Reykjavík Grapevine - 21.06.2013, Qupperneq 18

18The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 8 — 2013
Behind Björk's Mutual Core
Director Andrew Thomas Huang interviewed
by Nic Cavell
Past holographic women buzzing in electric mauves and garish greens, past Chinese artists scribbling grey scale not-quite-likenesses
of tourists, and just beneath golden arches and beaming advertisements for shamrock shakes, the crowd’s arms stretch nervously before
them, iPhones testing the light-polluted air like the knobbed feelers of hypersensitive snails. It is 11:55 pm, and a street artist is at work
in Times Square. Beneath him lies a blackened canvas gessoed with spray paint.
Iceland | Video
Fumes hiss off the paper into nostrils, and some
cover their mouths. At 23:56, the artist produces a
joint knife and bends it to the canvas like a military
instrument. Streaks of red, blue and orange light be-
gin to poke through the black world. At 23:57, 80
monitors towering above the artist begin another
refrain entirely.
In the video for “Mutual Core,” Björk appears
vertiginously costumed, sunk amidst grappling sed-
iment. From the sand come rocks; from the rocks,
tongues whose layers lap at each other but struggle
to connect. Skeins of moss and hair wind between
the bodies, stretching. A growing profusion of ex-
pressive colour seems to make the attempt at union
only more desperate.
At 23:58, the street artist’s palette is bursting
from charcoal to white-hot orange, deep purple,
black and blue. A cityscape emerges in the spaces
whittled by the joint knife. Rocks splash into sands
active like wood chippers in the video above, and
the crowd’s attention flits between the monitors’
frenzy of graphics and the artist’s own hand braying
layers of the painted blindfold.
With a large ruler he wipes the bottom of the pa-
per white as teeth. At 23:59, he reaches for another
can of paint just as above him Björk’s “unspent cap-
sule” of energy explodes. The compressed bodies
volcanically erupt; at 00:00, lava flows like sloe gin
down their pied tectonics in a world absent of lyrical
sound once more.
In the credits, beside Björk’s name, “ANDREW
THOMAS HUANG” glows.
Throes of creation
Out in the wilderness beyond Reykjavík lies a lot
of sand. Buckets of it—whole truckloads, even, in
the mining areas. Driving through the countryside
with a production assistant at shotgun, Director An-
drew Thomas Huang imagined himself sifting his
hands in thrall through the beautiful, plum-black
mixture. They would stop the car while he did this,
collecting sand samples of all sorts. But even as he
did so, Huang felt the artist in him rankling, polariz-
ing—felt certain that of all the sands in Iceland, only
seashell-collared sands would match the aesthetic
he was carefully rigging for Björk’s video.
So the car departed to bottle more samples de-
composed from the milky stuff that shields crusta-
ceans from predators in the sea. In separate trips,
they cribbed still more from the landscape: moss,
green sprigs, and some baked yellow on the sun-
heated rock. After that, they took the rocks them-
selves.
Huang’s native soil is in the American South-
west, where from a young age his creative imagi-
nation was filtered through a prism of red mesas,
expansive blue skies and earthy, yellow crust. While
this bright palette doesn’t define Huang—his break-
out video during film school, “Doll Face,” features
a robot whose ashen gears attenuate and fray in pur-
suit of puerile shades of lipstick—it has nevertheless
provided the basis for his recent successes including
“Solipsist,” a ten-minute short that sketches a world
of synaptic distance between individuals—a world
in which Björk, the artist, wanted to exist.
To open that dimension for Björk—to create a
new space in the aesthetic of “Solipsist”—Huang
had to attack his first impulses and suss out the
complexity of “Mutual Core” and Björk’s own sen-
sual presence. As he explains it, this is precisely the
rhythm that pounds out in the execution of any mu-
sic film.
“Maybe you hear a song and suddenly there’s a
visual cliché in your head—‘Oh, I picture her hair
blowing in the wind and she’s riding on the back of a
pick-up truck.’ And then you come back to yourself
with, ‘No, no, don’t do that. Or yeah, do that, but
what ways are there to make it more specific?’”
Acknowledging that this was a “volcanic song,”
he followed his dissatisfaction from the flat, science
diagram-like tectonic plates in his early sketches to
something more active—to various lively drawings
and Photoshop collages that grew less and less “stu-
pid” with each draft. For materials, he chose sand,
but not the black sand.
“It’s funny because growing up in Los Ange-
les, I always fantasized about the other side of the
Atlantic—about Scotland and the Highlands and
that whole part of the world. But when I came to
Iceland—away from Los Angeles, where those co-
lours come so naturally—I had this need to fabricate
them,” he says.
“I was trying to fight against the typical colour
that surrounds you there.”
Toxic, bitter glue
Sagafilm studio’s headquarters at Laugavegur 176
are set in precisely the kind of geometric build-
ing whose sanded white surfaces and Barbasol-
blue windows occupy the concept of “Scandina-
vian” in the American imagination. It was into
this building that Huang directed ton after ton of
his precious seashell-collared sand for the video
shoot with Björk.
At the time, there were about four feature film
productions shooting in Iceland. Accordingly,
most of the film community was booked. With just
enough film and art direction staff to operate on a
low budget, Huang got to work.
As Huang’s collared storyboards had it, not only
Björk but a bevy of huge rocks sculpted in foam—
imitating those plucked from Iceland’s landscape—
would course in the sand as if upon waves.
“We wanted the rocks to kind of move around
in the sand. I wanted them to feel like whales—
like a herd of whales rising in and out of the sand,”
he says. “But sand is formidable to deal with. It’s
heavy, and once you take something out of it, you
can’t really shove it back in.”
Compounded with the sand’s great weight were
new errors. Huang had brief battles with the art di-
rectors over how the rocks should look—“everyone
in Iceland seems to have a very clear idea in their
head what lava and lava rock look like”—and how
the lava should be concocted.
In Huang’s conception, “lava” could easily be
sourced from dye and cake batter. Perhaps, in fact,
simple food colouring was all that was needed. He
was surprised, then, to hear his team probe him
about the chemistry he planned for his mixture.
Huang had brief battles with the art directors
over how the rocks should look—“everyone
in Iceland seems to have a very clear idea
in their head what lava and lava rock look
like”—and how the lava should be concocted.
“
„
Continues over
Stills from video