Mark Wallinger - Painter, sculptor, video artist and now film-maker

By FISUN GUNER

Mark Wallinger is a nervous man. He is having visions of people walking out of his first made-for-cinema film, premiering at the Prince Charles cinema in London. He is probably already hearing the soft thud of upturned seats, the retreating scuffle of heels, perhaps even the angry demands for swift reimbursement at the ticket office.

"It's a sort of foolhardy offering to the public, in that it's quite long and makes certain ... um ... demands on the audience." He says this in what can only be construed as a sheepish manner, accompanied by a smile that suggests practised self-deprecation.

The work is inspired by Vaughan Williams' swooping, elegiac composition The Lark Ascending, and also George Meredith's lusciously weaving poem of the same name.

Apart from a shared title, there are, however, no direct references to either of these works in the film. Though there will be a gradual transition from dark to light, the screen will remain blank for more than 30 minutes.

The soundtrack is of birdsong, but far from the melodious response and call of two larks, Wallinger has taken the sound down several octaves so that, for most of the film, all we actually hear is a deadening, mechanised drone.

Not only this, but for the first five minutes the sound is practically imperceptible to human ears. Like the visual transition from dark to light, the lark song will, however, gradually rise to reveal itself in all its natural majesty.

"I've discovered that the lark is the most common creature written about in poetry," Wallinger says. "Wordsworth, Meredith, Shelley, they all reached for the lark. It seems to be the bird of choice for transcendence or rapture.

"Everyone knows the Vaughan Williams, and it's about as romantic as one can get, since it was written just before the First World War, and that story fascinated me a bit.

"But I'm distinctly nervous of how this will go down. I mean, obviously, as the screen brightens and there's a recognition that nothing narrative is going to happen ... well, the serried ranks of art-lovers will be thrown back to their own devices."

As we talk in Wallinger's Bermondsey studio, he puts on the audio for the film. Despite the fashion among younger video artists for narrative, Wallinger is not interested in anything approaching conventional film-making.

"The camera has never moved in any of my films," he says. "There are certain ... um ... strictures that are partly puritanical and partly to do with finance."

Does he actually worry about sticking to a budget? After all, this is the artist who was reportedly given one of most lavish parties of the Venice Biennale when he represented Britain in 2001.

It was held on its own little island, and one journalist joked that even close friends and family were turned away in favour of the sponsors.

"Well, it's actually that I don't really want the bother and the stress. Once you move the camera, and the more you do with the camera, the further away you get from a pure idea of the visual, which is what I seek to retain."

His attempts at conveying a pure idea of the visual may come as a surprise to those who are familiar with Wallinger's work, since his video installations could hardly be described in terms of their visual appeal. His references are resolutely biblical and literary; he deals in tropes and allusions, not pretty images.

In one, a dead fly occupies several static minutes of screen time. Eventually, a live fly comes along, and nudges and circles the dead one, presumably reluctant to give up its last hope of finding life in his lone companion - though it does, eventually.

It's Wallinger's little joke about the persistence of faith over reason, faith over hard evidence.

Spiritual ascension is a common theme in Wallinger's work. Two years ago, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London's East End, he showed No Man's Land, an ambitious multimedia installation that took as its theme the Dantean journey from hell to heaven. Downstairs, the visitor had a God's-eye view of an electrocution chamber, and was greeted by the sound of a high-pitched, eerie incantation of what turned out to be Ariel's song from The Tempest.

Seen on four television monitors in white shirt and tie, strapped into an electric chair, Wallinger's alter ego, Blind Faith, sang the words. As soon as he finished singing, the film went on automatic rewind and played again.

It was an endless cycle of torment, a truly Sisyphean vision of hell, while the exhibition's midway point gave us a badly focused projection of what looked like an eye-examination screen. Letters were intoned very slowly over the image, which was wavering in and out of focus.

You knew it had to mean something, but what? And would we ever truly be able to figure it out for ourselves? (The letters were actually spelling out a passage from Genesis, and if you'd hung around long enough, you'd have found that out.)

Although he came to public notice in 1995 when shortlisted for the Turner prize for his witty oil paintings of thoroughbred horses, Wallinger's best-known work is Ecce Homo, the white resin, lifesize figure of Christ.

As the new millennium dawned, it teetered at the edge of Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth - a boyish, beardless figure, the divine made all too human. It was by far the best-loved work of the three sculptures that have occupied the space (Bill Woodrow and Rachel Whiteread were the other two artists).

Wallinger has expressed his disappointment that Ecce Homo was not, contrary to what he had been led to believe by the Fourth Plinth committee, going to be a permanent fixture. He had made the figure with that understanding, he said, and you can tell he still feels a little put out by the whole experience.

As we speak, he is putting the finishing touches to The Lark Ascending, in addition to which he has made two new films for his show at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery.

One uses the crucifixion scene from Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, and is "a funny kind of sequel to Ecce Homo, since it moves the story on towards its necessary climax". However, we don't get to see much of the action: the screen is obscured by a black panel, which takes up 90 per cent of the picture, "like a Rothko black, so it's like a void".

The second film is taken of archive footage at Berlin's Jewish Museum. Asked why he chose to film there, he says, "You can't help looking at Germans and thinking, 'What would it have been like to have been born German?' Everywhere you go in Berlin you are reminded of Germany's recent history."

He was also invited to create the Tate Britain Christmas tree. Wanting to "contribute something that was a work, rather than just to show how I'd decorate a Christmas tree", he chose a bare, spindly aspen, on which he hung 500 rose-scented, mass-produced rosary beads.

He tells me that, while doing his bit of research, he learned that it was Martin Luther who introduced the tree to the Christmas ritual - in which case, I say, Catholic rosary beads are a nice touch, to which he says he "quite likes the idea of conflict in a Christmas tree".

What does he think of a contemporary such as Bill Viola, whose work is thick with religious imagery from innumerable sources? Did he catch him at the National Gallery?

Wallinger actually bristles when I mention the American video-artist's name. He did catch Viola recently, when he was showing at Berlin last year.

Naturally, he doesn't normally like to be drawn on other artists' work, but ... "I mean, he's the Billy Graham of the art world - all that emoting. And water. Unbelievably kitsch."

What is next on Wallinger's busy schedule? He is planning ahead. In September he will be debuting as a performance artist in Berlin, though he doesn't want to give too much away at this stage.

Is he anxious about that, too? "As it's a live performance, and not something to camera, yes, I am a bit worried that there might be an element of, well, endurance."

(I'm not sure whether he means on the part of the audience or himself, but I don't venture to ask.)

As I leave, I wish him luck with the cinema premiere. And although I'm not entirely sure about the film myself, it would be nice if I could reassure him - after all, it's not as if it will be showing in front of gangs of teenagers busily texting each other on mobiles at a multiplex, I say.

But I also leave thinking that, actually, it's rather nice that Wallinger doesn't possess any of that two-fingered, up-yours arrogance that many Brit artists of his generation do, occasionally, display.

Conflict, tension, uncertainty, ambivalence - as it is with the work, so it is with the artist.

- INDEPENDENT