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Presentations
of film and video art in galleries often embrace the elegantly stripped-down
character of such art spaces. Consisting of projections in empty
spaces with white or black walls (or both) and possibly one or more
benches to sit on, such filmic spaces are a far cry both from traditional
'movie palaces' and from contemporary multiplexes, as well as from
small 'art house' cinemas. In all these cases, the fundamental set-up
is more or less the same: there are rows of seats that are comfortable
enough to watch a feature film, and a screen. Movie theatre seats
are rare in art spaces. There may be practical and financial reasons
for this, but the preference for simple stools and benches - or
for no seating facilities at all - is above the result of a choice
for a different mode of reception. Watching a video in an art-space
is a somewhat more self-conscious experience than watching a film
in a cinema, and since many videos are loops that do not necessarily
require to be watched from beginning to end, the visitor who walks
from one video installation to the next ends up being more akin
to a zapping TV viewer than to a member of a cinema audience.
One could say that van Erik van Lieshout's videos 'deal with issues'
such as immigration and multiculturalism and the position of various
minorities and outsiders, as well as the anxieties and dreams of
white males in a changing society. In Lariam (2001), Van Lieshout
travels to Africa to learn how to rap. He has taken the anti-malaria
drug Lariam, which the locals cannot afford; the final scene shows
Van Lieshout rapping lines from the Lariam information leaflet to
a local audience. Whereas Lariam sees the white artist making a
pilgrimage to the mythical cradle of black culture, Respect (2003)
is a multicultural melodrama set on the streets of Rotterdam, involving
Moroccan youths. More fictionalized than Lariam, Respect shows how
Van Lieshout tries to find a boyfriend for his brother. Things seem
to turn out well when the brother hooks up with a Moroccan boy,
but it all ends in violence and bloodshed. Awakening (2005), perhaps
the most complex and fractured video so far, is less linear, interweaving
various excursions into different but sometimes overlapping Rotterdam
subcultures: the gay scene, immigrants and blacks, right-wingers
and neo-Nazis, and drug users, set against the background of the
2002 murder of Pim Fortuyn, the flamboyantly gay right-wing populist.
.
It would however be misguided and misleading to discuss these videos
as 'autonomous' pieces, isolated from the structures in which they
are shown. Van Lieshout's videos are often shown in huts or shacks
that are starkly opposed to the elegant minimalism of art spaces;
as intimate spaces within the exhibition space, they are a strange
blend between the cinema and the living room, between film and TV.
Van Lieshout's projections are usually relatively small; they seem
to hover between video-as-projection and video-on-monitor. The quality
of the image is a far cry from the spectacular videos produced by
some of today's blue-chip art stars. The constructions in which
they are shown, too, are far from professional-looking. Lariam is
shown in an enlarged replica of a Lariam package in which one has
to squat rather uncomfortably in order to see the video; Respect
was shown during the Venice Biennale in a rough and shoddy version
of the Dutch pavilion (designed by Rietveld), erected next to the
real thing, while Awakening (2005) is projected in a plywood shack
with a motley assembly of sofas and chairs. The space looks like
the TV room in a homeless shelter clumsily mimicking a bourgeois
living room.
Van Lieshout's
shacks are more or less public spaces that posit possible forms
of reception which complement and further complicate the uneasy
encounters in the videos. One could relate Van Lieshout's quest
for alternative modes of viewing to the Expanded Cinema movement
of the 1960s - for instance to Helio Oiticica's Quasi-Cinemas, installations
in which the artist combined film and slide projections with various
objects and materials in order to create alternative dispositifs
that challenge the viewing experience of a normal movie theatre,
which was deemed too passive. [1] While 'quasi-cinemas' could also
be a fitting epithet for Van Lieshout's constructions, there is
a noticeable difference in that such expanded cinema installations
often seek to do away with the traditional rectangular projection
which is to be contemplated in a seated or upright position. Van
Lieshout's video projections are usually 'normal' projections, on
an even white surface; in this respect cinema or video is not 'expanded'.
However, the environments in which they are shown differ from normal
viewing conditions to such an extent that they cause one's attention
to wander between the video and the circumstances under which it
is being watched.
In the 1960s, the rise of Minimalism led to increasing references
to 'the beholder', or sometimes the 'the viewer' or 'the spectator',
in writings on contemporary art. Since the physical experience of
the work was an essential part of Minimal art, art critics created
a disembodied and universalized spectator to represent the 'typical'
response to Minimalist works. [2] An artist who not only participated
in but also reflected on the emergence of art that demanded a physical
response was Dan Graham: with his use of video cameras and monitors,
glass, and one-way and two-way mirrors, Graham subjected the viewers
to a series of tests, both making them aware of the other viewers
and suggesting that (post-)Minimalist art strives to create precisely
the sort of homogenous, abstract and universal beholder referenced
in art criticism. Van Lieshout's video installation Happiness (2004)
recalls some of Grahams work, especially his 1981 Cinema project
and his pavilion structures. Van Lieshout's construction looks like
a cheap knock-off combining elements lifted from Graham and Frank
Gehry: it consists of a wooden structure supporting an undulating
skin which is transparent from the inside but mirroring from the
outside. Standing inside the structure, watching the video, one
can also watch the surrounding area and see if anyone is approaching.
The video focuses again on Van Lieshout and his brother; this time,
the siblings are not on Rotterdam's mean streets but in the countryside,
in the sylvan surroundings of a psychiatric institution, where they
- especially the brother - are grappling with their dysfunctional
behaviour. Standing inside, watching both the behaviour in the video
and the highly codified and disciplined art space and art-world
people surrounding it, one is in a strange limbo - Happiness is
an impossible panopticon that shows two incompatible spaces at the
same time.
Like most of Dan Graham's works, and like most Expanded Cinema pieces,
Erik van Lieshout's video pavilions are in fact seen by a relatively
homogenous group of art-world denizens, but they also point towards
the possibility a more inclusive audience. In so doing, they seem
to recall moments in early cinema history. Before the rise of classic
movie palaces, in which audience members were supposed to watch
the film in silence, films were shown during vaudeville shows and
in nickelodeons, where rather different forms of spectatorial behaviour
prevailed: "The neighborhood character of many nickelodeons
- the egalitarian seating, continuous admission, and variety format,
non-filmic activities like illustrated songs, live acts, and occasional
amateur nights - fostered a casual, sociable if not boisterous atmosphere.
It made movie-going an interactive rather than merely passive experience."[3]
In her study on early cinema audiences, Miriam Hansen notes a significant
shift in writings about 'the movies', which occurred around 1910:
up to that point, writers usually referred to the cinema's audience,
but increasingly they referred to 'the spectator'. As Hansen argues,
this "implied a shift from a collective, plural notion of the
film viewer to a singular, unified but potentially universal category,
the commodity form of reception." [4]
As noted above, such a universalized spectator or beholder has also
dominated art criticism since the sixties. However, a work like
Awakening, with its motley assembly of furniture, at least suggests
the possibility of more diversified audience, of flesh-and-bone
spectators with different backgrounds coexisting and watching the
film - which itself contains a highly diverse cast. Van Lieshout's
video shacks are fragile spaces for encountering images of others
and physically present others. Art spaces are often all too eager
to emphasize their symbolic difference from mass culture, their
refinement and highbrow glamour. Installed in or near such art spaces,
Erik van Lieshout's intimate and messy video shacks prefigure a
possible publicness to come.
Sven Lütticken
[1] A recent
overview of Expanded Cinema is provided by X-Screen: Filmische Installationen
und Aktionen der Sechziger- und Siebzigerjahre, exhibition catalogue,
Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 2004.
[2] The emerge of 'the spectator' in art criticism was noted by
Brian O'Doherty in Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery
Space, Santa Monica /San Francisco, The Pais Press, 1986, pp. 38-41.
[3] Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in Silent American
Film, Cambridge MA/London, Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 61.
[4] Ibid., p. 84.
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