It is dark. Only a fluorescent lamp flickers irregularly, making its characteristic buzzing noise in the vast echo chamber of a menacing concrete building. A group of young men with shoulder bags stand as if transfixed in front of a huge turbine. They listen intently, then delve into their bags, put on protective clothing and masks and climb down deeper into the catacombs of the service area that surrounds them.
Sebastian Weise‘s documentary film Exile (2020) is an observation made among a group of graffiti spray painters in Vienna that was recorded over several nights in the summer of 2019. The title, which refers to self-chosen, inner exile, stands for the lifestyle of the protagonists, who lead a double life vis-à-vis their friends, partners, and family. For their nocturnal hobby involves committing punishable offences. It’s the only reason they’re here tonight, driven by the urge to go all out, and by the fear of falling into the clutches of security guards and law enforcement agencies in the process. The film accompanies the group as they gain access to an underground labyrinth of railway sidings, ventilation shafts, and maintenance facilities, and as they advance cautiously but nimbly into ever new parts of the building.
Only slowly and hesitantly individual, synthetic surfaces emerge on the audio level from the ambient noises of the engine rooms. At the same time the handheld camera is manoeuvred so calmly and deliberately that one might almost be prepared to question whether the whole action is actually secret. Yet this impression does not last for long, for already in the next image the camera and the actors hide out under the siding while an employee of the transport services, unaware that he is being observed, walks past the intruders. In the last third of the film the group does go back to spraying – underlaid by intoxicating arpeggios from an Alex.Do’s soundtrack – until the cans are empty, and while his mates are already lying in wait near the exit, ready to flee, one of the actors decides to tackle the interiors of the carriage and of the engine driver’s compartment with a fat cap. This burst of energy on the part of the protagonists also infects the camera and editing: Everything now starts to move faster – left, right, left, POV, let’s scram, then the camera lurches – a blurred floodlight, the sound of hectic steps on the gravel of the track bed and the sound surfaces suddenly pitch down as well, the screen goes pitch black, and the closing credits appear.
Incidentally, one almost never gets to see spray-painted underground railway cars in Vienna. They are separated out from the rest beforehand and sent to be cleaned. The spray painters are generally not granted a public view of their efforts. In Exile, too, we are not presented with completed work. This is not what it all seems to be about, but rather about the action per se and about the thrill that is obviously one of the motives of the actors. When it comes to graffiti, every conceivable sensationally brazen and reckless action has already been captured on film and can be publicly viewed on the relevant channels even before the paint has had time to dry completely. Sebastian Weise’s film has practically nothing in common with this type of graffiti videos. Rather, it shows precisely what is left out in the self-representations of the spray-painting scene. It is up close to the figures which despite their toughness and aplomb occasionally appear insecure and fragile when they venture into the uncertainty of dark spaces. Here, the viewer is not only embedded in what is happening, he is a functioning member of the committed circle of wordlessly communicating actors and must have the full confidence of his accomplices. The particular closeness inscribed in the film comes at a price for the author and artist. For he has “promised the protagonists” not to show the film publicly “until possible legal claims have become statute-barred.”
Sebastian Weise anchors these underlying conditions in the concept of his work Exile and makes the selected viewers accessories and accomplices of his artistic action. For in order to present his work he has rented a unit in a Berlin self-storage facility and smuggled in the complete screening equipment in a wooden shipping crate, like a Trojan horse. This makes sense on several levels at once: First and foremost, the artist thus retains control over the audience. Inside the shipping crate spectators find a small cinema fitted out with velour carpeting. The film can be viewed with headphones on a rear projection screen, and the cramped seating more or less corresponds to the spatial conditions in the underground railway shaft through which the protagonists in the film have to fight their way. Above all, however, by renting a unit in a storage facility as his exhibition space, the artist makes the same claim to space as that with which the graffiti sprayers he portrayed set off on their campaign. You fall back parasitically on a commercial infrastructure and find – thanks to the painstaking preliminary work of scouting out the land – gaps in a system that at first glance appears to be completely regulated, controlled, and supervised. For the visitors who together with Sebastian Weise walk down the corridors of the storage facility to the sound of unobtrusive radio music, this is an almost theatrical situation. You want to behave unobtrusively, perhaps even try to act, in front of the countless surveillance cameras, as if you were here on some official or private assignment. These are performative considerations that are nothing new to the artistic practice of Sebastian Weise.
Bodies, camera, and space are the elements of his work. That is why two short, reduced video pieces, the two portrait-mode videos Happy End (2017) and Boy Next Door (2018), deserve special attention. Here, his artistic methods can be seen as though on an exoskeleton. He is interested in a performative form of video art – video performance, which has its own laws and can be clearly distinguished from the genre of performance art on the one hand, and of film on the other. In contrast to a live performance that is documented as a video, the recording medium here is an integral part of the concept, and the processing of the material in the editing programme is taken into account from the very beginning. Recording therefore does not serve as a mere reference for the actual performance, which is uniquely unrepeatable. On the other hand, the actions that are performed before the camera are also not a spectacle whose aim is the representation of a process, but rather follow rules that are freely determined by the artists.
In the case of Happy End these operating instructions may be summed up as follows: A performer points the camera of his mobile phone at himself with his outstretched arm and carries out a kind of progression run. He keeps increasing the frequency of his footsteps and of his breathing up to the point when he reaches the limit of his physical endurance and collapses.
With whom or what is the performer competing? It is the recording medium, the recording of the image and sound itself whose characteristics are being put to the test here: To the same extent as the body is increasingly being brought to its breaking point and the performer’s laboured breathing announces his impending collapse, the medium too breaks down under the demands of the recording situation and fails to depict adequately what is going on. Instead, compression artifacts and stabilisation faults are revealed. While the sound comes thick and fast, disappears and erupts in violent bursts, on the pictorial level there are distortions that become more and more abstract and that soon turn the performer’s features into a monstrous grimace. The video ends abruptly at the moment of the greatest possible abstraction in image and sound, and presumably with the physical collapse of the protagonist.
It is not only performance art, but the medium of film as well that serves as a reference for the art form of video performance. This becomes particularly clear when we look at the video Boy Next Door (2018). A favourite image in film jargon is an invisible fourth wall through which the camera looks at what is happening, and which separates the spectators from the action that is being portrayed. Boy Next Door can be read as a critical look at the paradigm of the fourth wall:
The performer does not simply act in front of the camera, but rather with it, turns toward or away from it ostentatiously and declaims the variations of his personal mantra in all four directions: “I don’t know! you know! (It’s) like!” It feels as though the author got a hold of the transcript of an everyday conversation and simply underlined the filler words and empty phrases which now in constant repetition, due to the changing intonation and facial expressions of the actor, acquire hints of new meaning. “You know, but I, I don’t know…” Suddenly the speaker straightens up and runs unchecked into a wall from which he rebounds hard and painfully. Did he run in the wrong direction? Or are all walls equally impenetrable and does the attempt at direct communication also ultimately remain trapped within the boundaries of the medium? Sebastian Weise uses the recordings of his performance as video footage. He decimates it, breaks up its chronological flow and gives it rhythm in such a way that a new continuum, a new context is created.
The very choice of the format 9 x 16, one found in most mobile devices, shows his interest in contemporary forms of expression. This is also confirmed in the case of Boy Next Door, mentioned above, whose movement patterns look like swipe gestures from a popular dating app transferred to the upper part of the body. People consider the phone to be a constant companion, a mobile storage space for ideas, and a device that is privy to one’s personal habitus. This is obviously demonstrated in the two textual works Untitled (2020) and Untitled (ein bisschen ambiente und ein bisschen ambition) (2020). Here Sebastian Weise uses the word suggestions and autocorrect of his iPhone as suppliers of keywords for lyrical experiments that at the same time attest to the history of his private entertainment. However, this reference to current events is not about making something more accessible, easier to share and to consume. For, most importantly, Sebastian Weise’s works are also always installations that are tailored to a specific spatial context and belong only there, whether in a gallery space, in public transport, or behind the doors of a self-storage unit. They occupy niches, confront, challenge, and get their viewers to assume uncomfortable postures. Above all, they hit the mark because, although they address weighty topics, they don’t always take themselves too seriously.
It is dark. Only a fluorescent lamp flickers irregularly, making its characteristic buzzing noise in the vast echo chamber of a menacing concrete building. A group of young men with shoulder bags stand as if transfixed in front of a huge turbine. They listen intently, then delve into their bags, put on protective clothing and masks and climb down deeper into the catacombs of the service area that surrounds them.
Sebastian Weise‘s documentary film Exile (2020) is an observation made among a group of graffiti spray painters in Vienna that was recorded over several nights in the summer of 2019. The title, which refers to self-chosen, inner exile, stands for the lifestyle of the protagonists, who lead a double life vis-à-vis their friends, partners, and family. For their nocturnal hobby involves committing punishable offences. It’s the only reason they’re here tonight, driven by the urge to go all out, and by the fear of falling into the clutches of security guards and law enforcement agencies in the process. The film accompanies the group as they gain access to an underground labyrinth of railway sidings, ventilation shafts, and maintenance facilities, and as they advance cautiously but nimbly into ever new parts of the building.
Only slowly and hesitantly individual, synthetic surfaces emerge on the audio level from the ambient noises of the engine rooms. At the same time the handheld camera is manoeuvred so calmly and deliberately that one might almost be prepared to question whether the whole action is actually secret. Yet this impression does not last for long, for already in the next image the camera and the actors hide out under the siding while an employee of the transport services, unaware that he is being observed, walks past the intruders. In the last third of the film the group does go back to spraying – underlaid by intoxicating arpeggios from an Alex.Do’s soundtrack – until the cans are empty, and while his mates are already lying in wait near the exit, ready to flee, one of the actors decides to tackle the interiors of the carriage and of the engine driver’s compartment with a fat cap. This burst of energy on the part of the protagonists also infects the camera and editing: Everything now starts to move faster – left, right, left, POV, let’s scram, then the camera lurches – a blurred floodlight, the sound of hectic steps on the gravel of the track bed and the sound surfaces suddenly pitch down as well, the screen goes pitch black, and the closing credits appear.
Incidentally, one almost never gets to see spray-painted underground railway cars in Vienna. They are separated out from the rest beforehand and sent to be cleaned. The spray painters are generally not granted a public view of their efforts. In Exile, too, we are not presented with completed work. This is not what it all seems to be about, but rather about the action per se and about the thrill that is obviously one of the motives of the actors. When it comes to graffiti, every conceivable sensationally brazen and reckless action has already been captured on film and can be publicly viewed on the relevant channels even before the paint has had time to dry completely. Sebastian Weise’s film has practically nothing in common with this type of graffiti videos. Rather, it shows precisely what is left out in the self-representations of the spray-painting scene. It is up close to the figures which despite their toughness and aplomb occasionally appear insecure and fragile when they venture into the uncertainty of dark spaces. Here, the viewer is not only embedded in what is happening, he is a functioning member of the committed circle of wordlessly communicating actors and must have the full confidence of his accomplices. The particular closeness inscribed in the film comes at a price for the author and artist. For he has “promised the protagonists” not to show the film publicly “until possible legal claims have become statute-barred.”
Sebastian Weise anchors these underlying conditions in the concept of his work Exile and makes the selected viewers accessories and accomplices of his artistic action. For in order to present his work he has rented a unit in a Berlin self-storage facility and smuggled in the complete screening equipment in a wooden shipping crate, like a Trojan horse. This makes sense on several levels at once: First and foremost, the artist thus retains control over the audience. Inside the shipping crate spectators find a small cinema fitted out with velour carpeting. The film can be viewed with headphones on a rear projection screen, and the cramped seating more or less corresponds to the spatial conditions in the underground railway shaft through which the protagonists in the film have to fight their way. Above all, however, by renting a unit in a storage facility as his exhibition space, the artist makes the same claim to space as that with which the graffiti sprayers he portrayed set off on their campaign. You fall back parasitically on a commercial infrastructure and find – thanks to the painstaking preliminary work of scouting out the land – gaps in a system that at first glance appears to be completely regulated, controlled, and supervised. For the visitors who together with Sebastian Weise walk down the corridors of the storage facility to the sound of unobtrusive radio music, this is an almost theatrical situation. You want to behave unobtrusively, perhaps even try to act, in front of the countless surveillance cameras, as if you were here on some official or private assignment. These are performative considerations that are nothing new to the artistic practice of Sebastian Weise.
Bodies, camera, and space are the elements of his work. That is why two short, reduced video pieces, the two portrait-mode videos
Happy End (2017) and Boy Next Door (2018), deserve special attention. Here, his artistic methods can be seen as though on an exoskeleton. He is interested in a performative form of
video art – video performance, which has its own laws and can be clearly distinguished from the genre of performance art on the one hand, and of film on the other. In contrast to a live performance that is documented as a video, the recording medium here is an integral part of the concept, and the processing of the material in the editing programme is taken into account from the very beginning. Recording therefore does not serve as a mere reference for the actual performance, which is uniquely unrepeatable. On the other hand, the actions that are performed before the camera are also not a spectacle whose aim is the representation of a process, but rather follow rules that are freely determined by the artists.
In the case of Happy End these operating instructions may be summed up as follows: A performer points the camera of his mobile phone at himself with his outstretched arm and carries out a kind of progression run. He keeps increasing the frequency of his footsteps and of his breathing up to the point when he reaches the limit of his physical endurance and collapses.
With whom or what is the performer competing? It is the recording medium, the recording of the image and sound itself whose characteristics are being put to the test here: To the same extent as the body is increasingly being brought to its breaking point and the performer’s laboured breathing announces his impending collapse, the medium too breaks down under the demands of the recording situation and fails to depict adequately what is going on. Instead, compression artifacts and stabilisation faults are revealed. While the sound comes thick and fast, disappears and erupts in violent bursts, on the pictorial level there are distortions that become more and more abstract and that soon turn the performer’s features into a monstrous grimace. The video ends abruptly at the moment of the greatest possible abstraction in image and sound, and presumably with the physical collapse of the protagonist.
It is not only performance art, but the medium of film as well that serves as a reference for the art form of video performance. This becomes particularly clear when we look at the video Boy Next Door (2018). A favourite image in film jargon is an invisible fourth wall through which the camera looks at what is happening, and which separates the spectators from the action that is being portrayed.
Boy Next Door can be read as a critical look at the paradigm of the fourth wall:
The performer does not simply act in front of the camera, but rather with it, turns toward or away from it ostentatiously and declaims the variations of his personal mantra in all four directions: “I don’t know! you know! (It’s) like!” It feels as though the author got a hold of the transcript of an everyday conversation and simply underlined the filler words and empty phrases which now in constant repetition, due to the changing intonation and facial expressions of the actor, acquire hints of new meaning. “You know, but I, I don’t know…” Suddenly the speaker straightens up and runs unchecked into a wall from which he rebounds hard and painfully. Did he run in the wrong direction? Or are all walls equally impenetrable and does the attempt at direct communication also ultimately remain trapped within the boundaries of the medium? Sebastian Weise uses the recordings of his performance as video footage. He decimates it, breaks up its chronological flow and gives it rhythm in such a way that a new continuum, a new context is created.
The very choice of the format 9 x 16, one found in most mobile devices, shows his interest in contemporary forms of expression. This is also confirmed in the case of Boy Next Door, mentioned above, whose movement patterns look like swipe gestures from a popular dating app transferred to the upper part of the body. People consider the phone to be a constant companion, a mobile storage space for ideas, and a device that is privy to one’s personal habitus. This is obviously demonstrated in the two textual works Untitled (2020) and Untitled (ein bisschen ambiente und ein bisschen ambition) (2020). Here Sebastian Weise uses the word suggestions and autocorrect of his iPhone as suppliers of keywords for lyrical experiments that at the same time attest to the history of his private entertainment. However, this reference to current events is not about making something more accessible, easier to share and to consume. For, most importantly, Sebastian Weise’s works are also always installations that are tailored to a specific spatial context and belong only there, whether in a gallery space, in public transport, or behind the doors of a self-storage unit. They occupy niches, confront, challenge, and get their viewers to assume uncomfortable postures. Above all, they hit the mark because, although they address weighty topics, they don’t always take themselves too seriously.
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