Wim Peeters,
Koen De Decker
One of Koen De Decker's older works portrays the American artist Dan Graham while asleep. The project was realised when Graham, visiting De Decker's studio, went to sleep and allowed the latter to film the event. In the front of the frame the shoes of the American video artist are situated. Graham himself is lying on the floor in the midst of one of De Decker's half-mounted works. The film lasts one hour and a half and is not edited.
Koen De Decker manipulates the video camera with a seemingly uncomplicated approach and usually allows for the things or objects to determine the 'cut' themselves. In a recent video portrait the face concerned is continually liable to change due to a variable incidence of light. The lens is out of focus. The hazily portrayed face only drops its guard at the end of the sequence when it unexpectedly answers a ringing phone.
Koen De Decker displays a semi-scientific curiosity. The atelier and the living room are his favourite fields of investigation. All objects that randomly linger there are subject to a fumbling perception. In some cases De Decker stages himself as an 'object' and directs the camera on the 'I' as if it were a third person. Like the eye searches places of support in a room or leeway, the camera glides over the objects and the space without an established dramaturgy: some things are dwelt upon others are manipulated. Thus during a short period in 1995 a superannuated VHS camera, which was focused on a television monitor, was mounted for a trial installation in De Decker's atelier. The live- connection between the camera and the monitor resulted in magical fractions, which generated a hypnotic gravitational force.
VERTIGO
During a conversation De Decker narrates the story of a house in the Brussels region where behind a deep-seated wall a garden and beyond that garden a railroad emerge in the nocturnal hinterland. The distance is immeasurable and yet close. De Decker's description of this vast depth inevitably hints at Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland:
'After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the distance, and she hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming. It was the White Rabbit returning, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other: he came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to himself as he came, 'Oh! The Duchess, the Duchess! Oh! Won't she be savage if I've kept her waiting!''
De Decker seems to hide behind an encounter between the 'gothic' and the 'clownish'. Covered in unworldly costumes and out of the world of the television screen -a world behind glass-, De Decker gives reality a box on the ears only to set himself imperviously aside while at the same time searching for possible companionship. For Alloo (2000) he dresses up with a swimming cap and a masque and films himself and the live transmission on the TV monitor in a round mirror. From behind the masque De Decker's voice reverberates. Thus Alloo delicately but yet grotesquely creates an insurmountable distance. In Draadfiguur (2000) a similar echo can be traced on a visual level. In a kaleidoscopic polyhedron a crooked little man with a wire-netted pointed cap studies the multiple projections of himself. In both works the echo transmutes the relations between fiction and reality in relay. The work abandons Plato's cave and the objects that are present there in order to focus on the rear side of things.
De Decker locates the origin of the clownish element in the encounter of knowledge and speciousness, awareness and irrationality. In view of these works a yet tender genealogy of the mind could be established, or better still, the oeuvre itself could be read as such a genesis, which goes back to the earliest cavernous paintings, ritual dances, ecstasy and masques. From these De Decker borrows the shape of the lengthened head, the horns and the spiral. They appear in baroque-like images: the skull with a pointed hat, the masked face, a swollen yellow body, which all function as an intermediary for other dimensions that surpass mere humanity.
Anno now those early icons of the ultimate reasoning are combined with the products of fiction and the entertainment business: De Decker taped an interview with a director from television. The original interview relates the tale of a mentally defective movie character. In his role the character is incapable of normal communication, but he can get into contact with nature and with children. The interview is played backwards and in the reversed soundtrack all signification is lost into an indistinct dialect. In topsy-turvy order the subtitles appear visibly as if we were dealing with a linguistic automaton. De Decker conceived a similar hybrid form of cultural autism and internalised thought for an exposition in a hotel in London. Yellow Man is an inflatable doll that makes ascending and descending movements, which are triggered by a ventilator sucking in the figurine. The doll has no openings, is made out of a bright yellow fabric and carries two soft cloth horns on its head. Yellow Man personifies 'passive presence' and finds its way to several aspects of De Decker's oeuvre: under the filing table or the margins of the installation or on a bed in a hotel room in London.
'There is of course the eye. Filling the whole field. The hood slowly down. Or up if down to begin. The globe. All pupil. Staring up. Hooded. Bared. Hooded again. Bared again.'
In another dark or in the same another devising it all for company. This at first sight seems clear. But as the eye dwells it grows obscure. Indeed the longer the eye dwells the obscurer it grows. Till the eye closes and feed from pore the mind inquires, What does this mean? What finally does this mean that at first sight seemed clear? Till it the mind too closes as it were. As the window might close of a dark empty room. The single window giving out on outer dark. Then nothing more. No. Unhappily no. Pangs of faint light and stirrings still. Unformulable gropings of the mind. Unstillable.
Samuel Becket, Company, John Calder, London 1980
