»Hey guys, do you think that very ugly people and very beautiful people have something in common because people are always staring at them?«
»Do you think it is right that everyone working on this exhibition receives a paycheck but the artists?«
»Given the fact that a film is in equal parts image and absence of an image, equal parts light and darkness, do you think it is possible that there could be culture or an individual who would perceive only the space between the images and never the images themselves?«
Jeroen de Rijke was an ethnographer of his own tribe, constantly asking questions, as though he were experiencing our culture for the first time. He was a participant–observer in all his waking hours, seemingly interested in everything and everybody. His focus and intensity were disarming.
Last November in Vienna we were sitting together at the Anzengruber for a morning meeting before we started the installation of our shared exhibition at the Secession. After the waiter delivered two »gspritzte Apfelsäfte«, a beverage composed of approximately fifty-percent apple juice and fifty-percent sparkling water, Jeroen said: »Although mixed by hand, these drinks are remarkable consistent. Do you think it is possible to train oneself to detect difference in that which appears to be the same?« At the Anzengruber, this traditional beverage is served in unusually large glasses. We started to order them in sets of two each and proceeded to treat the drink as though it were a fine wine. We raised each glass in order to sniff it, held each glass up to the morning light to examine its density, and finally tasted it. By the arrival of Jeroen´s long-time collaborator Willem de Rooij at noon, we had consumed eight to ten of these beverages apiece. Needless to say, the waiter – who looked like Jacques Tati – had become interested in us. Jeroen had turned an everyday occurrence in a Viennese bar into a precise experiment. Everyday life was something to be studied, experienced and played with.
With his sudden death in Ghana in February, I lost a good friend and we lost one of his generation’s best artists. It is not only Jeroen who will be discussed in the past tense, but also the extraordinary work that he did in collaboration with Willem de Rooij. With the release of each new piece every year or so, de Rijke and de Rooij would redefine and reposition their work in ways that made the arrival a much anticipated event. The constant and continual redefinition, refinement and displacement have come to an end. We can now view this body of work as a closed set of terms to be examined historically. Making their historical entrance in the early 90s, a moment dominated by practices directly or loosely involved with what has come to be called relational aesthetics, works which created »generous spaces for social interaction,« de Rijke and de Rooij began, in contrast, to construct a subject-driven, pictorial practice based on a deep understanding of the conventions and modes of address associated with more traditional pictorial practices. These two artists understood the distance that characterizes the traditional or conventional contract between a spectator and an art object. In other words, they took great pleasure in the »simple« quiet activity of spectatorship. Looking at pictures was more than sufficient.
The first film of de Rijke and de Rooij´s I saw, »Bantar Gebang« (2000), consisted of a single static shot, ten minutes in length, depicting a slum in Jakarta in Indonesia, the former Dutch colony. At first glance, it appears that the image is underexposed. As the film unfolds, you become aware of the fact that the film was shot at sunrise – the space between darkness and light. As the illumination of the scene progresses, the dark foreground is gradually revealed as a landfill or dump, which is the literal foundation for the village. The film´s direct, economical manner of address is anything but simple or reductive. This single scene presents the viewer with a wide range of subjects: the history of painting, Dutch colonialism, class struggle, modernity, globalism, religion, war, the construction of the exotic, the discourse of beauty, abstraction, and the love of detail.
De Rijke and de Rooijs films were presented as installations within the context of art. The artists thematized and made visible the physical and institutional framework in which the films were presented. That framework, as an architectural or sculptural entity, was of equal importance to the film itself. I am reminded of the 1947 quote by Clement Greenberg: »The best visual art of our time is that which comes the closest to non-fiction, has the least to do with illusions, and at the same time maintains and asserts itself exclusively as art.«
The last film in this remarkable body of work, »Mandarin Ducks« (2005), commissioned for the Dutch Pavillon at theViennese Biennale of that year, addresses a similar set of concerns to »Bantar Gebang«, though with a dramatically different formal approach. An angry, nearly hysterical, melodramatic rant (Fassbinder´s »Satan´s Brew«, Pasolini´s »Pig Sty«, Bunuel´s »Exterminating Angel«), the interest in violence, the dissatisfaction with the world as we have received it, which in »Bantar Gebang« is positioned quietly below the surface, blossoms in »Mandarin Ducks« as a xenophobic botanical formthat resembles a sticky, many-headed flesh hammer that produces its eleventh finger, which glows like moonlight over the African continent. As beautiful as the surface of the film is, this is as ugly as things get. De Rijke and de Rooij have made their anger a material presence. Within the context of the Dutch Pavilion, this presence could not have been clearer.
This body of work that has now reached closure is actually still quite young, having been in existence for a little over a decade. I will miss the arrival of new works by de Rijke and de Rooij, as much as I anticipate the arrival of new works by Willem de Rooij. Jeroen´s works are still here to be seen but the endless series of questions from this alien researcher are now the things of memory.
Christopher Williams, Offenburg, Germany, 15 June 2006.
Translated by Timothy Jones