06/15/09
Text: Kee Chang
After cementing a successful directing career in music videos and commercials under the moniker Josh & Xander (with directing partner Xander Charity), Josh Melnick premieres his first solo art exhibition with The 8 Train. The series of black and white portraits were born out of the artist’s fascination with technology’s potential for artistic expression and its resultant socio-cultural impact.
The portraits of passengers on the NYC subway were filmed with a scientific camera that’s capable of shooting at incredibly high frame rates. Therefore, the images play back in super slow motion, at once boasting the aesthetic and technical qualities of photography and film (a similar technique can also be seen in the duo’s intoxicating video for Cat Power’s “Where is My Love”). The artist’s intention is to reorient the viewer’s perception on human relationships, specifically the exchange between strangers in an intensely public setting. The train’s passengers come from all walks of life, but they’re essentially cut from the same cloth, so to speak.
Melnick screened some of the stunning portraits for Anthem earlier this month. It seems to be an auspicious beginning for his turn as an artist. The 8 Train exhibit is up at Art in General in New York until July 18. We highly recommend that you go check it out!
I understand that you studied sculpture at Yale. What pulled you in that direction?
I never really studied traditional sculpture. I guess I did in high school, but I went to Yale because my interest in art was conceptual and I wanted to be part of a program where I would be able to use many different mediums to explore ideas. So while I was studying sculpture, I mostly did video and installation work.
Do you find that what you learned in that program informs your current creative process in commercials, music videos, and various art projects?
Completely. To me, there really is no distinction between working in the studio and working in the commercial world as far as how I initially approach the ideas and what my intention is. The form is totally different, obviously—the form of a video and the form of an installation. But the process behind it is identical, at least in the ground stages.
Can you talk a little bit about what The 8 Train is about?
The 8 Train was commissioned by Art in General, which is a non-profit contemporary arts organization in New York. For the project, I basically went into the subway and shot a series of portraits of people riding the train with a high-speed video camera. The idea was to shoot portraits of people over a very limited amount of time in extreme slow motion. The camera itself shoots at 1,300 frames per second and records for about 2 seconds of real time. Within those two seconds, we would move the camera around the subjects and shoot a portrait as they were doing whatever it is that they were doing on the subway. I was interested in capturing that trance-like state that people get in when they’re on the subway—they’re looking at something, but avoiding looking at anybody else. This is the subject of the project, but what it’s really about is rethinking the way we look at others, ourselves, and the world. I was interested in using this suspension between still photography and cinematic motion to call attention to the psychological processes of seeing. The technique is an excuse to ask certain questions about perception.
Was the concept for The 8 Train born directly out of the Cat Power video that you shot with Xander?
I came up with the idea for The 8 Train around the same time as the Cat Power video. For years, Xander and I have been experimenting with high-speed video and film-based photosonics, and working on ideas that would eventually become some of the work we did for MAC Cosmetics, The Stills, and then finally Cat Power. I put the 8 Train idea on hold because I was concentrating my practice mostly on video concepts, and I really thought that the idea could be expressed in some form in that particular video. The Cat Power video was an excuse to deeply look, stare really, at people just like The 8 Train is about looking at people. It was in many ways successful, but it was inherently limited because of the music video genre—mostly the 3-minute time frame of the song and the narrative of the woman falling that had to be woven into the concept in order to make it work as a video. I realized during the editing process that all I wanted to do was watch the dailies, more than the edited video even. The extended process of looking at people’s gazes in extreme slow motion and the way these images seemed to move from being very specific to quite abstract became interesting to me. You start out thinking, “Oh, this person is so and so”—you create a little story in your head—and then by the end of the shot you realize that what that person “is” is largely a result of what meanings you project onto their image. It’s something that I realized I needed to explore in a gallery setting. Each of the portraits in The 8 Train lasts for 3 – 4 minutes even though they’re only documenting about 1-2 seconds of someone in real time.
Were you pretty much set on using the New York subway as the backdrop for the portraits or did you have other locations in mind as well?
The subway was the only place to shoot this project. Not only because of the photographic history of reportage photos of people on the subway that in some ways this project references, but because the subway itself creates a liminal trance-like state in people—it rocks back and forth, it’s dark, and it’s underground. There’s something very dreamlike about the subway to begin with and it’s also the place where there are barriers between people, these unspoken barriers. I grew up in NYC and have spent so much time on the trains. I’m fascinated by them.
What role does the absence of sound and music play in these pieces?
There’s going to be absolutely no sound when the portraits are shown. If I had the budget, I would’ve built a sound deprivation chamber to show them in. If you hear any sound at all, it’ll simply be the hum of the fan from the projectors. The piece is designed to have as few specific or manipulative elements about it as possible. Any sound manipulates an image and sometimes it really works to your advantage as a filmmaker. But in this piece, I really wanted the portraits to be as neutral as possible, and as silent and meditative as possible.
