MC LDN #9
Maria do Carmo Pontes, a correspondente avançada do b®og em Londres (com foto e micro-perfil aí na barra lateral), mandou a nona coluna MC LDN. Lá vai:
These boots are made for walking.
On the work of Jeremy Hutchison
A man is sited, crestfallen, on the border of a bed. A hysterical woman yells at him, throwing his vinyl’s on the floor and walls, on the man himself. Though he is a DJ and that’s his livelihood she’s destroying, Tom Waits’ character doesn’t transparence any reaction: whatever he did, it was massive, and she is probably right. The woman, inconsolable, proceeds with her anger, now slinging all of his personal belongings around the bedroom. When she is about to throw his boots away, he ultimately shows some reaction, stands up, and stops her with his arms: “Not the shoes”.
This scene from Jim Jarmusch’s “Down by law” is informative of the sense of development expressed in Jeremy Hutchison’s artworks. Being he, as himself, the main character of his own films, Hutchison is always in the move, constructing self portraits within real situations where walking is central to the action. In Portrait of a white British man in India, 2011, provisory title of a new piece by the London born and based artist, we see a local man carrying a large mirror on his backs walking through the chaotic streets of Delhi at daylight. Behind him, Hutchison’s camera is registering the whole journey, presenting the viewer an intense point of view: a framed landscape, a mirror bordering and reframing this frame while showing a nearly 360° point of view of the scene, the carrier and himself with the camera. As flaneurs, for one and a half hours they walk around the streets, no talk, no cuts, just the city itself and some centuries of exploitation being perpetuated or solved in a temporary work tie between a British and an Indian.
In another film, made during a residency in 2010 in the West Bank, Hutchison attempts to ride his bicycle from Ramallah to Jerusalem (The Road to Jerusalem, 2010). The video ends when he hits the famous Israeli West Bank barrier wall, but the episode provides the basis for a homonymous installation where this same bicycle, now cut in half and united again with one wheel up and the other down, is leaned against a wall; above the sculpture an 11 pages dialogue is displayed, where the struggle of the artist to transport this non-functional object back to the UK is narrated. “I’ll just keep it”, he would argue against the perplexity of each of the several border agents he had to talk with in order to ship the object, never recurring to the role of the artist to justify such a nonsense. In another film made in the occasion of the same residency, Hutchison disrespects the Oslo Accords, which states that Israeli products can be sold in Palestine but Palestinian products cannot be sold in Israel, and repeatedly takes one bottle of Palestinian milk into different Israeli groceries, trying to buy it from the stores. Acting as an average tourist, the artist has his camera turned on pending from his neck, shooting the awkwardness of the responses to his act without the acknowledgment of the sellers. Walking here appears in a less figurative manner, experimenting to move one step ahead from an inconsistent law dated 1993.
With his strategies, the artist aims to achieve a development, provoking situations where the possibility of progress is latent. It is difficult to asses the result of his task, for the same reasons that is difficult to measure the impact of any artwork, but what matters here is that these boots are made for walking.
Maria do Carmo Pontes
