Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan
Obstructies (Obstructions, 2003)
Lonnie van Brummelen, 1969, Soest
Siebren de Haan, 1966, Dordrecht
The 35-mm film Obstructies (2003) by Lonnie van Brummelen shows the chaos, jammed traffic and movements around building sites in busy city centres. The ordinary traffic rules are useless and road users are forced to improvise. Because of the high angle, slow camera movements and the absence of a soundtrack – the only sound is the rattle of the film projector – you rise above the noise and hubbub and can clearly see the coherence of the manoeuvres that seem random when seen from street level.
Besides films, Lonnie van Brummelen also makes photographs, writes essays, designs, initiates exhibition projects and makes site-specific interventions. De Stedelijke Conditie /The Urban Condition also includes a new work of hers: the open letter Call of the Wild that will be presented on 18 May 2006 at an Ongoing Series night. Lonnie van Brummelen co-wrote this essay with Siebren de Haan on the occasion of an art commission for the Municipality of Zwolle. The essay will be published in the periodical OPEN.
The authors state that the conditions set by many patrons for the visual arts put excessive restrictions on the artists’ artistic freedom and emasculate the expressiveness of their works. Art is used as a tool to serve a commercial, political or social agenda. Museums and biennales go along with this, and limit or even lose the refuge they can offer to art. The critical potential shifts from the artist to the project organiser, from the artwork to the intervention of the exhibition project.—1 This destroys the faculty of criticism (and self-criticism) of the visual arts.
Annick Kleizen
1 Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, “Call of the Wild”, OPEN 10 (May 2006), p. 61
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