Lloyd Godman - Interviews - CURRICULUM VITAE - © Lloyd Godman

Questions and Interviews.

Questions from Donald Fitzpatrick 2004

D.F

In terms of this thing you are talking about, what is - when I say out side the camera and this status your saying something else in response to that – what do you mean.  Like When I try and define that kind of odd thing about your work which is not quite in the mould of -  aged ex- hippy,  isn’t the world wonderful  I wish we were all green photo. You know – which a big chunk of you is, but you seem to side step those clichés by working in a slightly different way  - what is that- I would say its some thing to do with you working outside the camera. What do you define it as?  --- How do you define that difference?

L.G.
I think it’s - being engaged in a way where you kind of put layers in the work, like taking the notion of light as photography rather than photography as we already know it, but at the same time taking into account that in some ways its so easy to lose any kind of audience, you can make a work so esoteric that it speaks to an elite audience and the average people can’t climb into it at all or so simplistic it just clones a formula. There are plenty of artists working with photography in the traditional way the ground becomes to familiar. For me one of the things that I try to do is actually embed layers within the work, so on a basic level it works on a kind of kind of green level you refer to, its aesthetically seductive but there is other more complex layers that have to be sifted through as well. For me it gives the work a sense of maturity.

Also sometimes the most persuasive strategy is not the most direct approach. 

Isn’t the world wonderful and green, well there is all this other stuff going on as well but there is something else. Sometimes I don’t understand those layers myself until three years down the track and you look at it and think Oh shit that’s what I was doing. Often it is a kind of photography, but it’s outside the dimensions of the camera.

D.F

But when you are kind of investigating the work you are doing -  I mean how much is determined by having to use a lens or a plastic tube or photographic paper. That’s the point its seems to me your inquiry is only tangential to photography in inverted commas its got more to do with the process.

L.G.
Yea I think you are right. Photography for me means no predetermination other than light. I have made work that has nothing to do with traditional photography  - more sculptural pieces. I did a preformative work about 1994 when the river was being filled above the newly finished Clyde hydro dam. The work was timed so as the dam was filling and the rising water was flooding the land, I mounted an underwater camera housing in the forming lake and electrically wired myself into a complex electrical circuit that included constructed forms from discarded brass industrial artefacts, but it also included the shutter and motor drive of the camera – and did this performance piece where every so often I would touch these metal plates and release the shutter. So over a long period of time it took a series of images of the disappearing vista looking up the river as the lake water kept rising.  So rather than a means of merely documenting the work the camera became an integral part of me and the performance. 

D.F.
So in a way the cipher of the body as a part of the work is displaced with your stuff  - the body appears but in a different way it’s like a body of the viewer. Its not like this is you selecting this piece of the world and using the edge of the camera frame as a sculptural tool and you cut this piece of the world out and then present it. Your engaged on another level with the viewer.

L.G.

In some of the work yea – we can find our bodies operate within the world but every so often it seems disconnected too. The body seems to become more displaced as the work progresses. I suppose one of the things I find interesting with it is exploring where those boundaries, tracing the lines of slippage, finding where its blurry, where the ground is shaky. Where it’s not confined by the rectangle of the camera.  If you look at tradition photography, we might look at the world as a morphs mass, it does not fit into camera film formats, lenses project circular images and then through the conventions of drawing and painting, and conveniently photography got stuck with rectangles and squares. Photography has the ability to expose all sorts of strange shaped images – you can sometimes see this with pinhole cameras. I have even seen images where the body’s orifices have been turned into pinhole cameras.

D.F.

So is there some sort of reference to this on going concern you have with Botanical subjects. Is it something to do with the way in which plants all use light but they do it in a variety of ways and so ….

L.G.

Light and the plant thing is a pretty essential life process and as organic bodies we can’t really escape this, but it also alludes to a whole lot of other things as well, which I find interesting. Yea I think you are right - it’s really a diverse phenomenon.

D.F.
So the other thing in the new work you have planned (Timed Lapse) you use that phrase “unwitting” in relation to the audience – their participation is not something their are directly conscious of when they walk in. Is that something that came from your interest in the way in which natural forms - plants go on, they happen whether we observe them or not.

L.G.
Yea that is a facet – Like one of the things I found extraordinary with one of my MFA supervisors who had lived all his life in central London and he was trying to challenge me about what I was doing with the photosynthesis works, and said “didn't’t I realize if it was not for people plants would not exist because plants need people to plant them”. From urban England, that was his understanding of how plants operate.   To me it was not surprising but also bizarre how disconnected he was.  Largely people don’t understand the relationship of light and how plants work; how crucial our dependence on them is.

There is an article in this mornings paper about the speed of light, if you are travelling in a car at 100km with the lights on, the light being compressed as you move forward. The scientist who comments on it states that light is still one of the most unfathomable things.  They still don’t fully understand it.

D.F
Really – and part of that not understanding has got to do with installations to us … . and time and how we apprehend and understand light seems to me to be particularly distorted by our humanness and that’s got to do with how we exist within time.  Time also seems to figure big in a lot of your works including this proposal for Timed Lapse.

L.G.
Absolutely, - your right – references to time go back to the roots of photography it’s about time and about light as well. Like the photosynthesis works, you have to expose something for a length of time to make an image, even with the traditional found image photograph approach its isolating something in the view finder within a specific period of time. They are inextricably linked.  (Time and light) And as humans we experience time in relationship to light in a different way than we do when time is confronted in total darkness.

D.F.
In the new work it’s like a different manifestation of time, to the ones I have seen in your work before, and one characteristic it’s a different interpretation it also introduces this concept of aging into the work.

L.G.
That is because the exhibition was titled Accelerating sequence: Artists observe time and aging – Aging first surfaced with the negatives I discovered under the house and the When Light Turns to Dust series in 2003, for awhile it appeared disparate to the plant works, but the invitation to put a proposal to Accelerating Sequence was an opportunity to continue the exploration of aging and it doubled back to the plants. It’s an interesting departure from the earlier work and opens up a whole new dimension for the future.

D.F.
So do you think for you as a mid career artist  - that concepts like aging now have a different meaning for you, as you see your family grow up.

L.G.
Yea I think it does - aging is something that becomes more interesting as one gets older.  One of the things I am looking at in Timed Lapse is memory – like if a kid of eight is asked to give an account of their life history there are all these minute things that seem take on significance, grow to huge proportions, ask someone of 85 and they might skip a whole decade which is longer that the kids life. And then there is the other thing with aging, -  the memory lapse, losing memory, memory being enhanced, fading shifting.

D.F.
The process you have chosen for the new installation in some ways it mirrors this distorting, forgetting and remembering.

L.G.
Yes but there are earlier references -  Well with the first plant work I did - making the photosynthetic images - in a sense the images on the leaves of the plants are memories of that’s plants exposure to sunlight over a period of time and once you take the masks off and leave it in the sun they fade back into the tissue of the leaf.  So while its imprinted into the cells of the leaf it begins to fade, often disproportionately. But it also weird with some of the plants - when the parent plant dies and transfers all the energy to the young pups, if there is tape on the leaf the tissue in this area dies last and you can have a dead leaf with the only living part the image.

D.F.
Since the beginning of the 20th Century many artists have worked in what could be loosely termed temporal media - like make and installation and it has a very short life term and then it moves on - but you seemed to have taken it to a different place  - you are specifically inscribing in here that these things that we do – the whole of human activity in someway is like an inscription on something that is like writing on water it changes it’s going to move it’s not going to be static.

L.G.
Well its is – for the time being we really have inscribed the planet with our activities. The only certainty is change, I mean things do change all the time - sometimes in the most subtlest ways. Where when we are locked into a period of time we sometime don’t understand the things that are important for that period of time. You only have to look at traditional photography - many of the photographs taken in the late 19 century – the reasons those photographers took the photographs are not necessarily why we find them important now.  As cultural artefacts  - the context shifts  - changes - which is great and in 200 years people will probably read them in a different way again. You expect it to happen.

D.F.
The difference with this new work of yours is that the viewer themselves is there in some kind of record but they are also subject to the morphing and changing of the process.

L.G
Well it’s an deliberate risk to see what happens, there is going to be a lot of uncertainty - I may not be present for the entire show so if the gallery staff forget to water the plants they will die and that could create another layer. There may not be an audience to be part of the process, the technology could fail. It’s the uncertainty and vagaries of what could happen that sharpen the edge a bit more.

D.F
So you have made a body of work now for sometime in which for want of a better term is photo - post camera – is made outside the camera. Where do you think that’s going in your work its seems to me there is something in your work that’s also familiar to me in the body of work of a number of artists who one might have characterized as photographic or photo media artists and for some reason that experience has led them to some other place and I was just wonder if you see your work going that way or not.

L.G
It’s had to say really, it could become a major aspect but its possible it could fall back to a retrospective position too, its like it has done that in the past where at the same time that I was working on a project of really abstract, psychedelic colour photograms I was making traditional photographs based on the work of New Zealand poet James K Baxter. And the two projects were running along together just like using different tools from a widening vocabulary. One is not discarded for the other -  one just seems to suit a particular project at a particular time. Being locked into today’s technology and concerns and not being flexible enough to step back when it feels appropriate is as fatal as being locked into history and not being able to step forward. But who knows – you can’t tell what will pop up - that’s what keeps me engaged and makes it worth getting up really early in the morning.

The interesting thing with all the installation pieces is that somehow they still have to be documented. So you are back to taking photographs its like you don’t escape your roots, and a lot of that is photographed on 6x9cm neg film so in terms of quality they have a real bite to them.  It’s not like you just kind of whip them with a 35mm and go bang, bang. So you carry that kind of traditional practice through as a documentation of what you are doing. I suppose that the disadvantage is that for someone who did not have that background they would have to pay someone else to do it. But in my case, if you cock it up -  you can only kick yourself.

D.F
That’s interesting though the relationship of the work you do and the documentation of it - one level is all of this stuff really … a documentation of some activity.

L.G.
I suppose it’s do you make the work for itself or do you make the work to be documented, and the documentation is a kind of other work. The experience is obviously different than the documentation. But somehow you have to allude to the experience through the documentation of the work. So much work these days is only seen through the documentation.

D.F.
So - can you amplify that a bit.

L.G.
Well -  if it’s a time based piece where projectors are turning on and off  say like the en Light en piece where people are moving through the space and projectors are turning on and off  you can’t replicate the time aspect in still photographs, a series of photographs juxtaposed against each other might suggest the idea of change; even a video of the work still does not give the full effect of the experience.   It’s that interaction of the audience where they walk into a space and they suddenly realize that it’s their presence that is switching things on and off. Like the environment, we are not disparate from it – we are having an effect on it the way they are having an effect inside the en light en work. Things begin to move because they have become a part of the piece. And its like the latest work (Timed Lapse) the audience has become a more dominant part of the work.

D.F.
So the status of the piece in their memories is an extension of the work.

L.G.
Yea, yea I think so  - there is a resonance that is carried away with them, a residual echo that stays in their head. The en light en work was 3 x 18 hour days to install, talk about the disconnected body, I was absolutely shattered at the end of it.  But the feed back from people was amazing; you know people just walked around in there for hours. It was just like being inside this giant camera with seven lenses and watching a strange light show. It was sort of seductive, enchanting. It worked incredibly well.

D.F.
Do you think it is important for you  - that say in distinction to an artists whose practice be determined by the veracity of the single image  - you know the thing – the object. Where as yours seems to be not about that - its like it exists in peoples memories of the time of the experience.

L.G.
The experience is a big part of it one of the disadvantages that we have here in Dunedin is because of the limited population the people who are going to experience it is quite small. Unless there is an opportunity to set it up somewhere else and the installation could never be quite the same – you just can’t set it up in the same way. So the closest you can come to it is via back to the photograph I suppose and maybe putting it in a book and letting people experience that with some imagination.

D.F
And where do you - I mean that it you have - when we were talking the other day you have an interesting conception of photography and photographic practice itself where do see that sitting with the kind of challenges of say digital.

L.G.
Well it just adds to the vocabulary that people have to choose from really-  which is great. That vocabulary should grow, It’s like the debates that happened when photography first came on the scene and painting first felt threatened by it I mean painting did not die it actually went into some of the most explorative periods that had for centuries and maybe photography will do the same. The digital thing is interesting in that as manifestations on the screen the image is reduced to light. It’s kind of like  that if you could drag out every glowing screen form all the enclosed spaces we lock ourselves into on the planet to work on our computers, place them against a darkened sky  - you would have millions of pin points of light, but each with its own uniqueness of visual information -  I call this interwoven complexity of light the digital galaxy.     Who knows?

D.F.
You were saying the other day that if you were put on the spot and you had to have a crude definition of what photography means to you - you were saying its very much about the way light effects things

L.G.
Yea - the word photo goes back to the Greeks and talks  of light.

D.F.
So once again it sort of implies this thing of like after the camera in a way  - how would you define whatever photography has represented to human being? How would you define that now when one can think about a time to come, which is after the camera.

L.G.
I don’t know – there are interesting things happening with molecule transfer – the beam me up Scotty idea which is starting to happen. Maybe light and photography has a place there. Transferring things around the place.  Maybe it’s a combination of that and interactive holograms. Or  - just materializing on a desktop. Who knows? There are all kinds of possibilities.

D.F.
So - just changing direction there, another feature of your work we have not talked about is the use of language and the kind of word play that goes on. And element of humour that goes on  -can you talk a bit about that.

L.G.
Well I think at high school I struggled with language and in some ways I still do but I also find language a really incredibly fascinating thing. I actually did a poetry paper at the university and that was a lot of fun. And as part of this I began to look at what words do and just the messages within messages and things like that – like the text piece for Disturbance in the field where there is a fairly mundane piece of writing  that describes the bromeliads but inside it is just a complexity of messages where every letter or syllable or what ever is broken down into different fonts and colours that produce new messages and the messages get simpler and simpler but also harder to find. But when you try and decipher it - it becomes a nightmare I mean I can’t even do it myself without a reference sheet there are 35 messages or so within the one text.

D.F.
So it’s interesting that you say you took that paper in poetry and stuff it seems that you have been interested in other forms other areas - like you were talking the other day about the influence of film on you – particularly the influence of George Greenough but poetry language science all these other areas of inquiry, one of the things that causes me to wonder about it like where do you sit .. art with a capital A. It would seem to me that you sit a little uncomfortably and I’m interested in that discomfort.

L.G.

I think that apparent discomfort is great -  that’s what gives an edge to things – keeps them exciting and alive. I was thinking after our first talk that actually getting motivated and making something as a creative visual artists you just need to strike a kind of balance being a bit naïve and being totally informed. Because -  if you are obsessed about being totally informed or strive towards this position before giving yourself permission to begin  - you probably won’t start. Or you will probably be as nervous as hell. And the process of making things is a process of discovery. If you know exactly what you are going to do before you start then it has kind of lost the edge hasn’t it. A certain amount of naïvtivity can be the most powerful ingredient. I mean how sharp can you hone the blade up?

D.F
Yea.

L.G.
And the only artists who have been concerned about being totally informed before they start usually don’t make art – they tend to write about it. And that’s fine we need those people as well, they can offer an interesting insight into the work. So sometimes it helps not to know exactly what you are doing a little bit. To be a little bit naïve.

D.F.
Do you think that’s why some of these other experiences and some of these other figures have been important to you - like when you were talking about Greenough the other day? It was as though in some strange way -  personal to you in studio - seeing his work kind of gave you a sense of admission that you could ….

L.G.
I think you are right – Greenough taught me that something that we think we know and understand; can be approached in completely different way. He gave me a licence to look at the creative process that way. The guy is modest and an underrated master.  But I look at people like Max Ernst and others they were far more interested in the e’spirit of what they were doing than anything else.

D.F.
Why do you think it is that artists need permission?

L.G.
Well despite what we might think artists can be timid creatures. There is a whole bunch of stuff in there - there is the need to retain a reputation, -there are egos- fame, fortune – creating a signature style that one might become frightened to move a way from – that need to gain acknowledgement and funding to survive at what ever mode of production and life style level one sets, and somewhere in amongst it is the creative process - sorting it all out and moving on in a creative way needs self permission. For some it’s finding a signature style they can popularize and market, and that also includes marketing to various funding bodies, institutions as well as the art market.

For some others the process is an intriguing but uncertain journey- that’s where the buzz is.

D.F.
The other thing I was going to ask you was this thing about your sense of humour. There is an element of humour in lots of things you do.

L.G.
Yea . I’m not that conscious of the humour element until I look at my son Stefan who is a real humorist and then I can see it in the work in a way. It sounds strange. With something like my mail art it’s a very conscious element, but one expects that, in other works it just slides in underneath and sticks to one of the layers.

D.F.
Its interesting that you mention that you mention your son, because the humour seems quite adolescent in your work and I wondered now whether the new trope where you are exploring aging – like have you found aging difficult? Has that been something that has surprised you?

L.G.
No – no - not really- I think its part of the cycle. I think when you have operated an organic garden and orchard as I have done for the past 30 years you become attuned to the fact that some things are going to grow and others will die, some things can live longer than you and others only have a life span of less than a year.

D.F.
So the adolescent streak in your humour now as a mature adult is not representative some desire to reclaim a lost time or something. You have not found aging difficult in that way?

L.G.
No - No not in that way.

D.F.
And where do you think this new body of work (Timed Lapse) that you are proposing for Atlanta - what do think the viewer will find in the will find in that experience which is different to the work you have done…..because we have talked about how there has always been an interest in your work which  I find fascinating  and a kind of if I characterise it in that way a fledgling interest in the interactive, but its not interactive its not interactive in a way that a lot of techno boffins talk about interactive. In speaking about it metaphorically you really seem to position the viewer to an experience that they are not even sure they had.

L.G.
That’s great- that’s a key part of the thing. If you look at the surfing experience its like you take off on this big wave get totally inside the tube and then within no time it’s over you still kind of wonder if it happened and what the experience was like, so you have to do it again.