JOKE VDH
P005 → “134340” installation 2015
4:05 min, variable measuresOne might keep on forgetting it, but images are things. They cannot answer questions about their circumstances or intention; we have to – or can- put these words into their mouths ourselves. What is more, they consist of matter, even though they gleam out at us mysteriously from a screen on which other, seemingly unconnected, worlds are channeled into intelligible light. Magical frames that are unfolded synchronously or in succession, play next to or behind each other and are clicked away again, back into deep space of the web, away from ‘ meatspace’ with which they have at least some connection, or so we think; how can it be otherwise?
This technological confusion is not new; it is inscribed in the image, which has always been technological, just as a club or pen is.
Too bad if, in 2015, you were someone devoted to meaning, already deluged before breakfast by the blue light of your laptop, a spring tide of not just one crisis, but hundreds, captured in images that seem to want to vanish as soon as possible into their singular significance: propaganda, declarations of war, comments by an anonymous anti–community to your right and (mostly so-called) left, which rushes towards the end of language while handing out opinions: this is what the strange light that penetrates my precious, utterly personal eyes means, for all of us.
And in 2015 it will also have been too bad for you if you were an artist, concerned with a cautious solicitude for images, knowing that they are manufactured, perhaps even how, but not exactly why, let alone what links them together.
In the meantime you hear a TV journalist – looking for a way to round off a report on terror in the Middle East and for a link to a subsequent discussion on old masters – who laments that he ‘recalls’ that cruelty has always existed: an opening by which a terrible tension may escape. But of course it doesn’t help; who would it help?
You see all these years of anticipatory and sidelong glances at images overtaken by a present that is circling closer and even faster, and that makes you sad and angry; you would like things to be different.
In the film this book emerged from, we see frames appear on Joke Van den Heuvel’s screen. They show fragments of worlds that have no clear connection with each other, and which in the first instance are linked by being subjectively assembled by the artist: the hands of begging citizens during the Greek crisis, a girl’s hand by Rodin, fragments of a broken hand from Michelangelo’s Pieta (following the attack by Laszlo Toth in 1972), images of Pluto ( made by New Horizons, the first space vehicle to fly so close to this dwarf planet) and so on.
Because a film (or a book) is not an infinitely clickable space, the screen here becomes a linear merging and alternation of surfaces. Images that have been found on the web, in a newspaper or a book slip past each other as differing textures and come together in the new texture of film.
Everything is mediatised, by (digital) cameras, printing techniques, photoreceptors, words.
Heavenly body 134340, aka Pluto, floats as a centre of gravity through this visual space. It was once still a real planet; then it turned out not to satisfy all the conditions and became a dwarf planet: our techniques- words, classifications, space vehicles etc. – even determine what our heavenly bodies are.We also see the planetoid Proserpina (also called Persephone), which, just like Pluto, is named after a mythological figure.
In a work by Bernini that Joke Van den Heuvel saw in 2015, Proserpina is abducted by the god of the underworld. Although 134340 does not tell us this, Pluto is also a cartoon dog, not to be confused by Goofy.
The sounds of his name float through a space of things, looking for a context.
134340 is a fragmentary, juxtaposing anti-story about shifting contexts and transformations, but not because it is intended to analyse processes of meaning for the sake of the analysis. The work expresses above all a melancholy desire to search in the rubble of what is broken, to link together the dots, in the heavens and here below, to make a drawing once again. Not in order to arrive at an unbreakable circle, but to be still truly involved and personal. Which means: building up a subjective resistance to both the fragmentation of images and the urge to let a moving multiplicity implode into a point of meaning.
At the end of 134340, the artist’s non-journalistic, rather clumsy voice-over – using a quote from Fernando Pessao’s Book of Disquiet – proposes we should al become sphinxes, ‘ however falsely / until we reach a point of no longer knowing who we are / for we are false sphinxes / with no idea of what we are / in reality.’ 134340 may well be set largely in the cosmos, but this call for mysteriousness once again brings the work among people and their (visual) politics. No one can ever be fully themselves, says the riddle, and nothing is ever depicted in full.
text by Koen Sels
The images are exhibition views of different presentations of the work “134340” that varied according to the space, and material used.
Videostills + exhibition view Extra City Vitrine, Antwerp, May 2016
+ exhibition view Diagonal Noise group show, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, May 2016