BY STEVE BISSON
1. Let’s start from your next exhibition opening in Auckland ‘Social Realism’ at Sanderson contemporary art that, as Mark Amery put “it is all in essence sculpture”. A statement that helps to read your experimental research, although a bit paradoxically…
My video practice began from sculpture in an unpredictable way. I began using 3D software in the early nineties for visualizing public art proposals when I lived in NYC. When I moved to NZ in ‘95, my opportunities for public art dried up (I was still asked to be a finalist, but most told me I was too far away, when I said I had moved for good). Nevertheless I continued to work with the 3D software, 3D Studio. It is also animation software. The experiments in 3D animation led to video which we incorporated into my teaching practice within our sculpture major.
© Brit Bunkley, ‘Stalin (AP)’, 2014
2. Some of your latest works include use of 3d scanning technologies in continuity with previous digital sculpturing works. What drove you to test these technologies as a possible mean of depiction? How has the quick evolution of this tool affected your research?
Between 2002 and 2006 I contributed 3D printed artwork and video animation to Siggraph art exhibitions where I was also able to use the latest 3D scanning technology. In the last couple of years, photogrammetry 3D scanning (using photographs to determine X,Y,Z virtual 3D space) has arrived at the point where the resolution can almost compete against expensive laser scanners …under the right conditions. I have been learning to scan them in using this method with Agrisoft’s Phtotoscan. Sometimes the conditions are poor (low lighting and obstacles) so that the resolution is not great. However in some ways the imperfect scans are more interesting than high resolution ones in that they create ghostly images and dreamlike animations.
My project had two facets. One was to scan and transform classical and neoclassical sculpture and architecture, and then transform them (e.g. bend, stretch, cut holes or place a giant cockroach on top of). When scans were not available, I would model or even purchase 3D virtual models and scans. Some 3D digital models are available for free on-line.
© Brit Bunkley, ‘La révolution est terminée Je suis la révolution’, 2014
Artist Oliver Laric won a Contemporary Art Society Annual Award that supports a UK museum to work with an artist of their choice to commission a new work. Their new work was simply to make high resolution high quality 3D scans of their collection and make it available on line. I used several. So for instance I inscribed in 3D software in French a famous quote by Napoleon “The Revolution is Over; I am the Revolution” inscribed digitally on the cheeks of a scanned bust of Napoleaon by Antoine Denis Chaudet.
The other facet was to scan in building and sculpture that had already been transformed by acts of violence. They included a local monument whose statue of a controversial figure was knocked off the base, a preserved wall and colonnade in Berlin riddled by bullets and shrapnel from WW2, and the Auschwitz-Brikenau gate.
3. You recently completed an artist residency in Berlin. Tell us about it? What have you worked on, and what has attracted your attention of the city?
I had been attracted to Berlin since the cold war days, reading John le Carré and Ian Fleming novels since I was about 10. And of course I was curious to see what all the recent “Berlin as the new art centre” hoopla was about. The art is indeed fabulous.
Berlin was also a short train ride to Prague, the home of Kafka (and occasional capital of the Hapsburg Empire). Auschwitz was another overnight train-ride way. I have been mildly obsessed with Auschwitz for years. I never understood why. It is such a weirdly abject place, but I am not Jewish and felt uncomfortable using it in my art. It somehow seemed to be the perfect icon of evil- with the Birkenau Gate looking like a giant face, a motif that I unwittingly put in one on my early public sculptures in NYC, Gate Mask.
© Brit Bunkley, ‘Gate Mask’, NYC, 1984
(And my wife said I must have been there in a past life… that’s why I like to eat so much now…) I intuited some sort of link between Berlin, Prague, Kafka and Birkenau that I attempted to find resolution in “Kafka’s Sisters” regarding his sisters who all died in the Holocaust, one at Auschwitz. “Paradox of Plenty” is an economic phrase normal associated with corrupt third world states, but it also is apt for developed nations as well.
I continued the “floating monuments” theme begun in the first Paradox of Plenty in this new version but instead used neo gothic and neoclassical monuments of power instead of modernist ones. The escape away from humanity’s hubris to outer space has been an ongoing filmic theme for many years. The giant cockroach also seemed appropriate in clips of Kafka’s residences (a theme, also borrowed from earlier work - giant insects, a post nuclear cliché). The cockroach is usually attributed as the Ungeziefer or “vermin” of his famous novella Metamorphosis. Kafka was the David Lynch of his era who practically invented the Eastern European version of Magic Realism – as genre combining horror, humour and surreal fantasy.
© Brit Bunkley, still from the video ‘Paradox of Plenty. Futurology’, 2011
4. I first met your works through the videos. What struck me from the start is that they work as a mirror of the human ability to manipulate reality. Somehow it is like a magnifying glass on certain mass phenomena as fears and phobias of society. While the technology on the one hand gives us more confidence about what we were, somehow makes us feel rationally better, on the other hand, however, we are increasingly uncertain and unprepared about the future. How did you get first to videos and what motivates you of this medium?
I fell into video in the late 90’s when experimenting with 3D Studio software that I originally used for sculpture design. As mentioned earlier, it is a software used primarily for developing games and animation. The cinematic resolution and scale of video remains one of the more exciting developments in contemporary art. I have been lucky enough to have seen many thousands of video work and installation internationally since 2000 when I took students to the Sydney Biennial, which I wrote into our sculpture programme. The biennale as others is made up primarily of video art. I also saw many fine examples in LA, San Francisco and NYC during annual trips to visit family in New England. The immersive quality of a good video installation cam be transformative like no other medium.
© Brit Bunkley, still from the video ‘The Huntsman’, 2013
5. Filmessay has invited you to a special streaming session of your video works. Which video will you present? How do you rate this opportunity offered by the Internet to reach a potentially large audience through an artistic work, such as a video? In some ways it is as if certain distances were reduced. It is a bit like a book that you take home to read it. How to compare this type of experience with entering a physical installation? Will we enter 3d installations in the future?
The works will be: ‘Fleeced’, ‘Huntsman’, ‘Paradox of Plenty – the Classical (Kafka’s Sisters)’, ‘By Blood and Water, By Blood and Sand’, ‘Downbreak on 1, Upbeat on 2’.
The internet can provide reasonably high quality resolution video that can be played back at any scale anywhere with good broadband. (I keep my streamed video at 720p in case one doesn’t have great broadband – Also 1080p versions are for sale at Sanderson gallery.)
Entering a physical installation can be a stunning experience. In May I saw several excellent video installations at the Sydney Biennial, Douglas Gordon’s collaboration with Rufus Wainwright, Phantom. When we walked out, it put me into such an art induced daze that I almost bumped and knocked over a sculpture. At that moment I thought that sculpture could not compete with the transformative quality of video installation. That piece, Phantom was a compelling 3D installation.
© Douglas Gordon, Phantom, 2011, stage, screen, a black Steinway piano, a burned Steinway piano and monitor, dimensions variable. Installation view of the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Photograph: Sebastian Kriete.
6. You are a Senior Lecturer in Sculpture and Digital Media at Quay School of Art (NZ) since 1995. In these 20 years world has faced huge transformations that affect our daily life on planet earth: computers, Internet, and other ICT… yet probably the goals of education have not changed that much, have they? Tell us a bit about your experience…
The goals of education remain the same- basically to “assist the flower to grow, in its own way” as Noam Chomsky states, but with the addition of new technology. I am leaving teaching next year when our BFA finishes next year. New Zealand’s new prevailing neo liberal ideology had turned education into the Wild West with “market reforms”. Soon after I arrived in 1995 our school was considered one of the best in the country. It was the 5th BFA degree.
© Brit Bunkley, ‘Expand the Floor of the Cage’, digital print and wood frame, Sarjeant Gallery installation, 1998
Ten years later NZ, a country of 4.5 million people, had 21 art degrees of varying names, lengths and quality (e.g. a 3 year BVA, a 4 year BFA). We could probably only sustain less than half that number. The Times Higher Education World University rankings for universities in some cases have seen our universities ratings fallen through the floor. Our formerly free tertiary education is costing more and more for less and less. And indications are that Education here is heading the way of Australia, the USA and the UK by cutting most subsidies and turning the middle class into indentured servants for life with crippling debt.
7. Any exhibition you have seen that got your attention in the past?
Many, but most recently the Sydney Biennale was magnificent this year with standouts such as the aforementioned Douglas Gordon, Norman Leto, and Ann Lislegaard . Kate Copper’s videos at the KW Institute in Berlin were outstanding, as was a recent new technology exhibition at the Akademie der Künste.
© Brit Bunkley, ‘Hear my Train a’ Comin’ (Bricked-in train), 2012
8. Any artist that you find vibrant and interesting in this moment…
There are so many. Those mentioned above. Siah Armajani. Angelica Mesiti. Andrea Gardner.
9. Plans for the future?
I plan to continue scanning and animating abject monuments.
10. Books that you would not want ever off the shelf?
The ones on my tablet now… Dirty Politics by Nicky Hager, Power Systems by Noam Chomsky, The Nightmare of Reason by Ernest Pawel, A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren and Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.