CONSTRUCTING A TRACE ON THE TABULA RASA Rut Blees Luxemburg (RBL) in conversation with Adam Fuss (AF), London, October 2005

RBL: I am thinking about the content of your images, and it strikes me, that very often the subject is in-progress, like the babies or the pupae, unformed beings. Is there a correlation between your subject matter and the early forms of the photographic medium you utilize, when photography itself was not yet “fully-formed”?

AF: You mean 1840-50s photography? The early stages were a place where people were experimenting and new techniques were being developed and I was attracted to those techniques and those times because of the nature of experimentation, but also, since that time- basically the 1870’s- photography has been more or less the same up until the digital: a sophisticated lens and a fast shutter. Those early experiments and early processes had a language, which seemed slightly different to me and to the photography I had seen billions of times. There is an inherent boredom in the language, the syntax of photography, and when I started I did not want to repeat that.

RBL: You are not talking specifically about art photography, but photography in general?

AF: Yes, particularly the photography you see when you open up a magazine.

RBL: Did you study photography?

AF: No, not in a formal way. I did not go to art school.

RBL: So you are an autodidact?

AF: I did some classes at an art centre in Australia, once a week. We were shown photographs by famous photographers and given assignments.

RBL: Were you exposed to photography theory, the writing by Roland Barthes, Victor Burgin?

AF: I know very little about photography theory, and I have my own theories…

RBL: Lets go back to your attraction to subjects that are not fully formed.

AF: I think about the Chrysalis as metamorphosis: it is not exactly a growth, more a shift. The baby: as a metaphor that is about growing, something that has potential. You can think of it in many different ways, as an idea. An idea that you have today and that will change the rest of your life. It is not any idea, or any event. It is a big idea.

RBL: An idea, which is as yet unformed and unspeakable?

AF: It speaks about expansion. That theme of expansion is in the work. All the pictures I make, I don’t see them as different. There is a place, and I see them as signposts pointing towards this place.

RBL: Where is that place?

AF: I don’t know… the pictures are not the place in themselves. Rarely do they have everything to be the place.

RBL: Would you describe your photographic project as a coherent research project?

AF: it is not coherent… I live in New York. Frequently when I buy something I have to invent a name for my business, and that is Photo Research…

RBL: A lot of your work seems to feature a singular entity rather than a group?

AF: Yes most of the time it is either one or two or many.

RBL: And that structure which connects the singular into a whole? Does that come into your pictures?

AF: Yes I think it does. With this water form, and also these pictures which I think are about migration, which are little drops with shadows, and I made a work with sunflowers which seem to form bonds with each other. Although, generally I am not interested in the many.

RBL: Does your process…

AF: I don’t feel I have a process. I am happy to use any process that allows me to make an image that is compelling.

RBL: Could you make an image of something huge, like a high-rise, or a mountain?

AF: I haven’t tried. If I wanted to I would try. I think of my best work as with the camera.

RBL: There is a sense of the phenomenological in relation to your photographs, which could be described as bringing presence into being. You have mentioned previously the revelatory qualities of your work, the traces…

AF: To me traces are the same as signposts.

RBL: Traces are something that is left behind. Heidegger suggested that in the abyss you can still find the traces of the absent gods who long ago have left us to the darkest night…

AF: Well I hope so. I hope we can still find the traces. I feel that I want in the picture some kind of revelation in a visual way, maybe in a photographic language that is new to me, maybe something that I can perceive, which to me is compellingly beautiful. Let me try and define revelation: it is really a moment where you are not yourself, where you go out of yourself. So that could happen when you are in front of something you don’t understand.

RBL: Is this revelation close to reveling, close to intoxication?

AF: No, it is more a pause, or a not-being as if we have a pattern or a consciousness and that image takes you outside of that normal consciousness. You are in front of something. And you have to stop, stop and look at this thing because it is compellingly beautiful or because you don’t understand it.

RBL: Are you interested in the Ugly?

AF: Yes, Ugly also contains that revelation. I am interested. But it is not something that I have explored. I thought about using Ugly in my work because it has the attention. You quoted about the gods departing and leaving a trace. Well, within beauty that trace is big […] light has that trace. So if you construct something that uses light and beauty then that is a big trace. Whereas I think Ugly is more subjective.

RBL: Ugly is perhaps more visceral?

AF: You have Ugly and its shock, and it also takes you out. The same with horror, or something horrible, morally ugly. But where does that go? It is not a direction that made any sense to me. But it interests me. Philosophically Ugly interests me, but I don’t think I can use Ugly.

RBL: Let‘s talk about your photograph of the orgasm?

AF: I made a photogram of an ejaculation, the moment of male ejaculation.

RBL: Was that a series?

AF: It is part of a series. But I only made one that was successful.

RBL: Would that fall under the category of base materialism?

AF: Well, it is a penis ejaculating, but the way it is used is as a metaphor. It is the desire of the human to join the sun, to join the light, to join revelation. But what you look at is a penis ejaculating. And at the top of the picture is an egg.

RBL: What kind of egg?

AF: A bird egg. Light passing through an egg. It is an egg, but looks like the sun!

RBL: And does the ejaculate reach the egg?!

AF: It is not about… that! It is about the desire to. The way I use the ejaculate is as a sort of intention, because that series is about the space between earth and heaven. It is about that space in between. So it was about going up in that space, going out of that space.

RBL: Does irony play a part in your work?

AF: I don’t think so. The things that interest me are generally serious.

RBL: The way you describe the egg and the sperm suggests an acceptance of failure, we don’t reach the sun even if the male sperm might have that aspiration.

AF: It is not about maleness. That picture uses an erection. The truth is that we are all erect and what defines our life is being erect. You are being erect on the earth.

RBL: But maybe my favourite aspect is horizontal.

AF: It will be once you are dead.

RBL: Yet a lot of artists have used the floor, the horizontal as their production site. Like Jackson Pollock…

AF: Yes, he interests me. He was painting on the floor, yet he does not leave the paintings on the floor, he hangs them up. He uses gravity. I wish he had left his pictures on the floor. They are great on the floor. But this is slightly different. I am talking about the structure of our lives. We are vertical.

RBL: Some creatures, which feature in your work, are crawling on the floor…

AF: When I use the snake it is as a metaphor. I use the snakes in different ways, swimming in water, crawling through powder, and also sitting around with their babies in them.

RBL: What is your attraction to the snake?

AF: The snake is an energy form that is free. The snake wants to be under its own control. The trace of that energy is what interests me. You see that when the snake swims, it is like an arrow. It is the depiction of a particular kind of energy.

RBL: Do you want to re-evaluate the snake- transform its biblical reputation?

AF: No. I take the snake from what I know of it from nature. The snake is pure nature.

RBL: To the American Indians the snake is also very important as a symbol.

AF: We had English Indians and to those, the snake also was very important.

RBL: Are all your images constructions?

AF: Yes, when you work without a camera you make the picture, rather than take it.

RBL: And you are constructing a trace?

AF: A lot of the time, yes. There is an event that is recorded, that event might have a phenomenological quality like a snake swimming through water, or rabbit intestines leaving a mark on water.

RBL: The Greeks used the organs of the animal for future casting? Are you thinking with your work about possible futures? Is your work future-orientated?

AF: I say it is past-orientated. I think its dialogue is with a relationship to nature or culture that is past. So it could be a Christian past, pre-historic past or it could be my past.

RBL: What do you think about the photograph Dust Breeding by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp?

AF: When I was young I went to see a Jackson Pollock exhibition in Paris and at the same time there was a Man Ray exhibition, which I did not go to see. It did not interest me, because Man Ray’s photographs are more about a literary or a cultural model than something I am interested in.

RBL: Another photographer described you to me as “The Anthony Gormley of photography”?

AF: (laughs) That is nice. No, I am not the Gormley of photography. Gormley is a figure person. The human figure is his material. A lot of my work is playing around with ideas to do with abstraction and the figure.

RBL: Your photographs do not foreground the personal.

AF: In my work I want to have something that is not mine. I am desperate that there is something that is not mine. If everything is mine, it is so narrow. Once the artist makes a mark, it is all about the ego and it is very hard to make a mark that transcends that and thus is universal or not limited. I think Pollock could do that, he made that mark and he used gravity. To step aside. I think this is public work.

RBL: Is music important to your work?

AF: I love music. If there is one piece of music that interests me in every way it is Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa.