What was the starting point or the initial idea for this film?
The film developed out of two experimental documentaries I made on New Jersey, Paterson – Lódz (2005), and Skein (2007). In these films I realized that I was working indirectly with some of the questions and landscapes that had preoccupied the Post-Minimalist sculptors of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. My dialogue with these artists was on a formal level whereas the subject of the film was the social and political landscapes of New Jersey. But in Monuments I wanted to invert this order and bring their work into the foreground, placing the Post-Minimalist artists and their ideas into something like a graphic novel rendering of the narrative subtext of their work.
More simply, the film also came out of seeing how quickly the city relegates art movements and artists to obsolescence, as well as my experience of boarding a bus (as Robert Smithson once did) to visit my grandparents in Wayne, NJ and the shifts in scale that one experiences on this short journey from the city to the suburbs.
Can you share an important/funny/moving/surprising anecdote of the making-of this film with us?
As we left one of the locations, I had a brief conversation with a solitary middle-aged man from India sitting behind the reception desk of a grand late-modernist complex in the New Jersey suburbs, a lone figure in a research center that in 1963 accommodated 3,000 scientists and is now empty.
What do you do when not making films?
Look for ways to make more films, amongst other things.
What would you like to say to your audience before seeing your film?
‘Let us give passing shape to the unconsolidated views which surround a work of art, and develop a type of anti-vision or negative seeing.’ - R. Smithson
What project(s) are you working on this year?
A film and sound work on the car industry and the network of influences in pop and dance music between Detroit and Germany in the 70’s and 80’s.