Warren Fischer has commanded me to lie to you. “Expression over reportage,” he said over email. Casey Spooner echoed, “Use my voice.” After all, pop/art/performance project Fischerspooner actively evades “reality.” By comparison, their first book, New Truth, released last week, seems oddly straightforward. Featuring essays by Klaus Biesenbach, Gavin Brown, and Jeffrey Deitch, photographs of their performances from 1998-2002, and light-table-backed ephemera, the books seems a bit honest for a group that feeds on manufactured myth and spectacle.
This is how my interview with Fischerspooner morphed into a thought experiment. Spooner explained, "We love a dramatic reveal [of interviews that never really happened]." And I obliged. "What would happen if New Truth were a big fat lie?" I thought. What if Fischerspooner's debut 1998 performance in the Astor Place Starbucks never took place? What if all the images, pristinely documented, were actually staged? And so late one night, sitting down to edit this interview, I became Fischer, Spooner, and myself, just like the duo had suggested. I wrote a long conversation that had never taken place about how New Truth riffed on the disjoint between memory and imagination.
“The book doesn’t re-create anything,” I-as-Spooner said, “It creates. It was an important experiment for us to see if the book could encapsulate memory and furthermore, create memory. Could we force our audience to remember performances that didn’t happen?”
“Two years ago, when we began thinking about this book, we approached our friend, photographer James McConnell, about staging some of the performances,” I-as-Fischer chimed in, “We hired a troupe of 20 people and shot performances in James’ basement in New Jersey. While all of the performances look completely wild, they were actually manufactured. We had to make sure that people didn’t bring in iPhones, because we wanted everything to look like the '90s.”
But none of that is true. Even though Fischer and Spooner wanted me to publish my fake questions and answers, below is the real interview, where the two artists and I talked idealism, editing, and New Truth. Or did we?
1.
Slowly, as I dug through the mess, I discovered great and forgotten things.
When did you begin thinking about putting the book together, and how long has this project been in the works?
Warren Fischer: We have been thinking about making a book for a couple of years now, and it was really in the last year and a half that we actually had time to focus on it.
Casey Spooner: I’ve been thinking about making a book of the project since 2002, but it really hit me in 2005 when I was cleaning our storage space. It was a complete disaster. Everyone had been tossing all kinds of materials in there for years. I had to untangle piles and piles of stuff. Slowly, as I dug through the mess, I discovered great and forgotten things. It was very clear in that moment we needed to make a book, so we set about organizing the archive. It has actively been in the works since then.
One of the first things that struck me about New Truth was the sheer mass of ephemera that you’d saved for it. When you were performing, did you anticipate a project like this? Was documenting performances a conscious part of your practice?
CS: Absolutely. I always felt it was important to hang onto the detritus of production. I love the ephemera that is generated when making a film, a photo, or a performance. There is a strange romance to the evidence of lost action. I don’t know what it is that draws me to these objects. I began as a visual artist, and then I moved into performance. I think this focused my eye and made me perceive production as more of a studio practice and less of a commercial process. I value what is deemed irrelevant on set.
WF: One thing that's a little different about this project [as opposed to previous bands and projects] is that this time, we knew what we were doing. When we started Fischerspooner, we had already built and worked on other projects, and so from the beginning we knew we wanted to maintain an archive of this project.
You started Fischerspooner in 1998 through a performance at a Starbucks. How did you get them to let you perform there in the first place?
CS: Our first performance was part of a larger showcase organized by Kelly Kuvo. She was the leader of the first band I was in called Sweet Thunder. Somehow she connected with two students who were working at Starbucks in Astor Place who had been organizing weekly events. We performed at Starbucks three times. In 1999 we re-created our first performance from the year prior.
WF: The project started more as an ironic gesture for me until we were actually in Starbucks, connecting to different audiences. In seeing how Casey took this project very genuinely, it became clear to me that there was something much more positive than purely critical about what we were doing.
To ignore the aesthetic value of the surface is naive. Great work is a combination of thoughtful artifice and extreme production value.
Part of your project involves the idea that we can live genuinely, even in a world constructed through artifice. Do you think of this project as idealistic or as some sort of last-ditch effort to make meaning in a corporate, globalized world?
WF: While the project started more critically for me, as you suggest, ultimately it's a very genuine positive expressive ecstatic statement. We used to say at the beginning of the project that an artist like Jack Johnson, who embodies the tropes of folk music, is actually in a way more artificial than one of our lip sync digital performances, especially when our performances are oscillating between perfection and disaster.
CS: There is power and meaning in production. To ignore the aesthetic value of the surface is naive. Great work is a combination of thoughtful artifice and extreme production value. This model could be applied to the most ambitious works in art history and commercial entertainment. What we offer is confusion. We have been able to work within the systems of art and entertainment simultaneously. At our best we jam frequencies and create a new way to read familiar forms.
In the book's introduction, editor Meredith Mower makes the distinction between editing a book about you versus editing a book with you. What were your goals as editors?
CS: It is a delicate balance to express our ideas truthfully. We see connections [in our own work] that others would not. I suppose the biggest breakthrough in editing this book was finding guiding principles to structure the book. There was a period called “making pages” where we played with combining hundreds of images and creating connections. Then, 500 pages were organized into chronological order. The final stage was choosing images that defined how we manipulate time and space. These early performances were unique in that they combined a raw pop impulse with sculptural endurance performance.
For a band so interested in creating myth, your conversations felt so genuine and helpful in making sense of something that seems so foreign. Why did you choose the conversational format?
CS: Fischerspooner is really a dialogue between Warren and me. We don’t agree on many things but we do agree that there is something interesting in the space between us. We land in an unlikely place that neither one of us can define or deny, so a conversational format is an ideal way to see what we are.
WF: For me it was really the idea of creating a storybook: something that felt personal, that had a narrative. Having Casey and I become narrators was interesting. I also liked the way in which our conversations positioned the book somewhere in between art book/story book/screenplay—it's a hybrid.
Why did you decide to focus on your early work in particular, and why was 2002 the cutoff that you chose?
CS: I felt it was important to show the early development of our work. Most people know what we have done from 2002 forward. We needed to show the foundation of our ideas and how they initially came to be. It’s a strange and beautiful story, and I feel misunderstood when people think I am a musician and I am in a band. It actually makes me wretch. I’m a visual artist and performer. I know nothing about music. We also ran out of pages! We cut over 250 pages of images, so we have the sequel ready to go: NEW TRUTH:part two.
WF: The easy answer is that we just have too much stuff and we couldn't fit it all. We had to cut 100 pages out of this book in a week right before we delivered. It was just a logical segment in our mind: the first album cycle.
Music is, of course, an enormous part of your performance, and books are necessarily silent. Was that something you were thinking through in your editorial decisions?
WF: We don't really have a format. Yes, we make music, yes, we do performances, but we try to engage in anything since everything that we touch is a creative statement. In a way, we view our packaging design or our press or wardrobe or anything really as an extension of the core idea; a book is just another medium for the idea to engage.
we try to engage in anything since everything that we touch is a creative statement.
Your work defies classification, but you have maintained relationships with corporations throughout this history of Fischerspooner. Have you had to make any compromises because of corporate partnerships?
CS: AGH! The stories I could tell you!
WF: I guess I would say that ultimately the project is about trying to find this “new truth” and new authenticity, and the more that we experiment with how to connect to anything, whether brands or personal spaces or publications, the more we learn what is possible...
I read that you're making a new record right now. Do you think the book will change how people see (hear) the record?
WF: Everything changes everything.
Is there anything else you'd like to talk about that I haven't touched on?
WF: I would just like to state that what you write about us need not be grounded in accuracy.
What should I lie about?
WF & CS: Everything. But you should make it sound true.
