Johan Grimonprez (born 1962) is a
Belgian
Belgian may refer to:
* Something of, or related to, Belgium
* Belgians, people from Belgium or of Belgian descent
* Languages of Belgium, languages spoken in Belgium, such as Dutch, French, and German
*Ancient Belgian language, an extinct language ...
multimedia artist, filmmaker, and curator. He is most known for his films ''
Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y'' (1997) which the Guardian included in its articl
From Warhol to Steve McQueen: a history of video art in 30 works ''
Double Take
Double take may refer to:
Films, radio, and television
* ''Double Take'' (1998 film), a 1998 thriller
* ''Double Take'' (2001 film), a 2001 comedy
* ''Double Take'' (2009 film), a 2009 film
* Double Take (American TV series), a 2018 hidden cam ...
'' (2009) and ''Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade'' (2016), based on the book by
Andrew Feinstein
Andrew Josef Feinstein (born 16 March 1964) is a South African people, South African former politician who currently resides in the United Kingdom.
Early life and education
Andrew Feinstein was born in Cape Town to Jewish parents Josef Feinstei ...
. Grimonprez is currently developing "SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D'ETAT" about the promise of decolonisation, the hope of the non-aligned movement and the dream of self-determination.
Personal life
Grimonprez was born in 1962 in
Roeselare
Roeselare (; french: Roulers, ; West Flemish: ''Roeseloare'') is a Belgian city and municipality in the Flemish province of West Flanders. The municipality comprises the city of Roeselare proper and the towns of Beveren, Oekene and Rumbeke.
The ...
, Belgium. After studying cultural anthropology, he went on to complete his studies in photography and
mixed media
In visual art, mixed media describes artwork in which more than one medium or material has been employed.
Assemblages, collages, and sculpture are three common examples of art using different media. Materials used to create mixed media art incl ...
at
Royal Academy of Fine Arts in
Ghent
Ghent ( nl, Gent ; french: Gand ; traditional English: Gaunt) is a city and a municipality in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is the capital and largest city of the East Flanders province, and the third largest in the country, exceeded in ...
. Grimonprez received an MFA in Video & Mixed Media at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 1993, Grimonprez was accepted into
Whitney Museum
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude ...
Independent Study Program and later attended the Jan van Eyck Academy in
Maastricht
Maastricht ( , , ; li, Mestreech ; french: Maestricht ; es, Mastrique ) is a city and a municipality in the southeastern Netherlands. It is the capital and largest city of the province of Limburg. Maastricht is located on both sides of the ...
,
Netherlands
)
, anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau")
, image_map =
, map_caption =
, subdivision_type = Sovereign state
, subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands
, established_title = Before independence
, established_date = Spanish Netherl ...
. In 1993, Grimonprez worked on the series ''Besmette Stad'' for the program Ziggurat on Belgian television.
Themes
His films are characterised by a criticism of contemporary
media manipulation
Media manipulation is a series of related techniques in which partisans create an image or argument that favors their particular interests. Such tactics may include the use of logical fallacies, manipulation, outright deception (disinformation) ...
, described as: "an attempt to make sense of the wreckage wrought by history." This films "speak to the need to see history at a distance, but at the same time to speak from inside it". Other themes include the relationship between the individual and the mainstream image,
the notion of zapping as "an extreme form of poetry",
and the questioning of our
consensus reality
Consensus reality is that which is generally agreed to be reality, based on a consensus view.
The appeal to consensus arises from the idea that humans do not fully understand or agree upon the nature of knowledge or ontology, often making it unce ...
, which Grimonprez defines as: "a reality that is entangled with the stories we tell ourselves in the worldview we agree on sharing." Grimonprez claims that "
Hollywood
Hollywood usually refers to:
* Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California
* Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States
Hollywood may also refer to:
Places United States
* Hollywood District (disambiguation)
* Hollywood, ...
seems to be running ahead of reality. The world is so awash in images that we related to
9/11
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial ...
through images we had already projected out into the world. In a sense, fiction came back to haunt us as reality.
A perpetual distraction, this illusion of abundance staged by techno-magic hid the ugly face of an info-dystopia. Images of
Abu Ghraib
Abu Ghraib (; ar, أبو غريب, ''Abū Ghurayb'') is a city in the Baghdad Governorate of Iraq, located just west of Baghdad's city center, or northwest of Baghdad International Airport. It has a population of 189,000 (2003). The old road t ...
, 9/11,
swine flu
Swine influenza is an infection caused by any of several types of swine influenza viruses. Swine influenza virus (SIV) or swine-origin influenza virus (S-OIV) refers to any strain of the influenza family of viruses that is endemic in pigs. As o ...
, the
BP Gulf oil spill
The ''Deepwater Horizon'' oil spill (also referred to as the "BP oil spill") was an industrial disaster that began on 20 April 2010 off of the coast of the United States in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect, considered ...
and the economic crisis composed our new contemporary sublime." Amongst Grimonprez's influences are
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist.
An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mys ...
,
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, as well as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known bo ...
, and
Don DeLillo
Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, per ...
.
Films
''Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat''
Soundtrack to a coup d'état is about the promise of decolonisation, the hope of the non-aligned movement and the dream of self-determination. It is also about the multinational corporations working hand-in glove with the military-industrial complex to smother this very dream.
On February 16, 1961, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash a UN Security Council meeting to protest against the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime-minister of the Congo. Belgian embassies worldwide have to close their doors, as demonstrators are pelting eggs or simply setting the Missions ablaze. Belgium had drawn Congo into an international intrigue that tore the country apart in less than a month after its independence. Lumumba, like Nkrumah in Ghana and Nasser in Egypt, claimed that the riches of the land should become the riches of its people. Western powers, coveting colonial riches, took fright at the Pan-African movement that Lumumba personified. Washington, exploiting the hiatus left by the crumbling colonial empires, cooked up a paranoid cold-war narrative to smother the African dream of sovereignty. In September 1960 Congo had entered the UN world body together with 15 other newly independent African countries. As a result, the balance of the General Assembly majority vote tipped to the expanded Afro-Asian bloc. Taking advantage of the situation, Nikita Khrushchev, the shoe-banging leader of the Soviet bloc, invited all the heads of state to discuss demilitarisation and decolonisation at the forthcoming General Assembly in New York. By October 1960, racist policies of the US and the global interest in the civil rights movement gave ground for Soviet accusations of hypocrisy. The Eisenhower administration, in an attempt to restore its image, turns to a most unconventional weapon: Jazz. Louis Armstrong is dispatched as a Jazz Ambassador to the Congo, as a diversion from the unfolding CIA-backed coup against Lumumba. But as more and more jazz ambassadors perform alongside covert CIA operations, the likes of Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Melba Liston face a painful dilemma: How to represent a country where racial segregation is still law of the land?
The film was announced i
varietyand pitched a
CPH:Forum 2021
''Shadow World''
''Shadow World'' is a documentary about the international weapons trade. The film is based on Andrew Feinstein's book "The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade" (2011). Feinstein's book exposes the "parallel world of money, corruption, deceit and death" behind the trade in arms.
Key interviews include:
Jeremy Scahill
Jeremy Scahill (born October 18, 1974) is an American investigative journalist, writer, a founding editor of the online news publication ''The Intercept,'' and author of '' Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army'', which ...
,
Chris Hedges
Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American journalist, Presbyterian minister, author, and commentator.
In his early career, Hedges worked as a freelance war correspondent in Central America for ''The Christian Science Mon ...
,
Michael Hardt
Michael Hardt (born 1960) is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his book ''Empire'', which was co-written with Antonio Negri.
Hardt and Negri suggest that several forces which they see as dominat ...
,
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
among others. Grimonprez claims that "the contemporary condition of what it is to be human calls into question the relevance of politics and reality, one that has collapsed under the weight of an information overload and mass deception." To him the present political debate "has schrunk into mere fear management and paranoia suddenly seems the only sensible state of being, where it is easier to ponder the end of the world than to imagine viable political alternatives. "Shying away from getting stuck into merely critiquing social evil, I began exploring alternatives. It's indeed important to say what we don't want, but more crucial is to point at what we actually do want."
According to Grimonprez, the film not only exposes how corruption drives the global arms trade, while it often sets the stage for war, it hopes to offer also alternatives to the paradigm of greed, celebrated by social darwinism.
In her articl
When Big Screens Meet Small Screens: Deferred Homecoming in Johan Grimonprez's Shadow WorldSabine Hillen writes: Shadow World, with its sources, editing and discursive confrontations, opens up contradictory questions. In this sense, the notion of home is everything except an easily readable arena. The pleasure of a nostalgic narrative on television recalling the past is balanced by means of a historical counter-narrative. On the one hand, the affective charges of the past are limited to familiar images on television, adapted literature and essays. On the other hand, the past has no affective affinities with the present. And yet, as this article suggests, we have to keep it in mind to remember how the economic arm trade disaster started.
''Double Take''
Released in 2009, ''Double Take'' combines documentary and fictional elements. The plot, written by British novelist
Tom McCarthy Thomas McCarthy (also Tom and Tommy) may refer to:
Academia
* Thomas A. McCarthy (born 1940), American professor of philosophy
* Thomas J. McCarthy (born 1956), American professor of polymer chemistry at the University of Massachusetts
* J. Thomas ...
, centres on
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English filmmaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 featur ...
and a fictitious meeting Hitchcock has with an older version of himself during the
Cold War
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...
. Using the
allegory
As a literary device or artistic form, an allegory is a narrative or visual representation in which a character, place, or event can be interpreted to represent a hidden meaning with moral or political significance. Authors have used allegory th ...
of a sky-borne threat, Double Take charts the rise of the television in the domestic setting and with it, the ensuing commodification of fear. The five Folgers commercials for instant coffee that play throughout Double Take are standing for the commercial break of the television format as well as for the exploration of the theme that fear and murder lurks in the domestic setting. Inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges short story "25th August, 1983", it plays on the Hitchcockian/Borgesian
aphorism
An aphorism (from Greek ἀφορισμός: ''aphorismos'', denoting 'delimitation', 'distinction', and 'definition') is a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle. Aphorisms are often handed down by tra ...
that "if you should meet your double, you should kill him... Or he will kill you...”
This encounter with the double or the mirroring of Hitchcock versus Hitchcock (as Hitchcock frequently doubled himself as the storyteller in his films through his cameos), sketches out the theme of the doppelgänger- the parody of the original. This mirrors the plot of rivalry between cinema (Hitchcock the filmmaker), its television double (Hitchcock the television-maker) and the younger YouTube Hitchcock.
This
mistaken identity
Mistaken identity is a defense in criminal law which claims the actual innocence of the criminal defendant, and attempts to undermine evidence of guilt by asserting that any eyewitness to the crime incorrectly thought that they saw the defendan ...
is described by Grimonprez as "the uncanny feeling that in a situation, something, or someone looks exactly the same as another, but somehow is not, and hence is totally displaced. It creates an unease and a sense of anxiety announcing the impending disaster, but precisely because of this, reveals a glimpse of the sublime."
''Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y''
''Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y'' is an essay film that traces the history of airplane hijackings as portrayed in mainstream television. Set against a backdrop of a chronology of airline hijackings, beginning with the first documented airplane hijacking in 1931, which was immediately inscribed into the political arena from the get-go. ''Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y'' illustrates how, as hijackings got progressively more television coverage, they became more and more deadly.
The nature of live television allowed for a minute by minute update of the hijack as the situation unravelled; blurring the line between entertainment and tragedy,
For terrorists seeking to inscribe their struggle in history, the hijack devoid of the mediatized image of itself lost all of its communicative power. With the airplane always on the move between countries and borders as if in state of nowhere, the hijack came to symbolize the transgression across a violent border towards a political utopia.
"This study in pre-
Sept. 11 terrorism" is interspersed with passages from Don DeLillo's novels ''
Mao II
''Mao II'', published in 1991, is Don DeLillo's tenth novel. The book tells the story of a novelist, struggling to finish a novel, who travels to Lebanon to assist a writer being held hostage. The title is derived from a series of Andy Warhol silk ...
'' and ''
White Noise
In signal processing, white noise is a random signal having equal intensity at different frequencies, giving it a constant power spectral density. The term is used, with this or similar meanings, in many scientific and technical disciplines, ...
'', "providing a literary and philosophic anchor to the film."
Questioning the role of the writer in an image saturated society, ''Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y''s narrative is based on an imagined dialogue between a terrorist and a novelist where the writer contends that the terrorist has hijacked his role within society: "there's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory." As the plot progresses, it becomes clear that with the increasing media coverage of terrorist hijacks, this power of producing an inward societal shock has been wrestled from the writer by the terrorist. They are 'playing a
zero-sum game
Zero-sum game is a mathematical representation in game theory and economic theory of a situation which involves two sides, where the result is an advantage for one side and an equivalent loss for the other. In other words, player one's gain is e ...
' where “what the terrorists gain, novelists lose!”
By the 1990s, the individual hijackers apparently are no more, "replaced on our TV screens by stories of state-sponsored suitcase bombs". By now, the media is increasingly involved as a key player; "the images of the individual is substituted by a flow of crowds; hijacking is replaced by anonymous suitcase bombs.
..Since the eighties, the Reagan Administration started to accommodate the terrorist spectacle to veil its own dirty game in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Terrorism became merely a superficial game played through the media".
In this sense, the deeper underlying theme is that the hijackers' hijack was becoming itself hijacked by news media corporations.
The piece premiered in 1997 at the
Musée National d'Art Moderne
The Musée National d'Art Moderne (; "National Museum of Modern Art") is the national museum for modern art of France. It is located in Paris and is housed in the Centre Pompidou in the 4th arrondissement of the city. In 2021 it ranked 10th in ...
in Paris and was later screened at
documenta
''documenta'' is an exhibition of contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany.
The ''documenta'' was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultura ...
X in
Kassel
Kassel (; in Germany, spelled Cassel until 1926) is a city on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Regierungsbezirk Kassel and the district of the same name and had 201,048 inhabitants in December 2020 ...
.
The Guardian included ''Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y'' in its articl
From Warhol to Steve McQueen: a history of video art in 30 works
"Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter?"
The short documentary "Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter?" (1992) deals with the history of a remote village in the highlands of
New Guinea
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu
Hiri Motu, also known as Police Motu, Pidgin Motu, or just Hiri, is a language of Papua New Guinea, which is spoken in surrounding areas of Port Moresby (Capital of Papua New Guinea).
It is a simplified version of ...
. The videotape assembles archival footage and oral histories depicting the first encounter between the
Irian Jaya
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; id, Papua, or , historically ) is the world's second-largest island with an area of . Located in Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the wide Torres ...
people and the scientific crew, including anthropologists, of the Dutch
Star Mountains
The Star Mountains (Dutch (colonial)'': Sterrengebergte''; Indonesian'': Pegunungan Bintang'') are a mountain range in western Papua New Guinea and the eastern end of Highland Papua, Indonesia, stretching from the eastern end of Indonesia to the ...
Expedition.
The confrontation with the crew and their helictopter caused a shock that threw the worldview of the villagers upside down.
The event even entered their Sibil-tongue language; literally translated, weng means language, whilst kobar airplane.
"Kobarweng's" title is an ironic reference to a question first posed to Grimonprez by a local man named Kaiang Tapor, who, upon Grimonprez's arrival in the village of Pepera after a three-day hike, asked him where his helicopter was. The footage in the film is traversed by a running band of script, reporting observations and remarks culled from anthropologists' interviews, eye-witness reports, and the reminiscences of those highlanders who recall those moments of 'first contact' between the white intruders (
missionaries
A missionary is a member of a religious group which is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.Thomas Hale 'On Being a Mi ...
,
prospectors
Prospecting is the first stage of the geological analysis (followed by Mining engineering#Pre-mining, exploration) of a territory. It is the search for minerals, fossils, precious metals, or mineral specimens. It is also known as fossicking.
...
,
anthropologists
An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and v ...
,
adventurers
An adventure is an exciting experience or undertaking that is typically bold, sometimes risky. Adventures may be activities with danger such as traveling, exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, scuba diving, river rafting, or other extreme sp ...
) and the local inhabitants: "We never tell everything, we always keep something for the next anthropologist" they are candid enough to admit to
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.
She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard Co ...
, while another wit remarks: "We called the whites 'people of soap', but their shit smelled the same as ours."
Switching the roles of observer and observed, the relation implied in the anthropological representation is reversed: the desire of the observing anthropologist itself becomes “other”, “exotic”, an object of curiosity destabilised by the villager's questions. According to Grimonprez:
In 1994, Grimonprez showcased a five-channel installation, ''It Will Be All Right If You Come Again, Only Next Time Don't Bring Any Gear, Except a Tea Kettle...'', which expanded upon the themes of "Kobarweng". The encounter between the different groups in 1939 up to the current problems caused by neocolonialism: The province is occupied by the
Indonesian military
, founded = as the ('People's Security Forces')
, current_form =
, disbanded =
, branches =
, headquarters = Cilangkap, Jakarta
, website =
, commander-in-chief = Joko Widodo
...
and according to a
Yale University Law School
Yale Law School (Yale Law or YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824 and has been ranked as the best law school in the United States by '' U.S. News & World ...
report "there can be little doubt that the Indonesian government has engaged in a systematic pattern of acts that has resulted in harm to a substantial part of the indigenous population of
West Papua."
Amnesty International
Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says it has more than ten million members and sup ...
found that there were no effective means for people of the public could complain against the police acting in violation of
international law
International law (also known as public international law and the law of nations) is the set of rules, norms, and standards generally recognized as binding between states. It establishes normative guidelines and a common conceptual framework for ...
and standards.
Curated programs
All curated programs, in the form of a video lounge, could be seen as a media-jamming tool at the hand of an extensive collection of clips, that can be envisioned both as the joyful affirmation of a global disengagement of corporations abducting our very essence, patenting and privatizing for profit, alienating our food & bodies by creating a genetically modified variant
and the catalyst of debate.
According to Grimonprez, the participatory elements would be sometimes as simple as a hot cup of coffee. "We would never install our video-library without having cookies, the smell of coffee and the remote control present. These elements already induce a platform of conviviality, an atmosphere for chatting. You are invited to pick up the remote to zap through your own choice of videotapes, in a way to be your own curator."
''Beware! In Playing the Phantom, You Become One''
''Beware! In Playing the Phantom, You Become One'' is a videolounge based on the history of television, created in collaboration with
Herman Asselberghs. In the work, Grimonprez questioned the image of the spectator as a passive consumer
and seeks to detect the impact of images on our feelings, our knowledge and our memory.
In his opinion, the homogeneity of what the media have to offer presents a creative context in which images can consciously be read the wrong way. The boring uniformity of mainstream TV can never impose uniformity in its perception.
''Maybe the Sky is Really Green, and We’re Just Colourblind: On Zapping, Close Encounters and the Commercial Break''
This ongoing curated video-library/vlogging installation is a project on the history of the remote control and zapping in relation to the commercial break
and how zapping and channel surfing were installed as a new way to relate to the world in the 80s.
While Walter Benjamin and Sergei Eisenstein defined montage as a revolutionary tool for social analysis, MTV and CNN have surpassed this. Grimonprez said: "I saw what CNN did with war footage and then all these commercials spliced in between. I thought of the zapping as the ultimate form of poetry. It's a visual poem."
The project continues as, according to Grimonprez, zapping became useless after 9/11 as all channels were beaming the very same images of the collapsing "Towering Infernos", over and over again. No longer did the media have to keep up with reality, but rather reality was now keeping up with the media. No longer happy innocent consumers of a bygone TV era, we are said to have become both avid consumers of fear
and the protagonists of an increasing ubiquity of systems of surveillance.
Art
Grimonprez made his international debut on the art circuit at the
documenta X
documenta X was the tenth edition of documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition. It was held between 21 June and 28 September 1997 in Kassel, Germany. The artistic director was Catherine David. This was the first time a woman was ap ...
in Kassel with his ''Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y'' in 1997.
Ten years later, the first retrospective of his work, ''Johan Grimonprez - Retrospective 1992–2007,'' was exhibited at the
Pinakothek der Moderne
The Pinakothek der Moderne (, '' Pinakothek of the Modern'') is a modern art museum, situated in central Munich's ''Kunstareal''. Locals sometimes refer to it as the ''Dritte'' ("third") ''Pinakothek'' after the Old and New. It is one of the world' ...
in
Munich
Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the States of Germany, German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the List of cities in Germany by popu ...
, 2007. ''It's a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards'' followed as the first large-scale retroperspective of Grimonprez in his home country, Belgium, in the
Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst
The Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (commonly abbreviated as S.M.A.K., translated as ''City Museum for Contemporary Art'') is a relatively new museum located in Ghent, Belgium, and is renowned both for its permanent collection (Art & Languag ...
(SMAK) in Ghent, 2011–2012.
Artforum
''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notabl ...
described the exhibition as "an unfamiliar archive
..from the perception of fragments to the awareness of a common mentality, from the multiplicity of words to the emergence of a discourse".
Several artists, among Roy Villevoy, Jan Dietvorst and
Adam Curtis
Adam Curtis (born 26 May 1955) is an English documentary filmmaker.
Curtis began his career as a conventional documentary producer for the BBC throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. The release of ''Pandora's Box (British TV series), ...
, were invited to contribute to this exhibition. A prominent aspect in Grimonprez's work is the sky: "a canvas on which man has always projected his mystical aspirations, his political and economic struggles, and his poetic imaginings. They abstract spaces into which the very real histories of contemporary societies are woven".
According to Artforum, the critical dimension of Grimonprez's work follows close behind the "aesthetic of disaster and terror and the virtues of channel surfing in order to plunge the viewer into a state of genuine fascination".
Using repetition and delay, Grimonprez works towards a second glance; a double take - just like his feature-length film ''Double Take'' (2009), and "the state of confusion in which we are kept by the media machine".
Artforum states that Grimonprez "does not harangue us with denunciations but rather suggests that we reconsider the short circuits of this machine, of which we briefly catch glimpses".
''It's a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards'' also exhibited at the
Blaffer Art Museum
Blaffer Art Museum is a non-collecting contemporary art museum located in the Arts District of the University of Houston campus. Housed in the university’s Fine Arts Building, it is part of the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts. It was fo ...
in Houston, 2011
and the retrospective ''Johan Grimonprez'' exhibited in
The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, 2010.
Works
Books
*''It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards'' (Stuttgart:
Hatje Cantz
Hatje Cantz Verlag (English: Hatje Cantz Publishing) is a German book publisher specialising in photography, art, architecture and design. It was established in 1945 by Gerd Hatje[Slavoj Zizek
Slavoj may refer to:
* Karel Slavoj Amerling (1807–1884), Czech teacher, writer, and philosopher
* Slavoj Černý (born 1937), Czech former cyclist
*Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek (, ; ; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, cultu ...]
'' (contributions by Don DeLillo,
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Hans Ulrich Obrist (born 1968) is a Swiss art curator, critic, and historian of art. He is artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Obrist is the author of ''The Interview Project'', an extensive ongoing project of interviews. He is ...
, Vrääth Öhner, Argos Editions, Brussels: zap-o matik and Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2003)
*''Inflight Magazine'' (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2000)
*''...we must be over the rainbow!'' (Santiago de Compostela: CGAC and Xunta de Galicia, 1998)
*''Beware! In playing the phantom you become one'' (Johan Grimonprez & Herman Asselberghs, 1994–1998) video library. French version: ''Prends garde! A jouer au fantôme, on le devient'' (Paris: Musée National d'Art Moderne /Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997). German version: ''Vorsicht! Wer Phantom Spielt wird selbst eins'' (Kassel: Documenta X, 1997)
*''It will be all right if you come again, only next time don’t bring any gear, except a tea kettle...'' (Brussels: Les Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1994)
Published essays
*"'Maybe the Sky is Really Green, and We're Just Colourblind': On Zapping, Close Encounters and the Commercial Break", based on a text that was first published as "Remote Control. On Zapping, Close Encounters and the Commercial Break", in ''Are You Ready for TV?'', (Barcelona:
MACBA, 2010–2011)
*Asselberghs, H. & Grimonprez, J. "No Man's Land", in ''Inflight'' (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2000), 10–53, based on 'Nergensland' (Leuven: Dietsche Warande & Belfort, 1997)
Filmography
Feature films
*''Blue Orchids'' (2017), documentary
*''The Shadow World'' (2016), documentary
*''Double Take'' (2009)
*''Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y'' (1997)
Shorts
*"I may have lost forever my umbrella" (2011)
*"…because Superglue is forever" (2011), work version of ''How to Rewind Your Dog''
*"Looking for Alfred" (2005), also installation
*"The Hitchcock Castings" (2005)
*"Ron Burrage, Hitchcock Double" (2005)
*"LOST NATION, January 1999" (1999)
*"Smell the flowers while you can" (1993)
*"Well, you can't go to California, that's the first place they'll look for you" (1993)
*"Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter?" (1992)
*"Nimdol June 18, 1959" (1990)
Television
*''Besmette Stad'', produced by Ziggurat, Belgian TV
BRT
BRT may refer to:
Transportation
* Block register territory, a method for dispatching trains
* British Rail Telecommunications
* Brookhaven Rail Terminal
* Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, a former transit holding company in New York City
* Broth ...
/TV1 (1993, restored in 2007)
Multimedia
*''YouTube Me and I Tube You, On Zapping: Close Encounters and the Commercial Break'' (in association with Charlotte Léouzon for ''Are You Ready for TV?'', Barcelona: MACBA & Houston: Blaffer Art Museum & Ghent: S.M.A.K., 2010), 2-channel interactive installation and web project
*''Hitchcock didn't have a belly button: Interview with Karen Black by Johan Grimonprez'' (in co-production with Los Angeles: The Hammer Museum Residence, 2009), audio installation
*''It will be all right if you come again, only next time don't bring any gear, except a tea kettle...'' (Brussels: Les Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts & Ghent: S.M.A.K. 1994), 5-channel video installation
*''Bed'' (Deerlijk: Gemeentemuseum, 2005), interactive installation
Vlogs
*''Manipulators: Maybe the sky is really green and we're just colorblind'' (in association with Charlotte Léouzon for Ghent: ZooLogical Garden, Munich: Pinakothek der Moderne, 2006), YouTube-o-theque
*''Maybe the Sky is Really Green, and We’re Just Colourblind'' (Stockholm: Magasin 3, 2000–2002) video lounge
*''Dorothy Doesn't Live Here Anymore...'' (in co-production with Büro Friedrich, Berlin, 1997–2001) video lounge
*''Beware! In playing the phantom you become one'' (in association with Herman Asselberghs, 1994–1998) video library. French version: Prends garde! A jouer au fantôme, on le devient (Paris: Musée National d'Art Moderne /Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997). German version: Vorsicht! Wer Phantom Spielt wird selbst eins (Kassel: Documenta X, 1997)
References
Further reading
*Wood, E.
"Grimonprez's Remix" in Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo, ed. P. Schneck &
P. Schweighauser (Continuum, 2010)
*Hillen, S.
"When Big Screens Meet Small Screens: Deferred Homecoming in Johan Grimonprez's Shadow World" in Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings: Volume 5 Issue 1 (VUB Press, 2020)
External links
*
at
UbuWeb
UbuWeb is a web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.
Philosop ...
{{DEFAULTSORT:Grimonprez, Johan
1962 births
Belgian multimedia artists
Living people
Belgian contemporary artists