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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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