Window Display

It is not unintentional, perhaps, that my first glimpse of Rutger Schrijnemakers is through the large plate glass window of a café as I run to shelter from the Parisian rain. His eyes have been scanning the boulevard, and although I doubt he recognises me, I sense them following as I duck under the awning and shake my umbrella, then push open the main swing door.

“I’m so sorry I’m late.” I turn and turn again to apologise to the patrons I’m disturbing with the rainwater sloshing off my coat. I have no idea where to put the umbrella. My hair is a mess.

“No worries. I had no intention of leaving while it rains so.”

“Thank you.”

“Please. I have saved you a seat here.”

“Thank you.”

He sits patiently, creasing his face slightly in a polite smile, fully under control. He looks like a man who wants to be looked at. His hands are neatly placed together in front of his espresso, the cuffs of his shirt exposed a perfect distance from the sleeves of his tweed jacket. His poise is severe, shoulders pulled back and head almost arrogantly aloft, the hair perfectly balanced on his head and the moustache jutting upwards with the confidence of his expression.

“No trouble. Please sit down.”

“Thank you.”

Schrijnemakers spent the early part of his career being someone to look at. He has been a model, briefly, and says he enjoyed the attention but soon tired of being used to promote consumerism. He was young, but this was before his wild phase. Perhaps it triggered his wild phase.

“I am pleased to meet you.”

It is a long journey across to the coat stand and back, and I almost slip on the vast river system I have created on the tiles of the café floor. I regain my balance by grasping onto the back of the chair that Rutger has moved out for me.

“Again, thank you.”

He taps the side of his cup, and eventually a waiter arrives and takes my order. I move back the damp strands of hair that are leaching a cold grey liquid onto my shoulders. The window just in front of us has begun to cloud over with condensation, and very quickly the street outside becomes just a blur of umbrellas and frenetic steps.

“I hope you are not too cold.”

“No.”

“Let us talk.”

The modelling phase started out as a distraction for a good-looking Dutch boy from a fairly well-off family. One of the self-propagated legends has it that he was spotted by a talent scout sitting outside a brown café in his home town of Amsterdam, enjoying a smoke beside the canal on his own. Without much else to do, he acquiesced to the photographer’s suggestions that he pose for a few headshots, and later joined the agency without much thought. The gruelling work of providing consumerism’s stern self-satisfaction and unattainable beauty soon angered him, and awoke a critical voice that has guided much of his subsequent work.

“I would not have done anything that followed without the modelling. That was a moment of youthful vanity, but it exposed me to the world at the just the right moment. Before that, I had not many preconceptions of the way the world works. Conspiracy theories, you might say. I was innocent, and what took its place was an insight into the organised frenzy of capitalism, of making people unhappy to make them buy things. I had good looks, and these were used to make others dissatisfied with themselves, with their lives. As we know, only buying things can make you feel better.

“Before too long, I had enough. At school, I had been a slow learner. I was not a very academic pupil, but I was not stupid. It’s just that things took a while to sink in. The practical education of the world made its impact far more quickly, however. The people I had to perform for, the people who were my fellow models, they were so desperate and so visibly broken. I suppose I was sensitive, or too impressionable.”

He laughs. It is a petite, feminine laugh that seems to surprise him. I hug my chocolat chaud as a deep shiver threatens to rattle me out of the chair.

“I was lucky I was not famous, that I was not a successful model. In this case, I would probably have accepted the world. To be successful you must accept the methods and meaning of that success. But I was just being used, and instead this just hatched an intense dissatisfaction. At first, this pleased my parents because I left the modelling career. They were disgusted by the vanity and vacuity. But then they worried about where I might go next.

“My father was a tram driver in Amsterdam. It was a good job for him, as it was relatively predictable and routine. He had a very strong fondness for the city, and to spend each day exploring it was a treat for him. They were liberal people, they were progressive, but they also believed in work, in the importance of work for an individual’s self-worth. And in responsibility, in one’s duties to others, a social conscience. My father was on the works council at Gemeentelijk Vervoerbedrijf for many years, representing his colleagues. He was respected. He had self-respect. Some of this must have rubbed off, I guess. I shared his disgust with the culture that required models to promote it, to pose for its vacant purpose. I think at this point in my life, I was looking for a meaning.”

Rutger means this to be a laughter line, perhaps, and awaits my polite response. Instead I am worried about the two waiters who are crisscrossing the dangerous lake I have created on the café floor without any consideration of risk.

“By 1994 the socialist party had its first MPs, and I started to talk with students in the city and was a little involved with Offensief. I didn’t see the similarity between politics and modelling at the start. I thought this was a serious route to enlightenment, you know. A lot of ideas, it can be very exciting. You sit around smoking, you sit around intending to change the world. This is an energising proposition. You quickly become very opinionated and probably quite unpleasant. You are prone to preaching, and not being afraid to tell people what is best for them. You really believe you know what is best for them.

“Like a vegetarian toying with veganism, I was drawn to the extremism of anarchy. There’s that feeling of purity, otherwise you’re giving in to compromise. Obviously, we are faced with different kinds of extremism these days, but back then I felt I was being pulled towards an anarchic spirit that was fueling the anti-globalisation movement. This was in the mid to late 1990s, I was working in cafés and talking ideas, and all of a sudden I was in America like it was really happening. The Battle of Seattle. I smashed a Starbucks window. It was a huge movement, a huge wave that was carrying a lot of people along. There as such energy and so much anger. This was a couple of months after I’d tried to break into the Big Brother house, the first one. I drove down to Almere and tried to get through to the inmates, but I lost my nerve. Around this time a lot of people were worried about the experimental nature of the programme, but it offended my beliefs at the time that people could be cajoled into this celebration of Orwell’s nightmare vision. That people could be so motivated by nothing other that fame. Obviously, this was absurd naivety.”

Finally it happens. There is a loud crash and ouch and the immediate tinkling of broken cups settling on the floor. A waiter has slipped and fallen and dropped everything. Tables are moved and apologies offered. There is fast movement back and forth behind the bar. Rutger sees my attention has wandered.

“Jantine?”

“I am so sorry.”

“No, my apologies. The interview format is quite predictable. I no longer amuse myself in the retelling of these facts of life. And I have bored you.”

“Not at all.”

“Maybe we should go elsewhere. We could walk, now the downpour is relenting. Anyhow, I have something to show you.” Rutger stands, rising from his chair with military exactness. He waits for me to pull my notes together, patiently observing the nervous uncertainty of my movements. We leave the café and walk along Boulevard Saint-Michel. It is not long before the rain ceases altogether. Our pace relaxes. Rutger begins to talk again.

Outside another café he explains how he was inspired by the street photography of Robert Doisneau, especially the famous 1950 image Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville. During his modelling years, the photography had been so uncomfortably staged. During his political flirtation, it seemed there was the same opportunism of image-making, of trying to create an impression rather than reveal the reality of a situation. Everything in his youth so far had been artificial, a surface-deep effort at pretence that lacked any spontaneity or real life. Even the protests he was involved in seemed to be more about acting out the ideal of youthful revolt rather than a meaningful demonstration. The more he sought out some kind of authenticity as he matured, so it seemed that the world was a stage-managed avoidance of reality.

He picked up a camera and for a few years, while still in Amsterdam, attempted street photography, trying to capture something of the spontaneity of the city, the real lives of the residents and tourists. But he was dissatisfied. There remained something artificial, he thought, in the apparently candid moments he captured. There was still an element of performance, perhaps, even in the banal interactions of everyday life.

Finally, things fell into place when he decided to try to capture performance rather than spontaneity. This happened by chance while he was idly photographing the city one night, wandering around the red light district. The window displays seemed so much more real, so intensely alive than anything he had been able to capture until that point. The garishly lit women in the red windows convinced him that performance revealed more truth than the inane everyday actions of city dwellers and hapless tourists. The motive and lure of the sex workers was so direct, so overt. Their fake interest in passersby and pretend attempts at seduction, repeated so often that they were almost mechanical, seemed to be such an explicit revelation of the reality of their situation. The performance was an honest performance, rather than attempting to conceal another motive, as our everyday performances do. Nothing was hidden from Schrijnemakers’ lens.

Geslacht (2002) was the result of this work, a short exhibition held at Gerhard Hofland that created a small ripple of notoriety but didn’t really excite anyone. There had been pictures of the sex workers before, but Schrijnemakers’ treatment attempted an almost forensic level of detail. Critics still connected the images with his previous modelling work and subsequent interest in politics. They saw it as an examination of the parallels between his work as a model and the work of the prostitutes, or interpreted it as a political work, an indictment of the way capitalism makes prostitutes of all workers.

Stront eters (2003) followed quickly, and was hosted as a week long exhibit at the same gallery, this time causing more of a sensation. This was a series of images that Schrijnemakers had managed to capture inside the brothels themselves, showing a range of sexual and fetishistic acts performed in apparent privacy. The photographs were graphic and unpleasant, and upset many, causing the early closure of the exhibition. Schrijnemakers claims that this was intended, however. The images were withdrawn early so only the fuss remained, leaving the outraged public to debate what they imagined or had overheard the images contained. He claims they were not real at all, but posed by actors. It was performance art, he says, captured on film. Whether real or not, the images formed the beginning of his journey into voyeurism.

“We are here.” We have turned into a small courtyard, and Rutger stops in front of a solid wooden door in a whitewashed wall. It is quiet, away from the hubbub of the main boulevard. There are several storeys to the building, regular rows of windows in a fairly anonymous style. His finger indicates that we intend to continue our journey by entering the building. He taps a code into a security pad, and then pushes open the door and beckons me inside. We ascend a brief flight of steps and then walk through a set of doors into a large room, empty of any furniture apart from a few chairs and some crates. There is an acrid smell that seems to linger in the air, metallic and clinical.

“This is the location of my next exhibition. Even when it is empty, there is quite a feeling to the rooms. You have noticed the quiet, the stillness. I think this is ideal for an exhibition. Please, let us sit here.”

Rutger takes a chair from the edge of the room and places it next to another. We sit, and he clasps his hands together, rather excitedly.

“This is good. Let us step out of the routine examination of my career, the steps I have taken and the work so far. This is so tedious. Perhaps I try to be entirely new each time I present my work, even though the weight of my previous work hangs about me and seems of some importance to the work of the critics who must pass judgement. I would like to be a new artist each time I exhibit, and need no reference to the past.” His voices echoes between the empty walls, not loudly, but with a strange special effect.

“We’re at the hospice of Saint Marie-Léonie de Roubaix. You can see it’s no longer functional, but it has quite a history as a place where the sick and the mentally ill, criminals and the poor would be sent to be forgotten. The place was founded in the 1800’s I think, by a religious order who followed a visionary saint around in their shared delusions. They were trying to prevent the scientific treatment of smallpox, allowing people to take refuge away from the menace of vaccination. Later, the place specialised in the treatment of the criminally insane, the treatment being violent surgery and torture. There are unqualified rumours that the place was used for all sorts of experimentation on these less fortunate beings. From medical testing of drugs and primitive surgical techniques, to all kinds of mental warfare. More recently, it was used for end of life care for the terminally ill, until contractual wranglings with the landlord put a stop to that. Here we are. It is vacated at present, although I believe a transnational corporation is going to move an office here some time soon.”

Rutger stands, and raises his arms to indicate the walls. He has the appearance of a hipster ringmaster, playing host in an empty circus. An insect flitters around a fluorescent light tube on the ceiling, the intermittent dinks of its impacts the only sound for a few tense moments.

“The new show is Histoire Publique de Moments Privés. What I wish to do is examine the way our privacy and intimacy is changing. We are a more atomised society than ever now. We have a dwindling notion of social action and collective responsibility. We lead concurrent individual existences rather than a communal life, as our ancestors did. We believe in privacy as a necessary predicate for this existence, as its founding right. Our right to be anonymous in the city streets, to not have our neighbours intruding in our business, or the church or the state. Yet at the same time, we have these technologies that encourage us to effortlessly share everything, as if privacy has suddenly lost its value. Cameras everywhere, a panopticon. This poses a challenge to the idea of photography, perhaps.

“After the Amsterdam work, I’ve tried to focus on conceptions of public and private. Public is such a tainted word in our culture these days. It is used by our demagogic leaders to invoke the instinctual reactions of populism. But as something that we as individuals are a part of, that we have a responsibility towards, that we act within, this has gone. This public is now only a collective noun for individuals. It is no entity on its own. But there still exists the intersect of our private lives and our public behaviour. It is how we understand our actions as perceived by others, how we cope with that judgement. Perhaps we have done this by commodifying ourselves in this public realm, so our actions and public behaviour can be consumed by the attention of others, much as they consume media images, the lives of celebrities, social news feeds. Our collective public life is a hyperreality of commodified individuals that other individuals consume. Well, this is something I first tried to work out in my Window Display series.”

Schrijnemakers’ Window Display exhibition of 2008 was his best received work to date. He was invited to show his work at La Maison Rouge in Paris, and collected an impressive series of large images he had taken over the previous few years, during travels around Europe. Each image in the collection was a tableau of people seemingly enjoying themselves or sitting alone, gesticulating wildly or talking pensively, all framed through windows of bars and restaurants, cafés and pubs. They were photographed in extreme detail, and captured the individuals and groups, their gestures and half-formed expressions with striking precision. The result bordered on the depiction of hyperreality that Schrijnemakers says he strives for. The critic Timo Appelhof was among the most vocal in his praise for the show, describing how the photographs shared the perfection of their technical accomplishment with the advertising world, but cut through the banality of advertising’s images with a graphic presentation of reality. That the scenes were framed through shop windows further accentuated the commodification of the subjects, acting as hyperreal mannequins for those looking in through the windows.

Subsequent work, and several books and an online exhibition, have been on a smaller scale, and have tended to focus more on the dynamic of intimate moments, or concepts of privacy. Branlette (2010) was a series of intimate and explicit images of young actors; Innards (2011) focussed on private medical moments and surgical procedures; Webcam (2013) was a controversial series of images taken from intimate or private conversations on internet chatrooms, often, it was claimed, without the subjects’ consent.

“Together, our images of reality make more sense to us than the reality we actually inhabit. How can a photographer capture this? We must explore the perception of hyperreality rather than just the objective physical reality, which has been a photographer’s traditional subject matter. This reality is meaning less and less to us as we merge our minds with the devices and images that surround us. This exhibition is an attempt to depict this, or at least, to explore the possibility of doing so.

“It is more an installation than a traditional exhibition. It is an experiment for me. Not the first time this place has been used for experimentation, ha! I have been exploring voyeurism, this seems to me to be the most prescient mode of perception in our modern age. It is about compromising privacy. It is so easy now it is possible to extend our senses in these electronic ways. Our entire present hyperreality is formed by this expectation of voyeurism. Our awareness, our conscious awareness, is not limited to the things we can physically see, but to millions of private moments and thoughts. Time and space is no longer a limiting factor. Morality seems not to be a limiting factor. This was something we looked at in the Webcam series, but now I want to go further. It seems no one knows where this voyeurism will end.”

He walks back and forth across the floor of the empty room, occasionally looking up at the walls and the high ceiling, sometimes touching the boxes that have been roughly strewn about. There is a moment of hesitation. He loiters, then sits back down beside me.

“Jantine, I want to show you something. A series of images. These are the images of the new exhibition. They have not been seen by anyone, anyone at all. So, this is rather a special moment. I am … I am greatly interested in the concepts that arise from research in quantum physics, the extraordinary theories and experimental results that filter down to us from that area of research. One of the most interesting is how the observer can affect an experiment, how the act of perception itself is enough to change the result of an experiment. It is fascinating to use it in the context of voyeurism. If this could be repeated in the world of art, wouldn’t that be interesting. Just by perceiving, just by knowing, the outcome of the artistic endeavour would be changed. This is a thrilling prospect. This is what we attempt.”

He stands again, and pulls an electronic tablet from one of the boxes, and lays it on top of the box. He presses his hands next to it, perhaps to calm his excitement.

“Here we have the images. They are on this device. You will look, and you will be alone. I will leave the room while the experiment is in progress. My perception must be removed. Yours will be the only awareness of these images. Ok?”

“Ok.” Suddenly I am rather nervous. I stand, and approach the makeshift exhibition space. Rutger touches the tablet display, and the screen illuminates.

“You just swipe. You know this, I’m sure.”

“Ok.”

“I will be through here. There is no lock, no need to be afraid. Just a doorway to ensure I cannot influence your perception.”

“Ok.”

“Thank you.” Rutger walks away to the doorway he had indicated, and disappeared. For a few seconds I look at a flashing arrow on the tablet screen. Then, I recklessly swipe, wanting the hesitation to be over so I can confront my fears. There they are, the pictures of me I have been half-expecting. The pictures I have shared on social media, from all periods of my life and from various friends and acquaintances. There are more clandestine shots, taken with long lens, perhaps. Images somehow retrieved from my own devices, from the very phone I have with me, from my fiancé’s camera. Some must have been captured by hidden devices or some type of surveillance technology. The slideshow does little in the way to shock. The images are eerily familiar, or mildly embarrassing. Even the intimate snaps, showing me naked or having sex, sometimes using the toilet or masturbating, seem devoid of any kind of controversial content. I swipe faster, and the images become a blur of familiarity. It actually becomes quite boring to attempt to linger on any single snapshot. I give up, craving something that might indeed startle me.

“It was not what I expected,” Rutger says afterwards, when he is attempting to debrief me about the experiment. “You are unmoved.”

“I think technology and perception has overtaken you, Rutger. You are holding on to some old-fashioned ideal of privacy or shock. You are being nostalgic. The only way the exhibition is shocking is its conservatism, its nostalgia.”

“I see.”

“I presume viewers to Histoire Publique de Moments Privés will be selected and invited, and somehow the digital devices loaded with their own images?”

“Yes.”

“I think you will fail to shock. If that is your intention.”

“I want to confront narcissism. I want to confront voyeurism.”

“I think you will only indulge them.”

“Perhaps you are shocked but will not talk about it.”

“Rutger, I am not.”

“Oh.”

“You are chasing after these concepts, rather than confronting them.”

“Yes. At least the outcome of this experiment is unexpected. This is a vindication of the experimental technique.” He sits for a while, staring at his feet and tapping his fingers on the sides of his head.

Histoire Publique de Moments Privés is open to invited audiences from October.