PERSON: JASON UNDERHILL by Gilda Davidian

I am so excited to share this interview with Jason Underhill, an artist/filmmaker who also happens to be one of the funniest and thoughtful people I know. I first met Jason as an undergraduate at CalArts. He went on to complete his MFA at Goldsmiths in London and has since exhibited internationally in the U.S. and in Europe (see his CV here). He now lives and works in Los Angeles, making videos and other things. Here he is talking to us about his childhood traumas, his creative process, and more.

Hi Jason! What was your biggest fear as a child? Calling a child gullible is probably unfair, considering how little experience living they have, so to start this thing off on the right foot, let’s say I was the opposite of a pragmatist. When I was six-years old, I remember asking our Sunday School teacher, Joyce, how we could see God. ‘God is all around you,’ she said. ‘He’s watching all the time.’ I thought that was a nice thought, until later that night, when I saw an episode of Unsolved Mysteries about a former US Marine’s claims that an alien ship had landed on his base in Montana. He described a rapid succession of laser beams aimed at the First Officer’s Hummer as possible communication by ‘The Devil or something’. This made sense: if God is everywhere all the time, then The Devil should be too, trying to get the upper hand, taking possession of flying saucers and attempting to militarize the universe, setting the board for a giant, invisible war. That kept me up for few nights, sweating.

I should add that my fears were rarely this philosophically complex or so fully realized. A few weeks later, my brother convinced me that the new, dark square on our street where a pot-hole had been filled in was actually a midnight stairway to the Netherworld where, after dark, Dracula emerged and stole neighborhood children. This was his response to me asking why our bedtime was eight-o-clock.

How/when did you start making videos? When I was in high school, I fantasized about becoming a filmmaker, but I abandoned it in favor of painting – I honestly think seeing Dawson from Dawson’s Creek’s blind optimism about his home-made horror movie hit a little too close to home when I was 15; watching James Van Der Beek earnestly direct Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson while shooting a Swamp-Monster slasher film with a Handycam looked a lot like my attempts at directing Smashing Pumpkins music videos, filming my friends stylishly murdering one another under a strobe light in my parents garage. I’m still reminded of this moment when I’m shooting sometimes, but I’ve learned to embrace the delusion.

I came to video, in part, because I was interested in the way the first artists videos from the 1970s documented a performance to an unknown audience, for the camera (Vito Acconci performing intimacy in Theme Song, 1973, might be the best example). I thought of it as an interesting counterpoint to the development of Hollywood Blockbusters – in that world, scripts and productions and budgets and salaries are all based on what producers claim we all want to see, developing an audience by controlling their desires. I wondered what it might be like to come full circle, to script a project based on a character from this Crystal Pepsi Generation, performing their mediated desires and expectations to the camera, all for the sake of being filmed. That’s when I made a video called Jessie Lives (2006) with Roxie Fuller.

How would you describe your creative process? The process of making a video often feels like building a production out of many small improvisations. With The Road to Margaritaville (2010), we shot and wrote the film over the course a year, basing the script for each new scene off of what we (myself, Ben Smith and Roxie Fuller) had done previously, and developed a narrative from that. Other times it’s much more spontaneous, and the video happens very quickly. When I made Universal City (2010) last year, I rented a house in Laurel Canyon for four days, wrote the script the first night, and we shot over the course of the next three days.

I realized early on that I like to work with a core group of actors, and often times ideas for new projects come in between takes, in the conversations that happen after tape stops rolling. Also, before I start writing a script, I like to meet the actors and have a conversation about the project, and that’s usually how an outline for the script develops. It all sounds so calculated when I write it out, but it’s really not – I have never finished a script until the day of shooting, which used to stress me out, but I’ve learned to turn it into a way of inviting spontaneity onto a set.

Tell us about something you saw or heard recently that stuck with you. It was wintertime in London, and it was an exceptionally cold, rainy night. I was walking home with my bag of wet groceries, and I saw a large rat, standing on someone’s stoop, chewing on an onion. I felt like I’d unwittingly stumbled into that scene from the Disney version of Cinderella, when the clock struck midnight and the butler turned back into a mouse, and the stagecoach into a pumpkin. Except in this version, the butler was starving to death, and eating his stagecoach.

Do you have any favorite quotes or song lyrics? I do – It’s from a Yeats poem called The Second Coming:

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Thank you, Jason!

Crane TV - December 2010: Against Gravity

Catherine Borra and I talk to crane.tv about Against Gravity at the ICA, and I speak about Universal City. Also featuring artist Matthew Stone.

by Colin Perry

from MAP, Issue 21 (Spring 2010)

Of all the fattening cities across the globe, it is probably Los Angeles that is the most in thrall to its suburbs. Veined together by evocatively named trunk roads – the Golden State Freeway, the Mojave Freeway, and (rather less poignantly) the Ronald Reagan Freeway – Southern California is a frayed landscape of outlying conurbations that has spawned an entire genre of neo-gothic fantasies. Filmmakers from Tim Burton to Tod Solondz and writers from Joan Didion to John Cheever have found in this landscape a map of sublimated and quashed desires. The suburban sprawl represents a state of mind, the subconscious of our civilization. And Los Angeles has the full Freudian psychic apparatus: there is a super-ego (Hollywood), an ego (‘Silicone Valley’, the heart of the porn industry), and an id (the ghettos and ‘burbs). The psychic node of Simi Valley lies on the furthest margins of Los Angeles: a low-density grid of splash pools, pizza joints and retail outlets. It is an unexciting place that simmers with teenage boredom and Gothic potential. This is where Charles Manson made his home in the late 1960s, listening to The Beatles’ White Album incessantly and prophesising an apocalyptic race war that would consume the nearby metropolis.

Artist Jason Underhill has been making homespun videos here since he was a teenager, kneading the clay of suburban mythology like Play-Do. Art school training at CalArts and Goldsmiths has thankfully failed to erase the very un-Hollywood intimacy of his acutely observed mini dramas. Partially, this is due to the fact that he works in close collaboration with friends he has known since childhood, his co-scriptwriter and ‘muse’ Roxie Fuller and long-time friend and collaborator Ben Smith. Underhill rejects the moralizing clichés found in a swathe of mainstream movies: he names both Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia (1996) and Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999) as tendentious and proselytizing examples. In such films, Underhill observes, ‘suburbia doesn’t exist as a place, but as a lesson that we should learn from’. It is no surprise, perhaps, that Underhill is a fan of Solondz’s black comedy masterpiece Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995). He’s also a fan of artists Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn’s inspiringly oddball videos, notably Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out, 2006, whose roaming camerawork trace a world of febrile nomads living on the fringes of an imploding society. Underhill’s work utilizes a similarly intimate cinema verité or ‘mockumentary’ style, in which performer and cameraman orbit each other like planets; it’s the visual equivalent of a rapport.

Underhill’s longest work to date, Howlin’, 2009, is a 28-minute long suburban epic. The protagonists are Daniel (Smith) who is a Satanist, and Maria (Fuller) who wants to be a model (‘it’s my dream!’). Howlin’ is basically a story about two bored teenagers (albeit played by grown-ups) just shooting the breeze. The video begins with Daniel loafing in the corner of a car park, talking on his mobile phone and attempting to buy a Joy Division t-shirt. The salesperson says it’s not in stock, but Daniel doesn’t believe them: ‘it sounds like one big lie’. Turning to his uncommunicative friend Mike (played by Michael Patrick Carr) – a real Silent Bob character – Daniel delivers a soliloquy about a girl he grew up next to whose parents told her that ‘all plants cry because humans are so barbaric and cruel’, and how one day they did up the front yard by paving it and replacing the grass with cacti, ‘the only kind of plants that don’t feel pain’. Daniel takes this story, and the saga with the t-shirt as further evidence (if any were needed) of the shitty nature of ‘fucking people man’. There’s no logic to his line of thought – but vacuums of comprehension are a recurring motif in Underhill’s work. Later, Daniel is reading the Necronomicon, which he believes is truly ancient and powerful: ‘only 666 copies were made’. Fans of HP Lovecraft will know it’s all a literary hoax, a fake book made up by a pulp fiction author to con gullible teenage boys. But it is Maria’s response that is really funny: she calls it the ‘Necropotimus’, and as a riposte to Daniel’s magic-obsessed sullenness, quotes lines from the Sandra Bullock romcom Practical Magic, (1998). Daniel is not amused.

Underhill’s videos are composed of set-piece dialogues and freeform monologues. Often, what appears to be entirely spontaneous is, in fact, scripted. A great deal of the credit for the verve of these stories must go to Roxie Fuller. Her tour de force is Jessie Lives (2006) in which she plays a teenage Goth, desperate to fit in. Jessie, a wide-eyed greenhorn, longs for the type of friends who sneak out of their parent’s houses at five in the morning ‘just to give each other a hug!’. She is besotted with a boy who turned up at school donning a noose around his neck. Next, she attempts to go to a Goth party in a cemetery, but misses the whole point of the illicit venture by going in broad Californian daylight, hours before the nocturnal party is due to kick off. The video closes with a bewigged Jessie strolling down a dark train tunnel looking for a homeless guy she’s arranged to meet. She returns looking delighted, and speaks directly at the camera to describe her encounter. Suddenly, exhilaratingly, a train passes by within a few feet of both Jessie and the camera, its horn blasting like a trumpet, Jessie’s clothes and wig billowing wildly. Blithely, she continues to mouth silent words that are drowned by the noise and commotion, waving her hands in a manner that communicates only mute eagerness. Once the train has passed, she becomes audible once more: ‘I’ve never felt like this before… it’s just, (sighs) I don’t know where we’ve going to get all these flash bulbs and coyote carcasses…it doesn’t seem to be a problem. So, I guess I’ll just go with it’.

Urban myths are the fabric of these narratives. In one memorable scene of Howlin’, Maria meets her friend Stacey (played by Lucy Griffin), who conspiratorially tells a story about a murderer who has been putting human body parts – bits of ear and brain – in the pic ‘n’ mix at the store in which Stacey works in. It all sounds like outlandish fiction. Underhill tells me, however, that it is a modified account of a real event that took place in Simi Valley: a paedophile that committed suicide on a train track, whose remains were picked up by a local teenager (a high school colleague of Underhill’s) and put in the candy section of a shop for the delectation of small children. The attraction for Underhill in this story isn’t just the gore, it’s the way the story embodies misunderstandings, an example of a teenager’s deeply warped sense of poetic justice. Underhill’s characters frequently exhibit this disregard for the horrors lurking around them. In B.Y.O.B.B.Q., 2009, Fuller plays a character who is nonchalant about being kidnapped by an archetypal psychopathic hillbilly-murderer – she’s seen it all before in the movies – and is largely preoccupied by getting to a party on time.

Currently, Underhill is working on a new script for an as-yet-untitled video. This, too, will incorporate stories garnered from real life. In one scene a character called Lissa, who is somehow unaware that the movie United 93 (2006) was based on the real events of 9/11, asks her friend Nick if it was ‘any good’. Nick replies (thinking about the real catastrophe) that ‘it was horrible’; but for Lissa, at least ‘the soundtrack is gorgeous’. Underhill continues to draw our attention to the interesting miscues and dramas that blooms when reality goes out of focus.

by Jonathon Jones

The Guardian, July 15, 2009:

It is the college that gave the world Damien Hirst. Are today’s Goldsmiths graduates aiming to shake up the world?

The atmosphere is hot and still. The only noise is the sound of examiners’ footsteps as they pad from one exhibition space to another – looking, absorbing, assessing. I’m in the studios of Goldsmiths College in London, where MA art students have just installed their degree shows and are nervously waiting to see what grades they will get. For them, education is over. Look out world, here they come.

A good degree isn’t everything, of course. A tutor here tells me that, contrary to popular belief, Damien Hirst does not have a close relationship with his former college because he has never forgiven them for awarding his work a 2.2 (lower second class). Still, Hirst’s name is synonymous with Goldsmiths. In 1988, while still a student here, he curated Freeze, a seminal show in a Docklands warehouse that, as well as his own work, featured pieces by Angus Fairhurst, Mat Collishaw and other fledgling YBAs. Goldsmiths and its then professor, Michael Craig-Martin (creator of the Tate’s infamous glass of water on a shelf), were credited with giving these students their go-getting attitude.

That was then. I’ve come to Goldsmiths to see how final-year MA students are feeling about their futures now, in the shadow of recession. Four budding artists from the class of 2009 meet me in a lecture room and I quickly sense that everything has changed for this generation. Their idea of a life in art has little in common with the fiercely ambitious artists the college was turning out in the early 1990s. Is it the economy? Is it the sheer number of artists competing for attention in today’s Britain? Have tutors’ attitudes changed here since the retirement of Craig-Martin? Whatever it is, these students seem to have no illusions at all about their chances of making it big.

Jason Underhill, a tall, bearded 26-year-old from California, has the studied air of an independent film-maker. And that’s what he is, albeit one who is just finishing a fine art MA. His graduation piece is a film called Howlin’, about aimless young people in an American city. It features bodies turning up in a supermarket freezer, and two characters looking down on a town they see as a scar on the beautiful wilderness.

There’s clearly an ambition here to say something as well as to make something, but Underhill – whose work featured in last year’s prestigious New Contemporaries exhibition in Liverpool – does not seem in any danger of getting overexcited about success. “I chose Goldsmiths because I needed to reconsider my position,” he says. “My ideas felt half-formed, possibly because I didn’t know how to address a place like California. I thought that some distance could help me articulate things.”

Annie Hémond Hotte, born in Montreal in 1980, is a painter. Although she started out on a musical path, she now can’t imagine life without painting: “My family are not very artistic so I had to fight a bit when I decided I wanted to paint. I didn’t want to do anything else.” Like the others, she’s on the fine art MA and her degree show features large-scale paintings of Pinocchio-like characters. They drip with thick, waxy colour.

Tina Hage, a photographer born in Haiti, studied media arts in Cologne before moving to London. At first, the photographs in her degree show seem to zoom in on moments of crisis in crowd scenes; then you realise that Hage, in her early 30s, plays all the parts. She is the quietest of the group and reticent about her art, preferring to let her digitally manipulated fictions speak for themselves – which they do, rather well.

Jon Moscow, also in his 30s, feels art is his vocation and he’s not too bothered what the world makes of him and his fellow students: “We consider that we are artists already – I became an artist for the art, not for the art world.” Moscow, from Cleethorpes, used to be a chartered accountant. But, during the 1990s, when Hirst’s generation were becoming famous, he quit to follow his artistic urge. He has exhibited in Düsseldorf and London. His room in the degree show is filled with sculptures and significant objects, arranged in a surreal style. “I make rooms,” he says of his work, before highlighting one of its drawbacks: “How do you sell a room?”

Much may have changed in art schools, but one thing seems to have stayed the same: the cool demeanour of the students. You could almost imagine this lot in a band together, with Moscow as the Jarvis Cocker figure. Goldsmiths is renowned for equipping its charges for the reality of a career in art: if charm is part of what it takes, they have plenty. However, while all four are determined to put art at the centre of their lives, they are sceptical about actually making a living from it, especially during a recession. “There’s nothing we can do about it,” says Hotte. “But you can’t say, ‘the art market looks bad so I’ll stop producing work.’ It wouldn’t make sense.”

Their response is to look forward to lives as artists, with the intention of supporting themselves by other means. “There are statistics from the Arts and Humanities Research Council,” says Moscow. “They make depressing reading if you’re interested in making a living from your art. A tiny proportion of artists do that, so I don’t even go there.”

This approach – passionate about the work, doubtful of economic reward – has always been the best attitude for an artist to have throughout history. It costs money to be a student and they expect it to cost money to be an artist: making films, printing photographs, buying canvases. But it’s something they have to do. They are what you might call hardheaded dreamers. Art, says Underhill, “is a strange relationship that you have with yourself”.

“We want to keep in touch,” says Hotte. “Not just in terms of showing our art, but in terms of making it, and having discussions. It’s a big part of the Goldsmiths thing, to meet people who push you.” This is perhaps the most important thing they’ve got out of their time here. You get the impression that the friendships forged at Goldsmiths will play a part in their lives for years to come, as they go out into a world they seem well-armoured for. “My biggest hope in the next couple years is to develop a practice as an artist making feature films,” says Underhill. “My biggest fear is that it will take longer than a couple years to do it.”

by Jonathon Jones

The Guardian, July 15, 2009

Today’s art scene is a far cry from the moneyed days of the YBAs, so how are the new breed preparing for their careers?

Catherine Yass, who graduated from Goldsmiths with an MA in 1990 and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002, joins our four students and Jonathan Jones for a round-table discussion.

Jonathan Jones: Is it scary to be leaving Goldsmiths, or are you raring to go? Do you all want to go into the art world and be artists?

Jason Underhill: No, not particularly. I’m not interested in going out and finding glamour. I’m interested in cultivating a practice that doesn’t rely on that kind of thing.

Jon Moscow: The art world and artists can be separate things.

Tina Hage: It’s about not wanting to do anything else: just wanting to be an artist, just doing my work and enjoying it. I can’t think of anything else I’d like to do in my life.

Annie Hémond Hotte: Of course, I would like to just paint and live from that.

TH: You just have to try.

JM: But you might be making one thing, and the art world wants something else.

TH: You say: no, I want to do this, I don’t want to work in an office. But it’s not romantic at all.

Catherine Yass: The only people who came a cropper when I was a student were the ones who took the so-called art world too seriously and wanted it too much. Because what is the art world? I’d say galleries are just a tiny part of it, and it’s up to us all to create our own art world. There are public institutions, symposia, art schools where you teach and get tons of feedback. You have to hold on to that passion and romance, but at the same time you have to earn your money, you have to fund the work. Even for people who earn more money, I don’t think it gets easier.

JU: The cost of producing your work is so high. It makes the idea of financial success seem immaterial. That’s why most artists have two or three jobs. It’s great to talk about art like this, but then I start to think I’m deluded and the reality is I’ve got to get a job.

CY: When I was at college, it was a different atmosphere. I did my BA at the Slade and I was naive. I left and it was hard. I had my moment of doubt. Later, at Goldsmiths, I found there was an emphasis on how to survive as an artist and how to sell yourself. I really needed it because I’d had four years of the opposite at the Slade. So for me it was an absolutely brilliant balance. There was a kind of excitement back then. Freeze had just happened. There was this idea  that suddenly artists could show in galleries when they were young, which hadn’t happened before. I think it’s easy to demonise the people that you’re not. I don’t think there’s a them-and-us situation between artists and galleries.

JM: I don’t think any of us have that attitude of them and us.

JU: I’ve met a few curators I admired.

CY: If you can recognise your own limitations, it’s quite handy. You learn to be a bit more realistic about yourself. I think it’s very fluid, and there are so many people who want to be artists. It’s daunting and difficult, but I think there are possibilities.