For Jack Hauser

„In my areas, the common man says that the player has a knowledge (if you
know how to do it, you can do it) while the tightrope dancer is practicing an
art. To dance on a rope means to maintain balance at every moment by restoring it with new corrections at every step; it means sticking to a relationship that has never been acquired and that is constantly being restored by a perpetual invention, so that it seems as if it were preserved. In this way, the art of making is admirably defined, in that the practitioner is actually a component of the balance that he modifies without disturbing it. Through this ability to create a new state of affairs from a given equilibrium and to maintain a formal relationship despite the change of the constituents, he very closely approaches the artistic production. Namely the incessant inventiveness of tastein practical experience.“[„Art of Acting“, Michel de Certeau]

DREAM

Miss Coochie dreams of a journey. Together with a man. His name is Paul Sernine. His coat is often a white suit or a blue worker’s overalls, his adventures are fictional adventures. This time – and this often happens – it is a shared adventure. Paul Sernine and Miss Coochie. They walk through the city.

They walk through the city. Sometimes they wrap themselves in black and climb the rooftops of the houses into another time, another order. Up there they rest a little bit. Their bodies are no longer entwined with the streets, which they spin and turn according to anonymous laws. Up there, they transform the world of which one usually is bewitched and possessed into a relief of letters, things and intensities. They pause for a moment before plunging back into the depths of the street canyons. Back into the moving cityscape. A city of passion, in which they unobtrusively research through apparent everyday life, spaces and layers. For them, the world that surrounds them is completely physical and material. Their movements and explorations give rise to other memories and a shift takes place.

Here and there they build their camp. They lay back and forth. They are sitting either way. They swing their legs upright in order to move forward, their arms swing at their sides. They turn around to stand next to each other. „It’s a strange world,“ says Paul Sernine. „Let’s keep it that way,“ says Miss Coochie. Her gaze scans the rooms, which reveal themselves in an oscillating blur. Light and colors. Reflections of the night and the sea. They form new lines, redeem themselves in other colors, become different figures, shape light and shadows. That’s really unbearable. Miss Coochie says, „It’s killing me. I’m dying because I see all these colors.“ She does not mean: the-possibility-of-dying-always-if-you-want-or-not. She is headless happy. Paul is happy, too. They kiss. They want to love each other. Miss Coochie takes off her blouse and wishes Paultouches her breasts. Suddenly Paul has breasts and is a woman. Miss Coochie sits between her legs. She is huge and she makes up her pink clitoris with a lipstick. It fits beautifully with her pink bra. Her sex is shaved. Miss Coochie squats between these legs and sees cute pink things in front of her nose. A door on wheels, for example, rather cream-colored. At the door hang various documents from other trips and adventures. A man with a guitar is sitting in front of the door singing songs. Paul pushes the door from here to there. The place behind it is always a promise. It is the door of the apartment Miryam van Doren.

MIRYAM VAN DOREN

There is the apartment Miryam van Doren and there is Miryam van Doren. Miryam van Doren is not just taken from the book „Miryam van Doren“ by Jack Hauser and David Ender. It’s not, as you might think, just stepped out of the book. She, who likes to visit, once visited Jack Hauser and stayed. That soundseasier now than it could ever be.

It was 1994, there is no doubt about that. Since then, there are rumors, stories, coincidences, speculations and secret messages. Who is Miryam van Doren?

Miryam van Doren has been traveling a long time. She is the murmur of society. At all times she is ahead of the lyrics. She does not even wait for them. She is. She is what you make her. What is certain is that Jack Hauser left her the apartment in 1999. Since then, memories and thoughts materialize as images, films and objects. It is sometimes said that these books, records, pictures and photographs, from which stories and songs are made, are her collection. It is said that one learns to know Miryam van Doren through her surroundings, through her notes and passions. She is the wondrous companion of frontier workers, outsiders and heroines. The arrangements that Jack Hauser formulates in a variety of ways are invitations that make her appear. Friends and strangers are welcome and let their eyes wander through the apartment. Not infrequently they become part of these assemblies. Their eyes are the needle that slides over the grooves of a record. This is how their songs are made.

Whoever wants to, can get in touch with Miryam van Doren, so it is said, because everyone has memories that update themselves in the future or say goodbye for good. In this place, the apartment Miryam van Doren, the fear is lost in a strange way. And although the apartment is full of traces and copies of sinister figures and mysterious figures that have caused many a restless dreams. You get lost fearlessly in encounters with others and always find them in some story again.

By offering Pulp Fiction, Jack Hauser creates as a common field of memory and numerous references. These growths do not follow the law of logic or language. Rather, they dispute the privilege of scientific writing to organizeproduction, as Michel de Certeau puts it in the art of acting. They follow a logic of lines, colors, similarities and performative actions. As a visitor you step into the circulation of these stories and pictures that you can add your own variation to. Victories, losses, battles, trials, overcoming and miracles. One experiences oneself afresh – without the effort to reinvent oneself.

And so you experience a piece of a future. With this future one then returns to his or her life and goes with the her or his two legs ones way through the city; and something has changed. The apartment is a collection, a camera obscura, a snapshot that you understand only afterwards and with time. There are situations and figures that you meet again and again: the Planetary team is present in different variations. Irma Vep has been seen many times, Miss Coochie, Paul Sernine. Anton the lumberjack, as Living Music Box, and of course the chef who is none other than – Fantômas. Their activities, actions and reflections are also found in other, everyday situations. The apartment is a meeting place where people, like a band, come together again and again to do something together (music for example). A gang, says Jack Hauser, referring to Gilles Deleuze, who behaves like children who build a ship together. They build a ship and put it in a stream. The ship goes on, and in the next bend of the watercourse, others pick up this ship and continue to build it. (To avoid misrepresentation, it should be noted that the word „children“ is an important word because children do not have to participate in the functionality of the world.) These ships are not to be metaphorical products. They do not transport any goods. They are mean and medium, materialized gestures, never mere signs. These meetings also follow the orders of colors, lines and copies. They play with fictions, like dreams with memories, in which they change and connect to current references. They create their own time that is alien and familiar at the same time as Marcel Proust has been writing and remembering in „In Search of Lost Time.“ You could say that Jack Hauser deals with collecting and remembering. From everyday things in the direct urban environment he creates a collection in which the mediality of the various materials appears. From records, instructions, Schundheftln, Comix, figures, materials, slides and films, a sculpture has emerged. This sculpture is walkable. She is the apartment Miryam van Doren.

ONE HOUR – C’EST VRAI. REALLY

An example: on 26. July 2010 from 15.45 to 16.45, exactly twenty years later, when the American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank made his film „One hour – c’est vrai“, the door of the apartment Miryam van Doren opens to a continuous exchange and translation: deconstruction, doubling of details, transgressions of the narrated and narrators. Mise en abyme. A labyrinthine memory unfolds as a web of quotes, gestures, and actions. A game. A homage to „One hour – c’est vrai“ by Robert Frank.

Exactly 20 years ago, on July 26, 1990, Robert Frank started at 15:45 „one hour – c’est vrai“ in his studio and walked with the camera for an hour through the Lower East Side of New York, met acquaintances and friends this way and recorded their conversations. One does not know until today, what in this film is made up and set, and what coincidentally happened. There is a book about the film’s dialogue, so it is likely that much of what seems to be spontaneous in the film was actually prepared. The film does not have a single cut.

So on July 26, 2010, the neighborly field is moved by Robert Frank to the apartment Miryam van Doren, and Jack Hauser and Sabina Holzer start a one-hour sequence in the three rooms of the apartment for the movie „C’est vrai. Really. “ The kitchen, the (living) room and the library – also called labyrinth – the apartment Miryam van Doren. The encounters of the friends in Robert Frank’s film become encounters with friends Miryam van Dorens: Paul Sernine, Miss Coochie, Irma Vep, the Planetary team, the suit, a Secret Service agent, Modesty Blaise, the soundtrack to The Divine Horseman „by Maja Deren, Bladerunner’s pistol and record player, to name a few. The codeword is: One hour, one take. And so begins „C’est vrai. Really „, a fictional intervention as a film production, conception: Jack Hauser.

THE FILM

Start sequence: You can see a clock with the time 15:45, then the book „One hour – c’est vrai“ by Robert Frank. The first page, the first dialog is read. An additional time machine is turned on: the video of the one-hour film „A Search Disguised as Labor“ from 2004 by Jack Hauser. There, in this time window, a man drumming with drumsticks on a desktop. Here, in the apartment, the camera pans, and Paul Sernine in a white suit can be seen. He goes into the kitchen of the apartment Miryam van Doren and takes a pair of drumsticks from the kitchen wall. He goes back into the room, sits in front of the monitor and looks at the movie. The man in the film, Simon Wachsmuth as „the drummer“, keeps drumming on his thighs. He makes a short gestural sequence, bows and begins to perform a circular motion on a white wall with a drumstick. The drumstick is the needle that travels along the groove of an imaginative record. Paul Sernine pulls the line with his drumstick on the monitor screen. Then he lies down on the bed, arms and legs bent, eyes closed. The camera moves to the back room, the labyrinth of the apartment, picking out some photos on a desk. One of the photos shows Paul Sernine in the same position as in Coney Island in 2008, on the ground, in the background a rocket model. Another photo shows Miss Coochie hanging from an open door, another is an inflatable, yellow-and-blue Batman imitation. The photos are taken to the other room. The photo of Paul Sernine is placed on the bed on which Paul Sernine lies. The other photos are on a table. The camera continues to move. Next to the table, on the floor, under a large mirror, stands a twenty-centimeter-sized, inflatable, blue-yellow Batman figure. Beside her is the clothes of Irma Vep. The camera is placed on the table. Still picture: Paul Sernine on the tiger blanket. Suddenly Miss Coochie comes into the picture.
She reads another dialogue from „One hour – c’est vrai“, puts on her shoes andjacket, goes into the kitchen and opens the front door. She climbs on the open door and hangs on her stomach on the upper edge.

For one hour, gestures with images and sound circulate in this way, are quoted, doubled and superimposed. New contexts emerge in their application – composed and documented micro events. After two thirds of the time it rings at the door. The tension increases: Myriam van Imschoot enters the film, and the play of improvisations and rituals gets another momentum, making a leap with the unexpected. She is the other agent. Attentive complicity between participants. Takeover, acceptance, admission. Insistent arrival. Arrived only in a few, fleeting moments – in clothing, in the text, in a soundtrack, in a togetherness.

INTERJECTION

Jack Hauser prepares his fictional interventions and situations in the form of a co-ordinate system consisting of a material pool of films, actions and practices.These are traces of his artistic work, which are used again and again „in a new way“ and thus re-contextualize themselves. Gestures and clothing are imaginative dispositives that are cut as cut-ups in space and time, creating new connections through their performative application.

This is how activities become material. Through the improvisational arrangement of these settings, which, as John Cage often has a temporal brackets, but never determines when something is actually used, playful formats emerge on the threshold of everyday contingencies and formal contexts in which everyone involved actively participates in every moment. These relationships follow choreographic principles. In the performative works, it is positions, sequences of action and clothing that transform situations and adopt unexpected turns. In his pictorial works these principles become visible through the continuation of colors, lines and forms. In inconspicuous provocations of coincidences and their radical assumption (and not a spectacular blunt position), Jack Hauser realizes the readiness to take responsibility without the traditional control mechanisms of production systems having to be used. One could also see this practice as an extended practice of love and partnership, which as „gang“ or „band“ (social construct) and as „agent“ (autonomous agency) in different ways formulates an essential element of his work. In this elastic construction of the social, the autonomous, the accidental and the repetitive as possibilities of manifold references between humans and materials open up, which often develops a complexity that could not be planned in this way. Perhaps most clearly understood is this aspect of Jack Hauser’s photographic work, in which the snapshot plays an essential role, and his use of cinematic sequences, in which what is exposed and captured is always greater and more than at the moment of taking it is tocapture. These „marginal phenomena“ are subsequently included in the composition and are often those aspects that allow connections and transitions.

BACK TO FILM

The movie „C’est vrai. Really „is not just a plan sequence – the camera always switches between Jack Hauser and Sabina Holzer. So this game is not one for the camera, but with it. The camera is part of the instrumentation that is used. Clothes are rather like an instrument that gives a person rather a different sound than that they are supposed to evoke dramatic-theatrical interpretation. The figure of clothing is present, whether worn by someone or folded on the floor. It is the potentiality of the Other, an unknown, uncharted or alienated entity, which is always welcomed in a generosity that only known within a game.

Films, pictures, figures, words, sounds are used as material, presenting their historicity in small narratives. Here again, in this scenery that is so typical of Jack Hauser, movement pauses and things become incarnations of desire, memory, time itself. At the end of the film, the two women, one in black and the other in blond beige, suddenly break away from a soft affection, a conversation, from the bed, as if they had made the agreement of a project, and strive in different directions. One in the labyrinth, the other in the kitchen. The video camera moves in a line to the window. There, on the windowpane, is the cut-out image of a blond woman in a black suit walking down a flight of stairs. Now the stairs are no longer part of the picture. Detail of a motion on a transparent background bordering on an open space. One hour – one take. C’est vrai. Really.