A.I.R.

Extensions

Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 10:22:02 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Debian GNU/Linux) PHP/4.3.10-18
Content-Length: 1742
Connection: Keep-Alive
200 OK

On public personae in a video installation by Vermeir & Heiremans

download publication here

Full text

Vermeir & Heiremans’ most recent film installation Masquerade (2015) questions the value of art, and especially the way this value is constructed and perceived. This is reflected in one of the sub-themes of the work: people are not perceived at face value, but in direct relation to their constructed role—at mask value, so to speak.

Vermeir & Heiremans focus on the dynamics between art, architecture, and economy. In this practice the artists define their own house, a loft apartment in a post-industrial building in Brussels, as an artwork. Whilst keeping their home private, they use it to create so-called mediated extensions, translations of the house into installations, videos, performances, publications, et cetera. Art House Index (AHI) is a new extension in which the artists propose the transformation of their house as an artwork into a financial index, an instrument that measures the performance of a specific part of the economy. Merging art and real estate, (AHI) renders an opaque and static product that is difficult to trade, into a transparent tool that is accessible for many investors.

The actual performance of (AHI) is not only the central topic of their most recent video installation, Masquerade.1 It is also the instrument that in real-time defines how the central video in that installation is seen by the audience. Real-time data available on the Internet (global real estate, art and currency markets, as well as the attention the artists generate around their own work) are re-calculated every ten seconds, resulting in the index going up or down. This movement of the index triggers a switching back and forth between two Masquerade versions, one of which shows the perfectly post- produced scenes (when the index goes up), while the other displays variations, rehearsals, and failures as a consequence of the index going down.

As the viewers of Masquerade are informed in the opening scene: “a film it is not, unless a film means 45 exchanges conducted by characters who might pass for the errata of artistic creation.”2 The work presents us with an allegory of contemporary art and economy. In the film a reporter tells the story of the ‘initial public offering’ of (AHI) on the financial market. While introducing the index, she questions the artists’ public personae as a basis for value. “We’ll be discussing with a guest speaker, whom we’ll introduce in a moment, if we can have confidence in... Vermeir & Heiremans.”3 In a previous scene an exhibition guide shows a group of people around, stating that “...the singularity of the public persona generates a monopoly situation which artists can exploit as a brand...”4

Vermeir & Heiremans have used the concept of the public persona as a central device in the development of Masquerade. In the film, many characters enact the fictional debut of (AHI). The artists have a specific approach to casting. In the film a number of people embody characters that are similar to their social roles in real life. Since Vermeir & Heiremans have scripted the whole film, these people perform a fictionalized version of their professions.5 One of them is the financial trader who plays Frank Goodman, named after a character in Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Frank Goodman explains that in order for art to become a financial asset, transparency, liquidity, and media exposure are necessary. They lead to trust and therefore to higher estimations of the value of art. “Public information creates trust,” he says, “so yes, we should consider the option of printing a prospectus. Apart from the output of the ‘art rating agency’, which could formally measure visibility, institutional attention, publication profile... in short their credit as an artist, there is a whole set of parameters that can be constructed and published so that potential investors will perceive the index as completely transparent.”6

Masquerade essentially consists of a single extended, continuous conversation between a number of protagonists that take a public position in the ongoing debate on value, attesting to its discursive nature. Goodman’s logic of the value of art as a financial asset is constantly interspersed with opinions of other protagonists in the art world—the curator, collector, gallerist, auctioneer, investor and so on—who offer their own speculative views on the value of art. In parallel with these alternate discourses, the setting of the film transforms itself from a white cube gallery into an auction house, a trading pit, and even a courtroom: places where value(s) are negotiated. Furthermore, the characters’ use of language sounds highly familiar: the script for Masquerade pastiches texts from art magazines and journals that Vermeir & Heiremans encountered during their research for the work. The dialogues are constructed on the basis of quotes from art historical and art critical texts — texts that are in themselves discursive sites where the value of art is determined.

In Masquerade all actors perform more than one character and this makes for a contingency of characters that constantly puts the viewer on the wrong footing as was the case for Melville’s novel: Scholars today still debate whether the Confidence Man is one or several characters in the book.7 The artists themselves appear in their own film: we see them directing it and doing camera work. We see them ‘screen in screen’ in their role of the artist brand, Vermeir & Heiremans, promoting (AHI) while they are questioned by a character dressed up as a judge. The artists and many other characters act out roles that seem to transform and criticize their own public roles. The relation between the actors’ public personae in real life and their characters’ aesthetic—one could even say cinematic—personae is unknown to the beholder. In other words, he is witnessing the transformation of a masked or stylized subject into an aestheticized, filmic object but can only guess what this transformation entails.

The Brechtian technique of unveiling the apparatus by making explicit the use of green screens deployed in Masquerade as well as the way in which Vermeir & Heiremans make use of public personae, constantly evoke questions of confidence and belief. Both of these are underlying ideas on which the art world and high finance function, a theme that was very much inspired by Melville’s novel. The Confidence Man—His Masquerade was a timely story, in which the writer’s confidence man does not exploit his victims so much as reveal the contingency of their core beliefs and institutions.

(AHI) does not only short-circuit art and finance, it also affects the perceived and judged image of the individual. Vermeir & Heiremans have commented on this aspect: “Art House Index is not about the fluctuating value of two individuals. It is rather an image for the linking of subjectivity and finance for which we have used the artist personae as a substitute for the individual.”8 The various personae that are staged in Masquerade seem to be designed by the artists not only as personae but as character masks: the Marxian role-playing intermediaries of the humans who inhabit a capitalist system. Social class and market exchange determine these roles. Thus, not only the people are ‘masked’, also the commodities they exchange take on different guises. They acquire not only surplus value but surplus meaning, one could say, just like the work of established, ‘trustworthy artists’. That seems to be the reason why Frank Goodman mentions in the film that the audience will raise the question: “Can we have confidence in Vermeir & Heiremans?”

Vermeir & Heiremans is a Brussels-based artist duo. Their practice focuses on the dynamics between art, architecture, and economy. Vermeir & Heiremans have presented their video work in film festivals and contemporary art venues such as the 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007); Arnolfini, Bristol (2009); Kasseler Dokfest (2009); Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeonggi-do, Korea (2010); La Rada, Locarno (2011); ARGOS, Brussels (2012); Extra City, Antwerp (2012); Manifesta 9, Limburg (2012); 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); Impakt Festival, Utrecht (2013); Triennale Bruges (2015); Dojima River Biennale, Osaka (2015); and Curated by_vienna (2015).

ENDNOTES

1 A single screen version of Masquerade can be consulted online: vimeo. com/133391587 pass- word: M2015.

2 Masquerade, ‘Scene 01: In which a variety of characters appear’. This description is adapted from a review of Melville’s novel The Confidence Man — His Masquerade (1857) in The Literary Gazette, 11 April 1857: “A novel it is not, unless a novel means forty- five conversations held on board a steamer, conducted by passengers who might pass for the errata of creation”. Melville’s novel was a major inspiration for the film. The artists adopted part of its title and its 45 chapter structure with intertitles. The Confidence Man is a critique of a culture of ‘professional trust’, which regards human relations as purely financial transactions. It is a filmic story that narrates a series of exchanges between a so-called ‘confidence man’ and his victims. Appearing in multiple identities, the title character manipulates the convictions and the confidence of his victims, and finally binds them with a financial contract.

3 Masquerade, ‘Scene 05: By the way, Madam, may I ask if you have confidence?’

4 Masquerade, ‘Scene 04: Showing that many men have many minds’. The dialogue paraphrases Isabelle Graw, High Price. Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009, p. 25.

5 The names and faces of the art and finance industry individuals that were casted in the film can be found in In-Residence Magazine#02, a fake lifestyle magazine that Vermeir & Heiremans published on the occasion of the production of Masquerade. Vermeir & Heiremans, In-Residence Magazine, Spring 2015: Art House Index issue, 2015, p. 4.

6 Vermeir & Heiremans, A conversation with Frank Goodman (2014). Accessed through: vimeo.com/109586203, on 6 November 2015. The quote is the scripted version of the interview. Goodman is the impersonation of a number of finance professionals that Vermeir & Heiremans have interviewed in their preliminary survey for Masquerade. As an allegorical personification, he recalls Hilar, the project investor in their previous work The Residence (a wager for the afterlife) (2012). Revolving around speculation and what has been called the ‘cultural industries’, Hilar renders the abstract dimensions of present-day high finance in concrete narrative forms: he commissions the Chinese artist-architect Ma Wen to design a house for his afterlife. The hereafter, formerly the habitat of the religious and the spiritual, has been colonialized by venture investment. Ma Wen, on the other hand, is not a fictional character. Rather, The Residence sometimes seems to center on him, sometimes appearing as a documentary film, and gradually — depending on a live-editing algorithm linked to the currency trade — evolving into complex parafictional nexus, in which the artist-architect curiously starts to function both as a portrait of himself and as an emblem of an art world that is intricately linked to global financial systems.

7 Vermeir & Heiremans, in email correspondence with the editors, 3 January 2015.

8 Maurice S. Lee, ‘Skepticism and The Confidence-Man’, in: Robert S. Levine (ed.), The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p 113.

Back to texts overview