Modart » Influenza

The Art of Urban Warfare

Maxi — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 16:34:43 +0000

by Jeroen Jongeleen
(2002 – 2005, 2012)

The project began with a simple text that outlined rules for a game in which players would create their own pieces, using a standard set of tools and an imposed color scheme to become the author’s of a game that transformed urban environments into its playing field. Inspired by ludo-centric artistic interventions and the real life social networking of Graffiti and other street art movements, the project was launched in 2002. As many artists created work, which was reactive to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Jongeleen’s project took a more playful approach to encouraging civil action.

After publishing the original project text, one by one more than 500 people in 40 cities began to play AOUW on the streets where they live. Comically, this also led to the artist’s integration under suspicion of terrorism and eventual deletion of the project website and communications. More interestingly, with images included from various real and fictive wars, the game creates a dialogue of imagery that comments on human history in a way populist slogans and failed pleas for world peace are not able to. The aesthetics of war do not change, but the conversation does, in this shift from seriousness to play.

High and Cold with Influenza

Harlan — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 12:40:13 +0000

Tragic Miscommunication (but not failed romance)

I spent last weekend in the Netherlands where people are nodding their heads up and down or side to side about the possibility of the first Elfstedentocht since 1997. In retrospect, it does not appear coincidental that me and William Head started at the legendary pirate bar in Amsterdam. After a couple of nice nights catching up with friends and escaping 6 or 7 black ice sort of spills, the two of us headed over to Rotterdam.

Not long after we got there, I met a German couple and the fellow asked me where the old part of the city was, which is sort of funny if you know something of the cities history and the thrashing it took early in WW2. Rotterdam remembers the destruction of the 1940’s almost everywhere. The city is a series of construction sites and architectural experimentations, a constant contradiction between old and new as they both struggle to find some clothes to wear to the party (not to mention a place to hold it). As the Erasmus bridge, one of the most prominent recent architectural contributions, crosses the Maas River, you can see the tallest contribution; the Maastoren, which city press communications likes to claim makes it the “Manhattan of the Maas.” It was up there in the clouds that I first saw an image of a makeshift Jolly Roger waving bravely in the cold wind. Rotterdam, apparently remains under siege.

Historically, Jolly Roger is the name given to a flag, which identifies a ship’s crew as pirates. While the 20th Century brought pop culture and icons like what we recognize as a pirate flag, prior to that a Jolly Roger had no skull and bones graphic or standard logo. Most ships had their own unique style signifying their independence and meaning to scare the shit out of those who encountered it.

This specific Jolly Roger could only be identified as a common plastic bag. It was placed, not beneath the bridge on the water as one might think, but high in the sky, planted in a seemingly impossible place for any unofficial army to reach. It is one installation of Rotterdam based NNE member Jeroen Jongeleen’s current work, ‘Plastic Bags as a Jolly Roger,’ which appears as both a call to action and a proclamation: The pirates are amongst us!

In subtly flying his flag, Jongeleen, whom I first knew as Influenza, seems to have taken action painting and gestural abstraction to a logical place a half-century after people starting using these definitions. If you come from a country, which has produced the likes of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, de Kooning and Mondrian, the contribution of painting may be perceived as pre-existing and therefore, sort of a waste of time. Plus, if you listen to the 2012 crowd, the world is coming to end. Do you really want to see it out in the studio with some canvas and acrylic?

Action painting was popularized as a movement, which marked both the transitioning of aesthetic judgment from an end product into a process analysis, and by emphasizing what American art critic Clement Greenberg called ‘objectness,’ a discussion that later allowed psychoanalysis and post-modern philosophy to make claims concerning the deconstruction and value of contemporary art.

Reading the work meant reading the residue in both cases and Jongeleen continues this tradition in a body were the value of the work is the action itself. The painting is gone. The product has been removed completely and replaced with a fragile plastic bag (full) of wind, flaying as an absurd challenge to an urban landscape negotiating development. A bag? There? Prior to the naming of the action, it is a purely illogical intervention. In the standard economic terms of our shared landscape, the bag/flag has no immediate signification and remains a true rogue.

Its insertion into the landscape is a gesture, which much like Graffiti at one point did, provokes question in those who recognize and consider it: Why is that there? Why would somebody take such a risk to do that? How did they do that? How did that happen? In contrast to most Graffiti however, his work is not screaming ‘look at me!’ It is not so much the proclamation of an “I,” but the announcing of a ‘we,’ even if it is not clear whom this ‘we’ refers to. It is a flag after all. Whoever it may refer to is clearly not defined by the state or industry. Some minimal amount of anarchy resists and the action appears to represent a sort communal bid to regain the natural liberty we trade in for a passport and civil rights before a pacifier ever passes our lips, an escape from urban economization and regulation. The location of the flag is always relevant.

While Action painting was used to approach Jung and Freud’s notions of Subconscious, Jongeleen’s Action series is on the contrary very very conscious. It is not concerned with personal style or aesthetic taste, so much as a more political inquiry into the living history of a particular public space; a battle the artist participates to.

After the weather, all that remains is a fallen gesture. From a critical stance this is a strong move. It is gesture as art and offers understanding through urban phenomenology as opposed to abstract deconstruction or formal aesthetic analysis. In “Plastic Bags as Jolly Roger,” we read a type of lived statement, which builds on previous projects like ‘Information Blackout,’ ‘TreeFiti,’ ‘Elementals,’ or ‘The Climbing of Buildings, Fences and Other Opportunities.’ In this project, Corporate and Private spaces are the Don Quixote windmills that artist pirate looks to conquer.

Influenza in Paramaribo

Maxi — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 19:02:43 +0000

Rotterdam based Jeroen Jongeleen a.k.a. Influenza is known for his humorist public interventions and the impossibility to pin down his work to a single style or approach. By manipulating urinals, introducing urban games, fingerprint stickers, ‘pointless oneliner’ (a black spray painted line that moves along streets, across walls and windows), marking and measuring the length of a wall, and installing plastic bags as Jolly Rogers Jeroen introduced an abstract approach to urban art rarely seen before.

What many people don’t know is that Jeroen spent his primary school years in the former Dutch colony of Suriname. When reminiscing with friends about his childhood memories he heard about the ArtRoPa (Rotterdam – Paramaribo) project and got immediately invited to take part. Though he hasn’t been back to Surinam in the thirty years after moving back to the Netherlands he hadn’t forgotten about his childhood in the conflict stricken country. Once he got invited by the Centrum voor Beeldende Kunst Rotterdam to go back in 2007 it was a natural decision to take them up on their offer.

Together with about eight Rotterdam based artists from the most differing artistic disciplines, Jeroen went to Paramaribo three times since 2007 to realize a number of projects. Walking down the streets of Paramaribo, to take in the culture he would be working in for a couple of weeks, he felt like he stepped into a film about his childhood. Most things he remembered had changed, but a lot of long lost memories came back to him. What had changed most was his grown-up look on things and his perspective as working artist.

The colonial conflicts in Suriname, the domestic war and the December Murders in 1982 had driven Suriname into a cultural isolation that obstructed the development of art to a point, where the national art historical development came to a halt. Using art historical elements and references Jeroen tried to bring that development back and, as a consequence, give Suriname artists the chance to discover new techniques and approaches by giving them thought-provoking impulses.

During his first visit Jeroen started off with small interventions on a street art level. When he returned about a year later he noticed how these street interventions had been taken up and appropriated by local artists. Commenting on this development with a playful wink at the one-dimensional Surinamese approach to art, he spray-painted a text about conceptual art on a wall in downtown Paramaribo.

Another project involved the painting of a local house owned by a drug and poverty stricken family. Located close to the U.S. embassy the house was to be torn down and frowned upon by the local community. Hinting at the social critique implied in the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeroen painted the house in playful colors. While at first he witnessed the negative commentaries the family was confronted with on a daily base, the new paint job earned him and the family a round of applause by the community.

Jeroen likes working with elements that we, as inhabitants, don’t like about our city. One of those elements is trash, specifically plastic bags. The Jolly Roger project started in his hometown Rotterdam, where he collected trashed plastic bags and installed them on buildings and other absurd places. By giving the plastic bags a second live as pirate flags Jeroen combines the elements of myth creating with his hobby of climbing impossible high urban structures into something poetic.

On the 9th of September 2010 Paramaribo Perspectives at gallery TENT in Rotterdam presented the conclusion of this three year long project by showing the fruits of this cultural exchange between Surinamese and Dutch artists. Seeing the artist as an arbitrator of shifting cultural, political and social relationships the last three years had been an inspiration for Jeroen, as much as they have been an inspiration for the Surinamese and Rotterdam artist that took part.