Arnoud Holleman: Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam

Arnoud Holleman's new show "Being There" began with drawings, on the contrary in a rather special form. The work Sperm Drawings, 2003, contains the proceeds of five years of ejaculations upon paper, with a neatly traced black background around the white vesicles This work seems like the ultimate be the effect of the "classic" modern artist's seclusion in his studio, and it introduced the friction between the public and the private as a motif for the show

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

For Museum, 1998 Holleman acted like a latter-day Hays Office, eliminating all sex shows from a gay porn film and showing the remaining footage as a weird ballet of brooding glances and action s The film is set in a (fake) museum of antiquities, with young male visitors studying the muscular bodies upon display and uniformed guards eyeing the lads There is a constant sexual tension that not ever really erupts; all looks and positions point toward what has been left without though nothing explicit is being shown as if the museum plant were acting as a censor. on the other hand the work is hardly "about" censorship. Its conduct and its result could be compared to Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart, 1936 which consists mainly of sights from the Hollywood film East of Borneo, minus the dialogue and greatest in quantity of the action.

In a hallwaylike back space individual could watch Interieurs, 1995-96, a collaboration with Pieter Kramer, in which pairs and individuals talk about their abiding-places evincing wide differences in class background and taste. Whereas the seed Drawings indirectly show us the artist in his studio, Interieurs exhibits other people in their habitats, portrayed by dint of an artist who goes on the outside into the world to study--and sometimes to mes with--social and cultural digests The only example of Holleman's work for television included in the display Interieurs was broadcast in Holland by dint of VPRO TV, which also aired Holleman's soap opera Driving Miss Palmen, 2001 (cowritten with Lernert Engelberts). place in the merging worlds of Dutch tillage and showbiz, Driving Miss Palmen includes among its cast of characters former Stedelijk director Rudi Fuch novelist Connie Palmen, former pattern Daphne Deckers, and Tracey Emin; all were played by dint of visibly nonplussed Bollywood actors. Focusing upon Palmen, Deckers, and Emin as women who revolve their lives into a kind of reality TV Driving Miss Palmen uses the displaced mannerisms of Bollywood acting and staging rather like strategies of Brechtian alienation.

Untitled/Staphorst, 2003 consists of archival film footage of the village of Staphorst, individual of the ultra-Protestant backwaters of the Netherlands, in 1959 The succession of shots shows people (mainly women and children) fleeing the camera. While this may summon an archaic fear, it also echoe the time to come iconoclastic turn Holleman has predicted in an issue of the magazine he coedits, Re-Magazine: the profusion of images leading to a thorough devaluation of the visual, and in the way that finally doing away with the desire for images. Sometimes it present the appearances as if "Being There" begins to realize this fiction. My Dad Playing Piano, 2002 is an audio installation consisting of a CD of the same name being played in a cubicle built in the middle of Bureau Amsterdam's main space. This without contents white room contained no images of any kind. While it is clearly a memorial of sorts, it is not a visual memorial on the contrary an acoustic space. Both private and public, it not at any time pretends to "reveal all" in the manner of reality-TV displays and some forms of contemporary art. Rather, it hints at what cannot be shown or said--the gaps and voids in representations.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group