An Interview with Nathaniel Mellors

‘Yes, it’s getting a little bit like that! Gwen Christie I met before she even went to drama school, at the time she was the fiancée of a friend of mine. Johnny Vivash I met when he was a visual artist, and I worked with him in 2004 in the last show I did at Matt’s Gallery, then again in 2005. We’ve continued working together. And then there’s David Birkin, this is the second piece he’s been in. And now there are some new actors for this project. I’ve not worked with Brian Catling before, but I know him quite well, and Patrick Kennedy too. After he saw Giantbum, Patrick said he’d like to be in one of my pieces sometime. I asked him what kind of role would be something he’d enjoy and he said, “I’d love to play a complete bastard.” So, I’ve written this character, Uncle Tommy, who basically never leaves the pub, apart from one sequence.’

‘I have written the parts with a lot of these actors in mind, knowing that they could carry them. But the basic story is not influenced by them. I came up with this scenario at some point last year and then it was a question of thinking about what sort of characters to develop. I thought it would be nice to start using some more collaborative elements in the way that film and TV does – to develop it more ambitiously. I had a lot of conversations with Dan Fox [editor at frieze – ed.] around that time and he helped me with the story development, and he was the story editor when I wrote the step outlines [structure of the film – ed.]. Basically, I would write and send the material to him. He would make some suggestions and there would be a kind of ping-ponging back and forth between us. And finally I wrote the scripts after that.’

‘Yes, increasingly so. It’s been funded partly by the British Art Show and the Netherlands Film Fund, which has a strand for art making. And so I got a bit of money to develop the script from them, to pay Dan Fox for the story editing and to hire the director of photography who filmed The 7 Ages of Britain Teaser with me – Ben Wheeler, who I work really well with, and who is becoming a regular now as well. I would say by film standards the budget is incredibly low, but the project is probably punching slightly above its weight at the level of production. That’s because I have very good actors in roles that they’re into, and that’s grown quite organically, and also because of the growth of my relationship with this DP, Ben Wheeler.’

‘One of the things I saw with the Master’s Course at art school was that it was almost as if there were six different styles of contemporary art-making and people would pick one and settle on it. So I came to feel quite critical of this idea that contemporary art-making had become a mode and that it was a reductivist process that has happened over time. I began looking at artists, writers, and stand-up comics who I felt had an inherent sense of being able to draw on things, to respond to what was actually happening in the world and formulate an appropriate language for the time. That was something that seemed not to be a priority in terms of the work I saw in contemporary art which, more often than not, seemed to be quite happy talking about a history of conceptualism or reframing something, citing itself in a line. There was also a lot of assumed knowledge of the history of those things, and I found it problematic and also quite dull, really. It feels like it lacks ambition for the form. In the last few years I’ve been looking at Pasolini [Italian writer and filmmaker, 1922–1975 – ed.], reading some of his writings and looking at certain films. With Giantbum there was an influence of Salò and Porcile, and in the scenario for Ourhouse there’s some influence from Teorema, but it comes to something that is obviously within a much more British-language absurdist tradition and under the influence of TV and film, and these things which feel more natural to me.

The art world can be preoccupied with a structuralist approach. I think it can be a bit of a default position – deconstruction – and I’m thinking about that as I’m becoming more ambitious with these productions. Deconstruction is easy, in the sense that it’s natural within the resources you have available.’

‘There is. I went to see a scriptwriter at the very beginning who is a friend of Brian’s, Tony Grisoni, who did the Red Riding trilogy. He was being supportive and just gave me a few bits of practical advice. One of the things he said was: if you think you’re going to make the first two episodes, make sure you’ve written the story for the whole thing first. That really appealed to me, because maybe it relates to this issue of fragmentation in art. I didn’t want to do something that refers to something, I wanted to do something which is something, which can also have that reflexivity within it if you want it to. So I wrote the story with a progression for the characters – their family dynamics shift and change and finally there’s a climactic episode that leads to an ending. The first episode was naturally less expensive to make. But because the episodes get increasingly fantastical, they become more expensive to produce. Whether or not I’ll ever be able to make the next episodes, I don’t know yet. I really hope so, but I probably need to start building sound stages because the whole house starts filling up, different landscapes start appearing inside the house.’

‘It might not remain a constant. I want us to do a bit more, because it’s pleasurable in a really base way. Initially the motivation came from ruminating on kinetic art and thinking about how unpopular and unfashionable it was at that point. A couple of years ago it seemed like the worst thing you could do, in the same way that I’d been thinking about ceramics a few years before. But things get quickly co-opted and become fashionable.

I thought if I could make the animatronics actually talk then they could be doing something which was specific to my scripts and the language. It would be about that which my work is and that would be interesting in relation to the actors. So you could make a prosthetic performer and in the case of Giantbum, it’s a natural evolution of that character – the father character – in that, as this cult leader aspect develops, he becomes programmatic and mechanical in his completely unsound ideology, so then making him into a mechanical, unholy trinity felt right for that.

And with Ourhouse there is an introduction and conclusion animatronic – there is an animatronic of the Object’s face, which is a fountain of puréed books which it vomits up. And there’s an animatronic from the Daddy character’s face, which is joined together by its own hair. I provisionally titled it “Hippy Dialectics”, although I don’t know whether that title will stick. But it’s joined by its own hair and beard, and I like the idea that this thing could argue with itself – perhaps it’s a bit like the three-headed knight in the Monty Python and the Holy Grail, only a two-headed version. So, maybe for the installation you can see the vomiting sculpture in one room, then you can go and see the film and, in a third room, you can see the hippy dialectic sculpture. It’s nice because it roots the work in sculpture. And I like it in relation to the actors, something beyond the performer, a prosthetic performance. The animatronics also have a very direct appeal to people, which might be useful to present them with various entrance levels to the work. They have the choice of how much time to spend with it or to just enjoy something because it’s a joke or looks good. But you can also chose to spend more time with it and really get inside the script. I quite like the idea that people don’t just bounce off the surface.’

‘Absolutely. I was thinking about this in relation to Bataille (The Big Toe and his other essays), this idea of base materialism and inversions of the conventional hierarchical value system. So, in Ourhouse, the Object has eaten all these grand books and there are abject turd forms that he’s misinterpreting all the time. Some of that reading is in the mix. Originally, the idea of the Object was that it was a kind of printer, but instead of printing, it regurgitated more abject material. I even was calling it the Printer for a while.

I was also reading Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy in the run up to Ourhouse. And what I really enjoy in McLuhan, is the moment when he talks about the idea of the phonetic alphabet. He describes it as a colonising technology. He explains the idea that if you take, say, a Chinese pictogram, there’s contextual knowledge that’s required in relation to its usage to understand it. So there are these more complex linguistic forms, but McLuhan points out that anything could be translated on the basis of its sound into the phonetic alphabet. The point that he makes is that the phonetic alphabet was really suitable for colonising cultures, the western cultures who introduced it. And that it was particularly suited to administration and to controlling people from a distance, even without a thorough command of their language.

And so there is the idea that there was something that went from the complexity of real experience or forms close to that, to becoming increasingly reduced. And this was reflected in the growth of administration over the last fifteen years: the Blairite culture of confusing people with the fake democracy of bureaucracy. It gives the impression of having power within a structure, but it actually retains real power completely; it’s actually quite disempowering for ordinary people. So I was thinking a lot about those issues in Ourhouse and The 7 Ages of Britain Teaser. The barbarian character in Seven Ages is called Cadmus, who is the mythical king described by Plato as having introduced this phonetic alphabet. And in Plato I think Socrates says, when this is invented it will be terrible because people will start to believe in it as a substitute for experience, a substitute for reality. It’s the earliest thing I’ve found which is talking about mediation and its dangers. It warns that people will confuse real lived experience (and therefore real knowledge) with a substitute for knowledge. So I decided to make King Cadmus a medieval barbarian who just wants to smash the face with his hammer.’

‘Yes. We’re back in it. Mark E. Smith [front man of the English post-punk band The Fall – ed.] predicted it, didn’t he, the “second dark age”… We are in a post democracy, with the mediation and homogenisation of news reporting. Rumour is being reported as truth all the time, as exposed in Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News: it’s all just a big echo chamber in which stories start off in some local newspaper and get reported right the way up to the Guardian and The Independent.’

‘Rabelais [c. 1494–1553 – ed.] is always there – I think it was the artist Mick Peter who introduced me to Rabelais. It was a good few years ago when I read those books, and it really blew me away. That text feels like an Ur text, in that it feels like he’s studied all the classics and digested all of the seriousness of classical philosophy and ideas and then he’s able to satirize it whilst also articulating something that’s very serious at the same time. That ability to be able to hit different registers simultaneously, parody next to something that’s very profound...'

‘Exactly. It’s an interesting thing, the seriousness of it. Sometimes I think that with the satire, there is almost an inherent moral propeller. It would be really useful if I had a finished edit of this to watch so we could gauge what is and isn’t being hit. There’s quite a few different things in it: there’s the character of Daddy railing against wireless Internet, telling everyone to make sure they’re using cables because he doesn’t want books and pictures flying through the air unchecked. In that sense, it’s the unchecked part, it’s about control. And then you’ve got Bobby Jobby digging things up. There’s a chain of consequence in a way, and I wanted it to be Cluedo-like in a sense – there are all of these different lines that run through it and it’s appealing to me to make these different fissures across it.’

‘I don’t really feel there is a satirical component to it, though I think you see a satirizing of elements of art production. But that appears more incidentally along the way, it’s not an end in itself. But I love satire from Aristophanes on. It feels like a very rich tradition to me and I’d be happy if the work felt like it was worthy to be cited in relation to any of that stuff. In a way, I do and I don’t reflect on what I’m doing – sometimes it can seize things up!’