BOMB MAGAZINE interview with Kim G.
Issue 89 Fall 2004
Kim Gordon: Have you seen Neil Young’s current tour?
Rodney Graham: No, I haven’t.
KG: It’s pretty amazing. The Greendale shows are like supersized folk art. I guess it never occurred to him to do anything in a gallery—he just works in an arena. So he brought it all to it. It was really incredible.
RG: I think the last time I saw him perform was years ago, with Crazy Horse in Vancouver, when you guys were opening for him. You guys were great back then too.
KG: Thanks. Yeah, he’s a pretty interesting guy. You would like his film,
Greendale, the way he used film with the music. He incorporated the crew and his band. It was almost like a school play. In fact, the girl whom his daughter went to high school with, who was always in the school plays, was the main dancer. Your new show, does it have music in it?
RG: No, it’s just a film. It’s mainly one large projection piece called Rheinmetall/Victoria 8. It’s a documentary of this 1930s typewriter that I found in a junk store five or six years ago: Rheinmetall is the name of the company that made the typewriter, and Victoria 8 is the name of the projector. It’s a Cinemeccanica, an Italian projector from the ‘50s. Rheinmetall, it turns out, was also a big arms manufacturer for the Third Reich. It was just this incredibly beautifully made, solidly designed typewriter. Not one key had ever been pressed on it. It had somehow made it over to Vancouver. I had it around for a while and then I thought I’d do something with it. I thought I’d make a slick car-commercial kind of film, using just static shots of this typewriter. I worked with a cinematographer and we made a series, like a documentary, but every shot is static. It’s shot in 35 mm and projected using this vintage projector from a fairly large cinema, very beautiful, kind of overly powerful, so that when I show it in a gallery context, the film is smaller and brighter, and the light reflects back on the projector. So it’s these two objects confronting one another. Two obsolete technologies facing off: the typewriter and the projector.
KG: It’s interesting that you mention car commercials, because I’m currently obsessed with car ads, car copy, ad copy. Mostly print ads with elaborate slogans that involve celebrity lifestyles, like you can’t even tell it’s an ad. A lot of times they’ll just have these pictures of people—in fact I was in one of those ads a while ago, for a Lexus or something. And they just had a little blurb about me. It was really weird.
RG: Like a lifestyle thing, like this is the kind of car you would drive?
KG: I guess so, but it wasn’t even that much of a connection. It was just the strangest thing. But you know how the cars kind of represent everything. The ad can be like, What is your desire? It will take you to your desire. I always thought they were modern-day landscapes: you see cars sitting around lakes, and driving through nature. It’s right up your alley.
RG: I pulled back from the car commercial idea because I would’ve had a lot of moving shots, super sexy shots, and I wanted to focus on static. In the end, in this particular context, it really worked, to my surprise, because if you look at the video, it’s very boring—it’s these very long shots, sometimes a couple of minutes, just these keys in extreme close-up. But when it’s projected, the quality has a super effective sharpness, because the grain is kind of moving around. It’s inherently fascinating. So I found that it worked without the movement.
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http://www.bombsite.com/issues/89/articles/2670