Talking about… Elliot Caplan.

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On the frame:

‘What I respond to is a serious pictorial question that faces every artist about dealing with the rectangle. You have a rectangle, whether it’s a screen or a canvas or a stage, and then what do you do with it? That’s the starting point, and there are infinite ways to draw and to fill that rectangle in interesting ways, and that’s what art is to me.’

On being an artist:

‘We have a very short time in terms of our working life, and it’s important to do as much as we can when we can, and to try to be disciplined. The purpose of art is to grow as an artist, to develop yourself as a person. It’s not to be famous, it’s not to be rich, it’s not even to be liked.’

On discussing work:

‘When I want to talk about the work, I find that people have very little to say. People don’t know how to talk about work today because they’re talking about politics, or they’re talking about money, or they’re talking about arrangements. Those things matter when it comes to making it work, but they’re not the only thing.’

On festivals:

What excites me about coming to a place like this (Dance Screen Festival, Monaco, 2002) or any gathering – whether it’s a workshop or a screening – is that I’m in the company of like-minded people who are serious about what they’re doing. I enjoy the energy especially because, even if we have days where we work with crews, the nature of what we do is largely solo.’

On taking risks:

‘You go out into the world and you try to realise an idea. You struggle with it, you wrestle with it, you try things – it works, it doesn’t work. You try again. That’s what I think everyone’s work should be about. Imagine, if that was our worl, how much more serious it would be. And in the end, I believe that the money people, we would end up flipping them over on their back. We would pin them to the mat, and they would be at our service rathe r than what exists today, which is that we are their servants.’

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