Fiction Against Reality

For the past decade Eve Sussman has sought to capture cinema verité within various film, video and installation pieces. In 1997 she launched Ornithology , which was a surveillance projection of birds living outside of the gallery space. Later that year, Sussman participated in the 5th International Istanbul Biennial and wired the city's entire subway system with cameras. By 2003 the artist successfully moved beyond the confines of artifice and combined her fascination with random interrelationships in 89 Seconds at Alcazar, which was a film projection of Diego Velázquez's world-renowned painting Las Meninas. Following the debut of 89 Seconds at Alcazar at the Whitney Biennial the following year, Sussman founded the Rufus Corporation, an interdisciplinary performance group that consists of 22 members. Rufus continues its quest to capture disarming realism, rendered through the paradigm of the short motion picture. This interview with Helen Pickett, Anette Previtti, Walter Sipser, Eve Sussman, Jeff Wood, and Sofie Zamchick was taped in February 2005 while Rufus was working on The Rape of the Sabine Women, a film inspired by the myth portrayed in Jacques Louis David's 1799 painting.

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CONNER: Your previous work has not drawn directly from art history. What drew you to use art historical subject matter as visual content in 89 Seconds at Alcazar ?

SUSSMAN: Well I suppose initially seeing this painting in the Prado. I mean I wouldn't say I'm drawn to art historic subject matter. I'm just drawn to things that are inspiring in terms of looking for ways of thinking about making work.

CONNER: Wouldn't you consider this to be a form of appropriation?

SUSSMAN: No, I actually don't. I'm so tired of appropriation I can't tell you. I think appropriation is very different. Appropriation actually incorporates artwork verbatim and that's not what I'm doing. I find it pretty boring.

CONNER: What was your way of working on 89 Seconds at Alcazar ?

SIPSER: We were dressed in seventeenth-century clothing and were walking around the inside of a Velasquez painting with baroque music playing in the background. Eve paid painstaking attention to the lighting. The combination of all the effects was entirely transformative. If attempting to explore some of the emotional and psychological conditions of characters moving through an environment was one of the larger concerns of this piece then I can say that the foundation was pretty solid. The atmosphere was erotically charged and the feeling of improvising and working within the space was a nice combination of cerebral and sensual.

WOOD: From an actor's standpoint this was really interesting because we really had no exact idea of how the characters would behave in this situation and period. So we worked through a process of improvisation, playing around with all kinds of hilarious and embarrassing things, and in the end in order to avoid creating a parody-piece we went in the direction of pretty methodical gesture and choreography, with very little language at all. But because of the process of improvisation there was a strong emotional interior, so it turned out to be a situation of almost total subtext, which to me is one of the most powerful elements of the piece, a quality of charged narrative whereas there's very little actual story happening at all. The emotion almost feels like an accident, which seems closer to how emotions actually operate as opposed to being scripted and forced. And it feels like it might fall apart at any second. We're working through a similar process with the new piece, a process of sub-textual improvisation, and we're experimenting with different acting styles ranging from minimal realism to more conventional dramatic improvisation to abstract gesture work.

SIPSER: One of the interesting things about the way Eve works is the variety of ways in which she...