‘Stand Up’ is an exhibition of video and sculpture by Ronnie van Hout on view now at Station Gallery, Melbourne. Art Almanac spoke to the artist about his new work and why he’s most comfortable outside of himself.
Are you alone when you make films, what’s the environment like?
I am alone when I make my films. My studio has a wall painted green screen green, and when I am filming I have to push all the sculpture materials and stuff to the sides and out of camera sight. My technique is to press record and run in front of the camera. There are lights and a microphone on a stand. It is usually late at night after everyone else has gone home.
Why sample from comedians for these new videos?
This new work specifically looks at stand up comedians and their routines; I was interested in how they relate to the audience. I identify with the position of being outside, or between, and always becoming. I am drawn to the monologue, the play with language, and the mystery and complexity of what makes us laugh. I love that romantic idea of the comic alone on the stage, participating in a type of Freudian self-analysis, with the microphone as a device that enlarges their words as they detach from their body. It all feels like a certain kind of labyrinthine movement around and away from meaning, where the comic and the audience are connected and come together.
Now, and in the past, you have appropriated text from male writers. Is your art ‘gendered’ as such?
I guess my work is ‘gendered’ if you put it like that, but it’s not a conscious decision to select male writers. It feels like I am basically making the same show over and over again. Thinking about the same unanswerable question since a show I did in 1996 titled ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’, and could probably point to things I made at high school, or thoughts I had when I was about six years old. My work that used sci-fi and horror all seemed to be about Mothers, but the role of the father as indicating the external is something I look at over and over again.
You’ve said before that it’s not just about you. Can you explain why it is incongruous to see your work as self-expression?
It was never autobiographical for the sake of telling my story, but was supposed to be the way to talk about more general issues. As history and the institutions of art fall apart and lose their centre I don’t feel the need to have a consistent personality or ‘me’. The figures and roles that have the appearance of me are just materials, but it is also interesting that we want them to be complete, and to read them as a self-portrait. The self-expression framework may reap some reward for those that need it, but I think I’m just spending time eating and drinking ideas.
Why is dystopia a good tool or lens?
Well it is not a good tool or lens really, but we love thinking about, and designing dystopias. One of the results of Modernism and the Avant-Garde was to use failure as a destabilising provocation. We project or fantasise that the structures of our world will fall apart, or that the reality we experience is in fact an illusion. Do we strive for a return to a transcendent state where we become our ‘authentic’ selves, free from the smothering and punishing embrace of Mum and Dad? I guess I am interested in why we create utopia or dystopias at all.
Why is human-interaction with your works important?
The trajectory of Modern art was always toward interaction. In the tradition of Surrealism or Dada the person looking at the artwork completes the artwork. A joke isn’t a joke until someone laughs at it. My work is minimally interactive. The form of my exhibitions is cinematic, where one part leads to another, you turn and see this bit, then this part comes next, and an image is built up like a montage. It is difficult for me to see the various components as separate artworks. Although exhibiting work can be painful, and confronting, I have always made work to be shown.
You could argue that many people who enjoy sci-fi oppose or see beyond the status quo. Can you describe your ideal (even if implausible) world?
Capitalism seems to have ‘mainstreamed’ opposition these days. More and more, people that I would refer to as ‘straight’ identify as being ‘different’.
I once wrote my ideal future was one without art, or the need for it. Today, everyone is an artist, so I guess that amounts to the same thing. My ideal world would be the one with an empty cinema to myself a ‘last man on earth’ scenario like the film ‘The Quiet Earth’ (1985), or Richard Matheson’s novel ‘I Am Legend’ (1954).
The problem with any ideal world is that you still have to live in your body and in your own head. It will be interesting when, in the future, we can spend sometime outside of ourselves.
Station Gallery
1 to 26 November, 2016
Melbourne
YOU! (detail), 2016, painted urethane on CNC’d polystyrene, clothing, wig
Photograph: Daniel Gardeazabal
Stand Up, 2016, installation view at Station Gallery, Melbourne
Courtesy of the artist and Station Gallery, Melbourne
