INTERVIEW TOBIAS BERNSTRUP
Power Ekroth: During the opening days of Venice 2001, IASPIS hosted a special exhibition which is where I saw one of your performances. The event was housed in an old salt warehouse, temporarily transformed into an exhibition space by Elmgreen & Dragset. A Norwegian friend of mine, who is also an artist, stood transfixed in front of the stage, as if in a trance, completely stupefied and profoundly moved by your performance. Her reaction made me see you through her eyes, which made the experience much more powerful for me, too. When I think back on this event, several questions pop up in my mind. How do you view your performances? Is it the performative aspect that is the actual artwork, and the music, which one can buy, is a kind of by-product, or how does it work? And another, related, question: How important is the context for your performances?Tobias Bernstrup: The actual performance of the music is the work. The music has a very clear role, and form, as a bearer of something. Maybe you can think of the records as a kind of by-product, but the music can also function by itself: on a record, in your car, in an exhibition or on the dance floor, for example. And of course the context for the performance is extremely important and significant. In the beginning I thought that the type of melancholia which the white cube gives to the performance could only be created in an art space and not at all outside of it. But I was wrong. This tension and doubleness can also arise in a dark club setting.
My performances largely take place in art’s white gallery spaces, or in institutional galleries, which means that some of the “air” that is given to the work in these contexts can be transposed, together with the performance, to a dark goth club, for instance. In this way it creates an extra dimension for what would otherwise perhaps be perceived as a gig where the artist enters the stage and performs his songs, chats a bit between songs, and thanks the audience for the applause. My ambition, however, is to create a kind of distance and isolation on stage, which can reveal a type of vulnerability.
Needless to say, there is a difference between gigs, depending on the context, even though I always enter the stage from the same point of departure. However, there is an ambivalence here, and the music is rather poppy, after all, although I always write in minor keys and the lyrics are about isolation and distance. I remember a performance I did at Cassero in Bologna some years ago. When I performed my Italian song Ventisette I noticed that the entire audience of some thousand people were singing along throughout the song. Still, it was very nice and not at all like a forced sing-along.
PE: Do you often have that kind of reaction, that the audience is “sucked into” your performances and become somewhat paralysed? Maybe that’s something you aim for?
TB: Yes, that was probably one of the reasons that I started with these kinds of performances, that I felt a strong desire for my art to touch and influence the viewer – in the same way as I like to be affected by art. I don’t think there is any conflict in trying to reach the viewer on both an emotional and an intellectual level simultaneously. I rather think this is what creates good art.
PE: How would you describe your music? And your performances? Which components are most important here?
TB: I try to create a complex image, a sort of “frozen” scene, as if it were pulled out of a film, kind of. But there are no narratives here. Instead there is an atmosphere, a mood, that emerges out of the music in combination with the environment where the performance takes place, which is the most important for me. Maybe it sounds a bit woolly but I think it’s the best way of describing what I want to achieve. It involves a character wearing a costume and makeup, placed in a situation somewhere, or on a stage, and with a soundtrack. All parts of the equation are equally crucial, which is important to stress.
PE: Tell me about the sculpture you showed at Andréhn-Schiptjenko and at Göteborgs konstmuseum, entitled A.S.F.R. What is the background story for this piece?
TB: The work title, A.S.F.R., stands for Alt Sex.Fetish.Robots. It was the name of a now defunct internet newsgroup, devoted to Robot Fetishism. This phenomenon can be expressed in many ways, including imagining being with a partner who is a robot, which “ASFR-ians” practice by role play, among other things. Of course, this also touches on the idea of eroticising the statue, and I had Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs at the back of my mind, as well as the phenomenon of “Real Dolls”, hyper-realistic sex dolls that appeared some years ago.
But the idea for the sculpture was born while I was working on a performance project for the MADRE Museum in Naples last year, where my costume was a robot-like armour, tailor-made to fit my body. I made plaster casts of parts of my body. Using the plaster positives, I vacuum-pressed a costume in rigid plastic. During this process I started to think about body casts as documents of time, a documentation of one’s own body, so to speak. Then I decided to make a sculpture composed of a full-body cast of my own body. The idea was that the space should function as a stage where the viewer found him or herself in a frozen moment of a performance.
William S. Burroughs once wrote: “When you cut into the present the future leaks out.” I don’t think time is as linear as we tend to think. The “now” that I’d like to chronicle is composed of ideas from the past, the present and the future. In the performance, or the performance of a song, there is a very distinct “right now”, and a distinct experience – something is actually taking place for real. This affects the viewer in a different way compared to, for example, looking at a picture or a photograph, because that has already been produced, the action has already taken place. During the performance the viewer also becomes part of the action as it takes place.
PE: And how does that work in relation to the drawings that you also presented?
TB: The gouache sketches for the costumes came from the same idea about documentation and time spaces. I wanted to compile an overview of a longer time process, about how my performance characters have been transformed and developed over time. Some of the costumes had been worn out, so I had to recreate them in some way. Choosing painting as the technique for this endeavour felt like a logical decision, seeing that painting has a different kind of presence compared to a staged photograph. The actual painting was an interesting performative process, a kind of re-medialisation, but this time with another kind of virtuality: paint pigments on paper. The entire exhibition had a rather more analogue and craftsmanlike expression compared to my work of the last ten years. This was the result of a desire I had nourished for a long time to work with more physical materials and also because I had started to experience a sort of emptiness due to the fact that my work mainly exists as digital files on hard-drives. This time I felt a need to work differently.
PE: How did you “invent” your performance persona?
TB: My stage persona came out of an interest in cross-dressing, which was also driven and encouraged by my art, in the sense that I felt compelled to go further and develop this. I have always been very deep into personal exploration, so I understood quite early on that everything that went on in my personal world could be incorporated into my art.
PE: How would you describe your sources of inspiration, both within and outside of art?
TB: During my student years at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, I was very much inspired by Cindy Sherman and Paul McCarthy. I remember that I also liked Charles Ray and Max Book a lot when I attended a preparatory school of painting. I discovered Pierre Molinier’s photographic work some years ago while I was exploring surrealism and fetishism. I immediately felt an affinity with his images and working method – a strong identification, quite simply. There is a mysterious darkness in his images that fascinates me. His pieces function as a kind of fetishist male lesbian fantasy where he himself is the object and in some images is portrayed as a sort of hermaphrodite. He puts a twist on the whole idea of gender in a way that is similar to how I work. Nowadays, however, I’m mostly inspired by popular culture rather than art. It gives me more space for thought. I’m a big fan of sci-fi movies, such as John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York” (he is also a fantastic musician), David Cronenberg and Clive Barker’s classic “Hellraiser”. The entire video and computer game culture has also been enormously important to me, from the first Atari consoles, to computer games such as the masterworks “Doom” and “Half-Life”. Club and fetish culture is also a natural part and an inspiration for my costumes.
PE: Your costumes, do they usually have a “real” counterpart in the form of an avatar? Needless to say, I’m also thinking about the phenomenon of cosplay, which is referenced in your work Shanghai Cosplay.
TB: Yes, some costumes display explicit similarities with existing characters, but I don’t try to recreate them faithfully. Instead, they may function as ideas and inspiration. It’s more a matter of relating to a certain kind of aesthetics.
In conjunction with my solo exhibition at Duolun MoMA in Shanghai in 2006, I performed my work Shanghai Cosplay with a group of cosplayers on stage. They had worked with a specific manga, “D.Gray-man”, and their costumes were all based on existing characters from that story. My own costume, on the other hand, was a praying mantis, which I had borrowed from my video work Mantis City.
PE: Can you tell us about your work Mantis City and its background?
TB: The work was produced in conjunction with my exhibition at Duolun. For several years I had explored the artificiality of urban architecture in my interactive game-based works. I’m referring to my game reconstructions of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz and Paris’ La Defense. These artificial environments in glass, steel and repetitive façade textures seemed to me to be as synthetic as the buildings in the computer games. The city becomes an image of modernity and the future, rather than a real environment where people can live their lives. During my first visit to Shanghai I was struck by how architecture imitated fiction. Looking at the skyline of the Pudong district was like seeing a full-scale model from “Bladerunner”. That’s why I wanted to create a sort of science-fiction film where architecture was reconnected to the model format, and had a model in the scale of 1:100 made of the area. In the model I then filmed two living praying mantises that climbed about like King Kong on the tall skyscrapers to finally meet in a deadly face-off. I chose praying mantises because of their connection to Chinese culture and the tradition from the Imperial Era of fighting insects. I read several articles about police raids on illegal gambling circles where they still were doing this. In addition, the praying mantis is a fascinating animal, beautiful but horrifying, with its long, prickly pincers for arms. They eat their pray alive and can catch pray that is many times bigger than themselves.
PE: It seems as if you are inspired by all these things and subcultures, that you annex these world(s) of club and fetish culture, cosplay, cross-dressing, computer game worlds and sci-fi, and then create your very own world, which is a unique niche the components of which are integrated with one another, rather than that you, so to speak, “just” make use of the worlds. Do you agree with my description?
TB: Yes, I create my own world and I don’t regard my work as sampling or readymade recycling of subcultures where I only refer to phenomena outside of the works. The works have their own universes. They are their own subcultures.
Without being pretentious, I would rather create alternative routes to experiencing and understanding the world, understanding what it means to be human today. We are more artificial than we want to admit. It may be scary but, at the same time, it’s something that we can embrace and see as a possibility for change. Hopefully, my works will encourage others to dare to be different.
PE: The computer game culture involves an enormous amount of different things and worlds. Part of this culture is devoted to war-like situations and weapon fetishism, another part is concerned with inventing a parallel, fictitious reality, part of which has turned into a complete fantasy world. Is this something that is more relevant to you than anything else?
TB: While I was working on the project Museum Meltdown (1996–1999) with Palle Torsson, we were interested in a perspective of violence, the idea of architecture and the museum as spaces in a game context. When I then continued my own work with games, I was more interested in focusing on the idea of architecture as scenography and virtual qualities in existent urban environments. True, some of my performance characters, which are borrowed from games worlds, have been armed but then it has been more about fantasy and sci-fi themes. The weapons in the fantasy worlds I regard more like a form of props or costumes. Fantasy is often about escape. What I find interesting with sci-fi is its philosophical dimensions. It may be exciting and entertaining but at the same time it provides an opportunity to cast a critical eye on how we live today, and perhaps tomorrow.
PE: Talking of which, you took an active part in the Embassy of Piracy in Venice, another kind of collaborative project. Can you tell us a bit about it?
TB: The idea of the Embassy of Piracy was born when the artist Miltos Manetas invited the Piratbyrån (“The Pirate Bureau”) and the Pirate Bay to participate in the Venice Biennale’s first internet pavilion, curated by Jan Åman. The task of the Embassy was to represent the freedom of the internet, the pirates of the net, and to advance the Kopimi lifestyle, that is, the desire to copy and be copied. The Embassy assumed the shape of a foldable paper pyramid that could be downloaded, cut out and folded anywhere in the world.
Palle Torsson, with whom I had collaborated before, had long worked with the Piratbyrån and since I had worked with Miltos Manetas and Jan Åman several times, this was an excellent opportunity to bring all our ideas together. Together we produced an exhibition in Venice for the opening days. On site and in collaboration with the Japanese performance artist Mai Ueda, I made several performances with our song Pirates of the Internet. The mixing tracks for the song were also available for download. In this way, we received several remixes made by people all over the world. Among other things, we performed onboard one of the three pirate ships that invaded the Giardini during the opening days.
PE: To what degree are you part of the subcultures that you use in your art? And are there perhaps two audiences for your work, an art audience and an audience within the specific subculture you use – club culture, sci-fi, fantasy, gaming culture, etc? Are there codes one is not normally expected to pick up as a member of the art audience, but are only understood by someone who is well versed in the communities referred to in your work?
TB: For many years I was a “hardcore-gamer”, which was a result of my research through gaming. I visit synth, goth and fetish clubs and concerts a few times a year; perhaps not so often as I would like to, but my excuse is that I work too much. But sure, I operate on several stages simultaneously. Sometimes the audience is the same, for example a music audience with an interest in art, or vice versa. So, of course, the works may be received very differently depending on the audience and the context, but the content, the expression and the topics are essentially the same regardless of what context they exist in or are perceived in.
PE: It may sound a bit corny but for me your work both represents and deals with a powerful desire that is still, in some way, held back, like a secret passion controlled by a distance through an almost impenetrable surface, where the surface is fetishised and thus also elevated. There is an important and necessary distance between you, your characters and the viewers, which also (according to me) creates the fragility – or melancholia – that is part of bringing forth the kind of fascination and all-absorbing experience the viewers are presented with by your performances. Paradoxically, this distance becomes necessary in order to break down the distance between illusion and reality – the artificial and the natural (whatever “natural” really means), and earlier you said that we are “more artificial than we want to admit” and that this provides an opportunity for change, if we embrace it. At the same time as you cultivate this distance between the viewer and your work, there is an immensely fascinating closeness between you, your characters and your work, which of course is necessary if it is to have some urgency.
All this makes me think about how I regard the expressions of the culture in which we live – especially that of contemporary art – which also functions as a representation of our time, as an index of our world and our communities, if you wish, but that, as a viewer of the art that is created in our culture, one must keep a distance to it in order to be able to understand and embrace it. Much of this distance is created by the context in which we choose to give shape to the art: the institutions, the commercial galleries and perhaps most specifically the museums. In this way, film, literature, theatre, computer games and visual art are the most important functions in society, by the fact that culture and philosophy are “embodied”. It becomes the only meta-reality we have. By experiencing a distance to the object/the film/the screen/the book/the performance, we can also internalise its content and absorb it. Perhaps you have a final comment to this?
TB: Yes: “Long live the New Flesh!”