GAMES IN THE WASTELAND

Nana Melkonyants in conversation with the artist Nicholas McArthur

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nana Melkonyants: You are an artist based in London and Sofia. What brings you here to Sofia?

Nicholas McArthur: I’ve lived here for seven years, I think, and originally, I came because my girlfriend, who is an animator, is Bulgarian. We were really sick of very intense life in London. So, we came here, and I kind of really fell in love with the lifestyle. Also, I was really drawn, as in the films, to a lot of these kind of strange liminal places on the edge of the city. I liked exploring them and finding sort of abandoned factories or piles of rubbish, and that was interesting to me. I think that there is an interesting mood in Sofia, in general in Bulgaria and that reflects in the art scene. And I like how people have time here to hang out. I like the hospitality here, things like, you know, taking your shoes off when you’re in someone’s house.

Nana Melkonyants: You said that you really interested in the wastelands of the city. What do you think in general about Sofia’s architecture?

Nicholas McArthur: I’m not necessarily interested in architecture, but I think that when I made the films, I didn’t really want to set the film in Sofia specifically. It was more that I was seeing these strange places that are full of objects which people are throwing away, and it’s not at all unique to Sofia; it’s probably more all over the world. And if the country is rich enough, then they send it to China, and now China doesn’t even take the trash anymore. So, it seems like there’s all this stuff, that we kind of went from a world where people didn’t have enough things to having too much. All this stuff is thrown away. So, I wanted to find a way to play a game, like literally just to play in these spaces. For me, it is a serious game, but it’s a game – of dressing up and playing and imagining what lives these things had before. I think that’s what brought me to making films generally. There’s something extremely exciting about the process and also to push myself into a place where I would do things I wouldn’t normally do for any other reason. So, it became a reason to go to these places and it became a reason to explore and to really look at these objects and to spend some time with it.

Nana Melkonyants: If I understand you clearly, you had the idea of making these films – “Don’t bury my heart here” – that you are showing in Structura, when you were exploring the city, right?

Nicholas McArthur: Well, actually, I first did a show at the art space Æther and for that show, I drew a lot of these places. I made this installation with drawings of rubbish, but it didn’t seem to be enough somehow. So, when I was making the film, I wanted it to feel like it was real, and that’s why I have a costume. The idea was that when you watch the film, you’d believe in the magic of it. And you do that because you think that this is a real person, maybe… like in “Moby Dick” or in “Dracula” with this diary entry or in many, many books that have this way of first-person speaking. I wanted it to feel like that because it means that this strange device that this guy has may actually work. It’s a trick to make people believe. The character is always being filmed on a tripod, so he walks in, after he presses record, and then stands in front of the camera. It’s using a lot of this kind of YouTube-type approach to filmmaking so it’s looking at those social media films where you have a more personal connection with the character. And the places that I’m shooting in, everyday places, that are not especially beautiful or special at all, and I try to make these things look important.

Nana Melkonyants: Like you said, your films are made in this YouTube-do-it-yourself style. Is it the reason why you choose this style, to immerse the public into this atmosphere of a personal story?

Nicholas McArthur: I mean they’re not exactly my stories. I think there are two things that are happening – the first is that I’m pretending to be somebody else; it’s a version of myself, it’s a character. But the reason I want to do that is because it allows me, I guess, to be very sincere and very open in a way that I would struggle to do as myself. So, it’s kind of because of the costume… I can become some version of me, so that’s the first thing. Also, there’s this thing about authenticity, feeling real and feeling like the stories are real. I guess there’s a balance between, on the one hand, being very sincere, very honest, and on the other hand, the lie, which is the fact that I am pretending. There’s also comedy to the whole thing, but the comedy is in balance with these things; it’s a little bit over the top, it’s holding that kind of comedy back a little bit so it doesn’t become too funny, just as an uncomfortable feeling.

Nana Melkonyants: Your characters are really often searching, going through the city, running somewhere, and as I was watching one of your more recent films, it gave me a sense of anxiety. Is it what your intentions were?

Nicholas McArthur: I think there’s a loadiness and anxiety also in the film that I’m showing here, where the character is somebody who has a difficult relationship with the city. I guess the films are trying to express that sense of being pushed around by a place and being affected by an environment.

Nana Melkonyants: In this film of yours that I saw with the guy going through the city, for the whole duration of it, I was wondering – where is he going? Why is he so uncomfortable? What is going on with him? I was really empathetic, and I really wanted to understand what’s in his head.

Nicholas McArthur: Well, this film is actually a two-part film, both of them are three minutes. In the first film, he’s searching, he’s running away from something, we don’t see what it is. And it’s very much in his head. In the second film, everything is real; he runs past the people shopping, he is crawling on the ground. In the second film, these delusions, if they’re delusions, come into the real world in the form of this giant head that speaks to him, and he has this conversation, and he’s very confused afterwards, and he doesn’t know what to do. And this head kind of leads him into kind of questioning something, but it’s not clear what that is. In the last part of the film, there’s a song where he’s trying to work out his feelings, which is a bit like a Disney musical or something. Not in the way that it sounds necessarily, but kind of an arc where the character at the beginning is struggling, they’re like “I can’t do it, there’s no way I can get through,” – and then by the end of the song, they found some hope. So, there’s something about that ambiguity about not knowing why somebody’s running away, which is interesting to me as well. And I think that with YouTube, especially the way the film is cut up into these scenes or trailers, it’s really interesting. And I feel like there’s a big development within the internet that’s made people able to make big links and big jumps and understand things without really always giving all the information. So, speed is kind of an important thing, so I’m making a series of films now, and they’re all like one minute or three minutes. And I think it’s an interesting timeframe to work with because I think you can hold somebody for that time. That’s a really important thing when you have this, yeah, three minutes, if you can do everything in that – it’s great. And that’s quite a long time to spend with something, especially in the gallery contexts.

Nana Melkonyants: You started as a 2D visual artist, as you say, and then you expanded your work to performance and video art. And now you work mainly with films. Which media is more powerful to you?

Nicholas McArthur: I did my performance work when I was very early on, but I think what happened was that I found that being an artist would be exciting, and you do things you wouldn’t normally do. The process of being a 2D artist is to spend a lot of time at home or in your studio by yourself, but I wanted to do something that felt more exciting. With the film I feel like I’m in Hollywood, running along with somebody filming me. In the film that I’m showing here, every moment of doing it was really exciting. I think that’s what it is for me, it is doing something that is like finding a way to play with the world, even if that is going to a horrible place, and yet to find some way to play there. It gives you a way to relate to it, and games can be serious as well. The process of dressing up and being somebody allows that game to be more real and it gives you joy and excitement of doing something kind of weird. And that’s what 2D never really gave me.
I should say that for this film, the idea was that all of the objects have voices. And to make the voices, I wrote this big text, very long, with different sentences, and I asked friends but also just people on Facebook, if they might read these things out. I asked people to choose the sentences that they found to be the most resonant, things that felt that they were important to them, and then I listened to the recordings, and I chose the ones that sounded the most sincere. There’s a mobile phone, for example, that’s talking about the day that it was stolen, and my friend Alice, who actually lives in Bulgaria, she did the voice, and this voice of her saying, like: “‘Everything changed on that day…’’. I was trying to find some connection with what’s being said and the way that she’s saying it. And then I was looking for things that would fit right. And for example, Valentina Sciarra’s line was: “I had sex with him once, and it was the worst experience of my life.” So, my idea was then to connect that with a vacuum cleaner. I mean it’s a joke, but then the idea that this vacuum cleaner might have some feelings, the funny becomes strange or the funny becomes weird.
I think that as the project evolved, the connections became stronger, in the second film the objects are really speaking about how they feel. For example, there is this microwave which inside is splattered with food, and it’s mainly just talking about how depressed it is, how bad it feels, and how nobody wants to listen to it talk. The objects do have this presence. I mean people used to give objects names, like their swords, for example. I think that largely our world has denied those histories or where they come from objects. Because to fulfill our capitalist world of disposable everything, because it’s convenient to forget that things come from places. It’s much easier if we don’t have to remember because otherwise, we might continue to buy. I don’t think that my work is political, but I did want to look and frame around the culture of using rapid disposal of plastic, piles and piles of just junk everywhere. It’s just the waste of life, waste of materials, and waste of stories. All of these things have power and they have histories. So, I wanted to get across that.

Nana Melkonyants: While you were talking, I already felt that I have compassion for these objects. Was it your intention?

Nicholas McArthur: Yes, absolutely. Just to change the perspective a little bit. But again, through the game or through the magic of it. It’s like the trick, you ask “what if…” and if you go along with it, you might feel something. The character is a very sensitive, overly sensitive person.

When I was making this film, I was watching this documentary “Grizzly man” by Werner Herzog. It’s about this guy, who went to Alaska to record bears, he made his own movies there, he’s something between an eco-warrior and a TV-presenter. Actually, it’s very similar to what people do now on TikTok, I guess, but he went to live with the bears for 11 or 12 Summers, and then he got eaten by a bear at the end of this story. The thing that is fascinating about these films and why he was interesting for my character, was that he is so emotionally connected to the animals, he thinks of them as his friends. There’s a fox in one scene that steals his cap, and he was like: ”Why would you do that? Why’ve you taken my cap?”. He’s got a name for the fox and he gets very upset. There is that extreme sensitivity that I wanted in my character. Someone who’s too sensitive for the world and he’s made friends with objects.
One other element of the film, which is important to me, is when the character is listening to this machine. There’s a lot of static and interference, it’s like coming from some other place through this instrument. It’s like a metal detector or old radio or radiation – you need to catch it. Through the radiation there’s something coming like they’re recordings from the past. This was really important for me, the idea that he’s not able to speak to the objects but rather catch their voices. It’s like the objects are holding this thing within them, maybe their last memory or maybe just some essence of something, which is coming through. Like ghosts almost. And that’s what they’re all saying: this is how I felt at this moment or this thing that happened to me… it’s almost like overheard conversations on the train.
I wanted to create a poem that would be made up of lots of voices, to give voices to things that don’t have voices.

Nana Melkonyants: Do you compose the music for your films?

Nicholas McArthur: I do. Well, actually, for this piece, a friend of mine – V Turner made the music for the end of the second film, but generally I deal with the sound. And there was a challenge to try and make the voices sound like they’re inside. I work a lot with the acoustics of the sounds so that the voice sounds like it’s actually in the place rather than something that’s edited on. For example, there’s one scene where the character is trying to adjust the device and sound there is really important because of all the buttons that he pushes. The machine is actually just a cardboard box with foil on it, so it doesn’t really work.

Nana Melkonyants: Your art was described as dark or rough in some way. But now when you’re talking about the whole idea that is behind it, I personally see it very bright. After all, what is your point of view about the world we live in?

Nicholas McArthur: I see the world we live in as being with many problems, and I think that we all know that, and that’s very frightening. In my work, I sometimes look for a way to kind of work with that or just to be able to sit with that. Not because I believe that my work is going to change the world or change how anybody thinks about it, but more as a way to just acknowledge it. To say “these places exist”.