Keep the spirits at bay.
Sue de Beer.
An annihilation of deadness.
Sue de Beer.
Fantasy, fantasizing death, fantasizing being dead.
Sue de Beer.
That is the nature of much of the material I am pulling from – self-contradictory…But instead of solving these contradictions with a rush of adrenaline and terror, and a plot to resolve and explain, I have simply stopped things in the middle, built them three dimensionally, and photographed them. Compressing those impossible things we imagine with an actual object in space.
Sue de Beer
The film "The Quickening" it's a historical film, and I've been jokingly but kind of accurately calling it a psychedelic historical film. And because it does not take its time period to the law, it includes in it "A Dream Machine" a Burrough's - Gysin Dream Machine ... I am not sure if you know of this object, but, it was invited by Brion Gyson and William Burroughs; it was a mechanical device that could give you visual hallucinations like you were on drugs but you did not actually have to be on drugs...
Sue de Beer. "Visual Art, Installations, and Cinema." (Video) in: European Graduate School. 2008.
... so when I was working on this object, this sculpture, my idea was that the viewer would be receiving and not receiving light as you look at the Dream Machine, so as you walk by this light was kind of amazing light ... would have not the exact effect but it would give you the physical sensation of being in a dream machine.
Sue de Beer. "Visual Art, Installations, and Cinema." (Video) in: European Graduate School. 2008.
As you pass this object, this kind of double woods, you entered into the video space. So here you're looking out towards the woods.
Sue de Beer. "Visual Art, Installations, and Cinema." (Video) in: European Graduate School. 2008.
When I designed this installation it was this incredible crap shoot because it had a lot of color in it ... and I had a kind of gamblers bet with myself that if you fill a room with all this color that its kind of like black and white. And, um, when we were installing this piece for the first time and we got the color on the walls and put the ceiling in it was like Ronald McDonald had thrown up in the room and it was pretty horrible. And I thought for sure that I had made the most expensive public mistake on earth ... When we put the carpet in, luckily the room had its kind of own logic, thank god.
Sue de Beer. "Visual Art, Installations, and Cinema." (Video) in: European Graduate School. 2008.
One of the art handlers that helped to install the work said that this was the perfect place to watch really strange porn and lose your mind in and what the hell was my film about. So then we screened the film for them and watched it in the space.
Sue de Beer. "Visual Art, Installations, and Cinema." (Video) in: European Graduate School. 2008.
New York is kind of strange right now. The art world boom made a lot of people high on coke. I am liking the Berlin energy more right now for making work, but I am also getting more spaced out as I get older, so maybe it just suits me better.
Sue de Beer. "Ken Pratt Interviews Sue de Beer." in: Wound Magazine. Autumn 2007.
The exhibition at Arndt was particularly exciting to work on as it shows both the Quickening and Permanent Revolution together, and there are a lot of links between those two works. It is also the first time I showed three big installations and two big films at once. It was a really massive undertaking, and now I am very tired.
Sue de Beer. "Ken Pratt Interviews Sue de Beer." in: Wound Magazine. Autumn 2007.
When I was in pre-production making props for the film, Annika told me that she had been to film school, and had wanted to be an actress, but dropped out when she realized 'Das Boot' only had male leads. Somehow I hadn't seen this project as a specifically all-female submarine rock video, I had some other images of things going on in the submarine involving sailors, but yes, I would love to do that with them. They keep going on tour and I keep travelling also so we haven't really followed up.
Sue de Beer. "Ken Pratt Interviews Sue de Beer." in: Wound Magazine. Autumn 2007.
I remember that feeling. When you’re listening to ghost stories. That decision-making proces—How do you escape death by specific kinds of games. That also talks about specific invented symbol systems, which is what you were talking about before. And also the child-like rules that either create protection, or create supernatural-ness.
Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper (Interviewee). "Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper." in:North Drive Press.Issue #1, 2004.
Do you think about the ecstatic moment at all in relation to your work?
Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper (Interviewee). "Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper." in:North Drive Press.Issue #1, 2004.
They’re simple systems. Like the alphabet or language, they surround an experience. What I was asking, if the experience related, or there’s a transformative moment. The object that becomes animated by the spirit; these tract houses that get filled with the supernatural, or even the coffin getting filled with the living human being. Where the inanimate becomes animate.
Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper (Interviewee). "Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper." in:North Drive Press.Issue #1, 2004.
That’s the basis of the optimism in your work, because your fantasy world is based around images of death and ghosts. There is this kind of beauty and sweetness and optimism.
Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper (Interviewee). "Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper." in:North Drive Press.Issue #1, 2004.
I guess that’s also what’s interesting in SCREAM 2. It is us looking on the idea of the fear that we experience through voyeurism and through fiction and finding it to be real. It’s also got the faith-based device effect, because you will things to be through belief.
Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper (Interviewee). "Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper." in:North Drive Press.Issue #1, 2004.
...they were all about creating unification from difference. Where everyone comes in different, and discovers that they all seem to have the same innersoul. Where as now, difference remains difference and archetypes get knocked off at different points.
Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper (Interviewee). "Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper." in:North Drive Press.Issue #1, 2004.
Yeah. When I was like nine years old. I actually remember one sleepover, I was with a couple of other girls and we had hysterically worked ourselves up to the fact that we were going to be able to talk to the ghosts in this house. The house had once been burned down and we had seen that all the family in it had perished in terrible deaths. Then separately in the night three different people had seen an aberration and I saw a dog.
Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper (Interviewee). "Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper." in:North Drive Press.Issue #1, 2004.
It’s great to see an artist’s work expand over time.
Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper (Interviewee). "Sue de Beer and Ian Cooper." in:North Drive Press.Issue #1, 2004.
I made this piece in 1997. It was actually based on a performance that I did at Momenta Art where these two people were joined together at the lips. That piece was kind of a disaster but there was something nice about the motion and something that I couldn't capture in a photograph. The video itself is very photographic. It's three minutes long and in a way non-narrative. It's more like a kinetic photograph, the way that it functions.
Sue de Beer and Casey McKinney (Interviewer). "Casey McKinney Interviews Sue de Beer on Making Out With Myself." in: Sue de Beer Official Website. 2002.
I think if you compare it to my later work in photography that it's similar. It's one image, one shot. There's no editing, no change in framing. But I was able to do things that I couldn't with a photograph. Like you have the before and after of the kiss, the weirdness of it being live and being fake, which didn't really seem possible in a photograph. I actually tried to do it as a photograph too, but it didn't work as well.
Sue de Beer and Casey McKinney (Interviewer). "Casey McKinney Interviews Sue de Beer on Making Out With Myself." in: Sue de Beer Official Website. 2002.
No I like it crappy actually. I'm really interested in special effects in movie making and the way in which people try and make an imaginative image, but for me, one of the important things in this and which carries over into all of my works, is that you see the hand that makes it, that the blue screen is really jumpy, and that you see the edge of the face sort of flickering in and out, that you can sense someone behind it all creating this perverse image.
Sue de Beer and Casey McKinney (Interviewer). "Casey McKinney Interviews Sue de Beer on Making Out With Myself." in: Sue de Beer Official Website. 2002.
I guess the first violent piece I did, that was shown at the same time as the kissing piece was this photo where I was split in half. I had been reading a lot of Dennis Cooper books, and actually I was thinking about his relationship to Proust... I take in a lot of his (Cooper's) work and Genet's work because they are also interested in the artifice of (construction?) and because of the way Cooper uses violence as an expression of intimacy, or thwarted intimacy. It's very moving to me.
Sue de Beer and Casey McKinney (Interviewer). "Casey McKinney Interviews Sue de Beer on Making Out With Myself." in: Sue de Beer Official Website. 2002.
Yeah prosthetics and special effects but then also this idea of intimacy. When I did the video I had just finished reading Remembrance of Things Past, and there was this moment in The Captive where Proust, who has been sequestered in his house and developed this tremendous jealousy of his girlfriend, is kissing her goodnight, and he talks about the inside of her mouth being an entranceway and yet a barrier to her.
Sue de Beer and Casey McKinney (Interviewer). "Casey McKinney Interviews Sue de Beer on Making Out With Myself." in: Sue de Beer Official Website. 2002.
This kiss to me is a perfect symbol of thwarted intimacy, because on the one hand he is inside her body, but on the other hand it's just another sign of being incapable of inhabiting someone else's body. So making out with myself in this video has the same sort of impotence to it. The kiss that you are seeing is real, there are two of me, and the kiss is really happening, but it is also really low-fi, and therefore also very fake. There is this mood to it that has that same sort of impotence or thwarted quality to it, of trying to get inside of your own body, and being incapable of intimacy, even if it is reflexive. So it's really... it's really pathetic actually (laughs).
Sue de Beer and Casey McKinney (Interviewer). "Casey McKinney Interviews Sue de Beer on Making Out With Myself." in: Sue de Beer Official Website. 2002.
I actually think about formal things a lot. And I don't think that my work gets addressed a lot on formal terms. Because of the thing that we were talking about before, with leaving the loose ends visible, being able to see the hand of the artist, I think maybe people get this idea that it's spontaneous, but actually the work is very carefully constructed, extremely minimal - the photographs in particular are - so yeah they're all about formalism. I love it.
Sue de Beer and Casey McKinney (Interviewer). "Casey McKinney Interviews Sue de Beer on Making Out With Myself." in: Sue de Beer Official Website. 2002.
Partly what I am interested in is a kind of empathy that someone can have for something that's been mass marketed, like totally loving and believing in a rock star, or believing in the world of zombies, and that having a kind of sweetness and purity to it. And also sources that you wouldn't normally think of as being pure, like an earnest love of advertisements for a hair product.
Sue de Beer and Casey McKinney (Interviewer). "Casey McKinney Interviews Sue de Beer on Making Out With Myself." in: Sue de Beer Official Website. 2002.
And so taking a horror movie out of the context of the schlock narrative, you might have a fifteen year old confronting death for the first time, and dealing with their own mortality, and seeing that as a pure experience. That's something that is a constant in my work, even in the make out video.
Sue de Beer and Casey McKinney (Interviewer). "Casey McKinney Interviews Sue de Beer on Making Out With Myself." in: Sue de Beer Official Website. 2002.
The next big project was Heidi 2, which was a sequel to Mike Kelly and Paul McCarthy's movie Heidi, which was sort of styled on the American horror movie - I think I read somewhere that it was specifically styled on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - so I was sort of obsessively investigating American horror movies when making that piece, and combined with my interest in Cooper and Genet, it was somehow about seeing your own death or how America sees images of death. I think even in the make out video that element is there as well because one of the heads looks almost corpselike. It's like kissing a corpse or your imagined dead self.
Sue de Beer and Casey McKinney (Interviewer). "Casey McKinney Interviews Sue de Beer on Making Out With Myself." in: Sue de Beer Official Website. 2002.
Yeah I tend to think of myself in a more gender neutral way, and I think the make out video is gender neutral. It's de-glamorized, sort of goofy and sort of pathetic, but it's not particularly gendered to me. I am interested in the history of feminist art, and I am also interested in many other histories, whatever I find to be exciting to me at the time. So then Cooper or Genet are gay men, or Valle Export who is really great to me is coming from a history of feminism. These are all great people and they are categorized in different ways, which may or may not fit with what their work actually means.
Sue de Beer and Casey McKinney (Interviewer). "Casey McKinney Interviews Sue de Beer on Making Out With Myself." in: Sue de Beer Official Website. 2002.
This piece was conceived of as I was walking on 110th street across Central Park. A bus drove by, with a large advertisement on its side, which featured Linda Evangelista about to kiss herself. I was struck by the loneliness and futility of this image. It seemed to suggest a sort of warped self-fulfillment that I found to be quite funny. In the ad however, Evangelista's beauty, which was enhanced by the way they shot the ad, seemed to mask the actual pathetic qualities of the gesture. I began to imagine how humorous it would be to see that image with someone ordinary, shot in a more ordinary way. So I made MAKING OUT WITH MYSELF.
Sue de Beer and Reel New York (Interviewer). "Making Out With Myself". in: Reel New York, Thirteen.WNET. Season Three, 1998.
I edit all of my work on the computer and because prices just keep dropping on machines, the type of computer I can work on now for one of my pieces is radically better than say, two years ago. But the expense of equipment is always a problem.
Sue de Beer and Reel New York (Interviewer). "Making Out With Myself". in: Reel New York, Thirteen.WNET. Season Three, 1998.
I have found since completing MAKING OUT WITH MYSELF that there are some projects which work best as videos, and others that work best as photographs. For me, it is really about finding the media that is the best one for the particular project.
Sue de Beer and Reel New York (Interviewer). "Making Out With Myself". in: Reel New York, Thirteen.WNET. Season Three, 1998.
When I shot the actual kissing part, I was kissing a plaster cast of my own head. I shot the kissing sequence eight times as I kept messing up the blue screen. I really wanted the kiss to look passionate, and the very first time I tried to kiss the plaster head I realized exactly how difficult that was going to be. It was about as romantic as kissing a doorknob.
Sue de Beer and Reel New York (Interviewer). "Making Out With Myself". in: Reel New York, Thirteen.WNET. Season Three, 1998.
I began drinking a couple of glasses of wine before I did a take, and then I would put on some soft music to get me "in the mood," and feeling like the ultimate loser, would make out the head for a while. Well, the end result of the wine was not me feeling more romantic towards the plaster cast of my head, but was actually the plaster cast of the head getting bad breath. By kiss number eight, that head could really have used some Listerine. Oh, and I cut the mouth hole too small, so there is a really funny moment in the video, where I am trying to french kiss the plaster head, but I can't quite fit my tongue in the head's mouth.
Sue de Beer and Reel New York (Interviewer). "Making Out With Myself". in: Reel New York, Thirteen.WNET. Season Three, 1998.
Source: European Graduate School (EGS)
