How to Act, Gabriel Lester, Installations 2000-2006
Gabriel Lester’s installations are like editing studios of the mind. All around are sequences of single frames of film footage. They are arranged in a particular order, intentionally stacked, and serialized in sequences that do not initially make sense and, at best, appear scattered. The film itself was finished and screened some time ago. You make up the story, and you are part of the story. This strategy is echoed in an early single-channel video, Graffiti (1999), where the viewer is treated merely to the credits at the end of a film, where names keep rolling. The credits are screened consistently out of focus, forcing the viewer to strain to make them legible; in the same way, one has to work through a story composed in one of Lester’s installations. The end itself is neither provided, nor even suggested. At times, Lester’s work feels like a take between takes, the take that never makes it to the seam of the story and ends up being discarded. Lester writes, “in one of my first films was a ‘long-shot’ of a parking lot where one person was standing. Every now and then somebody would pass him and greet him, say something or make some gesture. What I was looking for with this image was how in one scene the message or narrative or atmosphere can change according to the people who enter the scene. The ‘story’ surrounding the man on the parking lot was shaped by him meeting others…”
Lester’s critical entry into contemporary art came with a work he showed at the Rijks Academy, where he created a syncopated sound and light installation. It was a Hollywood-based cinematic collage, an over-layering of sounds from genre scenes made to interact with a seventies disco floor. Still, there were no images to accompany the audio or the flickering light under which the viewer stands as if to complete the stage as both participant and scenery. Lester has been preoccupied with taking a story apart and allowing a different reconstruction from fragments: the rift between telling a story through images and combining images to tell stories. The viewer, enveloped in this atmosphere of auratic immediacy, is left with one choice: to work, enjoy, and make fiction from fiction to fictionalize oneself.
One could say that Lester’s work is contingent on the memory of something read, experienced, and shared. This dependency on possible collective experience is critical to the operation. During our correspondences in the past, Lester wrote, “who is to say that if we would indeed invent the wheel all over again it would lead to same application?” and in another letter, “Like the Sex Pistols to ‘My Way’!” This perhaps describes his way of implicating the viewer in the truth of a situation that is neither predetermined nor deterministic. This is a generous way of being with the world. For This is for Real(Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2000), Lester wrote a critical speech about the institution, pressed it to vinyl, and had two DJs perform it at the opening. The DJs fragmented, re-layered, sped up, and slowed down the speech to give a sense of the source material. Lester is entirely circumspect about the use of the fragments. His is not, paradoxically, a practice of obfuscation or muddy thought, but on the contrary, a practice of generosity where the viewer, too, has to do some work. You have to give to get, and it is not about asinine trickery or a masquerade of quick-wittedness but something that tickles the mind and the soul by whatever means possible.
In an installation of 2003, one has the uncanny feeling of walking into a film set. The installation is like a skin graft on the place it inhabits, confirming at once its improbability. It is a set and a set-up. Such is the case in the waiting room for an installation at the Fons Welters Gallery (Clock and Clockwork, Amsterdam, 2003), through which the viewer is led via a secret entrance to something that looks like an emptied yet pristine and scary laboratory. It recalls the film scene where an inquisitive intruder pulls a book off a shelf in an office or a smoking room, a lever is triggered, a wall rotates around its axis, and the intruder finds themselves in the enigma of a protagonist or a villain of dubious and shady occupation. Here, a waiting room is integral for a story to be made or deciphered, and the laboratory’s anteroom has been emptied to not hint at what has transpired there. You have arrived too late or too early. Between the space of no promise (the waiting room) and the curious promise of experimentation (laboratory), as ominous as it may be, we are left in a limbo of half clues. Art ain’t what it used to be, and the stage-set operates like an afterthought. Sketches of Space (Haags Gemeente Museum, The Hague, 2002) and Gift of Gab (Platform, Istanbul, 2002) were installations that took place in the antithetical cities of The Hague and Istanbul. The thin stripes of mirrors on the walls and the thin columns of timber, as well as the interior decorating and implements behind them, evoked visions of abstract modernism with the fragmentation of time/place in The Hague and recalled the scaffolding and the frames of escape stairwells in Istanbul. A first reading is inevitably from the place where the work is experienced. These self-conscious references are, however, presented in an informal and, at times, downright jocular context. Such was an Altar (De Appel, Amsterdam, 2001) that looked like a shooting gallery, rhythmically sequencing a sizeable memorial wall for a public house community center that evokes the local pubs within walking distance from the exhibition space. The memorial wall is the story of the other museum, a museum that defies the classifying logic of the orders, be they chronological, thematic, or hierarchical. Lester reinvented the memorial on the spot by persuading passersby and total strangers in front of the De Appel to come in and pose for the project. Such fake hair-trigger stories were then subjected to the sequencing of the dividing walls, where each gallery acted as a frame to trigger half a story. That is all you get, and the rest is up to you.
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