Interview with David O’Kane conducted by Francis McKee
10th January 2010
(English Version)
Francis McKee: You have a very broad practice
– photography, animation, film, painting
and drawing. Can you comment on the
relationship between these media in your
work – did animation, for instance, grow out
of drawing and painting? There is a constant
to-and-fro movement between these media
where for example a painting may become
animated and circle back into painting again.
David O’Kane: The media have a symbiotic
relationship. Working through one medium
influences and affects the other. It is a kind
of practical dialogue. I was already painting
and drawing at a very early age, and the
origins of my fascination with animation can
be traced back to two important events that
took place when I was about six years old. My
eldest brother Eamon had done a course in
animation in Derry and he brought back a
video camera. He demonstrated how to make
animation and helped all his younger siblings
to make several short pieces. I was instantly
addicted to the whole process. Animation is
a strange alchemy that still surprises me. It
is also very akin to a game and I still think
of the whole process in this way. Around
the same time my father borrowed a video
of Jan Švankmajer’s Something of Alice (Neco
z Alenky). I was completely enthralled by
this film, and seeing it at such a young age
had the most profound effect on me. It is
an incredibly accurate portrayal of how a
child experiences and negotiates with the
bizarre phenomenon of reality. In that film
there was no shielding from the terrifying,
uncanny aspects of this reality like there
are in many films made for children. This
darkness has had a very deep resonance for
me. So much so that the uncanny is now
present in nearly every artwork I make, as
an authentication of the alternate reality
I am creating. I consider animation to be
a distillation of real time, which hints at
film’s fundamental deceptive illusion.
These animated sequences are fractured
thoughts or reflections on the paintings. It
is a process of appropriation, authentication
and destruction. The animated paintings,
such as the Doppelgänger series, are influenced
by William Kentridge’s short films, however
Kentridge animates charcoal drawings that
leave a palimpsest history of every mark
made on the paper. The way I animate my
oil paintings actually achieves the opposite
effect because it constantly erases its history.
Animation enables me to go beyond the
boundaries of painting, without negating
painting itself. The paintings are no longer
static; they move and become sculptural
entities. After watching the animation the
viewer’s relationship with the physical
object of the painting is fundamentally
altered. The act of looking becomes
infused with an uncanny undercurrent.
FMK: What role does absurdity play in your
work? (I notice you wrote a dissertation on
Absurdity and the Game of Painting discussing
both Michaël Borremans and Neo Rauch).
DOK: Albert Camus wrote that the most
absurd character is the creator. So I think
absurdity is present in a variety of ways
in the art and the daily practice of being
an artist. For instance, I understand the
uncanny as a subsidiary of the absurd that is
tinged with fear. The very fact that making
art is treated as a game (by myself and many
other artists, such as Rauch or Borremans)
highlights its absurdity. Essentially, what
interests me is the presence of absurdity
in the perspective of the viewer when they
encounter the work. Although they can
perceive an underlying logic and structure
in the work they do not know the exact
intention of the artist. So in effect they are in
the absurd position of interpretation, where
the range possibilities are made manifold as
they are generated by their own imagination.
In this moment of interpretation or
interaction a silent imperceptible exchange
takes place that is saturated with absurdity,
as images and ideas shift and mingle
under the omnipotence of subjectivity.
FMK: There is a growing preoccupation
in your work with figures such as Borges,
Flann O’Brien and Kafka – all writers who
play with ideas of the infinite, the circular
and the labyrinthine – all thinkers interested
in bending time… It seems that not only
the ideas have importance in your work,
but the presence of these writers too.
DOK: These concepts and writers
have had an exponential fascination for
me, particularly their ability to imbue
fantastic surreal concepts with an everyday
plausibility. I’m interested in the varied
dimensions of temporality. There are vast
differences in the stillness of the painting
to the staccato movement of the animation
or the apparent passage of time in reality.
Condensing space and language temporally
into a single discussion between these
writers, as I did in Babble, was a way of
formalizing the idea of how we unconsciously
build something new from the multitude
of influences we absorb. The film explores
Roland Barthes theories about The Death of the
Author and his postulation that literature and
art are nothing but a spectrum of quotations.
O’Brien preceded Barthes hypothesis, stating,
“The entire corpus of existing literature should
be regarded as a limbo from which discerning
authors could draw their characters as required.”
(O’Brien, At Swim Two Birds, p 25, 1939)
FMK: I’m interested in the emerging
interest in theatre too. At times this is
manifested as the Kino or cinema and at
other times as the more traditional stage
surrounded by theatre blacks. Is this the
creation of a place beyond time (in Babble I
think the protagonists debate their location,
arguing for eternity, paradise or hell)?
DOK: Yes. They exist in eternity in a
void of darkness in the recesses of the
mind. It is quite literally a black box or
chambre noire. Of course it is informed
and influenced Samuel Beckett’s work,
such as The Unnamable or Waiting for
Godot, hence the theatrical space.
FMK: How does the theatrical space
you’re creating relate to the basic issue of
representation? In Babble, Flann O’Brien
describes ‘the whole monster procession
of life …as a sort of epiphenomenal magic
lantern show, too dim, too dull, too intolerably
indistinct… I am the shadow on the wall of
the cave mentioned by Plato.’ This takes us
back to one of the founding statements on
the nature of representation with Plato’s
Cave. Is the theatrical space surrounded by
blacks a more contemporary version of this?
DOK: I actually made a short animation
entitled Kino, which deals with Plato’s
Allegory of the Cave explicitly, but where
the film projector replaces the fire in the
casting of shadows. This reference is subtler
in Babble. In effect the actors are merely
shadows or vestiges of the identities of the
writers they represent exactly as elucidated
by Flann O’Brien. The theatrical space
communicates the distortion and illusion of
any form of representation more honestly.
The limits of understanding are hinted at
through the structure of the conversation.
FMK: The focus on language in your most
recent work and on the interaction of several
languages (Babble) and the phenomenon
of translation (Palabras). Is this another
means of destabilizing a sense of self, as
ideas and meaning move through various
dialects? Another way of interrogating the
accuracy or lack of it in representation?
DOK: Babble is structured as a verbal
labyrinth that references that recurrent
theme in all their literature. This is the
precise reason why there are no subtitles.
Although the conversation is complex
and entirely coherent, to most viewers
only one language is intelligible. The
incomprehensibility of the other two
languages highlights the fundamental
musical beauty inherent in the structure
and sound of each sentence. The film
exposes the inherent confusions and limits
to language. It emphasizes the fragility of
self, or the illusion of self. Babble could be
considered as a self-portrait generated from
a multitude of extant appropriated material.
A portrait built completely of influences,
which have a particular resonance. Babble
draws attention to the immortality of these
writers through the infinite repetition
and the consumption of their words.
FMK: Likewise it’s possible to trace a
persistent questioning of personal identity
in the work, particularly t Kino, 2008 (pg. 00)
the animation and film work. At times, it seems as if
the animation is employed as a means to
destabilize the more settled identity in
your portraits – of Beckett, Baudrillard,
Borges and Wilde for instance.
DOK: I am interested in portraiture,
not as a means of recording personality,
but rather the opposite, the dissolution of
personality through time and subjectivity.
The people portrayed in the paintings are
usually literary figures, who through the
very act of writing have created a secondary
persona running in tangent to the true
personality but enduring for much longer.
This series of installations take the form of
stereoscopic mirror images each comprised
of two oil paintings and one animation. The
illusion of movement is created through
the manipulation of wet oil paint until the
painting becomes completely abstracted into
a thick impasto. The animation highlights
the fragility of the image and its constant
metamorphosis through repeated viewing.
It complicates the element of time in
painting by merging it with the precepts
of filmic time. This creates an interesting
vacuum between movement and inertia,
figuration and abstraction. I am especially
interested in the idea of the doppelgänger
because of its threat to the authenticity
of the individual.1 In a sense, within the
animation, there are hundreds of paintings
layered over one original, like layers of
identity seemingly obliterating one another
over time but remaining subtly present.
The portraits are a kind of homage to the
figures they portray, but they also play
on the sheer remoteness of these artists
and their work. They are unknowable. The
video literally reanimates the figures in a
game of subjective projection, distorting
and effacing the original image.
I have taken this investigation of the failure
of perception and representation further
in the series of 24 paintings entitled, Stills
(Carol Anne), which I developed over the
last three months during a residency at
the British School at Rome. The illusion of
movement created through the animation
imbues the paintings with a sculptural
quality that generates a spatial depth, making
the succession of images appear threedimensional.
Therefore it is through the
progression of time that the spatial element of
the painting is revealed. I am interested in the
failure inherent in any form of representation
and the attempt to reconcile the discrepancies
with a perceived reality. Again, the figure
is shown represented in a void of darkness
that links it more to a dream reality than any
waking reality. I feel the difference between
the animated video and the installation of
paintings is similar to the contrast between
a flat map of the world and a globe, in that,
certain elements have been lost in translation
so that other aspects can be distinguished
with greater clarity. The linear display of
the paintings inverts this inward gaze onto
a single point. This transposes the reality
depicted into a panoramic frieze, highlighting
the impossibility of an overall view.
1. Doppelgänger describes the sensation
of having glimpsed oneself in peripheral
vision, where there is no chance that it was a
reflection. In some traditions seeing one’s own
doppelgänger is considered an omen of death.