Show (&) Tell. A Conversation

A First Quarter, 1973. Lawrence Weiner and Mel Kendrick on the set.

On the occasion of the upcoming screening of Lawrence Weiner’s films and videos—organized in collaboration with the Lawrence Weiner Estate and Gladstone Gallery—on Sunday, September 14 at e-flux Screening Room, and in tandem with e-flux Film’s September Staff Picks presentation of Weiner's A First Quarter, we are republishing  Bartomeu Marí’s interview with Weiner originally conducted for and published in SHOW (&) TELL / The Films & Videos of Lawrence Weiner: A Catalogue Raisonné.1 The conversation offers an entry into Weiner’s approach to moving images and the collaborative conditions that shaped his practice—providing context for encountering Weiner's film work.

Bartomeu Mari: Why and how did you start making films?

Lawrence Weiner: The attempt to make movies and video tapes came about for me in search of a mise-en-scène. That’s the same rationale for making posters. One is not content with the configuration that your work is being presented in. The first movies were done at a time when I, and the majority of the art world, began to question the configuration of where we were showing work and how we were showing work. The art magazines were allowing artists to have pages and such, but at the same time you were always within a context of advertisements and articles. I don’t write magazine articles and I don’t like to write prose. I found that I had a knowledge of films and an awareness of movies. I wanted a situation that would allow me to come out of the ivory tower of the studio where all decisions are made by the artist and you are the final arbiter. I found myself in a situation where since there were things in movies that I didn’t know how to do I had to convince somebody else that it was worth their time to do it. I found the dialogue quite good. I also found being able to build a configuration and present the work within a context that I felt comfortable with visually to serve a function.

Bartomeu Mari: Was that one of the main reasons for making films? To look for a presentation structure for the work? Or, what is the relationship between the work which was shown in galleries and the films? My first idea was that film needs a very precise kind of presentation, in a dark room with several people sitting in it. They share an experience, yet interpret diversely. Were you looking for a precise structure?

Lawrence Weiner: I accept the fact that I prefer film to show in theaters and not on cassette, and I prefer video to be shown on television. My use of film at that time was not to change the audience or their response to the presentation of the work. It was an attempt to place it within the stream of life (im stroom des lebens). And the stream of life becomes what a film is. Essentially film is false, but because it has to be manufactured it becomes the total reality that we have. We build the configuration that we want. One has more control over presenting the work within the lifestyle you prefer. Secondly, it allows for a different communication with an audience. I don’t want my work to be within the context of who I am and what I am when you see the work. But once it enters into other peoples lives, my life is the same as anyone else’s so I can use my inner life to place it. To find, in a sense, what the metaphor might be.

Bartomeu Mari: What were the possibilities when you started working with film? What were the production facilities? Were the people you worked with already involved with filmmaking?

Lawrence Weiner: It starts with the inception of the artist with myself. I had decided that I would like to do a film, called A FIRST QUARTER. I was appalled by a situation we were in, of wartime alertness because of the Indo-Chinese adventures of the mandarins of power. I decided to shoot, but I wanted to shoot it in video and transfer it to film. There was a kinescope mentality. I grew up with television. Television in the United States was quite common in the 40s. The only remembrance of “live” television was kinescope which is removing the videotape, taking it and turning it into film, filming the video image itself. That allowed me certain technical devices. How the production started? I started to talk to people about it. I found somebody who was interested in “this”, then we found our camera. Richard Landry was quite supportive. He started to work on the music. Tina Girouard, Mel Kendrick, Elaine Grove, myself and various and sundry other people began to pull together a working group to shoot the movie. The movie came about from an imperative. As far as budgeting as such, I was able to get a little money from Castelli. Jack Wendler was in from London and became enthusiastic about the film, so there was a little more money. By the time we were all finished, the movie got made. It was A FIRST QUARTER. It was pulled together on the street. Shot, edited, the score rolled into it, the songs written for it, and presented. All within about a month, from the first time that I said to somebody I think it's time for me to make this movie I wanted to make. So it went really rather quickly and was a reasonably good experience.

Bartomeu Mari: We have talked about the first films. What about the first videos that are in distribution — SHIFTED FROM SIDE TO SIDE and TO AND FRO AND FRO AND TO AND FRO AND FRO AND TO?

Lawrence Weiner: They came about because Richard Landry had access to the cameras that Andy Mann was using at the Castelli Gallery. He arrived one day at the gallery. We were discussing this work that had been recently shown and he said, how would you make an ad for that? We went into an office, we chatted for a while, we picked up the camera, and we made two advertisements for two works of art.

Bartomeu Mari: What is the difference or relationship between these two media, video and film?

Lawrence Weiner: They are totally different. The reason that I wanted to make my first feature film using both things was that I wanted to immediately address the question for myself of what I saw as the difference between video and film. Film is a material substance. Film is an emulsion on a piece of — in those days celluloid, these days — plastic that runs through a machine that has to send light through it. Every time a film is shown you see it in different colors. You see everything differently. It depends upon the light, it depends upon the state of the film. It depends upon the emulsion that is on the surface which resettles from different temperatures. Video is far more static and video can be fixed by the person watching it. You see it as two dimensions with an illusion, with shading of three dimensions. Film is a three dimensional media. You are seeing what is in effect a projection of a three dimensional image on the emulsion. That's one of the major differences. How to use it is that video gives you a chance to run it from the beginning to end without any interference in the process. Even hand-held cinema must go into the laboratory; and from the laboratory until it's printed there is enough of an interference that you are essentially editing it. It is possible to make straight through video without editing it. You edit it on camera as you shoot it.

Bartomeu Mari: What was your position with regard to other artists such as Vito Acconci, John Baldessari and Michael Snow who were making media at that time?

Lawrence Weiner: Closer to Edward Ruscha. If you are going to make a movie you may as damn well make a movie and not make a documentary about your own art practice and as well take into account the medium itself of movies which we all grew up with.

Bartomeu Mari: Was your generation one of television or film?

Lawrence Weiner: Both movies and TV. Movies were something you went a lot to as a child and TV was something you saw a lot of because in the United States they had TV all night.

Bartomeu Mari: In relation to the different films and videos you have done, what would you say is the difference between them in terms of the concept or evolution of the work?

Lawrence Weiner: That all changes... that all changed quite a bit as the development went on. The material afforded to us that would be possible… for a non-Hollywood filmmaker or a non-Hollywood, non-commercial videomaker in 1972 changed radically by the time we go to the late 80s. In the late 80s I was able to shoot videotapes straight out, go in, edit, and have it in two days. A full-color tv-quality videotape with a Thompson camera, that was equivocal to anything I could have done with a film camera in 1972. So things changed quite a bit, in 1971 really.

I do not know if it is about the medium. It’s about what you could do with video. Video is something you can talk to someone about on Monday, and on Tuesday you can have a full set up. Michael Shamberg was able to do FOR EXAMPLE DECORATED. The set up was already for me to come in the next day. He built the set, arranged the camera, and I pulled together the casting and the crew. We walked in, we both knew what we were going to do, and we shot the tape. You can’t do that with movies. That is a difference.

Bartomeu Mari: Looking at the video and film work as forming one kind of product, how would you distinguish between those that are more about performance and those that are more fiction/narrative work? I am thinking here of DO YOU BELIEVE IN WATER? (performance) and PLOWMANS LUNCH (fiction/narrative).

Lawrence Weiner: PLOWMANS LUNCH and the video tape DO YOU BELIEVE IN WATER? are totally different things. The performance tape DO YOU BELIEVE IN WATER? was a game set up of the interaction of ritual between people and what constituted the ritual. The videotape was used within the installation itself and existed al by itself. PLOWMANS LUNCH is a very very designed movie. It’s about my response to the lack of empathy. This film is almost a political statement of how films should be made. It’s using a certain kind of cutting that is used by commercials now. It’s using a certain kind of… never letting a character develop past a certain point. Once the initial idea of the character is presented, you’ve lost it. If you didn’t catch it, if it didn’t mean anything to you, it never existed for you. I have a habit of mixing amateurs with professionals so that at all times you are still always aware that you are dealing with people. If you empathize with them you might be empathizing with a professional actor. If you empathize with them as an actor, they might not be acting at all. That might be the way they are. It becomes a non-question.

PLOWMANS LUNCH is a rather sophisticated movie. DO YOU BELIVE IN WATER? Is a sophisticated structure that has more to do with what you are seeing than the way that it is shot and edited. PLOWMANS LUNCH has to do with what you are seeing and the way it is shot and edited.

Bartomeu Mari: What about the characters? You worked with both professional actors and amateurs. But what happens when we come to a case like the porno movie?

Lawrence Weiner: Well, DO YOU BELIEVE IN WATER? is soft porn, but there are two people in it who are making love. And A BIT OF MATTER… is hard core. It's a fuck film. Then you are constrained to only use well-known people. Because when you do that, use your own class, you are not taking advantage of anybody. If somebody is the director of a space or a museum, or is a well-known art critic, an art historian or an artist, and you ask would you do this for/in this film? And they say yes, then I know I don’t have any responsibility. I am dealing with people in my peer group. They know exactly what it means, what they are doing. And I don’t mean sexually. Everybody knows how to fuck, but they know exactly why they are doing it and they have their own reasons for doing it. They either accept my reasons or they don’t. But they don’t do it of they don’t want to. I’m not picking up a prostitute on the road and saying here is $20 or $100, do this. Or picking up some young person who is just so desperate to enter into the scene that they’ll do anything. These were people who knew exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it. So that allowed me to develop the structure that I was working on without worrying about exploitation.

Bartomeu Mari: Why did you make a porno movie, at that time?

Lawrence Weiner: It was almost a request. There was a lot of repression and censorship going on in the states. They were arresting people who were doing porno tapes and films. Most pornography, it becomes obvious from A BIT OF MATTER…, is quite boring. But that’s not the point. The point is that it becomes as viable an interaction between human beings as anything else. And if you are going to make The Ballons of Cherbourg, you may as well make A BIT OF MATTER… it was shown publicly, with a lot of publicity, because we wanted to see if we could bring down the wrath of the authorities on people who were capable of fighting back, against censorship and against oppression. Not a damned thing happened. It was part of a first series that was ever shown in Filmex (Los Angeles Film Festival). Nothing Happened. I don’t know why. Nothing happened except it became quite popular. It’s a rather nice tape, I must say, and everybody in it has done quite well. They handeled the subject and the material quite well. But it did not bring down the repercussions of “the powers that be” on people who were prepared to fight them. They only went after people who were not capable of fighting them.

Bartomeu Mari: I see in your work a kind of 'anthropology' of contemporary everyday life. By putting characters together who are mostly non-professionals becoming actors, you show the ambiguity between playing and not playing. How do you see this?

Lawrence Weiner: Between reality in the sense of the overwhelming dominant culture and reality in the sense of aesthetic culture. I see it as a utilitarian. This is one of the reasons that art is so useful to our society — in that there is no difference between the dream state and the awakening state. There is no hierarchy between what you see in a film and what you see in your mind's eye as the way to do something. When you find yourself in a social circumstance that you cannot manage, cannot figure out, at least for myself as a North American my first reference is to a movie. How I saw that being done. This was our parent, this was our role model. Movies are your role model. There is no differentiation when you think in terms of movies between what is real and what is not. It is all real. It's nice to say this abstractly, but in film it is the only time that reality happens. There is no differentiation between dream state — meaning fantasy state — and so-called reality. And that's without empathy. That is only because it is the only way you know how to light a cigarette, the only way you know how to walk across the room. We learn by imitating. The movies have given us an enormous amount of information to imitate.

Bartomeu Mari: What about the use of music in the work? How do the soundtracks relate to the image?

Lawrence Weiner: The soundtracks are usually less in relation to the image than to the general idea of the tape itself. I've been very lucky with the musicians that I have been privileged (and I use that word advisedly) to work with. People like Richard Landry or Peter Gordon. They've all been composers who have a knowledge of movies. So once the 'initial geist' of the score is together, the placement is invariably (with a few interruptions) in the hands of the composer. It's all done by watching the film build, discussing the film. Watching the music build, discussing the music.

Bartomeu Mari: What was the feedback that you got when the films were shown for the first time?

Lawrence Weiner: Enough to be able to continue to make them. That's the only way you can judge it, since it is a collaborative process and it requires people putting their names on it, putting their time and their energy into it. Each succeeding film lead to being able to arrange a crew and set up for the next succeeding film or video. That's for me, within my own concept of it as a working process, ample feedback because they are almost all self-produced.

Bartomeu Mari: Did the films fit into a commercial film structure?

Lawrence Weiner: They entered into a film structure. But there was a problem. There has been a reluctance in the film community to accept films by any artist. So it was not me particularly, but there were some filmmakers that seemed to have enough generosity to see what they were about. But the films entered in. They were in a lot of film festivals and that placed them in a context of other so-called “experimental” filmmakers. As far as entering into a commercial context, they never seemed to. Except ALTERED TO SUIT, which had a rock and roll venue for quite some time. It was intentionally made in black and white to avoid any kind of relationship to Hollywood rock video which was just beginning to become popular at that time, in 1979.

Bartomeu Mari: Which filmmakers were important to you?

Lawrence Weiner: A FIRST QUARTER was almost all Godard. That was my “Godard film”. At that time, Godard meant an enormous amount to me. I still have respect for the work Godard did with film, his understanding of the relationships between reality and non-reality. Understanding relationships of what is important and what isn't in terms of cinema history. So after growing up with lots of movies and finally coming to make my own first feature, it sure looked a lot like Godard.

Bartomeu Mari: When we look back to the late 70s from what has been happening in the 80s with the new generation of artists, the perspective seems to have changed.

The strategies of presenting art in galleries and museums appear to be different.

Can one see that in your recent video work?

Lawrence Weiner: Each generation builds work not based upon the facilities that are afforded to it by the dominant culture, but based upon the necessity of what they have to do. If the dominant culture finds a use of it, then it adapts to it. By the time it adapts to it, it seems as if it fits there. But there is always a lapse between the first time you pee on the snow, and when it finally melts through and you can read the writing. So of course it has changed. But happily, by the time it changes to accommodate you, you no longer are doing what it changed to accommodate. It ends up only accommodating the second or third generation. But that's what the dominant structure has always done.

Bartomeu Mari: Are you still working on films?

Lawrence Weiner: I am working on a film called WIDE BLUE YONDER now. It's all about what the reality is in constructing your own world configuration and what the reality is not. And I am also working on a few film projects with other filmmakers which are tied in with music and other things. I still see film as an absolute necessity for me. The use of media itself is a means that I use to test how the metaphor works with the work that I am doing. In their relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects. I cannot allow that to overshadow the fact that although I have no means within my art to deal the relationship of human beings to human beings, the work exists in a relation of human beings to human beings. Film and video allow me that access. Essentially the major question for me as an artist is that people are always asking if the films are auto-biographical. There is very little you can do that is not auto-biographical.

Bartomeu Mari: Do you mean that films are not about yourself?

Lawrence Weiner: They are. They always are. Perhaps not in detail, but certainly in feeling. There is nothing you can do in this world that involves presenting “something” to other people that is not, in effect, “auto-biographical”. Films are the great existential thing. I essentially make home movies. That's why I like to use my own class and that's why I am not attracted to doing a Hollywood movie. I have great respect for Hollywood, the whole process of a Hollywood movie, the enormous contradictions and such. But at the same time, I would lose then the ability to keep them as what I see them as home movies and to see what my state was at a certain point in time.

Bartomeu Mari: What is your role as director? How do you see your role as director? How do you direct non-professional actors and work with the relationship between human being and actor, reality and construction of a metaphor?

Lawrence Weiner: Long, involved conversations that seem to consist of trying to get people to understand what they are supposed to do, not how they are supposed to do it. It doesn't interest me to rehearse an actor or an actress 'across the floor' in such a manner that I am telling them how to do what I am asking them to do. I have a right, as director, to ask them to do what. But most of the how comes from the people that I chose. That's why I chose them. That's why I’ve talked to them and gone into it. I build a structure rather than direct a production.

Bartomeu Mari: Are there screenplays? Do you use that method?

Lawrence Weiner: I use another form. But everybody seems to know what they are doing so it seems to work.

Bartomeu Mari: And what about the editing process?

Lawrence Weiner: The editing process removes all the things that didn’t work and rearranges it on film. In video, very often, it is just laying no post-production language and working in the music. By the time you are all finished, hopefully, you have a product. But that is what it is – it’s pro-duct. Not a work of art, not an object, but a product.

Bartomeu Mari: What do you mean by product?

Lawrence Weiner: That it is a cumulative collaboration of various people to present something that is then read as media. The same as a record; a record is a product. A book is a product. They are not objects but products. They rely upon the technical means that are available. They rely on various and sundry other questions besides just the determination of the artist.

Bartomeu Mari: Can they become an object through presentation?

Lawrence Weiner: They become a cult object through presentation, an object of contemplation, but are always still a product. It's that old-fashioned thing that great artists are capable of saying that a beer can functions as art and only silly ones would say that it no longer is a beer can. Film becomes an object, but it always remains a product.

Bartomeu Mari: It is the opposite of a ready-made.

Lawrence Weiner: Absolutely. It has no relation to art as we use it. Film itself presents metaphor after metaphor after metaphor. Art itself is never a metaphor. It is always an empirical reality that is used by society as a metaphor. Film is the presentation of the metaphor.

Bartomeu Mari: Your work has been identified with conceptual art since its inception, the late 60s. How do the film and video work fit into this historical context?

Lawrence Weiner: This is a real problem for me. Happily for me, since a lot of the so-called conceptual artists and so-called conceptual performers have done work that I find extremely interesting, it was useful. And my practice seems to have been useful for a group of artists that considered themselves conceptual artists. But I don't see myself as a conceptual artist. I have always seen myself as a basic materialist which is why my films are so raunchy. I see myself dealing with the reality of the materials presented. The reality of human beings. Human beings eat, piss, shit and fuck. If they don't eat, piss, shit and fuck — if they don't do it within natural order — you are not dealing with the human being represented. But from the conceptual standpoint, if conceptual performers and conceptual video and conceptual filmmakers have been able to use some of the things that I have been experimenting with or am interested in, then I am happy enough to be listed and played alongside of them. But it was not my intention. My intention is to find basic materiality. When I am making a film I am looking for the core of matter between relations of one human being to another human being. I am not looking for the core matter of conceptual reality. I am looking for the core matter of absolute reality as we see it. So, I am pleased to find high, high quality in my colleagues called conceptual artists, but I ain't one of them. I am maybe even a socialist-realist filmmaker. Because my concerns of aesthetics are normal concerns there is no difference for me between the reality of aesthetics and the reality of having to eat, and having to learn how to dress, and having to learn how to do all sorts of other things.

Bartomeu Mari: Is there a relationship between so-called popular culture and home-movie making?

Lawrence Weiner: I don't know what the word means. Remember, I am a united stateser. I do not have a vested interest to protect what Europeans call “classical music” or “classical dance” or “classical anything”. I don't know the difference between what you call pop and music. To me, Thelonius Monk, Charles Ives, and Lou Reed — they are music - I deal with it. I deal with Waylon Jennings on the same level as I deal with Charles Ives. I don't know the difference. When I make music with Peter Gordon, when I make music with Ned Sublette and the Persuasions, I am making what I consider new American music, meaning music that it is made now in the United States. Of course I hope that I am dancing to the music of my own time, that at least I am having something to say about how to write it. That's one of the reasons one makes a movie. One wants to have something to say about how one's work is perceived, and how one's work is placed. You almost want to be able, every once in a while, to have your work used by people who look the way you want people to look. It's not fascist, it's not authoritarian. It is the same as an advertisement of how your work could be perceived. But it is not a documentary. It is taking the work and letting the work inform the people who then will inform how the work is seen. It is a continual growing process.

Bartomeu Mari: But that is what I meant by “popular” - useful to people. I would not reduce the whole question to the idea of use...

Lawrence Weiner: I have to reduce everything to the idea of use. It's part of my own credo, it's something that is built into me. I don't impose it on anybody, but still I am an old hard-line, non-ambivalent socialist and I still think that everything made by people and put into the world has some use for somebody. Use is not a bad word for me. The trouble for me is the word “pop”, and words like “aujourd-hui” and “Hedendagse”. They have an implication of age, rather than an implication of class. And what differentiates each emerging group of artists is that they assume a certain class, and that cuts through economic class. It's a class of information. It's a class that will take the trouble to learn something. And that has nothing to do with age. Nothing whatsoever to do with age. It has to do with how many obligations you have accumulated through the years.

Now with a movie, you can basically rid yourself of those obligations. You then can put it within a context. There is that incredible anecdote the first time ALTERED TO SUIT was shown in Canada. I had wanted to make a very very beautiful rock and roll movie. I think I succeeded with the help of Kathryn Bigelow as assistant director, with the help of Michael Shamberg and of Peter Gordon. We pulled together, I think, a very beautiful movie. The trouble was when it was screened, the attack on the movie was that the people in it were too beautiful. It was an attack made by professional, so-called intellectual people in an audience; and they attacked the fact that the lead character, Teta Gorgoni, was representative of so-called “youth culture”. Meanwhile, Teta Gorgoni had a child that was almost the age of people in the audience. And she just had given birth to a baby three weeks before. She was still breast-feeding, we had to keep stopping shooting. And I realized at that time, you cannot take the lowest common denominator as something that you are supposed to deal with. These were people that never had a job in their life. They just were sitting in a school until they were 31. And they were confronted by middle-aged people who were acting like they were quite normal. They had the rhythm of their own time. These people didn't. I never paid attention to the problem again. If I thought somebody was beautiful, they are beautiful.

Bartomeu Mari: They just used the fact that someone was beautiful as an argument for criticism?

Lawrence Weiner: That was the criticism by people of Hollywood films for years.

And then we got the most beautiful men and women in French “nouvelle vague”. But they weren't beautiful before they were in French “nouvelle vague”. And that's what nobody understands — that films do give you a chance to look at the way people could look, and that what was not beautiful can be used as beautiful.

Bartomeu Mari: What about yourself as an actor? You are in several of your films.

Lawrence Weiner: I am a lousy actor. But I do it because, as I said, I like to put amateurs in. And I then function as the quintessence of an amateur actor. If I can ask somebody else who's never acted before or doesn't act well to go in front of a camera, I can do it myself. I know what I am trying to do, but I have no illusions of myself as an actor. I feel as though it is a necessity. And it comes as a little recherche de la grandeur perdu. Hitchcock always put himself in movies. You always see Bruno Ganz. Why not put yourself there. And my voice is often in the movies and the videos. The presence has to be there. Not to manipulate the world, but to present the world in the way that I would like to see it.

Bartomeu Mari: You talked before about voice. Let's talk about language which is something that runs throughout all the films and videos.

Lawrence Weiner: Which language are you talking about? Are you talking about the language of film, the language of images, or verbal language?

Bartomeu Mari: I am talking about verbal language. Transforming it.

Lawrence Weiner: That's a problem because when you are dealing with film, film is a complexity of language. Since we have sound films and sound tapes, the language of the film is the music, the language of the film is what you hear spoken, the language of the film is any noise that's coming through. It's the color, the lighting and various other things. They all are the same inflection of language. What you see then is reading film as an oral thing. If you close your eyes in a movie theater, you don't get anything, you get some words. You open your eyes and those words become informed by the image. Language never can escape the image in the context that it's placed within a film. Which means, if you are not too sure of something and you want to test it, put it in a context of a movie or a film and you will see how it floats, see how it flies. That is what RED AS WELL AS GREEN AS WELL AS BLUE with the dialogue between Kathryn Bigelow and myself is. That was unrehearsed. Kathryn wrote hers, I wrote mine. I was mixing the sound, talking, and directing the camera (which Carlota Schoolman was doing) all at the same time. And it worked quite well. But we had no idea if it could really work because it's the language of the entire thing that informs the conversation. It takes it out of the context of an academic conversation and puts it into the context of real life, or tries to.

Bartomeu Mari: Is there a direct relationship between your “written” work and the videos and films? I am thinking about A BIT OF MATTER...

Lawrence Weiner: Well, I use books very often within the context of the video tapes. The book is a structure. The structure of A BIT OF MATTER... was rocks on a wall, a book that I had done in Sweden for my daughter. It was all about cinema and the idea of the material. To a doubled standard is not just in relationship to male/female or to class structure, it is also in relation to the concept of film itself. Film goes from 8mm to 16mm, from 16mm to 35mm, from 35mm to 65mm and 70mm, from 70mm to 135mm — that's super-vision. What you are dealing with is always doubling the material. In doubling the material you get a different gradation. You get higher and lower range of sound and you get everything else. So I used that book for the structure for it. It also allowed the movement of an object within the context of these people screwing in the room. It was all shot within one confine, one set.

Bartomeu Mari: How does the structure of a film relate to the structure of a book or the structure of an exhibition?

Lawrence Weiner: Structures of exhibitions are different. Exhibitions are things that people can walk into from various angles and from various doors. The structure of a movie by essence is “one, two, three, four, five...” It starts at one point and ends in another. As much as you may break that narrative structure, you still have the fact that the minute the light goes through that film it is started. The image cannot take away the fact that it's always “one, two, three, four, five.” For example, within the context of DONE TO, the soundtrack is all about “and then”, which is the standard filmmaker's concept of cutting film. “And then, and then, and then, and then...” It has to always be “and then, and then, and then.” The structure of an exhibition is such that it's an overall. It's a gesamt kunst. There is noise, there are people in the room...the lights go on, they go off. The daylight changes. You come in from the back or from the side. Video it depends. Americans walk in and out during video very much the way Italians walk in and out during opera and theater. It is something that's going on - it's “spettaccolo”. Video is a spettaccolo. Film as we know it commands a little more respect. You sit quietly and see it through. Or you stand up and walk out in anger. But you don't go in and go out; it's not really considered proper. So it's “and then, and then, and then.”

Bartomeu Mari: What about the different collaborations?

Lawrence Weiner: Happily, in situations like all of the video tapes, the collaborative work is quite obvious on the surface. One sees it, it's spoken of, talked about. It's even dealt with in THERE BUT FOR which is the last video that went into distribution (besides the theater production in Middelburg of NOTHING TO LOSE). The collaborative process between Peter Nadin, Peter Gordon and Michael Shamberg was all discussed within the context of the tape itself. There was no confusion of me as the mastermind. The only confusion was of what was written and what wasn't written. But that is nobody watching a movie's business.

Bartomeu Mari: It is just a voyeuristic curiosity of what happened in the back room in the process of making the tape.
 

Lawrence Weiner: Whatever happened in the back room usually is obvious on the front of the film, happily.