Sue de Beer's latest installation The Ghost is being presented in
association with Art Production Fund at the Park Avenue Armory in New
York. The work features a two-channel video projection concerning an
occult hypnotist who utilizes "material recollection" to attain lost
time. The Ghost is on view February 36.
ORIGINALLY I WANTED TO MAKE A GIALLO-a very classic version, with
ghosts in it. During the course of the narrative development I began to
undergo a series of hypnosis, and I also started going to a sensory
deprivation tank in Berlin. So I began to wonder about intersections
between the physiological and the psychological, or about ways to take
your conscious mind to a place that is unconscious but still visible-a
place that produces images. It was then that I began to conceive of a
character that was very much in a giallo-an occult hypnotist. After I
completed the basic outline for the script, I asked Alissa Bennett to
write a text for the hypnotist, where the hypnotist talks about ghosts
and the way ghosts inhabit a room-leaving traces of its former
occupancy, clues for present and future residents. I also asked her to
write a text for a character who repeatedly visits the hypnotist, to
experience a more vivid sort of "recollection." Alissa named this "the
material recollection."
It was difficult to find a person that could play this hypnotist
character. Jutta Koether, who plays the hypnotist, has a strong presence
as a person. She is also a musician and I find her voice to be beautiful
and rhythmic. For the two characters in the film that are musicians,
which are Jutta and John Spencer; they both have voices you could get
lost in, voices that carry a lot of feeling with them.
For this video, in particular, the editing was quite physical. How do
you make a ghost without it being something that is absurd? It's
especially hard on a small budget and shooting over a long period of
time. I shot from end of October to December 2008, for two months
straight, and then I re-shot five months later and did a lot of
experiments to try to understand how to make a ghost. I think that in
the editing of this piece, the hypnotism seems to be located in the
physicality of video. The way that light can affect your eyes and in
turn how that light can affect you physically was exciting to me. The
optical effect of persistence of vision, and the way that could make
segments of the video overlay.
The first part of this shoot took place in Fall 2009, after the October
downturn had been digested, so my budget was quite small when I began to
work. One of the characters in the film, Claire, was originally supposed
to disappear and she was supposed to do it in a way that was a lot more
filmic. But it became clear to me that I didn't actually have the
footage that I needed to make that happen, so I asked Alissa again to
write a text for this character where she could make herself disappear.
Claire describes how she will make herself into the perfect ghost, which
echoes a theme for Jutta's character-the nature of a haunting. How
absence can be more powerful than presence. Claire's character is new
for me, in that she's extremely unsympathetic. I find her to be a bit
malicious, in the way that she can see the damage she is about to do,
and is looking forward to its effects. She is secretive. But all of
these things could make her absolutely fascinating for the right person
who would love to be seduced by her. Please, come ruin me again.