Roy Villevoye " Propeller " at Vanderbilt U. Fine Arts

Tuesday, 21 March 2006 11:51

Nashville, TN- The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery exhibits Roy Villevoye: Propeller, which will feature photography, original films, and an artist’s book. The exhibition opens March 23 through May 12. Since the mid-1990s, the Dutch artist Roy Villevoye has been working with photography, installation, and video in the Asmat, a virtually impassable swampy region along the southern coast of Irian Jaya (New Guinea), in Indonesia. Villevoye explores human origins and cross-cultural understanding. The exhibition includes large-format photographs, an artist’s book, and two films: Beginnings (2005, 19 mins.) and Propeller (2004, 45 mins.). In both films, each of which will be screened daily and by request, Villevoye replicates the passage of real time while avoiding artificial conventions such as voice-overs or linear progression. Beginnings (recipient, 2006 Tiger Award for Short Film, Rotterdam International Film Festival) explores our concept of origins and our desire for paradise, or our wish to recover an idealized existence. In Propeller, Villevoye unravels the history of an aircraft propeller found in the depths of the jungle by interviewing an Asmat elder, the Dutch pilot, and others. Like his films, Villevoye’s photographs reveal a cross-cultural ambiguity reflected, for example, by Papuans wearing T-shirts with commercial logos and political messages. These images confront the viewers’ expectations, and invite us to look again at our assumptions about both native populations and our own commercial society. Villevoye views his camera work as the equivalent of looking, since documentaries are more accessible than paintings and installations, which can require the viewer to learn how to look at the images. Yet he does not wish to identify himself with the documentary genre, with its linear progression and often preconceived climax. Villevoye’s film sequences are deliberately slow, as if the viewer were actually present. There is no omniscient narrator, and the viewer witnesses dialogue and interactions that unfold in a non-linear, natural manner. There are no empirical conclusions, and the films invite us to ponder the different ways that people understand their personal and collective histories. As the artist says, “we don't want to answer questions, we want to raise them.” In Beginnings, Villevoye explores the human concept of origins and our wish to recover an idealized existence. Shot in Papua and in Holland in two parts, the film begins with a Papuan woman reading passages from the Bible that relate the story of the Garden of Eden. The viewer then sees a naked, native “Adam and Eve” strolling in a “Garden of Eden” in the Papuan forest. The film then shifts to a naked European “Adam and Eve” in a western landscape. Through this film, the artist explores our western psychological desire for paradise to exist somewhere in the world, and the related need to believe that a population can continue to live in the authentic, innocent state that modern industrial society has lost. The film confronts us with our expectations of the two models of “Adam and Eve” that we see, including our assumption that the Asmat live in an earthly paradise, when in fact they must survive the harsh, ruthless conditions of life in a tropical rainforest. In the film Propeller, Villevoye slowly unfolds the story of an aircraft propeller discovered in the swampy Asmat jungle. He reconstructs the 1944 crash of an Allied fighter through interviews with the local village elder, the Dutch pilot, and other commentators. The film interweaves the factual western account of events with the highly mythologized version given by the Asmat elder. The viewer is struck by the contrast between the western quest for historical fact and the alternative explanation of events using stories that assume the quality of legend. Through his photography, Villevoye confronts us with our assumptions and expectations about the Asmat, and also about ourselves and western society’s relation to the non-European world. The cross-cultural ambiguity represented in photographs of Papuans wearing T-shirts with commercial logos or politically inflammatory images forces the viewer to ponder the meaning of these images. Not only is the content on the shirts meaningless to a population living in the Papuan rainforest, but the very presentation of the Asmat in T-shirts and other western clothing disturbs our romantic tendency to envision these people as a traditional community living according to tribal custom. Instead, the viewer feels an ambivalent response to the image of a supposedly authentic, native person wearing the products of western mass production. The images invite the viewer to look, and reflect, again. Visit The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery

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