Heyoka Magazine:
Please tell me a little about your art background and
your previous work?
Simon Lee. I became interested in
making projected images when I collaborated with a physics
teacher in a high school. We co-taught a class where we
took science into the art studio and art into the science
laboratory and mixed things up a bit, (not necessarily as
dangerously explosive as it sounds) and one of the subjects
we tackled was ‘light’. As a consequence I began to learn
more about the physics of light and its complexities and
mysteries, and it gradually became a central media in my
work. I began looking for and documenting the natural
projections that occur because of the juxtaposition of
everyday circumstance -- a large windowed bus moving down
the street reflecting light into a darkened room etc --
and because I so enjoyed the quality of these images and the
subliminal information that they contained I began to figure
out ways of using similar projections in my installations.
HM:
Where did you get your inspiration for BusObscura?
SL. I was working with first generation live
projection, but had rejected making a camera obscura because
it seemed so ubiquitous and already investigated The idea
for the bus came when I finally realized that I should at
least experiment with the camera obscura phenomena, and
after a couple of false starts ended up building a large
multiple aperture camera obscura with back-projection
screens that sat on top of a pick-up truck and could carry
about five people lying on the floor and experiencing what
was essentially “cinema’. It was called Truck Obscura and I
thought about how to present it more conventionally for more
people, and which mode of public transit (bus, boat, train,
plane etc.) would be the most flexible as a live action
camera/projector.
I settled on a bus because it moves through
the world at street level with all the vagaries of traffic
and pedestrians and so travels amongst us more intimately
than a boat on water or a train on tracks; plus a bus is
more able to stop/start and change direction and speed at
will giving it more flexibility as a camera that can roam.
So I began to see Bus Obscura as an instrument that
was camera, projector and theater, and that could be used
anywhere that a bus can go to make live animated projections
to a live audience -- and that each outing would be like
screening a film. I asked Colleen Burke (musician) and
Walter Sipser (musician and artist) if they’d be interested
in making soundtracks for the Miami bus and the New York
bus, and they agreed and came in as collaborators and
developed and produced a major element of the piece. We are
now working on ideas for having live sound on the bus --
like the silent movies would have a live piano player in the
theater.
HM:
How
does the image taking process actually work?
SL. I suppose one answer to this would be
-- in exactly the same way that the image taking process
works in any non-digital camera, light enters a darkened
chamber and is focused on a plane etc. There is a rational
explanation for the phenomena, but it’s not one that we take
on board very readily. I’m sure that some people get off
the bus thinking that they have just watched a video (I know
this to be the case because people often ask where are the
video cameras). I am as incapable of explaining how a video
camera works as I am of explaining how a camera obscura
works despite their disparity in sophistication -- though
if I told someone that the bus was all a video projection
they would accept that as sufficient explanation and if I
told them it was made by a 1000 holes and some plexi-glass
they’d probably feel they needed further explanation.
Anyway here’s Leonardo’s explanation from one
of his notebooks:
All bodies together, and each by itself, give
off to the surrounding air an infinite number of images
which are all pervading and each complete, each conveying
the nature, colour and form of the body which produces it.
It can clearly be shown that all bodies are,
by their images, all-pervading in the surrounding
atmosphere, and each complete in itself as to substance,
form and colour; this is shown by the images of the various
bodies which are reproduced in one single perforation,
through which they transmit the objects by lines which
intersect and cause reversed pyramids from the objects, so
that they are upside down on the dark plane where they are
first reflected.
The images of objects are all diffused
through the atmosphere which receives them; and all on every
side in it. To prove this, let a c e be objects of which
the images are admitted to a dark chamber by the small holes
n p and thrown upon the plane f I opposite to these holes.
As many images will be produced in the chamber on the plane
as the number of the said holes.
HM:
Can you tell me some anecdotes about your experience
working on this concept, or an interesting experience with
the passengers.
SL. Because the bus is something of a
hybrid, part bus and part artwork, some people treat it like
they would any bus and point things out and talk to each
other, and some people treat it more like a projection in an
art gallery or cinema and quietly watch the performance.
Here is an excerpt from Ricoh Gerbl’s text
for the catalog about the bus that will be published in
July:
“……The retired couple from Chicago said to
me, as I stepped out of the bus, blinded by the bright
sunlight: I wish someone would explain to us what the artist
wanted to say. I could not even look out of the windows.”
HM:
Where else do you plan on taking the bus ride?
SL. So far the bus has been out for only a
few days -- 4 days at Basel-Miami Beach and 4 days at the
Armory Show NYC. It got a great response and now there are
tentative plans to run the bus in Pittsburgh, Kampala,
Georgia, Connecticut, London and Saigon.
In Miami we tried operating as a shuttle bus
between art venues, but that felt far too constraining, so
in New York we told people that we were going nowhere and
that we would be back in 10 minutes -- and that worked
much better.
HM:
What other projects are you working on?
SL. Ideally, I want to show the bus as one
part of a show with the other part being a separate piece
inside a gallery -- the bus is a great tool to extend a
show outside of the gallery. This worked quite well
recently with the bus running around New York (albeit
briefly) while I was showing a live video projection, How
Beautiful is the Turning Cabbage, at Pierogi in
Brooklyn. Right now I’m working on several gallery
projects -- some painted photographs on lightboxes, a
series of iron shadows (which I’m presumptuously assuming
will be amongst the first cast iron films ever made), and a
video of a rabbit, a chicken and a goat crossing the
Williamsburgh Bridge one bright spring morning……..any of
which would make interesting sister pieces to the bus
running outside.
Simon Lee has been exhibiting his work since 1992 at venues
such as Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY; The Armory Show in NY; The
Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Berkshire Museum, Massachusetts;
The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn NY; Espace Paul Ricard in
Paris, France; Snug Harbour Cultural Center, Staten Island,
NY; The Whitney Museum of Art; The Hudson River Museum,
NY; The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art; The Center
for Freudian Analysis and Research in London, UK; The
American Academy in Rome and many other prestigious
galleries and institutions around the world. He currently
lives and works in New York.
