Greetings from the Benelux Pt. 1
The comprehensive retrospective of Vito Acconci’s film-, video- and audio- performance pieces at ARGOS, Brussels, felt almost reassuringly traditional and straightforward in its presentation, with a long row of monitor after monitor and headphone after headphone. But it sparkled with bold self-reflectiveness. I readily admit I didn’t sit and listen through the entirety of each of the works. But even when subjected to a kind of zapping mode not initially or even now intended, Acconci’s early 1970’s use of video and the monitor as a kind of I’ll-creep-into-your-head box still is very effective. In Home Movies (1973) Acconci is seen seated in the dark, presenting a slide presentation of his previous work to a – real or imagined? – person sitting outside of the frame; he does so with a constant, creepily hilarious gesture of fraternization between in-the-know art people (‘They couldn’t possibly know these pieces the way you do…. you know how I took what was happening us and transferred it into the work.”) He describes the work in a fast, pressed staccato (“… cat in the box… I have the key to control …’) that feels like Ginsberg’s Howl (1955) crossed with Alan Vega ca. 1976. Sometimes it’s as if he was speaking in tongues, a kind of conceptual ecstasy not prescribed in the sobering up of art that had been prevalent at a point a few years earlier when other poets such as Lawrence Weiner had made the leap into conceptuality. In Turn-On (1974), the self-reflectivenness reaches a climax, as well as the breathlessness: ‘I’ve waited for the perfect time, for the perfect piece, I’m tired of waiting… but no, you want me to have something ready for you, something prepared.’ The viewer is the ghost being summoned here.
Upstairs, as a perfect complement, it’s not Acconci’s hyper-alert, late-modernist endgame, but the voice of hypnosis in the age of atomized samplemania. Karl Holmquist’s characteristically comatosed sing-song is heard, along with white letters on an otherwise dark projection. The title I’m With You In Rockland (2005) directly cites Ginsberg’s Howl, but the gesture is different: like half asleep with the iPod on shuffle mode, he keeps saying ‘how do you say…’ then rhythmically quoting famous lyrics: ‘… a kiss may be grand but it won’t pay the rental on your humble flat, or help you at the automat. Men grow cold as girls grow old…’ – Marilyn of course, but you immediately think of Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ as well, as Holmquist continues to weave it all into a seamless flow, like a prayer, making it all – like true pop fans do – his own.
Next stop John Murphy at Erna Hecey gallery: after breathlessness and hypnosis, a return to structure, dry as the desert, but in a good way. Murphy – 1945-born UK veteran of conceptual painting and conceptualization of film – pulls off a show that is like a solo game of chess, i.e. without interest in winning against an opponent. Some exhibits are, for example, books about cinema, framed like a photograph or drawing. For example René Barjavel’s 1944 book Cinema Total. At first it’s as if the book is just presented as is, but on closer inspection it becomes apparent that Murphy added a few letters to the layout, which comprise the title of the piece A B C Z (2008). Then the next step: a page from that same book, a manifesto-like quote of Barjavel’s about his vision of the total cinema, ending on ‘le cinéma total, art populaire.’ – Only that Murphy has blackened the ‘populaire’. Other works like a still from Antonioni’s La Notte positioned centrally and accompanied by small, super-minimalist drawings addressing the question of filming framing etc., may suggest that Murphy has a lean towards the common, Debordian rejection of the ominous ‘spectacle’. But a catalogue from his previous show at Hecey from two years earlier also reveal an acute sense for ribaldry: the catalogue of … the stench of shit … starts with a latin quote from St. Augustine – Inter faeces et urinam nascimus – followed by a longer quote by Jonathan Swift with a proposal for luxurious public toilets; and it closes with a quote from a letter by the Duchess of Orleans sent from the palace of Fontainebleau in 1694: ‘You are indeed fortunate to shit whenever you may please and do so to you heart’s content! … We are not so lucky, here, I have to hold on to my turd until evening…’ So much for scatology in the Post-Surrealist vein.
My last stop in Brussels, before catching the train to Antwerp, was the Un-Scene show of 20 emerging Belgian artists at WIELS. The building’s four floors form an impressive succession of rooms. These kinds of survey exhibitions are inevitably a mixed bag, but some pieces stood out: Koenraad Dedobbeleer’s post-Artschwagerian, psychedelic-minimalist objects where tugged in a corner of the space which didn’t make it easy for his pieces, but they survived it with their stubborn resistance to give away their ‘content’, to spell out the odd conundrum they present. I liked Gert Robijn’s wall relief of half a melon, a life canary bird in a cage, a rubber show filled with water, a plastic bag filled with water, and a water-drenched shirt, all lined up as if to form a weirdly convincing, but undecipherable sentence, with the title In Concert (2007) adding puzzlement to surprise (shoot me for saying it, but I sense a Belgian tradition of Surrealism and absurdity here).
The artist group Agency presented an open archive of lawsuits over copyright infringement and authorship, the most intriguing one to me being the case of Scottish pop band The Bluebells: their slightly cheesy, but admittedly catchy pop song ‘Young at Heart’, originally released in 1984, had a surprise return in 1993 being used for a Volkswagen TV ad, and became a number one hit – after the band had already split.
The Clark Gable lookalike who plays the fiddle riff both in this TV appeareance and on the actual recording – a guy ridiculously named Bobby Valentino – sued them for a share in the royalties, claiming he had written the fiddle part, proving it by playing it live in court (as if that proved anything). He won. Can he be sued for trying to look like Clark Gable?
Next time Antwerp and Amsterdam.
The comprehensive retrospective of Vito Acconci’s film-, video- and audio- performance pieces at ARGOS, Brussels, felt almost reassuringly traditional and straightforward in its presentation, with a long row of monitor after monitor and headphone after headphone. But it sparkled with bold self-reflectiveness. I readily admit I didn’t sit and listen through the entirety of each of the works. But even when subjected to a kind of zapping mode not initially or even now intended, Acconci’s early 1970’s use of video and the monitor as a kind of I’ll-creep-into-your-head box still is very effective. In Home Movies (1973) Acconci is seen seated in the dark, presenting a slide presentation of his previous work to a – real or imagined? – person sitting outside of the frame; he does so with a constant, creepily hilarious gesture of fraternization between in-the-know art people (‘They couldn’t possibly know these pieces the way you do…. you know how I took what was happening us and transferred it into the work.”) He describes the work in a fast, pressed staccato (“… cat in the box… I have the key to control …’) that feels like Ginsberg’s Howl (1955) crossed with Alan Vega ca. 1976. Sometimes it’s as if he was speaking in tongues, a kind of conceptual ecstasy not prescribed in the sobering up of art that had been prevalent at a point a few years earlier when other poets such as Lawrence Weiner had made the leap into conceptuality. In Turn-On (1974), the self-reflectivenness reaches a climax, as well as the breathlessness: ‘I’ve waited for the perfect time, for the perfect piece, I’m tired of waiting… but no, you want me to have something ready for you, something prepared.’ The viewer is the ghost being summoned here.
Upstairs, as a perfect complement, it’s not Acconci’s hyper-alert, late-modernist endgame, but the voice of hypnosis in the age of atomized samplemania. Karl Holmquist’s characteristically comatosed sing-song is heard, along with white letters on an otherwise dark projection. The title I’m With You In Rockland (2005) directly cites Ginsberg’s Howl, but the gesture is different: like half asleep with the iPod on shuffle mode, he keeps saying ‘how do you say…’ then rhythmically quoting famous lyrics: ‘… a kiss may be grand but it won’t pay the rental on your humble flat, or help you at the automat. Men grow cold as girls grow old…’ – Marilyn of course, but you immediately think of Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ as well, as Holmquist continues to weave it all into a seamless flow, like a prayer, making it all – like true pop fans do – his own.
Next stop John Murphy at Erna Hecey gallery: after breathlessness and hypnosis, a return to structure, dry as the desert, but in a good way. Murphy – 1945-born UK veteran of conceptual painting and conceptualization of film – pulls off a show that is like a solo game of chess, i.e. without interest in winning against an opponent. Some exhibits are, for example, books about cinema, framed like a photograph or drawing. For example René Barjavel’s 1944 book Cinema Total. At first it’s as if the book is just presented as is, but on closer inspection it becomes apparent that Murphy added a few letters to the layout, which comprise the title of the piece A B C Z (2008). Then the next step: a page from that same book, a manifesto-like quote of Barjavel’s about his vision of the total cinema, ending on ‘le cinéma total, art populaire.’ – Only that Murphy has blackened the ‘populaire’. Other works like a still from Antonioni’s La Notte positioned centrally and accompanied by small, super-minimalist drawings addressing the question of filming framing etc., may suggest that Murphy has a lean towards the common, Debordian rejection of the ominous ‘spectacle’. But a catalogue from his previous show at Hecey from two years earlier also reveal an acute sense for ribaldry: the catalogue of … the stench of shit … starts with a latin quote from St. Augustine – Inter faeces et urinam nascimus – followed by a longer quote by Jonathan Swift with a proposal for luxurious public toilets; and it closes with a quote from a letter by the Duchess of Orleans sent from the palace of Fontainebleau in 1694: ‘You are indeed fortunate to shit whenever you may please and do so to you heart’s content! … We are not so lucky, here, I have to hold on to my turd until evening…’ So much for scatology in the Post-Surrealist vein.
My last stop in Brussels, before catching the train to Antwerp, was the Un-Scene show of 20 emerging Belgian artists at WIELS. The building’s four floors form an impressive succession of rooms. These kinds of survey exhibitions are inevitably a mixed bag, but some pieces stood out: Koenraad Dedobbeleer’s post-Artschwagerian, psychedelic-minimalist objects where tugged in a corner of the space which didn’t make it easy for his pieces, but they survived it with their stubborn resistance to give away their ‘content’, to spell out the odd conundrum they present. I liked Gert Robijn’s wall relief of half a melon, a life canary bird in a cage, a rubber show filled with water, a plastic bag filled with water, and a water-drenched shirt, all lined up as if to form a weirdly convincing, but undecipherable sentence, with the title In Concert (2007) adding puzzlement to surprise (shoot me for saying it, but I sense a Belgian tradition of Surrealism and absurdity here).
The artist group Agency presented an open archive of lawsuits over copyright infringement and authorship, the most intriguing one to me being the case of Scottish pop band The Bluebells: their slightly cheesy, but admittedly catchy pop song ‘Young at Heart’, originally released in 1984, had a surprise return in 1993 being used for a Volkswagen TV ad, and became a number one hit – after the band had already split.
The Clark Gable lookalike who plays the fiddle riff both in this TV appeareance and on the actual recording – a guy ridiculously named Bobby Valentino – sued them for a share in the royalties, claiming he had written the fiddle part, proving it by playing it live in court (as if that proved anything). He won. Can he be sued for trying to look like Clark Gable?
Next time Antwerp and Amsterdam.
