Here is another exhibition review, though a bit of an older one. It’s from about a year ago at Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art.

The King’s Gambit:
An Exhibition of New Works by Guido van der Werve

A solitary artist toils across the frozen Gulf of Finland closely pursued by an icebreaker. The ship dwarfs his tiny, meandering figure and demolishes the path behind him. This is the first image I was confronted with upon entering Prefix Gallery’s exhibition The King’s Gambit, and the rest of the show persisted with the same blend of absurdity and beauty. The show is a solo exhibition of Guido van der Werve’s new video works curated by Scott McLeod that began February 4 and will continue until April 24, 2010.

Left: Ader Bas Jan. Farewell to Faraway Friends, 1971. Photograph; Right: Guido van der Werve, Nummer Negen: the day I didn’t turn with the world, 2007. Film-still.

Guido Van der Werve is a Dutch artist who works primarily with video, however he is a classically trained pianist and has studied a variety of academic fields. His diverse training and interests manifest in this new work in sweeping piano and orchestral scores, and monologues preoccupied with mathematics and musical minutia (Video Artist Guido van der Werve Inhabits Imaginary Realities). Coexisting with this academicism is an absurd sense of humour that often took the form of slapstick in his earlier work (Higgie), but here is a more nuanced schadenfreude. These seemingly contradictory strands led Jennifer Higgie of Frieze magazine to liken Van der Werve’s work to that of fellow Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader. As Higgie points out, the ‘romantic conceptualism’ of Ader’s Farewell to Faraway Friends is comparable to works of Van der Werve’s such as Nummer Negen: the day I didn’t turn with the world. While both are conceptually complex, they are executed with a voluptuousness of form that separates them from more rigid conceptualism (Higgie). Ader’s performance works have a Chaplin-esque quality in their use of black and white film, everyday settings, silence, and especially in the artist’s melodramatic and clown-like performances. The same cannot be said of Van der Werve’s performance works, which use high-resolution, vividly colourful video, sublime locations, overwrought scores and monologues, and an air of resignation in the artist’s performances. Where Ader tended toward the theatrical, Van der Werve opts for the operatic.

Guido van der Werve, Nummer Acht: everything is going to be alright, 2007. Film-still.

The show consists of three videos and a sculptural component: Nummer Acht: Everything is going to be alright, Nummer Negen: The day I didn’t turn with the world, Nummer Twaalf: Variations on a theme: The king’s gambit accepted, the number of stars in the sky, and why a piano can’t be tuned or waiting for an earthquake and a chessboard-piano created for the latter video. The show was curated simply by McLeod, with a minimal textual element in the form of a postcard and no additional statements from the artist. Any more would be unnecessary since Van der Werve’s long monologues and frank titles offer ample guidance through the themes of his artworks. The audio was managed efficiently; the longer Nummer Twaalf utilized speakers, while the other two videos utilized wireless headphones.

Nummer Acht is the aforementioned first impression to the show, wherein the artist walks in front of a moving icebreaker. The title of the work, “everything is going to be alright,” is a comforting if not wry commentary on the video that speaks to the anxiety it evokes. Van der Werve’s minuscule silhouette looks as though it could be overtaken and crushed by the ship or trapped beneath the ice at any moment, and the thunderous cracks of the ship’s passage only intensify this suspense. However, out of this same image comes romantic beauty and absurd humour. The image recalls David and Goliath as the artist continually triumphs over the towering ship by outpacing its ruinous bow, yet the contrast between the character of the ship and the character of the figure is also an exercise in absurdity; this massive, driving icebreaker is outrun by an insignificant artist, who walks languidly a couple paces ahead of it.

Guido van der Werve, Nummer Negen: the day I didn’t turn with the world, 2007. Film-still.

The proximity of Nummer Acht and Nummer Negen in the gallery and their similar settings make the two seem like companion pieces. Nummer Negen: The day I didn’t turn with the world is documentation of a performance in which the artist stood at the north pole for 24 hours, turning slowly clockwise as the earth turned counterclockwise beneath his feet. The video consists of time-lapse photography and audio, with a rolling piano score composed by the artist. Again, Van der Werve presents a David and Goliath scenario: the artist prevails over the planet itself by refusing to follow its natural rotation. However, in order to accomplish this conceptually beautiful goal, the artist must spend 24 hours standing alone in the frigid desert of the north pole, more an absurd chore than a romantic grand gesture. Unfortunately, poor signage in the gallery undermined the core concept of Nummer Negen: The Day I Didn’t Turn With The World by omitting the location of the performance.

Upon entering the gallery, I was drawn to Nummer Negen and Nummer Acht because they function more like moving photographs than video; both consist of only one shot, and they depict scenarios, not stories that must be seen from the beginning. On the other hand, Nummer Twaalf: variations on a theme… , is a 40-minute narrative in three acts. The video is cinematic in scale, making use of 4k video resolution (which is five times larger than standard 1080p HD video), a crane that allows smooth and dynamic cinematography, and an orchestral score by the artist.

Guido van der Werve, Nummer Twaalf: Variations On a Theme: The King’s Gambit, The Number of Stars In the Sky And Why a Piano Can’t Be Tuned or Waiting for an Earthquake, 2009. Film-still from act 1: The King’s Gambit Accepted.

The first act, The King’s Gambit Accepted, revolves around a perfect game of chess which ends in a draw because both parties are left only with their kings. This game is played by the artist and the ‘author’ of the game on the chessboard-piano mentioned above, and the piano notes produced by the game offer a framework for the orchestral score. This score persists throughout the rest of the film, along with algebraic notation tracking the ongoing progress of the game in the bottom-right corner of the screen. The concept of music delimited by a chess game hearkens back to Reunion, a collaborative performance by John Cage, Marcel Duchamp et al. In this earlier incarnation of the concept, the goal was an electronic music of indeterminacy, meant to diminish the composer’s creative influence (Lowell, 36). Meanwhile, in Van der Werve’s work, the intent and effect is the exact opposite; rather than the game making the music systematic and indeterminate, the game is prewritten to perfection, and the music is romantic and orchestral.

Guido van der Werve, Nummer Twaalf..., 2009. Film-still from act 2: The Number of Stars In the Sky.

The second act, The number of stars in the sky, is a monologue by the artist on the titular task in mathematical terms. He estimates both the number of stars in the sky and the number of years that an individual would have to allot in order to count them all. Throughout the monologue, the artist is seen wandering alone through the volcanic landscape of Mount Saint Helens.

Guido van der Werve, Nummer Twaalf..., 2009. Film-still from act 3: And Why a Piano Can’t Be Tuned or Waiting for an Earthquake.

The final act, and why a piano can’t be tuned or waiting for an earthquake, contains yet another monologue, this time on the subject of Bach’s amendment to the architecture of the piano in order to eliminate the Pythagorean Comma, meaning that the piano no longer needed to be retuned between songs. However, this invention was enacted at the price of the distinct character of each key. This monologue overlies shots of the artist standing and sitting near a makeshift cabin in the San Andreas Fault, apparently waiting for an earthquake.

The theme of Nummer Twaalf (upon which each act is a variation) is somewhat elusive, though certainly an overriding theme of this work and the entire exhibition is the bathetic victory. Each act and each work seems to triumph over a formidable force (the game of chess, the stars, the system of music, an icebreaker, the rotation of the planet), but the outcome is predetermined, so the victory becomes empty, and the ‘battle’ against these forces becomes more like taking out the garbage than slaying a dragon, hence the resignation in the artist’s performance.

Prefix Gallery’s exhibition The King’s Gambit is a grand opera of bathos. Its maestro, Guido van der Werve, presents us with a world that is absurd and lonely, but one that is also shrouded in melancholic beauty. The show is conceptually taut, but also a welcome foray back into the sublime.

Works Cited:

Higgie, Jennifer. “Guido van der Werve.” Frieze Magazine April 2008. 9 Feb. 2010 <http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/guido_van_der_werve/>.

Lowell, Cross. “Reunion: John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Electronic Music and Chess.” Leonardo Music Journal 9.1 (1999): 35-42.

Van der Werve, Guido. guido van der werve. 7 Feb. 2010 <http://www.roofvogel.org/>.

Video Artist Guido van der Werve Inhabits Imaginary Realities. Akimbo, 2010. 6 Feb. 2010 <http://www.akimbo.ca/exhibitions/?id=18045>.