Every image you have of another person is a reflection of yourself

Herman Asselbergh talks to Manon de Boer

Let us start at the beginning. I remember black-and-white portraits in super-8. They were intense portrayals of young people.
I started making portraits in '96. The black-and-white film portraits were pictures of friends I had very strong memories of. I filmed them at moments involving deep concentration: Laurien reading a book or Robert playing the guitar. The viewer does not see what they are doing. All you see is a face that reveals very little or nothing. The frame is fixed and the duration of the recording is the length of a Super-8 film: the portrait is like a photo that has been placed in time . I made about ten of them and finally ended up with three I show very frequently: Robert, June 1996 (3 min.), Laurien, March 1996 (3 min.) and Laurien, April 1996 (3 min.).

And just like a photo or painting these film portraits are presented without sound.
Yes, because it's not a video film, but Super-8 film which usually doesn't have sound. The texture of the image gives you a powerful sense of duration. The viewer experiences a feeling of deceleration. This is what I was looking for: how I could incorporate the relationship between time and space, between looking and the expression of concentration in the face in the image. In 2001 I recorded Sylvia, March 1, 2002, Hollywood Hills (2.5 min.), a portrait of Sylvia Kristel in preparation for the film I made that year. She relates to the image in a very different way than Robert and Laurien. I asked her to engage in some minor activity, to smoke a cigarette. This is a typical filmic activity used to strike a pose.

The formal aspects of the Super-8 portraits – the length determined by the length of the film reel, the uninterrupted recording, the fixed frame, its similarity to a screen-test – inevitably remind one of Warhol's early films. I have the impression that like him, you too make portraits of 'models' from your own entourage. Who are you willing to portray? Does a sitter have to have the requisite star qualities?
When I started making my portraits I was not familiar with Warhol's films. It was only after many people had pointed out their similarity that I watched them. Now I too am aware of a connection, especially with regard to the relationship I have with the sitters. Their presence in the image is twofold. They are people with a photogenic character as well as being personal friends of mine. Looking at them through the camera I create both distance and intimacy at the same time.

Do you regard these silent portraits as documentary images, as truthful documents of real people?
I'm more interested in when a person actually becomes a portrait than in truthful documents.First of all, everybody is suitable material simply because I am interested in finding out how someone 'works' on film. It is only afterwards that I decide whether or not he/she has truly become an image, or whether the relationship between the concentration of his/her actions and the concentration involved in looking at it really works. If the person is too conscious of my eye and that of the camera, and if this awareness is too visible, then the portrait does not work. But it does have to be there to a certain extent as it is very clear it has not been filmed with a hidden camera. The issue is the other looking at the other. Initially the element of a viewer was not important, I did not even exhibit the work. In fact this proved to be an advantage: Robert and Laurien did not know whether others would ever get to see their portrait. In Sylvia's case it was never just between her and me. Whether or not there is a chance of it being exhibited to the public, she is always aware of a virtual audience.

You usually present these film portraits in an art gallery or museum. How do you expect the spectator to react? What feelings are you hoping to arouse in the spectator?
I want him to feel the difference between time and duration. I want him to ask himself what he is seeing, as the portraits only show what is on the surface. In the black-and-white portraits of Robert and Laurien you encounter their faces because their eyes are often downcast. Nevertheless you detect something that is on not in the face. I hope that while you are looking you become aware of looking and interpreting.

I also remember portraits without faces. A sound recording of a voice, without an image. An impression of a portrait, as it were.
In Switch (1998, 9 min.) I wanted to make a sound work based on the intonation of voices. When I moved to Brussels I barely spoke a word of French but I often found myself in a situation where people only spoke French. Nevertheless I had the feeling that I could follow what was being said by way of the intonation and the way in which people spoke. I am interested in the fact that information can be communicated not only through the word but also on other levels.
Alison Goldfrapp and I met one another through mutual friends in London in 1996. On that occasion she allowed us to listen to tapes of something that involved her own experimental work. You heard her singing words which appeared to be meaningful but in fact said nothing at all. I thought she had a wonderful voice and asked her to listen to a monologue of friends in languages she did not understand: Dutch, French, Spanish and Portuguese. After she had listened on different occasions I asked her to reproduce the monologues, and this became Switch. Her interpretation is a sort of impression of the original. In it I am able to recognise the original speakers by way of their special intonations.

Two years later I asked Alison to listen to a conversation between Annemiek and Sylvia on Los Angeles. This conversation was held in English, a language she understood, and when she had listened to it a few times, I asked her to reproduce the whole text from memory. The result is sounds in which one can occasionally distinguish a recognisable word. The recording is like the memory of a conversation in which you sometimes remember the sound of the voices or the cadence of the words more than its content. In The Alpha and the Omega Project (2000, 7 min.) you hear Alison doing her best to remember the conversation and her search for what has remained in her memory.

Interaction and participation with both your model and the viewer play an important part in your work. Here too I see a link with the work of Andy Warhol: he portrays people from his immediate environment so that the people on screen are often seated in the theatre. In any case much of your film work has an affinity with experimental and materialist films from the sixties and seventies: the physical presence, the slowness, the long duration and the way the viewer is invited to experience the projection more than the story itself. Or rather: to experience both the projection and the story. In Monologues and Shift of Attention you supplement the portraits with the words of the sitters.
For The Monologues (1997, 3 x 10 min. in simultaneous projection) I asked three friends – Dora, Chloé and Annemiek – to talk on a subject that interested them at the time of the recording on several occasions in the space of four months. Then I filmed them while they were listening to their own stories and their own voices. You see them listening while you hear their voices. Dora has just become pregnant and talks about motherhood. Chloé has just graduated and talks about making choices in life. Annemiek has just met her great love and speaks about passion and submission. I noticed that the way in which people talk about a subject in which they are deeply involved differs greatly, depending on their mood of the moment. This work gave me the idea of interviewing Annemiek over a longer period of time. She had just returned from Los Angeles and in any case has an iconic quality when you film her. She has, or rather acquires, star quality when she is in front of the camera. She is completely different when she is not in front of the camera. I find it fascinating to see what happens to her on screen. I also love her stories. You can see that she is a painter from the way she tells a story. For two years I asked her to narrate a story every month about the time she spent in Los Angeles. Her stories have given me a very good picture of the city. Sometimes she would tell the same story but then with small changes. Annemiek had lived in Los Angeles for five years and very much wanted to return there. In her stories I was aware of a strong desire for the future as well as a longing for the past. I always recorded just her voice to enable her to narrate without being conscious of her image. After two years I collected all her stories together, wrote them out and selected almost all of them. I did not edit these stories in any way. I had an actor read all these literal transcriptions with all their pauses and then let Annemiek listen to them while I filmed her en face. This became Shift of Attention (1999; 52 min), a continuous video recording lasting almost an hour. She listens to her own stories being told by someone else. There are no cuts or recording tape. Her face tells you precisely what is happening. You can see her memory working in her face. One moment she remembers her own words and there are moments when it is as if she too is hearing the story for the first time. Then she is transported to Los Angeles, and then you see her attention starting to wander. Her face is a landscape that constantly shifts from here and now to there and then, and back again. At times you even see a longing for the future.
When you watch the tape from start to finish, you experience the same length of time as Annemiek. You see that three quarters of the way through the story she starts to get a little weary of listening, possibly just like you do. In this way the portrait becomes a mirror in which the viewer and 'character' regard one another. But of course the viewer has to watch the film right to the end and because I usually exhibit in an art context, this does not always happen.

People often look down on the so-called 'zap culture', but I sometimes have the feeling that in the art world there is a far greater degree of transience and the noncommittal. In this world it is very difficult to create an exhibition space in which people spend a longer period of time and where there is a substantial relationship between the artist, the work and the spectator. In addition to this, curators and the press are also very quick to use and evaluate things. In this sense your slow work is at odds with the attitude of 'let's have a quick look': 'ah yes, the new De Boer, another minimal portrait, a really fine and coherent work.' Of course it must be said that this very context also provides a free space in which any format is possible. Your Shift of Attention will, unfortunately, be very hard to sell for TV.
As far as I am concerned the context of art is the historical framework to which I relate in my work. I find it important to know to whom and to what I relate, that my Super-8 portraits are somehow connected to Warhol films such as Blowjob or Screentest. As I see it, my main frame of reference is conceptual art from the 60s and 70s, even though my own work tends to be far more narrative. Each of my works starts with an idea or an interest. From there I collect a great deal of material, a lot of sound, and in this period I familiarize myself with the material; often it is only at this point that I discover what I want. Only when I start thinking about the form do I begin to seek the most appropriate medium. This could be a video film, a website or a book. Within the framework of art I am able to start out from a concept, and select from every imaginable form and format while still relating to an existing context of meaning. Nevertheless, I do think that in the 60s and 70s it was easier to present work like this, that the alternative way in which the work was created was also contained in the presentation. Nowadays the presentation appears to be more uniform. The public consumes art. In a modern context duration and time are perhaps rather old-fashioned themes. I spend a long time working on a project. I also work on a number of projects simultaneously and they sometimes extend over a number of years; the duration lies not only in the work process but also in the work itself. With the final presentation form you could to a certain extent force the desired viewing behaviour, but I have never experienced it as ideal. So I was very pleased that for the exhibition of my most recent work at Gallerie Jan Mot we decided not to have a preview but to show the 40-minute film Sylvia Kristel – Paris as an integral opening in a cinema in Brussels. No doubt it was the first time all those attending an opening of my work had sat out the work from start to finish.

In Shift of Attention memory plays a central role. Are you trying to say something about the memory of the person portrayed or about the functioning of memory as a whole?
Both. What I liked so much about Annemiek's stories is that her memory is related to her desire to return to Los Angeles. Her memory is focused on both the past and the future. Her story about the past appears to constantly adapt itself to her present desires. A few times she talks about travelling by a car to see her friend Joe. He lives in McArthur Park which is a dangerous neighbourhood but she describes a beautiful location because the spot is coloured by her relationship with him. She sees mainly lovely Victorian houses and on her way there never encounters a red traffic light. She continues to find McArthur Park beautiful because she wants to go back to Joe who still lives there.
This is what interests me about memory. It is as if the next story were based on the preceding one. The first time you tell a story it is more or less what you experienced, but the next time you tell the same story, the original experience has become a story, a narrative that can be honed. In Shift of Attention you only hear the small changes and alterations in Annemiek's story if you see the film two or three times. But it is precisely the fact that you gradually see how memory functions, how the story increasingly deviates from the original experience, how the remembering becomes more and more a construction, that interests me.

After the film you made a book, Oscillations, which is a group project in which the reader can easily get lost. You have to browse through it and page back. It is impossible to read it cover to cover as it makes no sense. In other words, here too you expect the public to set aside a certain requisite amount of time for it.
I had recorded many stories told by my friends: all Annemiek's memories and conversations with Chloé. I found writing down these stories word for word an interesting process of translation. How do you make the rhythm of a conversation palpable on paper? Does it remain comprehensible or even readable? I had the idea of a book. But should it also have pictures? And although it was me who wrote down the monologues, the words were nevertheless those of Annemiek and Chloé. So wasn't the book also a part of them? They are the narrators. I am the 'translator'. Consequently, I decided we should do it together. And because we were working together, we disagreed on the design of the book. I suggested we consult professionals: the designers Daniël Van Der Velden and Maureen Mooren. For the sake of consistency the book also became something that was by all five of us. Oscillations (2002, 200 pages) is a project in which everyone's contribution was of equal value. This is why it appears to be so hybrid; five people have worked on it. This means that you can read the book in many different ways, and that you have to take your time doing so.
Oscillations introduces 6 characters – person 1, person 2, person 3, person 4, person 5 and person 6 – comprising those who have made the book and the reader. The book contains biographical facts about these people. Different 'chapters' contain different information ranging from dry facts to subjective observations. In the 'Facts' part for example, you find the only pictures in the book: 24 pictures from a second video of a portrait of person 1. Other parts contain blank pages and bits of monologue about clear memories of Los Angeles or about the struggle with memory. There is even a detective who wanders about trying to trace the characters in the book, including himself, but he suffers from amnesia and has forgotten that he is character 5. In the 'Memory' part the reader is encouraged by way of open questions to stir up his own old memories. In the 'About' part you encounter small inserts telling you more about our collaboration and the process of making the book. Perhaps the reason that it has only been possible to make a complicated book like this now and that it is more natural to make a non-linear book, is due to Internet. None of us ever felt that what we were doing was strange. We found it perfectly self-evident to present a number of different layers and to expect the reader to read back and forth. However, when the book had been printed I saw that it was not that self-evident after all.

The next project was a CD-ROM: a digital portrait without faces in which the user can see his mirror image.
Mind Mapping (2000-2001) was a project commissioned by the Public Library in Brussels. I asked 30 people to compile a list of books, films, videos and/or music they found important. I first asked friends of mine to do this, but too many of the lists proved to be similar. In the end I would simply approach a random visitor to the library with my request. On the basis of these lists, I read the person's favourite books, watched the videos and listened to the CDs. I selected fragments of text, image and sound chosen by fifteen people and put them on a CD-ROM. When you use the CD you first see a short description of the people as they have briefly described themselves. For example: a man who quenches someone else's thirst at night, a library Casanova, an absent-minded woman, etc. This minimal 'fictionalisation' was necessary as the people involved did not wish to see themselves pinned down to a list which in their minds changes constantly. This brief description made them more of a character, an image that would prove more useful to those using the library. At the search terminals they only have to click on the description of the person in order to get an overview of all the titles relevant to that particular person. Moreover, they can also click on the titles to get fragments of text, image or sound. Labels have been stuck onto the corresponding books, CDs and videos in the library, with the following words for example: 'this book is a portrait of the absent-minded woman. Click on Mind Mapping in the library computers'. In this way, people who borrow this book, CD or video encounter the 'characters' by chance and can then consult the whole frame of reference, the portraits, and the group portrait in the computer.

Could you say that Mind Mapping not only put you on the digital track but also meant a new exhibition space?
Yes the exhibition location was a defining factor in the choice of the medium. In a public space you can never create a powerful relationship with duration and time. In this volatile context, people soon regard a video portrait as part of the wallpaper. After all, my portraits are not images you can record quickly and so I did not think that my film work would function in a library. However, a library is a huge mental space and in a way this aspect of it does relate to my work. In a library you see a frame of reference, a cultural and social environment in which people gather information that affects them. I was able to use this frame of reference to make portraits of people from the outside. This time I wanted to portray people by way of what they read, see and listen to, not by way of what they say about themselves. The CD-ROM has turned out to be the right choice of medium: the work disappears completely in the library. It is not a work of art on the windows or doors or on the wall; it is invisible as it were, simply because it is being used. People can consult it on the spot and take a piece of it home with them. Because each member of the library also has his own frame of reference, each user relates as an individual to the 'person portrayed' and to the greater social-cultural context of the library itself. Moreover, the work will not remain a part of the building and its function until the end of time. We have agreed to keep Mind Mapping in the computers until the present information system becomes outdated and needs to be replaced. And the labels on the books will wear out with use.

The Dutch association SKOR (Foundation for Art in Public Spaces) saw Mind Mapping and has commissioned a work of art in the public space of the Internet. Another portrait without faces but this time in ongoing development.
SKOR wanted to know how an artist who is not a web designer can develop a work based on his theme for a public space like Internet. In my case this means: how I can show the content of my work – portrait, identity, memory – on the network. Internet was a new medium for me and you can also see this in the project. However, its most powerful aspects are most closely associated with my work. For example how the portrait and identity of a person is formed by means of references and how you can access these references very rapidly through the Internet network. However, I am obviously not a network artist and with more knowledge of the medium I could have been a little more inventive and built-in more user-participation. Now everything that will appear on the website is being checked.
Panoramic Portraits (2002-2004) is a collection of portraits of people based on information I find about them on the Internet. It started with three people I know. Through the links on their sites I accessed the sites of other people I did not know at all. I asked them whether I could make a portrait of them on my site. This outward spread is an important aspect of the project: how, by way of a person's frame of reference, you come into contact with another person, etc. The portraits consist of four different categories in which I collect descriptions. The first category is in no way related to the web: 'What I know/imagine', things I know about this person and things I can imagine about him/her using the information I find on the web. The second category refers to the 'character's' personal website. The third category reports the results of a Google search based on his/her name. The fourth category is the 'favourites' list from the person's browser which describes their relationship with the outside world by way of the Internet. I update the categories every two or three months. So these portraits are constantly developing, portraits-in-progress, and I only add to them and never delete anything. Consequently you see how time operates, and how each time I see and register new aspects of a person.

The medium has the potential to run itself which means that you could take a step back. But it is clear that you do not want to do this: the artist Manon De Boer will continue to supervise the site. How does your client feel about the fact that you are using Internet as a public space but nevertheless not allowing just anyone to use this space?
Now that I am more involved with it I do see that I am not using many aspects of the medium. At the same time I must say that if everyone could supplement the portraits with information it would become a very different project and one which as far as I am concerned would be less precise. I have also imposed a time limit on myself, a period that runs until August 2004, after which the site, the portrait, will be complete.
SKOR has the same ideas as you but at the same time realises that the project is a more reflective consideration of public space. It is about the exchange between public space and the individual. When people try for example to find more information about Joe Baisa, the guitar player who is a part of Panoramic Portraits, and they find my site, then they will be presented with an alternative portrait of him. His fans have an image of him as a pop guitar player but get a different picture of him through my site. The same is true of Chloé; she is the linguist and the people who are looking for her expect to find scientific articles she has written, but encounter a very different side of her in Panoramic Portraits.

There are now eight people in Panoramic Portraits. The first name you see on the site's homepage is yours but you cannot click on it as it is not included in the list of portraits. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that like your other portraits, this work is also a self-portrait of Manon De Boer. Is this a conscious project of yours to construct a self-portrait through all these works?
No, this is something I am only just beginning to realise. Of course this applies to many
artists. Because it is about portraits you suddenly get the question: 'is it a self-portrait?' For me it has to do with the relationship with the other. In any conversation what you say is always influenced by the other person who is listening. You never exist autonomously. Your identity – in fact I don't like that word, it sounds so clear-cut – or subjectivity, is partly formed by the relationship you have with the other and because of this is constantly developing and changing and this is what also happens in my portraits.
All my work is about this and it is probably only logical that you can see me in them.

Your most recent work is the first part of a trilogy. The film Sylvia Kristel-Paris is a portrait of a woman, a film star, a public figure from the past, based on her recollections.
This film was made in several stages. I made sound recordings of Sylvia's recollections several times in the course of two years. Each time I asked her to talk about a city she had lived in for a long time: Paris, Los Angeles, Amsterdam. I recorded several stories about each place, at intervals of between six months and a year. Sylvia is a public figure and so many of her memories have become well-known stories in the media. In the first place I was not interested so much in the story she told as in the way she told it, the way she linked the various key moments in her life together, always in a different way. I was above all fascinated by the impossibility of a coherent biographical story with a clear plot. That is why I opted to ask her just one very broad question on each occasion: 'tell me about the time you lived in Paris' (or Los Angeles or Amsterdam). It is not a question about an event but about a period linked to a place. Because she had lived in three cities on and off, her stories are always leaping from one period to another and are never about finite periods with a strict chronology. In the two years that I was recording her stories, I also made the Super-8 films I used for Sylvia, March 1, 2001, Hollywood Hills and have now included in this film too. For the first part of the trilogy I have chosen two monologues from the Paris period, which come one after the other. On the one hand these stories are very light and slightly ironical in tone, but at the same time you can read a real drama between the lines. Once I had collected all the material, I wondered how her stories would relate to her image, to her image in my Super-8 films, her public image and the image she herself presents. When in front of a camera, Sylvia naturally adopts a pose, and with her body and body language she immediately writes the suggestion of a story. It is not so much a question of her as a person, but much more letting one look and be looked at, about the relationship with the camera and the viewer in the auditorium. Because she is able to play on this relationship so deliberately, she is very elusive, and I like that very much. But the stories recorded on tape, without a camera, are like a documentary. They evoke the image of Sylvia Kristel the person. Her voice has great presence and emphasises the absence of her body. The same applies to the remaining elements in the film: her memories, her still Super-8 images, the images of the city of Paris with no direct sound and the soundtrack confirm a 'presence of absence'. I went to Paris to film with Sylvia's stories in the back of my mind. I did not look for illustrations of her stories but images I associated with her and the seventies (which is when she spent most time there). I filmed places that were built in the seventies and so did not even exist when she lived there. More than anything else these images form a movement, a mental journey over the surface of the city, the facades, the roofs, the Seine, the light. When editing I added a lot of white, empty images, as blanks in the memory. In the soundtrack, which I made with George Van Dam, I did not want any melodious music or concrete sounds of the city. The tape now seems like the noise of an urban landscape and evokes a spatiality of its own which in my view ties together the mental space of the story, the physical presence of the voice and the fictional space of the image.

The film sketches not only the portrait of Sylvia Kristel but also that of a city and a period of time. Does this shift from face to urban landscape, and from individual to collective memories signify a deliberate broadening or deepening of your work?
Once I had recorded lots of Sylvia's stories and listened to and studied them several times, I was struck by how much they evoked a particular period. They refer more to a shared past than my other work. This makes the viewer even more a part of the work. A meta-level arises whereby both the viewer's individual memory and a collective memory of the period are questioned while watching and listening. I have always read the faces I filmed as landscapes, so the step towards an urban landscape was not so great. I recently came across a nice quote in Mille Plateaux (by Deleuze and Guattari) which expresses precisely this feeling: 'All faces envelop an unknown unexplored landscape: all landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past. What face has not called upon the landscape it has amalmagated, sea and hills. What landscape has not evoked the face that would have completed it.'