contemporary art magazine issue # sixteen december ... - Karyn Olivier

MOUSSE / JOS DE GRUYTER & HARALD THYS / PAG. 20
black-face magicians, menacing “others”, stone-faced women
assuming a wide range of disturbing poses (many of the
amateur actors in these films are recruited from the artists’
extended families) and a whole cast of bizarre characters whose
robotic, machine-like movements and utter muteness invoke
strong memories of that most dependable chestnut of Freudian
aesthetics, the Uncanny.
De Gruyter & Thys’ work has little in common with the
documentary format preferred by so many artists active in
the broad field of social and political commentary, nor is there
much room (none, in fact – and I will be getting back to that
awkward fact in a little while) in their work for the conventions of
narrative that drive so much of this type of “sociological” work.
Yet their films, Ten Weyngaert, Die Fregatte and Der Schlamm
von Branst in particular, are strongly, undeniably “political” in
content – if only for the ruthlessness with which they portray the
dynamics and conditions that produce social behavior. As Monika
Szewczyk has put it, “the artists seek ways to confront marginal,
incapacitated, lost and alienated subjects without defining these
‘others’ in sociological terms. In this sense, and especially in
their novel use of a ghoulish humor, Thys and de Gruyter broaden
the scope of reflection on socially produced behavior”.
These portrayals and reflections are invariably gloomy,
sometimes achingly eventless, but always, as the reference to
a ghoulish, grand-guignol-styled humor reveals, funny – in a
deeply troubling way that ultimately betrays their substantial
debt to the sinister counter-traditions of a typically Belgian, noir
surrealism.
Ten Weyngaert – “vineyard” in archaic Flemish – is named
after a community center in the Brussels municipality of Vorst
that was founded in the late seventies when a wave of cultural
utopianism swept over Flanders; thirty years on, the utopia
of cultural emancipation or self-realization through art has
sadly given way to martial arts classes for the neighborhood’s
disenchanted youths and various undesirable “others” (Jos de
Gruyter knows the place really well – he used to work there as
a projectionist). Some traces of this progressive legacy – the
cultural climate, after all, of the artists’ own formative years –
do linger, but the film is above all a study of Orwellian power
relations in a microcosm of confusing pyramidal hierarchies.
The artists’ obvious (but no less odd) love for the detail of the
community center’s povera bureaucratic aesthetic only helps to
dramatize their cinematic diagnosis of Kafkaian group dynamics
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Die Fregatte, 2008 - courtesy: Dépendance, Brussels
in what Theodor Adorno once termed the “fully administered
world”. Indeed, much like the sad downward spiral in which
many community centers just like the original Ten Weyngaert in
Brussels got caught – from seventies quasi-socialist utopianism
to a contemporary dystopia – Ten-Weygnaert-the-film chronicles
the vagaries of group psychology and role-play to alternately
scathing and hilarious effect.
Die Fregatte, perhaps their greatest work to date, revolves
around a black model ship (the frigate referred to in the title)
that is at the center of a dense web of, yet again, speechless
social interactions – essentially a group of gum-chewing,
unflinching macho types in cheap bad-ass attire (one is
sporting a ridiculously fake beard, another nervously filming
the proceedings with a handycam) who move around the lone
woman sat down in a plucky sofa; a harsh, lugubrious parody
of the nuclear family trapped inside its tasteless domestic
surroundings – yet another recurrent motif in much of their
work. There is hardly any real movement in the film, and no talk
at all – just deranged, random church organ music. The only
dialogue in Ten Weyngaert, by the way, is a monologue, and a
monologue intérieure too: about a man who gets a lurid kick out
off pinching a rare type of Siberian jumping mouse – inside his
trouser pockets; other than that, there are bouts of sardonic
laughter, there is (only) whining and weird huffing and puffing.
It is clear, in short, that the absence, impossibility or refusal of
language, the “teachings of speechlessness”, are at the heart of
De Gruyter & Thys’ artistic project as a whole.
In a lecture I gave during the Berlin Biennial last year, when
this work was on view at Kunst Werke, I named the frigate in
the movie as the Lacanian objet petit a of the whole exhibition
– or certainly of the venue in which it was stationed: tucked
away in the basement of Kunst Werke, it was easy, or at least
very tempting, to conceive of De Gruyter & Thys’ work as the
Biennial’s secretive, lurid subconscious. In which Die Frigate
planted its uttainable object of desire, a remnant or residual trace
– the hard kernel of the Real that survives, as a terrible secret, in
the Symbolic order. A (Freudian, uncanny) Thing, in short, casting
its sinister spell of impenetrable magic over human subjects at
once reduced to a state of animalistic silence, to pillars of salt
and stone...
Geological metaphors are at the center, finally, of their latest –
and most extreme – film, Der Schlamm von Branst (“schlamm” is
clay in German, Branst the name of a sleepy village on the banks
of the Flemish river Scheldt famous for producing such clay),
set in a harshly-lit, brown-hued clay sculpting workshop. This
is where the triangular dialectic of inanimate matter, animation
and “spirit” is played out in its most literal, confrontational form
– it’s De Gruyter & Thys’ hilarious take on the age-old Golem
myth, their jab at retelling the classic story of Frankenstein, with
the workshop serving as a crude metaphor for the laboratory
context of social engineering. Voodoo dolls are being poked,
the humanoid clay head of a divinity (eyes sternly fixed on an
invisible sky) is being worshipped, langue and parole have again
been replaced by muttering and stammering, by animal-like
sounds, and right in the middle of this disconcerting reflection
on the human condition as a case of Selbstsozialplastik – what
would Beuys have made of it all? – we are treated to a short
glimpse of an unattainable outside world, the actual river banks
of Branst, its fuzzy trees swaying over the Scheldt. The ethereal,
sci-fi-styled music that accompanies this sudden affirmation
of the existence of an outside world, was allegedly taken from
an amateur film made sometime in the early eighties extolling
the virtues of the now defunct Opel Senator line of limousines
for the middle-class. It is important to add here that cars are
of great, passionate interest to both artists – automobiles are
probably the closest Man has ever come to achieving the dream
of realising his Golem, and automobile fan culture is set to be at
the heart of the duo’s next film project...
Since 2003, I have been working as a curator at the Antwerp
museum of contemporary art MuHKA, which was fortunate
enough to be able to premiere Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys’ Ten
Weyngaert in the spring of 2007, the first happy conclusion of
a long-standing working relationship. For a variety of reasons,
however, installing the work – the film came accompanied
by a suite of 23 black & white photographs – proved rather
more challenging than expected for the museum’s strained
(yet at times also frankly indifferent) staff, and the longer this
painful, frustrating process dragged on, the more I felt the
museum started to feel and even look like the community center
in Brussels after which the film was named (this was first
pointed out to me by the artists themselves, of course). This
was probably the first time that I was alerted to the alarming
possibility of reading De Gruyter & Thys’ parodic sociological
vignettes as allegorical mirrors of the world that I myself called
home – the art world (the “home” in question) in fact being no
different than any other segment or corner of the Human Zoo.
And Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys are both its most ruthless
observers and attentive, sympathetic visitors.