Photograph by David Torrence
The first thing Van McElwee did when he got his hands on a video camera was point it at a monitor. “This is the result,” he says, holding up a framed still that looks organic, like a seashell’s spiral, yet a little ominous, like a staircase in an Alfred Hitchcock film. Decades later, he still moves toward essences in his new-media art, either freezing beauty or showing it unfold.
“I’d rather cast a spell,” he’s said, “than make a point.”
McElwee does single-channel video, installations, video stills, and Web-specific art; his work’s been shown across Europe and in South Korea and China. Last year, he won a Guggenheim fellowship that helped him finish “Half-Real,” a high-definition video that interweaves natural textures, architectural ornament, and patterns of decay. He’s also one of the lucky few to win the American Film Institute’s Independent Filmmaker Award, and the Anthology Film Archives opened a 10-year retrospective of his work the month after he received the Guggenheim. “It helps to be obsessed,” he says, deflecting the praise that now floods his work.
He first studied painting and printmaking at the Memphis College of Art. “I’m not sure which my degree was in, now that I think of it,” he muses. “I was using printmaking in a rather impure way, combining woodblock, blueprint, lithography, silk-screening, even colored mimeographs, and then working back into them with various media.” The mix was freeing, releasing him from the limitations of any single medium. He wanted to use sound, too, but as a raw material, applying it the way a painter might daub in raw umber or titanium white. “It wasn’t musical, and it didn’t tell a story,” he says. “I would speed it up and slow it down and mix it in various ways.”
In time—which was what he wanted to explore, after all—his many interests converged in video. McElwee came to Washington University to study with Howard Jones, a pioneer of light and sound, and when Jones went on sabbatical, McElwee took over the department for a year. In 1983, he joined the faculty of Webster University.
Twenty-eight years later, he still sees the world fresh. He keeps his business cards slanted between the prongs of a conversion plug for European electricity. He’s shot video while being rolled around in a wheelchair, because it was smoother than hand-held and more artful than zooming. He edits standing up, because it makes him think faster and more intuitively. If somebody’s Aunt Matilda sees one of his abstract videos and scrunches her face up because she doesn’t “get what he’s saying,” he’s bemused; he wasn’t actually trying to send her a message. “It’s more like I’m trying to get at something,” he explains. “I’m looking for buried treasure, and when I find it, I show it to people.”
McElwee feels his way into his imagery: “Ideas sort of gather and show up in odd places and intermingle and mate, and then they form a community, and it’s time to start working.” He starts each project in a notebook: He decorates its cover with a collage, then spends about a year jotting down ideas, sketching images and symbols—a broken lemniskate morphs over several pages—and making flowcharts. “When it seems to be ripe, as opposed to green or rotten, I start shooting,” he says. “And I know I’m done when I feel like what was inside me is out.”
He remains fascinated by the intersections of time and space, nature and technology, reality and art. Lately, with the help of two experts based in Vienna, he’s been creating video and sound clips that fit together in different ways and are rearranged randomly in real time on the Internet. “I’m also enjoying working in high-definition,” he adds. “The resolution of the image was never a big deal for me, and sometimes I would destroy that resolution down to the level of what we call snow. But it’s an interesting challenge to have all those pixels at your command.
“If you consider that media is sort of the nervous system of the planet, it’s important for people to put unique, novel material into it.”
