Artist Lucy Raven on her creative process
Artist Lucy Raven on her creative process
A conversation with this acclaimed visual artist, whose work encompasses image capture technology, material transformation, and the mythology of the American West.
Lucy Raven is one of the most fascinating artists working today. In her moving image works, the camera is not naturalized as solely a device that's capturing footage. It's a protagonist, and its mode of capture is part of the content and the questioning.
Her breakthrough 2009 work, China Town, a 51-minute photographic animation made from over 7,000 digital still photos, follows raw copper ore on its journey from a mine in Nevada to its ultimate use as copper wire in China’s power grid. What seems on the surface to be a documentation of process ultimately reveals a deeper story of globalization and the complex relationship between humans and the natural world. She’s continued to explore these themes, and the technology of motion image capture itself, in her recent work.
Originally from Tucson, Arizona, Lucy lives and works in New York City. Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and featured in solo exhibitions at Dia Chelsea (New York) and Serpentine Galleries (London) among many others. I spoke with Lucy about her creative process, and the connections between her various works.
Gary:
It seems like with every project you do, you're utilizing a different medium: drawing, 3D video, high-speed photography, sound, stop-motion animation, etc. If you had to say what the thread was between your various projects over the past 15 years, what would it be? Do you see a thread?
Lucy:
I'm so invested right now in thinking about the connections between the works in this trilogy I've been working on for the last six or so years, and I can see aspects of that that connect to earlier work I’ve made. One way I've thought about this body of work—moving image installations and related sculptures, photos, and drawings)—is that it's a take on the Western. The first moving image installation was Ready Mix, and the second was comprised of two companion films, Demolition of a Wall (Albums 1 and 2). I'm just starting production on the third.
Unlike most Westerns, these works don’t foreground a character or a biography or traditional three-act narrative structure. The conditions that I'm interested in thinking about in relation to the genre of the Western are material and physical, meaning geologic, geodynamic and infrastructural. How material undergoes state changes through extreme pressure and force, and the cycles of violence that emerge from that, alongside cycles of development and destruction.
I’ve come to think about the genre of the Western—maybe increasingly it could just describe what we think of as Western civilization, but here specifically in terms of the Western United States—as less to do with the familiar tropes of Cowboys and Indians, or some lone figure on horseback riding through Monument Valley, and more about the invention, annexation, and protection of property. Rather than the ubiquitous gunfight scene—though today that’s become absorbed into a kind of unrelenting backdrop—I’ve been thinking about the genre as described by the transformation of land into landscape, the creation of private property, and the protection of that property by the police. These delineations evolved through the end of the 19th century through today alongside the development of photography and moving image capture technology, so the two are very much intertwined.
I’ve been thinking about the genre [of the Western] as described by the transformation of land into landscape, the creation of private property, and the protection of that property by the police.
I can look back on earlier projects of mine that reflect this, even if the ideas weren’t articulated in exactly this way. I imagine it stems in part from growing up in Arizona, then moving to New York and looking back at that Arizona through images. I felt a certain sense of displacement there even as a kid, but at the same time I felt and still feel very connected to that part of the country, particularly the way the mountains square the city and form a kind of rectilinear horizon, one that improbably continues to unfold as you drive up to and past it.
Gary:
You mentioned the idea of your work being about the transformation or state change of materials. In a project like China Town, it's overtly about that, and I can see a direct line between China Town and something like Ready Mix, where you're observing these processes (smelting copper or making cement) and the people who are doing it. But with your test pattern works or your 3D animation works, I find it harder to fit them into that theme.
Lucy:
Well, in a way, Curtains, the 3D installation you’re referring to, is a kind of 21st century sequel to China Town. China Town tracked the exporting of raw copper ore from a pit in Nevada, up through Utah and through the port of Astoria, Washington, overseas to the port of Nanjing in China, and eventually to a city in Anhui Province where it was smelted, refined and turned into the wire used primarily to empower their rapid urbanization. In Curtains, the raw material being exported abroad—to China again, but also to India, the UK, Canada, and elsewhere—are raw files, digital assets needing visual CG effects for Hollywood films.
This is very labor intensive, frame-by-frame work, and films are cut into small sections and exported to the lowest bidder for the most cost saving combination of low labor costs and high tax incentives. Like the raw copper ore, these files—often in the films I was tracking, images of backdrops or landscapes whose characters were shot on green screens in America—are sent off to other countries to be processed and recombined. So, I saw those as connected, and in a way what made that global 3D work possible (besides the lack of a global CG workers union) was the partially copper internet lines that allow for rapid uploading and downloading of those assets.
The test pattern works, like RP31, came out of trying to understand how to look at 3D images and how they were calibrated, and just trying to even understand how they operate on the space between your eyes and your brain. With a stereoscopic view you have essentially two streams of information, the way our eyes are each taking in a slightly different view of the world. The 3D camera simulates that with two lenses, and then our brain, in some way we still don't completely understand, is able to put those together to create the illusion of depth. So, in the case of Curtains, what was so striking was that the process being outsourced was to convert films shot in 2D with one camera into stereoscopic 3D outputs, essentially creating a synthetic second-eye view for every frame of the film in an elaborate process more akin to old school animation than filmmaking. They’re making up that entire other information stream from the one they have. I came to see it as another installment of the global industrial process I’d been investigating in China Town.
But I started collecting the test patterns from projectionists all around the country, people who’d held onto them even after the projectors they were meant for became obsolete, just because they liked them. These formalist images were meant for a projectionist to stare at while they adjusted the projector. They were printed on loops of film that were threaded through the projector—each frame of the loop the same single image. Once you loaded the loop and turned on the projector, you’d have a steady picture to make adjustments in relation to.
These images are very specific—each a kind of hieroglyphic instruction manual for how they are meant to be seen correctly—stand-ins for the film that would be projected after they'd served their function. In that sense, the test patterns chart shifts in the standardization of image reception. I started wondering how quickly your eye could register them, how quickly your vision could be registered by them. I built a kind of stroboscopic composition, an animation that used the single frame, rather than as the basis for a loop, as one interval of a more complex composition.
Gary:
Do you find yourself moving organically from one project to the next, just following stuff you're interested in, and that opens up another door? Do you feel it's very much rooted in the process of the previous works?
Lucy:
I do. I find there's an undulation where at certain times, especially after finishing something that I've worked on for years, I go into a mode that's more about reading and watching and taking in information. But there's generally something unanswered in whatever I've just finished that seems to open up questions that eventually suggest the next thing.
With this body of work, there was a moment during the first months of lockdown in 2020 where I realized a lot of what I’d been working on, while it had seemed disparate—Schlieren photography and how to image shock waves, physical experiments with concrete, models built around fluid dynamics—it had a through line. They all had to do with pressure, force, and material state change. I realized the various directions seemed to organically organize into sections, loosely corresponding to solid, liquid and gas states. It became clear that this wouldn’t all go into one film, but three that were interrelated. These three moving image installations anchor what became a trilogy, alongside related sculptures, photography, and drawings.
There’s generally something unanswered in whatever I’ve just finished that seems to open up questions that eventually suggest the next thing.
Gary:
I'm always fascinated by how people make a living and how they sustain themselves doing creative work. I'm guessing that for a fine artist, it's a combination of things? I mean, you're doing these exhibitions and commissions, and there's grants and residencies and books and things like that, and teaching. Is it a combination of all that stuff, and has it changed over the years since you started working?
Lucy:
I think out of everything you mentioned, grants are the smallest piece, at least for me. I never really got into a groove where I was applying for grants. Of course, there are bigger grants out there to get, and I was given a grant last year that was tremendously helpful. So, it's certainly not to knock the grant thing, but that was never a major part of my ecosystem. Working on other people’s films or working at magazines, along with commissions and residencies, sales of work, and teaching have all been parts of it over the years.
Now I’m a professor at Cooper Union, where I’ve been the last six years. I have a good balance of my commitment there and my time outside the school. But as my work has grown in ambition and scale, it has also grown in resources.
Gary:
I can imagine. This happens to me when I have ideas for films, I'm like, "Wow, that would be an amazing film." But then immediately after that, I'm thinking, "That will take so much time, and so much money, and I can't even wrap my head around how to start it."
Lucy:
Yeah. I mean, I guess I usually don't turn it off there. I think I always start with the idea and then just see where it leads. Like the film I'm working on right now is probably... I mean, I started it maybe a year ago in pre-production, but I’ve only just headed out to the location for the first time last week on a scouting trip.
Gary:
This is the third part of the trilogy?
Lucy:
Yeah, it's going to be dealing with water and fluid dynamics. The second part was Demolition of a Wall (Albums 1 and 2), which I made in Southern New Mexico. I detonated explosives on this 40-square-mile explosives range. It's generally used by the Departments of Energy and Defense and the national laboratories to test energetic materials and urban warfare scenarios. I framed the explosions themselves out of the view of the camera, and filmed the shock waves they set off going through the landscape, using very high speed cameras, going up to 75,000 frames per second.
Gary:
Oh, wow. And these ideas started six or seven years ago? Like looking at ways to photograph and film material moving faster than the speed of sound?
Lucy:
Yeah! A long time in the making.
Gary:
Well, it's fascinating, because from everyone else's viewpoint, they don't see all that time and process. They just see the end result, not the many, many years of thinking and evolution of the work leading up to the point where it can be up on a screen.
Lucy:
True…
Gary:
Because if it was just about turning the camera on and letting it film anything for an hour... well, I guess that can work too…
Lucy:
Warhol. Warhol made it work! [laughs]
Gary:
Exactly! [laughs]
Lucy:
But since then, I mean, I don't know!
All images courtesy of Lisson Gallery.
Further info:
Lucy Raven at Lisson Gallery
Lucy’s website
I was very interested in what you guys had to say up until the point when you mentioned a piece of technology that can record a sequence of images 75 000 frames per second _ In The United Kingdom it is called a Phantom Camera and I have seen examples of it's practice with jungle research programmes of the creatures that hunt in the type of domain ...truly Wizard in operation !