Exhibition Walkthrough: Ericka Beckman and Claire Gilman on Power of the Spin
Claire Gilman:
So welcome everyone. So nice to see you here this cold evening. My name is Claire Gilman. I am the former Chief Curator at the Drawing Center, now the Acquavella Curator and Head of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library. I'm also the curator of this exhibition, "Ericka Beckman: Power of the Spin." And I'm very excited to be here tonight with Ericka who is going to guide us in a tour of her show here.
Ericka is known primarily as a filmmaker, and she started making films... I think her first film dates to the late-1970s. We don't have drawings of her first film here, but we have drawings of her second film and so we're going to begin with that second film. And her films are characterized by a kind of handmade approach, guess you could say. She has consistently made her own props and sets for her films and that's a very important part of her process.
She also has worked exclusively in film, has not made the transition to video, which I think is also fundamental to her aesthetic. And her interest in a sort of theatrical sensibility generally, which I think goes into her handmade approach and the fact of her making her own sets. Often when she shows her films, she will show them in a expanded installation. We're not doing that here, but she will include props in a sort of theatrical setting for her films.
But from the very beginning, Monica has also been equally involved in drawing, and drawing is a fundamental part of her process and part of her figuring out, you could say, what she wants to do in her films, both in terms of the subject matter and in terms of the visual presentation. And she works in drawing in many different ways ,and you'll see a sampling of the different ways that she uses drawing here. Most of these drawings on the walls were made... They would be considered to be preparatory drawings for the films. I think the only drawings that were made after the films are the Cinderella drawings where she went back and made... Which are behind you, and we'll get to those, made these large-scale drawings from her sketchbooks.
But as you can see, her preparatory process is varied. So she will make both large-scale drawings and these smaller drawings, which I believe come after the large drawings. So that's quite an interesting part of her process. She sort of first works things out on large scale, then moves onto the smaller scale when she has a better sense of the different scenes in the film and makes what are really classic storyboards.
Together with these drawings, which span, as I said, her second-earliest film to her most recent film. We are showing two of her films. We are showing her most recent film, which has not been shown before, which is called STALK. It's based on Jack and the Beanstalk, and it came out of a performance that she did at Performa a few years ago, and also an even newer experimental animation, I guess you could say, that is a study for an upcoming film on Rapunzel.
Just to say a bit about the types of subjects that Ericka works with, you can already get the sense she works a lot with fairy tales, Jack and the Beanstalk and Rapunzel, but really she's interested in... I think the reason for her interest in fairy tales, and she'll speak a bit more about this, is that she's interested in storytelling conventions and the ways that we make meaning of the world through these kinds of conventions and tropes. So she's also very interested in game playing and how we use games both to follow rules and to break those rules and how they become a sort of mediator between ourself and the world.
So I think I will stop there and turn things over to Ericka who will take us on a sort of mini chronological tour. If you want to please, I think we would welcome questions if people have them. We may may not be able to take all questions as we're trying to keep this also moving along, but Ericka will also be around afterwards to talk with people if people have additional questions.
Ericka Beckman:
Thank you, Claire. Okay, I'm on. Okay, so that was a cool introduction she said. Okay, so we're going to start. I think what I want to do is explain the wall, which is right here. This is the first time I picked up drawing in 1979 after coming to New York after grad school. I basically was not interested in painting, although I had that kind of traditional art school education that one has in the Midwest where the faculty are Bauhaus trained and came down from Chicago to St. Louis. So I wanted to make a break with two-dimensional work when I realized that conceptual work was much more interesting to me.
So I came to New York and started to look at dance, for the most part dance and performance. And at the same time, I had started to make these Super 8 films that were basically performance pieces that were just recorded recording on video and then captured by Super 8 camera on the video screen. The reason to use film at all at that point in time was to be able to collage the image. And I used a Japanese camera that doesn't exist anymore, called the Fujica [inaudible 00:06:50] that you put in a little cassette, like a little audio cassette, and it allowed you to go forward and backwards and forward and backwards over the film STALK many times. So I was able to combine animation and live-action and work with different timestamps, meaning working with sped up action, animated action, props as people, people as props, objects and so on, a very plastic fluid way of working.
But I hit a crisis, which I was trying to figure out what is the relationship of language and symbol formation to action. I didn't want to be a performance artist, although that was my interest and that's the kind of dialogue I was having with other people. But I wanted to use the film camera itself because of the magical things that can happen in the film camera with these things like multiple timestamps in the frame, different types of images combined together with performance. So someone that I was working with told me about Piaget and I went deep into the study of cognitive science with Piaget about how we learn based on our physical actions, the interactions in the world, and how languages, this very top labeling thing that happens after a long physical process.
And as a child with brain development, there's all these stages where you learn different things at different times. I was part of the generation that is known as the Picture Generation. These were all my friends, but I was involved in a kind of discourse that was very, very different, although my interest in using very pop images or things that were from television, that kind of situation was the basis of how I would present the work or present the image in the work.
So anyway, what we have here is the second film. So these are the drawings. I was trying to make a film that dealt with rule formation. Is a private rule any different than a socially-acquired rule? So this is a puzzle, a problem, and I wanted to work it out in film. And film for me was a means of working out puzzles and questions. So I did this film in California with Mike Kelley, it's called The Broken Rule. And basically the drawings that you see are me trying to figure out how to do a sports game that involves teams playing against each other. Whatever you see up here doesn't show up in the film. And that's probably really important because the idea is that the drawings are ways of thinking that eventually somehow or another preserve the energy of what I'm trying to capture, but then they get translated into something else that becomes a film.
So for three years I worked on these Super 8 films. This is the second one. The third one is actually the yellow wall, which you see over there. That's a storyboard that I made for exhibition. There's quite a difference.
Claire Gilman:
That's the only one you've made like that, right? A storyboard for exhibition?
Ericka Beckman:
Yeah. That was a storyboard based on a storyboard and it was for an exhibition in 1981 in New York, not in a gallery, but in a public performance space, I believe. The bulk of the work that you see in the room happens right after the Piaget films. And I'm just going to take you around, there's a whole bunch of drawings here. So about 1982, I was determined based on this film to work with game structure, period. I just wanted to work with games. The reason is because narrative and game share a lot of attributes. And also because of my interest in action as not only a model of behavior, but a model for thinking so that you could... If you look at action, you understand what that person doing and maybe what they're thinking. That allowed me to really commit to making game work.
What Claire has chosen in this gallery, actually a very fundamental work that has stayed with me for many, many years, and is part of my process even now, in that I'm still... I've grown and learned, but I'm still very attached to the gameplay as a subject. So I think I'll start here. So this film is called You the Better. It was a 16-millimeter film. So my friends were telling me you had to move out of Super 8 and do something that can be distributed and go theatrical and all of that stuff. And of course a lot of friends of mine at the time were moving to California to be part of the industry. And I, on my own course, decided to stay. But it led me to have to think about more people, more image, bigger. And the real world as a space to work in, because working in Super 8 is liminal. It's a little very vague form, very quiet. And so I thought, I was thinking, "Okay, I'm going to work with more people and I was going to incorporate the world somehow."
This is a very complex film. It is based on games from chance games all the way to strategic sports. At the heart of it is I was thinking about chance, what does it feel like to play chance games, like dice games, gambling games with chance. And then how does that differ from playing competitive sports where you are a team and you have to coordinate and think of strategies and you're against rules? So I had this whole span of games that I wanted to represent, but more importantly, I wanted to think about chance as something other than the cause of chaos. I thought of it more as positive and transformative, that chance can allow things to change. And so I used chance not only as a structure in the film itself in terms of how I directed people and how I made the film, but I also... It was a subject. So it began the film and end the film.
All of these drawings are me trying to figure out if I'm going to work in a amusement park, am I going to build my own game platforms and have people play games? So this one, for instance, the good one to start with is I'm thinking of a disk on the ocean. The ocean is turbulent, there's a storm, there's chaos, there are people that are trying to balance. So there's a struggle going on here trying to write and balance the board. And that's it, there's nothing more to it.
Claire Gilman:
At that point. You don't know what the film is going to look like beyond that?
Ericka Beckman:
Uh-uh.
Claire Gilman:
You have no idea, this is just your starting place?
Ericka Beckman:
I'm starting with these really philosophical ideas and then trying to figure out how to picture them. Of course I'm thinking, "Okay, maybe it's the ocean that I'm going to be with." This one's another example. There's a cart with workers. So workers, play, labor, all fundamental basis of my work. This work activity is disrupted by a broken wheel. So things are now out of balance. What happens? They try to correct the balance. They're in the process of trying to keep the work moving forward, but some people abandon it, they can't. It's all askew, so chaos.
This one, this again features the rotating board, but now there's a column in the center. And what I'm thinking of here is what happens if you change your point of view? Not only are you on the game board playing with the rules of the game, but then you get above it to see what else's going on in the game. So it's about taking a different vantage point. And this becomes part of the film.
Another one here is a amusement park, of course with a Ferris wheel that's a spinning rotational mechanical device. Ocean comes in, again the ocean. It's disrupting the playground, but the wheel itself decides to turn in the opposite direction and empty the fairground of the water and correct the chaos. By here we're looking at finally gameplay drawings where I'm using characters. And this motif has suddenly stabilized. I've got the rotating roulette wheel, I've got the ball on the roulette wheel, I have the physical action not knowing where it's going to go.
Claire Gilman:
What are these blocks here, I'm just curious, that are kind of going over this figure's face? What is happening there?
Ericka Beckman:
To me that was money. So I'm beginning to think about betting on sports. I think if we look at this one, which is really far away from a lot of you guys, but down. At this point I'm thinking about chance and I'm making a character that is a representation of chance. So while you have the fairground, the worker in the fairground creating the job of getting the cart to where it needs to go, the motif of the Ferris wheel is in there. The direction of where they're going is led by chance. And this is the chance, the Michelin character, design of Michelin. But anyway, this guy ended up becoming the center prop of the film, which is in the roulette wheel. In the film, there is a spinner, and the spinner is a character designed like the Michelin man that spins and ejects the ball. By a certain point somewhere in here, we're going to have to walk back.
Claire Gilman:
Yeah, we actually. Because we have the storyboards, that's right.
Ericka Beckman:
Yeah.
Claire Gilman:
In the vitrine, sorry.
Ericka Beckman:
So you get your exercise.
Claire Gilman:
Yeah.
Ericka Beckman:
What we have in the vitrine here are three things. This notebook is concept boards. So while I'm doing these big drawings, I'm also trying to develop a sequence. So sequence is very different than an image, sequence involves logical structure, and so I'm thinking of gameplay with the certain motifs that I've established. Eventually between these drawings and this notebook here, I solidify what's practical and what can be made for a film. And so at the same time, I've decided that the film is going to be about gambling, and it's going to feature the triad struggle between the house, the players and their strategies and what they think they're supposed to do, and chance.
I'll go back and say the chance is the process that I use for the film and that I filmed action players in my studio and I had them on a rotating stage, had a motor built with a platform that rotates, it shows a car. And I had them both move in a circular fashion and then also be on the periphery moving in a circular fashion. And they're facing the center of the roulette wheel and the roulette ejects a ball, and they are hitting a target, which is a Monopoly-style house. And they don't really know that they're hitting it or not. So I'm asking them as a director, I'm saying, "Play the game that you play," that was like dodgeball. And then, "This is where we're going to start and do whatever you feel like doing while we're playing dodgeball." And then I animated the targets or the Monopoly houses over, and these chance things happened where they hit it or didn't hit it, where they reacted positively or negatively to their action, etc. That was gameplay in making the film.
So to get back to the column right here, one character after playing this game, and first of all, it does start with simple little dice games and then moves into team sports. But in the middle of the first team sports section, Ashley Bickerton who's now a character in the film, leaves the playing field, which is on the circular periphery, and goes to the center and stares past the players, past the targets, and sees the house in the background. So now we have this deterministic function in the game, which is that the house is controlling how many balls are ejected and where they go. If they don't hit a target, they go to the house. So now points are being accumulated.
I have to back up and I'm just going to say one thing that the film was really inspired by a California visit to a game in the desert called Jai Alai, which was at the time played by Mexicans in a pit very violently with a net over the top of the pit and bleachers with ranchers betting on the players. I saw real sports being bet on, and so that froze me into this idea that I would have a off-camera bettor. And so the off-camera bettor was never visible, it was just somebody laying down bets. And I always thought that that would be the way the audience would engage with the film is they'd identify with the bettor and hence the title.
Again, I was thinking about the struggle between determinism and free will and where chance plays in all of that. The last part of the film is, once Ashley is eliminated, the game then moves to a linear progression where these monopoly houses are up on a basketball court and they're playing basketball. Every time they make a point, a house is constructed on the court, the basketball background lifts and they move on to another court. So they're progressing and expanding the house. And so there you got your kind of capitalistic motive to keep moving forward in an expansionary versus this other type of motion, which is just cycling and recycling and pivoting and changing, but nonetheless not expanding.
Claire Gilman:
They are not breaking out. They are subject to two different kinds of rules. Either the [inaudible 00:24:37] being stuck on this circular motion, or when they do break out of that, they're still subject to this house. They don't have individual freedom.
Ericka Beckman:
They don't know it, that's the whole thing. And that was important for me was that nobody in the game knows what the house is doing. They're just playing by the rules. And in the last game that they play, the rules, they're just following, as sports people do, what they have to do to serve the bettor. And so they're just playing by the rules. The rules change on them in the last game, and finally change on them by a chance figure showing up that is the one-armed bandit in casino land. So the bandit asked for the balls to be sent to them, and therefore the house is emptied of the profits and the game ends. It ends in a balance of sorts where the house doesn't win, the players don't win, the bettor doesn't win, the chance wins.
Claire Gilman:
And this is the film, correct, Ericka, that you showed at Film Forum? I mean, sorry, at the New York Film Festival?
Ericka Beckman:
Yeah.
Claire Gilman:
Do you just tell that story very quickly because it's amusing?
Ericka Beckman:
Yeah, okay. The film played in the, I don't know, 55th or I forget when, New York Film Festival on. I think it was late 1983 or maybe '84, at this moment, I forget. But it played against Godard's Passion. And so Richard Roud, who did the organizing for the film festival at that time at Lincoln Center, put shorts before features. And of course my sports film really upset the audience. Number one, they were there to see Godard, and two, they didn't want to see sports on the screen. And so basically the film, if it got through, you can't stop a projector, they didn't. But nobody could hear anything after about 15 minutes because it was screaming, people were screaming in the audience. And so yeah.
Claire Gilman:
It's pretty amazing to think that even in 1983 work can have an impact like that, a negative impact like that, and that people still can't understand things.
Ericka Beckman:
Yeah, no, it's-
Claire Gilman:
Takes a while for people to understand things.
Ericka Beckman:
It really wasn't until much later in the 2010s or so that younger curators and audiences found the work and said, "Oh, it's totally understandable, get it now."
Claire Gilman:
And of course now there's all this interest in gaming. And you think immediately, especially when you look at that final drawing, I think immediately of Squid Game, that one game in Squid Game where they're walking along that path and the glass breaks. It really looks visually like that. It really does to the point where I wonder if they saw that. But I think, yeah, there is this... Now we understand how integral gaming is to everyday life, to our lives in a way that maybe people didn't understand at the time.
Q&A