Guido van den Werve
Lost
in Space
From
the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam Newsletter
N°95 (pdf)
The
homemade spacecraft featured in Guido van der Werve's 'Number
negen, the rocket movie 2' looks bound to fail: a deliberately
retro
'rocket ship' redolent of those from a half-century ago, more
Ed Wood
than Star Trek. And indeed, van der Werve knows the slight craft
he's
designed will never achieve the escape velocity needed to exit
the
Earth's atmosphere, roughly 40,000 km/hour. Thus the flight's
mission
– to launch a piece of meteoric rock back into space –
is implicitly
doomed. And much like van der Werve's films, the history of
transportation is also littered with quashed dreams, failures,
and
falls: grandiloquent names like Concorde, Challenger, and Titanic
almost precognitively augured their own spectacular demises; Germany's
Maus tank, the world's largest, was so heavy that it never took
to the
battlefield; and the Swedish warship the Vasa – at the time
the
biggest and most lavishly decorated vessel ever built, gobbling
up 16
hectares of timber – capsized and sank before sailing a
single mile on
its maiden voyage in 1628. The luminous ether in particular –
the
staging ground for 'Rocket movie 2' – has proven especially
prone to
ill fate: the Europa and Soviet N1 rockets of the 1960s were both
cancelled after 100% failure rates, and the first animal in space,
Laika the dog, immolated just a few hours into Sputnik 2's five-month
journey.
Van der Werve
himself is a kind of perpetual escape artist,
transcending the drone of daily life by concocting otherworldly
scenarios in which his protagonists can briefly cast off the coils
of
their uncharmed lives, as the marginalized sad-sack fleetingly
becomes
the center of attention. Again in Number Zes ('Steinway grand
piano,
wake me up to go to sleep and all the colors of the rainbow'),
we find
van der Werve sitting alone in cafes, in restaurants, or on benches,
not even an outsider artist but just a plain outsider. At the
same
time, the voiceover narrates the illustrious success story of
the
Steinway piano company, and how quickly it grew into the standard
for
concert halls everywhere. Today they sponsor an exclusive network
of
the world's best concert pianists, a close-knit family of talented
insiders, from which our protagonist is painfully excluded. Thus,
after hearing the exorbitant price from a Steinway salesman, he
slips
into a reverie in which a Concert Grand Model D is delivered to
his
small apartment, and he soon leads a magically conjured orchestra
through a recital of a concerto called Romance, by Chopin, another
tragic artist who eschewed crowds in favor of small spaces like
this
one.
Common to
van der Werve's loveable losers is a powerlessness, an
inability to control the circumstances that keep them down, like
a
rocket at the mercy of gravity. So instead of trying to change
their
luck, they flee into a sublime and spotless dreamworld, invisible
to
passersby, where the unfairnesses of everyday life are kept blissfully
at bay. Even suicide becomes a Sisyphean farce; whereas previous
works
by van der Werve featured the protagonist repeatedly failing to
kill
himself, in Nummer Zes the suicide is vicarious, transposed in
this case to the hopeless rocket, allowing the escapist to wallow
in the melancholy of it
all from a safe distance.
Because the
escape pods that van der Werve films mix pedestrian
details (the transport of the piano) with tragicomic punctuation
(the
ambiguous rainbow that ultimately takes the place of the piano),
they
never lapse into treacle, instead resembling the structure of
real
dreams, surreal fairy tales in which bathos and pathos coexist.
In
addition to being a trained pianist, van der Werve also played
for
years in a metal band, which perhaps explains the unexpected moments
of discord that continually interrupt his dreamscapes. And the
action
now unfolds even more hypnotically than before, with near-still
shots
of a minute or longer, and languid pans over the piano itself,
glimmering and bold, a transcendent object of desire.
But these
delusions of grandeur ultimately remain delusions, crashing
down when the piano is reclaimed by the movers, once again in
the
rain. Society is obsessed with its failures, micro-analyzing their
details in multi-volume accident reports, or in strangely compelling
shows like the Seconds from Disaster series, which atomize and
then
recreate every tragic second. Like van der Werve's rocket that
cannot
escape, the recently deceased Canadian actor James Doohan –
the
non-leading man who received minor fame as engineer Scotty on
the
original Star Trek series – tried for decades to escape
the gravity of
his character's long shadow, to escape the fake Scottish accent
he'd
created, or the apocryphal "beam me up Scotty" tagline
that he never
uttered, or his deathless appearances in Star Trek sequels, cartoons,
parodies, and fan conventions. But even in the afterlife, Doohan
continues to fail – two attempts to launch his ashes into
space have
flopped, and his remains now rest in a purgatory of sorts, deep
in a
Houston vault. Yet somehow, like that inner club of Steinway
superstars, Star Trek's rakish creator Gene Roddenberry succeeded
effortlessly, managing to get his ashes spacebound as far back
as
1992, and then on the first try. In fact Roddenberry has continued
winning accolades from beyond the grave, with a planetarium, asteroid,
and Mars crater now bearing his name, and a posthumous award from
NASA for distinguished service to the human race; Doohan, on the
other
hand, must make due with an Internet-based fan club. The unchartable
vicissitudes of life are such that for some, escape remains the
only
reasonable option, even with the full knowledge of its
unattainability.