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Phone Tag: Interview with Chris Ulutupu

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In this Phone Tag interview, Christopher Ulutupu talks about inspirations ranging from images of a 1970s drug fueled photo shoot, Romantic painting, and kareoke; his close collaborative relationships with those who work on his filmed projects, often friends and family; and how he came to the role of artist relatively recently. Chris makes video- and performance-based works out of Wellington, New Zealand. You can watch more of his work here.
Fitu (Fame) (2018). Vinyl print on billboard. Installation shot. Courtesy of SCAPE Public Art Festival.

In this Phone Tag interview, Christopher Ulutupu discusses inspirations ranging from images of a 1970s drug-fueled photo shoot, Romantic painting, and kareoke. We also talk about his close collaborative relationships with those who work on his filmed projects, often friends and family, and how he came to the role of artist relatively recently. Chris makes video- and performance-based works out of Wellington, New Zealand. You can watch some of his work here.

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

Linnea West: It was great of [previous participant] Olivia Koh to connect us. Do you know her through the project you did on recess, or did you know her before?

Christopher Ulutupu: I met Olivia at the Hobiennale. It was in Hobart in Tasmania. For the first time, they decided to do a biennale. I was the exhibiting artist for a gallery up here in Wellington called play_station. I also met another guy, Jake Preval, there. We got on like a house on fire.

I don’t know if you know the context of Hobart or Tasmania. It’s the most southern part of Australia. It’s an island separated from the rest of the land mass. It’s colder. It’s got a different feel to it than the rest of Australia. It’s got a very tight‑knit community there. Our community is amazing and very supportive of each other.

From there, Liv contacted me and was like, “Do you want to show one of your video works?” We went from there.

LW:  Nice. Is video and film typical of your work?

CU:  I generally make videos now, video and performances, because I’ve found that it’s probably the most payoff I get in terms of creating or money‑making is through a moving image.

LW:  Performance as well? Are you a performer?

CU:  Yeah, I was both. I did my undergrad in performance design, which was a course set between the New Zealand Drama School, Toi Whakaari, and Massey University. I was specifically looking at performance for theater, film, also performance art.

It was a degree very specific to performance, and being very attracted to different types of performances, especially dynamics between public and private performances, ritual in performance. All these kind of things, I was really interested in earlier on in my career.

Fitu (Lelia) (2018). Vinyl print on billboard. Installation shot. Courtesy of SCAPE Public Art Festival.

LW: What are you working on right now?

CU: I just finished a show down in Christchurch, which is in the South Island, which was part of a public arts festival called SCAPE. It happens every year. They commissioned me to do a work, and I proposed to them that I would do the third part of a trilogy.

This final one was shot in the ski field. I took a camera crew and the cast out to the ski field and did some performance stuff there, sang some songs and choreographed a set of pieces.

I was inspired by this strange magazine article in Elle Magazine about a winter Vogue shoot back in the 1970s in the Andes, on the border of Chile and Argentina. I got inspired as the story was very kind of Bond‑esque.

The story goes, photographers and a whole bunch of models including Jerry Hall go down to this resort, a ski lodge, down in Argentina and Chile. They get snowed in and they get surrounded. All they have in the hotel is an open bar and a bag of cocaine and a few bits of food.

[laughter]

Lelia (2018). 20:33 min. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

CU:  They decide to have this drug‑fueled photo shoot. It turns out to be one of the best winter shoots they’ve ever had. They got these beautiful shots of them fooling around with all this fur, absolute decadence. Actually really an absurd story.

And then, the Chilean government won’t let them leave the resort. There’s a whole bunch of security guards there, and so the Argentinian and American government hatch this plan to release them by getting them to ski down this ski field, in their furs and the jewelry that they wore for the shoot. They ski all the way down to meet this helicopter that takes them away.

LW:  That’s a real thing that happened?

CU:  Real thing. It is very Bond‑y. I was inspired some of the images of the story and use it as an aesthetic crux to inform someone my costume ideas and how I wanted it photographed.

Lelia (2018). 20:33 min. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

LW: What’s the story arc over the course of the trilogy?

CU: The first one, Into The Arms of My Colonizers, is about courtship and desire… lust. Framing it so you’re asking questions about identity politics. I feel the question has always been, “Where do I belong?” or “Where do I fit in?” Then in that particular work I’m asking more “Who do you want to be?” or “What is it you desire?”

I feel like we, as diasporic artists, can start to piece those things together ourselves. We spend a lot of time though articulating or asking, “I don’t belong here, but where do I belong? I’ve got connections here.” A lot of energy is spent doing that. I feel we should be asking more along the lines of “Who do you want to be?” You can construct these narratives, I think, and I have the luxury to do that.

Into The Arms Of My Colonizer (2016). 16:22 min. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.

The second one is called Do You Still Need Me. It’s a lot of performances in nature, in a forest, and a sand dune. A whole bunch of people, all of them actors and models, are singing karaoke. There’s a screen and they sing karaoke in nature. That was inspired by an artist friend Etienne De France. He asked me one day if I enjoyed poetry in nature. I was like, “Well, not really. It’s kind of a white thing.” [laughs]

It’s not really what I do. The equivalent for me is probably karaoke in nature. I really enjoy karaoke. So I did that. Took a whole bunch of singers out to these really picturesque places around New Zealand and just sung some big ’80s and ’90s power ballads.

If the first one’s about love and courtship, I think the second one was about heartbreak, dissonance, and miscommunication, and longing for the other person. Both these works have a strange dynamic where I tease or allude to this relationship with a colonizer. [laughs] I can be quite playful with it, but also present the heartbreak.

Then the third and final chapter, it’s the marriage: the acknowledgement that we exist in the same space, that we have a partnership. Through all the heartbreak and miscommunication, it’s a sense of acknowledging that we exist in the same space and we must coexist. I feel that this is an ongoing thing. It’s not going to just disappear.

Do you Still Need Me (2017). 21:20 min. Installation shot. Courtesy of play_station gallery, Wellington, NZ, as part of the Hobiennale show The Romantic Picturesque (2017).

LW: It’s interesting that you cast it all as a romantic adventure.

CU: I feel like there is so much heartbreak and so much sadness between this particular relationship between indigenous, colonizing…anywhere. Specifically, I was looking at probably more a New Zealander binary in that relationship. For me, it’s hard to say, “You did me wrong.” [laughs] “And you should pay me.” It’s not really how my personality goes. It gets layered with a whole bunch of funness or laughter and humor.

LW:  You mentioned one person who influenced you, but in general who or what are your influences in the making?

CU:  I’m very influenced by those who are around me, my loved ones. Especially in all the films that I have, I’ve mainly just cast friends and family. I see a person, and for some reason I get a flash of, “Oh, it would be great if they were here in this setting in this particular way with these people.” That’s how I make work actually. I’m inspired by other people and that triggers other things or other images.

LW:  It was interesting watching your videos. It felt at times like I was watching a painting. It’s like a living tableau.

CU:  Yeah. Lots of my works—not particularly this trilogy, but including this trilogy—reference Romantic painters.

LW: Romantic, capital R. Like Delacroix.

CU: Exactly. I think it was because when I first started looking at shooting in nature and I started recreating postcards and these beautiful picturesque places, I was looking at photography specifically. Photographic practices that documented indigenous people, brown people.

LW: –which there is such a history of.

CU:  Yeah, there’s a huge history of. But then, when I developed and created more work, I realized it wasn’t those images that actually helped inform my practice or the way I make decision‑making around designing the frame and the staging. I was actually painting. It felt more like the Romantic painter, trying to emulate the scale of things or the beauty of the surroundings. There’s a two‑dimensionality that I really enjoy about having no moving frame or just having a still frame. Just the action, the performances be very still, static.

I’m also inspired by other video. I’m not the greatest fan of Matthew Barney, but I really enjoy the way he creates imagery. He superimposes or juxtaposes a whole bunch of different things to make a new meaning. I love that. I work inherently like that, try to put together certain things, make it new.

Who else? Sofia Coppola, the director. I read somewhere that she compiles a list of songs, and then writes a script based on these 10 or 15 songs. There’s something really nice about that.

Dispel (2017). 9:37 min. Installation shot. Courtesy of play_station gallery, Wellington, NZ, as part of the Hobiennale Show The Romantic Picturesque (2017).

LW:  When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

CU:  Honestly, I think when I finished my master’s degree, because I didn’t do my undergrad in fine arts or visual arts. I became a set designer and worked in an art department for many years. I worked freelance as an art director for film, mainly.

Then I got sick of that because I was working too much. It was, “Oh, I wanna help people!” I would try to become a social worker, but I wasn’t going back to study. I ended up working for corrections. I worked in a probation office for a couple of years. Then I was like, “Actually I want to be an artist.” So I quit my job. That’s when I decided to do my master’s.

LW:  That’s a 180 shift.

CU:  It was like: “Go,” and then I did it. I remember the point where I started, I had just finished working at corrections. I had my leaving party on the Friday, and had Saturday, Sunday, and then Monday started the Masters of Fine Arts.

Since then, I’ve been propelled into a whole world. The art industry, for me, is still relatively new. I’m still trying to navigate that as well, and be familiar with the industry I’ve chosen to be in.

LW: That’s exciting. What’s an ideal day in the studio? Are you in your studio now?

CU: Yeah. I also work next door. I manage a costume store. Between these two places, that’s how I create ideas for my work. It’s funny because this year I’ve been working here and at home, and between the two you can come up with ideas and sketch out and plan, because most of my practice is about logistics and planning…facilitating a whole bunch of people to come at a certain time to do this one thing. Between those two places I feel like I get a lot of room to explore and do stuff.

LW:  What’s your process like for a film? Do you have it all story‑boarded out? Is it a little bit left open?

CU:  For me now, the way I work and how I dig into the answers, I bring all the elements to the site of location that I’m shooting, and then I build a frame. There’s no script or storyboards—that’s what I was trying to get away from. When I was working as an art director, I couldn’t help but feel there was something missing. Because it can be quite hierarchical, it can be very negative.

As part of that, I decided that I would not have a script, not having a storyboard. Be more like: “Bring your talents, what can you do?” Some people were like, “I’m really good at makeup and hair. I did my sister’s wedding?” I was like, “Great you’re in!” One film shoot that I did, I shot at a church one time. The people making the food were my aunties. They catered the two days’ shoot that I did.

That’s the energy I want to create. The final work is important, don’t get me wrong, but just as important as the process. Making sure that people who were involved with the project have autonomy over their experiences whilst shooting the work.

LW:  Do you have any interest in being in front of the camera?

CU:  Oh no. [laughter]

Relax (2016). 4:03 min. Video still. Courtesy of the artist. Part of a Triptych Honey, Relax, Rinse (2016)

LW: Do you think it is more important for an artist to be in a big city where you can have a career, where there are galleries, where there is an art scene and people to talk to about it; or to be in a smaller place where maybe it’s easier, it’s cheaper, there can be more of a focus on making?

CU: I would love being in a big city, but I fear that my work would suffer. My practice relies on those around me and specific references: Samoan people in New Zealand or indigenous people in New Zealand and references to the land even. That’s where I get most of my inspiration. I worry if I was to move to other places, it would actually change my practice. I’m very based on my environment, who am I’m surrounded by, what’s happening around me. I don’t know if it would be a bad thing. All I know is that my work would change and my practice would change accordingly.

I love living in a smaller space or city. Wellington is a small city in relation to many other cities, even though is the capital of New Zealand. It’s got a population of 400,000, 500,000, something like that. One great thing I enjoy is that you can walk everywhere. There’s still a thriving art scene. There are heaps of galleries, lots of artists. Here we manage to do quite a bit to support the local community of artists.

If I was to move to a big city, I think it’d be great for my career in terms of networking, access to other resources. It would be really hard to have to find a new crew, where I trust in their abilities and vice‑versa that they trusted me, etc. Although I am also thinking about moving to Melbourne. There’s a lot of crossover between the art scenes. A lot of my friends have done it.

LW: Great. Thank you.

CU: Thank you!

Phone Tag: Interview with Olivia Koh

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Olivia Koh, His heart was stuffed with dead wings (‘Suicide’, After Lorca, Jack Spicer), 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

I speak with Melbourne-based artist Olivia Koh in this Phone Tag interview. Olivia takes poetry and historical colonial texts as a jumping off point for a reconsideration of their context, biases, and contemporary relevance, often using video as a medium. We discuss her recent projects as well as the alternative exhibition space she organizes and the economy of living as an artist in Melbourne, Australia.

 

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

Linnea West: How do you know [former Phone Tag participant] Athena Thebus?

Olivia Koh: I met Athena through a friend in Melbourne. I think she’s a very generous person. She lent me her drone… I saw one of her works at a festival here. Maybe we’ll get to this in a minute, but I host a video website, which is an online database to host videos online called recess. We asked Athena to contribute to that next year. I’m looking forward—I know she does texts and installations and performances, but she makes videos as well.

LW: When you say you host, is that like being a curator?

OK: I’m not sure about the title for myself. Organizer? Because I’m basically an artist, so I don’t have that curatorial training. I work with two other artists from Melbourne, Kate Meakin and Nina Gilbert, and we facilitate putting works online that are film works or video works. I don’t know if you’ve spoken to people in Melbourne, but there’s a particular economy here around exhibiting. It can be expensive and quite competitive.

LW: So, the site is an alternative exhibition space?

OK: Yes, exactly. More simply, it’s an alternative exhibition space that’s accessible through the internet. We get writers or artists to both collaborate with the artist and to produce a text that sits alongside the video. If artists want to, they can leave their work on the site and then people can still access it after the exhibition.

It has been going for two years, so it’s just starting. There’s a lot to navigate. We’re trying to get some money for it, because now it is reliant on artists working for free, on us working for free. We’d love to change that, but at the same time, I think it’s good to make something of what you have.

LW: Totally. Is the format because of a particular interest in video or because of the economy of it?

OK: A bit of both for myself. Nina, Kate and I, we studied photography at the same art school, the VCA in Melbourne, at different times. We do have an interest in photography, and we’re bringing works with an interest in that medium, or thinking about how to navigate that in the contemporary moment…

How do you navigate having a video in a gallery? There weren’t many diverse approaches to doing that in galleries in Melbourne. Also, people are working so much, and they have works but they don’t always show them as a final product, so it was making space to show those. It sounds altruistic, but it’s been really great to see them—that’s a privilege as well.

Olivia Koh, Episodes, 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

LW: To back up a little bit, why did you need to borrow a drone from Athena?

OK: [laughs] I saw one of Athena’s works, Deep Water Dream Girl, and there was this amazing footage that she took in the Philippines. It was a video following her family and a certain island where they live. I was watching the video, and I thought I really would love to capture certain shots by air. I also went to the Philippines, and I’ve made a sculpture that I’ve been putting in the sea. I’ve been trying to film it by drone. That’s what I’ve been using it for, not that effectively…but practicing. 

LW: If you have to describe your practice in a couple of sentences, what do you say you make?

OK: I rewrite texts, found texts, and I collage them or sort of…go through what is there, whether it’s using video, or making text pieces as images or as sculptures. For example, I’ve looked at anthropological texts from the 1900s that were written about people in the Philippines, and I’ve looked at some that are about people in Australia at that time. In the past, they have definitely been social, like describing burial practices and mourning practices. There was a focus on a dead body or a body that can’t move or speak for itself.

Olivia Koh, Episodes, 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

LW: What are you working on now?

OK: I’ve been looking at poetry and looking at translated poems in the works of a California poet, Jack Spicer. He translated [Frederico] García Lorca, the Spanish poet. I had the idea to get some of those lines translated by a Filipina artist, Dennese Victoria. I’m using this text in a video called Episodes. I did a residency in Manila in 2017 and I’m producing a work from my time there. I’m trying to relate my experience as a tourist to certain texts about colonial “hygiene bureaucrats” that came to Manila from America in the early 1900s. In a text about colonial pathologies, a doctor and academic named Warwick Anderson talks about tropical neurasthenia—medical conditions that are basically nervous breakdowns, from colonizing guilt and the change felt traveling in a foreign environment. When I was in the Philippines, I was complaining so much about the weather, and I was really overwhelmed. I was also trying to study this particular history and thinking: “Oh no, have I got this?”

[laughter]

I’m trying to make the correlation between footage I’ve shot there and to the different layers of history written about the country.

LW: Who has influenced your practice?

OK: Locally, I’ve been influenced by a few friends who are great artists. One’s Rosie Isaac, who writes and makes performances. Lauren Burrow, who is an artist—a sculptor. I’ve been influenced by them in a day-to-day way. Also, being exposed to the processes of their work has been a really practical way of learning.

I read a lot. I like poetry. Other texts influence my work more than art… art isn’t my primary go-to. I’ve also been reading this book by Patty Chang called The Wandering Lake. It accumulates parts of an exhibition and a research trip to a migrating body of water in China. It’s about her searching to make the work, but also about having her own body in that landscape. I really loved that.

LW: Her work is narrative, and you’re working with text, which are already narrative. Do you think about that in your work? Are you trying to deconstruct the narrative, or are you trying to create a new thread?

OK: Sometimes I’m trying to create a new narrative, and sometimes to sit the narrative on top of an existing work, re-addressing preexisting texts from another perspective. Inserting myself into the narrative is a way of making myself responsible for what I’m making, as well, which I feel uncomfortable with—but it’s good to put myself in there. I’m trying to put myself more in there, to become more visible in my work. At the moment I’m trying to make a slightly more narrative video, with me as a “germologist”—a kind of 1900s hygiene bureaucrat—having a delirious experience and then going into a dream state, with texts and images and memory converging.

Olivia Koh, Ginebra San Miguel, 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

LW: Is this one of your first forays into performance?

OK: Yeah. Usually, I’m quite removed from it. I use my body to film, and I use a lot of handheld shots. I think that’s what makes my work less objective or removed than traditional films, like the body—my body—is in the film. It’s not professional cinema; it’s more haphazard. But I haven’t really been in front of the camera. I’ve just been behind it.

LW: That’s a big shift.

OK: Yeah, I’ll probably go back behind it. I like the way that performance can be—this is probably the wrong word—but integrated into an artwork in different mediums, like a performative sculpture, that kind of thing.

LW: When did you first think of yourself as an artist?

OK: I find that hard, actually. After I finished studying and I graduated as an artist, I started calling myself an artist. I really think it’s not about study though. Ideally, it’s about identification. Like, if you want to call yourself an artist, you’re an artist. Here it’s difficult to have it as a career—as in other places, I’m sure. Because a lot of people aren’t going to make a living off being an artist, it’s about having that dedication if you want to make work instead of doing other things.

LW: Is it important for an artist to be in a big city? Whether that is in Melbourne or a city like New York, or wherever. Or, is it better to be in a small place where maybe life’s a little easier, rent’s a little cheaper, and there can be more of a focus on making?

OK: I’ve only been here practicing a few years, so I haven’t had a diverse experience… I’m really not sure what it’s like in New York. I think it depends on whereabouts you are, what your relationship is with a city, if a focus of yours is exhibiting, or whether it is to be present for shows and stuff that happen in the city, or what you community is. It’s all about how you talk with other artists.

LW: Do you have a good community in Melbourne?

OK: Yeah, there are lots of talented people that I can talk to.

I would also like to experience art communities elsewhere. When I went to Manila, I really enjoyed meeting different groups of artists and filmmakers. They really supported each other in the way that they worked on each other’s projects. I thought that was really cool. They really knew each other’s work through making it, producing it. Also, they were there for each other to talk about the work or to see the work.

Olivia Koh, The blue tongue of the coastline (Ode for Walt Whitman, After Lorca, Jack Spicer), 2018. Image credit: Aaron Christopher Rees

LW: What does an ideal day look like in the studio?

OK: I don’t think I’m particularly productive as a studio artist, so I’m probably not the best person to answer that.

LW: If not in the studio, an ideal day working?

OK: It’s when thoughts accumulate over a period of time. When I have those days when things are starting to make sense. That’s ideal. There’s so much time spent that is so frustrating, when I feel like I’m working but nothing is happening and the choices I make aren’t developing.

LW: The nature of your projects seem like they would take a long time.

OK: Yeah, relatively. This video work has taken me a year, but it grew from work over the past three or four years. I’ve framed the video in different ways and then have been making different versions. I’m very piecemeal with making works. It’s hard to really finish a work.

LW: How do you know when it’s done?

OK: I’d say, “Never.” I like to think of works as iterations. That’s the best way for myself. With all the work, because they’re not really serial pieces, they really change with the context…where it’s shown, when it’s shown.

LW: Those were all my questions. Thank you so much.

OK: Thanks, it was really nice to talk with you.