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The video Het Fregat (The Frigate) was one of the big hits of the recent Berlin Biennial and the Un-scene exhibition at Wiels, in Brussels. This bizarre spectacle in which actors act out different tableaux vivants around a small replica of a frigate in each scene is typical of the irony in which Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys comment on human social exchange. For the Belgian artist team, humankind is a display dummy, a marionette in a banal and mundane drama that keeps repeating itself.In February, the Dépendance in Brussels opened an exhibition of nine photographs by Jos De Gruyter (b. 1965, Geel, Belgium) and Harald Thys (b. 1966, Wilrijk, Belgium). In the photographs, the artists have dressed up a series of wooden constructions as figures that they place in different decors. These figures, which mostly resemble scarecrows, are alternately presented as tourists, pirates and ordinary passers-by. The suggestion that identity is a question of playing a role, of packaging and presentation, is also central to De Gruyter & Thys’s most important project to date, a series of videos in which melodramatic situations are ironically dissected.

Prefab Psychology

De Gruyter & Thys’s videos reduce human behaviour to stereotypes, subjecting everyday human dramas to an analytical perspective that exposes their pettiness and absurdity. Their videos take place in empty, geometric spaces. The drama itself is also radically stripped down. The actors’ movements are minimal and awkward, and the artificial dialogues are read aloud by a monotone voice on the soundtrack, with no attention being paid to its synchronization with the actors. De Gruyter & Thys thus carry the theatrical technique of alienation to an absurd degree. They present us with tragedies in telegram style, constructed from clichés and performed with a minimum of expression. The situations are moreover completely predictable, because they follow the logic of the prefabricated psychology of soap operas. De Gruyter & Thys raise the question of how much our emotional lives are directed by the media. Are we just marionettes for pre-programmed emotional templates? If infidelity in a soap opera is the cause of an hysterical crisis, does this mean that the soap opera is a reflection of real human relationships, or have we made our relationships hysterical because we have learned from the soap operas that infidelity demands hysteria? The same question is raised by the emphatically Freudian construction of some of their videos, including the marital drama De Vloek (The Curse, 1999), in which the birth of a son drives a couple apart. Did Freud really chart the human psyche or have we just decided to behave according to the Freudian model?In De Gruyter & Thys’s video works, people are no longer the puppets of fate, circumstance or something as abstract as the subconscious. The videos touch on a more fundamental issue. Here, humankind is not just a feeling animal, but an animal that depicts itself entirely along the lines of popular psychological assumptions. People live like marionettes because they are ultimately willing to be put in whatever paradigm one might want. It is along such lines as these that the videos of De Gruyter & Thys seem to suggest that psychology as a whole is a rather absurd undertaking. There are no hidden depths to be revealed, just simple behavioural patterns.One exceptionally sharp illustration of this psychological deconstruction is the video Het Geel van Gent (Ghent Yellow, 2005), in which the artists themselves play a couple so obsessed with one another that they spend all their time on mutual irritations or totally senseless discussions, such as whether it would be a good idea in the future to ban all criminals to another planet. The dialogues are read by a single, monotone voice from the soundtrack, with no synchronization with the gestures of the actors, who move their hands, arms and heads as if they were being manipulated by strings, like marionettes. The absurdity of the scene is accentuated by the perfection of how the two men are dressed, in beige housecoats and immaculate white socks that contrast with their hairy legs. This detail is a piquant sexual wink of the eye, given that white socks are today only tolerated in the context of homosexual porn films – or tennis games. The tidy housecoat, the strict lines of the composition of the image and the senseless dialogues are the façade behind which the everyday irritations and sexual secrets that characterize intimate relationships are hidden. The white socks are a kind of static interference in this bitter idyll, the note from which someone in the know is alerted that there is more going on in this relationship than what can be seen on the surface.

Golem

De Gruyter & Thys are not simply amused observers of the human animal farm. The poetry in their videos has a fascinating philosophical background. An important key to this was provided by the portfolio once published by the two artists in A Prior magazine. A series of photographs shows how the figure of a man is made out of clay. This clearly refers to the malleability of people, but the clay man is also a reference to the golem of Jewish folklore – an image that with the help of magical words is brought to life in order to become an exemplary servant for his master. His only shortcoming is his literal and mechanical interpretation of the orders he is given, which are carried out in wooden motions. This mechanical movement has inspired countless monsters in films, with Frankenstein’s creation as the best-known example. It also characterizes the movements of the characters in the videos by De Gruyter & Thys.The golem theme also has magical, or better said, animist aspects. In Der Schlamm von Branst (2008), De Gruyter & Thys suggest this animistic inclination by setting their characters in the studio of a sculptor, where a variety of clay sculptures are being worked on. One of the sculptures, a head that is gazing ecstatically upwards, has been placed on a pedestal and is being admired by a woman, while two men are using a wooden stick to poke holes in a figure of clay, as if looking to see if they will discover a soul or anima in the image. The philosophy of animism goes back to both the Jewish Kabala and the work of Hermes Trismegistos, a (fictional) magician and priest of ancient Egypt. Kabala and hermeticism are both about astral magic, acquiring the influence of the heavenly bodies in order to bring earthly objects to life. In ancient Egypt, sculptures of gods were made animate in this way. In the Kabala, animistic power was primarily associated with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. With them, people could form the ten Names of God, which had magical powers. The golems were brought to life by writing down magical words, or one of the Names of God, on a piece of paper and laying it in the golem’s mouth. The lives of De Gruyter & Thys’s marionettes (or golems) take on their most bizarre and enigmatic form in the video Ten Weyngaert (2007), which begins with a row of people being shot. A voiceover tells that this slaughter is the work of a psychiatric patient who, for sexual pleasure, had squeezed over a thousand black White Russian jumping mice to death in his trouser pocket (!). That violence was explained as the result of an unresolved childhood trauma. In the end, his treatment proves to have been unsuccessful and the man falls back into his old habits, with mass murder as a result. By presenting this totally absurd case study as a pantomime of actors who stare foolishly into the camera like wooden clowns, De Gruyter & Thys undermine the seriousness with which our culture approaches childhood trauma and the entire psychology associated with it. Much more than in their other video works, this is emphasized here in the mimicry of the characters. In De Gruyter & Thys’s videos, faces are often held in close-up shots for an extended time, in frozen expressions. In Ten Weyngaert, these facial expressions are even more exaggerated, as if the grotesque, caricatured heads by Franz Xaver Messersschmidt (1736-1783) had been dressed in human skin and run through the psychological issues of the scenario as golems. The tragedy becomes a pastiche, overly exaggerated theatre, whereby it loses its drama.

Fetish

For Renaissance magicians, astral magic was not limited to the animation of images. All of the objects in the world possessed magical powers, a universal animism that found an interesting parallel in Karl Marx’s analysis of object fetishism. According to Marx, objects are bearers of meanings, because while people work, they invest a part of themselves in the objects. This means that we see the world around us as an extension of ourselves, not as a collection of neutral objects. The animistic dynamic of the fetish is the driving force behind the powerful work Het Fregat (2008), a brooding video in which a pitch-black model of a frigate ship is a symbol for female sexuality. A group of men is examining the model ship with the greedy lust with which they would stare at a woman. The video then develops into a crescendo of body language, in which a woman’s legs, alternately invitingly open or stubbornly clamped shut, engage in a dialogue with the macho posing of the men around her. One of the men, a virile young fellow, is even presented in frozen poses alongside a candelabrum with burning black candles, in what appears to be a parody of a satanic S & M scene. If the marionettes in the earlier videos stared ahead helplessly or grinned foolishly at the camera, the expressions on the faces of these men are of unmistakable lust. Ultimately, the men grab the woman in a series of tableaux vivants in which the fully-clothed actors imitate a number of pornographic poses in an armchair.In both its metaphor and its composition, Het Fregat is mercilessly to-the- point. The video can be read as a synthesis of De Gruyter & Thys’s work with video. Far more than in their other videos, in Het Fregat, the artists have eliminated the action. The actors now truly pose as window dummies – the actual meaning of the mannequin, which indeed also means ‘little man’, like a figure made of clay. The drama that takes place is again banal and mundane, and consequently predictable: the chauvinistic objectification of the female by the male. This dramatic core is in fact drawn together and summarized in a single image of the frigate, symbolizing the female sexuality that these men want to board and capture. This makes the frigate an animist object, laden with meanings in the same way as a fetish object. What in fact distinguishes Het Fregat from their previous videos is the absence of all irony. The work goes straight to its objective and leaves the viewer staggered. The sexual wink of the white socks in Het Geel van Gent is transformed into the terror of sexual violence, frozen in a series of pornographic poses that are all the more powerful because the actors remain fully clothed and as such, seem removed from any real awareness of their deeds. Lust, too, has become a mechanism, a sequence of poses that people move through, step-by-step, but with deadly seriousness.

Cool Heat

If we now look back to the figures built from wooden slats in De Gruyter & Thys’s photographs, it becomes clear that there is much more going on here than easy postmodern irony. By presenting people as display dummies whose identities can be changed by the attributes that someone sticks on them, this work questions how we understand ourselves. Who we are is how we behave, and we behave according to the conventions that the world holds before us, from our deepest psychology to mundane soap opera. What makes this fact fundamentally unheimlich is not the indeterminate character of our identity. As postmoderns, we have learned to live with that. What instils fear in us is the latent violence that is hidden in this role play and that the makers of Het Fregat have allowed to break free with such resolute power. The bland irony of their videos is in this sense also a mask. The artists comport themselves as artistic postmoderns, as prescribed by the spirit of the times. But behind this façade is a romantic consciousness of the dark urges that are masked by Apollonian irony. De Gruyter & Thys’s irony is consequently not some lukewarm standoffishness, but a cool heat, a sharp fire stoked with the skeleton of human identity.Works of Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys are shown at:- All that is Solid Melts into Air, MuHKA/ Cultural Festival Mechelen, Belgium, 21 March-21 June 2009.- screening at Kaleidoscope, Milano, Italy, 18-19 April 2009- solo exhibition at Pro Choice, Vienna, Austria, 29 May-27 June 2009