Guido van der Werve Won’t Turn with the World
Guido van der Werve, the Dutch pianist and artist has broken ground (and you’ll understand what a witty pun this is in a second) in film in recent years, exhibiting his short experimental work at museums and galleries around the world. His films tend to be simply shot and often static, but they are a lucky antidote to Warholian epic art films and are based on such clever concepts that they open a vast world of questions and ideas.
Currently showing at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington DC is van der Werve’s 2007 film Nummer Acht: Everything Is Going To Be Alright (not, under any circumstances, to be confused with Crispin Glover’s handicapped-erotica thriller It Is Fine, Everything is Fine!!) Here is an excerpt from a shaky bootleg that barely does the film justice:
This goes on for 8 minutes, but the shot remains static: van der Werve walks, and the icebreaker ceaselessly and mechanically eats up his footprints, negating the evidence of his presence, annihilating his existence. It’s a modern read on the myth of Sisyphus, with an Arctic sea vessel standing in for his rock, but the questions the film raises are not solely of an existential nature but of a technological nature as well. The camera is somewhere is front of van der Werve, but he never seems to be getting closer or further away from the camera, the icebreaker is neither gaining on him or falling behind, and there is no dolly track or footprints of the cinematographer to give away their methods. As the film goes on for several minutes the mind relaxes, the reducing valve of logic opens a notch and the images start to change. The ship transforms into a menacing face, and van der Werve appears to be on a treadmill in front of looped rear-projection footage. Ironically, the artifice is all imagined: the smoke in mirrors is the Arctic Ocean itself, filmed on location by a steadicam operator who cleverly left the foreground fuzzy.
Van der Werve’s other works prove that non-narrative art film can’t all be desolation and loneliness. A certain element of slapstick in his film reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously:
Other projects of his capture various acts of conceptual art, returning a meteorite into space in a homemade rocket, playing piano on a raft floating in a lake, and, perhaps his most famous concept, 24 hours spent standing on the North Pole, turning against the earth’s rotation by following his own shadow.
So if the earth stood still for him for a whole day, did he age? Discuss. -CH