THE ART OF DISTRUST

/ On the necessity and incapacity for engagement - Translation by Alana Gillespie

Everybody needs an enemy. I have found my own enemy in the so-called media. Enemies are exchangeable, but I have found a good opponent. In essence, I see the media as a portrait of myself, as an exaggerated version of my own need for order and my own need for an overall picture. The media and I are both desirous of order, in a world which is without order.

In a short time, the media have become experts in reducing complex world issues to a perfectly organised group of ‘hit’ items. This enables people to quickly gain insight into what is happening in the world; they can squeeze it in between a 9 to 5 job, a plate of meat, two veg and potatoes and the National Lottery show. These days, this is referred to the ‘free information market’. This is a market built on a sort of never-ending sale of wars, plane crashes, tsunamis, terrorist attacks and various forms of extremism; it’s almost a sort of public supermarket or a Top 40 ranking. In this way, we are able to take part in a one-sided and false type of enlightenment all day long, if we so desire. We do this in relation to subjects that, generally speaking, have nothing to do with our own lives, but which are nonetheless as suspenseful as the average soap, and give us the idea that we are a part of a worldwide version of EastEnders or The Bold and the Beautiful. It is a soap that is supposed to make us feel like we’re a part of ‘the whole’. The fact that we are actually passive news consumers standing on the sidelines of this world of collapsing twin towers, exploding cars and the mass slaughter of birds, does not seem to make it any less appealing.

More than ever, the world is crying out for engagement, moral involvement. Every day, pictures in the news confront us with total desperation, which seems to take the guise of countless disasters occurring all over the world. It is as if some great invisible terrorist has taken control, wreaking havoc with random declarations of war, suicide-bombings, crashing planes, African civil strife and falsified election outcomes. The world increasingly cries out for engagement and is increasingly confronted with the impossibility of it—at any rate the impossibility of ideological engagement.

A typical example from journalism has to do with reporter Joris Luyendijk. He is known in the Netherlands mainly as the interviewing presenter of past season of Zomergasten (Summer Guests: a TV programme in which well-known Dutch personalities are interviewed about the world, their worldview, their work and life, etc.) and his book They’re Almost Like People – Images of the Middle East. In the book he calls for a new style of reporting in the Middle East:

Complaints about the media are often about people or organisations which have not adhered to the codes of journalism. Those codes were certainly broken. However, my experiences in the Middle East point to a more deeply-rooted problem, namely, the codes themselves are not enough. You can only gain knowledge by gathering verifiable information, but such information is scarce under dictatorships. (Het zijn net mensen – beelden uit het Midden Oosten by Joris Luyendijk).

I want to use art to extend this idea, but then taking the Netherlands – Europe as far as I am concerned – as if it were a war zone, and with the media as the representatives of an international ‘dictatorship’ in the kingdom of image creation.

I a commodity child, part of the ‘commodity generation’. Nothing really happens in my life, apart from when I initiate events myself. I am the product of an age without conflict. Rather than war, famine or mass-deportation being forced upon me, it’s largely up to me to decide which conflicts I wish to explore or take on. If it is at all possible to even speak of freedom in this world, then I interpret it as having the following meaning:

More freedom means more opportunity to determine your own conflict.

Whenever I see yet another photograph of a starving third-world child, then I do not feel direct pain as a result of the abominable environment he lives in, but I feel pain as a result of my own indifference.

My generation has grown up in a society in which hypocrisy is an integral part of the system. It is a society in which the gap between rich and poor is denounced while at the same time, this same gap is exploited. On the one hand, we denounce violence, oppression and exploitation. But on the very same day that we donate money to third-world countries, we still queue up outside the H&M to get our share of the launch of Victor and Rolf’s fashion line, which will be sold at affordable prices, for one time only. The people we denounce from one point of view are the same people we finance from a different point of view.

It is characteristic of my generation that we experience nothing, but still constantly and from a young age have the impression that everything is wrong. Daily, we are confronted with big and less big, short and long-lasting catastrophic disasters, and these all serve to give us the idea that ‘something must be done’, that we are responsible for this. But—our freedom to choose our own conflicts seems to grow in proportion with the number of conflicts in the world. This is paralleled by the increasing feeling that with every ‘good deed’ we do, we commit a bad deed. Buy a lottery ticket and support the World Wildlife Fund at the same time. That’s the level we’re at. On the one hand we feel required to be engaged, but on the other, we find it impossible to really be so. Which is to say: the impossibility of unambiguous engagement.

The result is evident in my work. It is not the ‘conflict itself’ which is touched upon, but rather the portrayal of the conflict. Just as Joris Luyendijk no longer explicitly focuses on the events in the Middle East but on how these are reported, or still better said: on the impossibility of reporting them.

This seems to be characteristic of this age. My generation grew up with an excess of conflicts and a lack of insight into how these many conflicts are related to each other. As more and more information washes over us, the insight into which stance we should actually take to the situation becomes more and more distant. The European Constitution is a brilliant example of this. Everyone felt obliged to vote for or against. But everyone did so on the basis of ideas. Ideas which had little to nothing to do with the constitution itself. We do not vote for or against a constitution, but for or against the representation of it. Furthermore, this representation is heavily distorted by the media and the political world which most likely can hardly understand themselves exactly what the consequences of such a proposal could really be. In short, we find ourselves in a constant state of ignorance. The problem is not that we don’t have the faintest idea that we are powerless, but more that we haven’t the slightest idea what it is that should change. In this way, our international enemy is not ‘terrorism’, but the representation of it. Nor do we agree to a socialist party’s political programme, but to the (in this case) friendly, balding face of the man who, for the time being, represents this party.

In one way, my generation is image-saturated: we don’t ask, we just consume. On the other hand, there is a growing distrust, because so much of the (visual) information available persists in contradicting itself. A good example is the alternative journalism which has largely developed on the Internet; take the film Loose Change, a very thorough, but scarcely verifiable documentary about a conspiracy theory surrounding the September 11 th attacks. The documentary makers, whose own website claims that the film has already been viewed millions of times online, in fact show how easily fabricated information is in our society. The realistic value of photography and film has decreased, now that every person in the world is able to portray their own historical vision from their own computer. There they can voice a personal vision which need not be any more lacking in quality or in influence than those of the established news centres.

The fact that we have come to regard engagement as an isolated concept is significant. Engagement has become more of a hip item than a sort of activism, such as the so-called ‘guerrilla art’. This art form, if you can call it that, seems to be at arms with a particular ‘streetwise’ image, and not necessarily with the authorities or an ideological aim. Through their direct involvement in a socio-political situation, the generations of the sixties and seventies regarded engagement as a logical consequence of their personal experiences. In contrast, my own generation is not even certain that our own ‘experience’ is at all real. The disappointment which arose at the end of the seventies when it became clear that internationally, dictatorial regimes had been hiding behind leftist ideals, seems to have become the foundation upon which my generation’s distrust is built.

Back to art:

In contrast to the forced univocality of the media, art tends to characterise itself by not necessarily focusing directly on a message itself, but mainly on the way in which its reception and expression is contextualised. Which is to say, how the message is always effected—in fact, the content is determined—by the bias of the person who expresses the message and consequently, by the interest that news and media bodies have in quickly receiving and processing this information.

This is how the so-called free information market works: it’s not the level of truth that counts, but the level of consumption, how marketable the product is. Our current age – my age – is one in which coverage by the media has become increasingly further removed from an historical context. As a consequence, our perception of experience has become one of representations and not of verifiable information. That is, the Netherlands, Europe, the Western world as far as I’m concerned, as a war zone. As an artist, I am not fighting actual problems, but the representation thereof.

My own work does not have anything to do with Geert Wilders himself, or exploded cars. It has to do with the symbolic meaning that these images have in relation to the influence the media has on our contemporary consciousness. It has to do with an occurrence’s symbolic function, its function as a representation and not with an actual event that has really occurred.

I see my work as an extension of a growing distrust. I blame the media for becoming the representatives of an ideology. This ideology is an amalgam of opinions constantly reinforcing themselves which reduces world issues to a kind of mini-universe of themes which have been blown out of proportion. In this way, they have created such objectified monsters as The Gap Between Citizens and Politics, The Terrorism and The Freedom of Speech. But none of these monsters have ever existed. We have come to believe in them in retrospectively. My art is not journalism, I do not provide verifiable information, but instead provide a glimpse into our inability to approach the world as it actually is. I conceive of my art as an anti-ideology: the art of distrust.

There are no answers to the question of whether art should take a particular stance towards world issues. The whole idea that artists should be ‘engaged’ or even can be, is effectively the end-result of so-called ‘progressive’ thought of the sixties and seventies. This opinion suggests that there ought to be a sort of collaboration in ‘art’, among its practitioners, a critical offensive or philosophical entity, but that is an ideal in itself. ‘Art’ has never been in a position of power. My art too is an entirely peripheral form of expression, despite its intervention into public territory. The idea is not to change the world – for that you need to choose a different profession. It’s not so much about changing the world as it is, if just for a moment, about stripping it of the meaning imposed upon it by the media, its mediatisation. It is an alternative way of looking at things, one which the world consistently questions, and in this way, it may in fact come closer to ‘the truth’ than other bodies such as the media and the political world, both of which benefit from clear and simplified explanations that reinforce their own ideologies. The free market of information makes it so that it is increasingly less important for the media to strive for objectivity. That necessary drive to question that the media lacks, can now be the starting point for art. In fact, one can no longer speak of art as art when it lacks this doubting drive to question.

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