Johan Pijnappel: 'tulips for holland*': in the correspondence with the World Wide Video Centre about this project your letterhead reads 'TV without television, an ongoing series of events, installations, performances and publications, presenting television in transit. THE OTHER AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE'. What is the idea behind this statement?
Stefaan Decostere: A kind of discontent with television as a medium, because television has become too limited as a medium. This, of course, has to do with the fact that the world itself has turned into television. When you 'just make television' the experience you offer, the television experience, remains too restricted because what you really want is to start interaction between your own TV-action and the world around you. Hence the idea to make TV*Without Television. With 'tulips for holland*' you could say that visualizing the existing reality is more Television than television can be by itself. You could say: the best Television experience is to be found outside of television. On television you usually get the kind of television that no longer measures up to the expectations of the televisual experience. What you usually get is a kind of television which has stopped somewhere, whereas the television effect has become richer than ordinary tv. The televisual experience is a way of watching, a way of interacting with the world through images and a conscious programming of those images. The overabundant supply via satellite networks, circular zapping, the possibility of organizing touristy landscapes as real television menues, the offering of ready-made experiences programmed in advance to offer an evening of watching the telly, models of cynically enforced horizontal programming, all of these has caused the phenomenon of Television to transcend the confines of television. Hence this urge to make Television Without Television. Of course there are other reasons, too. For television has restricted itself and chosen to specialize under economic and political pressure. It is no longer tv in the all encompassing sense which covers the medium of Television, from now on it is only one of a whole host of media.
JP: Now with 'tulips for holland*' you have created a reality outside of TV for the World Wide Video Centre as well. You used a number of visual ingredients which do not refer to aesthetics or the theory of forms within the modern art world. How would you yourself describe what you put there?
SD: A 'territory of reality shifting': that about sums it up what I wanted to make. The ingredients are, in a manner of speaking, handed to you on a platter: to mirror Holland's twin, Huis ten Bosch in Japan (Nagasaki Holland Village) in the Spui in The Hague, in a spot where contemporary Holland substitutes with great ambition and flair architecture of bold dimensions for windmills and cheese. The best spot of them all for 'reality shifting'. And that's what it is: that kind of dexterity that we all taught ourselves through television. We not only know very well how to change our ideas, our personality, our opinions. We are also capable, with even more power and dexterity, of having several different points of view and several different philosophies about reality simultaneously, our eyes allowing for superpositions, like died-in-the-wool schizophrenics. We have turned into media ourselves, and it is this awareness that 'tulips for holland*' wants to raise. It deals with a new awareness of one's own culture, a multiple awareness: one sees one's own culture through another culture, in this case the Japanese. Just like, in this case, the Japanese for centuries had to understand their own culture through the West's colonial imprint. Exoticism is boomerang. Many of us, and not in the last place the tourists among us, would much prefer it if the Japanese culture were purely Japanese. And what do we get: Huis ten Bosch, Japan the Dutch way. It is about precisely these cultural shifts, and how cultures are used by international corporations. That's what it's about really. It is interesting, I think, that with Huis ten Bosch, the amusement park, Holland and the West get thrown back in their faces their own practices, such as the organizing of world exhibitions and the recycling and exhibiting of other civilizations. This is the completed action undertaken by 'tulips for holland*'.
JP: And as such it operates like a 'mirror-optical exploratorium' as you call it?
SD: It is a reference to those Renaissance magical mirror rooms like the Kircher one in Italy, in which very strange experiences of the environment could be evoked by means of a whole range of tricks, mirrors, holes, and filters; where reality shifting was practised, too. Then as now elements were mixed such as a fire burning inside with things happening outside by means of mirrors. In a sense people kind of made television: they brought inside what was outside, they scrambled existing geographies, experiences of time. They were the first secularized excercises in confusing the audience about the reasons and the origins of individual experience. In which questions were asked about reality and representation and the role played in all this by technology.
JP: As to these confusions of experience: In one of the texts written for Déjà-Vu by Henri-Pierre Jeudy it is argued clearly that the 'Déjà-Vu' look and therefore the death of phantasm constitutes a great threat.
SD: The empirical experience has lost its truth content. This is argued very emphatically by Henri-Pierre Jeudy. With the Déjà-Vu paradox we experience the sterility of the phantasm. Since we have become media ourselves new markets have popped up. It is therefore no surprise that a new industry has presented itself which would like to develop these markets. That is the sole aim of the software and virtual reality game industry. Henri-Pierre Jeudy calls it the downright 'colonization of the phantasm'. Phantasms are our unsollicited imaginings, stubborn, recurrent patterns of imaginings which we carry along as human beings and as a culture. Phantasm is archaic imagination. It is the imagination of the trace of your genes; that which you carry within you through reproduction and through culture. Nowadays phantasm is addressed especially by the most advanced software industry. By recognizing this we underscore the political dimension of this trend. That's why all this smacks of regression so strongly, as the archaic imagination is frozen in its 'original' state by this besieging of the phantasm. It is no longer questioned, it is recycled, while you could say that this century was epitomized by the failure and the subsequent undermining, and then the short-circuiting again of this stubborn archaic residue of phantasm. One's own phantasm is no longer compared to that of other cultures. Phantasm is no longer compared to the imagination, the imagination which has known some explosive moments of freedom this century. Because the software industry besieges phantasm without further ado, we see mostly repetitions of the most deeply-rooted, the most stereotypical manifestations of the imagination: resulting in monoculture. In Huis ten Bosch, for instance, Holland is reduced to windmills and wooden shoes and brick and dykes. European music means Bach and Beethoven and Mozart. Everything is reduced to generic forms from the past. It has a certain regressive element. This is where I find fault with the new total worlds of today: from the shopping malls to the Disney Worlds, from cyber this or whatever to Sega, from instant city planning to the frozen natural preserves everywhere. Total worlds are first and foremost frozen worlds where market economical securities are brought into play only and where culture is reduced to the size of a tourist brochure.
JP: The World Wide Video Centre works with light projections in its presentations mostly. Are light projections the means to evoke such feelings?
SD: Everything happens somewhere on the scale between projection and shadow. Mirrors are very well suited to the realization of illusions. They take us to the palace of the vampires, creatures, you thought, which had been committed to the past once and for all, but suddenly loom large before you, reanimated in front of your very eyes with enormous force. It is possible to have left behind a certain reality, the reality of tulips and wooden shoes for instance, and then tour operators suddenly reinstate them by a roundabout way. It all has to do with dimensions, with the scale on which we try and put those things into a museum, with the force with which we bring this kind of relic from the past up-to-date. Depending on their scale, these things from the past will play a very forceful, domineering role in your town, your environment and your everyday life. All of this violates what is alive in a culture. Particularly because those popular tunes from the past are revived without being questioned. One is confronted with an absolute past. And there is nothing one can do with it. A kind of 'black holes' come into existence in cultures: intangible, continuously restored monuments far removed from the power of everyday society. Those relics are only suitable for consumption, to be photographed and admired. And when the craving for monuments gets out of hand, when the number of musea increases too much, when too much money goes towards it and so many people are involved in it, then you get the feeling you live in the kind of world in which everything has been assigned its final destination. Things from the past, polished for use in the present, for a future we're already living: a cosmetic world which forever equals itself. This is the basic idea behind 'Déjà-Vu' and the effect of prospective elevating things to a museum level. The idea that you live in a time-space in which the past is continuously being rescuscitated for a future that is already decided. Of course this experience, too, is a half phantasm, an unintended mirror effect of television reality. Back to the beginning therefore. What good is a total world, or what do you do with a corporate identity where everything, from the colour of the buildings to the behaviour of the staff, from the production process to the end product exudes the same feeling?
JP: The World Wide Video Centre's assignment here was to examine in an installation the possibilities of the Priva Lite window for projection, taking into account the architectural position with regard to the Spui square. How would you characterize the location and the process in order to create something to do with culture shifting for this particular spot?
SD: Like in the 'Travelogue' series and in Déjà-Vu I try and keep things as transparent as possible, to avoid becoming the kind of world you want to critize and question as a maker. In the case of television it means you almost use the same rhetorics as ordinary everyday television. This means promotional stuff, advertizing and television which is satisfied with the way it is, and which is as superficial as its screen. It is a way of being invisible. Here in The Hague this was also what I had in mind. I wanted to make an installation or a series of installations which were invisible, as if they'd always been there. 'tulips for holland*' deliberately does not offer any new images; really no new devices, no new sculptures are built. You do get some kind of tension in which as a viewer you are continuously confronted with the impossibility of experiencing reality as problemless. Through these installations and those mirrors and reflections looking at reality is charged with unwanted twin images. Because this was not a video tape, it was possible to bring about within the same space and through several installations one and the same kind of visual short-circuiting. The audience never sees the real image, the ultimate vision. There is no aha-Erlebnis. All the time, for as long as you move around within the installation, you are encouraged to deal with twin images. I for one cannot look at Holland without superimposing that other model of Huis ten Bosch on it. Like the Japanese cannot experience their own culture without being forced to take along with it the exotic interpretation of it by the West. The exotic boomerang effect, once again.
JP: In your proposal for 'tulips for holland*' you quoted Yoshikuni Kamachika, director of Nagasaki Holland Village, Huis ten Bosch, Japan as saying: "Kyoto's urban planning was originately modelled after ancient Xian. After 1.000 years, it had ceased to be a copy of anything. It had become the unequivocal symbol of ancient Japan. Cities are consumated by their inhabitants through the culture that they create. One thoUSAnd years from now no one will dare to say that Huis ten Bosch is the model of a Dutch city. Rather it will be an unquestioned symbol of traditional Japan."
SD: What is unique about Huis ten Bosch is the objective to break down the fence in a couple of years' time.In the year 2000 the amusement park Huis ten Bosch will become a normal Japanese city. That is a new phenomenon. Already one can live inside the amusement park. You can buy your own home in it. This is new: the amusement park has transcended its model - the garden, paradise, a fenced heaven. The amusement park is one huge economic alibi, no more but certainly no less either, permitting enormous powers and sums of money to come together and invest it in a giant enterprise meeting the wildest of expectations. The amusement park functions as a model of the world which is yet to be. Dimensions have changed. In the old days, the days of Disney, it was one man's phantasm of one Disney man who was to be visualized, reproduced and maintained as completely as possible. The Disney concept is utterly unique and can deal exclusively with itself. Huis ten Bosch Japan is not one person's phantasm, but the phantasm of a whole culture, a worldwide industrial culture. Large corporations use the concept of the amusement park as a very convenient and powerful instrument to shape the world exactly according to what they want it to be. The relationship amusement park - industrial world order is the central idea behind Huis ten Bosch. This relationship is continued in 'tulips for holland*' by mirroring Huis ten Bosch in the Spui. The quote of the director of Huis ten Bosch shows to what extent this kind of top manager is aware of the potential of the total amusement park. I do not discover anything. I just make the existence of a universal trend visible. It is fascinating to develop a better insight into what these world empirebuilders and hyperactive entrepreneurial minds intend to do with this world of ours.
JP: Baudrillard once called the big department stores the museums of the future. They could become the temples of the muses. For individual statements expressed by artists there is hardly any room left in the world if these corporate cultures advance, or they will be swallowed alive in the whole process. It is strange to present an installation of yours predicting the end of individual, original expression in an arts centre like the World Wide Video Centre. And it is true that at first, in the eyes of the subsidizers, your installation did not evoke any art connotations. Did you become an artist rather than a tv producer?
I do not think so. I am a tv maker. I consider this assignment as one given to someone who makes television. It would not be true to say that because I am trying here and now to create a strong tension with the assistance of priva-lite and mirrors and the concept of 'reality shifting', that I therefor must be an artist.
JP: For the priva-lite project five people were invited from different disciplines, namely Rem Koolhaas as an architect, Bill Viola as a video artist, General Idea as a performance collective and Ponton Media Artlab as an artist's collective working with interactive media. Are there in this installation any specific components about which you yourself say: that typically evolved as a result of my being a television maker?
Perhaps it is the total absence of the artistic interference. Like in my work for television there is never any preconceived form. I work with image and sound, but do not really apply visual art techniques. The documentaries do take a final form, but I do not have a programme. Really on television I am a kind of Zelig. I prefer changing shape continuously. That's why the programmes I made all look very different basically. Perhaps that is their unique 'television-like' quality. In television, and this is where it differs from cinema, you are never confronted with the maker. It's as if the thing is there without being made by someone. Television is best when it just is, a kind of transparency. That is the only issue about which I am really stubborn. Contrasting with the game of the absence of the maker I place a kind of overemphasis on the television set as an appliance. On the one hand television makes use of transparency, but on the other it is also a kind of totalitarian machine. Whatever reality television deals with, it brings television in the first place. In the installation 'tulips for holland*' there is an element of the total absence of the maker. Here too there is some kind of transparency. Because what's at issue here is a kind of total world I think this transparency, this absence of the maker, enables types of criticism. Searching for the maker the viewer will constantly change his attitude, his shape, his point of view and thus take on the role of maker. The viewer therefore as a surrogate maker, quickly, brilliantly exploring the installation strategically. That is, I think, the new space total worlds give to critics. For in total worlds there is no longer an avantgarde. In total worlds there is not a margin any more. In a total world you are either inside or out. You are never on the fringes. However, it does not mean or does not necessarily mean that criticism is no longer possible in total worlds. But it is not the kind of criticism any more formulated from a little distance. Now that we have all become media, now that we all live in a hyper- and metareality we are all more or less responsible for it, but at the same time we have all become critics. There is no distance any longer. If you do criticize from a distance I think you are a little hypocritical and pretend that you are for a moment outside all the forces of the aspect of reality you criticize while at the same time being very much a product of it. Again, the disappearing of the distance does not mean the end of all criticism. But it has become the kind of critical practice in which the source of the criticism, the critic, continuously changes his point of view and his critical method. This is essential I believe. It is a kind of Moebius criticism. A criticism which turns things upside down and inside out. Perhaps that's where there is a link between the installation 'tulips for holland*' and my work for television. On the television you don't have much choice, you just make television. And if you want to make television from a critical point of view, then television is the first total world with which you will be confronted. You are forced to become an exploring strategist. You will deal with your medium in a soul-searching way. You will use this instrument very cleverly, skillfully, so cleverly in fact that whoever sees your work will become aware very cursorily of the whole heavyweight range of tv instruments which prefers to remain invisible under normal circumstances. This is the central idea behind the installation 'tulips for holland*'. This testimonial of good character may prove that this installation was made by a television maker and not by a sculptor, a videomaker, an architect or an artist.
The Hague, 11/03/1994.
– Johan Pijnappel
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