Discussing “Credence”
A conversation between Harris Allen and Dan Roe
1.16.2025
DR: 00:00 Natural hardware setup draws attention to the materiality of the screen technology. The subject matter, when you try to lose yourself in the illusion - this is the masterstroke - It's moving not slow enough to look like a still or a painting and not fast enough to tell a story so that when you look at the screen and try to engage in the illusory space and the conventions of illusory space, all that you get are these signifiers that cue you to think of sculpture and human anatomy and time and decay and change. You don't get the comfort of sitting and losing yourself in an illusory representation of reality. You don't get to see something happening fast enough for you to connect a narrative, fast enough for your brain to hold on to the continuation of it, nor is it slow enough for you to just enjoy the image. You are forced, you're subjected to the change that is happening through time, and the only associations you're given are those of crumbling statues and your own physical human form and that is directly related and directly connected to the physicality of the screen leaning, the wires and the hard drive and the power strip and the power cord plugged into your electrical fucking grid, you know what I mean? When I shut all my lights off and suddenly my frame cast a glow but what was super cool was turning my lights off and being like, "Oh, it's red in here, oh yeah because of that," and in the middle of the night waking up and going,
HA : 02:06. You left it on
DR : 02:08. Yeah, I left it on," and I woke up and I had coffee and was like, "Let me look at this thing," I forgot that it was here, it's still going. I like came into the room drinking coffee looking out the window, looked at my [02:20] painting and I went, "Oh fuck, that thing." So the content up on the screen, the visual subject matter on the screen is in tandem with that setup. I think that's like the coolest part about it.
HA : 02:41 It's all striking the same note. It’s all in line. It’s all in the same class.
DR: 02:45 It doesn't allow you to engage with it as a traditional flat screen or painting or canvas or whatever. So if anything I'd say like, "Wow, maybe what I would have done if we had set it up again is just folded my mirror up and put it back in the bedroom. Cause I’m not working out, I don't need that mirror, I can just let the wires hang out. Let's see what those wires do." I brought a power strip over to connect it to the wall. If it was in a gallery or a museum or whatever, yeah, you want to have maybe too many wires coming out, you know what I mean? Like Nam June Paik or Bruce Naumann but in a totally different way. Anyways, it's good stuff.
HA: 03:42 I say that a screen is a portal to the moment or it is the moment. The one where there's scrim in front of it and you touch it. If it's a scale, it's definitely making a present moment. Like, it's about the present moment. It uses something that happened and is displayed as the portal to the moment. But really it's doing something in present physical space. Or on the other end, you're recording something - a child blowing out candles. And it's like you're going back in time to that moment. It's a portal to that moment, so it's one of those two.
DR: 04:39 There's a great book on film called "The Material Ghost." The reason he called it that is that every image captures a moment in time that immediately disappears. So every image is like--
HA: 05:11 I call it giving fixedness to a fleeting moment.
DR: 05:15 There it is, yeah. I mean, that's what it is, yeah.
HA: 05:19 Like this piece, it wouldn't be the same if it were real-time. You're more aware of the capability and its power from a still photograph. Of the space and time continuum, a still image a sliver, a frozen instant. With video in space and time, you're capturing a swath.
DR: 06:10 Well, you know, it's like Magritte's like, "This is not a pipe." You just wrote that underneath the painting of a pipe. It's the same. I mean, it's sort of related.
HA: 06:20 And that this is not a video.
DR: 06:22 Yeah, it's kind of like doing the same thing, but there hasn’t been a Magritte of the video age. There hasn't-- all of the video installation artists, even Godard, everything, failed to really arrest the power of the moving image from its immediate kind of, pavlovian effect that it has.
HA: 06:50 That's the most interesting.
DR: 06:53 Yeah but that's what we've talked about forever now, it's just that there's the moving image exists within so many cultured cues and conventions that you can't-- it's so possible to escape almost. You know like the old story of the first people to see the Lumiere brothers' footage of the train pulling into a station, they jumped out of the way because they thought it was a real train but once that moment's done then you're lost. Or like the Chinese people, the French guy brings it to China and shows it to China and they go, "How did you get the little people inside the box?" And then as soon as you explain what's going on--
HA: 07:33 It's gone.
DR: 07:35 It's done. Forever. The magic’s gone.
HA: 07:37 That's a technology that's on to the next, that was once the color blue. That was a technology.
DR: 07:46 Exactly. So, when Magritte was able to after three millennia of painting, whatever, how long ago were the cave paintings? Thousands of years ago.
HA: 07:57 Tens of thousands of years ago.
DR: 07:58 Yeah, a very long time ago.
HA: 08:01 Ah like 2014.
DR: 08:03 Yeah. So, then suddenly in the 1940s, this French guy says, "This isn't a pipe." And that broke the spell. That was a sea change."No, it's not really a pipe. It's a representation of a pipe.” - That among other things and not entirely because now we have Photoshop and AI-generated images and people are still take it as reality.
HA: 08:42 So how has that applied to this?
DR: 08:44 So how it applies to this is that the effect of a moving image has not been disrupted in that way. But it's just so powerful that, like you said, even Bill Viola. If you ask anybody, "Who's a video installation artist?" if they know one, it's probably him. And when you see a Bill Viola piece, he tells a story, it's on a flat screen. We know what's happening, and it's on a flat screen. It does it. It allows you to engage with the image as a flat, illusory depiction of reality. Tony Oursler is like, it's like, "Oh yeah, yeah, I get it, it's the sculpture's the thing." And Bruce Naumann, it's more about your interaction with the space.
HA: 09:54 Interesting you say that about Bruce.
DR: 09:58 I mean, it kind of is, you see these images, these videos, and Nam June Paik was probably the closest that I could think of.
HA: 10:15 But you say that about Bruce who's--
DR: 10:16 I mean, Bruce is my favorite.
HA: 10:20 Tony is the one making it three-dimensional.
DR: 10:23 Like I said, David Lynch did that, and Matthew Barney did. I mean, a lot of people love fucking John Cocteau in different ways. There are lots of people who have done it. I mean, probably infinite examples that I'm not thinking of right now. I have big memories of weird little oddities. And we're not even talking about the different forms of three-dimensional image-making that happened before electronic media. But I'm just saying that Bruce Naumann— The one at Dia Beacon, it’s like the video screen showing a guy down this hall, and then you go down that hall. It's stuff like that, where it's messing up your sense of the temporal location. It's still using that technology to fuck with your sense of temporality and synchronicity, synchronization, time, and spatiotemporal conceptions. It's brilliant. He's one of the most brilliant artists of all time. I'm saying there's something much closer to Magritte or the surrealists in this piece, that truly fucks with your ability to passively engage in the image.
HA: 12:05 Because even Bruce Naumann-- it's like a CCTV or security cameras. I'm trained to look at the video in a certain way. Here, I wasn't trained, that's why it took so long. That's why I said, like, out of the box. I was befuddled, I was like, "I don't know how to do this." It took a long-- It took me five hours to go, "Oh, there's a lot going on here, I don't know really what, but a lot." Like Nam June Paik. I think the difference here is that the video artists that we're talking about are either using projectors, or they're using tube TVs. Technology that we're all kind of already alienated from. This is flat! It's fucking paper thin and it looks like a work of classical sculpture come to life, you know what I mean?
HA: 13:19 You’re hitting the boxes.
DR: 13:22 What else were you thinking when you made it? Were you thinking at all? What's your fucking-- How do you fucking get these ideas? It's amazing. What is your process?
HA: 13:49 I was thinking a little bit. What do you want to know? I can answer anything about the piece. The piece is-- I mean, did you wonder how long it was? Should I tell you?
DR: 13:56 Yeah, I am curious.
HA: 13:57 It's 40-minutes.
DR: 13:59 Really!? That's it? If I sat there for 40 minutes I'd see the whole thing finish?
HA: 14:07 Well “finish.” Remember when we had the conversation about how it’s work to live with - outside of the parking lot on the block of the assignation just afterwards? Whatever. The “It's something that you live with and in three months maybe you see this just a portion of its entirety.”
HA: 14:21 That's exactly what it was, I forgot about that, but yes, that's what it was!
DR: 14:22 That's what it should be, the fact that it was achieved in 40 minutes. I mean, I have pieces that are hours, and to hit that note, it has to be-- I haven't lived or experienced many of my pieces like that, but to hear this achieved that in 40 minutes -- It's a great exemplification of that.
DR: 14:44 Pretty darn good.
HA: 14:45 But you are hitting like-- Wow, it's really amazing, Dan. You're hitting all of these notes that I am trying to - in this piece - and in the broader practice - trying to hit. The sculptural element to its physicality, the moment. It's not about a recording. It's so beyond a recorded video that if heaven forbid, this piece, if you were watching it on the phone it would still hold true. It's taking up space. It's doing something in space. To the cues of sculpture — you literally said like traditional non-colored white marble sculpture like Michelangelo who turned marble to flesh and bone. That's where this piece is coming from most. I can do that. It’s in this way.
*bread pudding, an espresso martini, and a gin and tonic are ordered*
HA: 16:50 What did it mean to you? You hinted, but did you have a main interpretation? Because people love a one-liner.
DR: 17:27 Well, again, I was just letting the associations come without trying to articulate anything. Well, I mean, honestly, I have attempted in my life to figure out how to engage with conceptual art, read a lot about it, and helped other people do it. It really is just you start with the most basic impressions, and just slowly allow those impressions to build up until you can start asking basic questions that can become more complex, and create more complex associations. And then the discussion is then that which to me proves that there's like a richness to the work and kind of like a bottomless to it, a bottomlessness that keeps going. We keep going and making associations all day long. So there's a supplement to it as well.
HA: 18:30 I wonder how you would feel seeing it next to another…
DR: 18:40 Well, that's the main challenge, that's the thing that I think a lot of people are rebelling against, especially nowadays, is I'm picturing it as PDR leaning against a wall with a lot of wires. And I think in that context, a receptive audience like me would spend enough time with it to reach some of these conclusions. Someone who gets out of the wrong side of the bed that day might not be as receptive but as much as I hate to admit it because I've always been pro-white box context, pro-high art context like you need to have-- Like Dia Beacon, like the artists in Dia Beacon, most of them as great as they are, their work is meaningless if they're not in places like Dia Beacon. The white canvas is not a work of art unless it's not in a place like that. You know what I mean?
DR: 19:58 Chamberlain smashes together all those cars and they look like sculptures, but it isn't really until you see them all together in that big austere space that you're like, "Uh-huh."
HA: 20:15 I love that your relationship to the way in which, I was like, "I want to get this in front of you so it is what it is. Cables and all," and because it was, in my view, more of, if it's between a portal to the moment in time or it is itself the moment in time, it was a portal to the thing and yet it was still such a moment. Body Light - the piece with scrim - which I want to show you and see what you think - is that you touch. It takes up space in a different way. Body Light is making the moment. It's not about the past It's about the present. The way that it's taking up space right now but the fact that you have this connection to it that even the cables, its nice to hear you saw that relationship as unifying. It's so well put and I wonder what it would be like with two things: another similar piece and more time.
DR: 21:19 I'm not sure what it would be like if it was in a museum.
HA: 21:23 Well that but what about it next to the piece I shot the day before or the piece I shot the day after.
DR: 21:28 Which are quite similar?
HA: 21:31 They involve plaster in my body and time. I wonder if there's a point where you're like, "Oh, got it." Maybe. Maybe not. The goal here is things to live with that not live in your-- You live with. It lives as you live.
DR: 21:58 Honestly, now that I've lived for just one day with this one, the most interesting thing about the water ones is their dimension, like how long they are. I can't say for sure because I haven't spent a whole day with them, but the fact that this immediately was a challenge to me, out of the box, and that it over time drummed up so much - I was like, "Oh my God." I haven't had this experience in a museum because I can't spend a day in the museum, I haven't had this experience-- I mean, Bruegel, I spent years looking in that painting, on and off, it's been up for a few days, and one morning Gabby and I were looking at it, and finding new things, and I would say, "I forgot this painting is just infinite," but this is just an infinite painting, but I've never had it on the wall like that, and the frame is the closest approximation to the real thing, so this is the most time I've ever spent with this Bruegel painting, but I love this painting, I love Bruegel paintings. They’re infinite paintings. They’re incredible.
DR: 24:06 But this is the first piece. So again, it's a unique experience. That's why I'm kind of trying to be really-- I'm not trying to equivocate or take away from it. But I feel it's almost like a super cool creative exploratory moment here where this is not a white box gallery experience that I had. And we talked about it a couple of times before, - living with a piece - and this is the first time I've lived with an actual work of art. You've been to my place, and all my life I've had artifacts handed down from my dad, my grandfather, stuff I've picked up, or original movie posters, or whatever. Actual artifacts, actual works of art. But I've never taken a great work of art, conceptual art, and lived like this. And that's not something that you get in a museum or a gallery, even Dia Beacon. And who's the guy that has the path? He makes these installations with lots of photos and collages and tents, what’s his name? Or Tracy Emin. These are people who are basically saying, "The art I create, I live with this art. I make art for the world. But here I am in a world where I have to make art with this space, this particular space, with, when you enter into it, a set of expectations, and that's where your starting point is. That's how you create meaning." So someone like Richard Serra can create a work of minimalism or monumental piece in that space, and you can have an immediate reaction to it. But what they're doing is basically saying, "No, I have to bring you into my space. I have to bring you into my world," and then their art doesn't become the art they make in their world, but becomes about bringing their world into this other space and commenting on the space that they're in. So what I'm trying to say is that my experience of this work that you make is, it's almost unfair to your work because you'd have to bring it into a private home for someone to have this experience. It's not a mass public experience. It's not accessible in that way? It's very, very particular to the fact that I was alone with it in my apartment for 24 hours. And I’m like "God, I'm blessed." But what's interesting about this is, how could you approach that in a public space? And maybe it's not a gallery, maybe it's public work. Maybe it's a work of public art. I mean, like, Robert Smithson or all those other earthworks guys, they made this monumental stuff outside. And like I said, Tony Oursler had a installation on Main Street in Southampton for a year. Now I'm just riffing but my experience of it is not the experience that someone would have walking into a gallery.
HA: 28:05 Totally. I wonder what’d you’d say if it were presented differently? Here, I wanted to get this in front of you. Cables and all. Not “installed.” However it appears. And you're saying that that worked across the board, it was holistic.
DR: 28:46 It might be, yeah.
HA: 28:45 That's what matters is that you're saying that however it was presented, you're saying that right the way it was presented.
DR: 28:54 Sure. You know what? Scratch what I said because maybe now I'm just doing a disservice to myself because I am the kind of guy who will go into a gallery and participate in that process. I mean, I go to Dia Beacon and I go, "Alright, here's a white canvas. I guess, I'm gonna stand here for a while and look at it from different angles and get up close and then come back after a while and see what happens." You know what I mean? That's what you're supposed to do. You're not supposed to tour the whole museum. When I go to the Met, I go to one or two pictures. I don't go through many different rooms.
HA: 29:42 It took me two hours to get through Cycladic. Not even.
DR: 29:44 Yeah, that's what I'm saying. This is the Assyrian section with the stuff from modern-day Iraq, from the Bronze Age Assyria, and it's the entrance to temples. And at the Louvre, they have Babylonian pillars and these same entrances, and it's way better, but this is in America. This is in New York City. This is an Assyrian entrance. You see what they were trying to do is, it's so alien to our culture, but still the same where it's like heads on pikes and monsters. I loved that, and it's in New York City! The best part about wandering through the Met though, is that you'll stumble upon like, Bosch's Garden of Earth, and be like, "What? This is here!?" It's amazing.
HA: 30:43 So I was in Paris and I went from the Louvre, to landing in New York and going to the Met, then taking a train out to my studio. And I got to compare the three at once. Michelangelo there, Greek and Roman there, then the touch piece I'm referencing,, Body light.
DR: 31:27 Do you take inspiration from what you saw?
HA: 31:34 For which piece? Ever? Of course.
DR: 31:38 No, this right here. This one that you put in my apartment. Were you influenced by--?
HA: 31:42 I would say, I wasn't not influenced.
DR: 31:49 Was there any particular work or works that were going through your head when you made this?
HA: 32:04 I will say that I-- Beyond cliche, the trips to Paris--
DR: 32:15 By the way, I've learned to embrace cliche.
HA: 32:20 Fuck yeah— I learned about myself.
DR: 32:26 Ah, it was a sentimental journey.
HA: 32:30 A bit. But yeah, I saw amazing sculpture along the way. I met people along the way. I met up with Ellie and Moss that second time, my friend from boarding school was there, and so I saw him, and then I met some people. I went rock climbing with them and had a jazz bar.
DR: 32:50 Which boarding school did you go to?
HA: 32:53 Culver in Indiana, Culver Academies.
DR: 32:54 Wow.
HA: 32:55 You know it?
DR: 32:56 Mhm.
HA: 32:57 Oh yeah you would. That's right.
DR: 33:07 And then you went rock climbing or you ran into people you went rock climbing with?
HA: 33:14 I met people at this jazz bar, one who was Adonis incarnate. I went up to him, met his group. Anyway, we went rock climbing together the next day.
DR: 33:42 That's fucking fun.
HA: 33:43 It was so fun. It's huge in Paris right now. Anyway, I met people along the way. I had one of the most amazing conversations with someone who worked at the Louvre, around the same age as me, who basically shattered--
DR: 34:01 What? Spit it out.
HA: 34:02 The Louvre closed and we kept talking behind the ropes next to the slaves by Michelangelo, the Dying Slaves, who were like this. And I was like-- We were just contextualizing centuries of work next to centuries of work, grand swaths of time. Then, here we are now. The Louvre is 18th century, this stuff is only 2,000 years old. In 4,000 years, will the Louvre even be around?" It was a “what’s the point of it all” conversation. That type of thing. So the trip to Paris, everywhere I went I would strike up a conversation. I ended up getting drinks with an editor Elle France, so it's like--
DR: 34:47 You can only really have those conversations in Europe.
HA: 34:50 Or here at the Bell and Anchor.
DR: 34:54 Or with special guys like me. Do you know where I've been?
HA: 35:01 This is up there by the best of them.
DR: 35:02 Oh, that's special.
HA: 35:03 In that same trip, Louvre, Rodin, Bourdelle (studios) - he was a protege of Rodin.
DR: 35:15 My grandmother was French. I have a family of friends who I've been with my whole life. I've been there many times.
HA: 35:23 Was there a specific piece in mind here? No. Have there been specific pieces in mind when I do something? Sometimes I’ll have a reference.
DR: 35:33 But only like a milieu.
HA: 35:34 But again, a still photo. Not only is it still, a sculpture is still, a painting is still. Even if it's a dying slave. That's one frame. *strikes pose* That's one frame of a piece that might be one hour long. What do you do for the other 59 minutes and 59 seconds?
DR: 36:07 That's an interesting thing. My sister is an art historian and studies art history, and we've studied art history forever, and I studied art history. I grew up with artists and being exposed so and so forth. This just happens to hit on a lot of preoccupations that I've had my whole life. Schools of thought and trains of thought that are little pet projects of mine… whatever. The fact is, saying a sculpture is a moment in time is obviously true, but its a convention where the spectators' experience of it is what is spatial and temporal. Once you accept that, then you realize that your painting is also spatial and temporal, then even the written word may become a visual medium. The painting you found in France, one of the reasons why I'm so obsessed with it and so jealous that you bought that is not just because it's the iconography in it is so up my alley and directly relates to strands of art and literature that I'm in love with, but also because, it’s got that faded— it’s not one moment. One figure isn't fully sketched in, so it's almost like a dissolve-in-between moment, it messes with your sense of the temporal and spatial representation that's happening there, it's got so much going on in that painting. It's so crazy. I don't know who the artist is and that's definitely not on purpose, it's just an unfinished painting, but oh my God, the fact that you found it in France and brought it back and you do video, it's like, "Ah, oh, I wish I had that painting," but all that shit came together in this piece that you brought over to my place.
DR: 39:53 For this piece— I told you there was one of the best things I’ve shot that got erased and I had to get another one in because the other disappeared. A two-hands piece but a little different. This piece is the new one.
DR: 40:36 What gave you the idea of the plaster? The texture?
HA: 40:43 It's moving sculpture. I make video sculpture. It's more sculptural than that. I think that’s a quality that video adds, it can bring stillness and still sculpture to life. It asks what if they were, what if they are alive? Michelangelo turned marble into flesh and bone. Here I can do that the way I know how and I can make them move. What are sculptures of representation of? Humans, life. What's more a representation of life than movement? Sculptural movement. There's a human beneath that sculpture, there's a dying slave within that marble. This is that movement. The significance of the shattering, the relationship between the two hands, the quality of sculpture that's moving, a human life within that's revealed, it’s to your own interpretation. That's the beauty.
DR: 41:53 That’s great. So you were thinking about sculpture?
HA: 42:00 Sculpture and material.
DR: 42:27 You know what's cool about the Parthenon, the part that would be on top of the Parthenon is now inside, wrapped around a wall. Some of it's missing, and they have a little drawing saying, "This is the part that that English guy stole." But what's cool about the Parthenon is that it's all a relief, it's all bas-relief, and it's all a procession of Athenian society, the gods, the castes, different levels of culture and civilization represented, all moving towards the center, the entrance, where it sits, Athena and Zeus, But… none of them are fully three-dimensional, all of them are meant to be representing a movement towards the center.
HA: 43:48 What are the sculptures trying to do? Then, and now, sculptures captures movement. It’s as though the energy that is produced from a movement is present within them, though they’re still. Here, video. Movement is inherent. It unlocks the nth degree of communicative ability.
DR: 44:23 And you're also trying - in this almost paradoxical way - using movement to capture the power of stillness. Like what Daniel Cloud said about how a still frame from a movie loses all its power when you see it in context and you realize that movies are not a visual medium. Because once it's moving, the image is no longer an image. And what he's saying is, it doesn't have the stillness, the immediacy, the direct communication with the receiver. But here you are paradoxically using movement to achieve that force of stillness and rather than walking around this sculpture, I have it in my house for 24 hours and I don't walk around it, it slowly moves and walks around me.
HA: 45:28 You’re such a pro.
DR: 45:33 I mean it! I'm totally like-- I don't wax on this way about much. And look, I know too as like a writer, I write. I finished a screenplay while Gabby was away. I didn't tell anybody. I was writing a screenplay because I knew I wouldn't finish it so I had a hard time telling people what I was doing all day.
HA: 46:02 You can say it.
DR: 46:03 No, I didn't want to tell anybody because I knew I wouldn't finish it if I started telling people I was working on a screenplay. So I finished it.
HA: 46:10 That's the best way. I say it’s easier done than said.
DR: 46:12 Exactly, now it's done. So I'll say it. I did it. But, I know that I'll have silly, not intellectualized, not cerebral, not worked out influences, rather I’ll have moods - things I'm thinking about, other works of art, books movies whatever - making the connections. Whatever I was feeling when I read that or saw that or looked at that. So that's why I'm wondering, what were you thinking about looking at when you were making this? Because it feels like a similar kind of creative process.
HA: 47:18 I was late to dinner. I had just lost one of the best things I've shot. It was bone-cold outside and I couldn't feel my fingers. But that was all silent. I was purely focused on the relationship between these [hands]. Were experiences or visuals from my life present? Somewhere. But the only focus was on the movement and their relationship. This conversation
DR: 48:31 Yeah. You had sense though?
HA: 48:38 There was a sense that the hands liked each other.
DR: 48:47 That's what I thought. So I think I said early on that if I were to go down that road of interpretation, then I would also start to make an infinite cascade of connections.
HA: 49:01 I'm no movement expert or choreographer but there was relationship.
DR: 49:08 Sure. Just knowing. Because I started personifying the hands.
HA: 49:50 Perfect. How about this one? So the way you said that sculpture is experienced in physical space, you walk around.
DR: 49:59 And that's temporal.
HA: 50:00 It's temporal.
DR: 50:01 Spatio-temporal.
HA: 50:03 So close one eye. Bear with me here. All right you see how this spoon looks. *holds up spoon at angle 1* It's just the butt. And it's a dot. *shifts spoon lengthwise* And now it’s long. *shifts the spoon diagonally and at an angle* Now it's really narrow and of wonky form. They are all correctly, a spoon. Together they are a representation of the spoon, better than any frame alone. In my work the moment is the spoon. You're getting that three-dimensionality. It is dimensionality of understanding of a moment in time.
DR: 51:04 So there is a little bit of autobiography and individual experience in there. There's a romance to that. Not at one point in these 24 hours did I think of the individual possessing the hand. Maybe over time I would have, but I saw them as separate entities. If personified by the viewer as characters or individuals - not appendages of one individual, which is another interesting avenue - this is about two entities coming together. There’s a sensual, romantic aspect to that. I can't help but now just start to make associations with myself and the idea of what that means from a human experience. This humanistic element to it, beyond the conceptual elements we talked about. The narrative aspect gives it a romanticism, a humanism that I hadn't really appreciated fully. That's cool. I bet if she watched it *gestures to server* for five minutes, she'd be like, "It's two people coming together."
HA: 53:30 A performance you can walk around. That can be achieved with video.
DR: 54:39 Well, two things. One, have you ever heard of the proverb of the eight blind men who all put their hands on an elephant and they all have a different description of the elephant?
HA: 55:19 What if the spoon is a moment in time.
DR: 55:24 It's not really a spoon, is it? And then that reminded me of Wittgenstein's grappling with how you actually define anything. Have you ever thought about using multiple screens at once next to each other in a grid?
HA: 55:50 I pitched one to Watermill Center
DR: 55:55 Oh yeah?
HA: 56:00 It's called “Ballet Concentrate.” Performance is done and gone. 99% is missed. You see the 1%. I can capture it, the other 99. And I want to make it all permanent.
DR: 56:29 What's interesting about a ballet performance in that it's theatrical, is that each individual member of the audience has a unique perspective. But it is a collective experience. So how--
HA: 56:47 You don't even see their backs.
DR: 56:50 Yeah. What did you see?
HA: 56:53 Say you're sitting in front, you don't see what's behind. Like right now *raises arm* you can't see what my deltoid is doing in the way that the light would be hitting and creating this fleeting composition that is gone in an instant. That's part of the performance but inherent in performances, yes, you watch it on a stage--
DR: 57:25 But would you see the full figure or would it be like close ups--
HA: 57:32 Both.
DR: 57:47 You shot this?
HA: 57:51 This is what I would do for the summer program.
DR: 57:56 These works that we've talked about reference particular traditions in Western European art. Bourgeois signifiers of the post-aristocracy, post-guild era. That's worth exploring or examining. Those are still strong signifiers. Classical art and ballet still hold a cultural value.
HA: 59:02 And there's more that they didn't-- We're only coming to learn why we appreciate them so much with time. This is part of the answer.