Introduction | Mariska van den Berg

In 2005, Lonnie van Brummelen received the Prix de Rome for the 35mm film triptych Grossraum (Borders of Europe) (2005) and the accompanying publication The Formal Trajectory. An important argument for the jury was the balance between her documentary approach and the visual quality of the work. In the end, it was Van Brummelen’s ‘painterly eye’ that was the deciding factor.¹ In its report, the jury mentions two important points of discussion that were weighed against each other in judging the work of Van Brummelen in relation to that of her competitors. The jury endorsed the artistic value of the ‘registration’, while also recognizing the implicit paradox of portraying a political subject in an aesthetic visual idiom.

Although Lonnie van Brummelen won the Prix de Rome in a personal capacity, she has collaborated intensively with Siebren de Haan since 2002, and they now present their work under both names. Together, they make film installations, write essays and organize exhibitions. In this combination of activities, a practice that is engrafted onto an often-political reality becomes apparent in a documentary approach (comprising images and text) with a sober aesthetic. Within a broader framework, the current reorientation of art to the documentary is considered a re-evaluation of the relation between art and reality. Stimulated by a renewed need for social and political engagement and the power of social expression in art, artists are exploring new forms of realism.² The ways in which artists approach social and political issues and the artistic strategies and aesthetic idioms they develop in this regard are varied, of course. Diverse practices have arisen within the present ‘documentary aesthetic’. For Van Brummelen and De Haan, this entails the formulation of a critical artistic position. Their lectures and writings reveal that they see their artistic practice as the taking of a standpoint, both in the world and in the art discourse. Their practice consists of shuttling back and forth between the domains of international politics, culture and the aesthetic space of the artwork. Exploring boundaries and strategically crossing domains forms the core of their activities.

It is against this background that the work of Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan is discussed in this book, with especial focus on the films Obstructions (2003), Grossraum, and Monument of Sugar – how to use artistic means to elude trade barriers (2007).³ Landscape, in the broadest sense of the word, plays an important role in all three works. Whereas in Van Brummelen’s earlier films the landscape still functioned as the setting for performance, the focus has gradually shifted to the landscape itself, and in particular to the barricaded and divided landscape, the obstacles within it and its increasing inaccessibility and restriction. Obstructions is a silent black-and-white film showing busy streets and intersections in Amsterdam and The Hague that have been temporarily dug up. In Grossraum, Van Brummelen and De Haan trained their camera on three border locations on the periphery of Europe at a time when its territory was being expanded while, paradoxically, its outer boundaries were being strengthened. The artists succeeded in getting the ban on taking pictures in these border areas (which in fact are military zones) temporarily lifted in order to make a tranquil film of the landscape. In Monument of Sugar, they shifted their focus from Europe’s outer border to the barrier this creates for the countries beyond it. By importing the commodity of sugar into Europe as a monument, thus calling into play the status of artworks as special goods, they managed to circumvent Europe’s trade barrier.

Both Grossraum and Monument of Sugar are comprised of documentary film sequences and a written description of the production trajectory. Grossraum includes the publication The Formal Trajectory, which among other things contains relevant correspondence with border patrol authorities about procedures for obtaining permission to shoot the film. The installation Monument of Sugar consists of two groups of sugar blocks and a film essay in which a report on the production is integrated in the film as rolling text. This narrative was also issued (in French and Chinese respectively) in printed form. The publications The Formal Trajectory and Monument en Sucre have been faithfully reproduced in this book.⁴Grossraum and Monument of Sugar both started out as a concept derived from an actual political reality, a consolidated situation to which the artists gained entrance in order to produce the work. The build-up to this and the interventions on location are just as much part of the work as the images and installations that these actions ultimately engendered.

In thinking about artistic strategies of resistance, Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan have plotted various courses by which the artwork can offer formal resistance against encapsulation as well as demarcate free space, and ultimately intervene in a political and economic world. In Autonomy as Strategy, they argue that ‘The art-work is relatively autonomous because it embodies its own, formal aesthetic laws and does not represent the worldly laws of practical use, demand and offer...’⁵ They carry this further in ‘Call of the Wild’, in which they take a stand against making new work for specific locations that have already been prepared and reserved for art by governments or international exhibition makers. In the same essay, they present their search for ways of obtaining permission to film guarded border landscapes as an artistic intervention: an intermediation by which artists themselves capture space for art.⁶

We confronted the authors of this book with the recurring questions underlying the practice of Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan: What is the critical potential of art? How far does it reach? And to what extent can an artwork intervene in the world? Tessa Giblin, Christophe Gallois and Andréa Picard were invited to take Obstructions, Grossraum and Monument of Sugar as points of departure and to interpret, examine and position them from their personal perspectives.

Tessa Giblin goes into the early films of Lonnie van Brummelen, including Run Away Films made in 1997.⁷ In Obstructions, she sees an early indication of the direction that the artists’ joint practice would later take. The film shows autonomous individuals caught in a disrupted traffic situation, in which their personal freedom of movement is limited by detours and marked-off areas. Nonetheless, the passers-by find alternative routes and inventively manage to skirt obstacles. Based on these films and on the texts that Van Brummelen and De Haan wrote together, Giblin concludes that the motivating force behind all the work is the creation of free artistic space. This acquired space is both the subject and the place of action. The continuous pursuit of autonomy, artistic integrity and resistance against encapsulation has become the contextual framework of the work. Implicit to their approach is the fact that such a free zone cannot be considered separately from institutional boundaries. By showing the parameters, they create space for contemplation and the exchange of ideas.

Christophe Gallois connects Grossraum and Monument of Sugar both to the tradition of landscape painting and the work of the German-French filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Using Cézanne’s artistic position as a point of reference, Gallois interprets the filming of the landscape in the work of Van Brummelen and De Haan as the creation of distance, which both offers space for reflection and is the foundation for artistic experiment. He analyzes how the landscape perspective in their work functions as a vehicle for contemplation of current social, political and artistic contexts. Critical reflection and artistic experiment are dual aspects of the same dynamic here. He also sees a similar dialectic in the artists’ use of text and images in the work. Following from this line of argument, and based on the concepts of ‘acting’ and ‘contemplation’, he concludes by examining the tension between the political and the artistic in the light of Rancière’s views.

Andréa Picard finally reflects on the practice of Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan in relation to that of filmmaker Joris Ivens and the philosophy of Guy Debord. Picard shows how the artists’ aesthetic choices and the way in which they approach reality and engage the viewer, form a dynamic whole, the preconditions of which are continually called into question.


_{NOTES
1 Rutger Pontzen, ‘Juryverslag Prix de Rome 2005’, in PRIXDEROME.NL 2005, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2005, p. 33.
2 Mark Nash, ‘Reality in the Age of Aesthetics’, Frieze, no. 114, April 2008, http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/reality_in_the_age_of_aesthetics.
3 Obstructions, Lonnie van Brummelen, black-and-white, 16mm, 30 minutes, 2003. The original Dutch title is Obstructies.
4 The publication Monument en Sucre includes the English text that is integrated in the film, and a translation in French.
5 ‘Autonomy as Strategy’, in: Zillions, publication by VRIZA for the exhibition series ‘Disclosures’, which appeared in tandem with Jeroen de Rijke’s exhibition in 2004. www.vriza.nl
6 ‘Call of the Wild’ (2006), in: (In)tolerance. Open, no. 10 (2006), p. 112-129.
7 Run Away Films. Lonnie van Brummelen, colour,16mm, 3 films of 1 minute each, 1997. The original Dutch title is Wegrenfilms.}