kagablog

“The Solipsist” is one of Ian Kerkhof’s most personal films. It was made in 1991 and lasts 7 minutes. It is a subversive short film, to be interpreted freely, and imagined even more freely! This film provides food for thought and recreation. It’s a counter-culture video, improvised and poetic, “organic” in the sense that all the body’s organs are targeted. Thus these organs are the generators of a new form of poetry. The images of this short film are very strong from an emotional point of view, full of the psychoanalytical symbols of a loaded universe, according to its young author. Ten years later, in 2001, Aryan Kaganof reworks some of the images of this film in order to offer us its sequel, “What is Metaphysics?”, a sequel that is far from definitive. It’s a sequel “sketched” according to the poetic and political obsessions of artists who were inspired by Japanese Seppuku, such as Yukio Mishima and Masami Akita.
“The Solipsist” is a good lesson of bodily and social morals with a spicy Japanese sauce, little known in Europe. At the beginning we see Ian Kerkhof calmly watching several TV screens which are placed one on top of the other, showing various programmes; X-rated films, polemic commentaries and so on. His eyes quickly fill with astonishment and questions which are not easily formulated through his closed lips. Irritated by the pornographic images and the hate-filled voice of the person shouting, he takes an enormous knife and ends up slashing his penis and chest in a blood bathed scene. These reworked images of the film “Solipsist” are shown again ten years later in the new “What Is Metaphysics?” accompanied by Noise music composed by Kaganof himself. In order to try and give a rough interpretation of these two films, it could be said that Kaganof swings between two branches of artistic activism: Japanese Seppuku, an extremist branch which states that “to gain a meta-physical view on the secret of life, the body has to be opened up”. (Henk Oosterling, in SMS Sanctuary, the catalogue from the eponymous exhibition at the Centraal Museum of Utrecht, 2003, p.8), and secondly, the Austrian body activism which consists of carrying actions “intended as a fierce response to the moral, intellectual and artistic repression imposed by the government which was very reluctant to look at the nation’s recent past in a straightforward way”. (from the 5th LUFF Lausanne catalogue, p.15). We wanted to make an allusion not only to the Austrian government of the 60s, but also to all those Europeans today who are tempted by the reanimation of fascism. In this way the propositions of Kaganof’s diptych can be interpreted in an ambiguous way, an ambiguity which is dear to the Master of this form of expression. The first interpretation would be slightly nationalist, as Mishima would have preferred, and the second a bit “anarchist”, like the context of the whole of modern or contemporary alternative cinema.
Kaganof presents us his perverted and narcissistic universe – “His work exposes the violence by which identities are inmediated. What we see is not an art video made fro within a political ENGAGEMENT, but a radically inmediated zapreflection OF THE HUMAN MIND”. (Henk Oosterling, op.cit., p.9). The author manages to carry out his mutilation and suicide (which is suggested rather than shown), motivated by the daily spectacle of televisions and their insignificant images, creating frustration which is psychological and not simply sexual. He was unable to watch unmoved this anti-artistic televisual flux. His suggested suicidal zapping was done without televisual control, but with electronic architecture, a décor similar to that of big businesses.
Charles Manson could also have been present in this diptych, as he was in two of the author’s other films, “Ten Monologues From the Lives of he Serial Killers” and “Supremacist Composition Number 7”, whose voice and writings prepared the ground for Kaganovian creativity. In this diptych and in most of Kaganof’s films, Manson influences the behaviour of the characters. The setting of the scene of these “crimes” liberates them from their premeditated side, in order to organise a sophisticated performance of “criminal” art. It is an art that is not practised by real criminals, but by people who are free and completely liberated from the rules of commercial police-drama television, an essential art far from the regulations of good Christian (or other) morals, based on the revolutionary spirit which resounds to the echoes of its contrasts. “Anyone who – after beholding the litres of blood, the quivering flesh and the dripping intestines accompanied by the sighing, panting, moaning and screaming which, together with the frustrated macho talk and messianic claptrap of serial killers result in the blur of noise – reaches the conclusion that Aryan Kaganof is completely hung up, is not far from the truth”. (Henk Oosterling, op.cit., p.8).

Dionysos ANDRONIS
November 17th, 2006

(translated from the french by lucy lyall grant)