Excerpts from taped conversations between Michel Auder and Mark Webber, 2000
When I was about 17 I started to make photographs.
The only thing my father left in the house was an old Rolei-Flex, and
when I looked into it I could see 6x6 in the depolir, the beautiful
unpolished glass, the grid and the colour image of outside. It was fascinating
to me, to open the camera’s leather case and see these beautiful
images. It was a mystery for me, who could never understand anything
about anything, it was like a miracle. I didn’t have to use film,
I could just look in the camera and see movies. Then my father left
and I started to make pictures, that was my first step, and later I
got interested in film. I didn’t think making photographs was
that interesting and I would go to the movies all the time. This guy,
the first assistant to the photographer I worked for as a runner, found
someone to give me an Arriflex camera and some film to shoot a small
movie. It’s lost now, but everyone was kind of amazed that I made
a movie. It was like Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, my
own version of it. That must have been before I went to the army, I
was 18 years old. I made a lot of films with a 16mm camera which are
all lost, but they were like diary films, in colour, very beautifully
shot. By 1967 I saw some movies by Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Warhol and
they opened my mind to the fact that you could make films differently
from the principles that had been laid out for so many years in the
Hollywood system. I thought it was too low for me to be a fashion photographer,
I wanted to be a film director. I was always looking for something that
would give me the sound and image right away. Aesthetically I wasn´t
too obsessed with whatever the product was, whatever it gave I could
adapt to. Video was a dream I was waiting for and as soon as it happened
I got one.
One night I was walking in the street and I saw two women coming towards
me. It was Nico and Viva, they were in Paris. Three weeks before I had
just seen Chelsea Girls at Alexander Iolas Gallery and I thought it
was the greatest thing I ever saw in my life. I said, ”Nico, I’m
making a film, I want both of you to be in it”. They said, ”Ah,
why don’t you come with us, we’re going to a party.”
So I went with them to a party thrown by some rich character from New
York who was helping everybody, giving everyone drugs and playing the
patron. I had the money to make a film so I went to Rome with Viva and
Louis Waldon because Philippe Garrel was shooting there and his producer
had given me the money to do something. Philippe had said I could use
his camera. We moved into a hotel and I shot Keeping Busy. Viva got
a call from Agnes Varda, she wanted to shoot a film called Lion’s
Love with her in Hollywood. They called Rome and Viva said ”Well,
I’ve got my boyfriend here, if you don’t give a ticket for
him I’m not coming.”
So they sent a ticket for both of us and put us up in Hollywood while
Viva was shooting and we became very close.
We drove to Las Vegas and we got drunk and went to a little drive-in
chapel and got married. When the movie was over, we went to New York
and had no place to stay so we moved into the Chelsea Hotel. It was
in 1970. There were all those Warhol Factory people around all the time,
like Ondine, Taylor Mead, Andrea Feldman… . All these people are
in my film Cleopatra, which I only have the remnants of. You almost
can’t see the film, it’s a very bad copy that was put on
videotape. The sound is also very bad. I raised money to make the movie
when the New York Times made a big feature on Viva. I said ”I
want some money to make a film with Viva called Cleopatra, using all
the Warhol crowd to act like they were Caesar and Cleopatra.”
I had five producers call me, that’s how powerful the newspapers
are! Most of them pulled out, but one guy did put up the money, which
was like $200 000 then, probably worth like a $1 000 000 now. My only
demand was that I didn’t want to be bothered by anybody while
I was shooting, they couldn’t come and interfere. When the movie
was over they got very upset when they saw what I had done and they
physically destroyed the film. Henri Langlois at the Cinémathéque
Francaise wanted to show it in Cannes and the only thing I had left
was a work copy that I had in the editing room where I was working,
and they’d changed the locks. So I broke in the door and the film
was half-edited and about four hours long but I carried it out before
security arrived. We went to Cannes to show it and they wired to say
”If you show the film, we’ll sue you.” But it was
too late, we already had shown it in a special screening. They sued
me for a couple of million dollars. So we had to give that copy back,
too, but Jonas Mekas from Anthology Film Archives, he made another copy
of it and that’s all I have left. It’s third generation
of a film that wasn’t even printed right, just a work print, but
it’s got some style because of that, too.
The filmmaker Shirley Clarke was living in the penthouse on the roof
of the Chelsea Hotel around 1969. She got a video camera and we played
with it together. For me it was the answer for making films as a personal
filmmaker. When I made Cleopatra I knew it was my last movie. I knew
that by the way I conducted myself with the producers, disregarding
them because they just wanted to make money off me. I despised the idea
that the film business would be like this forever, so I stopped dealing
with the Hollywood type of film to make something that really came from
me alone, whenever I wanted. Video was the answer, but not immediately
because there was nothing you could do with the videotapes back then.
It seemed like I was in a no man’s land for many years because
the first bunch of videotapes like Chelsea Girls With Andy Warhol, The
Cockettes, The Chronicles were all made to be put on film, that was
my idea, to transfer them to film to be shown. The problem was that
it was too expensive, a lot of money I could never find. Being so busy
surviving and paying rent and everything, I kept making the product
but never coming out with anything final, but I obsessively kept making
tapes and I haven´t stopped 30 years later.
During the 70s I was using my life as the basic material to make the
work. I never saw that it was really my personal life, I only saw it
in a schizophrenic way like it wasn’t really me. It’s like
I was putting myself into the situations to make video. I didn’t
think that my life was so interesting, it was the people around that
were interesting. Back then it was like my whole life was staged to
make videotapes. I didn’t have a real life, it was all about making
works. I never did anything with my tapes until 1980.
For six, seven, eight years there was no way out, or I couldn’t
find any way out. What really made me get into it again was when The
Kitchen began – which was one of the first alternative exhibition
spaces focusing on performance, video, dance, and anything too out for
the rest of the art world – and they were interested in videotape
so I produced a few projects to show there. I had to wait until that
time to figure something out with the work. I started to think of making
pieces like Jesus where I interviewed all kinds of crazy people, just
for soundbites. That’s all it is, but when I make a soundbite
it can go on for five minutes at a time and the tape is long. It’s
pretty funny. I wouldn’t say I invented it, but it’s a style
that has been used a lot since. There was a time when even TV didn’t
think that way, now that style is totally incorporated into the mainstream
… asking questions to all kinds of people and then editing it
together. For another show at The Kitchen, I made a collage of little
vignettes called Stories, Myths, Ironies & Songs.
It’s a poetic assemblage of different sections from my old videotapes
and some new stuff I made at that time.
The soundtracks are all elaborately collaged – the sound is always
very important to me. Once the opportunities opened up I came to a period
where I used actors again because there was a new generation of Lower
East Side people.
I made Seduction of Patrick and A Coupla White Faggots with Gary Indiana,
Taylor Mead, Jackie Curtis, Cookie Mueller… . Then in The Video
Diary of a Madman I used Eric Bogosian. I always worked by myself, I
carried the lights, I set up everything, always a one-man band. I made
a lot of tapes with no money and a heavy herion habit.
When I met Cindy Sherman in 1982, she had a buzz around her but she
lived in a flat without a bathroom, you had to step out into the hall.
We got along so well that we got married five months after we met. Cindy
accepted that I had a sickness, she accepted my heroin habit, she’s
so not nuts but for her it didn’t seem strange.
I would never live with a junkie in my life, if you paid me I wouldn’t
do it. I know too well the complexity of it. It must have been a nightmare
but Cindy accepted it. By that time I wanted to quit but I didn’t
know what to do.
Then Cindy started to sell more pictures, was making more money and
she finally got health insurance and since we were married I was able
to go to a real detox that was covered by insurance and somehow I made
the decision to stop. In the late 80s when I’d recovered from
being an addict it seemed like everybody around me was making tons of
money, it was the big art boom. People would look at me like ”What
are you doing making videotapes? Why don’t you do something else,
videotapes will take you nowhere, ever.” People would say I came
from the 70s as an insult. Then suddenly all those guys started selling
paintings and stuff for a lot of money – everybody I knew cashed
in. I thought again that maybe video was the wrong thing to do, I couldn’t
argue with those people because I felt like I was a looser. But I never
really considered stopping making videotapes, it’s what I do.
It’s my pleasure and my pain, it’s my life. I don’t
know how else to function. I stayed silent and just felt lucky that
I could still experiment with my work and not worry too much.
The first person who gave me a chance again was Nicole Klagsbrun. I
knew her and she came to visit my studio and suggested we do a show
together, this was 1993. It was the first time I had a gallery, or a
place – I don’t care to be an artist or anything, that’s
not the point, but I need an outlet. Television doesn’t want my
work and I’m not into the movie business, so the only other outlet
is the art world. Saying to myself ”I’m a video artist”
is a weird thing, you know. There’s no definition, I just go along
with it because I don’t know how to put the tapes out any other
place.
At Nicole’s I made a tape called Voyage to the Center of the Phone
Lines for one room as a kind of installation, then downstairs I played
another tape called Made For Nicole K. which is eight different short
pieces.
I had a list of tapes that people could ask to see if no one was watching
anything downstairs and of course almost no one asked for the tapes.
At the entrance I had 20 videotapes on a shelf, I went to lengths to
make copies and re-edit them and put my work in order. I showed with
her a number of times and then she closed the gallery and AC Project
Room picked me up. Having more shows made me do more research and more
works.
I wish I could make only two-minute tapes, I wish I could make installations
because I have some ideas, but whatever, it’s just the way it
comes out of me. My work is a gut feeling, I can’t do it any different.
That’s why I kept all my work, not because I think it’s
great but because I had some kind of calling to shoot every minute of
it.
There’s no reason for me to erase it even if it looks bad. Experience
has told me I can look back 20 years later and find something interesting.
I was smart enough to understand that things get older and the meanings
change. Without even thinking about it I know everything has to be kept
because I know it’s going to be useful, if not the image then
the soundtrack. I don’t think about it, I shoot something and
that’s it, it’s in the boxes, it’s not going to move,
it’s part of my work.