There's reason one might be intimidated by the idea of sitting down with Antony Hegarty and the video director Nabil Elderkin. Both are capital-A artists, albeit from different worlds: Antony hails from the eccentric Downtown New York art sphere, while Nabil has made his name with sophisticated clips for the likes of Kanye, Frank Ocean, and Bon Iver. But upon meeting them last month in a Manhattan studio to discuss their video for "Cut the World" (starring actor Willem Dafoe and veteran performance artist Marina Abramović and produced by Pitchfork.tv), it was striking to find that both have exceptional senses of humor; neither takes himself too seriously. Antony is voraciously curious, occasionally self-depreciating; Nabil is a jokester. It is a gift to watch their personalities intermingle. "Can you pitch my voice three decibels down?" Nabil kids, before our conversation begins recording. "So I sound really deep and handsome?" To which Antony adds, "Pitch mine up!"
Antony penned "Cut the World" for the opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovi**ć, which he has worked at on-and-off for three years with Abramović and Dafoe. In the downcast clip, Dafoe plays a solemn, ultimately likable businessman. His secretary, played by Antony's friend, the actress Carice van Houten, engages him in pleasant conversation. But something is noticeably wrong, as the video builds tension with intently focused gestures and contemplative facial expressions. And then Carice slices Dafoe's neck open in a startlingly realistic and stunning fashion.
The video could only be the production of creative forces as disparate as Antony and Nabil, in its commitment at once to a radical political undertone as well as subtle, refined artistry. Antony insists the video does not carry a moral narrative, but he's never been reserved about championing female empowerment, as exhibited at his recent curation of the Meltdown Festival in London, as well as his seven-minute attempt at tearing down patriarchy with the eco-feminist monologue "Future Feminism", included on Cut the World.
Antony pushed his own personal boundaries for "Cut the World"; at times the project seemed unwieldy and "too problematic" to carry out. "In my life, I tend to stay in a very tiny boat and I navigate around giant vessels," he said. "This was really about utilizing big systems and being committed to them. It seemed like the wind was behind the sails. And maybe it was bigger than me." So he set his personal terror aside. "I feel unsettled by the piece, but challenged," he said. "It feels valid. I just want to be vigorous and participate as best I can, so other people feel confidence to do so. At the very least, it's going to provoke dialogue that's relevant to our times."
Pitchfork: Was the concept for "Cut the World" collaborative?
NE: It stemmed from Antony. I remember getting an email with an outline that was really well-written, which is something I'm not used to.
AH: It's something I've been working on for a couple of years, developing an idea for a film. I've got notebooks full of ideas. I knew I wanted to record a video for "Cut the World" and do something we hadn't done before. It seemed synchronistic. Most videos I've done have been a bit fringier. Nabil, were the Bon Iver concepts your original ideas?
NE: Everything I'd done prior was an original idea.
AH: This video was a bit more aggressively narrated.
NE: Yeah. But I loved it. As a director, what I'd love to do is a feature. So I was happy to make that shift-- getting a piece of a story. It was a big step in the direction I want to move and how I want to create things. Even the texture. I have this video as a benchmark-- the feeling and tone that I want to create.
Pitchfork: The video leaves a lot open for interpretation. Antony, how did you conceptualize the narrative?
AH: The basic premise was that a cataclysm in nature provokes a chain of events, which occur in the film. I ended up finding the word "cataclysm" because I kept thinking of a tsunami, or something that happened to everyone-- no one was making conscious decisions. And Willem sensed that something was changing, in the way that a dog would sense an earthquake. And by the time [Carice] was aware of what happened, somehow her consciousness had shifted. One of the struggles was--
NE: To find balance.
AH: --so it didn't seem like it was a revenge killing, or that she was upset with him for a personal reason. We really worked on the innocence of Willem's character.
NE: On really humanizing him. When you look at him, you're not thinking, "This is a bad boss."
Pitchfork: What did you do, in terms of the cinematography, to emphasize that?
NE: The tone of the film was very subtly approached-- keeping on shots with slow movements. Really letting you feel him through his subtle actions, as simple as drinking the coffee or looking out the window. Leaving that open to interpretation; not being too specific.
AH: [to Nabil] You really got into their eyes. It really drew you into both of them.
NE: Both of their eyes are so unbelievable. The way Carice's eyelids would flicker, the little movements of her eyeball-- you can sense her character and what she was feeling. Same with Willem. Eyes are the windows to the soul; that's not just a saying.
Pitchfork: The video seems to be about dismantling the male role, and the idea of different perspectives and ways of seeing the world.
AH: It's been provocative for me to see people try to create a moral narrative out of it. We didn't come at it from that perspective.
NE: It reveals what's in the viewer's head.
AH: It's been weird to see people with opposing points of view-- who have found something in it that might resonate with them, or that they hate about it. It's actually a bit disturbing to create work like that. It reminds me of like, Borat, where everyone's laughing, but everyone's laughing for a different reason. One person's laughing because they're racist, and the other person's laughing because racists are so idiotic. There's a moral ambiguity.
NE: What I was hoping we would create-- and I think we did-- was something with beauty, even in that [murder] scene. And the transfer.
AH: That was the most important moment-- when she cuts his throat-- the idea that she stays emotionally open while it's happening, and cries, and makes that transfer of a tear into his eye. It was actually quite amazing for that filming to happen. She really was crying into his eyes. Willem was freaking out because he'd never had someone's tears fall onto his eyeballs before. He said it was a really intense, hyper-intimate experience. It was a really central scene.
Pitchfork: What did you intend the transfer of her tear to represent?
AH: An intuitive, emotional awakeness. It represents that it wasn't a killing done out of rage.
Pitchfork: What was filming the murder scene like?
AH: There's a whole crew that put it together. The red liquid is pumped manually, like an artisan's arrangement. It's like a little crinoline, and it's hanging together by a thread.
NE: We had two chances. The first time, they actually squeezed the thing too hard and the thing of blood went and hit the window. It went haywire. We did it a second time, and, god willing, it worked out. Cause one [wrong] drop of blood and you have to redo it. It's pretty detailed.
Pitchfork: Obviously the video is difficult for most people to watch. Did you consider making it easier on the eyes?
NE: I wanted for that motion to be real. I didn't want it to be slow-motion or poetic. I wanted the action to be like-- if you're going to do that, what are you gonna do? You're going to come up behind someone and [sword noise].
AH: I wanted it to be very full-frontal-- direct, clear.
NE: Even seeing the way her head moved to the side. The aggression she put into it, like there was something pushing her.
AH: A lot of my hardcore fans have protested the piece, saying it's too violent. But the language of cutting has been in my songs since my first record. When I have sung about cutting, for instance, in "Cripple and the Starfish", it's within this pastoral music setting, so people have been able to take it as prosey and poetic. When you see something vivid and horrific, it puts it into a different perspective. But I grew up doing theatre on the Lower East Side. For me it's all just ketchup. Another theatrical device, like vibrato.
Pitchfork: The end of the video is interesting; it's not a happy ending, and there's no real resolution.
AH: There was a change. Anyone who commits an act like that is going to be destroyed; it's like post-traumatic stress disorder, like every soldier you've ever read about. You can't embody that kind of atrocity without being shattered internally.
Watch the Director's Cut version of the video below, with commentary by Antony and Nabil:
Pitchfork: Was there a particular reason you chose to work with Carice?
AH: I'd seen her in one movie, Black Butterflies. She was so emotional and expressive, and very empathetic. We actually did a trade. She asked me to sing on her new record and she did my video. A nice little artists' bartering system.
NE: Now I couldn't imagine anyone else playing that role. Everything about her movements.
AH: My favorite shot of Carice is when she's walking along the hallway, back to her room. And when she turns to the window, and that first tear falls down her face. It's so haunting.
NE: I love the way she came around the hallway. The moment when her head locks-- "Boom!" There was this feeling I got from her. It was a new experience for me, working with real actors. It's like a dance that happens. I wanna dance more.
AH: I didn't really know what acting was until I did this project with Marina and saw Willem onstage.
NE: Willem is beyond any movie I've ever seen; his character is mind-boggling. He does very untraditional acting, in and out of characters.
AH: He basically did ["Cut the World"] as a favor to me; it was a pipe dream. I think he was skeptical about the content when I described it to him. In fact, Willem really helped me develop the idea of his character-- the minefield of perceptions to anticipate playing in peoples' minds, if they saw him being killed by a secretary. I thought his participation was very generous. Willem can be very selfless in the way he approaches his acting.
Pitchfork: How did you first meet Willem?
AH: It was in 2000, on a film I was brought into, which Steve Buscemi directed called Animal Factory. Until 2005, I was still a pretty ghettoized, Downtown artist, but Willem always stayed friends with me. He was really supportive of me on the set of that film. It was filmed in Philadelphia in a disused prison and all the actors were prisoners on work release from a local prison. I was supposed to sing one of my songs, like a singing prisoner. Willem always had my back during that process. I really love him. He's the best.
Pitchfork: Who were the other women in the video?
AH: There were about 30 extras from Amsterdam and the surrounding areas.
NE: I loved the women coming out of the hallways; each personality. Usually I do a video and by the time it comes out, I'm like, "I never want to see this thing again." [laughs] But there are certain moments in this piece where I still feel emotion. Definitely, the hallway scene.
AH: That was the other critical moment in the piece-- when it turns into a much broader idea. A series of people marching forward, like an 80s music video. Then Marina was added later. Her presence became a third character.
NE: The way she came out in the hallway and looked over-- that resonated with me.
Pitchfork: What would you say Marina's presence brought to the video?
AH: The song itself, I wrote about Marina, for Life and Death. A lot of her work circles themes of endurance, particularly enduring suffering. With "Cut the World", I'm standing beside her on the stage, suggesting, what if instead of holding in the pain-- which is a very archetypically feminine approach to suffering, like how Shiva holds the poison of the world like a blue ball in his throat-- what if she were to turn and express anger in a different way?
Then it became a theme for the tour I just did. I tried to use all of the platforms available to me-- in the media and within the work itself-- to quite aggressively move forward an agenda I really care about, as opposed to feeling victimized, like most of us do as consumers in society, feeling disempowered. The classic idea of the little person who turns and takes power.
I even thought about it in terms of nature. We're used to these ideas of, for example, tigers or sharks as top predators in nature. But their populations are dwindling to nothing; there's only two thousand or less left in the wild. Suddenly, a tiger becomes vulnerable, and we're the predators.
I heard this amazing story from the San Francisco Zoo. About six years ago these two boys snuck in at night and had been teasing this tiger, Tatiana. And she jumped out of her enclosure and gobbled one of them up. She was shot the next morning, but she sort of turned and cut the world. She embodied this almost unbelievable self-empowerment and took an unexpected action and created an unexpected turn of events. That's always how power shifts-- the people who've long-been subjected, finally finding the power and unity and synchronicity and sense of common purpose enough to take action.
[Today] it's almost inconceivable that we're going to be able to shake this shitty system off its foundations, to create a new trajectory for ourselves as a species, in relation to nature. But that's the idea of "Cut the World"-- why not try? All we've got is legend to make of ourselves. The legends are being written, whether we try or not. We're either a bunch of assholes who lay around, waiting for the inevitable to happen, while we indulge our every last tidbit of consumerism. Or we try to use the platforms available to us to at least shake things.
Pitchfork: On the album Cut the World, the title track is followed by a monologue, "Future Feminism". Do you feel that speech works in tandem with "Cut the World" and this video?
AH: It's problematic. You've got to understand, I'm just an artist. I'm not a political scientist. I'm not organized in the way perhaps you would expect of someone taking a public stance so audaciously. I'm full of holes. I'm full of fallibilities. It's clumsy and intuitively formulated. The video is its own piece, but it's another shard of my process. Part of the suggestion is: what we all think matters. If you sense something's wrong-- if you have an uneasy feeling when you look out into the world-- there's probably a very good reason for it. You should speak up.
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Laurie Anderson has that amazing song, "Only an Expert Can Deal With the Problem". It was so clarifying for me. It really shows the ways in which we've been hammered into submission, because [a problem doesn't fall within] our area of expertise. But any grandmother or taxi driver knows that shit stinks. Whether it be boys' club politics, or corporate control of government, or the ways we've been paralyzed by massive organizations pretending to have our best interests at heart. It just seemed like an exciting thing to do-- to push it forward.
This video is obviously problematic, but I feel very strongly about it as a gesture. It's not a suggestion we're asking reality to pursue. It's a shaking of some ideas in peoples' heads-- a dialogue between archetypes within each of us.
Pitchfork: You said it's not moral, but it seems to work in tandem with things you've said about shifting governments from partriarchies to matriarchies.
AH: Some people have said this is a preposterous proposition-- "how could you be talking about ushering in feminine systems of governance, and then put forward a video that embodies vile, genocidal executions we would associate with patriarchal systems of governance?" I don't know quite what to say to those people. [laughs]
Pitchfork: It reminds me of a Brian Eno quote. "Go to an extreme and then retreat to a more useful position."
AH: Saved by the bell! That's actually a good idea.
Pitchfork: Do you feel the video falls under the umbrella of radical feminism?
AH: It's complicated for me to talk about the way I'm embracing feminism. I'm increasingly pulling in ideas about ecology, spirituality, the economy-- combing through the landscape of our civilization. One of the first courses I took in college was with Vito Russo, who wrote a book called "The Celluloid Closet", which is a history of gay and lesbian [people] in film. He said to us, "You can't separate your struggle as a gay person from the struggles of women," because the oppression of gays is built on the premise that the feminine is subjugated in society. That made a big impression on me. You can't separate the issues.
It's not accidental that we did this video, and Pussy Riot is happening on the other side of the world. There are people organizing all over the place. With Pussy Riot, [the media]'s saying maybe this is going to reinvigorate riot grrrl or whatever. Riot grrrl was brilliant, but you can go a lot further back. There have been incredible, powerful women making radical music for generations-- Buffy Sainte-Marie, Diamanda Galas, these incredible icons. There are articulate, powerful women who have been dreaming about this shit forever. All we need to do is connect the dots and plug in the Christmas tree.
NE: I'm learning a lot through the process of this video, by the way.
AH: In the early 90s, there was this amazing book called Angry Women-- interviews with powerhouse women from punk and the underground. It was our Bible. Those are some inroads I'd love to connect to the present. It goes back to people like Kembra, from New York. She's one of the most important, feminal-- we say "feminal" instead of "seminal"-- artists in New York. She has not really navigated the marketplace in a savvy, self-interested, shrewd way. But she's stayed with this burgeoning body of principles and ideas that are a tremendous inspiration to a lot of us-- me, CocoRosie, other artists Downtown.
Pitchfork: What's interesting to me about Pussy Riot is that it proves mixing activism and art does not make for bad art. This video is not exactly a piece of activism, but it's political.
AH: This video is nothing in comparison to Pussy Riot. Did you hear what they said in the courtroom? "Even though we're behind bars, we're more free than anyone." That's like Benazir Bhutto before she went back to Pakistan to be killed. That's like Oscar Wilde facing the courtroom before he was jailed. To see that courage among women in a white youth movement? That is incredibly powerful. It sets a new bar: how are we going to participate now? Should we all be going to jail? Should Animal Collective be going to jail? Should Grizzly Bear be going to jail? Should Bon Iver be going to jail? Is it time?
Typically the youth culture stance for the last 20 years has been, "Why bother participating, it's all so corrupt." But if we don't toe the line, nothing's going to happen. And what are you supposed to make art about if it's not what you care about? If you're only making art about your own pedestrian life, abstracted from the reality of the world today, soon you're just going to have this creative cesspool of meaningless work. Because it's not built on any values. The video is not clean enough to really be considered activist work, but it's provocative.
