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Nutty Professor Ronnie van Hout Darren Knight Gallery 28 February - 29 March, 1997 Sydney |
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Ronnie van Hout, Be
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Ronnie van
Hout's work can be too easily packaged as 'grunge' or
'slacker' art. It's apparently banal, lazy, derivative,
re-cycled, a laconic homage to loser anti-heroes of
popular culture. It announces itself as art through its
very anti-aesthetic. It's oh so very cool. In his first exhibition at Darren Knight's new Sydney gallery, weary street slogans tell us nothing we don't already tell ourselves - Don't Worry/Be Someone Else - whilst pretending the formal self-importance of paintings. They kid no one, it's clearly pre-cut plastic on vinyl. Other vinyl 'canvases' do duty as song sheets (California Girls/Venus in Furs) with the artist as fan carefully copying the lyrics of favourite songs just as he might have years earlier in an exercise book sitting bored at the back of class. Still more of these 'vinyls' act as story boards, stills from Jerry Lewis films printed over them in sloppy grids generating a sense of modernism gone flabby in its dotage. On the floor two video monitors face each other and attempt communication. On each a brief fragment of film depicting a head and shoulders shot of a figure attempting to speak. It plays over and over again; Jerry Lewis as the Nutty Professor facing Jerry Lewis as Buddy Love. There's no sound to either tape. Each head continuously jerks back to the beginning of its fragment as if trying just once more to actually get a word out. Whether new to the work, or familiar with van Hout's meanderings of recent years (through painting, photography, installation and embroidery; through his various and changing fascinations with pornography, fascism and science-fiction rock music, film) the key is to accept the artist's seemingly play-school art as an attempt at self-effacement. So much apparently 'slack' art barely disguises the desire for recognition and significance lurking behind its careless stance. In contrast the wilful incoherence of van Hout's practice conveys a sense of the artist as truly unimportant, useless for anything other than making pointless and plaintive objects and expressions. And of course there's an obvious intelligence at work in this. In their dumb and sad way these are very smart, engaging and critically useful works. The more perceptive commentary on van Hout's work has concentrated on the effacement of authorial stance through the artist's co-option of multifarious voices and identities within his work (first person pornographic fantasies, the names of famous artists sitting monumental in the landscape, someone else's songs or characters or narratives, the stylistic signatures of other's work, their left-over materials). No claim to creative genius here for the central work is not The Nutty Professor but another piece of vinyl with the lettering "Ronnie van Hout" horizontally mirrored by "Richard Prince". It's not an ego equation at work, not even a a wish. Nor really an act of acknowledgment towards one source of his text pieces. Just a glance of recognition and a bit of a joke ("look who Ronnie's lying with now"). But at the core of all the work, the most serious point of all, is the sense of pathos that comes with a recognition of the inability of the work to say anything more than what is immediately, excruciatingly apparent. With the hyper-babble of a media-saturated existence comes the ever-diminishing chance of actually being heard. Right through van Hout's work runs a sad, almost desperate muteness. No-one listens. Not that there's much left to say. Blair French © The artist and |
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Ronnie van Hout, Professor
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Ronnie van Hout, |
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