The term video graffiti, coined last year by Jeroen Kooijmans to define his work, seems to have since taken hold. After Kooijmans won the 1998 NPS Cultuurprijs for the rejuvenating impulse his work supposedly gave to the medium of video, newspapers and magazines wrote of video graffiti as though this art form had existed for years. However it is a form of video art that is hardly comparable to the 'traditional' tapes and installations generally seen at museums or video festivals. Just like 'traditional' graffiti, video graffiti takes place in the evening, unannounced. And also just like the traditional air-spray art walls, trains and lorries can serve as surface for a video graffiti - the main difference being that video images leave no traces behind. The projections are immaterial and so brief and lively that they are often gone again before you have seen them properly. A video graffiti is, like a performance, a one-off happening that will only be seen by a handful of people. Photos or video records taken of the happening are the only tangible evidence that it did actually take place. In a television programme we could see Kooijmans at work during one of his video graffities. The artist was driven round Amsterdam in a van at night and projected images of a dancing man in white onto the walls of houses and amazed passers-by. The man danced like a spectre along the fronts of the houses, the pavement and other vehicles, only to suddenly vanish into the darkness again. The atmosphere coming from the television was that of a group of friends, full of mischief, out looking for some night-time adventure. For how dangerous or illegal is it actually to surprise car drivers on the motorway with video images suddenly looming up at them? The greatest power of Kooijman's work is its simplicity. His video graffities often consist of basic shots of people who are making a rather monotonous movement. Projected against the seemingly solid background of house fronts, trains or cars, the figures transform into shapes that are continually changing but always intriguing. They humbly follow the contours of their surroundings in a way that is so elusive and mysterious that you later wonder if you didn't dream it all. Kooijmans' development of traditional video art to video graffiti started with the film 'Delhi Express', which he make during a train journey through India. While standing on one of the platforms between the carriages he filmed his own shadow which, with the sun as projector, swept over the rocks, bushes, roads and meadows along the railway line. The two contrasting movements - that of the train thundering on and that of the shadow moving back and forth - provided a truly dynamic image and gave Kooijmans the inspiration for his next work. During the exhibition 'Off the road' (1997) in Copenhagen Kooijmans, positioned in a little station house, used a strong video projector to throw his beams onto trains racing past. 'Train Dance', the work that is regarded as Kooijmans' first video graffiti, showed a group of dancing women who, when a train came along, danced along the passing carriages like spectres for several seconds before being swallowed up by the dark landscape. Dancing hand-in-hand the fairy-like beings brought to mind the dancers on the famous painting by Matisse. The next step was to replace the stationary projector with a mobile projector which could light up the surroundings from a moving vehicle. Since that experiment was also a success, Kooijmans now wants to work with two vehicles and two projections that interact with each other. During the World Wide Video Festival the artist will be showing his video graffities several evenings somewhere in Amsterdam and its surroundings. Where or when that will take place Kooijmans is not making known, for the element of surprise, the spontaneity and the element of chance are the most important factors in his form of video art. In Kooijmans' view to announce a video graffiti would turn it into a kind of 'carnivalesque' procession or a little piece that is repeated upon request. The artist compares his work with the feeling you get when travelling: if you visit one of the big tourist attractions like the Grand Canyon full of expectation, it will almost always be disappointing because you will be seeing it with eight hundred others and because you have seen it so many times already in films and on post cards that the element of surprise is gone. The road there is much more enjoyable than the sight itself. By showing his videos unannounced Kooijmans ensures that his work will be seen only by chance passers-by with no expectations. Visitors of the video festival will have to make do with a taped record of the actual video graffiti itself.
– Sandra Smallenburg
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Thanks to: Roy Cerpac, Mirjam Coelho, Elspeth Diederix, Gilbert van Drunen, Hans Jansen (Capi Lux), Remy Jungerman, Jack Janssen, Jolanda Kooijmans, Victor Kooijmans, P.A.R.K.4DTV , Marcel van Pinxteren en Frits van Sambeeck (Gigant International)
Jeroen Kooijmans ° 1967, Schijndel (The Netherlands)
Lives and works in Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
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