Artist of the Week
Steve Venright
By Kerry Wright Zentner
Posted July 16th, 2007.
I know what you're thinking, "Last week he interviewed his mother, this week he's interviewing his father, what's he gonna do next week, interview himself?" And to that I say, "WHAT-evah, I do what I want!" And, despite your presumed skepticism, the fact remains that my parents are two of the most interesting artists I know. I just happen to be in proximity to them. Besides, there's a small publication in Iceland that's been clamouring to get their hands on this material for months. Sorry, Iceland, looks like we got here first.
Steve Venright has been a monumental source of inspiration to me through my whole life. He infused my childhood with wonderment and awe, inventing board games, making stop-motion movies, and employing inspired word-play. He is a supreme lexiconjuror, a profound inventor, and a loving father to one and a half other human beings, and in addition is the esteemed author of Spiral Agitator, among other books of poetry. I had the honour of interviewing him this week, while he was away in his home town of Sarnia.
MONDO: Hi, Dad. Tell me a bit about your background. What prompted you to begin writing? What sorts of things inspired you as a child?
Steve Venright: I don't remember what prompted me to begin writing; I just remember the excitement of being able to make something out of nothing seemed like magic and still does. Maybe that's where my notion of "lexiconjury" came from. Even as a child I was fascinated by dreams and states of awareness that seemed to transcend the ordinary. Of course, an awareness of the ordinary can be transcendent too — and there's another idea that's figured into my work. I started self-publishing somewhere between the ages of five and seven, I think. My first publication was a saddle-stitched monograph called The Story of Elsie, Bessie and Geraldine the Cows. It was an edition of one, and may still be my bestseller. Other things that inspired me as a child were: an olive-coloured oil pencil, luxuriant easy-listening songs of the day such as Percy Faith's rendition of the theme from A Summer Place, catching crayfish on a board in "the crick", and every form of hockey imaginable.
MONDO: Most people know you as a writer, but you are also a "soundscapist" and an accomplished visual artist. I particularly love your Variegraphs. I remember playing with finger-paints as a child and attempting to create some myself. What process led you to begin creating them? What is the process itself like?
SV: I stumbled upon Variegraphy fortuitously. My son — you, right? — had been given some particularly vibrant finger-paints. I tried some basic decalcomania — blobbing different colours onto a glossy sheet of paper then pressing and peeling — and was impressed by the chromatic qualities and the sort of cordillera of lines that appeared. A few years later when I got a computer and started playing around with Photoshop, I began applying various filters and treatments to scans of those initial paintings. A few years after that, I began tiling samples from the digital variegraphs, producing what I called "tryptiles" (they reminded me of certain visions I'd had after ingesting tryptamine psychedlics). As for the soundscapes, the process at times is similar: mixing source materials together, applying effects, flipping the results around and re-layering, etc.
MONDO: You have an incredible pool of interests which you draw from. What are some of the things that inspire you most in your writing/visual art and/or in everyday life? Which particular artists do you admire and why?
SV: When I discovered the early writers of Surrealism at age seventeen, it was an intoxication, a liberation. I'd begun attempting to write from a sort of trance state and I must have wondered: who else was into this shit? Enter Breton and the gang, with their chance activities, sleeping fits, collaborative games, love of puns and other wordplay, mad love, black humour, exaltation of the sensual, exploration of "psychotic" states, and devotion to changing life and transforming the world. Nearly a century later, none of that sounds boring or irrelevant. MONDO has actually been covering a lot of artists whose work I love: Peter Kalyniuk, William A. Davison and Sherri Lyn Higgins, Dale Zentner, Kerry Zentner.
Canada has always produced incredibly dynamic and inventive poets. I have so many friends in the various small press communities here in Toronto, and elsewhere in the country, that I often shy away from mentioning anyone in particular, so as not to overlook the others. But here are a couple dear old friends of mine with great new books, so I'll mention them: Stuart Ross and his I Cut My Finger (Anvil Press), and David W. McFadden and his Why Are You So Sad? (Insomniac Press).
Other inspirational forces include: the nuevo tango of Astor Piazzolla, the writings and raps of Terence McKenna and other psychedelic explorers, the long, strange trip of the Grateful Dead, the paintings of Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, Punk and Prog, the research of Charles Fort, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Emo Phillips, the brave works of 9/11 Truth crusaders such as our own Barrie Zwicker, Claudine Longet's version of "Golden Slumbers"... no, I'd better stop there — this could go on for pages.
MONDO: In addition to everything else, you are a marvelous inventor and have also led several successful performance-tours. What was the idea behind the TVI Reality Check? Is there documentation of it anywhere?
SV: There exists about four hours of video footage from two different sources, and I'd love to make a twelve-minute movie from it one day, or maybe a thirty-second commercial. The idea was to spend a day driving around Toronto in the TVI Mobile Reality Inspection Lab providing "reality checks" at various commercial, residential, political and academic locations. Not the most ecologically sound idea, as Tooker Gomberg (who joined us for an unscheduled examination of then-mayor Mel Lastman's office) observed, but a much-needed service as noted by all. The online documentation is a little awkward to reach because the TVI site uses frames, but if you look around you'll find quite a few photos of onsite operations by reality technicians such as Samuel "Samuel Andreyev" Andreyev, David Eagan, Jesse Huisken and the aforementioned William Davison, Sherri Lyn Higgins, and Kerry Zentner. You'll also get to have a look at contraptions such as the Ontologator, the Phenomenatron, and the Ultimascope. The demand was high for continuing the service, but one day of reality was enough for me.
MONDO: Tell me again about your Hallucinatorium!
SV: The Hallucinatorium was an offshoot of Alter Sublime Neurotechnologies, which I began as a way of celebrating and selling various brain machines such as the BT5 Brain Tuner (cranial electrostimulator), and the DAVID Paradise (pulsed light and sound device). My sideshow-like set-up, which appeared at nightclubs and raves throughout the early-to-mid '90s, featured pairs of pulsed-light goggles I'd programmed to be particularly psychedlic. For those who hadn't used psychedelics before, it was a glimpse into "the retinal circus". For those who were on psychedelics it was, as many of the archival photos will attest, a truly ultimascopic experience.
MONDO: I've used some of those devices and they are incredible. So, are you working on anything currently that you'd care to reveal? What do you have planned for the artistic future?
SV: One thing I'm excited about is a feature film that the wonderful Markham Street Films is planning to do, based on the recorded sleeptalking of Dion McGregor. Pippa Lambert and I had done some initial shooting towards an animated documentary inspired by the life and somniloquies of the world's most renowned sleeptalker, whose astounding nocturnal transmissions can be heard on an LP from 1964 and two CDs (one of which, The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor, was released on my Torpor Vigil Industries label). We hope to be involved in some way with the production, but we're happy it's in the hands of MSF.
Another thing is a new book called Floors of Enduring Beauty. It's coming out through Mansfield Press in the fall. My favourite piece in it is probably the lengthy narrative piece generated entirely by original spoonerisms. I've discovered three or four hundred such puns as of this time, and they keep revealing themselves, sometimes even as I sleep. The best ones are always spoken unintentionally, tips of the slung, such as the great line (if your readers don't mind my bringing this around to the familial connection again) which your mother uttered the other day when she asked: "Do your hawks have souls in them?"
I think that's the question we all should be asking ourselves.
You can look into Steve Venright's work more thoroughly at www.TorporVigil.com.