FESTIVAL OF GERMAN FILMS: Herman Vaske’s documentary from 2008 opens with an episode featuring an elegant looking, retro-styled gent called Sebastian Horsley. What dominates his appearance is a very large stovepipe top hat, the sort famous from old photos of upper-crust chaps who would wear such a topper to formal functions in the Jazz Age. The on-screen caption explains that Horsley is a 'radical dandy". Quite what that means is never really explained. But then the key creative virtue of Vaske’s strange and ambitious 50min film is its capacity to have you wildly free-associate. Case in point: Horsley (actually a key figure in recent art who died last year). His accent and dress are polished but the story he tells to camera is all about how he narrowly missed getting his head blown off in an incident involving impotence, crack, heroin and a pair of disgruntled prostitutes. Consider this: How often do you see real people talking on screen about a near death experience like it was some party joke? When was the last time you saw someone in a movie happily admit that, drugs and commercial sex were a part of their recreational life? What adds to the films insistence that the viewer take responsibility for what we see and hear (at least in this moment) was that there was no narrator solemnly intoning some sanctimonious stuff about how narrowly Horsley escaped death.
This is a short movie about a big and compelling subject: radical art and its impact on advertising in the new millennium. In a very cunning way the Horsley vignette sets up the questions that dominate the films narrative: What images shock and why? For art to have validity must it be tied to who we are what we do and the choices we make in the most fundamental way?
Later in the movie it’s revealed that Horsley once filmed himself getting crucified (with real nails and no painkiller). The cross fell apart and British tabloids screamed: 'Art freak crucifies himself."
Horsley felt the crucifixion 'act" was a bit of botch: 'Instead of 'art freak’ it should have said 'freak""¦the minute you define yourself as an artist (in life) you’ve lost."
Vaske has a cast of artists and commentators who advance all kinds of theories about what radical art is and why it’s important. Malcolm McLaren takes the long view: '"¦it was a form of art that was a protest against the status quo."
Jeff Koons appears looking like a stylish futures broker and sounding like a diplomat: 'Radical art presents information with a sense of urgency"¦ it makes you conscious"¦ it’s an openness of thinking."
Artist Jonathan Messe, talks in a feverish blur of declarations reminiscent of an evangelist: 'The seed of radical art is playing with no rules."
Actually the differing personal styles of Vaske’s talking heads, the antipathies expressed and the language used and the way he juxtaposes them (often for ironic and comic effect) is one of The Radical Gardener’s great pleasures.
We see a lot of work: installations, many paintings, film clips, 'found object’ work like crucified cows hanging on a wall"¦ but much of it is left mysterious. This is not a film where work is explained in neat categories and details. It’s a bit like being in a gallery with each character a virtual 'exhibit’; we’re given a few notes for context, but its our job to absorb, 'read’ and apprehend the 'art work’ in a way that’s deeply personal.
Still, if the subject is radical art, Vaske’s style, aside from that stunning opening, is a little common place – with set-up interviews, some archival extracts, and a narration that occasionally intervenes to explain, in an often embarrassingly over-ripe way, the virtues of this or that artist.
Vaske isn’t in a hurry; the movie is almost over before it ties the radical art movement with advertising. When he does the commentary that emerges is less than apocalyptic and hardly revelatory; which is to say the artists interviewed abhor the sensibility of advertising. (McLaren describes it as the lowest rung on the arts ladder, while Meese condemns it as propaganda.) Meanwhile, Vaske has ad industry gurus rave about the inspiration they draw from London’s Frieze Art Fair.
The film does emerge with some striking examples of radical art as anti-ads. Or should that be ads that use advertising rhetoric which works against the idea of consuming? Vaske’s uses clips from the UNICEF Tap campaign and the pro-animal liberation ad where KFC’s Col. Sanders bares witness to the abuse of battery hens. (The ad linked the torture of POW’s at Guantanamo Bay with the abuse of battery chickens by depicting a man-size chook getting the crap beaten out of it by prison guards!)
Vaske puts Oliviero Toscani, a major radical art figure, on the cutting edge of this cultural movement. His 'Third World’ Benetton campaign was a sensation but Toscani condemns admeisters as 'subhuman" and his own work as disappointing. Vaske gives him the movies best line: 'If I could do what I really like I would be in gaol"¦ after 9/11 you can’t do art anymore because that was the best art ever made."
The title, by the way, refers to a relatively recent form of art/eco/green art activism. Artist Fritz Haeg talks about it as 'someone who plants where it’s least expected."
