Text by Mike Bouchet
“Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.”
J. G. Ballard
The video tape: VHS. What is it to the unknowing viewer? A black rectangular thin plastic brick with two holes in it. Outside dimensions: 187 mm wide, 103 mm deep, and 25 mm thick.The unrolled material inside is up to 500 meters long on a 240 length tape. Variable length—you could record up to almost eight hours on store bought tapes—but the quality and speed at which one could record was a confusing subject that required some knowledge of the recording machine’s functions. There is often a human use residue on the tapes: the printed stickers on recorded tapes, sometimes half peeled off, and the blank stickers that come with blank tapes. Keeping track of the content. Dates and notes written in ballpoint pen.
Have the black tabs been removed? The recording tabs pop-on or pop-off. Unblocked tabs prevented recording, but you could easily put a piece if Scotch tape over the square hole to record over any prerecorded commercial tapes. The surface of the object is a combination of shiny plastic with a textured matte surface on some areas—there are recessed and raised indentations on the form to let the user know where they can apply the label stickers on the top of the tape and on the spine. As mechanical objects, they are somewhat fragile, but almost nondegradable.
The tape inside is a strip of 1/2″ black glossy plastic film that has magnetically charged particles on its surface. (“1/2 inch” is an industry term for VHS tapes)
An object of secret information: if you have the right machine, there are multiple tracks available on VHS. While the average home playback machine could play two audio tracks and one video track—there is a lot more information that is invisible to a consumer machine. VHS tapes have four audio tracks, two video tracks, timecode, VITC, and two blank tracks that can hold various sorts of invisible information: such as proprietary information about the tape, or other sorts of electromagnetic codes. VHS could easily used as device for sending encrypted data, secret recordings, or signals—if you had the right machines.
A friend of mine worked on The Apprentice for a few years. He worked closely with Donald Trump regularly, and he told me an interesting story: Early every morning, a secretary would deliver a folder with whatever press clippings or articles Trump was featured in, from the day before. Trump would then go and turn on a video camera he had set up, read through the clippings, and give a videotaped response to whatever articles he was featured in. My friend noted that the video camera Trump was using in 2014 was the same shitty VHS camera that he had used since the eighties. The telling part of the story wasn’t that Trump was a borderline psychopathic narcissist. That was obvious. The significant detail was that he still used a shitty old VHS camera from the eighties. It was the dirty and revealing detail of the situation. A wave of images and questions were triggered for me, like: How long had be been doing this? And what had it done to him? Had it made his condition worse? Had it pushed his pathological traits and narcissism to a new level? Since the invention of the television, the consumer video camera allowed a lot of regular people, for the first time, to see themselves on an actual television. But why did Trump keep this old camera? Perhaps he had paid a lot of money for it at the time, and felt that it was of a very high quality? Perhaps the quality did not matter to him—just the ritual of ego reinforcement that could be recorded and watched by other people on a television was what mattered to him, even if no one else watched it? Like a parrot mimicking its owner. Or, perhaps, it was that he could simply pile up the videotapes to constitute a massive physical video library of himself.
Regardless of who it is: the VHS system was instrumental to create, cement, and reinforce megalomaniac media obsessed freaks. Without VHS there would be no Kardashians.
I wouldn’t categorize Joep van Liefland as a “pop” artist, although his work makes an interesting contribution to that ongoing movement. The surface content of some of his material was popular entertainment for a fleeting moment, and it did burn its way into a collective consciousness. The artist has largely been dealing with a certain video culture and technology of a recent past. This video culture was dominated by the VHS (Video Home System) tape format. The VHS video era, and all its associated aspects— physical, cultural, and formal—constitutes a rich model to analyze the late twentieth century as well as the current human condition. A condition that has been literally and profoundly “conditioned” by media, and by video. This VHS videotape technology and culture constitutes the bulk of Van Liefland’s focus for the last several years. His work covers a number of the main visible components of the “VHS era” of video: the tapes themselves; the equipment they are played on; the recorded content of the videos—both professional (a wide variety of popular entertainment videos, and amateur home recordings and editing)—as well as the pure technological content (colors, forms such as snow, feedback, and ghosted images); the technological and electronic visual content of both VHS tapes and the machines that play them back (that is, what a machine sends out to a monitor without a tape in it, or what a tape sends out if it hasn’t been recorded onto yet); advertising and marketing material from commercial productions; ad and marketing materials from the video industry; video production and technology companies business to business materials and posters; historic materials from video postproduction and technology firms.
These categories constitute a finite, yet seemingly limitless system of variables in which Van Liefland allows himself a great amount of freedom to operate within. Although the topic might seem narrow at first, the amount of material under this umbrella can seem endlessly profound in its scope. These categories manifest in the form of paintings, prints, sculptures, assemblages, installations, architectural forms, and video films, at least at this point. I am sure he will continue to come up with more novel interpretations of this material. Van Liefland has been collecting materials for almost two decades now. It is an enormous trove, and one should not underestimate the artistic responsibility of maintaining such a library. The video tapes, the machines that play them, the advertisements for the videos, the spaces in which they were rented or sold, the industry that produced them, the audience that grabbed onto the future via this now dated medium, and the industry behind the industry—the myriad of companies that formed a technological background for the more geeky video heads that supplied and developed the video industry. Whereas much of today’s video culture remains hidden in software and in streaming, VHS had a home enthusiast, a technical aspect that mirrored the more professional video industry—people could develop an attachment to gear similar to that of a car enthusiast. In this sense, the physical bridge between the entertainment and the means of recording and producing it were more intimately linked.
Early video pastiche had several signature formal qualities that Van Liefland mines in paintings: roughly cut scenes, snowy edits—you can also hear the sound of static that happens when disparate materials are harshly pasted together. The idea of recording information over existing information became common with VHS: one could cut a homemade scene, or found material into a commercial movie for the first time at home. It looked crude, but it was possible. I think we developed an intimate relationship to these video qualities, in the same way that a culture develops an intimacy with certain styles of painting. Our collective ability to analyze different eras of film stocks and video qualities, cognitively follow extremely fast edits, not become nauseous from handheld footage, and simply form consensus on how well a commercial has been made is all due to our cultural conditioning to video. The color spectrum of video is red, green, and blue (RGB). In much of this artist’s work, the particular VHS style of the RGB color spectrum is almost exclusively employed. This “VHS” RGB palette is used for prints, and the paintings that are prints, and are defined by these limitations. But we should realize that we now live in a world where much of our focus is existing in the RGB color spectrum. It’s not the spectrum our eyes register in nature, but it is how electronic colors are displayed to us, whether it’s in a smartphone, a TV, a digital movie projection, a VHS tape, or a computer monitor. Virtual reality will be in the RGB color spectrum. It is different from the primary colors of kindergarten art school. That’s what plastic colors and paper charts grow out of. Piet Mondrian’s primary colors, red, yellow, and blue, are ineffective. The new primary colors are RGB.
Van Liefland’s artwork represents a model of an epitome. An almost perfect representation of a particular and profound phenomena in contemporary life. The artist uses a variety of forms of representation in dealing with this “representation.” He has produced a wide variety of artworks that toggle between cultural poles upon a second inspection. The works often are both beautiful and cheap, dirty and clean, current and historic, deceptive and seductive, intensely detailed and seemingly haphazard, alive and dead. For some reason Van Liefland’s work never seems retro or static. This bouncing back and forth between poles finally settles at a point where you must simply accept the beauty and insistence of the object, and the artist’s gesture. They are a personal obsession and a cultural phenomena. The painstakingly produced leftover trash of mass production. Society’s dirty closet after a party.
As is often the case with challenging work, the specter of misinterpretation is raised once the initial seduction of his work transitions into deeper analysis: why glorify this medium? There might even be a fair amount of guilt or embarrassment when we think of how much we loved videotapes—or perhaps we simply forgot. Via the direct-to- video film production market, VHS allowed for individuals to become directors, actors, and producers of their own films. Anyone born before the last decade of the twenty-first century watched a fair amount of bad videos, and engaged in a certain amount of fantasy with VHS tapes. The same satisfaction and pleasure that VHS provided is now being supplied to us by Netflix series, smartphones, big screen televisions . . . Remember how much you loved your iPod? None of these compare to the depth and breadth of VHS, in my opinion. Perhaps for a younger generation, it might seem odd, or retro, but that would be missing the point. “Retro” requires a visual and romantic nostalgia to be effective or seductive as an art topic. Van Liefland’s work is absorbing and seductive, but not for nostalgic reasons, not at all.
Where does art spring from? One’s adolescence? Is adolescence the moment in our lives when we become more directly conscious of the visual culture that surrounds us? Perhaps it is a moment when we start to relate our personal history to the culture at large. By extension, an individual’s sensitivity to form and content is often constituted precisely at such a crossroad between self and world. In today’s world, we have no choice but to start to make sense of ourselves and of the world by means of the shared media and cultural artifacts of our time. For many of us today, the VHS tape is precisely such an artifact, one that encapsulates a moment when a mass-media technology became personal, for millions of people the world over. The visual culture that VHS spawned, the fantasies it inspired, its entire cultural and technological life cycle, all of these factors spawned a visual culture of the mediated self that literally covered the planet in the form of video. VHS was the gateway to the world we now inhabit.