Email interview, April-May 2012, for Jo Longhurst I Other Spaces, Cornerhouse / Ffotogallery Publishing with Mostyn
Charlotte Cotton: Jo, I've been looking forward to having this conversation with you. With your forthcoming exhibition and the publication of this book, I suspect that I am catching you at an especially reflective moment. I want to start by asking you about this moment in your practice and why this feels like the right moment for you to be creating this monographic exhibition and publication?
Jo Longhurst: Hello Charlotte, Right now I'm in the thick of production, absorbed with every material detail. I’m not sure I’ll really know what I think about the project as a whole until it’s made and hung, and even then, it may take time... but it’s a huge relief that the new works are actually being finalised. I’ve been working on them since 2008, and in an ideal world I would have liked to have shown this work sooner. I work very slowly, maybe too slowly?
CC: Well, It’s interesting that you say that you work slowly because it is quite difficult for the viewer to work out what your process is from simply viewing the work. I think you could perhaps intuit or imagine that the works of art that you produce are the distillations of research and experiment – that beneath their perfect surfaces there is depth – but you don’t create work that is easy to read as your biography or a linear process. Would you describe your process for this new work to me?
JL: I’m glad you can’t easily make a biographical reading of the work. Personally, I’m always a little surprised at what I produce. A biographical reading can really shut down the potential of an artwork to operate independently. Is it really important for the viewer to know I used to be a keen gymnast? Or that my coaches had defected from various countries behind the Iron Curtain? Or that I spent time studying in the Soviet Union in the early 80s, before Perestroika, exposed to some of the greatest Soviet propaganda films? (how I wish I had drunk less vodka and paid more attention…) Or how, through a chance encounter on the street, I ended up having tea with Olga Korbut in her ex KGB flat in Minsk, years after her moment of fame, but long before she emigrated to the USA? I could go on and on… while artfully concealing more pertinent personal experiences that no doubt also inform the work… Surely the important thing for the viewer is that something of my engagement with the whole strange ideological apparatus of gymnastics will be there in the work. That’s the bit that matters. And I have no idea if any of that comes across…
CC: In a non-literal way, yes, I think that the richness of your experience does come across but only in the sense that a viewer will intuit that there are strong emotional and imaginative energies interplaying with your formal and intellectual artistic gestures.
JL: Well, my project stems from a personal passion – it’s important to me that I have some emotional knowledge of my subject - but I also like to work from a position of detachment. This might sound contradictory, but the actual work takes place somewhere in the grey area between the two. The gap between thinking and feeling really interests me.
CC: I think many artists share with you this process of setting up a creative framework for the, as you put it, ‘actual work’ to happen. You could, perhaps, describe this as a ritual that you construct – in your case of pairing an emotionally subjective passion with a quasi-objective investigation – in order that you kind of trick yourself into that ‘grey area’ where creativity lies.
JL: It’s something I did intuitively in the making of The Refusal, my previous work with the British Whippet. Other Spaces has a similar emotional / intellectual split, but I’m not sure this provides enough of a practical function to propel the project forward. It’s ok to have a conceptual framework - to have two different ways of thinking about the work in progress - but much of the creativity happens in the actual doing. And of course the subject itself dictates to a great extent how I proceed, and in which medium. The practical limitations of the places where the works form, as well as my own personal limitations feed into this too. But you’re right, a creative framework is really helpful. In both these projects I set myself a series of studies to get going. Some of these translated into formal works, but others were just vehicles to allow ideas to take shape.
CC: Can you tell me more about the investigative aspects of this project? What was your research process like?
JL: In the initial stages I completely immersed myself in the project: I was visiting artist at Heathrow Gymnastic Club, home to some of Britain’s best gymnasts. I attended training on and off for over a year, shooting video and making photographic studies, but more importantly observing the gymnasts’ routines and relationships: with each other, and with the coaches. While I was there Heathrow elite squad members competed in the World Championships, the European Championships, and the Youth Olympics, as well as many national competitions. Over this period I had only two one-to-one sessions with them, and even then only five minutes with each girl. I was allowed to coexist with them, but I didn’t interfere. My role was primarily that of an observer. Even so, it was very important for the project formation. During this time I was also visiting artist at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships. The photographs I made there, as well as those made at Heathrow, formed an essential archive, which I later drew on to make my new works.
CC: What took place in your one-to-one sessions with the gymnasts?
JL: The gymnasts participated in a formal portrait session, following a set of simple instructions, which they were given on the spot and which required them to re-enact the first step of a gymnastics routine - the presentation to the judges. I asked them to imagine they were in competition waiting for the previous competitor’s score to come up - this a psychologically testing time when a gymnast needs to collect herself to deliver an immaculate performance. Once the ready light is on, a gymnast only has a limited amount of time to present herself and start her routine or she will be disqualified. So I asked them to imagine themselves there in the arena, in competition, and when ready, to step up and present to the judges (my camera). I made photographs and video at each stage, covering both the moment of private introspection and that of public display. In the second shoot I asked each gymnast to perform one of their regular warm up exercises. They were real professionals. We only had a few minutes, in less than ideal conditions, but they performed to order.
CC: Aside from this observational research, were you investigating more theoretical or art historical approaches to your subject?
JL: Yes, in parallel to this material immersion in my subject, I was conducting a more research-based exploration of Perfection. In my previous work I’d been exploring the idea of the perfect show dog – a specimen identified by predominantly physical characteristics, as described in the Breed Standard. One of the driving forces behind the gymnastics project was a desire to move beyond the idea of bodily perfection to explore a more psychological space. In Other Spaces I focus on the physical and emotional experiences of the gymnasts’ as they work to produce a perfect routine: a tangible, if rarely achieved, goal. As a starting point I looked at representations of gymnastics in the media through the work of professional sports photographers. This spawned my first work A-Z - a taxonomy of the human body in motion. Sifting through many thousands of photographs in commercial, professional and museum archives I realized that when photographing a particular move, certain moments in a routine were often considered more desirable than others.
While making regular visits to Heathrow I also started thinking about other aspects of social and political history inextricably bound up with ideas of perfection. I found myself looking at geometry, cosmology, communism, Constructivism, National Socialism – diverse academic disciplines and political movements all somehow associated with the ordering of our view of the world, and the idea and aesthetics of perfect form. This opened up vast new territories to me. From this broad-brush approach I indentified particular elements I wanted to work with: Plato’s ‘perfect’ solids; NASA’s subjective imaging of the latent star-forming regions; the Constructivists’ early utopian architectures and artworks; Leni Riefenstahl’s incredible athletic prowess in a series of nationalist mountaineering films, and, of course, her technically magnificent propaganda films… The inspirations were many.
CC: How did you organize this cluster of influences and references? Was there an order or a repeating method you were applying to your research material?
JL: The process certainly didn’t have a linear trajectory, or an obvious hierarchy. I would sketch and think, and look though my digital files on screen (a new way of managing photographs for me…) pulling out images that stood out. I saw many resonances between my research materials, which also prompted ideas of my own. The ideas would then develop, evolve, mutate, or die… I made multiple work prints and experimental forms, creating small models and larger prototypes in my studio. Some ideas never got out of my sketchbooks. Others kept on changing as I made different connections or considered different propositions, and some are still evolving as I work on the final fabrication.
CC: And is this the creative space that is the ‘grey area’ that you referred to earlier? At the risk of being too literal, it suggests to me that you, the artist, is trying to get the perfect balance between the right and left sides of the brain!
JL: Maybe… it’s difficult to verbalise how the thinking and the making come together. Actually I think it’s a mistake to believe they are separate to start with. It’s not that clear cut. I’m most interested in creating something engaging, however that comes about. But it’s funny you ask such a particular question. For years now I’ve had these two quotes stuck on my studio wall:
We should take care not to make the intellect our God. It has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. Albert Einstein
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. GK Chesterton
They’re just above my computer and I find my eye drawn to them when I tune out of Mail or Word, or some other programme that makes intellectual demands. They bring me back to the heart of the creative process. Right now working with the gymnasts, I particularly like the Einstein quote.
CC: What strikes me about both how you respond and the inclusion of those two quotes is that, if we take the idea that the right and left sides of the brain function together that then the ‘intellect’ of both Einstein’s and Chesterton’s quote is a shared capacity of both analytic and ‘creative’ thinking. But, added to this, you see that all of the balancing of the brain’s capacities are futile if not combined with something that Chesterton identifies as the ‘heart’. Is it this reminder of there being something beyond the intellect – something soulful, perhaps - that you tap into when you read these quotes, that you are responding to?
JL: Yes, that’s it! I’m interested in human experience: heart, soul, visceral gut reactions. They’re not things that can be adequately expressed through rational thinking alone. Those quotes take me to a different space.
CC: It’s interesting to think about what happens when you replace the word ‘intellect’ in both quotes with the word ‘camera’. What values and authorship do you ascribe to the camera in your work?
JL: Hmmm… the camera in the place of the intellect, interesting. For some reason René Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ immediately comes to mind - something to do with his defining notion of man, and the split between body and soul. Interestingly, for Decartes, the soul was also bound up with the intellect - his doctrine relied on his belief that animals don’t have souls - but he viewed the physical body as a machine-like apparatus, a biological machine incapable of feeling.
Where am I going with this?? I’ve made a leap. I’m equating the camera to the mechanics of the body, devoid of heart and soul. And of course a camera is literally that – a mechanical body that we use as we see fit, but vital nevertheless in shaping our experience of the world. I view the camera as tool; a means to an end; but the various different cameras I use, and the particular technologies involved in the image making, always leave a mark on the resulting image / object. So, there is certainly some authorship inherent in the camera itself. And, of course, the apparatus and material processes of photography are not just the tools of my work - they’re also the subject.
CC: Tell me more about the characteristics of the apparatus you have used to make this work.
JL: Various: a Mamiya; a photocopier; a Panasonic Lumix; a Nikon D3 for shooting at the World Championships and in the gym, where I shot my wall vinyl piece, Suspension (1). This particular work is a testimony to the incredible capacity of the D3, which was nevertheless pushed to its limits by the difficult shooting conditions: I was challenged by chalky sprung floors - unsuitable for a tripod, mixed light sources, low light levels, and gymnasts training incredibly fast moves. Suspension (1) depicts a world-class gymnast in the middle of a complicated twisting summersault. This is not immediately apparent to the viewer, who is presented with an image of a young woman floating serenely above the more energetic activities going on in the gym below her. The work is heavily marked by the unnatural, garish colours of the image: the dirty, digital noise simultaneously breaks into magentas and greens - polar opposites on the colour wheel - which any photography purist knows makes an accurate representation of the ‘real’ colour scene impossible. Rather than disguise or compensate for this, I harness this quality. By enlarging it to a hyper-real size, I emphasise the digital artifacts that make up the image. They seem to offer me a way to explore the psychological state of the gymnast. Floating in this suspension of digital particles, the gymnast appears disengaged from the action, her expression inscrutable, ‘elsewhere’; her right hand incongruously pointing upward in an almost religious manner. There appears to be a body / mind divide going on here too… the thinking required to master technique has to give way to bodily instinct at some point for a gymnast to successfully complete a move. What happens to the intellect at this point? It’s a question that intrigues me. But this image of a suspended moment in time, captured by the D3, is defiantly opaque.
CC: Do you think that this ‘defiantly opaque’ presence of the apparatus is not only present in your own photographs, including Suspension (1), but actually a shared characteristic with sports photography per se? I mean, is there a relationship between your own photographic approach and the lexicon of sports photography at a really fundamental level beyond your ostensible subject of gymnasts?
JL: I find this image tantalisingly opaque, but it’s not really down to the camera (or even the human-machine hybrid). For me, the opaqueness comes from the gymnast’s inscrutable expression.
To come back to your question, all photographs are marked to some extent by the particular camera that made them, as well as the reproduction processes involved - I’m not sure this is a special characteristic of sports photography, but it’s partly what I wanted to play with in my A-Z, where the 215 block-mounted photographs cover a span of nearly 90 years. The photographs depict famous gymnasts performing their signature moves, clustered together with photographs of other gymnasts performing the same move, or variations of it, in the ensuing decades. They’re all taken by professional sports photographers and include black & white and colour, analogue and digital photographs, made with a variety of different cameras whose technology has also clearly evolved over the decades. This is particularly visible in the colours and material qualities of the reproduced prints, as well as in what they reveal pictorially - the changing forms of the gymnastics equipment, and indeed the bodies of the gymnasts’ themselves. A-Z explores the visual language of the sports photographer and what they consider to be the perfect photographic moment - the ‘money shot’ of a particular move. This work became a sounding board to think about how I might (or better put, might not) approach the same subject. Why recreate the wheel? These guys are professionals, and they have a particular way of taking photographs. Despite the evolving capacity of the technology over the decades, the photographs are remarkably similar in the way they capture the ‘peak’ body position of a particular move. This appears to be the image which best conforms to the expectations and needs of the media of various ideological persuasions, who equate success at gymnastics to the health and vitality of their political and economic systems. I find this intriguing, but all too predictable. In my other works I’m more interested in exploring those moments which are not valued, and not generally shown.
CC: Did you have to understand sports photography in order to avoid duplicating those conventions, or was it the opposite, where you just had to stay innocent to the craftsmanship of professional sports photography?
JL: At the World Championships my approach, and my behaviour, was quite different to that of the sports photographers. I was not interested in celebrity, or documenting the trajectory of the competition. (That said, it was very important to me to be there, shooting during the competition while the individual gymnasts were under such psychological pressure to perform). I was more engaged with exploring an idea, than documenting a process. I was selective in my image making, focusing on a particular moment as the gymnasts launched themselves into the void of the arena. Their bodies speak volumes: their hands and feet are incredible! The images that excite me are no doubt ones that the sports photographers (and the gymnasts too) would reject as displaying an unacceptable failure in form and technique. I respect technique - it’s important, but the idea must always come first.
CC: And that then gets supported and reiterated by the post-capture decisions that you make for each aspect of the project. You’ve talked a little about Suspension (1) and the decision-making for presenting the piece as an explicit digital ‘noise’, a large-sized print, but I wonder if you could talk about the reasoning behind the incorporation of sculptural ideas in the work?
JL: We’re conditioned to seeing photographs of sportsmen and women and reading them literally – as a document of a particular individual and event. By giving my photographs a different context - by combining sculptural form and image - I suggest a different way for the viewer to consider the work. There’s a certain dynamic, a certain physical presence that a sculptural work can bring to a space, which I hope will invite a more open interpretation from the viewer.
Although not technically a sculpture, Pinnacle has a commanding physical presence. The 10 tesselating frames are deep set and tower 3.15 meters high – 7 meters if you count the 11th framed photograph, hung in the gallery eaves. The material – the grey powder-coated metal – also adds to the sculptural aspect. The work is hung close to the gallery floor, but requires the viewer to look up to experience the whole piece and the structural framing is quite at odds with the more fragile images contained within. This is deliberate: I want the viewer to have a visceral relation to this work.
The use of powder-coated metal is extended to the Space-Force Constructions, where photographs are inset into open lattice frameworks of a skewed geometry, which propel them into the gallery space. These metal frameworks are more dynamic than the heavy framing of Pinnacle, and the colour of the metalwork is also lively, but, paradoxically, this appears to focus the attention on the stillness of the inset images. I’m looking forward to seeing how people react to these pieces.
CC: I know that you give a great deal of creative energy to anticipating the reaction to your work through the way that it is installed. Tell me about how you think your work operates in physical space? Are the works transformed or made more emphatic by gallery spaces, in ways that don’t occur in your studio?
JL: I don’t really get to experience the works in my studio. In fact I have two studios: a ’clean’ one and a ‘dirty’ one. They’re both productive spaces, but not in the sense you might imagine. They house equipment, materials, files, negatives, hard drives, books, crates of work, models, prototypes and tests, but rarely ever the finished work. They’re not big enough, or clean enough, to accommodate works like these. So putting together this show for the first time I have to imagine how the works might inhabit the exhibition space, and how they might interrelate.
Pinnacle and Peak (a life-size portrait of a young Heathrow gymnast) are materially and conceptually very different, but have an integral relation to each other, which I hope to bring out by hanging them in close proximity.
Suspension (1), which we discussed earlier, is another work that needs to be installed carefully to maximize impact. Initially it will be a wall-to-wall 3 panel vinyl piece, butted up to the gallery ceiling so the pictured gymnast becomes framed by the physical architecture of the space - I view the white cube of the gallery as the interior space of a geometric form. The somewhat brutal crop of the image has been deliberately made to enhance the sense that this is a moment out of time; an enigmatic fragment, an isolated moment contained within this more formal space. But the architecture of subsequent venues already suggests different ways to hang and view this work.
As for the Space-Force Constructions, they’re still being made. It’s quite an anxious moment for me… I have a clear idea of what I want in my head, but it’s not so easy to translate this into practice: it’s impossible to know exactly how something will work from looking at a model or a computer screen. I gave the fabricator a copy of Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings of open-faced Platonic solids for inspiration: even though the images and skewed geometric structures don’t conform to conventional ideas of perfect form, I still want them to be immaculate! These works will hang at various heights – both low and high, and will also sit on the gallery floor. I’m hoping the play of light from the windows in the gallery ceiling will cast shadows through the high gloss structures, changing the appearance of the work throughout the day with the movement of the sun. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I have a plan for the installation, but this could all change once I have the work in the gallery space.
CC: I’m really gratified to hear you say this! It is a necessary discipline to be willing to rethink (if need be) and continue being rigorous once you are installing an exhibition. It is especially admirable given the labour of research, preconception, and rendering that you have described as the practice of your work. Tell me what you think is at stake if you are unwilling to challenge yourself at ‘the final hour’?
JL: Well, I’m also planning a series of quiet interventions with local gymnasts, which will need to be worked out in-situ with the floor-based pieces, which themselves have no fixed plan. This I really do need to work at in the gallery. As for the other works, there’s always a possibility for them to develop. I love it when something new presents itself - at any stage. The works are precisely thought through and certain aspects are fixed, but that doesn’t mean they’re not mutable. It’s often unforeseen moments: the little accidents; something propped the wrong way up, or sat next to something else that create unplanned deviations. In my experience every exhibition space prompts a different response. Back to Chesterton: when all the advanced thinking and planning has been done, it’s important to look, and to have heart.