text by Rune Gade (2002) for the book "Avoir l 'air" published by NIFCA
‘But his wife is Danish…’
- on colonization, being colonized and Colonel
Already at the outset he urges me not to mention that his wife is Danish.That’s what they all write, he tells me: ‘But his wife is Danish’. The manycolumn inches expended on him by the Danish press are invariably spiced withthis seemingly insignificant item – behind which, for all its banality, lurksa cluster of issues that goes to the very core of his artistic practice.For what is the significance of the fact that his wife is Danish? But ofcourse…that he is one of us. Or as good as. French…yes, but only partly –not amounting to more than a charming accent, an ineradicable phonetic vestige.For when it comes down to it, he might as well be Danish – his wife is Danish,he’s one of us. A good sort.
It’s this conflict-shy Danish affability and its way of smothering any difference,of embracing, occluding and subduing anything that might jar, any incipientthreat, that Colonel would appreciate being spared this time round. His wifeis indeed Danish, but that’s beside the point. For even though his productionin all its multiple ramifications is driven by an autobiographical impetus,his wife is seldom directly involved (although sometimes she is). Rather,it has all to do with himself, with Thierry Geoffroy, alias Le Colonel, commanderof an unvanquished one-man avant-garde movement, whose agenda includes thereorientation or détournement of the very notion of art. Or, moreaccurately, it has to do with the various personae assumed by this biographicallyreal individual. Autobiography, the documentation of lived life, serves hereas a springboard for a clutch of humorous and poetic practices revolvingon the issue of identity, often starting from Colonel’s own experiences butalways in an interplay with others. Work with identity involves transmutationsand exchanges, which serve to mark differences. Certainly, Colonel’spractice subversively effects confluences by highlighting those aspects ofidentity that resist identification in terms of discrete strands in an unambiguousand perspicuous separation between one thing and another. In Geoffroy/Colonelit’s a question – yes, right down into the name – of ‘both’, rather than’either/or’, which is to say an intermingling of diverse identities, Me AgainstMe.
A pivotal issue in the treatment of notions of difference has to do withnational identity at the level of the individual. What is a Dane? What isDanishness? Colonel has executed important works in this area, latterly broughtinto sharper focus in the Danish context through the alliance of the newright-wing liberal-conservative government with the strongly xenophobic DanishPeople’s Party, a party not scrupling to invoke ‘Danishness’ as a bannerin their angst-ridden demagogic anathemas issued against ‘overseas incomers’.But what is the Danishness to which the rhetoric of patriotic national romanticismappeals? And what makes a person Danish? Again, what is a Dane? Colonel raisesthis provocative question in a suite of works whose provocativeness is nowhit diminished by the fact that it isn’t posed as a straight question butis performed, exhibiting, rather, an array of candidate answers. Characteristicfor Colonel’s method is that artistic practice takes the form of a speciesof activism, an engaged and dynamic anthropological or sociological projectplayed out in a social arena, i.e. in interaction with other people. Theaim of the exercise is not, then, the amassing of objective data, but thepower of the particular instance, which by means of interventions involvingother people little unsettling crystallizations of social practices are mediated.
I want to look Danish, I want to look like you (avoir l’air d’eux) is thename of a work from 1999. In the pathos of its sheer basicness the work thematizesthe issue of integration. Colonel accosts people in the public park KongensHave and asks if he may borrow their clothes in order to look like a ‘real’Dane. Once sartorially transformed he gets the lender of the garments totake a photo of him posing in front of the Danish flag extended across somebushes. We find him in such poses in the guises of Danish painter, Danishbusinessman, Danish student, dishy Danish girl – garbed in a diversity ofemblematic ‘costumes’ or modes of ‘national dress’ that never succeed inconcealing the obvious: that the person who, unchanged, hides behind themall remains Colonel throughout. If integration, as its etymology dictates,means making whole, drawing parts into a unity, it can hardly be said tohave succeeded here. Colonel demonstrates what ought to be obvious, but isn’t,namely that Danishness is not a question of clothes, even though clothesare one of the signals we tend to use in identifying nationality and ethnicity.
Colonel’s integration is parodic but figures as such only because it is ultimatelypredicated on the logic underpinning integration proper, responsibility forwhich – without trace of irony – is assigned to Denmark’s Minister for Integration.It is the logic that requires of the incomer that he or she identify with‘the Dane’ and by taking on the characteristics of Danes become Danish. Integration,on this definition, is synonymous with the blotting out of all difference,an alchemistic exercise that would transmute one individual into anotherwithout residue. Colonel’s seances involving sartorial switches show thatany such species of integration is a virtual nonstarter. The differencesprove all but ineliminable whatever the efforts made by the incomer to applya disguise using borrowed clothes and adopted behaviours. In Colonel’s exemplarydisplay the clothes just don’t fit – the disguises become comical throughtheir accentuation of the permanent and indelible presence of difference.This raises the question of who is exposing whom in this work. Colonel’sradical mimetic practice makes conciliatory use of exaggeration to show howidentity is not susceptible to decree, precisely because it’s not about puttingon a different set of clothes or other visual badges of Danishness, but concerns,rather, a complex psychological process, whose labyrinthine ramificationselude glib political prescription.
Posing before the vertical flag with its cross standing out like that ofa crucifix behind ‘the immigrant’, Colonel resembles the sacrificial victim,the colonized ‘alien’ who has been corporally annexed by zealots for theintegrationist cause – who, confiscating his thoughts and his entire identity,force him into the vestments of Danishness. He has been co-opted; Danishnessis his cross. And yet the most striking impression is that of Colonel asthe clown who has us laughing at our own inanity by holding up a mirror thatallows us to see ourselves with new eyes. What goes through the mind of thedisrobed Dane, finger on the button…and confronted by the active immigrant’sdisconcertingly literal appropriation of his or her image, appearance? Colonel’saspiration, the obsessive ‘I want to look like you’ seen through this lenslooks most like an alarming intrusion into the personal integrity of thepasser-by, a colonization of ‘Danishness’, an identification too far, whilenot going far enough.
Colonel works performatively using interventionist strategies, and so asfar as that goes he may indeed be considered an activist artist. But firstand foremost he is a documentarist. None of his social ‘performances’ goesundocumented and the bulk of them are clearly designed to be caught on camera. In contrast to many other artists who work with fleeting artistic forms suchas performance, Colonel does not document for the archives. His innumerablephotographs and video recordings are instead transposed into new works, destinedto achieve their autonomy in fresh contexts, and so conducing to an ever-proliferatingmise en abyme. If anything is a hallmark of Colonel’s artistic practice itis surely that instead of being finally concluded, the works are constantlysustained in movement – used and reused in yet new forms and variations.His works are forever in motion, remaining fugitive because even qua documentariesthey metamorphose still. Colonel’s singular documentary practice turns thatvery notion on its head by continuously engendering new works that feed intonew ecologies rather than aiming at conserving time, preserving the transient.
The radical transitory and hybridizing character of Colonel’s works, co-existing,moreover, with hectic levels of productivity, if not a policy of outrightexponential escalation, makes them intrinsically difficult to fix – and noless so when it’s a matter of critical appraisal. It’s part of the fluidnature of the works that they resist any ‘hemming in’ inasmuch as they themselvespossess a peculiar obstreperousness, a (in a positive sense) droll qualitywhich repels any attempt at discursive closure. We are presented with anobject that eludes control, and in that sense there obtains a deeper, conceptualresonance between working practices and work themes: if the works often thematizethe situation of expats and exiles, it could be pointed out that that samestatus of peregrinator, vagabond, is shared by the works themselves. Theyare homeless without being exiled – are simply unsettled, wheeling, free-floatingideas in fluid ecologies where they are put to work – operationalized – inever new ways. This mobility is most literally perceptible in the projectMoving Exhibition (abbreviated to ‘ME’ – as though to underscore the biographicalconnection) which throughout the years since its inception in 1988 has involveda raft of mobile ‘exhibitionists’, persons who become actively engaged inColonel’s artistic project and are the ‘bearers’ and purveyors of the messageshe seeks to communicate. Through the many subsectors of the enterprise suchas Flying Exhibition, l’impermeable and Sport Art, the strategy has demonstratedits fruitful, generative and mobilizing powers.
Colonel’s practice takes the form of scattered local offensives that fastenon a particular place, a particular moment. Over the years such site- ordiscourse-specific interventions have regularly figured as media infiltrations,with newspapers, journals and television networks more or less (in)voluntarilygiving over space to Colonel’s episodic contrivances in the form of MediatiquePost Cards or similar subtle phenomena, so that thoroughly convention-boundmass media are harnessed as conduits for singularly unconventional ideas.Most impactful to date has been his most recent series screened on one ofthe national Danish television channels, DR2. Under the captions Capitainand The Immigrant the Colonel confronted a mass audience with brief episodesor social performances prosecuted in the guise of ‘funny sociologist’ ashe calls his persona at one point. Among other episodes challenging ‘Danishness’,the series took in one that builds from the production I want to look Danish,I want to look like you (avoir l’air d’eux). But others included the developmentof a perfume devised to endow him with a distinctive Danish odour, or hislaunch of a search for the Danish notion of ‘hygge’ – that much-cherishedDanish notion of congeniality and warmth. These subtle and entertaining episodessucceed in showing how humour enables radical avant-garde strategies andbroad popular appeal to be combined. The implicit grid of art-historicalreferences – primarily to Marcel Duchamp – are an extra fillip to be relishedby the connoisseur, while in no way alienating the uninitiated. In contrastto Duchamps’ elitist irony, which perhaps, centres primarily on the internalproblems of the art institution, Colonel draws on a comedic tradition whichactively engages the audience – indeed, turning the latter into co-creatorsof art, thus making of art a social event, an encounter.
If the remark that ‘his wife is Danish’ can be said to constitute a key toColonel’s artistic practice it is not because the themes that his art repeatedlypresents us with, namely cultural encounters, are already anticipated inthe private cultural encounter represented by an intercultural marriage.Rather, it is because the remark’s discursive effect – in the public arena– marks out a kind of colonization of Colonel’s alien status and so saysa good deal about the forces he is up against in querying and challengingthe stability of identity. However, in his artistic practice it’s the otherway round, for there Colonel makes foreignness his strength, his weapon.He avails himself of the anthropologist’s detached ‘objective’ slant on thehost culture while tempering that persona’s cool neutrality with participatoryinvolvement. Colonel is, as he calls himself, a ‘professional tourist’, i.e.deliberately alien in all cultural environments. He presents an attitudeof bemusement and allows this often comically naïve puzzlement to serveas a springboard for encounters between different cultures, different identities,different people.
It’s a method which, perhaps better than any other, better for instance thanthe critical dissection of the intellectual, lays bare the second-naturedand second-naturing properties that are identified as personal features inan individual, or as national features of a people. Through the calculatedlynaïve confrontation with what is ‘alien’ in Danish culture Colonel pointsout that those features that through the unconscious national consensus getto figure as a national essence, inter alia in the form of the much-bandied‘Danishness’, are in fact a cultural construct, the product of anachronisticemotional investments in the ideology of the national state, an imaginarycommunity. So for all that it might be said that Colonel wages a form ofwar against the blunting effects of the prejudices induced by such culturalconstructs and the illusory notion of community, his strategy is never oneof didactic exposure or condemnation – rather, Colonel, the active immigrant,works through the immediacy of human contact, social processes, using aesthetico-pedagogicinitiatives. Colonel reveals to us the ‘alien’ in ourselves and gets us tolaugh at our fear of it. No mean feat.
His Danish wife’s husband is French, but forget about that, for what’s fundamentallydisturbing about Colonel’s artistic analysis of ‘Danishness’ resides notin the circumstance that he’s married into Danish culture but rather in thefact that through his personae he simultaneously insists on both markingand blurring a difference from Danish culture. The undermining of the stabilityof identity that Colonel thus engages in is by no means limited to the worksfocusing on ‘Danishness’ but pervade his entire oeuvre. With relentless consistencyColonel works in the border territory habitable only by the expat. Assumingthis marginal and yet encompassed position enables him to render visiblecertain social and cultural dynamics that would otherwise pass unobserved.Colonel’s status has this strength because it remains dubious – we don’tknow quite where we have him. He moves, as it were, between the positionsof colonized and colonizer in an attempt to illuminate the power relationsthat are played out between them. And this ‘play’ does not proceed on thedescriptive level; Colonel does not content himself with offering commentaryon cultural processes from the sidelines through a conventional work practice.On the contrary, he puts himself into play, enacts himself, operationalizeshimself in the work, in that he actively enters into the relevant culturalprocesses, lets art take the form of an encounter, a confrontation betweendifferences. It is this irenic struggle in which Le Colonel is engaged.