Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby
Written by Beijo Lee
Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby are the dynamic duo that have been creating their art together since 1994. Their work has been exhibited in galleries and at festivals in North and South America, Asia and throughout Europe.
Duke and Battersby are currently teaching at Syracuse University in Central New York, where Duke is the program coordinator for the new Transmedia Program. In 2010 they were shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award. Their work is distributed by Video Data Bank in Chicago, Argos in Brussels, V-Tape in Toronto and Video Out in Vancouver. In 2012, a book about their work, titled The Beauty is Relentless, was published by Coach House Press. In 2015, they were awarded the grand prize from the European Media Arts Festival for their most recent work, Dear Lorde.
This interview was recorded on November 1st, 2017 (6PM PST) Via FaceTime from Davis, California to Toronto, Ontario
When I started the interview with Emily Vey Duke and CB Battersby via FaceTime, I initiated the conversation about childhood dreams and how they became the artists they are today. This is where their art career started.
Beijo Lee: So what were you doing in your early twenties?
Cooper Battersby: Well, Emily was in art school, and art-wise we were making books - like printed matter, posters, and we were in a band, and we made zines.
Emily Vey Duke: We disobeyed authority!
CB: Adamantly opposed to any kind of civility and civilization. We hitchhiked across the U.S.- that was one of the things we did. From Nova Scotia to Arizona and it took us nine months.
It took Emily seven years to finish her undergrad because we didn't prioritize and we just took time off and did whatever we wanted.
BL: How long did it take for you guys to be the artists that you are today?
EVD: We started when we were pretty young, we got pretty serious about it when we were around twenty five. We started to show and got a distributor.
BL: So when you were still in school and studying?
EVD: Yeah, our first thing that got picked up by a video art distributor was the the piece that we made for my thesis in my undergrad.
BL: What is your definition of experimental?
CB: So when I say experimental I just mean anything that is not intended to be in the mainstream, anything that lives in this other world that is adjacent to the mainstream that's more closely tied to experimental film history, avant garde film history, but also to the contemporary art world
BL: What does feminist/feminism means to you?
EVD: Feminism is just asking for equality of the sexes you know? I'm a radical feminist, for me, feminism is much more about contending with the serious pain and trauma associated with being objectified as a woman living in a world full of violence against women. It's not a very clear answer but... for me, feminism is radical feminism and radical feminism involves more pain and anger. I'm sorry to say that, I wish that I could just give you a more happy answer but it's not. I'm feeling pretty raw about it right now.
BL: How do you go about in your general filmmaking process?
CB: Our normal answer it starts with writing all the time and then every once in awhile, usually when we have some sort of deadline, we say, ‘oh we need to make something new; let's look through the writing we have and figure out what is useful to be the structure for a new thing’. But in the last five years or so we've also been shooting all the time. Shooting that is not with anything in mind, just like ‘oh we have a turtle now, let's shoot the turtle a lot.’ We have a time lapse of the valley, that'll be fun! Lots of shots of cats. This fall we collected a bunch of monarch butterfly caterpillars and we let them grow into pupas and watch the chrysalis and let them hatch.
Still from Here Is Everything (2013, 15 min)
EVD: There were six or seven of them and they hatched in our house! They broke out of their little chrysalis, and it's very weird… and sometimes it seems really disgusting and then other times like it's just so incredibly beautiful. So we have a bunch of footage of that.
I think it changed a lot for us when cameras got better and more available because I really like shooting stuff with a DSLR and it's become a lot more fun and a lot more beautiful. We used to just hate shooting and now we don't hate it so much. We work a lot with macro photography. The natural world, that stuff, there's a lot of joy in that.
CB: In the end, we'll take all of the writing and all of the footage and try to figure out what it's going to be and sit down and edit it, which is what we're doing right now. We're working on editing a new piece and that part is always the most fun and exciting, but it also hard, stressful and scary because we're worried that it’s going to be terrible and we hate it. I have been really struggling with the footage that we’d been editing together.
EVD: yeah, so it’s hit or miss, you never know! I just keep thinking you just have to put in the hours that's what really makes a difference. Our ideas... they're always going to be okay and there's always going to be something there as long as you really care about the thing you’re making something about. But then if you don't put in the hours then nobody's gonna want to see it.
BL: Where do you get inspiration to make your films?
EVD: I mean we're really in the throes of making something right now, so it's a good question to be asked.
I think it's whatever is the most important to us in our lives right then. So this piece that we're making right now, the kind of inspirations are about therapy because I was in therapy for five years, a really kind of intense psychoanalysis. So I was really interested in how the power dynamics in psychoanalysis work... and then also we knew we wanted to make something that was that dealt with race in some way. We didn't want to just make a piece about white people. Those two things, therapy and racism, are really thorny and hard. It's always been stuff that’s really hard in our lives and stuff that we feel like we need to make work about.
BL: So I noticed you have a lot of music and animation in your work. Do you collaborate with other people?
CB: We mostly make it all ourselves.
EVD: Not all the music. I mean obviously we've used Beyonce and and all that Lorde stuff. Sometimes also we have a friend for the earliest stuff who's a musician and we used his music for the earliest work. But we steal with music and we used to steal footage a lot… just kind of find what we needed, and we're doing that a little bit less now.
BL: Do you enjoy writing/composing your songs on top of making these films?
EVD: yeah I mean a lot of his songs are our songs. I think most of if it's just a single voice, then that's me and that's a really fun and part of making the work is making songs.
BL: So do you make the piece first and then song afters?
EVD: It depends, yes. But a lot of the time it's a song we already had.
Still from Beauty Plus Pity (2009 15min)
BL: What do your animals represent in your videos? Or are they just for fun?
EVD: There's different animals that represent different stuff, but usually we use animals, if there's an animal as the character that talking, we found that people were more open to hearing what animals or children had to say than if we tried to just say ourselves or have an adult or human characters say it. The other thing about animals is that I think animals are the most beautiful thing in the world and I can look at them forever. So I just want to look at them, and we usually include stuff that is there because we want to see it.
CB: You're out at a film festival watching someone's random video and it's boring and dry and then as soon as there’s a cat scene, the audience is like ‘awww’.
BL: I noticed that there were some curse words in your videos. What's your take on making work appropriate, and what's your intended audience?
CB: We used to always do that. Our intended audience was our friends, and it was people exactly our age are seeing that, and now I think our intended audience is a little broader. But with Dear Lorde we wanted to keep it sanitized to the show it to younger people.
EVD: The reason that stuff is in there is because those are my real feelings, and I need the darkness and dirtiness. It needs to be there because it's true. It's part of the way that I experience the world and so it would have felt really fake and dishonest to not have it there. And then with Dear Lorde, the most recent thing, I don't think we'd tried to make it less angry but it just kind of came out that way. Well we’ve tried and it kind of just happened.
CB: We're working with the actress Maxine Rose. We knew her family, but didn’t know them very well. After we left them, we felt like we have to make it okay for her and her family. We didn't want to put anything in there that would upset them.
EVD: That was important.
BL: So, I watched Lesser Apes, I was wondering if guys took the footage of the apes or was it found footage?
CB: It’s found footage. It’s an odd way of working, it’s from a documentary about chimpanzees that it was just like... national geographic, or some mainstream documentary. And we shot it on film - we shot the television screen using actual film, and then we hand processed the film. There was this weird roundabout method of making that footage because we were doing a residency at a place that does hand processing film.
EVD: There's a lot of animation in that piece, and then there's some weird stuff that we shot. That was a tape that we made when we were having a really hard time… and things were really bad. And now when I watch that piece it's really obvious to me how bad things were. It has so much darkness and despair.
BL: How did you form the story?
EVD: I made it up and I think that's the real answer we were really interested in were Bonobos. I wanted to make something about the bonobos because they're so amazing. I hadn't known about them before - how they are matriarchal and how they solve every problem with sex, and I found it really moving and so powerful to think about. So then I just started thinking about what it would be like to fall in love with an animal like that.
BL: How do you think your work stands out from other artists?
CB: I think that if someone else other than us was trying to answer that, they might say that the combination of music, animation, live action, and the subject matter that we deal with are episodic -there’s little chunks. That combination of all of those five things is fairly uncommon. We do that every single time, we always speak like we are going to break out and do something totally different now, but then it ends up usually being fairly similar.
EVD: We didn't mean to, but then you use the strategy, and it works and then you could just go back to it. It's good, I've been thinking also there are certain things about it, I love animating. I mean I love just doing this drawing, and I love that repetitive work. It's like knitting, you can do up in front of the TV and it's just really fun.
I don't know if we'll have any animation in this next piece. It's very time consuming and there's nothing there yet but there's a lot that we still need to.
BL: How do you like working in a pair rather than solo?
CB: It’s great
EVD: But it only works sometimes, we have tried to work with other people and it's just a disaster. Lots of couples could never do it, but we started when we were really really young and it just stuck, and it works. And there are problems when we fight too. But I think it really helps. And Cooper has skills that I don't have, and I have skills that he doesn't have. And I really like having someone else to show something too and have him say ‘oh yeah that's working, or it's not working’.
BL: So you're really good at conflict resolving?
EVD: We have some experience with it yeah, we've had lots of conflict. There was a moment when Cooper said something, and it hurt my feelings and I got upset and then it went away in five minutes. I wasn't upset anymore and it's amazing to not hold onto anger and that that seems like a sign that we are doing well and that we've been together for a long time.
BL: What is your most proud piece that you've created?
EVD: I have two favorites, Bad Ideas For Paradise and and I also like Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure , and I like Dear Lorde. Those are my favorites.
CB: I agree with that list. I don't know, there's some parts of Bad Ideas For Paradise that I am not happy with.
EVD: Yes that’s true I feel that way too, but yeah… right now Dear Lorde.
BL: What is your proudest moment being a filmmaker or being an artists? What gets you excited about your work and why do you do this?
EVD: There have been a few times when we've shown something to a group of people and when we first made Being Fucked Up we were in Vancouver in Canada and we weren't really that much part of the art world. But we had a lot of friends and we’d worked on that video in total obscurity, and then we had this big party. We asked if we could use this artist-run space that we knew of and volunteer at, and they said yes. And so we had a party, and there were two screenings of the work. And it was in that moment, where we knew that everyone in the audience was united and being like ‘wow’. I mean it's a scrappy little punk rock video, but at that time the feeling in the room was good. And our friends were looking at us in a new way, ‘wow you guys made this’. They hadn't really known that we could do that before.
CB: That's important , yeah for sure I think probably the biggest thing is having a screening, having an audience really like it, and then you know individual people being like ‘I really loved it’ and saying some nice complimentary things or how it was important to them.
EVD: I mean, I guess that makes us sound like we really make our work for other people and that's really true, it comes from totally from a very deep place of urgency. This is what I have to make things about, but then I really need people to like it. I think those are the moments.
BL: What are some challenges you faced as being an artist?
EVD: The biggest challenge is when I feel like the work is bad. I didn’t like Lesser Apes and I'd worked really hard on it but I didn’t think it was good, and that destroyed me. Making something that I've worked really hard on... I did my best, and I just don't think it's good. That crushes me, and I made me think I'd never make anything I liked again, I thought I had lost my voice. I didn't really like that it, or the next one Here Is Everything. I thought it was okay but I really was not in love with it at all, but then I loved Dear Lorde and I was back, I can feel okay again.
CB: Well I guess, one of the difficult things would be like... there are things that we would like to do that we've never done. It would be great to actually get to shoot more amazing animals and to have one really close, and we've never gotten to do that it's so frustrating
EVD: Once I patted a cheetah, I had to pay a hundred dollars for it but it was worth it. Weird but amazing.
EVD: It's a challenge to figure out how you're gonna make a living because our friend who was just here, he's a famous Canadian filmmaker - has won like the biggest award in Canada. He has written ten books and he's made like eighty films, and he doesn't have a teaching job, and he's just broke. Even though he's a really well respected artist if you don't have some kind of gig that pays the bills you’re really poor. That's a hard thing about being an experimental filmmaker. You have to learn and you have to decide, how am I going to solve this problem. For us, teaching is a good solution, but there's a lot of bullshit too. We don't focus on our work as much as we would.
BL: What advice would you give us young artists to not be discouraged in this field of work?
EVD: You guys will figure it out. Just do your thing, and be adventurous, and don't be afraid to be poor. When you're done, just be poor, it's fine it's kind of exciting.
CB: Make whatever you're making for your scene. Be really into whatever is happening close to you and your life. Don't worry about needing your film to show at Sundance. If that’s not part of your world, then make something that's for the world that you are a part of.
EVD: I guess the real advice is care about your work. If you can't care about your work you're outta luck.
For more of Emily and Cooper's work. Visit their website: http://dukeandbattersby.com/