Brief Profile: Tasman Richardson, Video Artist - Neubacher Shor ...

Brief Profile: Tasman Richardson, Video Artist
11-06-09 2:15 PM
small (1/30 of a second). It was all just cut and paste or pause and record if you know what I mean, but then
along came digital non-linear editing in the form of a very crappy early incarnation called “Perception” for
PC and before you knew it I had churned out five new videos, all of them in the style that I’d been wanting
to express. After all this time, it’s still those first five that are the clearest primitive break way from standard
practice.
The technique is not so much about editing for sound as it is editing for symbolism and immediacy on all
levels. I mean, yes, I listen to a clip and think ‘that sounds good’ but it needs to look good and if I freeze
frame, it needs to have a strong composition. Each clip needs to visualize AND auralize something
significant. Then when they all play together you get harmonies of information instead of noise.
ST: Tell me more about your collective, www.famefame.com. How did you guys get involved with each
other? What are the benefits/drawbacks?
TR: FAMEFAME was born out of an earlier collective called JAWA. That’s a whole story in itself but I’ll
cut it short. Jubal Brown and myself were already collaborating and I felt the need to take all my work in
different mediums and place it under a banner… some kind of seal of approval or quality and that was
FAMEFAME. It wasn’t officially founded until Josh Avery and Elenore Chesnutt started producing work
that was complimentary to this goal. Then we drafted the manifesto, got our tattoos of loyalty and started
the work.
Since then, we have a new member, Alana Didur. FAMEFAME is complex because in some ways it’s a
parody of many recognizable institutions, a record label, an artist collective, a curatorial body, an events
promoter, a design house, etc. We work with everything from vinyl records to kinetic sculpture, although
our main concern lately has been video in the JAWA style or
the updated FAMEFAME style.
ST: What do you think of the Toronto arts scene? I am particularly interested in your thoughts, as you have
had so much international exposure and can view the local scene with a more objective eye.
TR: This scene is very important because many cities don’t have anything like it. The artist-run side of
things is very much in balance with the commercial. People may scoff at that but if you go to Paris of Tokyo
you’ll feel crushed by the ridiculous demands of commercial venues and the impossible submissions process
for getting noticed. There’s a lot of creative, underground sort of venue work being done in these places to
counteract the commercial imbalance but that’s something we don’t have here, not to the same extreme. I
didn’t appreciate that until recently but I’m really proud of it when I go anywhere outside of Canada. I’ve
turned into this crazy nationalist canadiana pusher.
The biggest problem with Toronto now is that we have it so good and we don’t know it so instead of
keeping the artist run culture sharp and raising standards, there’s a tendency, especially in video, to dumb it
down as some kind of accessibility thing for the public. That’s bullshit and it’s sad because when you lower
the standard it’s harder to raise it again later. It’s not bi-directional, you can’t just give it a try and see. Once
you start showing kid-friendly anti-intellectual, 40 year old identity base work you’re going to introduce an
audience that naturally loves it because they’re just getting to know it for the first time. It’s our
responsibility to bring the audience into the present, or even the future of the medium, not wow them with
nostalgic concepts.
It seems like Toronto will always have these two type of screenings as a result: the public surface art which
http://silenttalkie.com/2006/03/03/video/brief-profile-tasman-richardson-video-artist/
Page 2 of 4