Caryn Coleman interviews artist Darren Banks ,  LUX 2010

UK artist Darren Banks incorporates found and made film footage into sculpture and installation to explore his ideas about horror, the domestic, science fiction, defunct technologies, creation, and the unknown. He conflates high and low culture exploring his own perception of sculpture and its relation to film and memory.

By appropriating iconic images of sculpture through the history of film and re-presenting them as his own work, Banks’ restructures filmic images and adds to his existing sculptural language. He establishes a dialogical relationship with these previous films through appropriation and montage. His folding of the past into the present is a strong example of how some contemporary artists are building upon the legacy of horror and creating new artistic narratives with the genre.

My own research considers how visual artists might be taking the innovative torch from horror film directors from the 1960-1980s since some cultural theorists such as critical theorists Reynold Humphries and Joseph Maddrey argue that horror cinema, at least American horror cinema, has been in crisis since the ultimate post-modern horror film, Wes Craven’s Scream was released in the late 1990s.

Banks’ work certainly becomes of interest to me because of how his self-reflexive approach to film, and thus memory, incorporates the structural, aesthetic and conceptual works of horror cinema (spatiality, self-reflexivity, interiors, sound, etc.) to move how the audience receives and looks at horror stories. It’s also an ongoing exploration for me to determine why artists of my generation relate to these particular horror films so much.

I first encountered Banks’ video Interiors (2005) years ago while participating in an art fair in New York. Recently, fueled by many email conversations and trading of film links (everything from The Uncanny to House aka Hausu), we’ve established an ongoing dialogue about our common love of horror film history. From Interiors Banks is continuing his practice with works like The Palace Collection shown at 'No Soul For Sale' at Tate Modern. And so he and I continue our conversation below, where it’s certain to expand into new areas of discussion and projects relating to, what else, horror.

Caryn Coleman: I see a relationship between your usage of collaged, fragmented, and re-organized elements and that of horror film’s history of re-appropriating narratives and themes from books, theatre, and earlier films. How do you see this as being important in generating new meaning in your work?

Darren Banks: I don’t think any found film footage is unusable and I’m not afraid to use recognizable film or sound within my work; but that often means dealing with the history, nostalgia, or memory that comes along with the original material. Sometimes re-organizing and collaging film becomes a way to lure the viewer towards the original by setting up a false sense of security; something which horror film has been doing from day one.

When I first read this question a piece of film came to mind straight away: the scene from Psycho 3 where Norman Bates sees Diana Scarwid for the first time and has a flashback to when he murders Janet Leigh's character in the original Psycho (1960). Through a series of edits we witness two opposite visions of the same idea montaged together: the highbrow history of Hitchcock’s Psycho versus the 1980’s lowbrow restyled by “Psycho” himself – Anthony Perkins. The audacity of Perkins to employ and appropriate Hitchcock’s original film is awe-inspiring.

CC: What affect do you want to have on the viewer when you create visual spaces through repetition, stopgaps, and quick cuts in your videos?

DB: Pure editing – placing image next to image in a seamless transition – can be magical.

As for myself, I’m willing to use any trick in the book to get what I want from a piece of footage: repetition, speeding up, slowing down, reverse, filters, effects, layers, distractions, smoke, mirrors, tone, texture, cross-fades, whatever. For me these all constitute ‘material’ equal to the footage itself and equal to the monitor I’m showing the video on. I want filmmaking and editing to be a part of the same sculptural process and language. To quote myself: “I want to use film and video like I would use an ironing board or a piece of string.”

In terms of the editing process and the affect on the viewer, I think it comes down to a question of influence and a need to keep the idea of the moving image as a sculptural process within the work. I have always liked a sense of urgency, uniformity and chaos. I cite Requiem For A Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) as an influence; ‘hip-hop’ montages, making drug users into action heroes, and the momentum of the last scene is equally disturbing and breathtaking. In turn, films like Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ Der Lauf der Dinge (1987), Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and the films of Roman Signer have been, for one reason or another, important to my understanding of editing, film, and sculpture.

CC: You use video as a medium; is this part of your interest in nostalgia and memory? Do you intend your work to be shown on a monitor rather than to have it digitally projected?

DB: Not only have I been using VHS footage but I’ve started to work a great deal with the actual VHS tapes themselves; their covers and cover art (featuring a period aesthetic) is part of an ongoing interest in nostalgia and memory. I would and have happily employed VHS however on a practical note I generally use DVD to show most of my film work as it’s easier to deal with as a day-to-day format.

Regarding format, cathode ray tube television has been my focus for some time now as an object, as a way to display film, and as a material to build sculpture. There is something melancholic about the television monitor; with an impending digital crossover old format traditional TV sets are slowly disappearing. This again reinforces an interest in memory and nostalgia. That said, when necessary I will show my films as projections and on computer screens.

CC: Thinking of your works It’s Not the End of the World, Interiors, and The Unboard, how integral is the musical component to your work? How do you select it or choose silence?

DB: My process of making film came from my understanding of sculpture, so I see audio or music or even silence the same as any material or object or film scene with which I work. I have tried to allow myself the freedom to use what I want regardless of its history or status, but I’m also interested in how music can affect us on a base level like smell or touch. I’m equally fascinated by how loaded certain songs have become through time and, in my opinion, damaged by adverts.

CC: Interiors (2005) is an homage to the horror film staple of the frightful, claustrophobic, death trap of a house. How did this piece come about for you?

DB: Interiors is really the first film I made using found footage and, come to think of it, is actually one of the first films that I ever made. As a sculptor I have always been interested in the affects of gravity, always trying to defy it, usually unsuccessfully, with comical and disastrous consequences. This, in a roundabout way, led me into ideas about the supernatural, UFOs, ghosts and finally to the horror genre. It was only a matter of time until I started to explore the 1980s “video nasties” of my childhood. Although fundamentally Interiors was spawned from the idea of animating the ready-made, the pursuit of a new found object (film) and the possibilities of camera movements with sounds effects upon the object also marks a movement into themes, genres, histories and cultural references that are also a nod to the influences of my past, my biography!

CC: At the recent 'No Soul For Sale' festival at Tate you showed a new work called The Palace Collection. This work seems to incorporate most of what we’ve just discussed. Can you explain this work?

DB: The Palace Collection consists of eleven VHS horror videos from the Palace Picture Distribution and Production Company. (Palace Pictures was a company established in London, England around 1982 as a distributor for cult cinema and international art films).

My original aim was to present The Palace Collection at 'No Soul for Sale' as a usable public archive. By keeping it only about Palace Pictures and their subsidiary companies (horror video), I avoided being overwhelmed by the long history of horror films; its relative modesty in size gives it a more approachable feel. I like the idea of the push-pull aspect of the collection being precious and revered but, at the same time, letting the public play with it by having it laying around like someone’s video collection. I see Palace Pictures as ephemera (i.e. the posters, film stills and postcards) that has been distributed and produced through its life span.

I also see these films as a vocabulary of material to make work from. My interest in Palace Pictures stands as a footnote within my practice, a reference point for discussion around horror and the effects of new technology. Palace symbolizes the slow erasure of VHS and also the decline of the horror movie through the excessive use if CGI. The Palace Collection is a readymade gesture asking us to remember the, ‘just forgotten’ and the ‘recently redundant’.

Darren Banks will be participating in The City and The Stars Film Lounge Programme (18.06.10) at Stills, 18 June 2010, and in 'Better Place Portraiture' as part of the 'Magic and Occult' night at the Barbican, 24 June 2010. www.darrenbanks.co.uk

Caryn Coleman is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts degree in Curatorial Studies at Goldsmiths, London with a research focus on horror theory. She owned the art gallery sixspace in Los Angeles (2002-2007), Chicago (1998-2000), and has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In addition to founding the seminal art.blogging.la, Coleman has written for publications such as Art Review online, Beautiful Decay, and the LA Weekly. Recent curated projects include Heather Cantrell's 'A Study in Portraiture: Act I' in Los Angeles and 'A Study in Portraiture: Act II' in London.