Interview date: April 2005
Interviewed by Ka-Man Tse
LMCC: So how long have you guys been working
together?
Mark: For 4 or 5 years.
Rebecca: …in a formal capacity.
LMCC: Can you tell me about the collaborative
process, working with another artist. Have you always worked
together?
Mark: We’ve been doing projects for 4 or 5 years,
we’ve developed the projects together, the ideas come out of
our collective brain….
Rebecca: We only have one brain between us. We
really can’t separate our ideas from one another, at least not
in retrospect.
Mark: And we don’t credit separately. Who
took what, who did what. We just go forward, no matter how stupid
or irrelevant it may seem.
Rebecca: If we both like it, that’s good.
LMCC: Do you ever disagree? … how
do work it out?
Mark: For a big project like this, we take
on different parts of the project and divide up the labor. I would
take care of the graphic design, and she would take care the video
editing. That way we get to make our own decisions on some
things. Cause we can’t both sit there and say, this video
has to be edited right at this second.
Rebecca: It’s stupid.
Mark: It’s ridiculous. But then this whole
installation that we’re going to build in the studio, we’re
definitely doing it together.
Rebecca: And we planned all of that together…
Mark: So the current project we’re working on,
we started last summer. We built a hut out of the sticks you
see right here.
Rebecca: These are willow from the Flower District
on 27th street.
Mark: We built a test one in Brooklyn, we looked
at designs of African huts which were constructed out of just sticks.
Rebecca: Flexible sticks. Particularly in what’s
now South Africa, Zulu, Swazi, very dome-like. Just sticks tied
together, and they’re covered by a hatch. So we were doing
a lot of looking at primitive, or what they call non-pedigree architecture. This
book Architecture Without Architects. Which came out
of the beaver project.
Mark: Before that we were looking at animals and
how they change the landscape and they build these beautiful dams,
particularly beavers. We built a beaver lodge at the Sculpture
Center in the basement and a beaver dam at Exit Art.
Rebecca: Now the beaver’s gone, we’ve
moved on… to our new satellite technology, the Broadcast Hut
Network.
Mark: This was the first real hut that we built
in Grinell, Iowa, where Rebecca is from. We put 200 sticks in the
ground in a circular shape, tied it with jute and tightened each piece
of jute successfully to make a big dome shape, and then we installed
a satellite dish, also made out of willow sticks, on the top. It’s
a structure that you can go inside of. … It’s just in
a placid location, nothing much going on, a suburban area….
Rebecca: Just the birds. I like to think of
it as rural. That they’re all built in rural or semi-remote
locations. The idea is, all you have is sticks and you’re
building this device to communicate yourself and your surroundings
to the entire world.
Mark: But as opposed to someone in New York broadcasting
to remote locations, this is people in remote locations broadcasting,
they are building a primitive structure and broadcasting to the rest
of the world.
Rebecca: So particularly at LMCC, we’re going
to have a receiving station of these broadcasts, from the four different
outposts of the Broadcast Hut Network. … So every video has
picture and the sound of the environment in this kind of simulated
broadcast. When we build the installation here, it will also
have this architecture inspired by the huts and primitive architecture.
Mark: And all of the broadcasts will come here and
make this environment here in New York City [at the LMCC studios].
We’ll be sitting here in Lower Manhattan receiving all these
transmissions, simulated transmissions. …
Rebecca: We like combining this kind of, looking
backwards architecturally, with this desire for contemporary technology,
where everything has to be live broadcasts and connected all around
the world. You
always have to have this idea that you can reach everyone anywhere
through technology. But we’re just doing it in our very
primitive way.
LMCC: How do you intend to have the final
product? How you intend to show this?
Mark: So the installation that we’re going to
build for the Open Studios will be these circular stick walls that
guide people into the space. It’s the same material that
we made the Broadcast Huts out of.
Rebecca: So these [jute sticks] will be tied together,
and will curve inward to create a feeling like the huts give where
you’re inside this dome but it’ll just be a larger version
where people can fit inside.
Mark: And inside it will be this receiving station.
Rebecca: So we’ll have the video broadcast
of each of the four huts and you can hear all the sounds.
LMCC: Can you talk about how you document your
work? Your process?
Mark: First how we build these pieces. It
is a negotiation with whoever owns the land in the “strange” area
we’re going to. For instance, we went to Mexico recently,
to Chiapas, Mexico, and we found a biological reserve called the Huitepec,
and the guys who ran the place were pretty into the idea.
Mark: We just showed up, and asked “Can we built
this sculpture?” We showed them pictures of what it was
going to look like, we told them it was going to be made out of natural
materials. They were naturalists. They were interested in this
kind of stick, because it’s from Canada, and they had never seen
that kind of stick before. So the guys helped us carry these
sticks up the mountain to an elevation of 2,490 meters. They
were the only people that saw this piece. It feels good to go
out into the wilderness and build something not for a Chelsea gallery.
Rebecca: Even when you’re in New York, you’re
probably thinking about five people seeing it—only the five people
that matter to you, whoever they may be. In this case, it’s
just the five people who live around where we built the sculpture.
Mark: Of course, at the same time we’re taking
video of the hut and we’re going to broadcast it. You’ll
get some sense of where it is, and you’ll get the sounds….
Rebecca: You get the immediate environment, but you
don’t
get the feeling of how your surroundings have changed if you don’t live
there, or what it means in relation to if you feel that you live in a remote
area or not. We’re going in there and saying, “Well, you’re
in the middle of nowhere, which is exactly where we want to a build a sculpture. Because
we’re from New York.”
Mark: It’s just a slice. That’s why all
the huts look the same. We bring the materials from here down to there. We
don’t go there looking for natural materials from that environment.
LMCC: Exactly. You go to the flower
district in Manhattan and buy cleaned….
Mark: Aesthetic, clean, beautiful sticks
LMCC: …and then transport them
Mark: And really what we broadcast is the image
of what we built, with the surrounding trees and animals….
Rebecca: with some sense of the surroundings. We
have the documentation of the piece, but we also have that different
experience of making a piece for a different kind of audience, or for
no audience at all, or for ourselves. Part of it is travelling
and wanting to be in different places… and not have just that
studio feel. We love having a studio, but it’s very insular. It’s
pretty much looking inwards. … A lot of times with nature you’re
just so overwhelmed. You have what you’re trying to do
but you have to work against your environment….
Mark: You fight bees, negotiate with people in strange
languages, and fight vandalism. It’s surprising. A
lot of people respond to the shape of the hut and the materials. And
they think it’s funny that it’s a satellite dish made out
of sticks. … This guy in Mexico was impressed that we
traveled all this way to do this ridiculous, absurd thing.…
LMCC: Would you say it’s more about
the process then the final product?
Rebecca: No. The process is fun for us, and
it makes the whole experience more satisfying. But really we
have an image of what we want to do.
Mark: We choose the location with the image in mind.
LMCC: What’s been the biggest challenge since
starting this project?
Mark: We’re never sure these pieces are going
to work out. Finding a site. …
Rebecca: Most of our challenges are fun challenges.…
We get an idea for something but we don’t know if it’s technically
possible. We’ve been planning this [other] video for
more than a year of swimming through lower Manhattan. We’ve
shot in a kayak several times… We destroyed one of our video cameras,
we’ve put it on Mark’s back and went swimming. We had
no idea how to do this project but we just knew what we wanted it to
look like in the end. And it’s still not done. We haven’t
finished all the footage.
Mark: Yeah, that piece was more challenging. This
piece is working out pretty well.
Rebecca: A lot of the videos are just technically more
frustrating.
LMCC: Did you ever frequent the financial
district before this residency program?
Matt and Rebecca at once: Not really. Not at all.
