courtesy of Emmanuel Van der Auwera

Interview with Emmanuel Van der Auwera (EVDA) by Denis Maksimov (DM) / originally published in The Brussels Times Magazine (February 2016 issue)

Emmanuel Van der Auwera is a recent HISK graduate, and the winner of the 2015 Langui Prize awarded during the Young Belgian Artist Award exhibition. In Van der Auwera’s series of Video Sculptures, the notion of screen as window to reality is literally stripped of its flatness, symbolically revealing the underlying mechanics of the media through deconstruction by the artist’s hand. Prior to sculpting the hardware, Van der Auwera continues his extensive research of contemporary video content and identifies those he feels accurately reflect cultural currents in the flux of postmodern bizarreness. These range from all-encompassing, full of manipulative symbols messianic political events to cultural events and intimate confessional moments.

DM: Can you describe the process of making ‘video sculptures’?

EVDA: The screen, technically, composed of LED lights that lit up liquid crystal glass, two sheets of it. On the top of the screen there is an LCD filter. If you remove this filter, all you can see is a white screen - to catch the image you need to apply this filter somehow externally, for example by applying glasses with this filter. Depending on the brand of the screen the filter reacts very differently. Samsung screen is easy to tear off, takes half an hour, while Sony one takes a full day. I don’t pre-cut in advance - it’s not about creating the designed solution. I can only have a relative control over the process. In this way it reminds me of painting and drawing. I am organising it until I feel I reach sort of an equilibrium. It sometimes quite painful - right now I’m building the new sculpture and it’s Sony screen (the decision of buying which I almost now regret, for the reason given before), so the process is very complicated, kind of violent. I am shredding the LCD filter in separate pieces. I keep all of the remaining materials, this outer layers.

DM: Do you see that unpredictability of the result makes the process sort of impressionistic?

EVDA: Indeed. It’s an experiment all the time - I don’t feel control over the process of making. It’s reassuring, because it’s not an automatic gesture. There is no intention and possibility therefore of mass producing the sculptures, despite the fact that material is quite ‘industrial’ in a way. The magical in way transformation from the regular screen into the conceptual sculptural screen is done through the artistic process. There is an ambiguous border in the format of the work.

DM: Is there rituality in process?

EVDA: Yes, I always start from the around the screen with very precise cut. I quickly switch blades for cutting, depending on how the screen is reacting. There is something autopsic in it. An ambiguous border between painting and sculpture in my work is something that I’m still figuring out in the process of continuous work on the new pieces.

courtesy of Emmanuel Van der Auwera

DM: Do you have ‘the bank’ of the videos or the list of the subjects which you are choosing from?

EVDA: I don’t have a precise idea of how I put the videos and screens together, it’s quite empiric. For example with the video of President Obama first inauguration. Initially I received a lot of criticism from people that they don’t want to see this image, so embedded in reality of today. Instead of being reminded and pushed towards self-reflection, they would rather want to see some aesthetic abstract images, beautiful and completely open for the widest angles of interpretation.  

DM:  Have you ever made live performances?

EVDA: I am thinking of doing a performances again, with cutting the screen in front of the audience. The one I made where I was cutting the screen while it way playing scenes of the first night the American invasion in Iraq during the Second Gulf War, specifically the CNN cover of the intense bombing. I heard the gasp of people in the audience who didn’t realise what was happening. The tearing in Samsung was very easy and you could have heard these sounds of static electricity, those kind of broken radio waves sounds. It’s almost humanising and definitely relates to the anatomical theatre of the Renaissance, while the human body is replaced with the ‘moving pictures machine’, that is so mystified in contemporaneity.

courtesy of Emmanuel Van der Auwera

DM: How do you reflect on symbolism in your researches?

EVDA: There is sort of iconographic analysis. For example Kasimir Malevich, who was a spiritual man, was aiming to create the icon beyond representation. In my case of the white screen, the image is still there, but whiteness of the screen after the LCD layer removed and presents this cleanness of the surface. This what I connect to Suprematism of Malevich. You sort of see the magic and the awfulness of artificiality of the image which is represented to you on this screen - as soon as the top layer removed, you are confronted by bare whiteness of the surface. The image is still there - however to see it you need to apply LSD glasses.

John Carpenter’s demonstrates it interestingly in the cult movie ‘They Live’ - when the protagonist finds the box with glasses, that reveal him the nature of the control society around him. All the advertisements suddenly appear as ‘orders’ - obey, buy, consume, behave, etc. My work is the criticism of iconoclastic approach towards the everyday objects which we are surrounded with - I am bringing back the physics in the technology through the deconstruction of this ‘machine of illusion’, sort of an awful power of control over our vision of reality. Through it’s important to mention that I don’t have an ambition of patronising or teaching anyone - this is rather a critical assessment of the immensity of it’s impact on our perception of reality and everyday behaviour in modernity.