Ane Lan makes videos and performances. He stars in them alongside accomplices and friends. His works address the complex inter-relationship between media, the body, the viewer and society itself with its preconceptions and its judgments.
His works have a disarmingly honest quality where voyeurism and participation are keywords. It is easy to be seduced and even blinded by the lush burlesque quality and the rich textural interweaving of flesh and silk. Yet his approach, though adept and perfected to the last detail, is essentially humble and intimate. These visions fuse the boundaries between life and art in an intoxicating layering of meanings and myths.
The character of his production presents itself as both private and public, both fiction and reality. It is as if his artistic sincerity is too overwhelming and ultimately draws a blind between us and his stage. This quality gives Ane Lan’s work a magnetism and a lasting complexity that maintains the level of attraction that all good art requires.
The contrast of exhibitionism and secrecy is again highly seductive. One wonders where he aims to lead us. When Sophie Calle claims that “The fact that it’s art protects me – it gives me the right to do things like that.” it is a statement that applies equally to Ane Lan’s strategies. But then again, we are never really sure. He is too clever to be pinned down.
The delicacy of the tones in his films and stage sets coupled with the immaculate renditions of the actors, together with sumptuous colours and strange haunting sounds, guide us gently into a strange and bizarre world where whatever clarity of vision that we presumed we had is blurred by the contrasting seductive powers of pleasure and unease.
What kind of enquiries are these works the result of? Are they mere experiments or some kind of weird documentary of part fiction and part truth?
Ane Lan slips with equal elegance into the role of serious groom or distraught bride or viewer and worshipper of the naked body. It is as if he strips himself of the last vestiges of whatever protection he could cling to in his artistic roles.
The intimacy and unease with which the exposure of his life and that of his helpers is conducted, creates a deconstruction of both fact and fiction relevant to his area of interest. Ane Lan’s world of ingenious invention disarms us with its openness, its inclusiveness and its almost childlike belief in the goodness of people. Yet there is, simultaneously, a note of sadness and melancholy that is, of course, unavoidable. This is the element that eventually corrupts, however slight, what hope that Ane Lan attempts to portray and, ultimately, his fantastic imagination and observation remains caught in a web of beauty, ambiguity and disillusionment. It is here that we find the focal point of the work; its essential poetry.
To what purpose does he use the moments of awkwardness and the apparent gaps that appear constantly within the works? Could it be to counteract any attempt at detachment on our part? Slavoj Zizek maintains that the real is not visible for us but that perhaps occasionally there is a small gap – a flash of something … ‘real’ that we may experience. Is this what it attempts to be? Zizek Again, rightly claims that our era is dominated by the ideology of cynicism, and it is here in the intimacy of his frail images of sad but serious actors reciting from books or singing hauntingly about unrecognisable pains and pleasures that Ane Lan fights his lone battle in support of the compassion that we are about to loose.
It is not surprising that his work refers to Baudrillard - who is still a great visionary and a potent threat to those who anchor us in essentialism and authority. Fascinated, and with this in mind, I watch the feminine shape that slowly revolves around and around before me, in one of his least known videos. Unavoidably I become the voyeur opening the stage curtaining. And again, unavoidably, I feel a strange sense of inadequacy as the female figure within my gaze becomes a spiritual and angelic icon before me. This worshipping transforms her ordinary woman’s shape into something sublime and the stage becomes an altar. At this point I see clearly why I am attracted to Ane Lan’s work. It is the threatened realm of the feminine and the beautiful that he attempts to preserve. It is against the harsh reality of a world of advancing masculinity that these frail and passive images gain their strength and define their purpose. It is in the defence of this very femininity that these works gain meaning and importance. Ane Lan has seen, just as Baudrillard has, that true power resides in the passive strength of the feminine not in the clumsy aggressiveness of masculinity. And by giving these ideas aesthetic form he manages to leave us within our own process of recollection and of memory.
Ultimately, in Ane Lan’s works, the narrative, the participants, the textures, the costumes, the songs, the readings and the vulnerable flesh envelop us like a drug. We are surrounded by answers to questions that we did not even dare ask. These strategies complement one another and constitute a highly subjective yet, unexpectedly, documentary-like study of the desire to stay alive. Somewhere across the genders, hidden in our harsh worlds of medical scrutiny, pornography and fashion imagery is a secret beauty, a femininity that refuses to die. These works are living proof of it.
Ian Damerell.