DANE MITCHELL
As a party got into full swing in the food bank next door to his studio, New Zealand-born visual artist Dane Mitchell told us about Post Hoc, his long-running project on NTS Radio, that stalwart of British and global underground music culture. A natural continuation of the work he presented for New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2019, Post Hoc collates lists of the extinct, disappeared, vanished, lost, forgotten, past and gone, whether birds, artworks, recessions, stolen artworks, or abandoned oil platforms. Mitchell discussed radio, sound, loss, repetition, isolation and the shipping forecast with TANK.
Interview by Tom MounaPortrait by Adam Luxton
Tom Mouna We’re both big fans of NTS. How did you begin working with them?
Dane Mitchell I approached them about four years ago when I was first working on Post Hoc. I didn’t really have a sense of what we might do together, but I felt that because the work has this voice at the heart of it, this list that’s read by a voice, I had the idea of the ear and listening being a crucial dynamic aspect. In Venice I was using cell towers as radio masts to emit the work and so I was thinking about the way these cell towers connected to radio. Originally, I thought maybe we could do an hour-long special by building lists that related directly to radio, like radio quiet zones. But now it has grown into an hour-long list a day for two years. It’s great to think that this is actually something that will wash over listeners in a really meaningful and soft way in the morning as a kind of daily listening ritual.
TM What does bringing Post Hoc to the radio do for the project?
DM It’s certainly not something I’ve done before. In my work, I do tend to gravitate towards working with other people, and I don’t necessarily mean that in a collaborative sense. I’m really interested in engaging with people who are working in specific fields of knowledge. I’ve never worked outside the art world in this specific musical sense and NTS sits firmly and critically in this context. I’m interested in leaning in that direction and thinking about how audiences will approach the work given that it’s not tethered to an art context in such a strong way.
TM Radio feels to me like almost an organic site to move the work into.
DM Thinking about signals and radio and transmissions was something I was really focused on early on in the development of Post Hoc for Venice. Understanding these signals as ways to extend sculptural language, to think about how an object might sit in space or pollute and collide with space in interesting ways. Radio was an active early consideration in the project. It’s also, thankfully, totally outside the white cube, so it becomes a nice kind of almost anti-engagement with the art institution.
TM The idea of this format of the lists as a daily ritual definitely feels like a new angle for Post Hoc.
DM It prioritises the voice and the list, whereas the Venice show had all these other parts, physical elements, and it was about manifesting these lists in some way. This radio version prioritises the voice, and in a way what’s beautiful about it is that it’s always changing. There’s nothing repeated and yet there’s a consistency to it, this constant reading again and again, which kind of soothingly holds you as a listener. I’m really curious to see how people respond; it’s really hard to know because it’s such a private space. When we listen to something we’re kind of in our own heads. Although, us all being at home through the pandemic, being in our headphones listening to the radio is a way of feeling a community beyond yourself and connecting to something bigger while also being isolated.
TM A lot of people were listening to NTS during the lockdowns, in my case, the Do!! You!!! Breakfast Show with Charlie Bones. It became a really important connecting point, especially inside the chat room. It would be interesting to think about what the chat room would be like during your broadcasts.
DM I’ve been wondering if I even want to go in there. I do love the idea of the work being somewhat enigmatic; it’s just out there like the forecast. I often think about the way we talk about the weather and the way that we connect to something much bigger than us. There’s something ritualistic in the way we socialise through discussions of the weather.
TM There’s also the shipping forecast, which is a great analogy. The work on NTS in that context is like an underground radio-music shipping forecast. I have an uncle who listens to the shipping forecast religiously, not because he’s a sailor or anything. He just finds it very meditative and relaxing; he can go to a different place. I feel this work having a similar effect.
DM The work certainly has gravity and weight to it, no doubt. It is heavy with political reality and yet it also has levity and lightness. Some of those lists are quite hilarious. I’ve just been programming the list of discontinued fragrances, like Nash for Men by Kylie… But then there’s this one list that I programmed in quite early, the list of missing artworks that reads for 60 hours. It’s beautiful; it creates images in the brain. If it’s not the title of the work, then it’s a description of the work and the maker, so it’s one image after another being called up. The whole thing is like forecasting the past. I’m inviting composers this time around, which draws in another possibility of the work washing over you in another way. It carries the voice in a way that’s really beautiful and unexpected.
TM Is this the first time you’ve commissioned composers and producers to create sounds that play underneath the list, or was it already a feature of Post Hoc at Venice?
DM It was not. There it was way drier, just a constant voice. I think collaborating with NTS offers the opportunity to imagine the work in another way through peers who are engaged in sound composition and responding in interesting ways or even looking to be an oppositional force to the lists. In a way it introduces the human back into the work, too, because the voice, although she’s seductive and very believable, she isn’t us, it’s AI.
TM Thinking again about the lists. By their nature, they are a kind of an emptiness or nothingness, from the past or not really existing in the physical any more, and similarly radio is this kind of physical-non-physical presence and absence, a kind of empty presence. There does seem to something affective about this bringing together.
DM I like to think of radio as operating in the ether. Many of the lists engage with these poetics of space and time, these thresholds of physicality, and the lists are like poems. It’s an incredibly subjective imagining of loss, vanishings, disappearances and extinction. It pushes up pretty hard against epistemological wisdom, around what it is to make an encyclopaedia and what it is to try and contain the world in an encyclopaedic form. It’s arrested by its own inability to really hold the whole world. Collections, libraries, museums, encyclopaedias: once knowledge is held inside these spaces, there’s a tendency to relinquish responsibility to it elsewhere; it’s safe here, we don’t need to worry about it out here in the real world. I also like to think of the lists as compositions: they have to be carefully composed and balanced. I haven’t added any new lists, but I’ve been adding things to the lists. One of the most timely and pertinent is the list of removed and destroyed monuments. That list is much longer now because throughout the past couple of years with Black Lives Matter, many monuments have been knocked over and removed from public spaces, and each one of these is named.
TM This is probably just a general point about history, but these lists seem so far detached from us when actually they’re also contemporary. You think you’re hearing something from the past, but actually, it’s ongoing.
DM This ongoing process speaks to a logic of the history of progress really being a history of obsolescence. In this current moment, or any current moment, we sit atop this mass of vanished, disappeared and obsolete things. I’m really interested in the weight of this, the idea of the data having a mass and size to it and then it being spread thin outwardly over the Internet and through NTS.
TM There’s something about extinction that seems to appeal to humans in a kind of bizarre, spooky, almost sadistic way, and which Post Hoc successfully touches on. When I was younger, I remember going onto Wikipedia to look at the extinct or nearly extinct animals, and it would fill me with this feeling of how big the world was out there and equally how fragile it all was.
DM That’s something that’s human, right? I think the work addresses that and makes it large and unfathomable, but also poetic and strange. Maybe it’s also the sense of the melancholic; there’s something about the melancholic that we move towards as a species. There are some lists that are really heartbreaking. Disappearing sounds and extinct birds – those two lists I find really haunting for the fragility of those sounds in themselves. I went back to the list of extinct birds just to check if there had been any new ones since the broadcast; there were, but there was also one that I took off because it had been rediscovered. I often say that the work is not a moral lesson, in that I don’t hold a position of authority or knowingness; I’m sort of lost in the data as much as anybody else, even though I’m the maker of it. I don’t see myself as some kind of teller of truth. I’m just interested in accruing knowledge and mirroring it back in a new and peculiar way. It’s also worth speaking about the title Post Hoc and what it points to. Post hoc is Latin and translates to after this. Latin seemed important because it’s the language of nomenclature, the language of naming, but the words also come from a longer phrase: “Post hoc ergo propter hoc”, meaning after this therefore because this. It’s used to suggest that we should be careful about assuming causal links between one event and one that seems to follow it. It’s also true that we can’t know the consequences of our actions in the present and what might unfold in the future. We can only sit on top of all this data.
TM Post Hoc opens up this kind of scary space at the end of the lists. They don’t feel finished. Maybe one day at the end of one of these lists comes humans.
DM Exactly. ◉