Hanging Around
Museum Ludwig, Parking Meters, BQ, Cologne, Germany
‘Hanging Around’ sounds like a rainy Saturday afternoon when you watch old Hollywood films with friends until you can’t bear the stuffy air in the room anymore. Curated by Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen as part of ‘Rotation’, a series of exhibitions and curatorial exchanges between the Netherlands and Nordrhein-Westfalen, ‘Hanging Around’ took place in three venues. Each displayed the work of one artist: Liza May Post, Aernout Mik and Jennifer Tee. In the latter’s installation Down the Chimney (1999) at BQ, the room’s windows were completely covered by colourful of fabric, which emphasised the height of the room. Mattresses and beanbags littered the floor. Inhabited by penguin-like creatures made from cushions and wooden sticks, the space was reminiscent of a secret retreat, like the ones that children build themselves in gardens.
However, the room was filled with a rhythmic beating of sticks, a sound which evoked less romantic ideas about childhood and up-bringing: three video monitors simultaneously displayed a group of people who transformed themselves into fabulous creatures using animal masks and long colourful garments. They hit each other with sticks and staged a little battle in the garden of a family house. After the fight, each video projected a different image: a handful of marbles falling onto a stone floor; a married couple dancing in a hall; a person sitting on a roof in moonlight eating an apple; a man carefully putting a balloon on his pillow and then lying beneath the blanket.
In tape recordings, her sister and parents have ‘confessed’ things to Jennifer Tee that they would not normally share with their family. The artist chose the confessions with the greatest visual impact and staged them for the camera. The results are video collages which narrate the family members’ secret histories and wishes, their private mythologies and rituals. The rapid rhythm of the seemingly playful scenes vibrated with obsession, fear and aggression.
For his installation Territorium (1999), Aernout Mik built sloping, disproportionate walls in the rooms of the Museum Ludwig. He then projected a silent video of middle-aged people dancing in a room filled up to their hips with foam. Some of the dancers seem moved by a soft melody, while others swing themselves around to wild rhythms. Immersed in their dancing, they accidentally touch or even bump violently into each other. The dancers get older, their relationships seem apathetic, and only the foam keeps swelling.
In Liza May Post’s wall-sized video projection Visitors (1997) at Parking Meters, the camera moves slowly away from figures clothed in oriental carpet fabric to reveal the room, whose walls, floor and even a table and two chairs are covered in the same carpet material. The camera then concentrates on the figures who move in a strange procession through the space. It’s as if the carpet-filled room itself is breathing. One person crawls on all fours backwards, while another two approach each other and lay their heads tenderly on one another’s shoulder. One of them shakes a leg for no apparent reason and turns towards a fourth figure in the foreground. Together they dance a few steps, but then, and again without motivation, they let go. A second, smaller video projection shows another figure in a carpet costume sitting on a chaise-longue like a stretched out, wind up doll wielding a broken cardboard sword as if warding off a non-existent attacker. At times these scenarios are reminiscent of courtly ceremonies and Renaissance frescoes, or of situations when etiquette is privileged over social interaction.
All of the artists in ‘Hanging Around’ created worlds in which everyday social situations get so confused that their obsessions become overwhelming. Post’s Visitors takes this to an extreme: unwanted visits from relatives or friends in intimate surroundings suddenly seem like an invasion from Mars.
Anja Dorn
