| Anna Jackson: Your work The Wedding Video enthralled me. I was absolutely enchanted by its wry take on romance and wedding bliss. The bride and groom disappear under a Harry Potter-esque invisible cloak and, for the entire duration of the wedding ceremony, are only recognized as blurry, invisible matter. I understood it as an obvious and skeptical commentary on the cultural fantasy of the white wedding—the interesting part being that you are both the protagonists. Rumor also has it that this really is your wedding video… |  |
Sentimental Sci-Fi – Anna Jackson
Ms. & Mr. are the exploited subjects of their own work. The Australian- based pair collaborate exclusively in a practice that combines sacramental sentimentality with the absurdity of Science Fiction.
Anna Jackson: Your work The Wedding Video enthralled me. I was absolutely enchanted by its wry take on romance and wedding bliss. The bride and groom disappear under a Harry Potter-esque invisible cloak and, for the entire duration of the wedding ceremony, are only recognized as blurry, invisible matter. I understood it as an obvious and skeptical commentary on the cultural fantasy of the white wedding—the interesting part being that you are both the protagonists. Rumor also has it that this really is your wedding video. As both the protagonists and creators of this work, is this a deeply cynical viewpoint on marriage or do you have a broader intention in mind?
Ms. & Mr.: We are, as you stated, interested by both the cultural fantasy and cultural production of romance. It was also so tantalizing to work with because a wedding video carries with it a certain sense of reverence. Actually, your question is an interesting one. It may have been cynical to use someone else’s wedding, allowing for that kind of critical distance that reads easily as irony. Perhaps the opposite is true of our practice as we exclusively collaborate with each other. The fact that we conflate our romance with our collaboration is probably the opposite of cynical.
While there is always an element of play and humor in our work, there is an overarching sense of sincerity in our approach. We saw using our own wedding footage in recent work as a sincere way to examine the document of performance in the wedding video genre. We were always fascinated with this document, which was produced and created by someone in the family. By re-cutting and altering the document, we were perhaps reclaiming authorship.
We erased ourselves from the footage as a way to become the observers rather than the observed, hence entering the footage with the cover of an invisibility device. The erasure is a way of stripping the footage down to everything that happens around the event other than the protagonists themselves.
Humorously enough, for many years people told us getting married was a very dangerous thing to do at such a young age, so, generally, cynicism is something we have encountered often. But, perhaps it is the early antagonism, a kind of social paranoia for the individual and the threat of being absolved within a close collaborative identity that drove our work a little. In fact, this is, in a way, why we started collaborating and making work that explores this indirectly.
AJ: Another work that I found completely gripping is your video The Lovecats, throughout which a young girl dances a routine alongside an adult who has been superimposed onto the same stage. As it turns out, this is Ms. and Mr.—only Ms. was filmed as a nine-ish-year-old, and Mr. as a 20-something-year-old. This video is, once again, based on real footage—you both play the lead roles. How imperative to the reading of your work do you think it is for the viewer to know that you [Ms.] are not acting here, and that half of the video footage was really shot in the early 90s?
M&M: Well, the year of the work is always listed as 1991/2007 and this is really important to the work to understand that there is a dissection of time. The Lovecats footage was a ripe piece for restoration as the lone figure is restored to the plural of the Cure’s song title The Lovecats. In many ways, using home movies is interesting, because there is a familiarity that a viewer can relate to; there is something generic about the footage that in some sense is accessible to everyone. The absurdity in the idea of communication over time is also implicit in the way that Mr. confounds the video memory and is learning the movements from Ms. not only through the original footage, but also through the behind camera instruction of the mature Ms. For us, this created an interesting dynamic. Once the footage is captured, it is then another process of collating it together as if in dialogue with each other.
Our practice is, in many ways, accumulative, and knowing that it is self-portraiture always adds another, and perhaps more emotional, dimension to the work as well as an additional relationship with other works. We see an extended narrative connection between many of the works we create. Similarly, a video can now be so fluid that it reinterprets time.
AJ: For me, this was both a compelling and extraordinarily romantic suggestion—that the two of you were destined to be together—and a hilariously absurd investigation into time travel. But, I also got the feeling that it was possibly hinting at something more sinister—is that the case?
M&M: Our latest series of video works, of which The Lovecats is a part, is titled “Videodromes for the Alone.” For these works, we have trawled through our home movies from childhood to create a series of adaptations, which are, essentially, fantasy works. In these, we have isolated lone awkward moments to effectively rewrite history. Perhaps the sinister quality you suggest is what attracted us to using these home movies in the first place. It can be uncomfortable watching someone else’s, let alone your own, video footage. We kind of find home movies awkward and exposing in a way that a photograph can only suggest. In a way, home movies bear a strong relationship to the exploitation genres. We were responding very much in an emotional way to the footage we were watching of each other as children. In a funny way too, the original footage reveals the most, and this is made more apparent in contrast with the new footage in the work. They are perhaps the most subjective works we have made to date, and they have involved a completely different kind of collaboration between us than we have previously experienced.
We’ve transformed these sometimes lonely and awkward moments into fantasies that combine remembered childhood fantasies with our mature selves’ desire to restore the past. In Jim Henson’s fantasy film Dark Crystal, when the two Gelfin characters meet, they put their hands together and partake in an activity called “dreamfasting.” Jim Henson visualized this supernatural power as a montage that was exchanged between the characters speedily, as their hands touched. It allows for the giver and receiver to simultaneously accumulate/experience the past of the other, so as to create a kind of assumed empathy. We both always found this activity to be a kind of euphemism for sex as well as an interesting example of the desire to understand where a person has come from. Basically, it’s a superpower that allows these characters to see and experience someone’s past in a sped-up manner. In “Videodromes for the Alone,” we communicate in the past tense as well as in the present.
