Everybody Comes to Holyrood
Text by Ken Pratt
#1: Epic
Every year the urbane reserve of Edinburgh is jolted into the festival
season. Once almost entirely the domain of "high culture", recent
years have seen the definite ascendance of the full-scale international
media circus. Television crews chase leads down cobbled wynds. Rumours
fly about the city as to exactly which screen stars are ensconced in The
Witchery. And papers gossip about who will –allegedly- be putting
in an appearance en route to the inevitable highlands wedding…
"Everybody Comes to Holyrood" aims to create a timely dialogue
between a distinctly local phenomenon and the practice of a range of contemporary
artists.
We live in an age when celebrity, stardom, fame and glamour permeate
all aspects of visual culture. Cinema narratives and political realities
blur. Private lives can be more of a story than any specific creative
achievement. And complex social issues are presented to diverse international
publics with the simplistic language of the catchphrase or advertising
punch line. Our relationship with the mass media seems to be characterized
by forever accelerating in terms of the density of information we are
expected to consume. And yet, as our visual media literacy levels increase,
ratings at least would seem to indicate that we are very happy with "dumbing
down".
Therefore, it is hardly surprising that artists working in a range of
locations and with diverse practices address the topic of our relationship
with mass media and, more particularly, its representations of fame and
glamour; its mechanisms for promoting the consumption of stardom, fame
and luxury.
Of course, artist engagement with the media and the world of film, glamour,
luxury and fame is nothing new. Andy Warhol’s seminal experiments
with folding the worlds or high-art and popular culture owe a lot to his
own unqualified –yet deeply conscious- fascination with and seduction
by the world of the screen star. But exactly where Warhol took these interests
have already passed into the text-book category of art history.
In more recent years, the international art circuit has been offered
the works of artists such as Vanessa Beacroft and Francesco Vezzoli on
the loftiest platforms. The former famous for her performances (and the
photographic documentations thereof) that use the language of the fashion
industry to create seductive works, the latter, perhaps best known for
his high-camp works of weeping Italian film divas for which Vezzoli engaged
the stars themselves to embroider. More recent newcomers to this strand
running through top-end presentations include artists like the Scot, Donald
Urqhart whose installations, drawings and films engage headlong with the
titter-ye-not, drag queen music hall tradition that have been part of
the artist’s life for more than a decade preceding his recognition
as a museum calibre artist.
In fact, perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that ever since Warhol
cracked open the Pandora’s Box of populism, the ever far-reaching
effect of mass media would make it inevitable that media fame and all
of its constructs – glamour, luxury, consumption, identity politics-
could not fail to be addressed by contemporary art. If some artist, or
rather a substantial number of them, did not address these issues, would
not contemporary art have completely failed in a number of its broader
functions?
These mechanisms and phenomena that contemporary art has addressed involve
complex social constructs and hierarchies. Who is the bigger star? Whose
fame value is the highest? Who is the most consumed product? And ironically,
in the decades after Warhol, so too has the art world become more like
these mechanisms. It too operates on principles originally growing out
of the Hollywood star system. It too has hotter and bigger properties
amongst its practitioners.
“Everybody Comes to Holyrood” aims to be a survey of the
way in which a diversity of artists engage with these themes –or
their darker counterpoints- despite working with different media and,
most definitely, building very different individual discourses; from the
political to the deeply personal, the formal to the textual. But it also
aims to do so with a consciousness that the thematics are present across
the hierarchies and that they have been around for a fair while. If there
are any big names or stars in the project, then they are asked to share
the limelight with the more neglected or the newcomers. The outlook aims
to be more Orson Welles than studio system.
In some cases the inclusion of the work might be unexpected, touching
on the topic in lateral and unexpected ways, whilst in the case of others,
its engagement with the core themes of the exhibition is as clear as the
famous sign sitting on the ridge above Los Angeles.
It is also worth acknowledging the conscious curatorial avoidance of
solely concentrating on artists working within the Anglophone cultures
that gave birth to the might of the Hollywood machine and, later, television
and global advertising industries. For Hollywood has stopped being an
industry and become a kind of language.
Anglophone cultures are notoriously, lazily self-chastising about their
lack of preparedness to learn other languages to a level that enables
them to operate in other linguistic cultures on the terms of those cultures.
Conversely, perhaps patronisingly, they praise the ability of non-Anglophone
cultures to meet them on their own linguistic terms. And, as in the arenas
of business and politics, so with the language Hollywood: the discourses
arising are often more interesting and specific when they arise from an
artist fluent in both a native tongue and the global language of Hollywood.
Vezzoli is just a case in example. If those outside of Italian culture
perhaps fail to access the subtle nuances of his work, he has certainly
picked on Italian content with enough of a history on the export market
for the Anglophone dominated language of Hollywood to grasp it. Similarly,
Vanessa Beacroft, drawing on her own transcultural roots, has taken that
close cousin of the language Hollywood – the dialect of international
fashion media- to construct images and experiences that are easily interpreted
by an international audience used to being bombarded with Fashion TV montages
of Milan catwalks in airport terminals and department store promenades.
In one sense then, it is no surprise that if, after spending many years
in the twentieth century driving up demand for its product –and
seemingly uncaring about the implications for local production- Hollywood
inadvertently created new skills within its export markets that, perhaps,
left the locals wanting. In much the same way the post World War II bombardment
of Japan with American ideology and cultural iconography firstly created
a great demand for it within the foreign culture. Further down the line,
this appetite and fluency in its mechanisms would be appropriated and
reinterpreted in unexpected ways: Japan would come to manipulate and exploit
the technologies markets originally meant to provide satellite markets
for US products and be exporting its own new, clever, smarter, smaller,
prettier products back to the source.
If then, the source of the language Hollywood and its original artistic
questioning (Warhol et al) is American in origin, then it would be foolhardy
to assume that only American artists can now be held up as the only valid
commentators. Hollywood went global a long time ago and the discourses
arising in reaction come from global perspectives. Naturally, this does
not negate the continuation of its draw for American artists.
On the international circuit, artists such as Gregory Crewdson continue
to engage directly with the language Hollywood. If Warhol’s seminal
experiments were more preoccupied with the drives and desires intrinsic
to the Hollywood and fame mythologies, then Crewdson’s works operates
on a more restrained path. He is less of the publicist and more of the
linguist of the School of Hollywood Studies. In his meticulously realised
photographic works, the language of American cinema is pulled in from
various sources ranging from mainstream big-budget trickery to low-fi
cult movies. Arriving on the same print, these languages are often used
to create moments that are as evocative of popular American art history
– Hopper, Rockwell- as they are of about moments from American film
history.
The trashier moments from Hollywood exist in an ambivalent more implied
way in Crewdson’s work. But they are even more strongly fore grounded
in the body of work produced by Charlie White. His humanoid alien puppets,
perhaps responsible for the slaughter or some equally unsavoury interaction
with small-town cheerleaders, seldom shy away from taking the discourse
more in the direction of John Waters than John Ford. The cinematic languages
that unfold in his works demonstrate an unbridled engagement in the hedonistic
aspects of a culture’s kitsch and more horrific moments. Three women
with shaved heads stand before a courtroom bench, intentionally evoking
the strange-but-true proceedings of the Manson Family trial; housewives
gossip around a suburban dining table in an over lit scene that manages
to convey more excessive malice than any number of horror make-up effects.
And, high-school kids cower in a cafeteria thrown into chaos by the rather
factual arrival of the monster from 20 000 fathoms…
No consideration of the topic, however, could even claim to have started
without acknowledging the work of Cindy Sherman. Although her practice
in the last decade has seen her move into more lateral territory, Sherman
is one of the great pioneers of appropriating the language Hollywood into
an artistic discourse that is, largely, about something else. Recognising
this is not rocket science. The fact that her large early body of work
consisted largely of works that were called “untitled film stills”
is something of a give away. But, of course, whilst her untitled film
stills had a lot to do with film, they had a lot more to do with gender
politics. Like many of her contemporaries arising in the 1970s and 1980s,
Sherman brought power to her discussions about identity politics by discussing
the issues through a secondary medium, in her case, the language of mainstream
film and television. Recapturing herself time and time again in meticulously
realised photographs in which the full mise en scène is brought
into play, she was able to direct the viewer to ask questions in a less
familiar language- the language of gender politics- by phrasing them in
a more popular and familiar one, the language of popular media.
If the example of these mere three artists can demonstrate something
of the linear history of the endurance of the language Hollywood in contemporary
art practice, perhaps they also highlight something about work arising
from within the mother culture of that language; from within the Anglophone
culture that gave birth to the language Hollywood. There is a sense in
which the viewer responds to American art working with the language Hollywood
as a kind of classicism. And, as with other classicisms, there is an acknowledgment
of an implicit imperialist edge.
The ancient Romans built a visual language that all who were affected
by her imperial might were able (or forced) to read, a reality that numerous
subsequent totalitarian states have been eager to replicate in darker
moments of more recent history. However, at its imperial height, the numbers
were literally inverted. The number of Roman citizens and subjects massively
outweighed those who could claim origin at the centre, within the mother
culture. In other words, far more people engaged with and communicated
within this global language whilst simultaneously drawing on other languages
and cultural identities closer to their own regional origins. The end
result was a constantly evolving feedback loop of hybrids and rapidly
mutating language. This occurred both at the periphery and at the centre:
the influence of Egyptian religious cults were brought back to mother
Rome as much as marbled sculptures bearing both Roman and local elements
appeared in Tunisia or France.
Fluent or forced to be fluent by the patriarchal imperialist military
and economic control imposed by Rome, the children of the empire were
told that they would reap benefit from the centre, and, indeed, many did.
In fact, those that eagerly engaged in learning, appropriating and manipulating
what was globally imposed showed a remarkable ability to benefit. Viewed
from the distant past through a popular framework, the constructions of
ancient Rome by the language Hollywood offer little in the way of the
ethnic and cultural diversity at the heart of the later Roman Empire ruling
machinery.
The reality was that once the global language of Rome was imposed on
the periphery and left there to stew for a few hundred years, the periphery,
not the Empire, struck back. Spaniards and Syrians would become emperor.
The machinery of wealth and control would be shared with black and Arab
hands. And women, whilst officially being assigned clear roles and limitations,
could nonetheless find ways to kick against the pricks.
The stake held in the predominant centralised language would eventually
become so prevalent that, when the centre collapsed (as it did on numerous
occasions) the investment in maintaining some form of its continuation,
no matter how corrupted or mutated, was too great for it to be completely
thrown out. For example, vulgate Latin would remain an international linguistic
currency long after Europe had turned to a Christian faith or, in the
18th and 19th centuries, new European cultures that actually had little
resemblance to the original mother culture, would turn their gaze backwards
and find an imagined past in which they too, where the direct descendants
of Rome.
In the fast forward digital age, this same relationship between the
mother language of Hollywood and its global acolytes inevitably places
American practitioners in a classicist role: their voice comes from within
the empire; their take on the discourses arising from the studios and
the networks is the take of a member of the family. The fact that the
language Hollywood was itself a mélange of disparate European influences
arriving on a barren strip of the west coast can only be deconstructed,
not undone.
For the rest, other practitioners that exist in this global landscape,
fluent in the language Hollywood, may not be particularly concerned with
measuring themselves against the classicism of American practitioners,
but, inevitably, their output cannot be classical. They may derive from
a particularly identifiable local hybrid tradition. For example, just
as the recognition of Gallo-Roman has a meaning in the codification of
a local visual language arising from the original Roman imperative, so
too have terms like “French Cinema” come to mean something.
Exactly what they mean is hugely open to debate, but nonetheless, there
has arisen enough of a critical mass, a distinct school, that they have
come to mean something.
Herein lies another core issue. The imperialist drive at the heart of
the mother language culture, whether it be Ancient Rome or Hollywood Babylon,
is often too simplistically understood; is often seen as a force that
is only ever experienced as a cruel drive for control that must only be
resisted. The reality in both cases is far more complex and co-dependent.
“French Cinema” can be understood in terms of resistance
to the imperial mother Hollywood; a garlic-ridden, tricolourised defiance
to the imperial imposition of a foreign tongue. But, it is worth remembering
that a key development in the notion of “French Cinema” was
the implicit seduction by - and ongoing love affair with- the dominant
imperialist form by the very practitioners so influential in its development.
“Birth of a Nation” begat birth of a notion.
“Cahiers du Cinema” and its daddies, such as Francois Truffaut,
looked above all else to the dominant language Hollywood in formulating
their ideas. In learning the imposed language fluently, they developed
their hybrid products. And their own worldview. So successfully so, in
fact, that long after fashion-conscious Europe had tired with auteurs,
kids on the west coast of America would still be drooling at the possibility
of mapping this European savoir faire onto their own secondary feedback
loop, of becoming “independent filmmakers”, that is to say,
of becoming auteurs who wore jeans and baseball caps.
And so back to Vezzoli. He is, arguably, an example of another phenomenon
arising from a global imperial structure. Unlike Truffaut or other practitioners
working within the core industry, his discourse is less about engaging
with the mother culture directly, but more about engaging with the local
cultures on which it has impacted and which, effectively, make it accessible
back at Hollywood HQ. In his works, his gaze is planted firmly on the
Italian fame machine; the Italian world of film and television with its
own particular forms, flavours and stars. But, of course, like some many
other cultures, the interplay between language Hollywood and the development
of these local phenomena exists. In the case of the Italian scene, the
fluency of the locals in language Hollywood has experienced various points
of direct intersection. These range from the popular to the more intellectual.
American GI’s posted in Italy at the end of World War II famously
returned to America with a love of opera. More importantly on the populist
front, they also returned, like the Romans dragging Sabine women behind
them, with a cohort of buxom Italian starlets whose lack of skill in acting
in English did little to deter their onscreen appearance in American films.
Large pointed bras and simmering Mediterranean sensuality could be understood
globally.
At a more refined level, a trickle of traffic between Los Angeles and
Cine Citta meant that these more jet set possibilities could be integrated
into Hollywood’s Technicolor, cosmopolitan vision of itself in the
1950’s and 1960s. Rather ironically, the new hunger of the fame
industry to get photographs of the stars frolicking on Capri or eating
out in elegant Roman restaurants, would allow the cracks to be infiltrated
by Italian cineastes with a more serious agenda. If Visconti was originally
feted for his rent-a-aristocrat glamour, then he was happy enough to seize
the opportunity to gain a global audience for his earnest contemplations
of European political dilemmas.
“Rome Open City” could be understood by many American men
who had been stationed in Italy, but chances are they watched it with
less intellectual preoccupation than the beatnik circles milling around
the new phenomenon of the cinema arts club. However, taken together the
on-the-streets grit of Italian Neorealism and the lush political colour
of Visconti provided the seedbed for the socialists in sunglasses. Already
jittery about the political discourse inadvertently trapped within the
sprockets, a new generation of specialist American audiences would embrace
Bertolucci and Pasolini.
If Francesco Vezzoli makes work in his more local language, turns his
gaze in a distinctly Italian direction, then he is at least fortunate
that when American audiences glance in a European direction, there is
enough common language for them to immediately grasp a context for his
work.
#2: Viva Las Vegas
Somewhere after World War II, the language Hollywood began to experience
a new twist; the development of a separate, distinct dialect. Fed by the
need to draw on the spending power of a new affluent generation of youngsters,
the media – both film and the arriviste television industry- needed
to find ways of developing a niche market with its own identity. On one
hand it was keen on preventing these new inventions, the teenagers, from
straying from the path of righteousness. However, on the other, the evolving
marketing consciousness was aware that nothing sold like transgression
and sex.
Thus, a complex language, the language Rock ‘n Roll, would evolve.
It was one in which the contradictions would exist side by side. It had
an almost infantile naïve quality keen on protecting the young from
both the memory of global conflict and from making a new generation of
Baby Boomers out of wedlock in the back seat of cars at drive-ins. But
it also colluded with the drive of the younger generation to rebel. If
they, the teenagers, were not necessarily interested in confronting the
realities of global conflict, they were certainly keen on the activities
that led to conceiving a new generation of baby boomers out of wedlock
on the back seats of cars.
The result was a strange collaboration between unexpected fellow travellers.
Teenagers, having been told that’s who they were, were keen on developing
their own identity, their own customs and their own resistance to the
evident yoke of the grown-ups who originally manufactured their identity.
Music above all else would be the driver and locus of these acts of resistance.
The grown-ups, eager to keep the teenagers in check, also knew that
milking the dimes and nickels of teen spending power relied heavily on
the illusion of independence and resistance. Thus, elaborate machinery
developed. The full investment of expensive production –film, television,
music- would be committed to developing new language forms; b-movies,
matinee idols and rock ‘n roll. The result was a strange hybrid
language in which concepts like rebellion and freedom were shown to be
not at all incongruent with toeing a conservative, right wing and above
all else, anti-Communist, sensibility. Any true teenage rebel would be
educated by film and television to know that the only true enemy of his
or her God-given right to rebel were the Reds.
If Elvis’ uniform-wearing rock ‘n roll narratives are perhaps
the strongest artefacts demonstrating the ability of this new language
to both embrace the notions of rebellion and conformity in the same frame,
then it is hardly a sensibility that disappeared. This intrinsic contradiction
at the core of the mainstream language Rock ‘n Roll is one which
is defiantly evident today. Despite a brief lull in its strength during
the mad years that followed the mass rejection of its values in the 1960’s,
the media industry has very effectively utilised the fears of fragmentation
posed by the arrival of the Internet to reconfigure a centralised Rock
‘n Roll language. Empire Magazine has struck back.
Emerging in the 1990’s this retro notion of the pop star, a kind
of “back to basics” use of the language Rock ‘n Roll
has very much been brought to the fore in the mass media. New faces –such
as Britney- and seasoned veterans – the inevitable Madonna comeback-
would be used to spearhead the return of the teenybopper, a Generation
Y all demanding to be exactly the same. Give or take a little facial hair,
there was little difference between Elvis of the 1950’s and Britney
of the fin de siecle. Both were rebels within the constructs allowed by
their manufacturers and both would be fabulous tools for the conservative
capitalist machinery that the music industry decided to become in the
1950’s.
The underlying social drives present in these two eras, in themselves
fairly politically neutral, were also not too dissimilar. If the world
was keen for teenagers to be given an identity that separated them from
the war-scarred preceding one in the 1950s, those responsible for Generation
Y may also have been keen to respond to the intrinsic threat of loneliness
to the Internet generation. The experiments of punks and slackers had
shown the sheer level of self-management necessary to carve a personal
identity in which a central reference point did not exist. Not all teenagers
were going to be up to it. As cyber realities grew ever bigger and more
uncharted, somebody was going to have to give them a roadmap back to a
shared experience.
The faceless corporations of executives deciding exactly what products
every teenage girl would buy were happy for Britney to be the lighthouse,
a shining beacon promising the same kind of shared experience that Elvis
had offered: a castrated rebel that everyone could want to be without
the fear of social exclusion. In much the same way that the media of the
1950s saw hypocrisy as a valid means of developing their Elvis product,
so too could they nurture the stars of the 1990’s and beyond. This
was a generation that could be seduced with sexually overt Lolita images,
a generation that at an early age had access to all kinds of brazen material
over the Internet. Both could be used to push manufactured pop. Everything
could be tolerated as long as it was paid for. But, should the new teenyboppers
try and download it for free, they would need to be aware that Mr Music
Mogul might just be watching and sue their pretty little asses. Only time
will tell whether their hero is also capable of a period of true rebellion.
One wonders if Britney will one day also have her own bloated, satin jogging
suit state of real rebellion in Las Vegas.
The triumph of an old-school capitalist ideology with the development
of the mass language Rock ‘n Roll does not exist without its real
countercultures. The origins and lineage of these are well-documented
and much discussed. The dropping out of the 1960’s and punky rebellion
that followed later are themselves legendary. However, if discussing them
again is somewhat unnecessary, perhaps the unexplored area is their relationship
to the dominant discourse of Rock ‘n Roll and, in particular, how
they were usurped and brought back into the mainstream as a staging post
on the road back to a centralized mainstream music industry ideology.
However, the gap that is probably most useful to acknowledge here is
not how yesterday’s defiant heroes were yoked into working for the
Man, but instead, the subtle resistance arising from voices speaking different
dialects of the language Rock ‘n Roll. One of the reasons this is
useful is because, in its critique of the dominant discourse, it shares
a number of mechanisms or even desires with the languages developed by
many contemporary visual artists.
The heritage of the 1960’s and the decentralized “pub rock”
music scene to which it gave birth in the 1970s was hugely significant
in the resistance to the conservative simulation of rebellion offered
by the mainstream media. Notably British in its most triumphant forms,
this was literally the breeding ground for what would become the largest
voices offering a different political position, the NME and the Melody
Maker.
British experiments with developing global rebellion substitute products
in the 1960s had been somewhat unexpected. Beatlemania arose almost by
fluke. The same processes that had been deployed to make Elvis’
transition from vinyl to screen and television were tried out on them.
And, in so doing, the reality of a regional Rock ‘n Roll dialect
emerged. The self-effacing sensibility of Ealing Studios came through
more strongly than Hollywood. And it would be variations on this that
would shape distinctly British use of the language Rock ‘n Roll.
British film and television has often been an interesting phenomenon,
a place where the people behind the scenes have had to reconcile their
intellectual, educated perspectives to find subtle ways of rebelling in
a highly class-conscious society little impressed by the overt use of
motorbikes and leather jackets. By virtue of who ended up making it, British
film and television owes a great debt to the tradition of the privileged
intellectual left wing, to the heritage of a 19th century Fabian socialist
worldview. The reality is that those who would become the guardians of
the language Rock ‘n Roll were fundamentally from the same demographic.
Of course, this is not to say that they were necessarily financially privileged
-many were the product of the success of preceding social movements to
open education to all sectors of society- but they were, nonetheless highly-educated,
often in institutions with a strong history of left leaning intellectualism.
What Beatlemania showed the insightful observers was that rebellion
in Rock ‘n Roll could be informed by other traditions than those
offered by Hollywood, ones in which adherence to Uncle Sam’s message
to the new Empire need not be perpetuated. It could be modest. It could
be humorous. And yet it could also be more socially aware of the military
industrial complex.
In crummy music venues and working men’s clubs, in low-budget
newspapers and university hall discussions, the sensibility that emerged
was one that had more of a William Morris utopian tradition than the drive
for universal stardom. One could be famous to the right people, to a select
group of truly respectful fellow travelers. This was the language of Rock
‘n Roll as a cottage industry, a cottage industry with all the same
quiet passion for craftsmanship that informed the 19th century socialist
experiments in quaint rural areas. It was “independent” and
as such the birth an independent music scene that would later label itself
“Indie” up until such times as the boundaries became blurred
and big industry found ways to exploit the term.
For almost two decades from the 1970’s onwards, this force would
become a strong voice in opposition to the capitalist adherent ideology
of the dominant language Rock ‘n Roll. The giant American labels
filled huge stadiums with permed soft metal pulp; the Indies practiced
their wan Romanticism in rooms above pubs. The giant labels tried to lure
new recruits with promises of dollars, palm trees and swimming pools.
The Indies offered lashings of tea and a day trip to Brighton.
Perhaps it is seems strange that British culture in particular should
offer a form of Romantic resistance in the language Rock ‘n Roll.
But the notion of the British as uptight, rigid and terribly polite is
a fairly recent development. Let’s not forget that the British did
a good line in Romanticism the first time around, complete with wife swapping,
swashbuckling and gender construct manipulation. Furthermore, the use
of the word “British” is shorthand. It does little to signify
that it takes in the involved Celtic tradition, one which, for many political
historical reasons, has an almost engrained culture of resistance to the
mainstream. Whatever the underlying reasons, the resistant voice in the
language Rock ‘n Roll arising from the islands was one that said
that Rock ‘n Roll could be domestic, romantic, soft. And somewhere
it struck a chord with fellow travelers abroad because, at its height,
during the 1980s, this dissident voice in Rock ‘n Roll became and
export product and was so visible that it is still understood; we can
still read it in a global context even if only to observe how it has spawned
a thousand local dialects.
The media today is heavily understood through these two languages: Hollywood
and Rock ‘n Roll. That visual artists should choose to engage with
them is not a surprise but rather inevitable given their level of saturation
into the fabric of many contemporary societies.
#3: Low Lens & High Risk
This text opened with a brief examination of the use of the Hollywood
mechanism in the context of a specific practitioner, Vezzoli. Another
way would be in the context of a local linguistic culture.
Examining the work of number of Dutch artists provides such an opportunity.
Each makes highly individual work, often with unique concerns and realistion.
Yet, taken as a group, their work also affords and opportunity to examine
the relationship between language Hollywood and a local linguistic culture.
The media and media representations have long been of particular interest
to Dutch artists. This is perhaps unsurprising given the early Dutch embracing
of photography as a valid “fine art” form and progressive
cultural and economic policies that both encouraged embracing the media
–including video, film, unstable media and design- as arenas for
conceptual exploration. Conversely, as some Dutch artists point out, the
whole issue of international fame and stardom is an intriguing paradigm
for Dutch artists. The Netherlands is at once in a unique position in
Europe with its unusually and historically high levels of literacy in
international languages –such as English- and history of mercantile
engagement. Yet it also has a very immediate national mass media.
The national policies and physical size of the country mean that media
such as television and film exist as an odd contradiction, characterised
by both the created distance between performer and public that the media
uses to create constructs of fame and the national history of accessibility
and democracy. In a sense, Warhol, could have been imagining the Netherlands
when he said that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes.
Similarly, the work of a number of contemporary Dutch artists is concerned
with exploring the gaps between the realities of the unique local “polder
model” of celebrity and the aspirations and appetites created by
global media.
Work that engages with mass media, fame, glamour and stardom is a notable
tendency of contemporary Dutch art; one that might not be immediately
recognizable outside the Netherlands. Perhaps this is because of the dominance
of a number of other Dutch contemporary tendencies being fore grounded
in the work of artists exported internationally at the “top level”
in recent decades, for example, conceptual projects, painting, social
practice, sculpture and installation addressing issues of architecture
and urbanism inter alia.
Of course, this does not mean that the tendency addressed by this exhibition
is the sole locus of the included artist's work. For example, both Madeleine
Berkhemer and Risk Hazekamp engage with images of glamour and stardom,
but do so to build a discourse that takes in gender and identity politics
in a mechanism not dissimilar to the early practice of Cindy Sherman.
Attraction to these themes is visible in the work of Dutch artists at
a range of career stages. Madeleine Berkhemer and Risk Hazekamp, for example
are long recognised in the Netherlands and abroad with museum shows to
their credit. Whereas an artist like Martin C. de Waal has been making
work for a long time (early work by Martin was purchased by the Caldic
Collection in the 1990's) but has only relatively recently been embraced
by the art establishment and commercial gallery sector. Perhaps this is
because his practice, like that of DJ Chantelle, has defied easy reading
and has only more recently been accepted into the institutional canon
of artistic practice.
Avatar practice – or at the very least, playing with performative
personas- is present in the practice of a number of these artists. That
it is also present in the work of other included artists working in different
cultural contexts raises interesting questions about this kind of practice
and the topics addressed by artists.
Madeleine Berkhemer is a Rotterdam artist who has shown extensively
in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Scandinavia. She works in a broad
range of tropes and media, including drawing, sculpture, installation,
performance, photography and collage.
Female identity and female sexuality – often her own- is at the
centre of most of Madeleine’s work, whether represented very graphically
through performative self-portraiture that is incorporated into the work
or through the meanings of the materials she uses; lingerie, fetishised
shoes and products that speak of a woman’s body. She often manages
to achieve an aggressive and confrontative quality in the work, a quality
that remains even in works where she has removed herself or overt graphic
imagery altogether; rage, desire and sexual frenzy expertly conveyed through
form, tension, material and colour.
The media, and more often the tackier end of the media, has often been
a point of reference for her. The world of the pole dancer, the topless
model and the other faceless forms of the “celebrity” of top-shelf
magazines has often been the starting point for her post-feminist exploration.
Sometimes she creates clearly demarcated personas through whom she can
be an active agent in her work; Milly, Molly, Mandy. These personas, complete
with the full range of make-up, costume and wigs that she uses to create
them upon her own body usually seem to be a progression of Berkhermer’s
position that a woman’s sexuality is both a powerful and viable
means to an end: self determination; by any means necessary.
Risk Hazekamp is an artist from The Hague who works primarily with photography
and video. In her work, the language of Hollywood is directly engaged.
Often the works take the issue of gender by the horns, quite literally
in some cases since the images of “the West”, cowboys and
all the baggage that they carry in terms of gender and media constructions
of gender, are prevalent.
In works that use the figure, disturbingly familiar clothing and landscape
to deconstruct –or perhaps reconstruct- the idealised images of
maleness and femaleness, Risk’s work often exists in a state of
ambivalent “femanliness”. Is she seeking to attain the perfect
image of a lesbian Marlboro woman with tinges of a female James Dean?
Or is she asking us to think about how Hollywood manipulates us? And does
the bullfighter imagery challenge the sexist swagger of Hemingway or reflect
a blatant admiration? Sometimes it is difficult to tell and perhaps one
does not need to since therein lies the power of the work to arrest.
In more recent works, the issue of gender and personal identity is tackled
even more directly as bearded androgens –she has moved into using
models in addition to casting herself in her work- populate portraiture,
video and what appear to be stills from films. Interestingly enough, whereas
the earlier work that uses the language of Hollywood and Risk’s
apparent (and perhaps desired) resemblance to a young James Dean, the
new works have a strong European cinema feeling to them. “Giant”
(2002) pulls no punches in referencing a mainstream Hollywood classic
whereas “Liberte Pour Tous” (2005) could be a still from a
cult French film that never got made.
It is not necessarily pedantic to insist that these works are much more
about the relationship between personal identity and gender than about
sexual identity. Of course, sexuality is a key aspect of personal identity.
However, whereas artists like Della Grave Volcano have trod similar ground
in terms of content, these works do not shock an amaze because of what
someone might do with her body, but far more who she might “be”
deep within herself.
Martin C. de Waal is an Amsterdam-based artist, whose work crosses disciplines,
working in design, fashion and the visual art world. Digitally altered
photography and performance are often Martin’s mode of working though
Martin’s own body often forms part of the work being apparently
altered through plastic surgery or make-up to construct its discourse.
His work frequently engages in the notion of “identity” and
its relationship to the way in which mass and fashion media use “identity”
as a commodity. Sexuality, gender and race –and more often the complex
intersections between all of these things- feature strongly in his work.
His work has a wry quality often expressing the desire for the unattainable
glamour and perfection promoted by media images whilst simultaneously
poking a self-effacing finger at himself; someone who should know better.
Whilst the modes of his subject matter –the mainstream fashion media-
have often been the means by which he has made work, more recent performances
have taken this discourse even further: literally “using”
or placing himself within the musical performances of Belgian Electro
stars (and Karl Lagerfeld cover duo) Vive La Fete or swapping songs with
each other and sharing the stage at large-scale outdoor pop festivals.
If there is a distinctly “shape shifter” quality to his
career in the music and fashion media scene, then nothing highlights the
aspect of his shape shifting more clearly than his large “Global
Citizen” series of works. These works, usually presented as digital
prints or projections, saw de Waal literally altering his physical appearance
in an attempt to find the ultimate “global beauty”. Aided
by cosmetics, the odd bit of surgical intervention and Adobe Photoshop,
de Waal has presented images of his possible selves ranging from the ludicrous
(massively over-implanted lips and bleached blond hair) to the unexpectedly
beautiful (the blond Hollywood native American).
Similar practices have been used to realise his more recent print works
in which models are used and placed within extreme landscapes.
However, video and performance –and hybrid forms- remain an ongoing
interest. These have ranged from the subtle to the monumental.
The connection between his work and practices and the worlds of glamour
and fashion are clearly obvious. Perhaps less obvious to the audience
outside the Netherlands is its engagement with the art historical context
of contemporary Dutch art and, most notably, to the conceptual practices
of the 1970’s and 1980’s. For example, his 8mm film work,
“I Am So Sad To Tell You” is quite literally a remaking of
Bas Jan Adder’s seminal film work, Adder being one of the artists
who strongly influenced de Waal in forming his own practice.
DJ Chantelle (a.k.a Boris van Berkum) is a Rotterdam-based conceptual
artist whose work pokes an irreverent, Dadaistic swipe at contemporary
Dutch society and, in particular, the relationship between gender, sexuality,
power and consumption. Like a number of other artists included in the
project, DJ Chantelle uses complex avatar practices, in fact DJ Chantelle
is the avatar invention of Boris van Berkum.
“Objects of Desire” remains a preoccupation for DJ Chantelle,
the bizarre entity with the body of a suited man and the made-up head
of an archetypal bourgeois woman who produces work that reflect deep seated
desires to consume luxury and exclusivity as the ultimate fashionable
social power accessories. Subversively political, the works, however,
defy simplistic readings as a mere critique on consumerism.
What makes DJ Chantelle unique within the contemporary conceptual field
is the concentration on very traditional production methods: ceramics,
glass and granite works are often allowed an existence of their own, sometimes
combined with photography, performance or works on paper drawing on one
of Boris van Berkum’s former existences as a political cartoonist.
In addition to showing works with The Artoonists, DJ Chantelle was also
one of these artists commissioned by the city of Rotterdam to create the
Martin Toonder Monument, a monument to the Netherlands’ best loved
cartoonist. This seminal work –executed in pure 19th century materials
such granite, bronze, gold leaf- is one of the key pieces of post-20th
century public commissioning by a Dutch city, approached entirely without
concern for the modernist orthodoxy.
The large body of work that forms the modular installation “Self
Serving Salome” takes as its starting point DJC’s preoccupation
with French decadent texts such as “Against Nature” and “decadent”
aesthetics, in particular the works of Aubrey Beardsley, an unusual starting
point for a Dutch artist. The work involved a number of large-scale ceramic
pieces handmade by the artist using traditional techniques. These are
then placed in site-specific relation to other photographic, video and
sculptural elements, depending on the unpredictable mood of the weird
diva.
Interesting, perhaps, that a number of these Dutch artists engage with
the language Hollywood by, in part, exploring its darker counterparts:
the worlds of pole dancing, pornography and tacky desperation for fame.
Of course, the same might be said of numerous situations in which artists
have sought to subvert the dominant language by chipping away at its self-delusion.
And they are not bonded by being contemporaneous.
Beardsley in the 19th century cast a jaundiced eye on the received images
of glamour and beauty of the day in order to offer his cruel, decadent
reworking. Infamy could be made to taste sweeter than fame. In much the
same way, an entire gay culture developed on the premise of subverting
the mainstream into a cruel, satirical gaze. The complexity of the mechanism
is only heightened by the fact that, quite contrary to merely attacking
icons of glamour and fame with vicious insight, the very attack acknowledges
an almost willing seduction. For every ugly lampooning of Mae West or
Bette Davis, the visual language of gay counter-cultures often has an
inherent reverence. In the drag-queen like performance by Jeanne Moreau
in Fassbinder’s “Querelle”, she utters the lines of
the song, “Every man kills the thing he loves”. And the queens
in the audience swoon.
The subtext speaks more accurately than the literal expression since
to any insightful observer; the adulation of such cultural moments by
dominant gay cultures would be more honest if it acknowledged its attraction
more accurately. The bittersweet ‘n sour turn on is not truly for
Genet’s outsider inversion. Genet, the perpetual criminal, understood
the seduction of being the murderer, of the enjoyment of actually killing
the thing (even reduced to having no identity) that he loved. The mainstream
gay culture, however, is more seduced by the possibility of being the
victim, being the obliterated object of love.
In a sense, much of dominant gay culture adulates the mechanisms of
fame because on the very domestic level, dominant gay cultures reinforce
values that postulate that it is better to be a prison bitch than an unrequited,
sane admirer; better to be destroyed and consumed as an object of extreme
desire than to be forever the one offering another a sane affection. But,
ultimately, the direction of the gaze –who is pursued by whom- is
not the as high up in the hierarchy of dictates as other fantasies.
Obliteration and nothingness form lauded endpoints in many gay cultural
fantasies. Through such dark drives, either end of the active/passive
spectrum can be accommodated. If you can’t be a prison bitch; an
object whose attractiveness for other men is so extreme that it literally
puts you in danger, then it is acceptable to be a man whose attraction
to others is so extreme that it puts you in danger. Dominant gay cultural
fantasies assign a score of nil points to any man who sanely finds another
attractive but whose desires are rejected. Should the same man, however,
throw himself insanely into his desire and pursue it to the point of destruction,
he can be received into the gay mythology in an affirmed form. As long
as you hurt yourself, it doesn’t matter if you’re butch or
bitch.
The relevance of these mechanisms is that they coincidently (or intentionally,
as insisted by some gay film historians) came to form a key role in the
constructions of fame and glamour arising of the heart of the language
Hollywood. Whether gay men merely over identified with the tragic lives
of the divas of the silver screen, or whether they actually made them
(for example, by pulling the strings behind the scenes to make the film
and media depictions in the first place) is less relevant than noticing
the similarities and, in hindsight, their endurance into the mainstream
contemporary culture.
At one time, the leakage of the grubby “true” lives of the
Hollywood stars was only of interest to subcultures with a vested identity
interest. Only the gays were interested in the hard life of Amphetamine
Annie or the struggles of Miss Ross to rise to the top. Dissidents such
as Kenneth Anger both provided a visual language and dished the dirt to
a discrete audience eager to identify. However, if we examine the mechanisms
of today’s tabloid media, it soon becomes apparent that the hunger
to gloat –and ultimately identify with- narratives of excess taken
to the level of self-destruction and obliteration have completely mainstreamed.
Twenty-something heterosexual women devour the demise of supermodels in
rehab with a ferocity akin to their gay counterparts. Heterosexual men
with professional jobs no longer experience revulsion at detailed perversions
of sports stars exposed in tabloids, but are instead seduced by them in
a way that was once the domain of sardonic swishes.
Perhaps it is because a gay culture now exists where there was once
none; because gay has become an identity in addition to a set of sexual
activity options. For whatever reason, the mechanisms that now drive this
interaction with bitter camp fantasies of a destructive fame are strongly
linked with dominant gay cultural fantasies. If they are “gay”
in sensibility, it does not necessarily mean that they are sexually homosexual
since, historically, they have a link to a similar drives behind the gaze
of artists like Beardsley, who no matter what he got up to in bed, could
simply not have been “gay”. After all it did not exist then
and neither he nor onlookers could interpret his presentations through
such a cohesive visual cultural language.
Beardsley coincidently seems to be an influence in the work of American
artist James Gobel. Gobel’s works -usually made as a form of beautifully
crafted felt marquetry, sometimes painting- create a camp sensual world
that refers to iconography recognisable in most western gay cultures.
These could be drag queens being fabulous; flaming creatures. Yet, there
is something more than celebration going on here. In the construction
of the images and the depiction of the characters that fill them, we are
somehow invited to take stock. In much the same way that Beardsley is
both complicit with and critical of the decadent creatures he created,
there is something in Gobel’s work that asks us to question the
incessant drive for fabulousness, gorgeousness and fame (if only on the
dancefloor ) that form the fallout out of the radical gay movements of
the 1970’s. The artist seems to be fully cognisant that the promise
of community has been replaced with a form of corporal capitalism, yet
he certainly pulls away from rejection. We are, at the very least, asked
to understand the attractiveness of gay iconography for many men, the
way in which it at least presents some hope of a hedonistic actual gay
community free of heterocentric constraints and how the currency of fame
and glamour an important role in sustaining the ideology of this hope.
The faintly ridiculous visual language created by gay cultures may fall
short of a Utopian solution, but it remains a powerful attractor.
Interestingly enough, in the paintings –in which the language
by virtue of the medium can operate on more subtle levels- the interaction
between the individual and the larger gay culture seems more fore grounded.
In these, the shameless, tubby, bearded realities offer a starker insight.
Sure, they may still aspire to the official aspiration, but the reality
is clearly different. Without ever knowing if James Gobel is a muscle-bound
go-go dancer or a fabulous drag diva, we are steered clearly in the direction
of believing that he identifies more as a less-than-fit guy in a baseball
cap.
Drag-queen antics also feature in the works of Peter Podworski &
Jonny Woo. Jonny Woo is well known for his live performance work that
is very much about exploring the low-end, apparently ridiculous forms
of theatricality.
These performance forms are often the starting point for their collaborative
video works that explore some of the desires and drives behind low-rent
performance forms. Often, though, these become transformed. Cleverness
arrives and things are turned around in order to reveal unexpected depths.
What could be more tacky and frankly, gay, than lip-synching? But very
quickly, through the choices of music and the manipulation of another
cheap performance strategy –glamour make-up- something completely
different emerges. We are brought to a point of new meanings that are
immediately entertaining and, in some cases, surprisingly shocking.
For example, the cheap visual pun that drives the work "Squatty
Roo" is at once disarming, but does not ultimately prevent it from
being a challenging work. The viewer is constantly placed in a position
of confusion that means that humour and being offended have to jostle
for place. The mechanism itself has resonance with 20th century cabaret
forms in which performers wanting to show strident resistance to the mainstream
culture also had to find strategies for overcoming legal and structural
barriers to what they wanted to say. Furthermore, they also needed to
ensure that they kept their audience –that included those who may
not have shared their views or identity- on board. There, as here, humour
proved a powerful vehicle for being able to talk about what was taboo.
In the most recent collaboration, both mainstream gay iconography and
its related Hollywood sources are the subject of consideration in a radical
remake of “The Wizard of Oz”…
#4: Are You or Have You Ever Been...?
If the included Dutch artists highlight the diversity of ways in which
artists touch on these themes from within one specific cultural linguistic
region, then the included work of Jemima & Dolly Brown shows a much
more personal engagement with the topic.
Coincidently working with an avatar – a replica of herself, her
manufactured twin sister Dolly- Jemima & Dolly Brown have brought
their own quirky post-feminist works into existence for over a decade.
The work of Jemima & Dolly is often associated with an intrinsic,
amplified Englishness. It’s there in the landscape photographs and
in the decorative elements deployed in wallpapers, drawings and sculptures;
it’s there in the home-brew genetically mutated sculptures with
both human and animal elements; a perversely grown-up notion of the world
of Beatrix Potter.
But, in a more recent body of work, Brown has directly engaged in personal
histories in a surprising new direction, one that perhaps more clearly
elucidates the “Englishness” of earlier work. Personal history
and family have always been key themes of the work. But, these have historically
focussed on the immediate nuclear family. Brown has often used casts taken
of her parents and drawn on the experience of growing up in rural England
to construct works.
In a more recent body of work, the focus has shifted to the previous
generation; the grandparents. And it is in the contemplation of the experience
of her paternal grandparents that a new, distinctly political body of
work has emerged.
Jemima & Dolly Brown’s paternal grandfather was Phil Brown,
one of the American actors blacklisted during the McCarthyite Hollywood
witch hunts of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Like a number
of others in the same predicament, he left the USA for the UK, effectively
a political refugee. And, like many others in similar predicaments, he
soon adopted the perceived trappings of the culture that gave respite
from the rampant anti-Communism of the USA. The vehement Englishness of
Jemima & Dolly Brown’s life experience owes itself, in part,
to the vigour with which an American grandfather adopted it.
In the new body of work that includes works such as “Give me your
blacklisted Wallpaper” and “Steal Her Style”, Jemima
& Dolly Brown apply their distinctive cut up techniques to engaging
with a real, surreal family history: Jemima Brown’s own eye’s
inhabit the Hollywood studio photograph of her grandmother, Phil Brown’s
aspiring actress wife in a seductive video work. A wallpaper in a pink
and black 1950’s palette captures moments from the era of the House
Un-American Activities Committee and fuses them questioningly with distinctly
contemporary American activities. A composite sculpture of an Angel fusing
Jemima’s and her grandmother’s features hovers near the ceiling,
perhaps alluding to the City of Angels in which her grandparents started
out –and to which the eventually returned- having taken in the UK
and Tito’s Yugoslavia as places to live away from the American dream.
If glamour of the Hollywood variety is thrown into a broader political
context by this new body of work, literally based on real Hollywood experiences
and people, then glamour of another kind has not been absent in earlier
work. Or perhaps, more accurately, a kind of anti-glamour, an examination
of the thwarted desire for glory and luxury.
Sculptural works such as “Purry Purry” talk of the thwarted
desires of suburban longing for something more luxurious and glamorous.
This is a sculpture wandering into the realms of Nell Dunn’s popular
1960’s kitchen sink novel, “Poor Cow”.
Social critique using the inevitably doomed and senseless drive to be
someone more glamorous, to be a somebody, is often a feature of British
cinema and television languages, a phenomenon that first became pronounced
in the 1960’s. And whilst this sculpture, amongst others, intersects
with some of these discourses, it is interesting to note that it seems
to be something of a commonality in the concerns about desires for luxury
and glamour expressed by numerous British artists, even where they work
in completely different media or core practices and preoccupations.
The Scottish painter Janice McNab, for example, is a deeply conceptual
painter. Her oeuvre is strongly bound up with a conceptual approach to
painting that literally questions the “truth” or “documentary”
nature of the photographs she uses as source materials. In many ways,
her paintings are a form of research into the nature of painting itself.
These are works that seem to be deeply concerned with finding the point
at which a photographic realism is interchangeable with abstraction. Her
images are at once immediately recognisable as things, objects, places,
yet simultaneously seem to exist of nothing except carefully rendered
form, shape colour.
But, in addition to the formal aspects of her work, there is content.
And, a preoccupation with the failure of glamour or luxury to pierce the
banality of everyday life seems to be one of a strands running through
her work. The garish curtains in “Morning” speak not of a
Las Vegas found, but a Las Vegas lost. The undeniably false nature of
the beach in an indoor leisure centre talks more about being beached than
reclining in sun-kissed comfort on a beach. These are works in which the
longing for a better place is acknowledged, but also the grimness of its
failure to arrive in a million suburban lives is contemplated. There must
be more to life than this. But not here, not yet.
#5: Fellow Travellers
If Janice McNab’s structured, intellectual approach as a painter
brings this British mindset to the surface in one way, then the work of
fellow Scot, Ross Sinclair, occasionally touches on related issues, despite
consisting of a completely different core practice.
Best known for his sprawling installations that frequently refer to
what might best be described as ungainly utopias (rather than simply dystopian)
there is most definitely a line of humour running through his work that
often makes reference to fame and glamour of the rock ‘n roll variety;
a somewhat sardonic gaze from one who both knows and knows better.
Whether this is strongly related to his own previous experience as a
member of a successful indie band or whether purely a personal interest
is somewhat irrelevant in the context of the work. Sculptures featuring
iconic electric guitars and antlers seem to be casting a knowing gaze
over the romanticism of rock ‘n roll iconography. Not that being
knowing is an antidote against seduction. T-shirts roughly emblazoned
with hand-painted names of local heroes, some of whom may have even had
their moment of fame in the international limelight, are ambivalent. There
is a sense in which they indicate an awareness of the silliness of aspirations
to rock stardom, yet they also seem to embrace the strength of the myth.
Yes, it may be the clichéd dream of a million teenagers to escape
their bedrooms and hurtle into the world of limos, gigs and chart success.
But what other dream is truly viable in a society in which all other forms
of the Romantic has been quantified and qualified?
Rock ‘n roll iconography and glamour have also presented an attractive
topic to Austrian artist, Ursula Mayer. Avidly interested in fashion and
popular music, Mayer played as a member of a number of pop groups operating
on the vibrant Vienna underground music scene. These interests have often
overlapped into her visual art works, initially in works that sought to
investigate the punk and a body of work in which notions of glamour were
challenged.
Both the “Confrontational Glamour” and “Fallen Imperial”
series of work saw Mayer exploring a range of media and sources as she
literally designed and made costumes for performers –including herself-
who appeared in her photographic installations and video works. This experimentation
with performative practices intersects with the realm of “avatar
practice” at times. For example, in a book work made as part of
“Fallen Imperial”, she casts herself as an upmarket call girl
working a famous Viennese hotel, a vague and emotive text accompanying
the photographs printed in a slightly “retro” looking book.
In more recent work, these practices have become less fore grounded
and more distilled. Whilst her interest has shifted more towards using
cinematic visual languages to make works that imply but never state a
narrative, her interests in performance and pop music remain. In one recent
work she invited three women performers from Viennese pop bands to participate.
She designed a specific costume for each one and asked them to interpret
the same song directly to camera, all filmed within a mirrored cube. The
result is a sparse, beautiful and thoughtful work, sometimes shown as
a sculptural object – projected within the same mirrored cube within
which it was filmed- at other times as a projection.
Her most recent series of works draw on film theories arising from Italian
cinema of the 1960’s and, in particular, the way in which mise en
scène rather than actors’ actions can be used to build an
emotive state or a narrative. In these works – shown as projections
or on plasma screens- Mayer intentionally exploits the cinematic nature
of the image. Working with a choreographer, we see a “character”
move through specifically chosen interiors. The tight, limited movements
of the performer are neither dramatic nor naturalistic. Instead, we seem
to be drawn into a highly personal “story” in which we can
never be fully certain of the meaning of the performer’s actions,
but nonetheless experience the highly-charged individual atmosphere created
by each work. In much the same way that stage actors traditionally have
to learn to “act smaller” to become good screen actors, Mayer
seems to have taken elements such as cinema and Bauschian “tanzteater”
to create a new hybrid form suited to a digital age.
Another artist involved in the music scene, Angie Reed is probably best-known
as a pop performer signed to the Berlin-based “Chicks on Speed”
label. Her quirky electropop songs are more than capable of holding their
own as pop music, coming from a distinct Berlin scene that includes the
likes of Gonzales, Mocky, Peaches, Namosh and, of course Chicks on Speed.
But a key feature of her work is that Angie Reed’s musical practice
is inseparably connected with her practice as a visual artist. She has
not, for example, ever released an album that was not, in effect, a pop
opera. Both albums to date are effectively the track lists for two hour-long
staged performances, “The Barbara Brockhaus Show” and “XYZ
Frequency”.
In Angie Reed’s practice, her song writing comes out of forming
the content for a performed experience –whether in galleries or
more theatrical settings- intrinsically linked to the worlds she creates
through the use of text and drawing. In the more recent of her two hour-long
works, the projections of sequential drawings have been transformed into
animation.
Although always involved in the music scene from adolescence –
for example she managed to play bass for “Stereototal” whilst
successfully completing her visual art studies in Berlin- Reed’s
practice has always involved drawing and an interest in animation, an
influence of the American pop culture of her youth. During the period
that she studied under Katarina Zieverding, she explored a broad range
of permutations of the various practices. One result was the performance-based
works discussed above. The other main form was the use of her idiosyncratic
drawings –or animations made from them- in making installations.
In some cases these have involved turning specific rooms into a form of
three-dimensional storyboard. In others, the work is more sculptural.
For example, in a work shown in her Berlin Senat Stipendium show at KunstBank,
an animation made from her drawings is shown on a small monitor with headphones
inside a nun’s cloak. In order to view and understand the work,
the viewer is forced onto his/her knees. The animation (and the lyrics
of the song) tell a famous tale of a lesbian nun who is excommunicated
and, during the economic hardship of the Weimar years, becomes a famous
courtesan.
Viewed from the outside, the individual viewing the work is physically
forced into a position of prayer or something a lot more scandalous; a
visual pun in keeping with the overall tone of the work.
In her work, images of glamour and fame are always filtered through
her highly individual –and funny- worldview. Legendary courtesans
become figures of warm fun and buxom, seductive dames are always risking
being undermined by their own vulnerability at any moment. Her vision
of the nature of fame and legend is a very human one. It is earnestly
filled with a gaze of love……whilst not falling for any bullshit.
A second aspect of Angie Reeds practice also intersects with notions
of glamour and fame, namely her straying into worlds outside the remit
of the more traditional visual artist. Both as a musician and more recently
as an actress, she has walked a more DIY (and frankly less embarrassing)
version of the path walked by the likes of Bowie and Madonna, that is,
she has appeared as a screen actress in both short art films and a feature
length film made through the same German television film funding system
famous for having given Fassbinder a leg up from stage to screen.
A camp post-feminist critique and an attraction to popular cultural
kitsch is something that Angie Reed and the British Israeli artist Tai
Shani share. In the case of Tai Shani’s earlier works, this comes
out in video drawing on the b-movie and the world of horror and slasher
pics. In works such as “Cheerleaders Rock My World” (2002)
she uses the language of low-budget, drive-in fodder to construct a very
funny and ultimately alarming narrative. A cheerleader is literally relentlessly
pursued. Although we are never exposed to the full denouement of her fate,
we have all become cinema literate to the point that we can fill in the
possible blanks. What is particularly challenging about the work is that
Tai Shani casts a deeply ambiguous camera in the direction of her fleeing
cheerleader: are we supposed to be rooting for her or, like ancient Romans,
enjoying her demise? Only the last seconds bring a kind of relief in which
the possibility of the cheerleader’s triumph is offered.
In more recent works, she has evolved her practice into working with
much more complex video material such as in the work, “Take Me Back”
(2006). Using music and a visual language strongly reminiscent of British
cinema dealing with the magical – one thinks of Jonathan Miller’s
“Alice in Wonderland”- and a Hitchcockian suspense, complete
with all its Freudian visual cues, she creates visually striking, highly-personal
and somewhat opaque viewing experiences. As in her other non-video works
such as performance and installations, reappraising and playing with image
of women and womanhood seems to be a strong preoccupation. Make-up, hosiery,
cloth, seduction, repulsion, violence, theatre and mascara might easily
be keywords attributed to her work in a databasing exercise.
However, this is not a straightforward post-feminist critique: her preoccupation
with the illogical, eerie world of magic, the occult, the unexplained
does not square easily with a received position; does not direct the viewer
towards perceiving her as of a particular political position. In much
the same way that works of filmmakers like David Lynch present problems
for assimilation by any number of traditional critical standpoints, Tai
Shani’s works remain too individual in their preoccupations to be
pegged. And, like Lynch, this effect often seems to be as a result of
the heady mélange of cinematic languages brought to serve the works.
The work of British Cypriot painter Arif Ozacka has little intentional
connection to cinema. That its language nonetheless comes to the fore
in his early paintings is rather a testimony to the level of saturation
the visual languages of Hollywood and television in our contemporary culture.
Araf Ozacka’s work is very much concerned with art history and
the painter’s technical skill. Although his more recent work has
shown a shift to experimenting with different painting languages drawn
from different cultures, both his more recent and older works share his
almost obsessive interest in the works of old masters such as Caravaggio.
In the newer works, these elements come out in a composite style with
both recognisable and abstracted elements. In the earlier works they are
firmly rooted in a classic, painterly realism.
Working from posed photographs, in these earlier works, Arif Ozacka
was seeking to explore expressions of a kind of “psychic violence”
that existed between people, perhaps specifically within the psychodynamics
of family life. What is striking about what emerges is the cinematic nature
of the images. Carefully graded qualities of light are brought to bear
using the most traditional of painting crafts and yet, the content emerges
as a strange juxtaposition of the firmly classical and the freshly contemporary.
This is Jerry Springer family violence realised on the wall of a Venetian
palazzo.
Psychological violence and screwed up families are also at the heart
of Dallas Seitz's "candy dishes". A popular literary source
reconfigures ideas about a dysfunctional family's story. And, in a strong
congruence with its literary source, we never see the faces of any of
the players. Figuration is absent. Instead, we are offered "candy
dishes" - delicate and seductive glass objects that look as if they
could be domestic ornaments, human organs or drug-taking paraphernalia.
Dallas Seitz's starting point for the piece was the dysfunctional family
in Brett Easton Ellis' brat-pack classic "Less Than Zero" (1985)
where the only presence of the parents’ lives for their screwed-up
children is the constantly refilled candy dishes they find upon returning
to their empty Los Angeles home…
Ironically, the absence of parents and their figurative presence in
this work exists almost in opposition to their process of construction.
Dallas Seitz worked closely with his own father – a skilled glassblower-
to realise the piece. The involvement of his own family in the process
of making his work is not only restricted to this work and he has also
involved them in making other pieces in other media – such as film
and video- for which he is, perhaps, best known.
However, whereas the “candy dishes” refer to a familiar
Hollywood (or rather Hollywood wannabe) through an absence of cinematic
language, the film and video works often make dramatic use of our knowledge
of Hollywood language to raise a stir through our recognising the difference
between the screen “reality” that we might experience in the
popular cinema as opposed to other forms of moving image such as the quasi-documentary
film in which he filmed his father killing a cayote on the family farm
in rural Canada.
The film’s mechanism, in part, works through recognising that
we will inevitably experience a moment that the usual Hollywood rider
that “no animals were hurt in the making of this film” fails
to arrive. Life on the farm, unlike life on the lot, can be a shocking
and brutal experience. The device is deceptively simple. For all the suspended
disbelief that we are trained to harness in viewing thousands of dramatic
screen deaths during our life times, a documented death of a simple animal,
the kind of death that takes place every day away from our sanitised urban
surrounds, remains a shocking experience.
|
