Kiwi artist ready to puzzle Aussies
Toy soldiers are the inspiration for some towering figures destined for a Melbourne exhibition, finds Ashley Crawford.
Ronnie van Hout might need to learn to say no. Not only is the New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based artist about to receive the first major solo exhibition at the new Buxton Contemporary gallery in Southbank, but he’s also been commissioned by Bendigo Art Gallery to create a work for this year’s Melbourne Art Fair in August.
‘‘These are only a couple of things I am involved in at the moment,’’ he says. ‘‘Last year was so dead that I said yes to all requests, and now I am a bit overburdened. I have a couple of other public sculptures I am working on, putting together a book, marking papers and parenting …’’
The Bendigo commission, Surrender, features two towering figures of more than 2.4 metres in postures of submission. Viewers might immediately think of the evening news and events in the Middle East. Or teenagers cowering in an American school. Or even our own submission to the barrage of violent news we are pummelled with every day. However, in a typically mischievous tactic, his forlorn figures are in fact sourced from toy soldiers, the kind regularly massacred by 6-year-olds.
Van Hout, a bold and brash multimedia artist, who combines the surreal with the social and the serious with slapstick, tends to confound viewers. (In 2016, a national news site in New Zealand called for a van Hout sculpture to be removed from the roof of the Christchurch Art Gallery building, saying visitors found it, among other things, ‘‘puzzling’’.)
Van Hout may have been a dangerous artist to commission, but Bendigo’s director, Karen Quinlan, and the Melbourne Art Fair’s director, Maree Di Pasquale, are thrilled with the result.
This is the first time the fair has partnered with a regional institution; the work will be unveiled at the fair before moving to its permanent home at Bendigo.
Quinlan says van Hout’s sculptural works are ‘‘known for their social narrative and drama’’.
Surrender is, she says ‘‘ambitious in scale and concept. The figures’ monumental scale is uncanny – especially as they are otherwise lifelike. The scale also speaks to the idea of the public monument or memorial.’’
The artist himself says ‘‘there are many ideas or thoughts that have contributed to the figures’’.
‘‘Some I can’t quite remember but, mostly seeing the original kit and responding to its content and then working out what went into my response – which is my usual way of working.’’
Asked to describe his practice, van Hout says: ‘‘I don’t see myself as having a practice. I have a workspace.
‘‘To sum up what I do in a paragraph is difficult, but I would say that I try to work things out in the best way I know how, which is to say I couldn’t really see myself doing anything different to what I do now. Thinking about stuff and making things.’’
Despite others’ interpretations, van Hout says he is, ‘‘not big on meaning and/or social commentary, so any interpretation is reliant on the spectator.
‘‘I was probably thinking about surrender in all possible ways and particularly as a submissive position in relation to power and the gestures associated with surrendering – the opening of the body and the trust and potential for shame and abuse.
‘‘We live in a culture that values winning above all and we celebrate that, but success is born on the back of failure and a surrendering figure is not a projected ‘other’, but an empty land to dominate. So in this way they cannot be read as aliens, but as the abductees surrendering to the will of the visitors, arms raised in fear and bewilderment.
‘‘I think the work has humour, but in that ‘I don’t get it’, or ‘that’s not funny’ school of anti-comedy.’’
Van Hout concludes by quoting the old Cheap Trick song, Surrender. ‘‘Mummy’s all right, daddy’s all right, they just seem a little weird/Surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away.’’
Born in 1962, van Hout retains an obsession with the Lego-style robots of his youth (his massive reclining 2014 aluminium and steel robot Dayton was installed at Monash University’s Clayton campus). Then there are his unabashed fan-boy fixations with such classic 1980s sci-fi films as John Carpenter’s The Thing and Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Blade Runner.
His video/installation work I’ve Seen Things
(2012) refers to the famous Blade Runner scene in which a replicant shoots a cop. The title is taken from the soliloquy Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer) delivers as he is dying. In the work, van Hout plays both roles, in effect shooting himself.
Alongside sci-fi and horror, cults and conspiracy run rampant in van Hout’s work. I’ve
Seen Things combines tinctures of Blade Runner with the history of the Full Gospel Mission, a cultlike religious group that was based near his childhood home in Christchurch.
In 1977, police seized more than 150 weapons from the group’s compound, run by self-styled ‘‘Bishop’’ Douglas Metcalf. To this day, van Hout remains fascinated by the outsider/insider mentality of cults and religious movements, the fear and thrill of their secretive activities.
But in Surrender, despite its being sourced from the playground, van Hout veers more closely towards gritty social commentary, to chilling effect.