JULIAN HOEBER’S RECENT WORK IS...
Julian Hoeber’s recent work is primarily concerned with the objecthood of the body and its place in cinematic and photographic representation. At first glance his Killing Friends project – which incorporates a video projection, a series of photographs and two sculptures complete with blood-pumping machine – tells a straightforward story of a serial killer. By the end of the film it has developed into an examination of how the connection between the ‘flesh’ and the ‘person’ is affected by representation.Although initially it might look like it’s about death, Killing Friends is, on further examination, about what it takes to make a depiction of death. In this depiction the body is used as material for sculpture, but not just ‘carcass-as-formalism’. A grotesque killing spree is transformed into a series of mechanical movements and choreographed scenes which provoke queries about how viewers associate an actor with the role of a character within a narrative, and how the functions of subject and object may be explored, reversed or even rendered irrelevant.
To a certain extent every film draws attention to the bodies of its subjects, and the construction of character is built out of the manipulatible materials of sound and image, simply because representations of people are not people. Hoeber’s challenge lies in understanding the movement of characters that are by their nature devoid of subjectivity and using them as signs to be manipulated for the construction of meaning.
Much of his attitude towards the presentation of the body and sense of staged voyeurism is indebted to Duchamp’s Étant Donnés... – a complex assemblage he “grew up with” in Philadelphia that shaped his foremost ideas of how to make art. It was, however, Hoeber’s connection between the early video performance works of Bruce Nauman and Marina Abramovic and the exploitation gore films of Herschell Gordon Lewis that really fuelled Killing Friends. He recognised their common use of the body as an element in its own right, to be used directly as a tool or sculptural material, and as a site for producing a kind of empathy. Hoeber sees much early performance video as an examination of the structures of early film and television. Here he incorporated performance video devices into a narrative form. Although there are some similar concerns already present in the two forms, he highlighted these and toned down any camp or pop elements. By doing so he reintegrates this strand of video art history into contemporary video practices and examines the relationship between video art and the medium’s cinematic capabilities.
To avoid making a straightforward variation on slasher films, with their misogynistic male aggression towards passive women, Hoeber diffused and complicated the violence. He made violent actions highly repetitive to the extent that they are detached from meaning and can begin to be read as gestures. He also mitigated the violence through narrative, subverting the male killer’s position of power and disrupting the victim’s position of inaction. All of the victims return to life at some point in the film, and their death itself becomes an action. In fact in the making of the video ‘playing dead’ was the most directed action for all of the actors. In this way all behaviour by any character is complicit, even the act of submitting to a depiction of death and their own physical objectification.