happiness was that “somewhere” is a potential inscribed in the origin, a destination beyond the gap or, in the case of “The Boy with a Magic Horn”, the gap itself.
I was recently introduced to the lecture held by Nikolaus Harnoncourt on the unfinished finale of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Towards the end of the unfinished score there is a three-tone motive written for the horns, followed by a silent break. The nature of the three tones suggests that some sort of a resolution should follow. Instead, there is a unnatural but precisely marked break. Harnoncourt described this moment in words: “here nothing is missing, it clearly leads to somewhere”. This sentence is always in my mind. The idea that something is missing can be a strong departure point or it can mean that what is missing is simply dislocated or has to be traced in what is not directly linked to the origin, a sort of inter-textuality. In the Age of Happiness, I try to understand this question.
The protagonists in my works are characters with their features limited to what I wish to project, but also to what reflects on them. Their movement and action in space is that of sculptures rather than people, moving through time and space.
I think a lot about motion because the characters are not only “what”, but also “when”. The sense of suspended time and sense of immobility comes from the treatment of motion and this is very important to me. This helps me to create a movement precise enough to be observed properly.
There was a conductor who was famous for conducting music at very slow tempos, much slower than what would be written in the scores. When someone asked him “why so slow”, he answered “that even if the flow of music moved so slow that it would seem as it had stopped, we would still hear less sounds than the music actually contained”. I think this can be extended to almost everything we perceive. This is why my works seem unnatural, they have this reduced motion, not only is the movement reduced but also what you can see in the protagonists is a reduced version of what you can observe in the real world. But essentially, it is a clarified reflection of the real. One should not forget that, although invisible, music is a character too.
MRS: The projection of the films inside architectural spaces in the exhibition at Kunsthalle in Munich enhances the spatial and sensorial experience. Do your video installations embody the idea of cinema as a total environment or do you consider them as an expanded concept of sculpture?
DO: The exhibition in Munich was a particular case, because it was the first time I was showing two of my films in one solo exhibition, so it was necessary to build a certain structure between them. The Boy with a Magic Horn and The Age of Happiness have many points in common but they are also very different works.
The size of space was also to be considered. It was a “grand” empty space, quite large in size and completely open in structure. No walls or dark rooms suitable for screenings. These conditions imposed that a structure should be built within, a sort of center of gravity pulling works closer to each other and forming a possible route between them. I like to think about continuous movement through exhibitions, a certain rhythm one feels when moving along films, sculptures, drawings and the space itself. Building forms is one way to constitute a continuity, much like designing a stage in theater. Except that in this case the spectator is the one who moves through time, encountering the works.
The sculptures appearing in my films are never exhibited. I consider this to be crucial for the sake of their presence in the films. Instead, I take the opportunity to sculpt connections and the missing or unclear situations in the narratives.
The central light installation from the Munich exhibition has something that originates in films. It appears as an overgrown lamp from the last scene of The Boy with a Magic Horn, but it blinks in the slow motion version of the strobe sequence from The Age of Happiness. Furthermore, the title “Illuminated from Beyond” refers to the last composition by Olivier Messiaen, a composer who was fascinated by birdsongs but also by what he called the “charm of impossibilities”.
I used this light installation with its spinning light pulse to create a scale of duration necessary to look at the drawings displayed around it.
So I guess it is a sculpture expanding out of the films, but instead of doing so literally, it delivers what is not easily perceived in the films. And it brings the exhibition to the overall density filled with an indefinite potential to recreate platforms not only to relay my work, but to bring various social, political, lost or failed models to the front.
MRS: What role do drawings have in your artistic practice? I would like to know in particular about the music score drawings which refer to the historical avant-gardes, and the Study works that express to what extent literature is a poignant reference for you.
DO: I use drawing as a tool to “clear the noise” in the production process. When I work on a film, it usually takes only two days to shoot and three weeks to edit. It is a dense schedule, but production itself takes place usually in a very long period – sometimes more than a year – so I find drawing to be a necessary tool in this process. If I have a problem or I am undecided about something, I draw it, and this usually solves any dilemma. When I was planning the night scene from The Age of Happiness, it was a bit of a problem to imagine what kind of a site should host the action, so I was drawing the sites on black paper using white chalk until the right image was there. So this decision was made through drawing. It is important for me be able to think with hands as well.
Besides imaginary, I also try to visualize the soundscape. This is done through the scores I write either for myself or for the musicians I work with. It is visual information indicating the flow or texture of what I wish to hear, and to better define this I use graphic notation systems where you are free to work with any kind of visual articulation such as signs, colors, forms and orders, if you establish a systemized relationship between them. Avant-garde movements brought this visualization of sound from the basic need to speak about the unity of the senses to a sort of quest for the ultimate sensation, the synesthetic experience. Alexander Scriabin, who was a synesthete, speaks about this in his Mysterium.
Another departure can be traced back to the first problems composers encountered when having to write down electronic music. It was not the ultimate sensation they were looking for, instead they were developing the tools to write down what was impossible to be written using the traditional notation system. When drawing, I depart from both cognitive and perceptual positions, the ultimate sensation and the tool to write the instructions down, and while doing so, I try to be conscious of the heritage and the potential in the systems already established. In this process, inventions and reevaluations are less important. Instead I look for a different platform, one that is not only instructive in nature. It is the same with literature. I have to find a way to articulate the references I use. Some things influence the film directly, and some stay around it.
There were three books I was very interested in while working on The Age of Happiness. René Daumals’s “Mount Analogue”, J.G. Ballards’s “Crystal World” and Joris-Karl Huysmans’s “A Rebours”. I use literature as a starting point or to make my own vision referential, and this is something that also happens in my drawings. There is a group of drawings I made using a short text from “Mount Analogue”. It was the image of a childish memory about insects that bite you while you are asleep. The morning after you wake up dead. I liked this paradox, being dead and still waking up. At first it did not seem to have much to do with where the film was going but I could not resist including it.