Omer Fast in "Fiction" - Season 7 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

Wondering if we could just, like, get, like-
You want to get it on the wall?

Yeah, just a couple of strips on the wall.

Growing up between two cultures and two languages
allowed me to get some distance from them.

I feel authentic in one particular milieu,

but I switch milieu,
and I feel just as authentic in that other place.

And what is that thing that we call identity about?

Action.

At a very young age there was an awareness

of how much identity is in fact a performance,
a kind of construction,

and how much narratives underpin our societies
and our cultures.

Being able to shift from one place to another

also puts a kind of a focus on the self
and this performance of authenticity.

These are things that bubble around the edges
of my work.

Where it becomes interesting
is how to explore that dimension

without writing a political treatise,
or a piece of journalism,

but rather through understanding that this
is implicated

in personal relationships.

This is a subject that I keep coming back to.

(knocking on door)

(door slams)

Everything okay?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm okay.

OMER: when I find my subjects,
the process involves a lot of doubt about

ethical dimension

of what I'm doing,
vis-a-vis someone else's story, someone else's life.

These guys have to be here?

I didn't realize you'd be filming.

INTERVIEWER: We can stop if you're uncomfortable.

The kind of space I create to throw those
doubts into

and shut them away is creating this
kind of doppelganger art,

this sort of double,
who becomes the target for those issues.

What's the difference between you,
and someone who sits in an airplane?

There's no difference between us.

We do the same job.

INTERVIEWER: But you're not a real pilot.

So what?

You're not a real journalist.

OMER: All those kinds of roles of someone

who is listening while at the same time
ostensibly forming judgments.

INTERVIEWER: You sure you're okay?

OMER: Allow me to externalize doubts,

and to gain a little bit of distance
from a subject that might be very dry or very personal.

It creates a conversation about
the right to take someone's story and change it.

You don't like it?

Why don't you ask me a better question?

OMER: This project is triggered by

a conversation with someone
who is working in the drone program.

Drones are these unmanned aircraft
that are controlled remotely.

There is a pilot who controls the movement
of the aircraft.

The other person is responsible for all the optics.

SENSOR OPERATOR: 5,000 Feet's the best.

You're a lot more sitting at 5,000 feet.

I can tell you what type of shoes you're wearing
from a mile away.

We have the IR-infrared,

which we can switch to automatically,
and that'll pick up any heat signatures or

cold signatures.

I mean, if someone sits down,

let's say, on a cold surface for a while and
then gets up,

you'll still see the heat from the person.

It kind of looks like a white blossom,
just shining up in heaven.

It's quite beautiful.

I mean, heck, if you see somebody

light up a cigarette on that,
that's a huge beacon.

You're just on a preset path
flying a circular orbit,

watching them as they're smoking
from about two to three miles away.

And the computer will figure out the trajectory,
the distance, and the speed,

and come up with an estimated time
that it would take for the missile to impact.

The pilot will get all the clearances
that are necessary to fire.

He'll release the missile,
and I'll guide it in on to its target.

(knocking on door)

INTERVIEWER: Hey, what are you doing?

We're here.

Everything okay?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Everything's okay.

So what do you want to talk about?

INTERVIEWER: That's what I was going to ask you.

Man, I don't want to talk about anything.

You're the one paying, remember?

Not paying that much.

PILOT: You want to pay any more?

(bleep)

INTERVIEWER: You okay?

Oh, yes, it's just junk food.

The work offers a restaging of that conversation
and several flashbacks.

Then each flashback,
we eventually see a flying overhead shot of

a landscape.

That voice that accompanies that shot

is the real sensor operator's voice,
describing his real life and work.

The work tries to weave together
this person's recollections and his conversations,

reimagining that encounter several times over
as a kind of unresolved, repeating piece.

SENSOR OPERATOR: Usually I wouldn't get home
until 10:00 in the morning.

You jump in the shower,
get your breakfast.

Play some video games for, you know,
for four hours and then try to sleep.

I guess Predator is similar to playing a video game,

but playing the same video game four years straight,

every single day on the same level.

But then you have your moments

when there's a real emergency going on,
and that's just where stress comes into play.

How do I hit that truck,

and how far away should I put the missile
to get the truck

so that way I don't have any damage

to the surrounding buildings or to the people
or hurt anybody else's life that's around there?

And sometimes I make mistakes.

I mean, there is horror sides to working Predator.

You see a lot of death.

I mean, there came a point after, you know,

five years of doing this that
it's just I had to think about,

wow, there's so much loss of life
that was a direct result of me.

I mean, there was a lot of personal stuff
I had to go through,

a lot of chaplains I had to talk to,
and a lot of people look like,

"How can you have PTSD
"if you weren't actively in a war zone?"

Well, technically speaking,
every single day I was active in a war zone.

I mean I may not have been personally at harm,

but I was directly affecting people's lives
over there

every single day.

You know, it's not like a video game.

I can't switch it off.

It's always there.

I'd very much rather think about
the work in terms of portraiture.

We know that somebody who's painting a portrait

is inevitably going to use a particular style
in order to represent the subject.

What I do in a sense
very often are portraits of, in this case,

the drone sensor operator or laborers in sex industry,

but because they are portraits,

there is somebody who's telling their story
and telling their stories are increasingly

interfering

with a more passive and fluid reception
of who these people are and what they do.

So Julia, what's coming up then
after the dogs are taken care of?

What do you do?

I'm going to make my breakfast shake, run my bath.

OMER: The structure of this project

is literally showing a day in the life of workers

in the adult film industry.

I wanted to find a way to connect to a company
and to film them filming their film.

At that point I started to write vignettes
that I would combine with this,

so there's a documentary component to it,
and a fictional component of course.

I wanted to show them simultaneously,

because I wanted to show how their separate lives

at some point converge because of their work.

The four screens represent an attempt
to articulate that spatially.

The work continuously braids

stories and individuals together,
and it pulls them apart,

and there is kind of a structural dynamic there

that's about movement and repetition,

and the potential for seeing beauty in something

which is as pedestrian as
four people driving to work in L.A.

I mean, how boring is that?

(music plays over radio)

I rely on fiction very much for my work.

Everything That Rises Must Converge
is the title of Flannery O'Connor's short story,

which served as an inspiration
for what I was thinking at the time

and how I was going to approach a particular subject.

Why I got in the business?

It's my parents.

INTERVIEWER: Your parents?

Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Were they also adult film directors?

No.

My parents were hippies.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, so were mine.

No.

No, no, no, no.

My parents were the real deal.

INTERVIEWER: Mine were too.

No, dude, it's written all over you.

Your parents were your typical fair-weather, happy,

non-threatening flower children.

OMER: There's one character whose politics
is correct on the one hand,

but he's completely resentful towards his mother,

who represents this sort of other in the story.

Reagan democrats, am I right?

More or less.

They were hippies,
and they lived in a commune,

and in this commune they were very busy chipping away

at the hierarchies and the kind of power
that underpins society at that time.

Part of that is sex.

Part of that is family and its relation to sex,

so he describes a past where 38 people
are sleeping and working together.

Sex is something that you do with everyone.

It's your obligation to do it.

It becomes in a sense, work,

something that defines that particular society
and that children are also involved in this.

This is something that this character has
been through.

This is the particular conundrum
that that person is stuck in and that he represents.

DIRECTOR: Okay, sexy time, ready?

This one's got to be the one for all the marbles.

I feel it in my loins.

Here we go.

Please hold.

And sexy time,
and hold on please.

OMER: When they're acting in front of the camera

for their film,
they're in a genre.

They're mannered.

DIRECTOR: Here we go.

Action.

He turned out to be 70 years old.

What?

Yeah, his picture was from 1986.

This woman is a goddess.

She needs to be appreciated,
like a fine wine, aged to perfection.

Just, just.

OMER: It's a very stylized kind of performance,
using a particular language for a particular

audience.

They were in a sense the most banal,
and that's what I was after.

–Yeah, but you're just a-

OMER: It's very, very postmodern in a sense.

They're not bad actors.

They're just playing in a particular way.

It's genre,
and I like using these different genres

and sort of unpacking their languages
and playing around with that.

DIRECTOR: As soon as she starts talking,
it's going to move.

OMER: Okay.

Tom, do you mind if-

The first page?

"Bueno todo estas?"

Yes, please.

Okay.

(actress speaking Spanish)

This character pulls you into another location,
which is a studio.

She's your guide into this world.

She reappears when you're lost or bored.

Her reading of the script and interaction
with a director

constitutes a distant and critical element,

this other narrative regarding crossing the border

and migration.

(actress speaks Spanish)

But she really said all this stuff.

Everything stands on something else.

Everything stands for something else.

Yes, she did.

Of course, there's some editing.

And all that stuff about licking,
you know, the wet dog at the beginning,

and then the wind licking,
and cold, bitter bursts.

Wait, where does it say this?

When they're on the truck on the way to the border.

But it's biting, not licking.

Right.

It's just a way to stop the flow.

You know, it makes you think twice
about what you're hearing.

There will be a man and his wife
who are undergoing a particular crisis,

and perhaps a moment of transformation,
perhaps not.

Okay, action.

These two brothers I told you about,
the ones I keep seeing.

JOSH: You mean brothers, like two Black dudes, or, like?

They were white, Josh.

Biological brothers.

Maybe twins.

They looked really similar.

What they find?

An egg.

What kind of egg?

I mean, I mean, like a chicken egg?

OMERFAST: In order to resolve the crisis,

they need to produce something,
and so they don't produce a child.

They produce a story,
and that story produces an egg.

This was, like, perfectly oval.

And it looked old.

Trust me, Josh.

It was an egg.

Plus, they handled it carefully.

OMER: People always talk about my work
in terms of the real and the fictional,

and that is not interesting to me at all,
these notions of truth and the real

are hugely important for us
when we're talking in terms of a process of justice.

I'm not a journalist.

My work does not exist in the court of law.

It exists in the space of art,

and the space of art allows
for ambiguities and for contradictions.

This whole fetishized notion of truth and ideal,

which is a lovely thing to aspire to,
is in a sense the plaything in the work.

To think about the work in terms of truth
and lies

or truth and fiction is to kill the work.

(knocking on door)

What, what are you doing?