Interview Transcript Interviewee: Shaun Gladwell Artist Australia Venice Biennale 2009 Interviewer: Lisa Rumble COFA Art Education Student Australia Venice Biennale 2009 Education Team. Date: 7 th April 2009 Location: College of Fine Arts, Paddington, NSW, Australia.
START OF TRANSCRIPT Lisa Rumble: Welcome Shaun Gladwell. My name is Lisa Rumble and I'm a student from the School of Art History and Art Education at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales and I'm also part of the Australian Venice Biennale Education Team. I will be interviewing you today about MADDESTMAXIMVS - Planet and Star Sequence, which will be exhibited at the Australian Pavilion in the Venice Biennale, due to open on 3 June 2009. MADDESTMAXIMVS - Planet and Star Sequence seems to be an ever evolving multifaceted project which you have been working on since 2007. Would you discuss how it came about and the evolution of the project? How has the artwork progressed in terms of themes and concepts from the outset? Sure, okay. I guess I ve been working on this project for about maybe two and a half, three years, but really it s an idea or a set of ideas that I had well before then. So if I was to think of my interest in people who were kind of performing in some sort of creative way within their landscape, like looking at where they are, whether that be in a city space, an urban space or, in these new works, a kind of a rural space or a desert space. The project is really ongoing. It s quite a long term interest that I ve had in this kind of way of working with people moving and reacting to space. So in 2007 I made a shift where I was interested in people who were working in urban spaces with particular activities that were responding to urban environment cities and the built environment. I thought, well this kind of activity takes place also in rural environments, like in hinterland and desert environments as well. I had a little bit of experience with that sort of activity, although I d been much more of a city kid myself, but my brothers for instance were more involved in activity that took place outside of cities. It was very interesting for me to kind of look at those activities in the same way as I was looking at activities in the city and the thing I was looking for was really this kind of creativity that people want to rework their relationship with these environments and have some sort of very creative response to it. Hope that answers the question. INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: S. GLADWELL, AUSTRALIA VENICE BIENNALE 2009, 7 APRIL 2009 Page 2 of 5
Lisa Rumble: How do the technical aspects of your work reflect the dominant themes you were exploring? For example, what role does slow motion play in the delivery of the video works? That s a good question. The slow motion is a big part of it, because when I used to look at what I was kind of interested in, like skateboarding or BMX bike riding or whatever it is, surfing or other kinds of activity, a lot of the time that same kind of activity is shown on television and the kind of TV model, which I call the MTV model, is really fast. Usually it s kind of produced and cut up and it s given this really fast soundtrack and so for me, to kind of think of a different way of representing that stuff was also trying to think of a way where people could actually see detail. Because, one thing I was trying to work out was, what the hell was going on when I was watching TV. These activities were taking too little a time to describe too much action. So in a way the slow motion was just a way of offering the detail of these movements to people. So, yeah, they re very connected, the actual ideas and the way that I present them technically. Lisa Rumble: Fantastic. How do you plan for MADDESTMAXIMVS - Planet and Star Sequence to be installed in Venice? Would you reveal some information about how the artwork as a whole will come together? Because I'm interested in the way people creatively respond to their environments, that s kind of almost the subject matter of my work. It s also the way that I want to install my work in the space. It would be a little bit of a contradiction if I didn t also think about my environment like these people are thinking about their environment. So I'm considering exhibitions as installations. They re always thinking about what kind of space they use, how people access that space and what s an average sort of sight line, or the height of a body in relation to that space and how big it is. So in a way, the entire Venice Pavilion is like an installation, and that means that I consider the outside as much as the inside of that space. So there ll be a lot of work actually before you even get into what the architects would consider the front door, I guess. It s kind of a way of dealing with the whole space as soon as people, kind of,get anywhere near the Pavilion, they re already in the artwork so to speak. INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: S. GLADWELL, AUSTRALIA VENICE BIENNALE 2009, 7 APRIL 2009 Page 3 of 5
Lisa Rumble: And lastly, like myself you also studied for a period at COFA. Would you like to talk about your education and how this has impacted on your career as an artist? Yeah, sure. I actually studied a postgraduate degree at COFA, so I d already done an honours degree and three years of undergraduate study at another art college, and that was interesting because I sort of came to COFA with a certain amount of knowledge and an interest in certain issues that I wanted to explore in my artwork. But I hadn t actually sort of focused those interests and it was at COFA where I really started to both explore these ideas in the painting department, which is what I had enrolled as a painting research student, but also I started to spend more time in time based art. So, by the time I was a postgraduate student, I was already looking at a kind of multimedia practice and that was an incredibly fertile time and I consider the time that an artist spends in education in an institution formative because they re in a kind of incubator. It s a very interesting environment and it was great. END OF TRANSCRIPT INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: S. GLADWELL, AUSTRALIA VENICE BIENNALE 2009, 7 APRIL 2009 Page 4 of 5
Additional transcripts and video interviews with artists: Vernon Ah Kee, Ken Yonetani, Claire Healy & Sean Corderio and curator: Felicity Fenner, can be found on the at the Australia Venice Biennale 2009 Education Hub. For more information about the Australian exhibitions at the Venice Biennale 2009 and to access the Australia Venice Biennale Education Hub, visit: www.australiavenicebiennale.com.au The Australia Council for the Arts is the Australian Government s arts funding and advisory body. We support and promote the practice and enjoyment of the arts. The Australia Council has managed and funded Australian representation for more than 30 years. Previous Australia representatives at the Venice Biennale have included Judy Watson, Howard Arkley, Patricia Piccinini, Ricky Swallow, Susan Norrie, Callum Morton and Daniel von Sturmer. www.australiacouncil.gov.au This transcript was made possible by the financial support of the COFA, UNSW. COFA is one of Australia s premier art and design schools located in Sydney, Australia. Shaun Gladwell, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro are graduates of COFA their Australian representation at the Venice Biennale highlights the crucial role of training institutions in the development of the next generation of artists, designers and theorists. www.cofa.unsw.edu.au INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: S. GLADWELL, AUSTRALIA VENICE BIENNALE 2009, 7 APRIL 2009 Page 5 of 5