JO: I saw your film and I was completely delighted. Technically I think its beautiful, Visually pleasing. The camera work is gorgeous and the weaving in of the spiral drawing #801 into the film, letting us know there’s going to be this wonderful revelation at the end, the pulling of the tape. It comes as no surprise. You develop a tension and anticipation which I completely enjoy, that being said, I could go on heaping praise…But.
My first question is why did you choose Sol LeWitt as the subject of your work?
CT: That’s very simple. On March 1, 1984 I turned 18 and on that day the Dutch 8 o’clock news ran an item on the opening of a Sol LeWitt show in the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam. I was already involved with art, going to art school. I knew art history, but I had never encountered anything like that. So I saw it on TV and decided to go see the show. I was not living in Amsterdam at the time and it completely changed my whole way of thinking about art. That an idea can be art or the motor that produces art! I sensed the work that was behind it even though you couldn’t actually see it, but you felt all those lines. It stayed with me. And then I forgot all about it. I grew older doing my own thing. But, as a film maker I made things that start with an idea. Not so much a thing but an idea, a conceptual thing. In 2003, I think, together with my wife I made a film about Jonas Mekas and the Anthology Film Archives. That film was shown as part of an exhibition in the same museum where they made the spiral drawing and I really liked the idea to show a film in the context of a museum rather than in a cinema. We really liked it and we said to the museum people if there’s anything in the future that we can do together lets do it. That would be a good idea. Years later I was in NY with my wife staying with her parents for Christmas I got an email from someone at the museum saying they are going to redo the spiral wall drawing by Sol LeWitt. And by chance or not by chance my wife and son and I were going to DIA Beacon the next day where they have a beautiful collection of his drawings and I was standing there and I was 18 again and I decided this has to be a film.
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