Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby
"Here is Everything"
Introduced by Anneka Herre
HD video, sound, 14'
"Here is Everything appears as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit. The two spiritual guides have decided to address humans via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the whole movie."
Anneka Herre: The most obvious place to start is with the title, "Here is Everything," which is also how our cartoon animal interlocutors from the future introduce the piece. So, we start out with a playfully bombastic claim. But what follows really is, in fact, exegetical or didactic in tone, with our narrators hitting the big questions: the existence of god, abjection and redemption, the problem of suffering and death—and attempting to set us straight on them. These have been recurring themes throughout your work from your earliest collaborative videos. But this time, it's not from the self-doubting, self-satirizing place of first-person confessional mode that characterized the earlier works. It feels almost purgative. Does "Here is Everything" mark a shift in or put a capstone on a particular trajectory in your practice?
Emily Vey Duke: You have really struck on what I think is one of the central problems with this work (for me—I think Cooper disagrees here). There is something self-righteous, sort of paw-shakingly fastidious, in the tone in "Here is Everything" that I am not into. I think it's because of the place I was in emotionally when we made it. We had just come through (or most of the way through) a storm in our personal lives. Tons of shit had happened, including sickness and heartbreak and very bad behaviour, and I was feeling like I had a lot to prove to make up for what had come before. I think the new voice you're noticing in this work—the lack of self-satire, the didacticism— is about wanting the work to erect a fortress around me, rather than cutting windows into my dark-but-funny soul.
And frankly, I think that cost the work a lot. I mean, I don't disavow it completely. There are a handful of moments I really like. And I certainly have no problem with being bombastic. Grandiosity is great! In the world of experimental media, we don't have much—we can't afford to hire professional actors or make elaborate sets or stage pyrotechnic displays. But we can be audacious in our aims. "Here is Everything" was our attempt to do that no holds barred, no punches pulled (odd that I chose a pair of pugilistic analogies). But I think my sense of precariousness in my personal life made me in fact do just the opposite. I pulled punches. I barred holds. I didn't do what I had always done before, which was confess that my bombast was bluster, that my audacity was that of a scrappy, mangy cat fluffing up her fur against a sleek and well-fed opponent.
Cooper Battersby: The grandiose claim that we are trying to explain everything is a joke! Maybe it's not funny, but it's an easy humorous wrapper to put around a bunch of very serious and depressing topics.
On the other hand I do feel more confident in my voice than I used to, and more willing to use it in a proscriptive manner. This is illustrated by the "advice for young women" segment of "Here is Everything." Previous versions of this piece were more personally revelatory. They were done in the vein of the self-satirizing personal voice used in our earlier works. Unfortunately the self-satire did not come through; rather those parts came across as un-aestheticized pain and resignation.
AH: What it means to aestheticize pain, both psychologically and ethically, and what that means about the role of the artist, is really interesting to me. On the one hand, it's ostensibly the job of the artist—to aestheticize—but also a burden. And then, also, casts art in an ethically complicated, and perhaps compromised, position vis-a-vis lived experience.
CB: It's interesting that you pick out "Here is Everything" as the end of autobiography in the videos. We have always talked about the shift away from autobiography as having started after we made "Being Fucked Up" (2001). That was when we became conscious of the strategies we could use (and were already using, in some cases) to shift the narrator to occupying a space between the author and the viewer—a character! But still, the characters spoke from a more personal place—as selves with whom the viewer could more readily identify, I think, than she or he can with the cat and rabbit in "Here is Everything." Those two—they speak from on high. In fact, they're kind of jerks—bossy, pompous, so sure they know—well,everything. Except when they say that humans think video is the best way to explain things. There, they clearly got their facts mixed up.
AH: There are other certainly some things which distinguish "Here is Everything" from the earliest works, which make use of a low-fi or cinéma vérité aesthetic. But with "Here is Everything," we have imagery which is explicitly, eye-poppingly beautiful and highly crafted. I think I remember filmmaker Jennifer Montgomery remarking that she saw your work entering a "baroque phase" around the time of "Songs of Praise" (2006) or "Beauty Plus Pity" (2009), which had to do with the role of beauty in the work. I'd be curious to hear more about how that role has changed in your work over time.
EVD: The more skilled we became with the tools we had, the more beauty seeped into the work. When we were first producing, in our early to mid 20's, we just didn't have a fucking clue how to make stuff. "Rapt and Happy" (1998) we made with Director, a now totally obsolete program for making interactive CD-ROMs. At that point, all we had at our disposal was minimalism. Later we started to learn about the technologies we could use. But proper film always scared the shit out of us. Maybe that's the final frontier.
Duke and Battersby, 2013
Thanks to: Scotty Slade, Evan Tyler