It’s sad if inevitable that I didn’t get to any museums or galleries during my brief time in New York City. To quote a friend who lives there, I became an “appreciative inhabitant” – fully cognizant the Whitney, the Guggenheim, MOMA, the Met (et al) were there, but not running to them. Art does take time -time, patience, attention, energy, the very qualities I listed yesterday required to fully delve into Byron’s work, in fact -and I simply didn’t have enough of it this time around.
There is a certain presence and grounded-ness required in art-making itself -something that always drives me back to the easel, that gnawing hunger for being fully present for your art and what it’s asking of you. It’s something I witnessed last Monday at the Zinc Bar, experiencing Eric Lewis live. And it’s something I also feel whenever I see the work of Adam Vollick, a Canadian filmmaker and artist, and the man behind the 2007 documentary, Here Is What Is.
Stating that he’d like to “use a camera like a paint brush”, Vollick has carved out a name for himself as a go-to-guy visuals guy for musician/producer Daniel Lanois. Along with Here Is What Is, Adam has done Le Noise, a work related to Neil Young’s latest album, which was produced by Lanois; Adam provided the imagery for the CD, LP, DVD and Blu-ray versions. He filmed last February’s Black Dub show at the Bowery Ballroom for live online broadcast too, and has been working with the Lanois-lead collective visually. He also filmed the magical, shamanic video of The Birth of Bellavista Nights.
I intensely admire the way Adam seamlessly integrates so many influences into his work and yet makes it entirely, fully his own, bringing a beautiful, meditative quality to his shots and their magical dance with sound. Watching Adam’s work, you begin to realize just how intimately his work is connected with sound, with music, and with the act of creation. I had the opportunity to have a Q&A around his ideas and approach to art, and the act of creating it.
How do you see your role relating to the creation of Daniel Lanois’s music?
I’m simply a dedicated observer. Sometimes that can be catalyst to getting a good take -usually when the hair on my arm is standing up (the Vollick emotional barometer) we unanimously agree that we got something. I try to keep the visual as parallel as possible to the expressions in the music. We never sacrifice the power of the sound for superficial image considerations. Without a powerful musical performance a great film is useless. I’ve really got to be on top of my game 24/7.
Who are your visual influences? I see a lot of Pennebaker, Maysles, Viola, & Corbijn.
I’ve got my head in the sand most of the time which I think helps the naivety of my work. During my formative late teens and early twenties I spent about a decade in the darkroom working on my own photography, barely eating and barely sleeping so I missed a lot of pop culture education.
I see the Pennebaker reference and I love his work although it makes me anxious, and Anton (Corbijn) has always been a hero of mine. He actually shot part of Here Is What Is -what an honor for me that was! My first love was and is still photography; to me the absolution of a single perpetual frame, in its structure and timeless broadcast of a brief moment in space, carries infinite mass. I find more inspiration in photographers.
A guy like Ansel Adams is very inspiring. His lifelong dedication to hiking through national parks, pre-visualizing grand images into his ripe old age. He carried 100+lbs of large format gear into his 80s and would sit and wait for days on end for the perfect light. Not only was he a compositional master, but a scientist responsible for modern densitometric roadmap of the medium. The man is a role model in all departments, patience, grace, dedication, understanding, excellence, and intuition.
Another photographic hero as well is Henri Cartier Bresson, a purely instinctual and patient operator who was a conduit to the seemingly impossible “decisive moment” frames he made. I also just read a book called In The Blink Of An Eye by Walter Murch, an amazing film editor and analyst of the human experience. Just last night I watched a mystifying Jacques Perrin / Jacques Cluzaud film called Oceans.
I love expressionist painters and some part of my shooting is alive, like the paint dropped from Jackson Pollock’s stick: initiated in a gesture and momentarily guided through flight by chaos before being cemented on the canvas.
How have you seen the role of visual interpreter in music change? How much do you think that relates to the change in the way people discover & share music?
I have a very different mode of operation than most. I try to do as much as I can myself, with as little as possible… usually with one camera, one light and one crew member. The role of the interpreter has changed drastically with the proliferation of handheld digital devices connected to the internet. In some ways it’s fantastic: everything becomes accessible to everyone almost instantaneously. All one has to do is say “Hey, have you seen Bill Withers do ‘Use Me’ acoustic?” and seconds later you can look at it on YouTube, even if you’ve never heard of Bill Withers. Anyone can post footage from a show that they are at and the same night have there friends experience it through their Facebook or blog or Myspace or whateverothersocialservice.com.
It’s revolutionary that everyone has a voice that can fall on the world’s ear, it’s just hard to hear the meaningful messages over all the chatter. I try and remain hopeful that the cream will continue to rise to the surface. Maybe google will invent a taste meter for rating versions of things in your search results, or a sample identifier that links back to the original sources, so people can educate themselves.
The downside of the media trend (parasitically attached like a cannibalistic Siamese twin) however, is the diminished quality we have to accept in internet media, sonically and visuallyl. It really negates the excellence of talent in my opinion. I mean, Al Green on Soul Train via Youtube still gives me shivers, and as grateful as I am to have access, I often wonder what it would have felt like to see it broadcast in full fidelity back in the day.
The medium is a part of the message for me, and I can’t watch things out of sync, and all choppy looking for very long without getting agitated and removed from the moment. I hope it’s a momentary bump in the road for us as a species, but I know that there is a whole generation of young people out there who think of music as disposable mp3s on laptop speakers now. I just hope they grow up to realize what they have been missing and buy a good turntable and amplifiers to play tangible records with tangible artwork that they paid fairly for.
The art of the album cover has really faded; do you see other form taking its place? How much do you see your work filling that void -or do you?
The art of the album cover has changed, but I hope it’s just a passing trend. I hope we come to our senses and reinstate it. Would you eat digital food? Sustenance needs to be tangible. What you feed your souls should be no different -we, as a people, are starving ourselves on empty carbs of pop fast food. I don’t think that what I do is replacing the album cover at all. I am just a witness for the ages to virtuos musical moments much like a stenographer would be in a court of law. Leave the rest up to the jury.