Fear, Loathing and Ronnie Van Hout
Courtesy of Dominion Post - 17-09-2004

By Mark Amery

Most mid-career professional artists I know have a rigorous work ethic. That said, many have a rhythm to their working life that sees occasional intense periods of inspired artistic activity framed by periods of boredom and self-doubt.

Image: Ronnie Van Hout - a spot of needlework in the sunshine. Fear, Loathing and Ronnie Van Hout
Courtesy of Dominion Post - 17-09-2004

By Mark Amery

Most mid-career professional artists I know have a rigorous work ethic. That said, many have a rhythm to their working life that sees occasional intense periods of inspired artistic activity framed by periods of boredom and self-doubt.

Image: Ronnie Van Hout - a spot of needlework in the sunshine.These are periods that can turn an artist almost paralytic with fear - fear of the unknown, fear that their work has nothing new to say and has become a parody of its self. A fear that they have, in fact, sold out.

In this way as a portraitist artist Ronnie Van Hout is deadly accurate. While much is made of this artist's work as subversion of the self portrait, beyond all the clever constructs are emotions and ideas we keenly, personally identify with. Paralysis is often recognisable in the representations of himself Van Hout sends out into a gallery. Figures either struck dumb by boredom or paranoia, or stuck alternating between challenge to the viewer and self-deprecation. He echoes common human self-doubt. That, as we get older and more defined by our past and what we do we can start to worry about whether we really know who we are anymore. That beneath an affected persona we have become somehow emptied out.
 
 In the signature work in Van Hout's Dunedin Public Art Gallery mid-career survey exhibition I've Abandoned Me (at City Gallery Wellington until 28 November), the artist is literally sick with self-doubt. A monkey mannequin stumbles forward in pain, a pool of vomit at his feet. The suit he wears says sell-out. One of Van Hout's exhibition alter egos or stand ins, the monkey is suggestive of regression, of an art capable of being created by any chimp, and of a general monkeying around - as if the gallery were a zoo with which to entertain us with displays of freakish behaviour.
 
Through the use mannequins, disembodied heads and voices, and video screen entrapments, Ronnie Van Hout plays at being both trapped by his own past and present identities, and able to step outside of them. He explores self-image as one caught in contradictions and varied appropriated identities, in the space between our ambitions and our fears. A position susceptible to being judged, like stand-up, as simultaneously comedy and tragedy.
 
Van Hout's personae include the stand-up comedian (fighting between an audience's love and loathing), and the wannabe rock star (all ambition and three chords), but the biggest is his past self. One work places balsawood models of his childhood home and school next to each other, with Van Hout (on video) bored and restless in the interiors and a UFO hovering above. In another, UFO drawings are interspersed by unemployment records, both true and false.
 
There are works that evoke the dark, troubling suburban obsessions of a Christchurch teenager, while at the same time warping them with an adult's selfconsciousness, and art world references. In one dream, the artist visualises a UFO from childhood hovering above emblazoned with Swastika, before flicking to take off of a formalist abstract painting on the wall, which depoliticises Nazi insignia. In another work, a school reunion ad is pasted in next to clippings about the Manson murders, with a real school testimonial attached ("a likeable lad, who will do very well at any job which captures his imagination."). As the gallery fills our heads with movie and art historical references, and the soundtrack emanating from the work takes us from The Stooges to The Clean intensifies, we become increasingly aware of self-image as one formed as much by external as internal forces.
 
There's a notable number of contemporary New Zealand artists exploring identity and the self-portrait of late, the inclusion in Prospect 2004 of Van Hout, Sarah Jane Parton, Steve Carr, Shigeyuki Kihara and Yvonne Todd testament to the identity issue's currency.  As this survey demonstrates, Van Hout is both a forebear and contemporary of this work, his work having become more keenly constructed around this issue in more recent years.
 
An overt focus on the self-portrait as a construct however is also a return to a historical concern. While we've become used to a expressionist position that states 'I'm all here, this is a part of me on the wall', much prior self-portraiture presented an artist's image that says, as Van Hout does, both 'I'm here' and 'I'm not Here'. In a 17th century Rembrandt or Velasquez the part of the artist is overtly acted out. The artist appears to be giving us his all, yet at the same time gives nothing away, their ironic stance reminiscent of Van Hout's punk-inflected art persona that says - Bruce Nauman or Tony Oursler-like - 'Hey, come here' before then going, 'Nah, go away'.
 
While Van Hout's self portraits reflect a generation influenced by rock album covers, filmography and the video camera, in the 1930s in a self portrait Rita Angus was archly clothing herself like a mannequin in the cultural apparel of her time. And as a mannequin of Van Hout stares at a video of Hanging Rock in Australia in this exhibition, I'm reminded that over Albrecht Durer's shoulder through a window in his 15th century self portrait is a carefully placed patch of landscape, symbolising the artist's grander ambitions.