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English Text from the catalogue
of the exhibition ‘Force’, Casino Luxembourgh, 09-2002. Written by Doreet Levitte.
Peter
Bogers’ video installation, Ritual 1, consists of twelve monitors placed in a circle. In precise sequences
of one second each the monitors relay, clockwise, scenes of violence
taken from films and TV action dramas. The spectator stands in the
middle of the circle, in a position similar to the Panopticon’s
guard and must submit to the circular movement in order to follow
the images’ sequences. This movement disturbs his absolute position
of power as an all-seeing entity and forces him to interact with the
images, thus submitting himself to their hypnotic attraction. Bogers orchestrates violence
like an opera. He chooses the climatic moments of the aggressive action
as seen on the screen, separates it from the narrative it originally
belongs to and concentrates on the cathartic moment when aggression
reaches its home target. The broken narrative of each video, the fragments
that had a coherence while belonging to the cinematic experience,
are assembled into a new text, which changes the essential characteristics
that were built in the original story. Thus, whether the action was
justified or not, moral or revengeful, aesthetic or ugly is of no
importance. This spectacle of pistols and blows, blood and wounds
zooms towards one target — it shows aggression to be the weakest link
in the chain of power and reveals force as a last resource, where
real power is subjected to a corrupted version of its potential. Force
in Bogers’ video reveals itself to be both the most spectacular yet
the least genuine manifestation of power. Because violence is rendered
in precise sequences, as opposed to its chaotic and random features,
and since this timing creates order and aesthetics negating the essence
of the subject matter, it becomes clear that Bogers has elevated violence
to a ritual and has introduced the notion of a mythical time into
the set of actions he presents. The very arrangement of a circular
time and space corresponds with the idea of time outside the natural
order, as characteristic of the duration of a holy sermon. By isolating
the actions they become meaningless and enigmatic, as if another meaning
was imposed on them for which we lack understanding. In doing so Bogers
leads us back to the futility embedded in the aggressive act. While
within the context of a story we could have excused it, considering
motives and human reaction, violence, when isolated from any context,
is always a weak and stupid act. Ritualised violence is
a phenomenon we are familiar with. Ritualisation in matters of aggressions
has the purpose of giving meaning and decorum to atrocities of all
kinds. Moreover, the very aesthetics of virility this ritualisation
takes on covers the weakness suggested by acts of aggression. Bogers
manipulates the ritualistic element to serve his ends and exposes
both power and its celebrations to be the icons of a value they are
supposed to negate. The sound and light effects
that go with each act in the video are like a physical attack on the
onlooker. A double assault is created: one inherent to the image itself,
the other produced through its presentation, i.e. while the images
tell the story of the attack, they repeat it symbolically by the nature
of their transformation.
DLH
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