9:45am | I sometimes suspect that Chris Scoates, Director of CSULB’s University Art Museum, has a secret mission to convince the world that Long Beach is the Mecca for cutting edge art. Not only has he overseen exhibitions by cultural icons like Brian Eno and, most recently, legendary rocker Lou Reed, every aspect of the museum’s work is consistently high. It comes as no surprise, then, that the book he wrote, Bullet Proof…I Wish I Was: The Lighting & Stage Design of Andi Watson, is equally impeccable.
Watson is best known for his work with Radiohead, whose live shows continue to astound and amaze fans around the world. Watson masterfully blends architecture, light, cinema, and bleeding edge technology. The book is, in part, a detailed look at nearly every stage design he’s done, including multitudes of full color photographs, sketches, and frames grabbed from animation sequences.
In addition to text by Scoates, Radiohead front-man Thom York pens the forward, and there are fascinating essays by J. Fiona Ragheb and Dick Hebdige. I asked Chris how the book got started.
Chris: I was working with this guy, Martyn Ware, who was with Human League back in the day. I was working on a sound piece with him at the university. We did a big 3D sound cube in the middle of campus. He said to me, at the end of that project, “you really have to get to know a guy called Andi Watson, who is a lighting designer, stage designer, primarily he has worked for the band Radiohead from the beginning.”
When Radiohead were coming through for their In Rainbows tour a couple of years back, Andi called me, sent me an email, and said we should get together and chat. And so we actually me at the lighting board at the Hollywood Bowl, where they were playing that night. I handed him a bunch of museum material that I had prepared, and we met the next morning at The Standard on Sunset.
I was so taken with the show, and the In Rainbows concert, in part because it was this beautiful, beautiful LED forest that, for me, started to reference and quote all kinds of wonderful fine art works from Dan Flavin (for more of his work, click here) to Walter De Maria to Eric Riddle to Ann Veronica Janssens… Just a lot of people. So, I said I’d love to talk about doing a book that encompasses everything he’d done from the first Radiohead tour to this, and I think he was taken aback. He said, “that sounds great, but how do we do that kind of thing?” We talked about getting a publisher, and me putting a team of people together. I said I’d edit the book and write the essay, and hire a couple other people to write about Andi’s work form different perspectives. So, that’s kind of how it started.
Chronicle Books in San Francisco jumped at the opportunity to do it. It’s really one of the first books of its kind to really look at somebody in the lighting design field, and to really look at the work through the lens of fine art. And like I said, I wrote the main essay, and the British critic and cultural theorist Dick Hebdige wrote an essay, and Fiona Ragheb, a curator who was at the Guggenheim and who had worked with Dan Flavin and had written a lot about light and space work, wrote the third essay in the book.
The book also includes photographs from every Radiohead concert. In conjunction with the photographs, there are mechanical drawings that show the stage set from various angles and elevations. I also had access to these incredible animations that Andi uses for special effects on stage that we turned into stills. In the back of the book there’s a graphic library of all the effects that Andi designed for the shows
I was back in London for Christmas a couple years back and we met at the Tate [Modern], and we talked more about the book. Then 3 or 4 months later he was back in L.A. and one day we were having lunch and he handed me a hard drive and he said “Be really careful. This is my life.” An he entrusted me with this hard drive that essentially had everything on it. The animations, drawing, photographs, sound files, and all kinds of other material. There was really a lot of incredible material that we didn’t use for the book because it wasn’t appropriate but, essentially, Andi was very kind to say, “this is the archive–go at it. Lets try to curate and edit from this material.” It was really a black hole because, every time I opened this particular hard drive, I literally lost hours of my life. I’d open one file, and the next file, and the next file … and it took me months, actually, to really have a good understanding of what was on it.
Sander: How did you get into take that material and organize it? How did you begin to figure out a way to put it into a narrative that makes sense?
Chris: First of all, the essays in the book take a very broad view of Andi’s work. My essay really starts off by talking about the first lighting designer, Adolphe Appia. We have a drawing that goes back to 1923 as a way to establish a larger historical context. I then talk about Laszlo Maholy-Nagy’s light prop. We have a Picabia set that’s been done in 1924. We all started talking about what lighting design for stage was and how theatrics play a part in that.
I then moved into the liquid light guys of the 1960s–the psychedelic guys–like Glen McKay and Mark Boyle. I then took a look at Mike Leonard, who was the first lighting designer for Pink Floyd. He made incredible light machines made of Perspex lenses. From there, I then started looking at film, too, because a lot of what Andi was doing in the Hail to the Thief tour was almost quoting Jean Cocteau. So Blood of the Poet, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Matrix and 2001: A Space Odyssey are referenced in the book.
The essays in the book provide a much larger historical context to sit Andi’s work in, and then we look at fine art too. So the organization principles around the book are really about “lets create a history,” and then lets organize the book into shows, into diagrams. Then, let’s see if we can’t tell the story.
Sander: When you say he was referencing these different works, different historical frameworks and things like that, are those things that you found in his work, or are those things that he said he was consciously doing?
Chris: It’s a little bit of both. I mean, this Blood of the Poet image that we have from Jean Cocteau back in 1930, the references here are really quite stunning. I brought that up with Andi. “Is this something you’re referencing, or is this something I’m finding?” And it was a bit of both.
Most artists today go through university. They study art history. They study film history. As a part of their academic studies there‘s a broader understanding of what the work is. Andi was trained within a kind of historical moment and, yes, where he studied this material seeps out. Right, you make references, so he was very pleased that we had gone back and started to understand that nothing is made in a vacuum, everything has a lineage, and you make these connections. And so in the reference we made to The Matrix, when you go to the In Rainbows show, you know that, when the lights starts going green and flickering, there’s a film reference there.
Sander: Was it difficult to get your other essayists to take something that people might not necessary think of as fine art and place it in a fine art context?
Chris: There is a better understanding these days. I think authors and artists and curators and folks in the culture are interested in crossing boundaries, blurring boundaries between different disciplines. For example, you have architecture using animation software to design buildings. You have video artist making games. So the idea that you get artists thinking about artists thinking about rock and roll lighting or stage design is not that foreign anymore. And I think it’s fairly important, from my perspective, that we don’t ‘silo‘ disciplines, but that we start to think of the convergence of those disciplines together. There’s a different kind of language that gets developed and, as a museum director, we can begin to think about the future of museums differently if we do that.
So many of the projects that I have worked on in the past few years start to think about that, particularly the music projects and the sound works. Another example would be Brian Eno. Brian has been working since 1968 as an artist. He’s primarily known for the work that he does with U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, David Bowie, and a number of other bands, but in all the time that he’s been working with those bands, he’s been working on his visual arts career too. And it’s not as a hobby. It’s actually a serious practice. So his work goes back and forth, seamlessly, between the music he involves in his installation and his lighting work. It’s all a part of the same story. So getting authors to think differently about what their writing is not that difficult these days.
Sander: There’s an interesting progression as you move through the book, seeing as how the designs from Andi’s early days unfold and evolve, but I have to confess that I was taken aback about how consistent he has been throughout his entire career with a very specific kind of aesthetic that he seems to have developed.
Chris: He, like many artists, fall into an aesthetic that they have refined. And Andi’s work, in terms of fine art anyway, is very much this sort of minimalist aesthetic. But it’s very beautiful, it has a very specific look. But there are people like Mark Fisher who worked for U2, right? They all have a very specific look, and those guys tend to get crazier and crazier with each tour. We talk about U2’s 360 tour in reference to In Rainbows because In Rainbows was the first 100% carbon free stage design. With all LED lights, it was carried across the world in five trucks, as opposed to the 360 tour, which was like 36 trucks or 136 trucks– whatever it is, I don’t remember now, but it’s a huge number.
The In Rainbows tour was essentially an LED grid, a forest, and he wanted them all to go to the ground, but they had to stop at a certain point to get the band members on stage. But this grid, essentially, is a kind of arbiter through which he plays and shows all these various animations so it turns form one thing to another very quickly. It changes shape, it changes dimension, it changes perspective very quickly, which I think is the beauty of the piece.
Sander: You also got a rare and wonderful opportunity to see the system up close.
Chris: When I began working with Andi, I said “I need to come see the shows to think about how we’re going to do the book in order to think about how I’m going to put this together.” And he said “Well, we’re playing two shows in South America–the last two shows of the tour–in Santiago. If you can get down here, I can give you tickets.” So I went to the last two shows, and the first night I got to stand on stage, behind Andi, working the lights, and the second night I got to stand in the front row. And luckily, after the show finished on that first night, the wonderful thing was that I actually got to go on stage and watch them as they actually played the lights so I could get a sense of what they were doing.
Sander: How did Andi get connected with Radiohead?
Chris: When Thom and Andi met at one of their very first shows at Oxford in 1993 or 94, Andi was working with the Cure at the time. There was something about the way that Thom worked, and the way that Andi worked, that they both really hit it off. It didn’t take long for Thom to have complete trust in him, so there really is a lot of autonomy with the work that Andi does with the band. It is very creative, it’s very per formative, and I think the interesting thing is that there’s complete trust there. He is like a member of the band. I think he’s said he missed one show in all the years they’ve been doing it. There’s obviously a great working relationship.
Sander: Not only is the content of the book amazing, but the design is also quite stunning. Who did it?
Chris: It was designed by Andrew Blauvelt and Matthew Rezac. Andrew is the design director at the Walker Art Center, and it’s been designed in such a way that the holes in the cover are a play on light and light filter. It’s like a light aperture type of thing. It’s beautifully designed.
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Bullet Proof is available from Amazon.com, Chronicle Books, Barnes&Nobel, and at the University Art Museum.
Many thanks to Amanda Fruta, UAM’s Public Relations Director, for her help in transcribing our conversation.