David Claerbout

OD: (Ory Dessau) David, we are having this conversation one month after the opening of your solo exhibition at Konschthal Esch, titled ‘Five Hours, Fifty Days, Fifty Years.’ The title points to the factors of time, endurance, duration and persistence in your work. Still, before we address this scope within your practice, I wanted to ask you to elaborate on the notion of virtual materiality that it draws upon. What is that exactly?

DC: (David Claerbout) It can be found in many of the artworks, in which I dig deeper into Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI). CGI is commonly associated with a misinformed view, the fable or mythos that there is the real and the unreal, or the not real, to which CGI belongs, while photographic imagery belong to the real, the index, etc. Like any imagery, CGI conveys to us, to our brain, a sense of the real. We are human beings, and like animals, we are believers. When we receive optical stimuli, we go in and engage with them, whether they are a painting, CGI, a game engine, or photography. From there, I extrapolated the idea of virtual materiality, which is not exclusively mine. Also referred to as ‘image reality,’ virtual materiality is always, already, on the way, in the middle, always becoming. It is not clear where it originated or where it is going. I find this very intriguing, especially in artworks like Oil workers, where I play with and respond to the foggy, misty situation described in its full title, Oil workers (from the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain. This was the caption accompanying the image I took from the internet. The language informs us about oil and water, or rain, and infects our vision in a Magrittean way, leading to the mixing of oil and water, which then, both literally and metaphorically (in virtual materiality, there is no difference), produces a third substance.

OD: A synthetic one.

DC: Oil workers is illustrative of much of the work I have been pursuing, where we encounter a strange infection between the language, or the linguistic, and the visual-optical. I really look for one to infect the other, much like a writer does, only I employ different tools.

OD: In Oil workers, language ceases to correspond to objects, which, in turn, are caught in constant transmutation, with no identity or distinctiveness. But the scene is also explicit, signalling the creeping disastrous reality of the climate crisis, as well as the industrial pollution, resource exhaustion and the exploitation of labour, characteristic of the way Shell Nigeria once operated and corporate capitalist ventures in Africa operate more generally.

DC: With this third substance, I was able to bifurcate between the title and the image. Both are equally strong. Through their bifurcation, I avoid assigning a political message to the work, which I didn’t want to do. Instead, I wanted to mute that message and bury it beneath the material. I wanted to give shape to this political muteness. The image easily lends itself to interpretations confronting the colonial and the post-colonial, but all these readings are deliberately muted.

OD: The transformative power of the virtual carries the scene outside itself, landing it on new ground. In the context of Oil workers, it depoliticises the scene. However, in Wildfire (meditation on fire) (2019–20), you equate the transformative power of the virtual with that of fire, loading it with a metaphysical dimension.

DC: Yes. Wildfire works on a similar level. We are in a similar technology. We design something on the PCs and in the studio, and at one point, we stop the motion, and let time continue, let something happen. And the time continuing after things are set on fire, after the tragedy, creates a space, an architecture. And then, to an extent, the work no longer functions as a film but becomes a proposal for a building, where one could walk from one place to the next in a pensive state. I am offering a simple, pensive state, which, for anyone who stays five minutes in that dark red space with the work, can grow into a meditative state as well.

OD: This is why you subtitled the work ‘(meditation on fire)’.

DC: It enabled me to go back and forth between this primitive state of fear and destruction and the pensive state of meditation. In fact, Wildfire is a metaphor for the brain, for thinking. I realised why we have such a well-developed neocortex with 21 to 26-billion neurons. Why do we manage energy much better than other animals? Because the human brain consumes twenty percent of our energy while at rest, which for other animals would be absolutely deadly.

OD: You metaphorise the operation of fire to human brain activity.

DC: From the beginning, I saw the blood vessels running through the cells of the brain of the white matter as smoke. They are energy. It’s an exercise on the metaphorical power of this idea; that our brain is energy and our energy is brain power.

OD: In your practice, the conception of matter is linked to the conception of time and duration. Many works in the exhibition transpire within a unique and vast temporality, ranging from the length of a lifespan to that of planetary rotation, geological periodisation or a historical epoch. Olympia (The real time disintegration into ruins of the Berlin Olympic stadium over the course of a thousand years) (begun 2016) is set to last for a millennium. The woodcarver and the forest (2025) is set to last for approximately thirty hours covering three different days over a period of thirteen years. Backwards Growing Tree (2023) was determined by the cyclical time of nature spanning five years and Bordeaux Piece (2004) is a thirteen-hour film defined in accordance with the rotation of the earth around the sun. These works, each in its own way, exist in real time, but within an elastic, multidirectional concept of time that undermines the distinction between past, present and future.

DC: I am thinking about psychological time, about the understanding of time in feature films, to which we are most conditioned, such as the psychological time of sequencing and the unfolding of events. It is like living the life of others, of the screen’s protagonists, as you follow their path. This approach amounts to a very narrow proposition. In this flux of images, there isn’t much space left for what Roland Barthes termed pensivité, such that the spectator is completely absorbed by the narrative. Most people will not accept a film that proposes a much more spacious, panoramic duration. At times, it seems to me that my works are made for the spaces in which they are shown, rather than for the spectators, as if I long for the loneliness and the emptiness of the exhibition space.

OD: In your most recent work, The woodcarver and the forest, you further employ the parameters of real-time or natural time. The work is a sort of research into the consequences, contradictions and paradoxes of the ‘return to nature’ trends in a cultural landscape of over-saturation and immersive mediation. It revolves around two figures, a solitary woodcarver and a forest that serves as his limited resource. The woodcarver is a bearded, pale, white man dressed as a lumberjack. He spends his days inside a neo-brutalist villa defined by a glazed floor-to-ceiling window wall facing the forest. From dusk to dawn, his sole, ceaseless activity is carving wooden spoons out of the forest’s tree logs. However, we do not see him felling trees, cutting them into logs or carrying them inside. He does not approach the outside, but sits behind the window’s glass screen, carving. The window is also a video screen, blocking, protecting, and filtering the world behind it. The film constantly shifts between the inside and the outside, tracing the hardly discernible depletion of the forest and the processing of transforming its trees into wooden spoons, until it is cleared.

DC: Let’s start with the tree. The tree is an icon. It is also always a witness, always older. What the elephant is for animals, the tree is for plants. It is this gentle giant standing there and being patient with others. So by definition, tree’s duration exceeds that of human life. This is the subject of the next work we are working on, in which I’m concerned with tree growth and active deforestation, two topics already appearing in The woodcarver, where I further explore yet another characteristic of the nervous system, the brain, namely, that of divided attention. Everything about our nervous system suggests that there must be a reason why life decisions are based on the back-and-forth between the two halves of the brain, the left and right hemispheres. Why is that so, and what can we learn from it? In The woodcarver, two proposals that are not supposed to coexist nevertheless exist side by side. In the work, I hint at deforestation and the industrial aspect of image culture, while also addressing aspects of wokeness and mindfulness as part of the culture industry.

OD: You show the inconsistency of the mindful approach, which is, in fact, another form of industrialisation.

DC: It’s another way of being preconditioned into a system of consumption and industry. And this is what we see. This is part of the principle of modernity; it industrialises as many areas of life as possible, including well-being, wellness and the relentless consumption and use of raw materials in favour of this industry, even when it looks like it is calming us down, soothing our mind, and helping us fall asleep better. We’re nevertheless still in the same relentless consumption method. And what I’m suggesting through the duration of The woodcarver, I hope, is the time of the clock. So, we have the real-time aspect, which effectively calms people down and brings us back to a sort of microscopic enjoyment of matter, while on the horizon is the relentless progress of time, industrially rolling towards the future, towards the end of the thirteen years it takes to process ninety trees, leaving a picture of the forest as consisting entirely of wooden spoons.