Bell, Book and Camera
A FASTWÜRMS GRIMOIRE
"Bell, Book and Camera" by R.M. Vaughan, Spring 2007, pp. 72-78Wonder is the basis of Worship.—THOMAS CARLYLE
First, definitions, decodings: a grimoire is a magical text. Or, rather, a text that inspires magic, facilitates magical acts, a text from which magic can be worked. The words in the text contain no power in themselves—it’s all in the application. Remember this later, because it’s another way of explaining how art can be made from junk (and vice versa).
The most famous grimoire, Le Grand Grimoire—allegedly written in the early years of the 16th century, but probably faked by clever occultists in the 19th, or at least reconstituted from a mishmash of earlier, pre–Age of Reason spectral recipe books, not unlike the proverbial rabbit pulled from a hat and a coin under a silk cloth (and this is another art tactic to keep in mind for later, the witchery of the old switcheroo)—opens with the following teaser:
GRIMOIRE,
or the art of controlling celestial, aerial,
terrestrial, and infernal spirits.
With the TRUE SECRET of speaking with the dead, winning
whenever playing the lottery, discovering hidden treasure, etc.
Who could resist? No artist.
Without slipping too far down the righteous, cow-pie-packed, down-home mud hill of CBC-ish pronouncements on capital-A Art…isn’t that what even the humblest of us hackers and forgers and smelters and caricaturists dream of bringing forth—something unseen before, something poached from the world of air and light and, yes, infernality, something startling and grand? The lottery part is pretty sweet too, but fencing a treasure isn’t as easy as it used to be.
Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, the two-person art machine known collectively as FASTWÜRMS, are magicians of the first order, tacky as that might sound.
“Magician” is such a diluted word, especially lately, when holding your breath in an oversized water balloon or making an already near-absent supermodel disappear constitutes a magic act. But let’s reclaim the word for Kozzi and Skuse, who honestly are witches (yes, witches—Wiccans, neo-pagans, knife-in-the-salt-circle practitioners, pick your term—albeit, as Skuse reminds me, they “ain’t orthodox”), and let’s apply the august honorific to their magickal practice, apply it with abandon and lust, especially in consideration of their startling collection of post-millennial video concoctions—works of hypnotic power and freewheeling alchemical mixology, video art that (talk about supernatural!) people actually enjoy watching.
FIRST CONJURATION
Addressed to the furred and eiderdowned, the silent stalkers and watery night croakers.
Work with animals.
The old showbiz cliché is wrong, except for the part about kids— you can work with animals. You just need the right familiars.
Vultures give good profile. A bog swarming with peeping frogs is as swell as a John Williams score. To paraphrase the worn, distasteful porn-industry adage about “ethnics,” one cow is exotic, but a herd is a stoop-shouldered ghetto (a laconic, lowing ghetto, good to walk through and divide, like a Roman emperor parting the crowds).
And cats, well, cats are natural actors—you’ll never catch them inhabiting a space outside of the actor’s coveted “moment,” the performative zone. They couldn’t go elsewhere if they tried.
Kozzi: When I go outside to look at the moon or at spiders, I don’t have a camera in my hand. I don’t plan the animal behaviour. Our most successful works are ones where we’ve established a dialogue between cinema and what’s real, within our environment, which includes animals. Lots of animals.
Skuse: Putting our cats in our films is a perfect example of how we work from the pleasure principle. Pussy Necropolis, which stars four of our cats when they were kittens—that’s designed to give us pleasure forever. We bought our first digital camera to record the kittens, and the guy selling it to us was convinced, based on all the questions we asked, that we had just had our first child.
Kozzi: I can watch that film once a day.
Skuse: If we had the money, we’d be a witch version of Siegfried & Roy.
And how. Observe the chattering ravens and watchful vultures of 2001’s Red of Tooth and Kaw, a 28-minute trance “sky burial” ceremony enacted on video with axes, pointy hats, mesmeric, looped music, warlock capes, long walks in the tall grass, cats (there are always cats) and poached moments from the classic 1970s zero-population-growth propaganda film Soylent Green.
Sky burials are the traditional Tibetan way to go to glory, and are as gory as they are practical. After one expels one’s last breath, one is taken to a flat stone high in the mountains, hacked into beak-sized chunks and left to the delectation of vultures. No muss, no fussing with pits and linens and boxes. You’ve spent your life eating; you end it being eaten.
On the meadow-grass farm where FASTWÜRMS make their home, this cycle of eating and getting eaten is not an abstract concept. Their posse of tame, semi-tame and “barn” cats collectively kill off entire families of mice, voles and sparrows, plus the occasional sonar-impaired bat. A nearby community of vultures, keen to the abundant cat carnage, not to mention the limitless number of inattentive raccoons and too-slow porcupines that wait like a buffet by the roadside, regularly swoops down on the WÜRM farm to scavenge. The circle-of-death narrative practically writes itself.
But Kozzi and Skuse take what could be a subject for a pleasingly grisly TVO-style nature doc and turn it into a kind of performed diary—a farmer’s occult almanac, enacted via multiple and colliding cultural referents, of the ebb and (blood) flow of their country days.
Donning witch hats and flowing, operatic gowns, they march down long and winding gravel paths, axes in hand, chased by fat tabbies. The tabbies harvest mice, and we get to watch one poor squeaker chewed to ruddy bits by a fluffy orange darling. The vultures, knowing as monks, circle and spiral overhead, accompanied by spooky, remixed pop tunes. Kozzi and Skuse, in full witch drag and full witch mind, carry a human corpse (an actor, we assume) to a cozy, grassy glade and, without too much ceremony, proceed to make mincemeat for the waiting carrion feeders. It’s all so simple, this life and rebirth business.
And yet, as the periodic interruptions of snippets from Soylent Greenremind us, we have become so detached from the primal processes of death and disposal (the denizens of the horribly overpopulated future New York in the film do not realize that their main source of food, the title substance, is made from the harvested carcasses of their own friends and neighbours), so remote from natural cycles, that the actual guts of the matter, events we as humans should long be used to by now, are horrifying and fascinating when they should be as ordinary as shit.
Thus, the role of the many animals in the video is to reconnect us to our own base, dormant, yet ever-tingling survival impulses, and, more importantly, to reposition the dialogue as one not exclusively between us metaphor-drenched humans; to widen the scope of the discussion, so to speak, to the contributions of the feral and preliterate, to create unknowable spaces within the video’s transactions that are outside of the acculturated, the literary, the signifying.
We can watch animals, catch every whisker and fang with digital precision, but we cannot know their minds. Ever. Unless we rely on magic.
Kozzi: The other day I was listening to one of our videos where we filmed the swamp on our property, with all the frogs croaking, without watching it. There was so much information, so many languages being spoken! I had this epiphany moment where I was just completely absorbed by their talking. I really like the power of that. I know there is something there.
SECOND CONJURATION
Addressed to the besparkled, all lovers of luxuriant weaves, drag queens & grand hams.
Clothes make the witch.
Whenever I am about town and the topic of FASTWÜRMS comes up, people who know a bit about their work, or are acquainted with Kozzi and Skuse themselves, always ask me the same question: do they mean it?
Meaning: are they really witches? Or are the capes and caps just for fun? The answers, or at least my answers, are as useless as the questions: yes and no, and both.
I was brought up to understand that asking people intimate questions about their religion, faith and worship practices, or lack thereof, is impolite in all but the most cultivated and careful of situations. So, I will abide by my upbringing. But drag, the donning of costumes to tell glamorous lies and heartfelt truths, the performance of one’s self through transformational rearrangements of gender, costume (and custom), distracting mirrors and self-reflexive disguises…drag, I know all about.
Skuse: For the movies we play clichés of witches, because they’re already deeply encoded in the culture.
Kozzi: Being a witch isn’t all that glamorous in reality. It’s just a way of being in the world, of coping in the world. You can’t bring that into a film directly, through ritual…I mean, we’ve tried that in gallery spaces, and it doesn’t communicate—
Skuse: —it’s always co-opted and overmediated. And the other half of the do-they-mean-it question is: how would you know a witch is authentic? What context are you going to use to judge authenticity? But we enjoy the conundrum.
Kozzi and Skuse rarely appear in their videos not kitted up in witch finery. When they do appear sans robe, as they do so memorably in their 2005 Venice travelogue Stregha Gattini, they are usually unencumbered by thread. (In Stregha Gattini, the happy travellers take turns adorning their infrared-lit, tumescent body parts with expensive Italian fashion logos, rendered in cheap black Sharpie.) The message, then, is plain: the capes and cone hats are their second skins.
The textile fetishist, or any informed homosexual, notes, however, that the witch habits are not standard-issue, Stratford Macbeth cauldron wear. There’s tinsel in the tunics, flash in the hem. In ankle-length, metallic silver cloaks, the duo cast spells and bring familiars to heel. In plain blue-denim ceremonials (what the artist Luis Jacob calls “day drag”), the witches wander the sunny streets. And plush, poodle-curl black velvet is best for a day spent traipsing through the bright white snow.
So, while it remains ungentlemanly to ask blunt questions about others’ beliefs, questions about the performance of said beliefs are fair game, as all that glitter is clearly meant to convey that there’s more than a bit of Las Vegas in the broom and brimstone business.
Skuse: We play up the exotica of the country versus the city with the witch actions. A lot of people in the city have no idea what songs the frogs are singing in the swamp.
What Kozzi and Skuse offer is a vision of their own otherness, a series of self-portraits that invite the viewer in with blatant, near-pantomime theatricality while simultaneously marking the bearers of such finery as remote, almost alien interveners. We watch the witches enact mysterious rituals and hauntings and, unable to fully comprehend the mysteries of their actions, intentions or even the level of real-world devotion they carry, we shift our attention instead to their shimmering trappings, to the swaths of silvered fabric twisting in the whispering winds. Call it the Liberace strategy.
If Kozzi and Skuse are ever brought to trial by some clerical court for heresy, they can escape the stake by claiming it was all for fun. Real witches don’t wear lamé. Or do they? Understanding the delicious ironies (and loopholes and permutations and mirrored rabbit holes) of performativity at an almost biological level, that mercury-like uncertain certainty that only a performed, filmed reality can create, Kozzi and Skuse rewrite their own witch identities with each new video—playing actors and acting out play in an ongoing record of two lives spent in unimpeded flux between the spectral and the technical, the cultivated and the mystically divined, the rehearsed and the visionary.
They mean every gesture, they perform their meaning(s) of every gesture; there is no difference. It’s also, like any good piece of theatre, damned entertaining to watch.
Kozzi: The word “performance” is so completely loaded…a lot of our choices are based on where we’re comfortable. Maybe we’re just lazy, or we think we’re fascinating [laughs].
Skuse: I’d love to hire actors, but it’s so complicated. Where would we put them, out in the woods?
THIRD CONJURATION
Addressed to the shoplifters, pirates, samplers, information-stream fishers & hip waders.
A well-planned theft is a form of empathy.
Kozzi: We started remixing films with more regularity when we first moved from Toronto to the country and had no money. We could get VHS tapes out of the library for nothing, and we’d take a bad two-hour film and make it into a really good five-minute film. I think that’s everyone’s right, to remix a film the way they want. You paid for it.
Skuse: An audience today feels they own a film more than the producers. It’s an inversion of the Hollywood dynamic.
No FASTWÜRMS video is complete without a generous plate of rehashed Hollywood cabbage. Kozzi and Skuse watch old chestnut films the way the CIA scans satellite images of Iranian desert compounds. No actorly misstep is missed, no harmonic blast of soundtrack goes unheard (or unremixed), no lurid special effect wastes away. Kozzi and Skuse mine mainstream cinema for its unexpected contradictions, its unintentional moments of self-revelation, for the flashes and brief peeks into the underlying (and wildly conflicted) psychodynamics that fuel all attempts at mass communication. And then they fuck with the findings.
At Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s 2006 all-night art festival, FASTWÜRMS took over the University of Toronto’s Hart House basement pool—a glorious, neo-Gothic white cathedral dedicated to athleticism and good health—and turned the space into a psychedelic, decidedly unwholesome movie palace, broadcasting for the unwitting masses of toned, bright-eyed students a technicolour mashup of cinema’s most vivid depictions of hallucinations, freak-outs and hellacious visitations. The poor kids, all they wanted was a beer and a laugh.
Blending Dave’s journey into the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001with the isolation-tank dreamscapes from Ken Russell’s Altered States(two of the best, most long-winded psychic meltdowns in cinema history) with carefully culled fragments from less recognizable sci-fi and horror gems, Kozzi and Skuse demonstrated once again that lovers make the best thieves and, to paraphrase Thomas Carlyle, that wonder breeds wonders.
Kozzi: We approach video and film in a material way. I make collages. It feels physical to me. I don’t have much time for traditional narrative. We’re a bit distracted, distanced, from formal narrative threads.
Skuse: And, because we’re also running a non-stop identitypolitics narrative—
Kozzi: —That’s the mega-narrative.
The practice of sampling is, of course, as old as art-making. Everybody steals, everybody is stolen from. But Kozzi and Skuse approach their pocketed treasures with a deeper reverence than most postmodern cutters and pasters. They will watch a film literally dozens of times before selecting the exact moment, to the half second, that they want. They will repeat and repeat the borrowed narratives until, like a word that is spoken over and over until it is empty of meaning, the original context and content of the filmic swatch is nullified and the sample is given a new texture, a new glaze. And yet the viewer is always made aware that the sample is a sample.
In contrast with, for instance, the video work of Jubal Brown and his FAMEFAME collective, whose overriding purpose is to reduce Hollywood fare to single, negating blasts, FASTWÜRMS apply and reapply their samples until our brains automatically invest each particle (if for no other reason than the natural pursuit of novelty) with fresh readings and new stories. And yet we remain cognizant of the fragment’s existence outside of the remix—that it is a moment snatched from a beloved and, most importantly, respected, original work. FASTWÜRMS do not covet simply to convert, they covet to make new covenants.
Kozzi: Sometimes you don’t need them to identify the source film, and in some cases we take the more obscure parts of the film—the parts no one remembers—and in those moments it’s important for people to know the source film so they can see what we are pointing out.
Skuse: It’s our crazy kind of counter-ideological event, where we decide that a classic film has an undiscovered subtext that’s been there forever and is integral to the film, and therefore all we have to do is bring those subtextual moments forward. We remake the film according to our perverse presumptions, kind of like the way science-fiction films are based on large presumptions about the future, then we build editing rules based on our new tropes for reading the film. We project a new ideology onto the film.
GRAND CONJURATION
Addressed to the seasoned veterans & almsgivers, the makers of webs and tall tents.
Share your space and it grows.
FASTWÜRMS are first and foremost a collective. A collective of two, granted, but two that work like ten. It is impossible to tell who does what in this team. One suspects Kozzi and Skuse are less than certain themselves.
Skuse: Usually, we’re both watching a film and doing six other things, then some little sequence stands out, and we notice it, and we jump on it.
Kozzi: Then there’s the banal moments. Right now I’m looking at scenes of full moons in films. That’s the way it usually works—Dai will be watching for something else and I’ll be looking for another particular type of sequence…and then we both edit. But Dai likes to do the burning and interface.
Skuse: We just move project samples around from card table to card table.
Kozzi: And we test each film from each other’s perspectives— cranky morning perspective, coffee-anxious perspective, stoner perspective.
Collectivity informs not only their studio practice, but also the core thrust of their work. The videos are meant to be shared. Their aesthetic is anti-elitist, anti-corporate, gleefully inclusive. No matter how arcane the necromantic, cinematic or, for that matter, zoological references in their works, almost anyone can approach a FASTWÜRMS video and find a way in, make a particular and personal sense of what is sometimes a very private revelation.
Skuse: We’d like to design the ideal watching environment for every film we make, from what kind of carpeting to what kind of subwoofers to use, etc. House-party dimensions are probably the best for watching our films.
Kozzi: It has to be a physical experience. I’m not content to watch the films in a theatre space. I like to feel the movie through my feet, feel the bass; I need the body to be engaged, even if the engagement is distracting from the actual video.
Thus, the reason so many of their videos pass the 15-minute mark is that they want both to hypnotize the viewer and to make sure the viewer leaves with a full stomach. The videos are visual groaning boards, packed with fragrant treats.
Watching a FASTWÜRMS video, one always feels that the people who made it had a ball. (This is an illusion, Kozzi and Skuse will tell you as they recount horror stories of shoots gone wrong, editing calamities and uncooperative cats…but they are witches, after all, traders in illusion, and good sports.)
Kozzi: Our original style of quick-cutting our samples came out of the economy of working in Super 8, which is how we started making films, so it’s kind of natural that now that the technology has changed, so has our style. The samples are longer and fuller, shorter and faster, because they can be.
Skuse: Our more “endurance level” videos are about the dynamics of the presentation. At Nuit Blanche we had a 12-hour window: that was a unique opportunity to do a big, long video that people can slip into.
Kozzi: But the cutting is still fast. If you walk into an installation of ours and we’ve got a 28-minute tape playing, you’ll probably only pick up segments. We expect a certain fragmented attention to be paid. It’s also sonic, not purely visual. You don’t have to look all the time. We want our videos to have broader applications than stand-and-watch.
There is a generosity to Kozzi and Skuse’s video work that is grown, and then shared, via the extraordinary openness that characterizes both the structure of the videos and their presentation. The repeated motifs, samples and looping of music allow viewers to enter or leave the screenings at will, without feeling that they have missed some narrative clue. FASTWÜRMS videos are permeable texts, in design and intention.
Furthermore, and personally, I would argue that the flexibility and expansiveness typical of their videos stem from the gregarious, playful attitude Kozzi and Skuse bring to their chosen material (and practice). They are the primary stars of their own videos not out of vanity, but because they have a giddy compulsion to share what excites them, what they adore and their latest discoveries.
Skuse: The problematic premise for sampling is that any garbage film could hold a gem that is only five seconds long. But that keeps a window open for watching loads of junk films!
I have witnessed this generosity up close, in transactions between Kozzi and Skuse and their sometimes baffled public. And anybody who makes videos starring their pets is obviously not worried about revealing too much on-camera.
Kozzi: Do we have an agenda, a plan? Technical mastery is not going to be what takes us anywhere—it will be all about who we are, what we do and where we live, and the fact that we’re willing to keep going. What we make has to be open, part of a communion. Why not?
Skuse: And, ultimately, everything we make has to pass our pleasure test.
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