Excerpts from an
Interview with John Kurtich
by Clay Cousins, edited by Andrea Polli

John Kurtich has been teaching at the School ofthe Art Institute of Chicago for 22 years. He did his undergradztate studies at the UCLA film school, spent three years in the Navy, and then returned to school to study architecture, first at UC Berkeley and then at Columbia University before becoming a faculty member ofSAJC.
Clay: The issue is performance and photography, and there‘s this question in my mmd about the link between the two, because it seems that of all the art forms, photography is the most craftsmanship-like and performance, being strictly process, is the most “artistic“, and that it is difficult to find a link between the two.
John: Well, you have to break away from the printed photograph. What our department of photography believes in is photography as an art and the individual picture as the most important thing. When I do still photography, I shoot it as though I‘m doing a movie so I have to shoot five, ten to one, fifteen to one. In other words, fifteen times what I‘m actually going to show, and so the succession of images is what‘s important, and how you put it together, and putting it together live is part of the performance. In other words, before I had enough money to buy anything that was pro, well, they didn‘t even have it invented yet; I had to do all my multimedia stuff live as though I were playing the piano. My father invented this keyboard,
it‘s beautiful. it‘s got 28 keys in four different colours. We had four different banks of projectors, and they‘re all connected to telephone equipment of relays and so forth, that then control 28 projectors. Each key does a different projector, playing like music, and I can get feedback from the audience as I‘m presenting the images so that every time I do it, it‘s slightly different, all in a general score. The score is the sound.

C: So these live slide shows, they‘re very much like live performance.

J: They are live performances, and that‘s what I used to do before I programmed stuff. It was really hair-raising because I would have to have a system of making sure that no slides jammed because I could not afford glass mounted slides. So my most ambitious show that I did after I got to Chicago was the Muncie [Indiana] show which used 28 slide projectors and five movie projectors. At one point, all the projectors are on at once. I had to have ten assistants. It was an hour show, and we had something like 120 trays of slides, and they had to change slide trays during the show so there would be no break, no intermission. That‘s where I think performance and photography come together in the most direct way, and I still miss that sort of thing. I still think there‘s something very exciting about doing a photographic presentation that‘s live. It‘s a performance because it‘s all this element of...it‘s not an element of chance, but an element of . .well, there‘s so many things working that could go wrong, like a theatrical performance, if you‘re using various equipment and so forth. But it‘s also something that you can vary with the audience that you‘re playing to, that lt really becomes a living thing that‘s a two-way street. Which is what 1 think performance is all about, it has to be two-way.

C: Do you consider pre-programmed slide presentations performances?

J: WeIl, I consider any kind of projected presentation in which the artist is present, in control of the environment, even if it‘s on film which is totally automatic, a performance. Tom (Jaremba) feels the same way. We used to tell people that a true filmmaker will care about how a film is projected, when it starts, when it stops, what the atmosphere is like. Do you want perfume in the air? I mean, what do you want to have happen to the audience? To me, that‘s performance. I have a very broad definition of performance. The artist has to be in control, not to go to a projectionist and say, “Show this.“ Then it‘s no longer performance.

C: What about the picture taking process itself - do you consider that a performance?

J: Yes. First of all, do you think performance has to have an audience?

C: Oh, no.

J: I mean there‘s some people who have this notion that performance is something that‘s formalized and that there must be an audience.

C: What would your definition of performance be.

J: Mine is much broader. I think that one can do a performance privately. You‘re going through the form, you‘re doing something as a process, and in the process is a form of art making. Performance is a time art which only exists in its body of time and if no one sees it, it doesn‘t matter, it‘s still a performance. So I would say, yes, the process of documenting or collecting photographs can very well be a performance. Most of the time it may be a very boring performance, but in certain cases, you may have to do certain things to get interesting shots for this other kind of performance which would be the projected performance, such as lying down in the middle of a parking lot to shoot a shot of a temple with a beautiful view of the sky or the dome of the Pantheon looking straight up. So, anybody who‘s around, obviously, is your audience and is very curious about what you‘re doing because it‘s not a normal stance.

C: So you think the whole relation between performance and photography lies within the control of the artist?

J: No, because the artist cannot control the reaction. It (my slide presentation) was better than I thought it would be. I think that the artist can set up conditions and I think those conditions can be extraordinary, that‘s what is so wonderful about photography. But 1 have to say that photography alone can‘t do it, you have to have audio input as well.... One of the things I‘ve always wanted to do with performance and photography but never had the money because it requires a lot of tech... Are you familiar with the Czech technique called Lanturna Magica?

C: The Magic Lantern ?

J: Well, that‘s what it means, but Lanturna Magica is a very special technique that combines film and live actors, and they use a slit screen. They project on the screen, and you can‘t see the slits, and they‘re showing some realistic scene. For instance, there‘s somebody in the middle of the street and an automobile comes and hits that person, and all of a sudden, the live person pops through the screen and is there all iit, so what they do is go back and forth between film and live and you can‘t teill the difference. That kind of thing fascinates me in terms of performance and photography. If I could have 35 or 7Omm film at my disposal, 1 could shake the world!

C: What would you do if you had, say, a million dollar grant?

J: I would like to continue and try to clarify and maybe even solve the problem of hew you communicate three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional medium, and I don‘t need a hologram to do that. I need film. It would have to be done with a combination of  live people and projected image.... When you combine film and performance or photography and performance with not only honesty and sincerity, hut understanding of the techniques, it‘s such dynamite - nothing can touch it.