Art Rotterdam

During a new year's party, in which we celebrate the passage of time, I saw one page of a magazine with images and texts perfectly readible, but it was reduced to ashes on an almost extinguished fire. While that year came to an end, so was this page, I was the last person to look at it. Althought the subjects discussed on this page were nothing extraordinary, the context in which I saw it made this page unique and memorable.

This moment resulted in a series of works that take advertisement imagery of luxury watches as its point of departure. I came across these images in the How To Spend It section of the Financial Times. Each image in this series is chosen as one step in a gradient that leads from a completely enclosed object to an exposé of its inner workings. This idea of the black box and its inner workings, is derived from Vilem Flusser's essay Towards a Philosophy of Photography and Into the Universe of Technical Images, both texts discuss image production in the electronic age. I wanted to apply this idea that comes from media theory with content from a newspaper that minutely describes the tides of our capitalist economy.

Personal annotation

In his ‘Towards a Philosophy of the Image’ Vilem Flusser underlines the concept of time in relation to the image: ‘While wandering over the surface of the image, one’s gaze takes in one element after another and produces temporal relationships between them. It can return to an element of the image it has already seen, and ‘before’ became ‘after’. The critical act of Lahuis towards images is the art work on the floor showing a still from Federico Fellini’s film 8 ½: the big scaffolding structure that has this alarming meaning. The monumental structure that resembles a launching pad for a hypothetical starship is a symbol of the void, the uncanny and the missing. The movie that has a tautological and autobiographical connotation shows a critique of the film industry on the one hand and the recurring tragedy of the blank page on the other: the void of inspiration. It is a film about the need to make a film, but for whom, for which industry of consumption or which political propaganda? Fellini wanted to be the author without a goal except that of reclaiming his own identity, which was imprisoned in his own past.

This whole complex situation has been reassembled in an image that Lahuis has silkscreened and, after burning it, has left on the floor. The piece entitled ‘Some…Cleanliness’ cannot escape its condition of being. As in a cage the work, longer than two metres, cannot be moved or displayed in another way or place. It is there and it will be there until its end. The end of the image imprisoned in this material as an extreme condition of being shown. The big useless structure is now presented in a dramatic condition and a precarious state.

Lorenzo Benedetti An attempt to measure the fragility of time.

The appropriated images on the silkscreens are taken from advertisements for luxury watches. By speeding up the process of deterioration Lahuis puts an emphasis on the themes of duration and consumption. The advertised eternity of these high-end watches seems to be negated by the burnt paper. In a way Lahuis seems to capture the last breath of these images.

This tension between construction and deconstruction is reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s famous film 8 ½, in which an eminent director, played by Marcello Mastroianni, starts the production of his next movie while suffering from “director’s block”. The film was highly influential as it liberated subsequent filmmakers of the conventions of time, place and mode of experience that had prevailed up to the 1960s. Lahuis silkscreened and burnt two film stills as a reference to 8 ½ ’s dealing with the deconstruction of narrative and the never-ending greed for image production.

Dürst Britt and Mayhew, exhibition text