© 2010
The Movement of Standstill
by Johannes Wendland*
‘Parallax’ is a term from physics that describes the angle formed by two straight lines directed towards a single point from different positions. This angle can be used, for example, to help calculate the distance between stars and the earth. However, one precondition is that the earth moves – i.e., that we move. A measurement can only be determined by means of an alteration in our own position.
The Dutch artist Roderick Hietbrink was also aiming to create movement when he set up his video and sound installation Parallax in the Rotterdam action space TENT. some two years ago. The installation can be seen again in the museum Boijmans van Beuningen, also in Rotterdam, throughout August 2004. It consists of three projections placed on the walls of a cubic space – which has a central dividing wall – in such a way that there is no vantage point from which it is possible to see all three projection surfaces simultaneously. This means that the visitor has to keep changing position in order to obtain an overall impression.
Viewers can then see three different versions of a twelve-minute film showing details from the anonymous facades of modernistic grid and office architecture in slow, superimposed images. Computer-generated sound tracks based on original recordings provide a background for each of the projections. Sounds suggesting that something is moving emanate from different corners of the room. These sounds function spatially, so that the visitor’s cognition of the space is constantly being manipulated.
The visitor’s perception, therefore, is disrupted in several ways by the particular arrangement of Parallax. Formally, the differences between the three versions of the film are comparatively slight. One has to spend a relatively long time in the space and move around in it before it is possible to safely determine that there are indeed different versions. Various positions have to be tried out, and from these the visitors are able to view two projection surfaces at the most. The acoustic confusion adds to this uncertainty. Playing with the different elements that give shape to the way we perceive the aesthetic environment we live in, the Parallax installation demonstrates the focus of interest in the 28-year-old artist’s work in an exemplary manner.
It is a cinema film from the sixties that Hietbrink cites as an important source of stimuli and impulses for his practice – Michelangelo Antonioni’s pessimistic film criticising modernism, The Red Desert (orig.: Il deserto rosso). Besides the highly stylised pictorial language of the film, which works with colour manipulation and reduction, he is primarily interested in the way that the isolation of the female protagonist, played by Monica Vitti, is reflected in her latently threatening industrial surroundings. With an apparent lack of emotion, she walks alongside factories and through newly-developed residential areas. In an oppressive way, this visualises her psychic instability, while the alienating over development of her direct environment appears to be one reason for her crisis.
This pattern is clearly discernible in Hietbrink’s video installation Cargo (2001). Hietbrink conceived the installation for the Rotterdam club Now & Wow, which was located in an old storage shed in a shut-down dockland area, one of the many districts in Rotterdam where the transformation from an industrial to a post-industrial society is impossible to overlook. Hietbrink shot the material for his film only a few kilometers away, in the section of the port still used for trade. A ship being loaded by a crane can be seen in a still-like nocturnal image. White steam rises occasionally, and floodlights produce a bright halo. Tiny dock workers appear now and again. A dull, tense tone booms out incessantly from the sound track and emphasises the image of a soulless industrial landscape, which albeit having been created by man, lets human being appear as mere staffage figures. Surreptitiously, almost unnoticeably, the twenty-minute film leads into the next day’s dawn.
Inexpressive city scenes and office architecture, as well as monotonous sounds which seem to wrap things in cotton - Hietbrink will combine these elements once again for his Berlin installation in Studio 2 of Künstlerhaus Bethanien. He uses interior shots of new, empty office complexes, but also images of a hooded crow. This species does not inhabit his home country, and Hietbrink views it as a 'finding' associated with Berlin. A grey, cawing pursuer of culture that also flourishes in those wastelands and industrialized landscapes where people may so easily get lost.
Johannes Wendland ©2004
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* Johannes Wendland is a freelance journalist focusing on fine art and is based in Berlin
This text is part of the publication BE #11, published by Kunstlerhaus Bethanien.
http://www.bethanien.de/kb/index/trans/en/page/exnews/id/174/
For more information on the video installation Corner Corone click here, http://www.roderickhietbrink.nl/work/corner-corone
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