Eye of the Storm
Apocalypse Now? Artist Ronnie van Hout is ready when you are.
By Phillip Matthews

Ronnie van Hout arranges a hobbyist's plastic models to conjure up a cryptic scenario of` UFO invasion, military evacuation, hastily erected checkpoints and poisoned water. "- Rex Butler, in the catalogue for PreMillennial, an exhibition by Van Hout and Mike Stevenson.

The night before this interview, Ronnie van Hout dreamt of an alien encounter. The alien, in human form, had a book full of higher knowledge to pass on to humanity. "I remember thinking, 'Great, I won't have to pay my student fees. All that stuff will be suddenly irrelevant.' But he was a pretty useless alien. He wasn't very competent. He seemed more interested in partying." Wouldn't that be the worst thing: if the aliens turned out not to be superbeings?

"That's one of the contradictions about it. If they were that good, that advanced, then surely they would have accomplished their mission by now, I think we could do genetic engineering a lot quicker than they're supposedly doing it.

"For the PreMillennial catalogue we downloaded some stuff off the Internet, It's fascinating. Apparently, there's 40 different species of aliens on Earth. They had pictures of them all and what I they did and how they fitted into our society. Which ones worked for the government. Some were nastier than others. They had interviews with "Someone must just be making that stuff up. For what purpose, though?"

PreMillennial. Subtitled "Signs of Soon Coming Storm". Opening at the: Dunedin Public Art Gallery next month. It has two years to work its work up the country. The catalogue is decked out like a Watchtower tract, secret news of the apocalypse for those in the know. A conspirator's handbook, wrapped fop the: Rapture in smooth leather, the tile embossed. Inside: "A true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths. This publication is dedicated to all who seek the truth.

In these times, we are used to -he idea that the truth is secret, A paradigm of distrust, believing the opposite of what we are told, Whether it's the Bain murders or the Roswell incident, we see cover-ups, layers of conspiracy, coded lies, We haw lost the plot. Stupidity is rampant. Ronnie van Hout is the right artist for right now, "A rabid browser, his work feeds off the prevailing zeitgeist ... abject art, loser art, X-Files art," critic and curator Robert Leonard wrote.

The grand "I AM" has been scattered by scores of niggling voices: "Am I?" Van Hout would like to suggest that maybe your whole life is a cover-up. He has a prankster's eye on the storm. He knows it's not the end of the world.

You want to create a persona, something so consistent that people will be fooled, so fake that it must be real. Every choice you make reveals the person you want to be. Life is a process of becoming,

Van Hout is fascinated by how people overhaul themselves, reinvent themselves, leave old selves behind. "Who you were previously doesn't exist anymore"

An artist has to do this, because being an artist is about more than making art. It's about image.

"When I was at high school, I got really obsessed with that Warhol scene. It really affected my way of looking at things, How you react to things. You react coolly to things. You are unaffected by everything."

As Leonard has noted, van Hout has taken on identities of artists and discarded them. He has appropriated them: Warhol, Polke, McCahon, Trockel, others.

An impersonator, a covers band, a body-snatcher (they also say he does a great Elvis). "He seems to have no signature style, but the very absence of one," Rex Butler writes.

Van Hout is also a top comedian. His favourite piece of writing is Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which, when reflected from high culture across to low, becomes Beavis and Butthead or Dumb and Dumber. In his diptych "I'm with stupid, stupid's with me" (1993), two separate panels illustrate the popular T-shirt slogans. A comedy duo of one.

Comedy duos - Martin and Lewis, Vladimir and Estragon, Beavis and Butthead, the two Ronnies. He paints the oneliners, stretching them thin and making them permanent, making them banal. When jokes stop being funny, the effect is sadness. All dues must come to an end. "I go more for sadness," van Hout says.

"There's a quote I made up at high school. `What differentiates man from animals? Stand-up comedians.
Humour is about self-consciousness. Making fun of yourself implies an intelligence. Which is integral to art production as well: Humans are makers of things. "

The same concerns: the self and its relation to the world. Where you start and where you stop. The same sense of humour.
In The Unnameable, Beckett wrote, "Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know..."

In his 1996 installation, I'm OK, van Hout constructed plasticine letters that read, "Help Me, I'm in the Land of the Giants."

"When I started doing embroidery, it was the idea - I don't know if this is true or not - that in religious communities they gave young unmarried women embroidery to do. Because the devil makes work for idle hands. So you do embroidery to stop yourself thinking about other things. But the more you don't think about it, the more it comes out. You can't help yourself."

Into the Void formed in Christchurch 10 years ago. Van Hout is on vocals. It is a part-time band of artists - on lead guitar is Black Sabbath-inspired artist Jason Greg. On their self-titled album, Cliff Richard's "Devil Woman" was transmuted into whispering, creepy, walking-zombie-metal.

A sample van Hout lyric: "Drink to me 'cos I'm in the eye of a storm ..." The idea was partly to parody and partly to honour doom-chord 70s rock, with van Hout appropriating Baccanalian-rock-wild-man poses: Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison, Lux Interior. The Cramps, with their hyper hormonal B-movie badness are a favourite band; Slayer, with their corny stalk-and-slash evil, are his favourite heavy metal band. "I like heavy metal. I like it for its outsider status. I find it incredibly funny. It's so stupid. It's the most pretentious music there is. I like that. "I like the idea of it. The size of it. The themes. So over the top. Especially that Nordic stuff It's all about Vikings and ancient gods.

"Black Sabbath are pretty good, They're one of the funniest bands. You ever see that documentary about them? The Sabbath Years. Two volumes."

"Fascism is the whole key to his work, because it is precisely about being weak, about giving oneself over to charismatic images, about losing and finding oneself in whatever one finds compelling." - Robert Leonard

It has been said before that heavy metal has a fascist edge: the chants, the mass gestures, the arcane, cultish symbolism, losing oneself in something huge (Queen sieg-heiling through their "Radio Ga Ga" video...).

Higher powers. Alien superbeings. Heroic guitar soloists. Fascists with the will to remake the world. This century's most famous model-maker was Albert Speer; architect to the Nazis. Hitler would regularly visit the cleansed utopia that was soon to come, built to scale in Speer's studio. A new world (of) order.
Of course, van Hout is not a fascist - "I'm a left-wing guy"; hell, he embroiders - but perhaps he understands that, in the confusion of identities, confusion of truths, it always seen as easier to give up responsibility, become the mass. A mass whipped into shape by dreams of clean-slate purity, by grandiose plans, hoping to animate myth into reality.

"I like the idea of the dead coming to life," says van Hout, an aficionado of zombie movies. Making the inanimate animate, creating life, making peoples. Much of his recent work has been photographs of models he has built. When he began, he got a book on how to do this.

"It went on about this idea of fooling people. The aim of taking photographs of miniatures was that you could show them to someone who would believe that they were the real thing. I thought that was pretty bizarre."

In the catalogue to his photographed-model show Mephitis, van Hout wove in a story of a person receiving, and being turned an by, an obscene phone call. Leonard wrote, "The point seems to be the pleasure derived from occupying the subordinate position."

"I was brought up Catholic, but I find it very corny. The images are used too much or seen too much. They're not as contemporarily relevant.

"I think McCahon used it up. That was his territory. It's not that I reject what he does. It's just that you've got to move on. You've got to represent your own generation.

"And there's also this idea that the Bible represents meaningfulness. It's a hangover from old art."

"I was collecting alien abduction stories that happened on my birthday," van Hout says.

Van Hout has Jungian theories on aliens: ideas of projection, that which is repressed - the abject - objectifying itself. "But I don't believe in alien abduction."

Perhaps belief implies meaning and, as van Hout said in an interview with Neate in Midwest in 1994, "I want to get more and more away from meaning if I can."

"I was at art school when postmodernism started to come out. I was excited by it. It was in line with how I thought. It was like punk rock, the same kind of idea. They're quite connected - in Australia, particularly. It was seen as a fad here. They couldn't wait for it to go away. And they still resist it.

"They think that you're making bad art. Or that it's wanky."

"It's not really about one show, or one work. The shows are connected. If you put them all together, there's a theme carrying on."

Reprinted from the Listener, December 20 1997