Johanna Billing
Camden Arts Centre, London, UK
Johanna Billing, I'm Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009), DVD still
More social scientist than voyeur, Johanna Billing stages situations that examine – through the lens – amateur performers and people interacting. Yet deft observation is only part of it. The Swedish artist, who also runs a record label, often returns to cover versions in an ongoing reflection on the nature of collaboration, considering how individual expression relates to collective interpretation.
These interests are epitomized in her project ‘You Don’t Love Me Yet’ (2002– ongoing), for which Billing invites different bands to perform a cover of the eponymous 1984 Roky Erickson song in cities across the world. Presented at Camden Arts Centre as DVDs on a central table, each gig is boxed and labelled with date, location and a list of performers – like bootleg live recordings though all of the same song.
Participation threads its way through Billing’s work. Commissioned by Camden Arts Centre, Modern Art Oxford and the Arnolfini, I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009) involves amateur Romanian dancers improvising a dance to a live rendition of ‘My Heart’ by Swedish duo Wildbirds and Peacedrums, performed here by local musicians. While the film’s DIY aesthetic is reminiscent of the handcrafted cuteness of adverts for mobile phone networks, the films’ locations – though rarely made explicit – are pointed. In I’m Lost… the dynamism of the movement and music, laced with shots of city life, seems to allude to the struggle of post-Eastern bloc countries to form their own identities in relation to each other and to ‘the West’.
Magical World (2005), DVD still
This theme is more pronounced in Billing’s earlier film Magical World (2005), which sees a small group of school children in Zagreb singing the eponymous song written by civil rights-era soul singer Sidney Barnes. Juxtaposed with footage of the desolate urban environment, the lyrics become both hopeful and melancholic, yet there is something coercive about Billing’s strategy, in the sense that she was presumably well aware that most of the children wouldn’t understand the lyrics. Furthermore, no audience is visible – only the artist herself and a couple of others. These decisions give the film a more sinister character than is initially apparent; while the repeated close-ups of the kids’ innocent faces seem mawkish, Billing in fact intends the staged the scene as a political comment on the exploitation of children.
This Is How We Walk on the Moon (2007), DVD still
This Is How We Walk on the Moon (2007), in which the subjects are the artists’ friends rather than another community, has an intimacy the other films lack that renders it both more sentimental and less punchy. Billing invited members of a Scottish music collective to collaborate with her on recording a version of the titular Arthur Russell song. The music is set to footage of the group learning to sail along the Firth of Forth. Unfortunately, as elsewhere in the exhibition, the curators provide the viewer with little background information about the making of the film – a shame given that the film considers the varied results of performing and learning as a group.
Taking as her subjects anonymous people in unnamed places Billing deals in behavioural conformities rather than idiosyncracies, and their relation to music’s cultural role. Conversation is notably absent; Billing relies upon the power of sound to create atmospheres, and her generous sensibility produces pieces that are at once funny and insightful.
Florence Mackenzie
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