metropolis m

He is a rising star that the exhibition circuit can no longer do without. Constant Dullaart, fresh from the Rijksakademie, can always be found showing his work somewhere. He is a critic of the medium, highly active on the Internet, and is an equally talented critic of himself and of his vocation of contemporary visual artist.Juan-Stefano Vidal was the big stowaway at the 2007 Rijksakademie Open Studios. Visitors meandered into his studio to find the walls coated in a brown that was exactly halfway between mocha and milk chocolate. His Spanish background was betrayed by a poster of Aldomodovar’s film, Volver, starring Penelope Cruz. This reference to ‘all things Spanish’ in the international language of Hollywood was quasi-nonchalant, pinned to an otherwise empty wall. The white sofa was covered with objects, but everything was immaculately clean. The painter had not spilled a drop. Vidal was the prototypical artist, the result of a survey that Constant Dullaart (b. Leiderdorp, 1979) conducted amongst Rijksakademie employees. The results initially indicated a female video artist in her thirties, mother of a single child, but by the time the cleaning staff had added their contribution, she had become a painter, male, and the perfect twentieth-century stereotype: the abstract expressionist. A scenario writer for the popular Dutch television series, Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden (Good Times, Bad Times) worked the survey results into a character description: Juan is 34 years old, the only child of a Spanish father and Dutch mother, knows his whisky and his women, ‘is relatively successful, earns a fair bit from selling his paintings and is able to get himself a grant now and then, but has always continued to work in a bar one night a week, in order to stay in touch with “real life”.’ Vidal’s studio at the Rijksakademie was in its turn also an interpretation by the series’ set designers, their idea of the prototypical artist’s studio – half a studio, actually, as the other half had to be available to be set up the cameras. As Dullaart explained, ‘I had especially asked the other students for old things, so the set designers could use them, but they were all either too worn out or the wrong colour.’ The work fits perfectly into the circumspect strategies that Dullaart employs in order to stay as close as possible to the expectation patterns of his viewers. This deconstruction, a détournement of the mundane, is a crucial cornerstone of Dullaart’s work, although it is in most cases applied not in physical space, but in virtual space.Détournement was again a theme at the Rijksakademie’s 2008 Open Studios, although the atmosphere was diametrically opposed to the ordered, colour-coordinated chaos of the previous year. Constant Dullaart was again a focal point. His studio was poorly lit and there was trash on the floor. Several digital photo frames were strewn about, showing generic photographs and such texts as ‘No Image Available’. On a computer, visitors could acquaint themselves with a series of short films, with titles such as YouTube as Subject, in which you were confronted with the familiar silver-grey image of the YouTube play button against a black background. No one remarks on it, or even looks at it. In Dullaart’s series of short films, the button is not only the starting signal, but also the subject: it falls off the screen, grows out of focus, wanders around or begins to blink like a disco light. Once again, the key to the work is the deconstructivist attitude with which Dullaart questions our contemporary visual literacy, specifically the influence of digitalization on how we relate to visual images. ‘The play button has unconsciously become a part of our visual culture. It is one with its function. No one thinks about the fact that somebody designed it.’ Where we once never noticed or looked at the standard, syrupy photographs in the frames in store windows, we now no longer look at the interfaces with which we come into contact every single day. Because we have become accustomed to the ease with which we use the Internet and the ‘misconception’ that everything on the Internet is free, we rarely pause to think about the number of design decisions and man hours that go into an interface, and even less do we stop to think of their political or social implications.

Medium Research

Constant Dullaart’s artistic strategy is an unusual one. He investigates the newest medium that art offers him. But how different is Dullaart’s investigation of his medium from that of his predecessors in the history of art? What consequences does it have for the medium itself? The color field painters investigated the painting, but that was neither a new medium nor a mass medium. Video art of the 1970s is perhaps a better example. It was, like the Internet, a technological medium, and as such it was also an evolution of that ultimate mass medium of the twentieth century: television.Investigations of the medium in (early) video art can be roughly divided into two groups. Numerous artists sought the technical limits and possibilities of the medium through such techniques as slowing down and speeding up their images, repetition and live, continuous registration. This was in essence an investigation into the behaviour of time within the medium. Investigating distortion and image manipulation, as in the work of Nam June Paik, can also be included in this group. In addition, a great deal of video art can be seen as a form of social experiment, an investigation into the activist, democratic potential of video. It was an attempt to undermine the ‘one-to-many’ system of communication in television, and it was a quest to discover possibilities for regaining power over the medium and create a medium of the masses rather than for the masses. One example of YouTube avant la lettre was the video tent that was part of Sonsbeek Buiten de Perken in 1972. This temporary studio was accessible to everyone – both artists and passers-by – who wanted to make use of it. (The fact that there where hardly any passers-by who actually did so is still a problem today, now referred to as the participation gap).Both of these strategies are intertwined in Constant Dullaart’s work. The use of interfaces as part of his visual language is, to begin with, an investigation into and commentary on the technical developments within the medium. What is more important, however – as already noted – is the investigation into their social potential. ‘Technological developments have no inherent ethical value. They can be either used or misused. It is up to people to find out what is what.’ Dullaart’s Stabilized Earthquake is a poignant example of this kind of ethical experiment. Dullaart applied the ‘stabilize motion’ effect – part of Adobe’s ‘After Effects’ (AE) – to surveillance camera images from the earthquake in Sichuan, China, in order to visually neutralize the visible shudders. Dullaart employed the analysis of motion used in this filter in a different After-Effect: the ‘earthquake’. This is a filter that is offered to any filmmakers – professional or amateur – to simulate earthquakes of their own. ‘With my adapted tool, you can perfectly simulate the Sichuan earthquake. But I would like to adapt a tool like the earthquake so that what you get is the number of deaths as the desired effect, rather than the frequency, the pitch and the roll.’ Although there is an element of activism present in both the work of the early video artists and in Constant Dullaart’s work, we can nonetheless speak of a fundamentally different attitude to the medium being used. Where the video tent of Sonsbeek buiten de perken demonstrated a positive, stimulating attitude in regards to ‘the masses’, Dullaart is more critical. Now, given the immensity of the use of networking sites, the ideal of the participation culture seems now to have been achieved on the Internet. Dullaart’s position (and that of many other artists) sooner seems intended as a brake, a restraint for the wild, uncritical surrender of the masses to the medium. Where video artists of the 1970s had difficulty getting their hands on equipment – scarce because it was formidably expensive – the contemporary equivalent of that technology, the user interface (from operating systems and browsers to photo and video editing programs) are available to everyone. The democratization of video is so far advanced that our tools and filters have become part and parcel of the images that we produce with them. It is a phenomenon that Dullaart cleverly employs as he Photoshops the sun out of a series of landscapes or uses specific tools to an extreme degree, such as the clone stamp in Clone Stamp Shadow Shape (2009). These are the primary dangers of uncritical use of the Internet, now being questioned in a playful, visual fashion. Dullaart exploits existing possibilities to present an example, to give a warning. Instead of calling us to action, he is inviting us to come to our senses.

Immersion

Those who might dismiss Constant Dullaart’s work as pure technological negativism, who would have him as an exponent of a hacker’s culture (hacktivism) that hangs on to the beginnings of Internet (free information exchange and maximum space for creativity), which are now under so much attack, sell him short. ‘I have enough idealism in me to get involved with it, but the visual image is at least as important.’ Moreover, there is Dullaart’s own involvement in the medium. In addition to being an ideal (i.e. critical) user of the Internet, Dullaart is also a heavy user, who both understands and exploits its language. ‘A fascinating dialect has developed: the quick jokes, the celebration of the coarseness and knowingly saying the dumbest things. The Internet has semantics that are different than existing written and spoken language.’This light-heartedness is also something that is often seen in his own work, as well as online in his collections with found material. Browsing through his YouTube channel or his Delicious page, you find films of students squeezing fat pimples from one another’s backs, as well as works of art by fellow artists. ‘It is true of all that imagery on the Internet that somebody else has already provided an alibi,’ according to Dullaart. ‘All I have to do is put it into a new context.’ In that collection, there is no difference in value between art and a silly joke. Entirely in keeping with the medium, he does not limit his profession as artist to things he has created himself, but incorporates the entire selection process – from the making of lists with links to group exhibitions, to engaging in collective projects, to temporarily or coincidentally shared authorship with other users.YouTube as Subject is a good example. When Dullaart had posted the series on YouTube, Ilovetoeatmicedotcom, alias Ben Coonley, responded with another series of his own films that investigated another YouTube trademark: the revolving dots that appear as you are waiting for the film to load. This reaction in turn inspired Dullaart to make his installation, YouTube as Sculpture, a series of styrofoam balls that hang in a circle in a dark space, illuminated by a spotlight rotating from one ball to the next. The work has been on view in Versions, a group exhibition at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam. On the night the exhibition opened, Dullaart put a video of the installation on YouTube. It was not the installation that was the core of the work, but the video dialogue with Ilovetoeatmicedotcom.Where video artists in the 1970s were pioneers in investigating the technical possibilities of their medium, Internet artists are today exponents of a new ‘cyber anthropology’. There are now many artists who specialize in searching for and combining found footage fragments. In Dullaart’s case, it does not stop there. He is not a clinical analyst operating at a safe distance, but is both personally and professionally invested in his investigation, ensuring that a continual back-and-forth exchange takes place between different semantic levels. He is simply delighted that, thanks to the Internet, he can watch any episode of Cheers whenever he feels like it, but he also offers his own commentary on the lack of criticism that is inherent in this ease of use.Erik van Tuijn is web and new media coordinator Gemeentemuseum Den HaagWork by Constant Dullaart can be seen through 21 February in Photography – In Reverse, at FOAM, Amsterdam, and through 7 March in Don’t Worry. Be Happy, at Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam.And at: http://constantdullaart.com/www.youtube.com/constantdullaart